With the passing of Václav Havel goes one of the greatest figures of my lifetime, and I say that without a shred of hesitation or caveat. Few people have sacrificed so much of themselves, and to so great effect; few people have managed such a delicate balance of intelligence, creativity, and moral force. If you're new to Havel, I think this brief editorial sums up why he left such a deep impression on the world, and why his loss is so painful.
Most obituaries today are going to focus on his political activities - Havel was an outspoken political dissident during the worst years of Soviet Czechoslovakia and he proved to be a level-headed president when he was elected after the fall of the USSR - but I wanted to spend a few moments remembering his literary output, which ranks among the best in 20th century theatre.
NOTE: No disrespect to the late Havel, but of course he would pass while I'm traveling for the holidays and don't have my copies of his works handy. I'm trying to piece together a diary based on what I can access readily online, which is a pity: there's so much great stuff sitting on my shelf at home. Bah.
THE ABSURDIST PLAYS
As a young playwright Havel was heavily drawn to Absurdism. Seeing the possibilities of Absurdism as a sharp satirical tool, he aimed it at the bloated, inhuman bureaucracy that had come to define Soviet-era Czechoslovakia by the 1960s.
The first of his full-length plays he saw performed was 1963's The Garden Party, a work which still dominates his reputation today. It is in the best tradition of Ionesco, a tapestry of dazzling wordplay that evaporates into nothing, a vicious critique not only of the language of everyday government, but of the empty platitudes that we use to shield ourselves from the world around us (one example: "He who fusses with a mosquito net can never hope to dance with a goat!" Say what?) The protagonist of the play, Hugo Pludek, is an empty vessel who his parents hope (through connections) will be a successful member of the Party. As Hugo is bounced from home to a garden party to a government institute, he absorbs the empty language around him until he returns home, unrecognized by his own parents, but a brilliant orator who can string together platitude after platitude in something that resembles a speech, but means nothing at all. Hugo is now a success.
In the play Hugo is bounced between two competing institutions - the inaugurators and the liquidators, neither of whom seem to do anything other than bounce orders off each other. Note how convoluted the bureaucratic language of the play can be; here's the head liquidator trying to sort through the responsibilities for a recently issued order:
DIRECTOR: And will it then be inaugurated by a liquidationally trained inaugurator trained by an inaugurationally trained liquidation officer, or by an inaugurationally trained liquidation officer trained by a liquidationally trained inaugurational officer?
Tortured as that my sound, Havel layers lines like these into a kind of musical cacophony that's both exhausting and really, really funny. The Garden Party does everything a great absurdist play does: it makes us question the nature of theatre (time passes arbitrarily, characters sometimes yell at the audience), and question the relationship between language and meaning. The play has an actual hero, Hugo's brother Peter, who says nothing, avoids the limelight, and leaves the play with a wife and a job and no one watching him. In a world where people like Peter are derided as "bourgeois intellectuals", this is happiness enough.
Havel followed up the success of his first plays with two more classics: The Memorandum takes the satire on language even further (if a little too on-point) with a government office forced to translate all its memos into the "new" language, ptydepe. Unfortunately its bureaucrats need training to read ptydepe, need clearance to get training, and can't get clearance until they've been trained. Havel intercuts the Kafkaesque slapstick of office life with "classes" on ptydepe that expose how needlessly complex, worthless, and stupid the language is. His last play to be staged before the Soviet invasion of Prague, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, is a borderline sci-fi work about the nature of love and happiness, and about what happens when science and ideology are mixed to dangerous effect. The play's convoluted timeline doubles back on itself, with identical dialogue reappearing in the doctor's various sexual advances.
THE VANEK PLAYS
Not all of Havel's plays were in this absurdist vein. As his dissident behavior began to alienate him from some friends and lionize him among others, he turned introspective about the role of dissidence and the moral toll it takes on its practitioners in a series of loosely-connected, one-act plays about his fictional stand-in, Ferdinand Vaněk.
What's extraordinary about the Vaněk plays is the rigorous self-critique that Havel imposes on himself. Dissidence makes one a hero, but becoming a hero means one risks moral danger in one's self-perception... There's nothing worse than a martyr who takes pleasure in his own martyrdom. Is it the self-sacrifice of ego? And what if the people who oppose him have a point?
The earliest of the Vaněk plays, "The Audience", takes an episode from Havel's life as a factory worker, when he was blacklisted out of other forms of work. It's a fast-paced, two-person play, ideal in an environment where his plays could only be performed in the living rooms of sympathetic friends. In the play the foreman of the factory knows that the new worker is a famous playwright, and tries to secure Vaněk's willingness to act as an informant on other workers. Vaněk tiptoes around the question, trying to refuse without offending his boss, but he overplays his hand. Suddenly the tables are turned, and this is about class tensions, as well. The foreman finds Vaněk disgusting:
FOREMAN: And what about me? Going to drop me right in it, aren't you? Let me stew in my own juice. Never mind about me, I'm just an ordinary brewer yokel - but a fine gentleman like you can't participate. I can soil my hands as much as I like, as long as the gentleman stays clean. The gentleman has principles. Everyone else can go hang. Just so he keeps his lilywhite soul. Putting principles before people.
It's easy to claim the high ideals of political dissidence, but dealing with human beings is another matter. Vaněk is right to refuse, but the foreman isn't a bad person and his offense at the high-and-mighty attitude that he senses from Vaněk isn't entirely wrong. In one brilliant joke, Havel suggests the foreman's fears are well-founded:
FOREMAN: Have you any idea what risk I'm taking by being so decent to you? What happens if you rat on me?
VANEK: I'm not going to tell anybody.
FOREMAN: So you'll write about it. Put it in one of those plays of yours... they'll confiscate it and I'll be ruined...
VANEK: Don't worry, I'm going to keep it to myself...
Heh, given that we're reading about it in a play, that's exactly what happened... The foreman was right!
Over the years Havel followed Vaněk through multiple, increasingly awkward relationships until they culminate in "Protest", a fictionalized account of the effort to secure signatures for the "Charter 77" (see below). In "Protest" Vaněk approaches an old and successful friend who weighs the balance between dissidence and complicity, failure and success, and wonders whether the choice of dissidence is itself a kind of cowardly act, seizing abstract moral authority rather the tricky balance of real life.
From anyone other than Havel this would be easy to dismiss; but because Havel lived his convictions, we take these debates more seriously. He chose the abstract moral authority, but he never lost sight of the dangers - arrogance, hypocrisy - that that choice engendered.
CHARTER 77
It's hard to imagine today, but during the 70s the Party was terrified of rock music. One group in particular, the Plastic People of the Universe (named after a Zappa song), raised their ire not because of any direct anti-regime sentiments in their music, but because they were defiantly and exuberantly counterculture. If the goal of the Party was the Utopia of Tomorrow, then counterculture was a de facto enemy of the state. Concerts were banned; 'unofficial' concerts were raided, and eventually the Plastic People found themselves on trial.
Havel wasn't unaware of the Plastic People, and he attended the 1976 kangaroo court that convicted them and was enraged enough to take part in a manifesto that appeared the next year, the landmark "Charter 77". The charter is technically anonymous, but most attribute it to Havel, who was one of its official representatives. First and foremost, it argues that citizens have a moral duty to call out abuses by the state:
Responsibility for the observance of civil rights in the country naturally falls, in the first place, on the political and state power. But not on it alone. Each and every one of us has a share of responsibility for the general situation and thus, too, for the observance of pacts which have been enacted and are binding not only for the government but for all citizens.
"Charter 77" is a nifty bit of politicking: rather than a broadside attack against the systematic and indefensible abuses of the regime, the text lays out a careful and subtle appeal by citing the state's own legal responsibilities towards its citizens. Thus the criticism is not some pro-Western, pro-capitalist plot (as the Party might allege) but a clear disjuncture between the nation's binding legal responsibilities and the abuses heaped on its citizens. "Charter 77" makes its case by juxtaposition, and it's impossible to ignore the hypocrisy.
In the first round of public dissemination the charter was signed by 242 people, and eventually reached 1898 - no small feat in a country where signing the charter was officially a political crime. Havel delivered the text and signatures in person, for which he was arrested, tried, and imprisoned.
AND ONE MORE THING...
I can't possibly cover all of Havel's works the way I want to here, and given that this is also something of an obituary, I wanted to add a brief footnote that likely won't be covered in the major obits that go out today: Havel was an ally of the LGBT community. There's not much available in English on this point, but I'll provide a few links and information.
Havel was very close to his openly-gay, outspokenly anti-fascist uncle Miloš Havel, whom he considered a great inspiration; John Keane's biography of Havel, A Political Tragedy in Six Acts, covers this relationship extensively. It was his uncle's persecution during the 40s and eventual escape from the country that first sparked Havel's political sympathies. During the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent push for greater cultural homogeneity, Havel recognized the danger that this posed to minority groups, including the LGBTs community (this from his essay collection To the Castle and Back):
Who will be next in line? The Roma? Homosexuals? All the foreigners? And who will be left? Pure-blooded little Czechs in their own little garden.
His support wasn't just rhetorical; as president he carried this forward into his support for domestic partnerships and HIV/AIDS initiatives, and it was under Havel's leadership that various laws were 'equalized' for homosexuality (e.g. until 1990 the age of consent had been different, the laws involving prostitution had been different. This all changed under Havel.) Here's how one activist remembers him:
President Havel came to the Dum Svetla, or house of light, a center for people with AIDS. We helped to found and built the center, and I co-wrote many of the brochures. The president was very supportive of that, and also was involved in trying to get registered partnership passed. So he was a very supportive of us.
Under Havel's presidency multiple bills for the Czech equivalent of domestic partnerships failed in the legislature; unfortunately when the bill finally passed in 2005, it was Havel's successor and ideological opponent (Václav Klaus) who vetoed it. Klaus' veto was eventually overriden. Havel was pleased when the law finally passed, although disappointed in its narrow margin of victory, and statements on the debate are worth noting:
What interests me most about this whole debate around domestic partnerships is the totally absurd ideology that the benefit of a [traditional] family, as opposed to a homosexual one, is in rearing children. In this sense the family is reduced to something like a calf-factory: it makes them a place for bringing bulls to cows to produce calves. So there's nothing spiritual or soulful in this; it's a very materialistic, co-op notion of the family. And that's what angers me the most.
In a delicious bit of irony, Maggie Gallagher considers Havel her inspiration for 'winning' the fight over the gay agenda:
Rod Dreher: Maggie, you and I are on the same side of the gay marriage issue, but I am pessimistic about our chances for success. You, however, are optimistic. What am I missing?
Maggie Gallagher: Vaclav Havel mostly. "Truth and love wlll prevail over lies and hate." On that basis Havel took on the Soviet empire. Where is that invincible empire now?
I'm sure Havel would have been horrified to hear his name brought up in this context, if not amused by her cluelessness.
Today we saw the passing of the true heroes of our time. Havel's story is extraordinary and extends far, far beyond this, but I didn't want this small part of his legacy to go unnoticed.
6:36 PM PT: Courtesy cfk in a comment below, a beautiful statement of moral responsibility from the man himself:
