Václav Havel. A Political Tragedy in Six Acts by John s> Keane (review)

Abstract

178 SEER, 79, I, 200 I Over theyearstheprocessofEuropeanintegrationhasbeen anunprecedented greatsuccess;politiciansshould now avoid snatchingfailurefromthejaws of victory.The author'salternativeis to embarkon buildinga liberalorderby overcoming the past which has oscillated between violent disorder and hegemonic order (a dig at the Franco-German alliance). Europe should be based on non-hegemonic order, a common law which secures human, civil and minority rightsand become a single actor on the world stage (pp. 328f). If GartonAsh's book is neither historyin any of its academic sensesnor wellresearchedsocialscience thatneed not deterthereader;itswealthof evocative particulars,resplendentliteracy,probing questions,prudentjudgements, not theleast itsenlightenedvisionsmakeit a compelling read. London LASZLO PETER Keane, John. Vaclav Havel.A PoliticalTragedy inSixActs.Bloomsbury,London, I999.vii + 532 pp. Notes. Plates.Index. [25.00. PROFESSOR KEANE describes his ruminative biography of Vaclav Havel from his birth to early I999 as 'a serious work of scholarship' (p. 508) and as 'factional'(p. 8). By 'faction'he means a workthatis 'selective',thoughpaying 'meticulous attention to all of the important details' and a work subject to 'value-laden "interpretations"'(p. 8). In its normal, now obsolescent, usage 'faction'means the record of a seriesof factualevents narratedin the manner of fiction, and normally containing extensive fictional elements. Keane certainly uses imagery that belongs more to fiction than to scholarship (the most ingenious example, 'likea bull at a gate baying forblood' (p. 44), but the readerassumesthat this is part of his political scientistgame likethe whole notion of scholarshipas faction. The readerwill have troubleascertainingthe rulesof the game. One clue no doubt lies in the keywordof Keane's subtitle, 'Tragedy'. Havel does have some of the conventional features of the tragic hero: he is admirable in his courage (an element down-played by Keane except in his account of Havel's behaviour in hospital), in the noblemindedness of his essays, especially those of the 1970S and I980s, in the consistence of his thinking from the late 1950S onwards. His life, however, does not inspireterror,is not cathartic,and it would seem hypocriticalto label his ambitious nature or his arrogance hubris. Havel certainlyvied with the gods embodied in the Communist regime but these gods did not crush him. Keane's imaginary picture of Havel's state funeral, introduced to persuade the reader that the subtitlehas meaning, manifestslittle more than bad taste, and certainlyalackof knowledgeaboutT. G. Masarayk'sstatefuneral;Keane claims that Havel's funeralwill be 'a global media event on a scale much bigger than the state funeral of Masaryk' (p. 504). It is difficultto imagine hundreds of Czech poets and poetasters marking Havel's death, as they did Masaryk's. Towardsthe end of his study,he playswith the notion of Havel as king (not an uncommon notion in the Czech press and a notion recentlyexploited to comic effect by the Slovak novelist, Peter Pist'anek).It is a pity that Keane does not know that Czechoslovakpresidentshave from the startbeen treated REVIEWS 179 more orlessasroyalty.He does note thatCzechs spokeof Havel's 'abdication', not resignation (p. 496), but appears unaware that this regal term was used also of Masarykand Edvard Benes. I have never seen the term used for the oustingof Antonin Novotny or GustavHusak. Though I learned many little details about Havel's life from Keane, I learnednothing aboutHavel, the man orthewriter.This bookwasnot written for historians or for students of Czech culture. Keane does call his work 'political' (p.12) and no doubt he thus informs us he is writing for political scientists. Throughout Keane conceives of all relationships, between individual human beings, between individuals and institutions, and between institutions as relationships of power. Disquisitions on the nature of power interlardthis biography. Unfortunately, for a student of culture ratherthan politics, these disquisitionsofferlittle new. Statementslike 'in the era of mass communications, one of the prizes and privilegesof power is the freedom to define reality for others' (p. 369) sound hackneyed; furthermore, 'mass communication'isvague and potentiallymisleading:thinkof the power of the nineteenth-century novelist to define reality. Though power is the theme of Keane's book, he also gives us disquisitionson democracy (forexample p.14), death (p. 494), friendship (p.I83), hubris (pp. 283-84), and nationalism (p. 450). On the last, Keane speaks only of ultra-nationalism, excludes national mythologies and...