Václav Havel
Graduation date 20 March 2001
A speech delivered by Václav Havel at the occasion of accepting an honorary doctorate of the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno
Mr Rector,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Guests,
“We await the Orator. He will speak for me, he will tell you everything from the bottom of our hearts. He will explain everything. Just be patient. You will hear my message. Coming right up.” I suppose at least those of you who study theatre dramaturgy have discovered that these sentences are the speeches of the Old Man from Ionesco’s famous Chairs. This play – like any good play – has, of course, many motives, levels, meanings and possible interpretations. However, personally, I was always most interested in the motive that could perhaps be called “the need for a message”. The lives of the Old Man and the Old Woman are coming to an end and they invite many guests to tell them about everything, about what they experienced, what came from their experiences, what they discovered and understood, to perhaps even tell them some basic secret of life and the world, which they discovered and which until then they apparently did not have the opportunity or reason to pass it on to someone. They simply did not want to leave the world just like that, unnoticed, without context and in the middle of the petty and trivial, that is, without summarising, explaining and generalising their life, its reason, content and meaning in a comprehensible way, thus making a clear full stop after it. The guests arrive, are politely welcome, but not visible: the chairs remain empty. Thus, the planned message will not have a real audience, either because none is interested in our heroes, or because of the presumed futility of their message, or as a sign that the incommunicable is to be communicated, which is de facto the same as speaking to a non-existent auditorium. However, the need of the Old Woman and the Old Woman to acquaint the world with their legacy is so strong that they can see their non-existent audience. One can understand their illusion. After all, for a creature capable of self-reflection, abstraction and speech, the realisation that he cannot tell anyone about what he has experienced and discovered, that is almost as torturous as the feeling that he lived in vain. After all, each of us speaks to a non-existent audience from time to time – without even knowing it!
However, the Old Man and the Old Woman at least suspect that their task is too serious and too important to leave anything to chance. That is why they will hire a professional Orator to explain everything to the world for them, on their behalf. They turn a metaphysical problem into a professional problem. After all, success is a matter of skill. The Orator’s explanatory skills and his rhetorical talent will solve everything, the world will be amazed, our lives will be closed with real dignity and we will be able to pass on to the other world in peace. The Orator really arrives at the end of the play. However, his speech consists only of gestures and inarticulate screams. He is deaf-mute. He tries his best, but nothing understandable is communicated to us. He gets an idea to save the day: he will write it all on a board. But even this attempt is not met with success: the message is made up of a series of letters that bear no meaning. A person’s need to explain himself and his actions completely and to everyone is probably great, at least for more sensitive individuals. Maybe it is the product of some kind of atavistic memory of natural life in the community, where everyone knew everything, maybe it is an unconscious training for the Last Judgment, maybe an attempt to resist death by not taking everything to the grave, trying to pass at least something to the collective memory of humanity or even into the total memory of all the being. Either way, a person’s ability to truly put or translate himself into words is extremely limited for various reasons. And the greater our ambition in this regard, the greater our failure.
Dear Friends,
I confess to you that I feel more and more often in the position of Ionesco’s Old Man and the Orator both at once, which is perhaps the reason why I have decided today to speak on this venerable ground on this very topic.
It is weird, but it is true: Ionesco’s topic keeps coming back to me in a very profane form, weighing on me more and more. It is not that about us lacking freedom of speech or me lacking enough opportunities to express myself. On the contrary: freedom is almost limitless in our country, and as the president of the republic – unlike most of my fellow citizens – I can, in fact, comment on anything I can think of in the media on a daily basis. Yet, strangely, I suffer from the uncomfortable feeling that I cannot fatally explain everything clearly, that I remain misunderstood, or even unknown, that a number of some grotesque doppelgangers are put in my place, scaring me by the way they look like me without being at least a little like me, that I simply owe the public a kind of fundamental explanation of myself, of everything I have ever done, good or bad, my whole conception of the world and my everyday actions.
My co-workers can testify that I periodically demand – despite my reluctance to appear in the media – some appropriate opportunity to explain several things more coherently, to refute a few common misconceptions, describe truthfully what happened then or there and what led me to behave in a given situation one way or another. They can also testify that I periodically cling to such appearances, like Ionescu’s Old Man, I expect too much of them, I prepare too much for them, which eventually begins to have only one effect: as the opportunity approaches, I become more and more frightened of it, to finally try to cancel it at the last minute. My co-workers can eventually testify that when my self-explanation does take place despite the above, I am depressed after it that I have not been able to explain the main topic I wanted to explain at all, and that I have not even been able to touch upon that topic at all. This stress of mine is finally completed by the media response to my appearance, from which a whole flock of my grotesque doppelgangers suddenly jumps at me. When I recover from it, I keep my distance for a while, waiting until it is all forgotten, I work calmly and honestly, only to be overcome after a while again by the need to explain everything once again, better and definitely – but this time truly convincingly, so that I will be completely understood. And the whole story repeats itself.
So again and again, always the same: first I am the Old Man who is about to pass on his message to the whole world, then I am the Orator, performing that very task, and then I am a spectator, disappointed in my own failure.
The need to explain publicly and coherently how some things really – but really really! – are, I used to have that during communism, at the time of dissident, and even long before it. The need was all the stronger and more comprehensible because I did not have access to the media for most of that time, while the had the floor to write whatever they wanted about me.
Nevertheless, to my great surprise, I must say that today my desire to explain something or even to defend myself against someone is disproportionately stronger than it was then. This can, of course, be explained by the fact that I am much more of a public person today and that far more people are directly or indirectly affected by my actions, making me far more exposed to all sorts of observations, comments, diverse expectations, critical analysis and, of course, malicious attacks.
But this is only a very superficial and insufficient explanation. What is more important is that I am older, I have a different relationship with life and death, and therefore a stronger need to leave behind something meaningful, closed, understandable. In short, I have a need to prepare my full stop, just as the Old Man.
But even that is not a complete explanation.
Even more significant is the influence of the overall situation of our civilization: nowadays, there is such a large amount of media and communicated information or opinions around us that it is almost impossible to be acquainted with everything and make some sense of it. Lost are the times when public life and public awareness, as well as their tools, were still clearly structured, and it was therefore clearer what was important and what was not, what was known and what was not, what has happened and what has not. Today, it is disproportionately more difficult to find out what was noticed and what was not; how come something became a topic and something else has not; which of the interpretations or misinterpretations of a phenomenon is the best and which is doing the best; what is actually worth attention to whom among the countless Parallel Polis.
It is obvious that in these civilization conditions, a publicly active or well-known person feels more and more that he is losing influence over the general impression of himself, over the sum of things that are known about him or not, over the understanding of his own actions.
Notice something: there is still the same number of us in our country, maybe it is even getting lower, but we keep needing more and more of those who were not needed before, namely various media agents and intermediaries, like some professional Orators who are trying to make sense of the media thicket for a fee, inserting something into it here and there. The very existence of this field of services and its boom speak volumes about a paradoxical fact: in this age of the information revolution, it is increasingly difficult to publish something so that someone really notices it.
However, I have not only the experience of a public figure and a person living in this turning point in civilization, but also the experience of a politician. And it is that third experience that apparently completes the set of motives of my urge to explain myself to the world again and again – and thus, of course, to myself – and to defend my way of being before the world – and thus, of course, before myself. A politician is forced, at least in democratic conditions, far more than others to report to others about his actions, about his meaning, about his deeper contexts. A few can imagine how difficult it is for some politicians if, for one reason or another, some of their actions remain unexplained and misunderstood due to this or that chaotic reason. For some it is difficult because it threatens their further political rise, for some it is simply humanly unbearable to go on about their life with a disgraceful sign of an undefended act at their forehead.
Perhaps I may note that I classify myself in the latter of these categories. I can provide a list of areas where I feel the need to explain something again, better and more coherently, be it the sphere of my actions, experience and knowledge, or my relationship to the general political phenomena of this time; I could even offer a new attempt to explain this or that position of mine. I will not do it because it is not my topic today. This topic is only and solely a reflection of one’s own unsatisfied and hardly ever fully satisfactory need for reflection, i.e. a kind of meta-reflection.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
everything I have said so far was supposed to lead to a single question: what shall we do?
It can be argued that, in the end, nothing can be explained to anyone, that experiences, deeds, or even whole lives are simply incommunicable, and that if one does not want to end up like Ionescu’s Old Man, he must reasonably and in due time give up all hopes he will ever be able to communicate something fundamental to someone else.
This is definitely not the case, and it certainly was not what Ionesco wanted to convey. After all, if he did not believe in human communication in principle, he would not have written any plays, because writing anything in such a state of affairs would obviously make no sense.
Of course, we will never be able explain the deepest secrets of the world and of life and human existence to anyone, simply because we, obviously, do not know what those are. It goes without saying that we can never capture the infinitely continuous and infinitely concrete matter we touch upon through the completely incoherent and always to some extent abstract language of our words. Of course, there are no words, tones of speech or its colours, or even mimics or gestures that could completely contain the infinite variety of our feelings, passions, experiences, desires, dreams, nerves, inclinations and animosities. While reality, all existences and their very existence, they are soft, and even the best and most accurate language, whether of poetry or mathematical equations, is brutally hard compared to them.
The world, our experience with and in it, as well as our experience with ourselves – they are all really incommunicable in their entirety, in their depth, richness, mystery and in their essence. All we can do is circle around it freely or touch it at a single point.
But is that not what it is all about? Is not the miracle of human knowledge and mind just that our language circles around something over and over again, something we could hardly even circle around without the language? And is language not the tool that, above all, allows to set out again and again on an adventurous pilgrimage, the charm of which is precisely that we know nothing about its end or goal?
Yes, it is true that the moment we say our first word, we make our first big compromise, because at the same moment we agree that we do not have to be precise. However, at that very moment, we open the great drama of the human spirit. A drama that creates a new world through human language and the words of myths, holy books, poems, sciences and philosophy, a world which – maybe – by its very existence, full of inaccurate words, makes sense of the great world in which it originated and of which it is a part.
So I do not see the incomprehensible shouts of Ionesco’s Orator as a warning that nothing can be said, but as a warning against the pride of those who think they are able to remove the mysteries of the world with their words.
Dear Guests,
I thank you for the honorary doctorate as I use today’s solemn moments to tell you that I will continue to try to explain something to someone, and the doubts whether I have succeeded will be nothing more than an incentive for me to re-examine my positions and then make new attempts to pass them on to this confused world.
Thank you for your attention.
Laudatio delivered by prof. Petr Oslzlý
Your Magnificence, Mr Rector,
Dear Mr Candidate,
Dear Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen!
When Václav Havel received the nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize along with the Tibetan Dalai Lama in 1989, and when they were the most serious candidates, it was clear that he could just as well have been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, as he was internationally recognised and awarded not only as a fighter for human rights and civil liberties, but above all as a playwright and philosophical essayist. Although he was silenced and imprisoned in his homeland for twenty years, he was a well-known figure around the world, receiving many prestigious awards mainly for his literary work, of which the most important one at that time was undoubtedly the Erasmus Prize. The nomination for the Nobel Prize was immediately preceded by the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, for which Václav Havel thanked his masterful philosophical essay Word for Word, in which he calls for a fight against “proud words” and perceptive distrust toward words “seemingly humble”, but at the same time urges all sensitive people to “save the words”, to be “responsible for the word and towards the word”, calling it an “essentially moral task”.
Vigilance towards the word and the highest moral responsibility for them can be understood as the principle that connects Havel’s life and work, his intellectual and ethical commitment into one identical whole and makes him an artistic and civic personality entering the world, admired by the world and hated and silenced by the world’s totalitarian governments at the very same time.
From the beginning, Václav Havel faced various difficulties in his life. Born on 5 October 1936, he spent his childhood during the Second World War. Although he grew up in a highly cultivated family environment full of Masaryk’s humanism, he entered the creative part of his life at the worst time, after the February communist coup, at a time his family was exposed to the harshest persecution. The communist regime prevented him from studying, so he had no choice but to study to become a chemical laboratory technician and then get a high school education while working. It was not until the age of thirty, in 1966, that he graduated in dramaturgy from the Theatre Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
However, it seems as if he was intrinsically prepared for these obstacles, because the more discouraged he was, the more he threw himself into attempts at literary creation. The first volume of his writings, published in seven volumes by Torst in 1999, shows Havel as a teenage poet, perhaps even lyrical, who wrote several collections and hundreds of poems before he was in his twenties. The gratitude expressed to Jiří Paukert in the letters for each typewritten edition of his verses reveals between the lines, on the one hand, a humble understanding of this “samizdat” state, on the other hand, the great importance he attaches to each and every word he had published. The beginning of his official literary life is – perhaps because of everything mentioned above – all the more significant. As soon as two months after his public printed debut in the magazine Květen, he made a riotous discussion speech at a meeting of young writers in Dobříš in November 1956; from the very beginning, he has become one of those who strive not only for freedom of creation, but also understands the writer’s mission as the role of an advocate of freedom as such.
He also stepped on to the theatre scene in two ways: “from the inside” – trying to understand and grasp it in a number of theoretical and critical studies and articles, and “from below”, when he was first a stage technician at the ABC Theatre (1959-1960) and only then became an assistant director for Alfred Radok and only then a playwright and one of the leading personalities of the Divadlo Na zábradlí.
Full of theoretical thought and practical experience, he showed up to a playwright on the Czech stage with a big bang. In 1963, his Garden Party premiered at the Divadlo Na zábradlí, and this stage debut (of his independent dramatic work) immediately put him at the forefront of young Czech playwrights looking for a new theatrical expression. The international staging just a year later also made him a recognised European author, awarded with the Obie Award by the New York-based Village Voice magazine for the most avant-garde play of the year.
With the Garden Party, Václav Havel also entered the realm of absurd theatre. However, his concept was new and unmistakable. Almost parallel to the time of its creation, in the more extensive article Anatomy of the Gag, he defined the “sense of absurdity, ability to make special and the absurd humour” as probably the only possible way to “purify” adequately to the contemporary world – as an unsentimental “catharsis of cyber age”. Moreover, even then, his distrust of proud words, his understanding of depatethisation as a basic principle of humour and at the same time responsibility for the word leads to a brilliant and thoughtful play with words and phrases, which stands at the top of Czech nonsense literature in general. With his subsequent lifelong dramatic work, which of course changes and develops, but at the same time remains true to its origins, he established an internationally recognised and admired distinctive branch of the absurd way of seeing the world through theatre, which can be described as absurd drama “set and engaged in the reality of today’s world”. Havel incorporated into his plays, in which the philosophical subtext and the appeal were gradually growing, those mechanisms of contemporary life which change communication between people and their natural relationships into a means of dehumanisation, leading to the loss of authenticity and thus the identity of human existence.
In the stage of his career, the Garden Party was followed before 1968 by several texts for radio and television, as well as by two plays: Memorandum (1965) and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968). In the latter, he predictively and comically foreshadowed all our current troubles of living alongside computers.
In the two decades following the Soviet occupation, when he was not only made completely taboo in this homeland, but also imprisoned, and persecuted in the worst way for playwright, with a ban on staging of his works, he did not slow down in his creative dramatic work and gradually wrote an unusual series: Conspirators (1971), his own variation of The Beggar’s Opera (1972), Vaňek plays with autobiographical element, Audience and Unveiling (1975) and Protest (1978), and in 1976 also the Mountain Hotel, in which his structural floor-plan-like principle of writing in a circle reached its formal mastery, in response to imprisonment in 1983 the Mistake and then the trio of great dramatic opuses Largo desolato (1984), Temptation (1985) and Redevelopment (1987). While the official world of the Czech stage was closed to these plays and their author, the stages of theatres worldwide were open to him: each of his plays was almost immediately translated into several languages and performed on a number of foreign stages. Nevertheless, even at this time he was able to watch the result of his work twice under different dramatic circumstances on the Czech scene: in 1975 at the police-attacked performance of the Na tahu Theatre’s staging of his Beggar’s Opera in a pub hall in Horní Počernice and in 1988 at a public performance of his only historical (and so far the very last) play Tomorrow, which was presented author-less in a main issue of the controversial stage magazine of Divadlo na Provázku and HaDivadlo called Rozrazil 1/88 (on democracy).
While his plays were forbidden from materialising in the world of the then Czech theatre, he himself was increasingly influencing the dramatic force curves of the real world! A world from which he was being pushed out by political powers, a world he described in his philosophical essays and actively intervened in it with his ethical actions. In an Open Letter to Gustav Husák, as early as April 1975, he analyses the situation of the hardening totalitarianism and predicts its fall in a clairvoyant manner. The 40-page letter was spread among many in samizdat copies, helping them find a way out of the severe depression into which the situation of incipient normalisation was leading them step by step. The reaction was adequate and the playwright’s life became an authentic drama. In the world of the struggle for civil society, he became a real, unsilenceable and unsilenced protagonist.
In 1976, he was one of the initiators of Charter 77 and the first of its three spokespersons, co-authoring most of its statements. He was imprisoned for several years for working in the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted – imprisoned almost to the point of non-existence. However, in prison, he writes his “summa philosophica”, Letters to Olga (1983). The list of his previous and following remarkable philosophical-essay works would be long and unusual, but it is still necessary to name the Power of the Powerless from 1978, in which he unmasked the absurd model of everyday life in totalitarianism and how to face it.
The painful path of top of civic activity finally logically put him at the helm of the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and later in the position of President of the Republic. However, even in this political role, for the performance of which he is appreciated all over the world, he did not relinquish his “responsible for the word and towards the word”; he became the author of remarkable speeches by which he literally entered the “thinking of the world” – even dramatically by some. He also did not give up the essential moral tasks. Right at the beginning of this portion of his career, for example, despite the opposition of part of the Czech political scene, he invited Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Tibetan Dalai Lama, with whom he established a special spiritual connection and friendship over the bridge of world space during the revolution. He made it clear in this dramatic plot that he did not intend to compromise on his identity even in a high political position.
Everything that was only indicated here proves that Václav Havel, even if we completely overlook his current supremely important role in society, is a thinker, an artistic and deeply human personality of great importance not only for the Czech Republic, but for the whole world. A personality whose main field of creative expression is – understood in the dimension of lifelong activity – theatre. Therefore, it is logical that he was invited to Brno (a city his mother comes from, a city where one of his spiritual fathers, the philosopher Josef Šafařík, lived and worked, a city for those two theatres Havel wrote his yet last play), so the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts could award him with an honorary doctorate of the Faculty of Theatre. However, the inclusion of Václav Havel among its honorary doctors is also an honour for the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts itself and it gives name to its highest pedagogical profiling not only as an art school, but also as an academic institution that wants to actively co-create our moral environment.
Thank you for your attention!
no images were found