32 Why does the author laugh?
What if laughter, itself, was treated as an intertext? Humor is a critical response to the complete evisceration of language. It takes language that has been estranged from lived experience by propaganda or ad-culture and plays to the fiddle of its estrangement.
In refusing to take the given world seriously, laughter humiliates the dictator. Ceaușescu’s Romania made laughter a criminal activity: a joke could lead to the loss of one’s livelihood and imprisonment. Distinguishing enemies from friends often hinged on these subtle exchanges where a joke might begin. Good friends were those with whom one could mock the dictator and the Party pageantry.
My aunt flew in from Bucharest recently. At one point, as she and I sat on the porch, my aunt’s daughter (my cousin) phoned. I savored the sound of their voices clipping through Alabama shrubs before joining my own to the gabby goose-choir of interruptions and gesticulations that characterizes intimate Romanian conversation. I felt at home in the words and the tempo, at home enough to miss the idea of something as implausible and solid as home.
“Then it remains as we established,” my aunt was saying to her daughter. Both women were laughing.
“What did I miss?” I asked, wanting to drink from the chalice of jokes.
“Then it remains as we established!” my aunt said. “It’s an expression, a thread in a joke we used to tell under Ceaușescu.”
“It is the nail with the large head,” my cousin added.
I copied the joke into my notebook as my aunt told it:
A Romanian man walks into a kiosk and asks the manager, “Do you have a nail with a large head?”
The manager says no.
“Well, fuck Ceaușescu,” the man says and walks out.
The next day, the same man returns. “Do you have a nail with a large head?” he asks again.
“No,” says the manager.
“Fuck Ceaușescu,” the man says and leaves.
Concerned that the man might be a spy or dissident planted to test him, the manager phones the Securitate and reports that a man is coming into the co-op every day and sullying the Leader’s name.
The next day, two Securitate agents dressed as mechanics linger in the co-op and wait for the blasphemer to show up.
Sure enough, the man walks in and asks the manager, “Do you have a nail with a large head?”
The Securitate agents prepare their surveillance mics.
“No,” the manager says.
“Then everything else remains as we established,” the man says and leaves.
The author laughs because there are many ways of not saying the thing that most wants to be said.
The author laughs because the joke is a literary form that depicts reality by challenging the ridiculousness of reality.
The author laughs because the joke uses language to subvert language’s capacity to define reality.
Then it remains as they established. Historians and archaeologists draw on the assumed accuracy of archives and documentary materials. Do we laugh at our gaffes or turn them into curricula?
Jokes are nonfiction. But archives of state surveillance files are best read as speculative fictions, documentary monuments to the paranoid reading employed by dictatorships. The surveillance files contextualize various social histories while also charring the heart of the dictator’s fiction.
Given the fragmented, frantic shape of Securitate files, interpreting them includes dialoguing with the absences that the future will read into. This use of incompletion, this embrace of what cannot be entirely explained, encourages us to embrace Nietzsche’s “dangerous reading” and its acceptance of uncertainty.
Why overwrite a past whose graves are still hidden?
And maybe there is a literary element to this as well. Some Romanian literary scholars have argued that Romanian postmodernism emerged separately from that of the West. Mircea Cartarescu’s constructive nihilism and refusal of metaphysics and historicism exemplifies it, while also challenging Western orthodoxies. The Romanian postmodernist swerve wasn’t a ‘product’ of late capitalism so much as it was an acceptance of incoherence, poverty, and censorship. In what others have called “the land of the wooden tongues,” Aesopian style was evasive and glossolalic; it leaned toward pastiche. Rather than testifying to their authenticity, the narrators foreground their unreliability, the absence of ethics, and the betrayal of language by literature and text. The Romanian in me is inclined to trust the unreliable narrator over the exemplary one.