The Literature of Oppression

The current wave of obsession with the Christian notion of the Rapture and the Apocalypse, on the surface, has little to do with literature and certainly even less to do with the writing of Herta Muller, the Nobel Prize winner of 2009. Rapture literature is low-brow fiction, for sure. The Left Behind series written by Christian hacks Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye in no way participates in what the Nobel committee calls the “great conversation of world literature.” Jenkins and LaHaye cannot even reach a level of literary art that is concerned with things like: how can I craft a good sentence? are my characters believable? Is my dialog authentic?  Their sight is set on a more lofty aim, viz. presenting a conservative Christian doctrine with the goal of selling millions of books and converting people to their peculiar (though wildly popular) theological perspective.

Left Behind , however, has its roots in a perversion of the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, and Revelation, in turn, owes its existence to a popular form of literature in its own day called apocalypitc. This genre flourished among the Jews and Christians immediately before and after the time of Jesus. As a genre, apocalypitc is charaterized by the use of symbols, world events cast in a cosmic perspective, mythic beasts, and ecstatic visions. Readers of the Old and New Testaments catch glimpses of the genre only in the books of Daniel and Revelation; however, there is a large body of work outside the Jewish and Christian sacred texts that defined the genre long before John was exiled to Patmos. When the Book of Revelation is read in the context of the entire genre, it is not nearly so mystifying.

Apocalyptic as a genre is the original literature of oppression. It is the answer to the biblical Psalmist’s question: “how can we sing the songs of YHWH in a foreign land?” The answer is to code the message. The ruling empire is thus a beast and/or a whore. Death at the hands of this beast becomes a martyrdom and vengeance for the martyred will come swiftly and from on High. Apocalyptic is a genre that can only arise from an oppressed people as a way of coping with and resisting their oppressors.

It is here that it becomes clear that the true heir of the book of Revelation is not Left Behind (the literature of the oppressor class, truth be told), but writers like Herta Muller.

Muller was born and grew up in Romania under the reign of Ceausescu. She labored under this regime, coding her language, speaking quietly with others of her kind, until she could escape to Germany.

Muller’s books are filled with imagery. In The Land of Green Plums, the verdant plum tree becomes a symbol of life attempting to flourish under a reign of death, but it also is a symbol of how the empire appropriates the life of the oppressed. The soldiers fill their pockets with the little green plums, even as they dream of rape.

Muller’s book The Passport is laden with these images. In The Passport, the miller Windisch has one goal: to obtain his passport and thus his freedom. The reader sees the village through Windisch’s eyes, their passivity, the caprice of the authorities (priest, soldier, and politician). The oppressive regime has the side-effect of isolating families and friends.  Who can you trust? Each person in Muller’s story is desperately alone and yet dependent on everyone else for survival.

Neither Green Plums nor The Passpport are structured around chapters or books. Instead, there are short anecdote-like sections, each containing a single image that moves the narrative forward. Windisch is trying to buy his passport with flour stolen from his mill and paid to the magistrate, yet he is becoming increasingly aware that only his daughter’s sex will serve as payment. But the reader only gets this message in images like this section titled “The Golden Oriole”:

There were grey cracks between the blinds. Amalie had a temperature. Windisch couldn’t sleep. He was thinking about her chewed nipples. Windisch’s wife sat down on the edge of the bed. “I had a dream,” she said. “I went up to the loft. I had the flour sieve in my hand. There was a dead bird on the steps up to the loft. It was a golden oriole. I lifted the bird up by the feet. Under it was a clump of fat, black flies. The flies flew up in a swarm. They settled in the flour sieve. Then I tore open the door. I ran into the yard. I threw the sieve with the flies into the snow.

This small section is indicative of Muller’s writing as a whole. Dense and evocative, full of meanings that the reader must decode, and there are many ways one might decode her writing.

Muller is the real deal. She even uses imagery in her Nobel lecture to call out oppressors. I highly recommend reading the entire lecture. In it, she uses the simple handkerchief and her mother’s daily question, “Do you have a handkerchief?” as a way of exploring life under the regime. In the conclusion to her lecture, Muller sums up the goal of apocalyptic writers from herself all the way back to John the Revelator:

I wish I could utter a sentence for all those whom dictatorships deprive of dignity every day, up to and including the present—a sentence, perhaps, containing the word handkerchief. Or else the question: DO YOU HAVE A HANDKERCHIEF?
Can it be that the question about the handkerchief was never about the handkerchief at all, but rather about the acute solitude of a human being?