"Weariness with the present" — a review of "Travels with Herodotus"

Author: Piotr Wojciechowski source: Nowe Książki no. 12/2004, pp. 12–14 date: 2004-12-01 ——————————————————————–

Ryszard Kapuściński is a literary star of the first magnitude. One of the not so many Polish writers present in the consciousness of the reading elites of the contemporary world, and perhaps more respected abroad than at home. For some, the object of a peculiar cult. The young people of the Reportage Laboratory at the Journalism Faculty of Warsaw University follow three names as though they were a constellation of guiding stars: Kapuściński, Krall, Kąkolewski. It is no wonder, then, that booksellers await each new Kapuściński book with hope (it sells well), and that members of the intelligentsia on the lookout for something to read await it with impatience (there will be something to talk about). I am sure that neither group will be disappointed by Travels with Herodotus. It will sell well and it will be talked about. But what will be the subject and the direction of the conversations for which Kapuściński’s new book will be the catalyst?

Will people talk about the world and the turns of its history, about the author and his stance, or about literary non-fiction, its prospects, its transformations, its point? To me that third space of questions seems closest to the book’s intention. The world is ever better reported, and the portrait of Kapuściński the media supply is distinct and deep — interviews, reviews, presentations.

What the world is like everyone can see and no one knows. Worse, we are coming closer to the conviction that as we see the world ever better we are at the same time moving away from comprehending it; we conclude that the world cannot be closed in any synthesis, formula or prescription. The degree of complication on every storey of being, and the shimmering of transformations of mounting speed, bring us to the point where we stop believing in any structure at all; we are struck by a crumbling strangeness and lose ourselves in it. Good reportage still draws us in, plays with our imagination, enriches our knowledge of the world — and at the same time does not bring us closer to the world but takes us further from it; it does not explain the world but shows the entanglement and the darkness. Kapuściński’s book, lucid in every sentence, rational in every thought, does not contradict that flood of strangeness, does not lighten the gloom. We live under attack from verified facts — the constant availability of descriptions and images, of hundreds of accounts, biographies, monographs, of reportage written, filmed and televised. To all this the writer-traveller now adds his own image of the cities, villages and trackless places inhabited by the human species; he leads us from India through China, Egypt, Black Africa, Persia and Algiers to Turkey, to Halicarnassus, Herodotus’s birthplace. He multiplies almost contemporary landscapes, details, events, the figures of drivers and politicians, guides, hoteliers, officers, shopkeepers, people met once and found again years later; and he adds to this a similar inventory taken from Herodotus, whose Histories he summarises, discusses, glosses and quotes abundantly.

It is easy enough to say: Kapuściński has confirmed his class, has added to his previous books something new, original, unexpectedly widening the formula of reportage. He goes back to his youth, describes the beginnings of the formation of his writing and of his career, and at the same time adds a historical counterpoint to all of it. He goes through exotic countries and through their present political condition not so much with Herodotus as with Herodotus’s retinue, with a crowd of Greeks, Persians, Scythians, kings and warriors, barbarians of every kind from two and a half thousand years ago.

Krzysztof Masłoń wrote in “Rzeczpospolita”: “What determines a writer’s success? In Ryszard Kapuściński’s case: sincerity. The writer has won his readers’ trust.” Masłoń, with whose opinions I usually agree, missed the mark this time. Readers’ trust — agreed. Such trust is won by anyone who does not lie and does not bore. But sincerity? Nothing of the kind, no sincerity at all. Kapuściński is secretive. He is genuinely modest; there is no pose in him when he writes of his humility. But he always writes little about his private life, is sparing with his opinions, does not confess his feelings, and likes to replace generalisations with polished aphorisms. Is he insincere? An example of arrogant insincerity is Umberto Eco, thrusting all his erudition and compositional virtuosity at the reader. Kapuściński cannot be charged with that. His peculiar secretiveness arises from many causes, and may be explained by trust in the reader, by faith in his experience and his capacity to make connections. Travels with Herodotus must be counted an exceptional book in Kapuściński’s output. Here the secretiveness is doubled and questioned at once. Doubled, because to the old tactic of hiding behind the world is now added the hiding behind a second screen — behind the Histories and their author. At the same time, from behind that double guard, a shy but encouraging smile flashes out, which seems to say: I have come out towards you, reader, as far as I could, as far as I know how. Now be brave and intelligent, take these few steps in my direction. Try to grasp what my profession consists in and what kind of person it has made of me. One step more, and perhaps you will learn what I think about the human condition in general.

The author of Travels with Herodotus presents the patron of his book, an author from millennia ago, as a fellow reporter, in order to show the profession through its principles and, still more, through its limitations — its eternal limitations.

Kapuściński writes about Herodotus, but in many places we shall not be wrong to substitute a contemporary Polish surname for the ancient Greek name: “Herodotus’s book came precisely out of travel; it is the first great work of reportage in world literature. Its author has a reporter’s intuition, a reporter’s eye and ear. He is tireless, he must sail the sea, cross the steppe, plunge into the desert — and he gives us an account of it. He astonishes us with his endurance, never complains of exhaustion, nothing discourages him, not once does he say he is afraid of anything (…) he must have been a forbearing and well-disposed man, cheerful and warm, a good sort, one of us. There is no malice in him, no hatred. He tries to understand everything, to find out why someone acts in one way and not another. He does not blame the human being as a person; he blames the system. It is not the individual who is by nature evil, depraved, base — what is evil is the system in which he happens to live. That is why he is a fervent advocate of freedom and democracy and an opponent of despotism, autocracy and tyranny, since he believes that only in the former case does a person have the chance to behave with dignity, to be himself, to be human.”

What, then, separates the ancient author from the modern master? Herodotus is guided by “a faith full of optimism which we long ago lost: that the world can be described.”

That is a fairly shattering admission from the pen of someone who devoted his whole life to literary non-fiction, who became its classic and its idol. Kapuściński returns again and again to his elementary, simple motivations. He became a reporter because he wanted to travel abroad, because he was curious about the world. He wrote because he was a reporter. He was on the side of the barefoot, the poor, the wronged, because he himself had no shoes during the occupation, went without enough to eat, knew want. Do these motivations — childishly simple, boyishly naive and noble — reveal the author, or does the author hide behind them?

Did he say much more about himself and the world in the address he gave at the recent conferral of his honorary doctorate at the Jagiellonian University? Again there was the crystalline, efficient and lucid Polish; instead of Herodotus, other distinguished masters appeared — Norwid, Levinas, Bronisław Malinowski. And the prescription for a worthy encounter with the Other was movingly simple and decent: dialogue and exchange are better than war and isolation. What more? “The experience of spending years among distant Others teaches me that only goodwill towards another being is the attitude that can stir in him the string of humanity.”

Let us not expect more from Kapuściński. Let us recall Krzysztof Kieślowski, and how he shielded himself from questions, from the tasks of interpretation. “I only tell little stories,” he used to say to journalists. One has to try to read Kapuściński more deeply, to follow the paths of his silences and subtexts — does he not provoke us to it? So let us see Travels with Herodotus as a story about a very young man losing and winning a struggle with “the system” — with actually existing Polish communism, with Marxist indoctrination, with the entanglements that stood between him and a passport and a journey, with the price that had to be paid for a post in the party press or a government agency. Let us not read this book in isolation; let us compare it with, say, Leopold Unger’s Intruz or Aleksander Jackowski’s Na skróty, the better to feel the heavy atmosphere of a Poland of apparatchiks and of a Cold War world, and to recognise the world into which a young man in a suit from the state retail store steps with Herodotus under his arm and a Polish press card in his pocket. He was driven by curiosity, by a desire to cross wired-off borders, and later also by the inertia of a reporter’s success. When did an awareness arise of the tragedy inherent in the business of describing “a world impossible to describe”? When was the tragedy recognised of describing human cruelties and follies that cannot be prevented? For these tragic suggestions are passed to us by a Kapuściński already conscious of his position, speaking for himself but at the same time commenting on the contemporary art of reportage — perhaps on literary non-fiction as a whole.

He turned back to the times of Herodotus so as not to fall into “the trap of provincialism”, because there are “provincials of space and provincials of time”. He fled from weariness with the present into the past, from the reporter’s solitude into the company of Herodotus, because Herodotus was “one of us”. But where was he leading the reader?

Kapuściński’s stories flow swiftly and smoothly. There is a temptation to read them as an entertaining novel of exotic adventure. But the author, conversing with Herodotus’s shade, wants something else for us. He shows us other cultures, convinced that “they must be known, because those other worlds are mirrors in which we and our culture see ourselves; through which we understand ourselves better, since we cannot define our identities until we confront others.” Let us not pass over his warnings. Behind the description of a meeting with Congolese rebels flashes a reflection on “how dangerous freedom becomes when it is stripped of hierarchy and order — or rather, anarchy freed from ethics and from order.” Is that situation, too, not a mirror set before us?

Why will Herodotus’s monstrous account of Zopyrus’s self-sacrifice be quoted to us? So that we may grasp the situation of today’s suicide bombers through this statement of Kapuściński’s: “A person whose dignity has been violated, who has felt himself humiliated, degraded by someone for the sole reason that he is somebody different, can free himself from that burning feeling of shame and disgrace only through an act of self-annihilation. I feel that I am marked, and being marked — I cannot live.”

Not a word of hasty judgement. Not a line of a comforting prescription for how to act. That is exactly how he describes the mechanics of empires and the riddles of the workings of human memory. “In Herodotus’s world, almost the only repository of memory is a human being. To reach what is remembered, therefore, one has to reach a person, and if he lives far from us we have to go to him, set out on the road, and once we have met — sit down together and listen to what he tells us, listen, remember, perhaps write it down. That is how reportage begins; it is born of such a situation.” Humility before the world, trust that the reader will go further. “A journey, after all, does not begin at the moment we set out and does not end when we have reached our destination.”

Transcribed from the printed text by: Michalina Krydel