Трудният разказ.Модели на автобиографично разказване за социализма между устното и писменото
Александър Кьосев, Даниела Колева ред.AFTERWORD
The Structure of Chaos. Results of the
Research Project „Patterns of Anxiety“
Alexander Kiossev
Abstract
The long Afterword to this book is a sort of meta-study – it traces the individual
case studies, compares their results and checks them against the initial hypothesis;
modifying the initial assumptions, it draws general conclusions about the state
of autobiographical narration in post-socialist Bulgaria. In parallel, it also draws
conclusions about the picture which today’s post-socialist people in Bulgaria have
created of the era of socialism and their own lives in it.
The Afterword begins with a long but necessary digression. Its task is to
describe (beyond the hypothetical „Babel-like“ state of the individual discourses
and idiolects) a signifi cant collective narrative resource which the initial hypothesis
did not take into account: the antagonistic Grand Narratives as well as the multiple
public and sub-public languages of the transition period. The dominant discourses
and debates in the period between 1990 and 2013/14 are analyzed, and the competing
grands récits about the socialist past are described. Inasmuch as possible, the
approach is chronological, starting with the bipolar model of Bulgarian political life
at the beginning of the 1990s and the ideological and political confrontation between
the Blue (i.e., of the anticommunist opposition) and the Red Narrative of the past,
described with their internal contradictions, historical dynamics, and polemics as
well as with their different consequences. Then, a brief account is offered of the
subsequent pluralization and fragmentation of the Bulgarian public sphere, the
disintegration of the bipolar model, and the de-validation of the political Narratives
(approximately between 1992 and 2000). The politicized and historicized models of
life were replaced by new media models involving ostentatious display of success and
wealth, which often fi nd it hard to distinguish success stories in legitimate business
from those in criminal business as well as from clan and family stories. The analysis
demonstrates how the media narratives of the post-socialist transition lost their broad
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historical perspective and became fi xated on the present, close-up, individualistic,
or familial-domestic. The last phase (approximately from 2000 to the present) – the
complete fragmentation and dispersion of the Bulgarian public sphere after the
digital revolution, the establishment of multiple enclaves and niches of electronic
communication, social networks, youth subcultures, etc. – is only mentioned. It is
beyond the scope of this research project because the main autobiographical narrators
in the case studies are from the older, pre-digital generation.
As a result of the introduction of the picture of this diverse narrative resource
of the post-socialist transition, interim conclusions and modifi cations of the initial
hypothesis were made. Contrary to expectations, the collapse of the communist
ideology did not lead to a public vacuum: between 1992 and 2000 there was an
oversupply of competing, diverse Grand Narratives and models of successful life
in the Bulgarian media, a situation that was very likely to lead to a decline in the
signifi cance of the public models for narrating personal life stories and to their
competition with group, clan, sub-public, social-network and sub-cultural models.
The next part of the Afterword is devoted to the individual case studies and
their contributions.
Some of the individual research contributions demonstrate how the fi rst
personal recollections and life stories, published in party newspapers in 1990/91,
were almost entirely „shaped“ by the vehement political confrontation between the
communist and anticommunist forces in Bulgaria at that time. Despite their stylistic
diversity and genre indeterminacy, these early recollections and memories have a clear
„Blue“ or „Red“ rhetorical and conceptual framework: the fragmentary individual
life stories reproduce almost literally the antagonistic political ideologies and the
popular politicized jargons of the post-socialist transition; that is, almost all of them
are individual versions of the political Blue or Red Narratives. This fi nding leads to
larger generalizations, concerning other case studies, and the politicized life stories
are classifi ed along other lines as well, for example, along the „habitual/emotional“
axis: at one end the researchers describe the automatic, habitual and neutral repetitions
of socialist clichés (they are usually relicts of the administrative genre of the brief
socialist curriculum vitae, written constantly by all socialist people on all sorts
of occasions), and at the other, the conscious, often overemotional heroizations/
victimizations of one’s life.
The study, however, has found that by no means all life stories, narrated during
the years of the Bulgarian transition, are politicized. Contrary to expectations, there
are a number of autobiographical plots, most of them narrated orally, which are
very far from the historical and political models of life. They are usually various
family, clan, teenage, childhood, and other personal stories that totally ignore Grand
History and its political and ideological confl icts – they make up a large part of the
interviews conducted under the research project. The analysis shows the dominant
place of the traditional family story among them, which creates the illusion of a selfsuffi
cient familial temporality, supporting individual life-coherence and becoming an
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instrument for explaining all personal choices, changes and ruptures in the individual
life-trajectory. Parallel with those non-socialist and in fact essentially pre-modern
models of biographical time and identity, there are much older, even archaic and
pre-historic mechanisms for maintaining the protagonist’s identity. More specifi cally,
they display universal explanatory fi gures of the type „I am always true to myself“,
„I am always true to us“, „it happened to me“. These ancient formulas mediating
between sameness and difference, endurance and change, activity and passivity,
support – under all circumstances and during all seismic historical changes – the
identity of the Self and the coherence of one’s life path. That is why such deep
structures of the life story can coexist with various other layers of the narrative –
historical, political, familial, etc. The task of such „narrative operators“ is purely
structural: in all possible cataclysmic events, despite all political and ideological
clashes, to preserve, by purely formal means, the monolithic identity of the Self.
Whereas in discussing the fi rst group of studies (the cases analyzed by Daniela
Koleva, Ilia Iliev, Nadezhda Galabova, Teodora Karamelska, Elena Stoykova,
Nikolai Vukov, and Georgi Gospodinov), the meta-study produces its generalizations
mostly based upon their anthropological analysis of oral life stories, in the next part
it addresses the personal contributions of Galina Goncharova, Galina Georgieva,
Kristina Yordanova, and Alexander Kiossev, and refl ects on their interpretations of
published autobiographies and memoirs of socialist „celebrities“. The autobiographers
examined in this group of case studies were famous fi gures in the last decades of
Bulgarian socialism: writers, scholars, economists, and politicians. Yet, despite their
different political and social positions, their memoirs and autobiographical books
persistently repeat one romantic invariant of narration. In it the autobiographical Self
implicitly or explicitly assumes the role of a Chosen One, and uses the privileges of
this position to produce a peculiar type of autobiographical narrative. The narratorprotagonist
is endowed with exceptionality and elevated beyond the ordinary
existence and its usual coordinate system of everyday domestic and moral values. It
is from this point on that his/her life is narrated in hyperbolic and lofty extraordinary
terms as a noble exception. The presuppositions of such a narrative are that the
autobiographical protagonist is a special and spiritual creature, beyond mundane
circumstances, even beyond Good and Evil – and that he/she lives a life of an extraordinary
person from another, higher, gifted and ideal world. The case studies show
that this crucial role is rarely explicit. It is usually hidden behind all sorts of other
roles/masks – of a repentant sinner, of a serious memoirist, of an academic economist,
of a grey cardinal, etc.; yet it is its religious and romantic inertia which actually
governs the deep-structure grammar of the „Chosen One’s“ narrative. Different
variants of the deeper and hidden role of the Chosen Self are also described – of
„the Impartial Moral Witness“, of „the Ironic Sage“, of the „Great Poet-Sinner“, of
the „Extraordinarily Gifted Person“, the „Self-Made Man“, the „Tragic Hero struck
down by Destiny“, etc. Special attention is paid to a case where the personal story of
this exceptional fi gure as well its narrative identity are supported by a paradoxical
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historical framework, which could be called „Grand Historical Narrative for personal
use“. This is a hermetic, self-invented, self-maintained system of judging – a unique
and idiosyncratic „map“ tailored to fi t the Chosen One who pretends to be beyond
the coordinates of all collective values and all patterns of collective memory.
What all those variants have in common is that they always endow the
exceptional Self with one and the same privilege: a secure and monolithic, extracircumstantial
position, guaranteed beyond the profane details of the shared social
world, immune to the moral anguish of the question, „Did I live well?“ In such
narratives the Chosen One has a mysterious life-trajectory, deprived of autonomy,
governed by other, supra-personal powers. The Chosen One is not an independent
moral Self who is forced to confront moral choices, trying to become the master of his
destiny, but, simply, a Chosen instrument of Destiny itself; his life is commanded by
higher, external and fatal powers; that is why he does not need to take responsibility
for his own life.
The case studies have found also another role of the autobiographer – that
of „the possessor of secrets“. It is a position which privileges the autobiographical
protagonist-narrator in many different ways: for example, through access to secret
places, to secret powers, truths, knowledge, etc. In all of these cases, the „Secret“
turns out to be a powerful structural mechanism of the narrative which assigns the
Self a role similar to that of the Chosen One – blocking, in a similar way, all ethical
autobiographical questions such as „Who am I?“, „Did I live well?“
This, in conclusion, gives good reasons to claim that all the differences between
the ancient „I am always myself“, the romantic „I am the Chosen One“, and the
cynical „I am the Possessor of Secrets and you are all fools“ are, in fact, superfi cial.
Despite all of them, despite the differences between the oral life stories improvised in
a concrete situation by ordinary people, on the one hand, and the published complex
and thought-through (often even manipulative) autobiographies of celebrities on
the other, all these types of autobiographical narration have important features in
common. On the level of narrative deep structure, they are all variants of a powerful
logical mechanism for maintaining the identity of the autobiographical narratorprotagonist.
Its ultimate task within the different structures of different life stories
is the performance of a peculiar operation where the logical category „sameness“
simply replaces the ethical category „selfhood“ (Paul Ricoeur). Thus, all these
life narratives, different as they are, block in an identical manner any attempt at
„taking stock“ of one’s life. They successfully prevent any effort to make sense of
one’s life in an analytical and refl ective way as well as any intention to take moral
responsibility for it.
Among the many similar life stories analyzed, the Afterword points out two
important exceptions – the autobiographies of Vesselin Branev and Tzvetan Todorov
(examined by Kristina Yordanova and Alexander Kiossev). In them, the way one’s
life path is narrated is completely different, almost opposite in terms of genre and
poetics. The act of narration is anxious, refl exive, analytically destructive and self411
examining; it represents a risky intellectual journey that endangers the integrity
of the Self and calls into question the communicability of his life. Such narratives
involve serious „work of mourning“ over one’s life under totalitarian conditions,
and the heavy load of this Trauerarbeit (Freud) takes the autobiographical narration
to depths and limits where the moral burden of „stock-taking“ threatens to destroy
everything: the plot structure, the life-coherence, the narrator’s perspective, the
communicability of one’s life… and eventually, the very genre of autobiography.
The last part of the Afterword fi nally modifi es the initial hypothesis and draws
general conclusions about the state of the narrative resource, the public sphere in
Bulgaria, and the ultimate effect of all these conditions on the individual life stories. It
is pointed out that the chaotic multiplicity of Grand Narratives and media life-patterns
has a specifi c structure. They operate with incomparable and irreconcilable pictures
of the role of the individual and its relation to History, but in all their multiplicity
and differences they function in a kind of paradoxical regime – simultaneously in
competition, antagonism, and isolation. Each one of them is internally monolithic
and does not allow its veracity to be questioned by others’ arguments, by contesting
narratives and alternative pictures of the past. That is why each one of these collective
life models is reminiscent of a closed mythological narrative: self-focused and selfsuffi
cient, beyond any possibility for verifi cation, each one of them claims that the
others are lying, manipulative, and naïve.
Although it endangers successful and democratic public communication,
such a paradoxical regime turns out to be an unexpectedly favourable condition for
successful individual life-narratives. Individuals use the resources of one or other
collectively valid narrative, yet not to analyze, understand and make articulated
sense of their lives, but to „totalize“ these lives quickly and unproblematically,
„healing“ themselves of all historical ruptures as well as of all personal lack of
integrity. The secure Grand Narratives and media models make the heavy analytic
„work of mourning“ unnecessary; they suppress successfully all possible traumas
and anxieties and shield the individual from diffi cult self-questioning. Building
upon these collective models, the individual narrators construct selective personal
life stories that easily overcome every moral problem posed by their own life path,
as well as all historical cataclysms and the transvaluation of ideological values
brought about by the collapse of communism and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. To
put it briefl y, the available life models help to construct meaning of one’s life and,
at the same time, allow successful avoidance of true and deep refl ection upon it.
The narrative resource which the individual autobiographers have at their disposal
is of a peculiar kind – it is rich, even super-rich, but it basically offers individuals
an opportunity to fi nd relief from every possible anxiety by appealing to mutually
isolated and antagonistic mythologies that are not interested in a profound analysis of
the facts and the truth. Their function is to produce quickly and successfully meaning
of one’s life, to ensure unproblematic personal dignity and rigid identity. In all their
variants these „mythological“ narratives are close to the basic fi gure „I am always
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true to myself“ and are designed to enable individuals to narrate their lives easily,
calmly and harmoniously. „Anxiety“, which was expected by our hypothesis to exist
in personal life stories, leaves the realm of the personal but remains somewhere
„in-between“ – between the multiple antagonistic Narratives and life models – as a
schizophrenic and disintegrated state of public communication.
The final part of the Afterword discusses precisely this important fact.
Obviously, it contradicts the initial hypothesis: the study has, in fact, found that
„anxious“ personal narratives and individual life stories are actually very rare;
the expected symptoms are also rarely observed. Could this mean that life under
socialism in Bulgaria was in fact simply normal? And that nowadays people rightfully
remember it with nostalgia? Objecting to such a supposition, the meta-study analyzes
the purely ideological character of the word „normality“ in the above naïve questions.
It shows that it is an ideological construct antonymous to „demonization“ of life
under socialism. „Normal“ reveals itself as an ideological construct and shifting
signifi er, whose changing meaning depends on the loyalty and the political needs of
the moment. „Normality“ may signify both the era of socialism (back then people
lived „normally“) and the dreamed-of near future of a successful transition when
Bulgaria would at long last become a „normal“ Western capitalist country.
That is why the Afterword replaces the ideological construct „normality“ with
the elaborated concept „normalization“, pointing out different possible meanings of
this Foucauldian term, which are related to the concept of „cultural intimacy“ coined
by American anthropologist Michael Herzfeld. Understood as cultural intimacy,
normalization under socialism was not a form of biopolitics standardizing the
bodies of the population, but a process in which the offi cial ideology was accepted
and reproduced by small, intimate (provincial or family) communities. They were
isolated within themselves and alienated from the socialist1 society, using its panlanguage
only to imitate that they, too, were „normal“ – that is, just like everybody
else in this society, demonstrating apparent loyalty to the hegemonic norms. In
fact, in a condition of cultural intimacy under socialism, people used imitatively
the offi cial ideology only for their own small and selfi sh practical ends. However,
by doing so, they participated in the universal reproduction of this all-embracing
ideology, maintaining the status quo of the totalitarian regime. The most paradoxical
consequence of this cultural intimacy is that in the event of confl ict with foreigners
and outsiders2, the same people from the intimate group, who have otherwise once
cynically used the communist ideology solely as hollow rhetoric, will begin to
1 Herzfeld analyzes national, not socialist societies: here the research project „Patterns of
Anxiety“ reinterprets Herzfeld’s concept for its own purposes.
2 Young people from other generations who „don’t understand our lives under socialism“
are „outsiders“ as seen from the perspective of such an intimate generational group; they
seem to behave like foreigners who make us mobilize all our resources in defense of „our
values“, including the old, empty ideological language.
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defend it ardently. Some of them have actually begun retrospectively to believe in it,
while others defend it even though they continue not to believe in it; yet, this public
language and its Grand Narrative has been transformed for both the former and the
latter into „their“ language and „their“ Narrative, the jargon of their intimacy. After
the collapse of state communism, its disintegrated ideology has become a sign of
their own parasitic, poaching, and tactical (Michel de Certeau) identity in the same
small, intimate community – and it has to be defended by all means.
The Afterword lists also further types of „normalizations“, which differ from the
„cultural intimate“ type: normalization as modernization „from above“ (in Foucault’s
sense) as well as normalization as assimilation-internalization „from below“ (in
Michel de Certeau’s sense). The claim is that nowadays, in the time of the postsocialist
transition, all these different types of normalization produce simultaneously
their post-effects (i.e., they produce different pictures of socialist life and different
meanings of its predicate „normal“), thus obscuring the collective narrative resource
and opening up different, incommensurable biographical perspectives on the past.
The Afterword ends by expressing a fear about contemporary Bulgarian society
which cultivates isolation, lack of communication and of wish to attain understanding
beyond the chaotic multiplicity of competing but hardline, isolationist mythologies. It
ends with the anxiety with which the research project „Patterns of Anxiety“ began –
could this be a sign of disintegration of basic social solidarities in Bulgarian society?