Kapuściński — Herodotus's pupil

Author: Paweł Urbaniak source: “Tygiel Kultury” 2005, nos. 1–3 date: 2005-01-01 ——————————————————————–

One of the fundamental points of dispute in discussions of Ryszard Kapuściński’s work is the genre of the writing he practises. The tendency to call his works reportage does indeed predominate — but the name is not entirely apt. It is hard to assign the author of The Emperor unambiguously to a single literary genre. The scale of the problem is illustrated by the coexistence of such different terms for the books of the reporter from Pinsk, proposed by critics and scholars: parabolic reportage, reportage-impression, documented drama.

Travels with Herodotus, the writer’s latest book, brings us no closer to resolving the dispute. It marks a further step towards the essayistic — that is, towards deepened reflection and a subjectivised utterance supported by numerous quotations — a tendency characteristic of the author’s earlier texts too, but revealing itself now with particular force. The book contains only a small proportion of typically reportorial elements. What dominates are quotations drawn from Herodotus’s Histories, and above all reflective passages that take the recounted stories as their starting point. Kapuściński conducts the narrative in an extraordinary way. He presents personal experiences gained over many years of work as a reporter in order to set them beside analogous ones lived through centuries earlier by his predecessor from Halicarnassus. That is why the story is often surprising, why new subjects surface spontaneously and unexpectedly. The reader cannot predict which way the next pages of the book will go. A few sentences of an account from decades ago, drawn from the Polish reporter’s memory, may give rise to an ancient story that complements a relatively fresh recollection of Kapuściński’s — for whom the two worlds, the contemporary one and the one of two and a half thousand years ago, are not incommensurable realities. What is striking is precisely their translatability and their complementarity.

The world today, just as many years ago, is governed by human emotion. Both Herodotus and Kapuściński show that history is not shaped by rationally taken decisions. What seem to have fundamental significance are people’s feelings and their weaknesses. The great battle scenes known from historical accounts came about through the strong passions, the betrayals, the wounded pride experienced by the great figures of the ancient world. It was they who, driven to act by so much as a desire for personal revenge, brought whole nations to biological ruin through bloody wars lasting years. One example is the story of Cyrus, king of Persia, whose love was rejected by Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae. The unfulfilled male desire of a great ruler became the cause of the annihilation of two nations numbering many thousands. Today, too, we witness bloody events whose authors are rulers with delusions of grandeur, unbridled pride and an innate aversion to compromise. The twentieth century supplied them in excess on every continent. Kapuściński, however, does not leave the stories he tells without commentary. He tries to present his own opinions of them, to submit them to personal reflection, to draw a general truth from them, aware that reportage confined to a historical account is condemned to a short life. The writer deliberately strives to universalise his texts, making of them works that are parabolic to a high degree and that therefore remain current for many years.

Why did Kapuściński decide to draw on Herodotus’s stories in particular in his latest book? The most obvious reason seems to be that Herodotus is the forefather of world reportage. It is his Histories that constitute a masterpiece of historiography and of literature at once — marked by a strong rigour and a respect for historical truth, and at the same time a colourful narrative of great literary value. They are, then, an ideal that the Polish master of reportage has also been realising throughout his own writing career. But that is not all. Kapuściński is convinced that today’s reporters, journalists and historians have much to learn from Herodotus. For he was the first thinker who wrote to see our planet as a cultural whole. Those who wrote before him described particular tribes and lands as separate realities. “He was the first to see them not only separately but at the same time whole. He saw the trees and described their distinct features, but he also perceived the copse, and with the same gaze he took in the whole forest.” He knew how important context is for describing and understanding any phenomenon. And so he always described a person together with his customs, beliefs, social organisation and culture — the commentary indispensable to describing a person, his behaviour, his attitudes and the decisions he takes.

Herodotus was also the first to grasp “the multiplicity of the world as its essence”. Crossing hundreds of kilometres of the world of his day, he came to know, in a way unusually rich for his times, the variety of human realities and the abundance of cultural forms. By the same token he met daily with people different from himself — differing in race, in custom, in the ways they worshipped their gods — with Others, to whom Kapuściński devoted the lecture he delivered in October 2004 on receiving an honorary doctorate from the Jagiellonian University (the text of the lecture makes up the small book published by Universitas under the title The Encounter with the Other as the Challenge of the Twenty-First Century). In it Kapuściński states that the contemporary world, undergoing the processes of globalisation and inhabited by a society that is no longer mass but planetary, has paradoxically become multi-ethnic and multicultural as never before. Once, the encounter with the Other took place almost exclusively after crossing the borders of one’s own country or, more broadly, one’s own continent. Now, by contrast, we are put to a new test: we must learn to live permanently alongside the Other. We have no choice, then; we must see a fellow human being in the Other and try to ensure that the Other, too, sees a fellow human being in us — because “it is true that others are Other, but for the Others it is I who am the Other”.

In the pages of his book Kapuściński draws a portrait of Herodotus that is a great tribute to him. He emphasises his childlike eagerness in coming to know the world and his unceasing imperative to reach for deeper knowledge, on the principle that a state of ignorance is equivalent to non-existence — from which the author of the Histories wants to protect everything he has witnessed. But does this portrait really contain only the image of the Greek? Of course it does not. It is just as legitimate to regard it as a self-portrait of Kapuściński himself, who for the last half-century has travelled to the various corners of the world where something worth passing on to readers is happening. And perhaps it is precisely this compulsion always to be at the centre of the world, in the places that are the sources of the most important social processes shaping continents and even the whole world, that most closely joins the biographies of the two masters of the reporter’s art, whose writing became something more than an account of what had been observed. It became an exposition of universal truths which, despite its lack of topicality and its description of events long since forgotten, seems a fresh and valuable lesson for the reader at the beginning of the twenty-first century.