Signs, etc

[Gerry Rouff]

Dear group:

Thought I'd post this from 
Norman Manea: On Clowns, The Dictator and the Artist [1992]
The author is an exiled writer from Romania. 
Of interest to me is his mention of the writer Ernesto Sabato, the great 
Argentine writer who spent time with the Surrealists in Paris, and 
metamorphasizes the Argentine dictatorship into the secret society of the 
organization of the Blind [Heroes and Tombs].  
 
 There were press reports in 1986 that in a park in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, a 
 young intellectual made a mimed protest speech before a crowd that had 
 gathered spontaneously, a speech without words [to avoid being accused of 
 breaking the law]. It seems, however, that the audience understood his 
 message perfectly. In Romania, this coded type of communication--in 
 response to the brutal machinery of repression--permeated the whole of 
 society, signs--perceptible only to initiates, and often implied rather 
 than expressed--was indispensable in any exchange betweeen individuals 
 and groups. A whole society, under surveillance around the clock, split 
 between feigned submission and masked refusal.
 While working on my novel, especially in the description of the 
 association of deaf-mutes, which I had conceived as a pseudosocialist 
 equivalent of the evil organization of the blind in Ernesto Sabato's On 
 Heroes and Tombs, I forced to meditate at length upon coded communication.
 
 Gerry