Travels with Kapuściński, by Krzysztof Mazowski

Author: Krzysztof Mazowski source: www.dziennik.com date: 2004-12-03 ——————————————————————–

I wonder whether Ryszard Kapuściński really does have a sense of a chance wasted, a life wasted. Is he not satisfied with the position of a man hailed as the best reporter in the world? Will subjects made of sand really scatter with time, leaving nothing but sand, the desert?

Reading Kapuściński’s texts is a bracing gust of air at the bottom of the musty cellar of our age. It seems almost impossible that anyone could live through one day after another with such intensity and such clarity of sight for even the vaguest detail. At the same time it must be a terrible torment, a pain behind the eyelids brought on by the glare of the image. He sees, he is a witness, he is aware — and at the same time he is powerless. That can shatter a person, it must shatter a person, it can kill. At least kill one’s humanity, bring on numbness, indifference. If I can do nothing, I can only shrug and walk on. I can also describe it, confess it in words on a page, and in that way absolve myself for being unable to do anything.

Kapuściński’s texts ought really to be banned. Texts — for Kapuściński writes texts. That is what he calls his writing. Then it is printed, we read it, and something bad begins to happen. But not at once. First comes fascination. There we are, reading The Emperor.

For many years I could not bring myself to read anything by Kapuściński. What could a man who worked for communist newspapers in the People’s Republic, and whom the communists let out to write about the world, possibly write about that world? That Winnie Mandela is a magnificent fighter for human rights? I assumed in advance that I would not be taken in by such texts.

Our loss of faith in the weight and sense of values — how frequent it is, how universal. All enquiries into the sources of a world career come down to questions like these: who helped him? Who fixed it for him? How did he play it? It occurs to nobody that what he did, what he created, won recognition because it has value. (Lapidarium II, p. 262 [1])

Living in Poland, I listened to Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America and read Przegląd Techniczny. When I began writing in Polish newspapers myself, I tried to avoid “the heart of the matter”. Then there was a break in my intellectual biography, caused by emigration. I do not know; perhaps that break is still going on, or perhaps it has ended. In any case I came across The Emperor by chance, and my legs gave way beneath me, and in a mind numbed by emigration strange thoughts began to sprout.

So we are reading The Emperor, and a process of morbid dependence on Kapuściński’s texts begins. It is something I would call a combination of illumination and obsession. A desperate search for further books begins — borrowing, buying, then devouring, greedily at first and then chewing over again, slowly, so as to digest everything and lose nothing, so as to fatten oneself on this spiritual food, to be sated and not to be nauseated. I mean, of course, Sartrean, existential nausea. But nausea comes anyway, from the disturbance of one’s psychic balance. If the world is as Kapuściński describes it, then in principle one ought to jump out of the window at once, preferably from a high floor.

Kapuściński is not only a writer. He is a stuntman addicted to a level of adrenaline — but good God, such a dose of adrenaline can be dangerous for us, ordinary mortals. I do not know; perhaps for Kapuściński the world is a Disneyland, and what he describes is only reportage from a cabinet of curiosities and a ghost train; or perhaps he travels hand in glove with Herodotus and in that way “invents” a distance from it all in order to keep his sanity. It is only an adventure with a sheet of paper. But if someone does not have that distance, because he is only a primitive creature reacting to pain with a scream and with tears, like the tormented gorilla in Lapidarium (II, p. 191), then the Great Reporter’s texts are shattering and as such ought to be banned.

There may be a little boyish bravado in my readiness to take risks. When, disguised as a pilot, hidden in a Russian aircraft, I flew to Nagorno-Karabakh, I was practically certain the military would find me out. It was in essence an operation impossible to carry off. Had I been caught, I would have been charged with attempted hijacking, and for that capital crime the Russian code prescribed the death penalty. I would probably not really have been sentenced to death, but I would certainly have ended up in prison. Yet when it all ended well, I felt satisfaction: I got away with it again. It is a game. The need for an atmosphere of extreme tension sits deep in me. Without a challenge I become sluggish and incapable of writing. (Lapidarium II, p. 219)

At this point one thinks of the film Bell’Antonio [2] with Mastroianni, though it ought rather to be Mondo cane [3]. But what age certificate does that film carry? Have we already passed through adolescence and learned that the world is not only flowers and butterflies? Or, on the contrary, do we watch and read and fail to read what is really written there? Do we go to the film because there are “strong” scenes in it, and fail to see the mechanisms behind them? Have we sneaked into an over-eighteens film at the age of eight? In that way we can calmly read an adventure book about Indians by Kapuściński, a writer for young people, and then sleep soundly.

Many people today, moreover, buy books by weight. I buy because I am an intelligent person, because I want to be up to date, I buy because this writer is being talked about. The book will be leafed through in the evening before sleep, with the sense of a duty of the Polish intelligentsia well discharged, and in the morning it will be put on the shelf. In truth, books are read only by literary critics and by Witkiewicz’s “cultured aunts”, and perhaps by pensioners, who have nothing left either to say or to lose. That is why reading Kapuściński provokes no revolution, not even a moral one, and no wave of suicides.

My father buys several books a day. He comes home in the evening and wonders where to put them, on which shelf, where there is a similar format, a similar subject. There are never enough shelves; my father knocks up new ones, often from boards found in the yard. The books already stand in two rows, sometimes three. There is no access to the first or the second, which is only a good pretext for buying new books, even the same ones in different editions. Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy is in the first row against the wall and in the third, still accessible one. Kapuściński’s books are apparently standing safely somewhere in the second. My father says they are certainly there, he does not know exactly where, but I should not buy any more. And yet I want to read something; an intellect starved by emigration demands another dose of texts, even if it is another Lapidarium. I run to the bookshop and buy A Portrait of the Reporter [4] — that is, a McDonaldised Kapuściński, in pre-digested form. A book published on the wave of the emerging cult of the Great Reporter. I read it and cannot get over my admiration. One golden thought chases another, each successive quotation more apt than the last, and all of it in a de-dramatised, safe form, just the thing for sitting on the sofa in the evening. Afterwards I shall put the book on my shelf, in the next row.

Well, we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that Kapuściński will not write another “new” book, that there will be no more dispatches from the front. Instead there will be the Lapidaria and Travels with Herodotus [5]; there will be journeys into the interior of the self, perhaps even more dramatic than the African adventures. The Lapidaria are read like the Bible. You can open them anywhere, read a passage, and have enough wisdom for the whole day. You can also turn page after page masochistically and swallow one little text after another. There you will find an answer to every question. These are punchlines enough for many books. And meanwhile Kapuściński simply throws them at our feet, not in the least troubled by the Nobel he would receive if he wrote a whole book around one of the sharper punchlines. A terrible waste — or is it a lack of time? Perhaps it is a television habit, where one has only a minute to convey information, to catch attention. Who today has the time and the peace of mind to read Crime and Punishment? We only have time for a glance at the television screen. We manage to see a few flashes from around the world and, above all, the weather forecast, and now we know how to dress for work in the morning. Perhaps, then, Kapuściński wants to outwit us, to exploit our television habits, and fires an accurate paragraph at us in Lapidarium. He knows we can concentrate only for a moment. He does seem to absolve us, though; he has seen so much that nothing astonishes him. He is an endlessly multiplying observer of events in which he does not take part. Just as he does not take part in Polish political life, which he almost never comments on. What would be the point?

Is there any sense in discussing boorishness in the pages of a literary weekly? There is not, because boors do not read such weeklies. Discussing the rabble in such a paper misses the point, since it does not read at all and takes no interest in problems such as culture or ethics. Boorishness is closed in on itself, hermetically encysted, riveted shut, unreformable. (Lapidarium II, p. 265)

Kapuściński has by now written so much that one could assemble any construction one liked out of his texts, one’s own book, as in Cortázar’s Hopscotch. One can fit a suitable quotation to any thesis at all and say — there you are, Kapuściński said so. Recently several publications have appeared, put together from interviews and various texts of his. I have already mentioned A Portrait of the Reporter, a book that should not have appeared, because it only does Kapuściński harm. We are watching the formation of a cult of the Great Reporter. Endless interviews appear, reducing the writer to the level of the reader; there is an unofficial website where almost everything about Kapuściński can be found. This is both good and bad. I have mixed feelings. All that is missing are quotations on banners. If only the proportions are not upset. It is a fact that we are experiencing a certain intellectual vacuum in Poland, which neither Masłowska nor Kuczok can fill. So the vacuum is filled with “new literature”. Kapuściński meets every parameter necessary to satisfy the most demanding readers’ tastes, but if there is to be only Kapuściński, then I protest. Of course I shall go on reading him, of course I shall wait for further publications, I shall travel with Kapuściński as he travels with Herodotus, I shall simply look for wisdom where it is to be found — but for God’s sake, I do not want to be a man of one book.

For whom does Kapuściński write? To whom does he appeal, to whose consciences? Politicians? He considers them mad and despises them. Politics, he writes, if one occupies oneself with it for long, warps and corrupts the mind. To ordinary people? They lack curiosity about the world. They do not read his books. To aesthetes who will read his texts and say, how interesting? To the senates of humanities faculties, who can award an honorary doctorate? When Jan Karski brought the West an account of the extermination of the Jews, nobody wanted to believe him — or rather, they pretended not to believe him, because that was more convenient.

When Kapuściński writes The Shadow of the Sun, everyone believes him — but does anything come of it? How interesting, and how well written. Yet will it occur to anyone that the situation in the refugee camps set up by the UN is sometimes worse than that of the prisoners of the Nazi death camps? And what does that mean? There will be no Nuremberg trial, because nobody here is guilty. “Many things we begin to understand late, still more very late, and most of them too late.” Or perhaps we are all guilty and ought to choke on our pork chops so that historical justice may be done? Perhaps, then, we should agree that everything Kapuściński writes is literary fiction, give him the Nobel Prize and send him into retirement. Let him stop provoking a sense of guilt over Sunday lunch. Or perhaps such books should not be published at all, should indeed be banned? There are books after which the reader feels a better person. After reading Kapuściński, unfortunately, one does not — though one can always take comfort:

As a result we often observe the loss of all proportion, of all reasonable measure. Take the writing about the massacres in Rwanda — “the death of Africa”, although the inhabitants of that country make up less than one per cent of the continent’s population. Or the statements of various intellectuals that the world is sinking into war, although the societies in which wars are being fought make up less than one per cent of humanity. (Lapidarium III, p. 367)

Kapuściński has reached the stage where he could publish practically anything. Even his notebook of friends’ telephone numbers and addresses, with a suitable commentary, of course. People would buy it and be delighted. So probably would I. Why not, then, publish his notes from the lectures on ancient history given by Professor Iza Bieżuńska-Małowist? [6]

I “met” Herodotus in exactly the same place as the Great Reporter, only twenty years later. Professor Bieżuńska’s lectures were soporific. So was I. I sat in the same long bench Kapuściński describes — at the Historical Institute of Warsaw University — and could not be bothered to think about Herodotus. I bought the book for 90 zlotys in a second-hand shop on Świętokrzyska Street, and after passing (!) the exam I sold it back, with distaste, to the same shop, for 60. When you are twenty and a war is going on inside you between hormones on one side and common sense and a desire for knowledge on the other, you need Kapuściński’s backbone to be enchanted by Herodotus while sitting on a hard bench at the Historical Institute [7]. Meanwhile we — and not only I — on those same benches twenty years later hated Herodotus and could not tell his Histories from Xenophon’s Anabasis, with notable consequences in the first-year exams. It was known that a good many young people were admitted to the first year with points for social origin, and that Professor Bieżuńska’s final exam would be a mass execution. Classes were conducted in a “repressive”, unpleasant, indeed sadistic manner. History was reduced to the intellectual dimension of a multiplication table, to be learned by heart and then recited faultlessly. “Izunia” had the gaze of a basilisk, and such a spell emanated from her when she came majestically up the Institute stairs. Everyone feared her; everyone, with the possible exception of Kapuściński, hated her; and the thought of the final exam brought on a globus hystericus. So when I heard “C-plus” from Professor Bieżuńska’s lips, I ran straight to the second-hand shop and sold my Herodotus. Now I am ashamed. Now I am reading Travels with Herodotus and I really am ashamed. I do not suppose my copy of Herodotus is still in the shop on Świętokrzyska; I do not know whether the shop is still there; but the next time I am in Warsaw I shall go and check and probably “buy back” a Herodotus — because there are, after all, history students now too who hate him and get rid of him after passing or failing the exam.

So Kapuściński writes on, and is seized by regret that he wasted his years in Africa:

I had the chance to write a volume of reportage from expeditions to ruins, to make a volume of conversations with writers and painters, to come to know that music and dance better. Instead I wrote several books on a subject made of sand — that is, on African politics, and therefore on the least durable, most illusory and fleeting thing in the world. The weight of a book’s subject in some sense determines the weight of the book itself. Of course a book may be better or worse, but a work devoted to eternal and great problems has a better chance of surviving than a thing about trifles. (Lapidarium I, p. 162)

Does Kapuściński, then, have a sense of a chance wasted, a life wasted? Is he a pessimist? Does he cling to Herodotus? Does he fear that subjects built of sand will soon scatter, leaving nothing but sand, the desert? Is it only coquetry, a writer’s obsessive neurosis? I think not.

Six billion people live in the world. That is potentially six billion different interests, ambitions, contradictions, conflicts. Charged with such energy, our planet ought long ago to have blown up — we do have the bombs — and yet the world exists, lives in peace (more or less), somehow develops. How, then, can one not be an optimist? (Lapidarium III, p. 442)

-—————————————————

Notes

1. Quotations follow the collected edition (I–III), Czytelnik, Warsaw 2003. 2) Bell’Antonio, 1960, a screen adaptation of Vitaliano Brancati’s novel, screenplay by Pier Paolo Pasolini, directed by Mauro Bolognini. The story of an impotent man who must first do something dangerous to become capable of physical love. 3) Mondo cane, 1962–64, directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. 4) Autoportret reportera, Znak, Cracow 2004. 5) Podróże z Herodotem, Znak, Cracow 2004. 6) Professor Iza Bieżuńska-Małowist took over the chair in 1952 and from 1969 headed the Department of Ancient History, a post she held until her retirement in 1987. 7) The Historical Institute of Warsaw University, founded in 1930, formed part of the University’s Faculty of History alongside the Institute of Art History and the Institute of Archaeology. Source: http://dziennik.com, Przegląd Polski on-line (New York cultural weekly)