Balla, In the Name of the Father and Other Stories, trans. Julia and Peter Sherwood (London: Jantar, 2017), 144 pp.
“In the Name of the Father” is the titular novella in a collection that also includes three short stories by the mononymous Balla. All four works in the volume serve as further volleys in the effort by contemporary Slovak writers to destroy the romantic image of their home country: demonstrating that the land of pious beekeepers and goatherds, historically innocent victims of wicked imperial forces, is a lie.
This far into reading novels from Slovakia, I’ve come to the conclusion that all of its contemporary fiction is political in nature, even if its subject matter is not explicitly political. Actually, the ostensible story is rarely political at all. But this is not surprising. The mandate of communism was to turn everything political. Nothing could be private, personal, individual, religious, familial, or economic without simultaneously being political. However much post-communist Slovaks might be exhausted by this hostile takeover of all of life by politics, there are very few conceptual alternatives on the horizon.
At the exact same time that communism demanded the politicization of everything, though, it forbade anything like real political engagement. After all, there was only one Party, which did everything, and furthermore did everything right, so what more was there to say? Only pretentious repetitive speeches affirming the neverending victory of the workers’ movement.
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This is the obscurantist fog in which the novella takes place. It’s an aged man’s bitter, whiny reflection on all the failures of his family life: his ex-wife’s descent into madness, his one son’s indifference to him, his other son’s intense hatred of him, his occasional affairs and half-hearted relationship with another woman in old age, unhappy memories of his own father, and the weird basement building project of his mad visionary brother. Occasionally he dabbles in self-reproach, but that ultimately requires a level of moral wherewithal that his culture cannot provide and he cannot independently summon.
None of his meandering memories add up to a plot—by now it seems that plot belongs to a world that makes a whole lot more sense than the ravages of post-communist Central Europe would allow—and even his metaphors are hazy. Sense, meaning, and insight are no more available than plot, and perhaps impossible without it. Sense is an unaffordable luxury in a senseless world. Even the nomenklatura can’t afford it.
You might think that by now, twenty-five years after the end of communism, Slovak writers would be emerging from those horrors. But that is the optimistic view of people with a long history of democracy (however fraught and compromised) behind them. Such psychic scars live on a long, long time. “In the Name of the Father” is not the first work I’ve read in which the difference between before and after communism is ellided, if not ignored. “‘Oh, so it was for our own good that we were left practically penniless for years on end? That’s when the revolution happened. The Revolution!’ My younger son gave a sarcastic laugh.” There is nothing romantic about revolution anymore. Communism proclaimed that everything it did, all the way down to its static institutions, was revolutionary. The falling of the wall didn’t of itself create a revolution in the mind.
The novella reflects a further quality specific to Czechoslovak communism. Its first twenty years, from 1948 to 1968, were dominated by Stalinism (even after Stalin’s death in 1953), with the heavy hand of persecution enforcing policies via imprisonment, show trials, and executions. When the attempt at “socialism with a human face” failed after the Prague Spring, a new modus operandi came into effect: “normalization.”
In other words, normalization was business as usual, pretending that nothing had ever happened even to whisper of real political change. But it also meant no more overt persecution. The strategy shifted to subtle moral compromise, seeking to create neither martyrs nor heroes but a 100% complicit society. By and large it succeeded. The ease with which the revolution took place in 1989, while happily bloodless, also proved that it could have happened a lot sooner. It wasn’t the tanks that kept the system in place, but the complicit people. That’s not exactly an inspirational thought.
And that appears to be the real target of Balla’s ire. Not the external persecution but the complicity of his countrymen all the way to the core of their emotional lives. The protagonist confesses, at the end of the novella, that he’s “unfree, empty, and selfish!”—only to realize that, actually, so is everyone else. It’s a mutual conspiracy to race to the moral bottom. He concludes:
“So the local populace hasn’t been apathetic because of something actively radiated by my house. The people are apathetic because that’s their nature. They let others trample all over them, they endure any regime without muttering a word, nodding meekly, raising their hands puppet-like to vote, and there isn’t an iota of judiciousness in this, no Buddhist devotion, it’s not the magical effect of my brother’s apparatus, it’s just their shitty slave mentality.”
Or, as a very American hero once put it: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
