A Letter to Ernesto Sábato
Norman Manea
(Translated from Romanian by Stephen Kessler and Daniela Hurezanu.)
Author's Note
Ernesto Sábato's novel Abaddón el exterminador (1974) includes a dense epistolary chapter addressed to a virtual fellow writer, which begins "Dear, distant young man..." This response (published March 20, 1984, in the Romanian literary monthly Vatra) borrows ideas, themes, and even expressions from that and other novels by Ernesto Sábato, using them as references for a publicly declared solidarity. But the "open letter" to Sábato the reader familiar with the codified language of the sinister period of the Ceausescu regime will easily understandówas also addressed to a Romania traumatized by oppression and poverty, to its writers suffocated by the dictatorship's terror and depravity.
This rather obscure text signaled to the Romanian reader, through a mutually known code and an already established complicity (those "signals with hidden meanings"), what the author meant when he wrote about mineral passivity, the unspoken, ciphered "call" of the captive whose destiny is sealed, the dictator, the blind terror, the deaf-mute boredom of the gregarious slave, the all-powerful blind Order, the project of organized evil, the very atomization of existence, depersonalization, fear's chaos, apathy's opacity, a perfect frozen state of terror, the blind orchestrated oppression concerning a collectivity massified in a unique, enormous, servile body, an inert, "global" body, whose only chance of solidarity is to mimic, in code, signals with hidden meanings, a deaf-mute alphabet of a strangled apathy, and a forced and embittered silence postpone the explosion.
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A tale torn from the headlines of today ... and yesterday ... and the day before yesterday ... from medieval manuscripts ... Roman scrolls ... Egyptian papyrus ... Sumerian baked clay tablets ....
