The Shaman,the Greengrocer,and “Living in Truth” 1

The Shaman

“And do you live in truth, shaman?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you live according to the truth.”

“I do,” answered the shaman. ²

This dialogue comes from the novel Shaman, which the Czech writer Egon Bondy wrote in March 1976. If Bondy here uses the phrase “live in truth” over two years before Václav Havel would write The Power of the Powerless, this may just remind us that Havel himself didn’t coin the term. Indeed, we can find it even earlier, for example, in a 1975 text by the underground cultural critic Ivan Martin Jirous, who says that true art should address those who “wish to live in truth.” ³ And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had articulated the call “not to live by a lie” in 1974. If Havel didn’t coin the term, however, he did transform it, taking up a phrase that was in the air and fashioning it into the cornerstone of an entire oppositional platform. A comparison of Havel with Bondy can, I think, show us just what was new in Havel’s understanding of “living in truth,” and help explain why The Power of the Powerless represented an unexpected approach to questions of political opposition.

Egon Bondy (1930–2007) had been a versatile counter-cultural figure ever since the early 1950s. He had a PhD in philosophy and published several philosophical studies in the 1960s, but most of his writing—including a great deal of poetry, a multi-volume history of philosophy, and many novels and first-person memoirs—could not be published officially under Communism. Always a marginalized and somewhat unclassifiable figure, he nevertheless left a lasting mark on several generations of Czech writers and, in particular, inspired a generation of counter-cultural or “underground” youth in the 1970s, when he became one of the central figures of the Czech music underground that was coalescing around figures like Jirous and bands like The Plastic People of the Universe. We now know, as well, that Bondy gave a lot of information to the secret police, and much of his writing from the 1970s and 1980s can be seen as referring, obliquely or not-so-obliquely, to his own feelings of guilt and betrayal. Despite his collaboration, he remains one of the central figures of Czech culture of the 1970s and 1980s, a charismatic thinker who was a perennial outsider but was also closely involved in many exhibitions, happenings, and concerts of the artistic underground. Some of his best writing comes in a series of prose works from the 1970s and 1980s—including The Little Monk (1975), Invalid Siblings (1975), Shaman (1976), January in the Village (1978), and Afghanistan (1980)—that mix personal meditation, philosophical debate, and political essay with hallucinatory visions and vaguely fantastic or science-fiction plots. ⁴

Shaman takes place in some kind of ancient hunter-gatherer society, somewhere in present-day Europe, but Bondy weaves in numerous allusions to Communist Czechoslovakia of the 1970s, as well as to the politics of modern authoritarian regimes in general. For example, there are secret policemen who perform “house searches” of the shaman’s tent; there are a Great Chief and Great Shaman who are spoken of in terms reminiscent of twentieth-century dictators. There is also a primeval equivalent of the music underground: the tribe’s young hunters wear their hair long and put on secret concerts, which are forbidden by the Great Chief because they corrupt public morality. The novel’s protagonist, the shaman, plays a very particular role in the life of the tribe—he recites incantations (which he himself doesn’t much believe in) for the success of each year’s hunt; he manages and administers rituals; he observes the natural environment for information about the weather and the movement of mammoths; he deciphers cave drawings to see what they say about the tribe’s ancestors; he preserves consciousness of the past and mediates contact with the supernatural world. He wields a great deal of power even as he is ironic about his own influence. In short, he fulfills something of the role of an intellectual in this primitive society. (He is also an informal patron of the underground concerts and is held in respect by the youths of the tribe—a role analogous to Bondy’s own in the Prague counter-culture of the 1970s.)

In the shaman’s spells as well as the utterances of secret police and the tribe’s political rulers, Bondy’s novel offers a pastiche of modern Communist discourse. In one of his speeches, for example, the shaman says things like: “The hunting successes of our society are increasing by the year. Under the leadership of our wise and all-seeing Great Chief and Great Shaman, the wealth of our tribe is ever greater” ⁵ —the idea of “ever greater success” being one of the clichés of Communist discourse. But the shaman hardly takes his own words seriously, and next to the parody of regime speech here, we also hear a sigh that is discernibly Bondyesque. “It’s an utter curse,” thinks the shaman, “living in this country at this time, when you can’t think anything for yourself, let alone say it, and definitely not do it, when there are official regulations and censorship for everything, when you have to bow down before murderers like the Great Chief and bloodthirsty idiots like the Great Shaman, and when you must fear for your life as soon as you start to play modern music, compose your own songs or wear a beard and long hair.” ⁶ Nevertheless, the corruption of this world only spurs him to seek the truth elsewhere.

As in his other novels from the 1970s, Bondy here offers a mystical conception of the truth. Truth is a higher state of consciousness, a supernatural or divine knowledge of the world; the artist or intellectual approaches truth through spiritual discipline, hard work, and mental training. Truth is not a form of behavior, a daily practice, or the product of dialogue and reasoned debate. The shaman experiences truth, for example, during a twelve-hour “Great Trance” in which he cures a deathly ill girl from the camp. During the trance, he experiences a feeling of universal love, of the mutual interconnectedness of all people and things. This is a mystical conception of the moral order, in which the injustices of this world dissolve in a vision of higher unity. When the trance is over (and the girl is cured), the shaman cannot articulate this vision. It remains outside language; “even the shaman lacked the words for it.” ⁷ But after this intense experience of the truth, he is no longer capable of living among people. At the novel’s climax, the shaman undertakes a pilgrimage to the north, to a zone called “the ice field.” Here, in a dream-like rocky landscape, he meets a devil, a distorted image of himself, a kind of principle of evil. He confronts this evil, battles it—and is defeated; it’s not entirely clear what happens, but the devil seems to take on his physical appearance and the shaman himself is paralyzed. He eventually recovers and drags himself back to the camp as a human wreck, a shadow of his former self.

Readers might derive two lessons from the shaman’s fate. First, despite his enigmatic defeat at the ice field, he does achieve a certain knowledge—presumably a knowledge of his own weakness and evil nature. Earlier in the novel, he says: “The truth is acquired through knowledge. Caring about the truth means striving for knowledge. Anyone who takes this path can go astray. He can go very much astray. But by striving for knowledge, he cares for the truth. God wants to be known.” ⁸ The shaman does go very much astray, but this leads him to a deeper humility and understanding of his own weakness. At the end of the novel, he even receives a kind of absolution when the young hunters invite him, once again, to preside at their secret concerts.

At the same time, it is clear that the shaman is no model of civic virtue. His behavior is generally selfish and sometimes cruel. Thinking that he rises above conventional morality, he loses his moral footing and is drawn into all kinds of questionable behavior. When the secret police demand a sign of cooperation, he readily agrees to inform on one of the young hunters in the tribe. And at the end of the novel, he abandons his faithful disciple Kukučka, a somewhat confused helper who cannot take care of himself and ends up dying in solitude. (It was this Kukučka who asked the shaman about living in truth in the dialogue I quoted earlier—as if he already sensed that the shaman’s self-confidence was leading them both to ruin.) Not even the mystical journey to the ice field brings the shaman courage. After he returns to the camp, the Great Chief stages a show trial, forcing him to give false testimony against another tribe member. The shaman resists at first, refusing to lie, but after he is beaten, he gives false testimony and the victim is summarily executed.

In other words: the courage necessary to attain the truth is not, for Bondy, a civic virtue. Recognition of the truth is not tied to civic courage. The solitary, concentrated spiritual training that leads a soul to the truth is not compatible with the self-sacrifice and cooperation necessary for political opposition. Bondy was, in many ways, a mystic. For him, the idea of truth is associated with the mutual interconnection of all people and things; it is beyond language and beyond conventional morality; in the all-encompassing experience of truth, action and resistance give way to meditation and contemplation. Truth is not connected to political opposition.

The Warehouse Worker

The main character of The Power of the Powerless is first introduced to us under the somewhat clumsy title of “manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop” (vedoucí obchodu se zeleninou). Havel quickly switches to the more modest “greengrocer” (zelinář) and finally calls him “our greengrocer” (náš zelinář). Our greengrocer is not a literary character. He is sketched out quickly, in just a few brushstrokes. In fact, we don’t know much about him at all: “At trade union meetings, after all, he had always voted as he should. He had always taken part in various competitions. He voted in elections like a good citizen. He had even signed the ‘anti-Charter’” (VI). ⁹ We seem to be dealing with an orderly citizen—mild, obedient, and not particularly interesting.

How is he transformed into a person who lives in truth? The most remarkable thing in the greengrocer’s biography is the modesty of his great epiphany—the turning point when he begins to try living in the truth. The whole story takes place in just a couple of sentences: “Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself” (VII). ¹⁰ One day something snaps—that’s it. Havel does not offer us a worked-out theory about how we discover our authentic inner selves, or even a vivid story about how the truth gradually shines forth in the greengrocer’s soul. There is no journey to the ice field here. In fact, at this key moment in the greengrocer’s life, there is really nothing that would serve as a signpost to others, nothing that would lead other truth-loving people along the same path. “Something” just “snaps.” Not even the greengrocer’s subsequent behavior, his revolt against the system, is very stirring: he stops putting up slogans, stops voting in sham elections, and “he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support” (VII). With whom, actually? The inelegant syntax here (nalezne v sobě dokonce sílu solidarizovat se s těmi, s nimiž mu jeho svědomí velí se solidarizovat) merely serves to emphasize the absence of pathos in the greengrocer’s transformation—as if Havel did not want to specify what the greengrocer’s conscience commands.

The enumeration of punishments that follows is also somewhat strange: “The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate. His children’s access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him” (VII). ¹¹ One striking thing about this list is the incommensurability of the sanctions—with all due respect to the right to a vacation, we might consider some of the other punishments, such as getting fired or having your children expelled from school, to be more impressive. And the list does not culminate with a sanction at all, but rather with the puzzlement of his “fellow workers.” Who are these co-workers, actually? Maybe the other warehouse workers, the drivers of the trucks he loads and unloads, or perhaps his former co-workers in the grocery store, who wander down to the warehouse to shake their heads in disbelief? Havel does not paint the scene for us; he offers no detail. Although a brilliant playwright, he makes absolutely no effort to stage the greengrocer’s disgrace. Similarly, he intentionally avoids describing the greengrocer’s new life—he avoids telling a “dissident story” about his rebirth into a “life in truth.” We don’t see the greengrocer entering into a new society of righteous individuals; he is still surrounded by people from the old world of lies.

The thinness of the whole story becomes even more striking as Havel follows “our greengrocer” (in fact he is no longer a greengrocer; he is a závozník, an assistant truck driver or warehouse worker) in his path toward the truth. If earlier he decided not to do certain things (vote in sham elections, hide his opinions, hang the sign in his window), he may now decide to do something. We may wonder whether this distinction is even coherent; in any case, this movement toward more significant protest remains unmotivated. Havel simply says that the original effort to live in truth may “grow into something more” (XV), and he gives few clues to this further transformation. Once again, it is described in colorless language. Havel proposes it as a theoretical possibility rather than as a story: “He may, for example, organize his fellow greengrocers to act together in defense of their interests. He may write letters to various institutions, drawing their attention to instances of disorder and injustice around him. He may seek out unofficial literature, copy it, and lend it to his friends” (XV). “Various institutions,” “instances of disorder”—Havel remains at a high level of generality here, and it must be said that the greengrocer’s story is just not very interesting, let alone inspiring. It seems as if Havel has set aside his talent as a playwright who knows how to stage absurd conflicts, to embody abstract concepts in the lives of his characters, to make fun of the language of power and self-deception—in short, as a writer who knows how to dramatize things. The manager of a shop has lost his job. He’s now working in the warehouse. He writes letters to various institutions. How did this mini-story become the hallmark of Czechoslovak dissent?

Life in Quotation Marks

“A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent’” (I). These are the first words of The Power of the Powerless. They mark out the essay as a kind of response and antithesis to Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels were explaining, to the world, the nature of a specter called Communism; it seems that Havel will be explaining the nature of another specter, the one called “dissent”—or so it is called in the West. What is the specter called in the East, actually? Havel never really answers this implicit question. The reader’s first impulse might be to say: In the East, this phenomenon is called by its true name, living in truth. “Dissident” is just a label that the Western press places on someone who is living in truth. But as we read The Power of the Powerless, we gradually realize that dissidence has no name in the East. This is because the word itself is a misnomer: there are many, many people living in truth (in various ways and to various degrees) in the Eastern bloc, but only a few of them become known abroad, when the West shines its spotlight—usually for random and unsubstantiated reasons—on a few isolated examples of protest and elevates them with the exalted names “dissident” and “dissent.” It’s an example of Western journalists invoking a phenomenon that does not really exist, and thereby summoning it into existence. Dissent is thus a Western term for some small subset of truthful behavior, a subset that has, for various insubstantial reasons, attracted the attention of the West. The goal of Havel’s essay is not to define “dissidence,” but ultimately to render it obsolete, to help create a world in which it needs no name—a world, we might say, that is no longer divided into East and West at all. ¹²

The essay thus starts with a question of naming. To invoke a philosophical distinction, we might say that Havel does not use the word “dissidence”; he mentions it, while alerting us to the complexities of its usage. And in the memorable thirteenth section of the essay, he completely dismantles the word “dissident” and shows how it systematically distorts people’s real efforts to live in truth. As in everything he wrote, Havel here places great stress on language, on what we call things and how we use words. Havel placed great faith in language—as is clear, for example, from the power he ascribes to a simple act of speaking the truth. Havel also harbored great distrust of language—as is clear, for example, in his deconstruction of the true meaning of the greengrocer’s slogan, or in his skepticism toward the “dissident” label. His distrust is also abundantly clear, throughout the essay, in the enormous number of words he places in scare quotes—that is, quotation marks that do not indicate a quotation, but rather call doubt on a term, indicate our sheepishness in using it, or mark its provisional nature—starting, in the first sentence, with “dissidence” (disidentství, “dissent” in Paul Wilson’s translation). I did a rough count and found more than 550 pairs of quotation marks in the eighty-page Czech-language essay, roughly 7 per page. Among other things, the phrase “living in truth” appears consistently in scare quotes after its first usage (which is in italics)—every single one of the forty-five times it is mentioned. The same goes for “living in a lie.” “Living in truth” is even couched in quotation marks in the essay’s final section, with its stirring consideration of how Eastern bloc dissidents might inspire meaningful forms of political participation in the West. It’s as if “living in truth” never lost its provisional nature for Havel, as if he didn’t want to use the term, but merely to point at the possibility of using it—and misusing it.

Havel maintains a similarly contradictory attitude toward the pathos of protest more generally. He wants to confront his readers—whether in the East or West—with an inspiring vision of dissent; at the same time, he wants to avoid cheap or romantic invocations of “dissidents.” Let us return to the shaman and the warehouse worker—they represent a kind of Scylla and Charybdis on Havel’s path, two stories that he did not want to tell in The Power of the Powerless.

On one side is the shaman: the Great Trance, the revelation of truth, the mystical ecstasy of truthfulness. Bondy sent his shaman on a journey to the north, to the ice fields, so that he could be conquered by evil but, through his suffering, discover the truth. Mysticism, spirituality—these were the intellectual coordinates of the music underground, an environment that Bondy had equally inspired and been inspired by during the 1970s. This was the environment of the Plastic People of the Universe, who put Bondy’s poetry to music in songs such as “Magical Nights,” with the refrain: “I am from Prague, that is where / the spirit itself will one day appear.” We sense this atmosphere in the final sentence of Bondy’s novel, as the shaman “gazed silently through open eyes into the impenetrable darkness” ¹³ —this is an effective image, combining vision and blindness, open eyes and ignorance, knowledge and mystery. The shaman knows that he knows nothing, and this is the only thing that might, in the reader’s eyes, save him. A couple years earlier, Havel had tapped ingeniously into this mystical atmosphere when he rallied opposition intellectuals to support the music underground after several of its members were put on trial. This is the trial that became known (inaccurately) as “the trial of the Plastic People of the Universe”—a misnomer that evolved, in fact, from Havel’s own efforts to frame the trial as a contest between the metaphysical innocence and purity of the underground, on one hand, and the calculating corruption of the regime, on the other. ¹⁴ Framed in this way, the trial helped draw together a wide coalition of opposition forces in the drafting and signing of Charter 77. But Havel did not want to build a political opposition around this kind of starry-eyed desire for mystical transcendence. He kept looking for a new principle of opposition—as if he were beginning where the shaman had ended, with the consciousness that the revelation of Truth with a capital T has very little to do with civic courage or civil society.

I think this is why Havel limited himself to that vague “something snaps.” He doesn’t really care about this internal transformation, at least not in The Power of the Powerless. The greengrocer is not an oppositional type, not a troublemaker; he harbored no tendencies toward political outbursts; he was obedient. For just this reason, his “rebirth” into the truth must have been a fundamental change, as well as an alarming and inspiring one. But Havel does not wax poetic about this inner rebirth. Perhaps he did not want to discuss a problem that had been identified, a few months earlier, in a much-discussed samizdat essay by Václav Benda called “The Parallel ‘Polis.’” There, Benda argued that moral correctness was not enough to sustain a political opposition: “An abstract moral stance, however, is merely a gesture; it may be terribly effective at the time, but it cannot be sustained for more than a few weeks or months. Proof of this is a phenomenon familiar to Charter signatories: the ecstatic sensation of liberation caused by signing the Charter gradually gave way to disillusionment and deep skepticism.” ¹⁵ It is clear in The Power of the Powerless that Havel does not want to discuss this problem, to trace these emotional highs and lows. He is more interested in what comes afterward, in the forms of community that arise among signatories after they have signed. For Havel, the true story of dissent develops from their subsequent civic activities, from the everyday practice of opposition. Thus, in the essay’s closing section, he suggests that small, spontaneous dissident groupings in the East might inspire the rebirth of political life in the West as well:

I know from thousands of personal experiences how the mere circumstance of having signed Charter 77 has immediately created a deeper and more open relationship and evoked sudden and powerful feelings of genuine community among people who were all but strangers before. This kind of thing happens only rarely, if at all, even among people who have worked together for long periods in some apathetic official structure. It is as though the mere awareness and acceptance of a common task and a shared experience were enough to transform people and the climate of their lives, as though it gave their public work a more human dimension that is seldom found elsewhere.

Indeed, the phrase společně sdílené (“common” or “jointly shared”) occurs three times in the essay’s final section.

The Shaman, then, is Scylla. Charybdis is the warehouse worker: the pathos of a “dissident story” about persecution that descends on anyone protesting courageously against an all-powerful state. Indeed, the phenomenon of intellectuals forced into blue-collar jobs was one of the most common topoi in Czech culture of the 1970s, when many professors, journalists, scientists, and other intellectuals were fired for political reasons. This was the pathos of banned writers, of philosophers and sociologists driving taxis, stoking boilers, or working in warehouses even as they typed philosophical essays in samizdat and withstood house searches and police interrogations. ¹⁶ Havel clearly did not want his landmark essay on dissent to be about interrogations, prisons, or the pseudo-romance of intellectuals fired for their political opinions and reduced to manual labor. The whole story of the greengrocer lacks pathos and the frisson of protest; it lacks the drama of an individual taking his or her first fateful steps into opposition and courageously paying the price. In this way, it is similar to Havel’s 1975 play Audience, which is shot through with self-irony, or his 1984 play Largo desolato, which offers what is still one of the best analyses of the absurdity of the life of a prominent dissident.

The Power of the Powerless is an unusually rich work, and it has inspired many readers in many directions. Nevertheless, it’s striking to think that Havel was of two minds about his own inspiring force. He felt that maintaining ambivalence toward the power of language should not weaken his influence but rather strengthen it. If his account of “living in truth” is one of the most potent ideas in The Power of the Powerless, I hope I’ve been able to suggest why it is not really the key to Havel’s argument or even the key to its effectiveness. I think Havel placed more weight on trying to understand how efforts to live in truth could coalesce into those ad hoc civic groupings with which, in the late 1970s, he associated dissent. And to my own mind, the strongest passages in the essay are those in which Havel speaks about “living in a lie”—this is why, to this day, we know the greengrocer as a greengrocer, and not as the warehouse worker he becomes when he lives in the truth. The deepest part of the essay may be its account of “post-totalitarian” society, its brilliant analysis of the mechanisms of ideology as an alibi for our own cowardice, and its reading of the greengrocer’s sign, which really says “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient”—who among us today is not afraid, and how do we cover up our cautiousness? Through his brilliant account of the “everyday panorama” of life under Communism, Havel makes us ask what ideological (or advertising) slogans may create the panorama of our own lives today. Just as brilliant, and absolutely indispensable for anyone thinking about dissent and dissidents in today’s world, is Havel’s deconstruction of the specter-term “dissident” and his attempt to give it new meaning. The opposite of living in truth is not living in a lie. It is, rather, the dissident clichés that East and West mutually project onto each other. And by another fateful turn of the screw, “living in truth” itself threatens to become one such cliché, thanks precisely to the force of Havel’s landmark essay.

Havel the dissident explores and, ultimately, takes up an ironic position between Western dreams and Eastern realities, between skepticism and empathy, between determined truth-telling and ironic self-observation, between life in the truth and “life in the truth.” It’s a position that he elsewhere calls “Anatomy of a Reticence,” in the essay of that title—much less frequently read, but much more candid about his mindset. ¹⁷ It’s the position of an absurdist playwright who is conscious of the quotation marks hanging over his own words, of a prominent dissident who stands at the confluence of many different lines of force (only one of which can be called “civic courage” or “personal autonomy”). If “living in truth” is nevertheless one of Havel’s most cited, and indeed most inspiring ideas, that may simply testify to the whole problematic with which The Power of the Powerless begins. When we follow dissidents and dissent in today’s world, we should forget neither Havel’s pathos nor his irony. Few dissidents knew how to join so much irony with so much pathos.