September | 2012 | A Thousand Words

“It Always Makes Sense to Tell the Truth”

I am currently reading a collection of the prose of Vaclev Havel (1936-2011) entitled Open Letters. Born in Prague to a bourgeois family, Havel spent the early years of his life in Czechoslovakia working as a playwright and dramaturge in the Prague theatre. His writings, including plays, poetry, essays and letters, increasingly began to engage with the political and social issues of the Communist controlled state, and following the Prague Spring of 1968 Havel became voiciferous as a dissident, activist and critic of the government and the nature of totalitarianism. After years of surveillance and interrogation by the state police, including four years spent in jail, Havel eventually, in 1989, rose to be elected as President of Czechoslovakia (a quick Wikipedia search will provide you with the relevant details). He held this position until 1993 when Czechoslovakia was split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Until 2003 he remained president of the Czech Republic and he has been recognised around the world as an advocate of humanism and political freedoms.
Havel is an interesting figure, coming as he did from cultural notoriety to a position of political power which he always stated that he had not desired to hold. Open Letters provides an insight into the development of his political and social beliefs prior to his time in political office, and his reflections on the place and purpose of culture in the face of oppressive government and ideological control. I am only a hundred or so pages into the book but have decided to post here some exerpts that struck a chord with me as I was reading.

(from Vaclav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Prose 1965-1990, Selected and edited by Paul Wilson, (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1991)

from Second Wind:

“I do not belong to that fortunate class of authors who write constantly, quickly, easily, and always well, whose imaginations never tire and who – unhampered by doubts or inhibitions – are by nature open to the world. Whatever they touch, it is always exactly right. That I do no belong in such company, of course, bothers me, and sometimes even upsets me: I am ambitious and I’m angry with myself for having so few ideas, for finding it so difficult to write, for having so little faith in myself, and for thinking so much about everything that I often feel crippled by it.”

from Dear Dr Husak

“And everyone who still tries to resist by, for instance, refusing to adopt the principle of dissimulation as the key to survival, doubting the value of any self-fulfilment purchased at the cost of self-alienation – such a person appears to his ever-more indifferent neighbours as an eccentric, a fool, a Don Quixote, and in the end is regarded inevitably with some aversion, like everyone who behaves differently from the rest and in a way which, moreover, threatens to hold up a critical mirror before their eyes. Or, again, those indifferent neighbours may expel such a person from their midst or shun him as required, for apppearance’ sake while sympathizing with him in secret or private, hoping to still their conscience by clandestine approval of someone who acts as they themselves should, but cannot.”

This last excerpt seems a description of the potential and place of the artist in society.

“People today are preoccupied far more with themselves, their families and their homes. It is there that they find rest, that they can forget the world’s folly and freely exercise their creative talents. They fill their homes with all kinds of appliances and pretty things, they try to improve their accomodations, they try to make life pleasant for themselves, building cottages, looking after their cars, taking more interest in food and clothing and domestic comfort. In short, they turn their main attention to the material aspect of their private lives.
…
The authorities welcome and support this spillover of energy into the private sphere.
But why? Because it stimulate economic growth? Certainly, that is one reason. But the whole spirit of current political propaganda and practice, quietly but systematically applauding this ‘inward’ orientation as the very essence of human fulfillment on earth, shows only too clearly why the authorities really welcome this transfer of energy. They see it for what it really is in its psychological origins: an escape from the public sphere. Rightly divining that such surplus energy if directed ‘outward’, must sooner or later turn against them – that is, against the particular forms of power the obstinately cling to – they do not hesitate to represent as human life what is really a desperate substitute for living. In the interest of the smooth management of society, then, society’s attention is deliberately diverted from itself, that is, from social concerns. By fixing a person’s whole attention on his mere consumer interests, it is hoped to render him incapable of realizing the increasing extent to which he has been spiritually, politically, and morally violated. Reducing him to a simple vessel for the ideals of a primitive consumer society is intended to turn him into pliable material for complex manipulation.”

“What has happened to the idea that people should live in full enjoyment of social and legal justice, have a creative share in economic and political power, be elevated in human dignity and become truly themselves? Instead of a free share in economic decision making, free participation in political life, and free intellectual advancement, all people are actually offered is a chance freely to choose which washing machine or refrigerator they want to buy.”

“The main route by which society is inwardly enlarged, enriched, and cultivated is that of coming to know itself in ever greater depth, range, and subtlety.
The main instrument of society’s self-knowledge is its culture: culture as a specific field of human activity, influencing the general state of mind – albeit often very indirectly – and at the same time continually subject to its influence.
Where total control over society completely suppresses its differentiated inner development, the first thing to be surpressed regularly is its culture […] it is culture that enables a society to enlarge its liberty and to discover truth – so what appeal can it have for the authorities who are basically concerned with suppressing such values?”

“The forcible liquidation of [a literay, artistic, theatrical, philosophical, historical] journal – a theoretical review concerned with the theatre, say – is not just an impoverishment of its particular readers. It is not even merely a severe blow to theatrical culture. it is simultaneously, and above all, the liquidation of a particular organ through which society becomes aware of itself and hence it is an interference, hard to describe in exact terms, in the complex system of circulation, exchange and conversion of nutrients that maintain life in that many-layered organism which is society today.”

…

“For we may never know when some inconspicious spark of knowledge, struck within range of the few brain cells, as it were, specially adapted for the organism’s self-awareness, may suddenly light up the road for the whole of society, without society ever realising perhaps, how it ever came to see the road.”

from It Always Makes Sense to Tell the Truth:

To end on a lighter note, from an interview with Jiri Lederer, 1975:

“What gives you the most real satisfaction? Have you experienced something you might call happiness in the last few years?”

“I experience a lot of small, everyday pleasures. I feel happy when the weather is fine, when our roses aren’t frostbirtten, when my letter to Dr Husak speaks to someone’s soul, when I get a beautiful letter from Alfred radok, when my friends come to see me and we have a good party, when I cook a meal that everyone likes, when we burn less fuel than we thought we would, when the carpenter made us a nice piece of furniture and charged us less than I expected, and so on. But I get the greatest pleasure – and unfortunately this is becoming rarer and rarer – when I finish writing something and feel that it’s finished and that I accomplished what I set out to do.”

These are just a small selection of the many insights expressed and articulated by Havel in his writings, and if they do anything (and they did achieve much) it is to provoke thought on the manner with which we conduct ourselves in society and what kind of a society we would want it to be.