The Dissonance of Dissidence
Theater Apparatus, Václav Havel’s Protest.I don’t really believe things are black as all that.
— Vaněk, in Václav Havel’s Protest
In Czech dissident Václav Havel’s “Vaněk plays,” totalitarian political structures are a given. The question is not what makes them tick, or how they emerged, or what they mean, but rather how one should respond to them. Does one take a radical stance or a reformist one? Does one totally refuse to conform, face the consequences, but also bask in the light of moral rectitude and purity? Or does one engage, reform, and navigate the system from within, despite the compromises this will entail? What does it mean to confront authoritarian power directly or to try to move in and below it, trying to undermine it? Havel probes the question again and again, from multiple angles and perspectives.
In Audience, Vernissage (sometimes titled Unveiling and Private View), Protest, and other plays, the Vaněk character is not exactly Havel himself, but certainly resembles him. The character is busy writing letters of protest, refusing to snitch on others, and seeking to live in truth in the face of a feeling of powerlessness within a powerful system of control and paranoia. He even, as Havel did, goes to prison for his resistance. Yet Havel does not portray Vaněk as some kind of hero. Sometimes other characters turn out to be doing more for liberation, freedom, and practical safety by trying to manipulate the system from within than opposing it entirely from without.
At first in Protest, it seems like this isn’t the case. Vaněk seems like the good guy, and his friend Staněk the compromised coward contorting himself into babbling justifications for his inaction. Vaněk merely provokes this by being himself—a dissident—and the play becomes, in essence, a painful dialogue about negligence and inertia, a duet between the two characters. Vaněk has just been released from prison and Staněk has managed to survive in the arts and popular media within the existing regime. Now Staněk has invited Vaněk over to get him to write a petition to free his daughter’s lover, the musician Javurek. Why he cannot do this himself seems pathetic and problematic in the first instance, but when Vaněk produces the letter, already written, and asks Staněk to sign it, Staněk twists himself into knots about whether he should or not do so.
Eventually, he declines to sign the letter, revealing the upside-down logic that living within totalitarianism can produce. Dissidence, Staněk reasons, as Vaněk seems to practice it, offers the light of moral purity, but Staněk bizarrely convinces himself that everyone already knows what the dissident thinks, so therefore it reduces the power of the petition itself. To sign the petition, in this Orwellian—or more accurately for Czechoslovakia, Kafkaesque—logic, is to undermine the power of signing the petition. No is yes. Signing is not signing. Standing up against oppression merely becomes another futile way of sitting down and enduring it, except maybe now from a prison cell with nothing improved for all the suffering.
At first the point of the play seems obvious: Vaněk good, Staněk bad; moral clarity and purity good, complicity and spinelessness bad; dissident good, person trying to manipulate dissident without putting himself on the line bad. The end of the play, however, brings yet another turn of events that renders the letter moot, and suggests how if Vaněk had sent it, this might have made the situation worse. And the situation grows even murkier when it emerges that perhaps Vaněk was less heroic in prison than he first suggested.
Here is Havel’s most explicit use of Vaněk not to celebrate moral certainty, but rather to reveal the torturous, perilous situation that totalitarianism raises for all involved. In fact, I wondered if the production that Theater Apparatus staged at the Multi-Use Community Cultural Center as part of the Rochester Fringe Festival overplayed Vaněk’s anger at the end of the play when he witnesses his friend Staněk’s duplicity and moral cowardice. In this play, Vaněk is there to be a mirror for Staněk. After all, as their similar names suggest, the characters might be understood more as twins than one might first think. Havel perhaps saw himself in Staněk as in Vaněk despite his own bravery.
To be sure, from the armchair, the choices between protest and complicity may seem clear—and sometimes they were in Communist Czechoslovakia just as often they are today—but just as often, as many Americans are learning, the situation grows more murky the more one exists within it. Interventions, protests, protecting people, keeping totalitarianism from going totally mad, it turns out, takes many different forms and formats, versions and variations. There are many ways to fight. And fear is understandable. It’s not that Staněk has any moral standing by the end of the play, it’s just that the mysteries of defeating totalitarianism seem to be bigger than a simple contrast of characters.
There is something bitter, rueful, sobering, and sad about this dramatic realization, but also very beautiful. After all, Havel’s reputation as a political figure—remember he would go on to serve as the Czech Republic’s president after the 1989 Velvet Revolution—makes it seem like he had it all figured out all along, that he was always confident that his, the right, side of history would win out. The Vaněk plays show otherwise. Instead, they offer a far more complicated and honest reckoning with systems of totalitarian rule. The reality of dissidence is more dissonant, Havel’s fictional plays propose.
Protest‘s greatest achievement is to protest ethical certitude itself without giving way to apathy, cynicism, complicity, or doublethink. Perhaps it calls less for the pure path of pious certainty than something more like a messy moralism. One must take a stand and be brave, but one can also adopt a humility in the face of contingencies, a wickedly ironic sense of justice in the face of fighting a massive system of repression. To remain human in this situation is not always to remain in control. After all, that is precisely what fighting totalitarianism involves—defeating systems of control. To dissent in such a situation is instead to struggle, imperfectly, toward freedom’s chance.
A few scenes from Protest by actors David Millstone and Drew Valins and dialogue from the late Hon. Madeleine Albright; Susan Galbraith, Artistic Director, Alliance for New Music-Theatre; Ambassador Martin Palous; and Ambassador Cynthia Schneider, Co-Director, The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics:
Vaclav Havel’s Protest, in Conversation at The Gathering/CrossCurrents Festival, HowlRound Theater Commons, 9 May 2019.
