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Madrid is a large city, and a large city in Europe, so there are tons of immigrants from all over the globe. The large population of Latin Americans seems to have escaped mockery in this particular poster, but the Muslims, the Africans, the Romanians, and the Chinese were not so lucky. The poor elderly Spanish man is being cruelly held back by…Osama bin Laden, some African guy who’s either part of the A-Team or running some heroin business in Africa while moonlighting in cheap remakes of old rap videos, the Romanian woman who wanders through the metro barefoot saying her back hurts and her baby’s hungry and she’s got twenty more in her shack and they’re all hungry too, and a jolly Chinese man with a serious FUPA (presumably a representation of the Chinese businessman that monopolizes the convenience store market—the Chinese are geniuses with their little convenience stores…seriously, they have EVERYTHING).
It took way longer than it should have for the bank to take the posters down, but they’re all over town anyway…and only at banks. It’s weird. There are nationalists and fascists and crazy people in Spain just like anywhere else, but I don’t know any Spaniard who approves.
I finally got around to checking out their website today. If you can read Spanish, take a look at their declaration and articles. Even if you don’t read Spanish, you can kind of get the gist of what they’re saying. I’ve translated some of their declaration:
El Frente Nacional is a collective party that … aims to unify people of every social class and political ideology, with the objective of building a large social movement that wins the support of Parliament, defending first and foremost the Spanish nation and the well-being of its national citizens.
El Frente Nacional does not endorse the political right, nor the political left … [and aims to] build a strong Europe-respecting the different national identities that compose it, including Russia and the Balkans-free from and independent of the Anglo-Saxon empire, promoting the model of a Patriotic Europe against the European model of globalization and savage capitalism.
It then goes on to talk about how El Frente Nacional is a solution to the moral cowardice and egoism of the current politicians and politics, the most interestingly worded example being “the political suicide of immigration”. While their website describes them as being non-partisan, all-inclusive, and basically open to all things Spanish, the other sources I find online describe the party as far-right.
Anyway, I’d be curious to hear your comments and/or questions.
]]> http://makedonika.de/2008/10/26/contestations-over-macedonian-identity-1870%e2%80%931912/ Sun, 26 Oct 2008 03:50:51 +0000 www.makedonika.de http://makedonika.de/2008/10/26/contestations-over-macedonian-identity-1870%e2%80%931912/ http://nationalismeasterneurope.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/images-of-hungarians-and-romanians-in-modern-american-media-and-popular-culture/ Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:09:28 +0000 romanianrevolutionofdecember1989 http://nationalismeasterneurope.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/images-of-hungarians-and-romanians-in-modern-american-media-and-popular-culture/JERRY: He, uh, he must’ve been dictating first thing in the morning. “I want a cup of coffee and a muffin!”
KATYA: And you could not refuse.
JERRY: No, you’d have to be crazy.
KATYA: He was a very bad dictator.
JERRY: Yes. Very bad. Very, very bad.
(from the American television comedy series, Seinfeld, episode entitled “The Gymnast,” aired 3 November 1994, multiple sites, see for example, http://www.seinology.com/scripts/script-92.shtml)
HUNGARIANS…
TONY KORNHEISER: “Thank you, Julian…folks, Julian Rubinstein, author of ‘The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber’ [a Hungarian bankrobber of the 1990s whose cover was playing ice hockey], will be at the ‘Hungarian-American Foundation’ tonight…What’ll they have there? [Laughing] Gulash, yes, they’ll have popperkash [sic]…”
ANDY POLLIN: [Laughing] Maybe Zsa Zsa [Gabor] will be there…
(author’s gist of a conversation heard on the sports talk/comedy radio program “The Tony Kornheiser Show,” 2 December 2004, 9 AM Hour, WTEM 980 AM, Washington, D.C.)
Part I: Introduction
Larry Wolff, Maria Todorova, Vesna Goldsworthy and other scholars interested in the development and spread of Western images and stereotypes of the peoples of eastern Europe understandably have focused their research on travelogues, plays, novels, oper(ett)as, paintings, etc. This makes sense and is methodologically appropriate since these are the artifacts of the age in which these ethnonational images and stereotypes came to be specified, recorded, and communicated to audiences larger than the one in direct earshot. But the content and context of these images and stereotypes are not static, and neither are the means by which they are communicated. Over the last century, and particularly half century, technological and media innovations—primarily in the form of mass communications (films, animated cartoons, radio, television, the Internet)—have changed how ethnonational images come into being and are conveyed to others. This change has arguably decreased the role of traditional (especially intellectual) elites in shaping the content of ethnonational images, while simultaneously enhancing the role of the audience in determining which images “take” and which ones creative intellectuals, journalists, and others will use in their work.
Ironically, the very point that is at the center of the research of Wolff, Todorova, et. al.—that these ethnonational images were not always what they became later, or are today—has somehow gotten lost, including in their application of their own theories to the latter part of the twentieth century. This departure from their intellectual assumptions has happened despite the fact that conditions such as the technology revolution, marketization, globalization, and democratization clearly challenge and reshape—and have challenged and reshaped—individual and collective identities. It is one thing to say that ethnonational images evolved, but hardened over time, and continue to shape how peoples view themselves and others, despite such changes. It is quite another to say, as many in this constructionist literature seem to, at least implicitly, that somehow this evolution became frozen in time, that these images, after a long period of evolution, “consolidated” and now are essentially impervious to meaningful change—that is, that everything is merely déjà vu all over and over and over again and again.
The two excerpts I have invoked above suggest the arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and often personality-contingent and event-driven character of modern ethnonational images of Hungarians and Romanians in the United States. These images are set against a backdrop of, influenced by, and feed upon the broader preexisting images outlined by scholars of the “first generation” of image and stereotype creation (the constructionist literature described above), but they are neither a subset of, nor beholden to, those first order images. Moreover, the interplay between televised images and the audience who watches them (i.e. as consumers who can vote-with-the-remote so-to-speak)—as well as the Internet’s empowering capacity to encourage and facilitate individual expression and participation—means that power over the content and meaning of these ethnonational images has devolved more to non-traditional elites (journalists, producers, media executives, business people) and the mass audience in comparison with the situation that prevailed in the past.
Despite the “Eastern (European)” classification of Hungarians and Romanians, the negative Hun/Mongol/Asian/Oriental connotations of the Hungarians and the “Balkan” characteristics of Romanians, and the general “neo-orientalist” treatment of this “second/third world” or “semi-periphery/periphery,” the actual content of popular and media images of Hungarians and Romanians is far less foreseeable, and more internally and externally diverse, than such overarching, generalizable theories of externally-created and imposed cultural construction predict. (I shall employ Csaba Dupcsik’s term “Euro-Orientalism” here to capture collectively the ideas of Wolff, Todorova, Goldsworthy, Bakic-Hayden and others.)
Moreover, the constructs of this literature have a difficult time accounting for something that derives from the excerpts above and recurs throughout this paper: the difference between Romanian images, which I will argue tend to be more recent and political (from the Seinfeld episode, Nicolae Ceausescu and a Nadia Comaneci-like gymnast)—and, as a consequence, vulnerable to change in content and connotation—and Hungarian images, which tend to be older and more “cultural” (from the sports radio talk show: goulash and Zsa Zsa Gabor) and static. Although the cultural constructionist model of Western image-creation and imposition does not fully spell out its assumptions and expectations, based on its treatment of the concept of “Central Europe” its underlying logic would seem to suggest that the more “Eastern” a people, the more simplistic and perjorative the ethnonational images and stereotypes attributed to that people, the more indistinguishable that people is from the rest of the “unwashed” peoples of the non-West, and the more inflexible the images and stereotypes. At least in the comparison of Hungarian and Romanian images in the West, this does not appear to be the case, and that begs the question: why?
Overall, I conclude from an examination of representations of Hungarians and Romanians in modern American media and pop culture, that in comparison to one another, to other peoples from central and eastern Europe and to peoples from western Europe, the neo-orientalist (Todorova’s distinctions and caveats of her own model notwithstanding) bent of much of the work that studies images of “Eastern Europeans” oversimplifies and overstates the picture. As I have already hinted, part of this derives from the sources, medium, and time period selected by these scholars for study. Another part, however, I would argue derives from the reification and schlerosis of this academic vantage point—one that at times seems unable to overcome its elitist roots. All of this said, I do not completely conclude that the neo-orientalist perspective has nothing useful to contribute. For one of my conclusions is that images of Hungarians in the American imagination are older, more consolidated, less subject to modification, and more diverse than contrasting images of Romanians. The stockpile or archive of images of Romanians tends to be smaller, less differentiated, more political, and newer. Part of this I hypothesize is arbitrary, but deals with the timing of the incorporation of ethnic images—itself a consequence of travel to the country, emigration from that country, and the timing of modern national consciousness and identity movements in that country—into western European/English-speaking/American consciousness. Like Gerschenkron’s late developing states, late developing nations face a different set of rules, or at least more limited options—a choice between irrelevance and ignorance, less-than-desirable stereotypes, or the possibility of exploiting comparative advantage of that stereotype no matter how unsatisfying and patronizing it may be.
Here is a preview summary of my findings then:
1) The range or universe of ethnonational images of either Hungarians or Romanians in North American film and television is more diverse, more internally contradictory, and less predictable than neo-orientalist assumptions seem to allow for.
2) Neo-orientalist assumptions prove somewhat ahistorical. Accident and absence of intention are filtered out in retrospect, and intention and malice are assumed in their place in order to create a coherent narrative.
3) Concrete, individual, idiosyncratic images prove much more enduring and influential than the pale abstract assumptions associated with the neo-orientalist model. It is these that frequently differentiate peoples in the popular mind and that are more impervious/inflexible to change.
4) Partly because of the role of individual images, televised images/pictures prove more compelling and lasting.
5) This points us toward the influence of television, film, and the Internet—media largely ignored in the earlier constructionist, neo-orientalist research, research which, surprisingly, while emphasizing the role of new mass media such as novels and travelogues that brought new peoples and places into the Western consciousness, and while stressing that images have changed over time (i.e. were not what they were later to become), underestimates or ignores both the capacity for change and the role of new media in identity and image formation.
6) The issue of modern media, popular inclusion/consumption culture, etc. brings us to the question of audience and highlights the link between technology and broader market access in determining image selection, formation, and endurance. The neo-orientalist perspective focuses excessively on elite control and dissemination, suggesting audiences are labile and easily manipulable, and placing almost no importance on the role of audience in determining image formation and content. The greater role of masses in determining which images “stick” buffers the elitist focus of the neo-orientalist perspective and accounts in part for the more mixed, syncretic character of contemporary ethnonational images.
7) As with state formation, the late developing nation and its late incorporation into the Western consciousness has a lingering role in the content of ethnonational images. Being unknown and having no image, although beneficial in presenting a tabula rasa template upon which good images can be projected, often leaves a people vulnerable to being pigeonholed in the foreign imagination by a small number of late developing images—images which inevitably seem to be more political than cultural, and as a whole, more negative. However, it is important to note that this is as much a product of mass audiences and visual media…as it is of elites and any imputed constructionist imperative.
As I believe befits this topic, the layout and content of this paper is eclectic. As a result, it is unlikely that the reader will find every section of this paper of interest. However, I do believe that a wide variety of different audiences should find something germane to their particular interest—including those interested in media and communications studies, Central and East Europeanists, pop culture trivia buffs, movie aficionados, and sports fans. This article has something for most people, but it is definitely not “for everyone.”
An Autobiographical Note as an Introduction to Hungarian and Romanian Images in American Culture
Encounters with ethnonational images, of course, often predate one’s intellectual capacity to recognize ethnic and national distinctions and to link people and fictional characters with ethnic and national groups. It is only in retrospect that we can recognize the connection. Because of the subject of this section and the role of personal memories, the approach is somewhat stream-of-consciousness.
“Knowing” Romanians (or at least, Tran-syl-va-ni-ahahaha-ns)
As a child, when it came to Romanians, I knew of course of Dracula, or at least his pop-cultural/film (re-, and seemingly never ending)incarnation. After all, to the extent I knew where he was from it was some place called “Transylvania,” which was either its own country—in which case it must have some pretty cool-looking postage stamps, spooky castles on forbidding mountain tops and the like—or a made-up place. I suppose this should not have been surprising for a kid, since, of the myriad Dracula films, there were ones such as “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966).” (Where does that take place, Dodge City?)
Dracula’s birthday, as we all know, is 31 October, which just happens to coincide with Halloween, thereby causing some confusion. Anyway, so when I went trick-or-treating as Cornelius from the “Planet of the Apes”—it was the ‘70s okay, and I was a kid, how was I to know?…I actually thought soylent green was people—in a costume that they probably use today to demonstrate the danger of fireworks—to say nothing of the mask, a cheap plastic mold with an elastic string that invariably broke, causing you to have to carry it with you and thereby destroying any capacity you might have had to surprise the people who came to their doors…unless of course they tried the “please, take just one” candy-in-the-bowl-out-front-with-the-lights-off-really-we’re-not-home-socialism-in-action method—more often than not, I would run into countless Draculas. They had the the cape, the fake fangs, and that cool fake blood…and perhaps even some of those cool postage stamps. (Context is everything at Halloween. My youngest brother went sometime in the late ‘80s as “Jason” from the “Halloween” horror series. A little old lady opened up the door at one house and said “Ooooooh, look at the cute little hockey player”! By the way, what happens when you go up to somebody’s house in a costume, ring the doorbell, and say trick-or-treat, on a day other than Halloween? I figure one of two things can happen: 1) they call the cops, or 2) they seek to regift the still-remaining popcorn balls and circus peanuts left over from last Halloween.)
If Dracula was only present in person on Halloween, he could be found the rest of the year on television—especially, perhaps ironically, for kids. There was Count von Count from Sesame Street. The count’s theme song included a line, “When I’m alone. I count myself. One, one count! Ahahahaha [to thunder in the background]!” Interestingly, according to the Internet’s Wikipedia (“Count von Count”) entry, there is some vampire folklore which suggests that vampires can become obsessed with counting things and that should you ever confront one, throwing sand or seeds may help to distract them (a helpful travel tip…).
The Count von Count skit is emblematic of the confused mix of Romanian, Hungarian, and sometimes inexplicably inserted slavic elements that make up the Dracula composite. For example, as in the Seinfeld scene excerpted in the introduction (whose characters actually speak a few words of Romanian in the scene!, but who are nevertheless named Katya (the gymnast) and Misha (the circus performing acrobat), names (diminutives) which are neither Hungarian, nor Romanian), the Count’s bats for some unknown reason have slavic names—Grisha, Misha, Sasha, etc. The Count’s characteristics are clearly inspired by Bela Lugosi’s (indeed, a real Transylvanian (from Lugoj), of Hungarian origin) 1931 portrayal of Dracula (down to Count von Count’s accent), and, it would appear, the Count’s cameo girlfriend “Countess Dahling von Dahling” is inspired by the Hungarian actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who is famous for being famous, as is said, and for calling people “dahling” (convenient, she has said, because then you never have to remember anyone’s name).
Finally, there was Count Chocula, a staple of Saturday morning television serials and the commercials in between which they were sandwiched (nothing in comparison to today, however, as commercial breaks took up much less time then). All I knew of him was that he presided over what looked like a really-tasty chocolate cereal that looked more like dessert than breakfast. That, of course, explains why our mother refused to buy it for us. Back in the in-retrospect-not-a-bad-time-to-be-a-kid, now much-maligned, hedonistic “have a nice day smiley-face,” “Me” decade of the 1970s, gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins was given temporary special dispenstation. Gluttony was in…even if chocolate covered cereals with marshmallows were not in some households. (In those days, “nutrition correctness” had not yet taken over, as names such as Sugar Smacks (renamed Honey Smacks) or Sugar Pops would suggest.)
“Knowing” Hungarians
My introduction to Hungarians was similarly obscure. To the extent I identified Dracula with any place at all, it was, as I noted, Transylvania; to the extent that it was a country, Romania—not yet having gotten the spiel countless times by the proprietors of private rooms I was to stay in in Hungary in later years, “ah, so you are going to Transylvania, you know that used to be part of Hungary—one, one dismembered kingdom, ahahahahahaha—until they took it away (to the accompaniment of thunder in the background) .” What did I know and when did I know it (well, it was the Watergate era, you know)? It was not, for example, until years later that I realized that I had once lived in the Hungarian-American mecca known as Cleveland, or that the Austrian family from whom we bought our house in a suburb of Toronto in the early ‘70s was named Feleky. (It was quite a street we lived on then (1970-1974); my parents, Irish immigrants just naturalized American citizens, the mother of a friend a Prague Spring Czech refugee, and many new Greek families, doubtless some having fled the right-wing military junta of 1967-1973.)
My mother used to make that staple of many an American household (at least at a time), “Hungarian goulash”…it sounds ghoulish, but it tastes delicious. (As is frequently noted, the American version is more similar to porkolt (stew-like) than to gulyas (a soup).) I loved it, even though I didn’t know what it was or where it came from. (It can only be said to be ironic too, although I did not realize it was ironic at a time: my father is a ’56er, only he came from Dublin, a relative (a policeman!) stiffed him at the port, and so he wandered the streets of New York with his suitcase in heavy Irish tweed during Indian summer, only to duck into a bar to see a few pitches of Don Larsen’s Perfect Game in the World Series, an event whose importance was inscrutible to him; like many a Hungarian ‘56er, however, he felt like a Martian (see below for more on the theme of Hungarians as “aliens”). No, my father did not bump into Frank McCourt!)
“Goulash,” of course, already had a long history on television by that point, what with mad scientists in Warner Brothers cartoons, living in “Transylvania” among lightning storms and talking about making “spider goulash” and similar mad scientist specialties. (The other Hungarian touch used in a whole series of cartoons—including a classic Warner Brothers’ cartoon by Fritz Freleng with Bugs Bunny as a concert pianist (“Rhapsody Rabbit”) and a classic MGM cartoon by Hanna and Barbera of “Tom and Jerry” dueling it out at a piano (“The Cat Concerto”), both of which came out within weeks of each other in 1946 leading to mutual accusations that the competitor was guilty of plagiarism (see Wikipedia entry)—is the manic-depressive, mostly manic, frantic music Franz (Ferenc) Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2”.) “Goulash” was also the plot-line of what from today’s optic was a clearly racist episode (“A Majority of Two,” 4/11/6 8) of the 1960s sitcom “Bewitched” in which, as usual, “Darrin” (alias “Darwood”) was to entertain an out-of-town business guest—would you like a high-ball, sir, make that a double; sorry they’ve slashed the expense account, dinner at Darrin’s again…—who on this occasion was Japanese. The whole episode, Darrin’s wife, a witch named Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery), is trying to track down how to prepare the meal request the businessman’s secretary had relayed: Hun-gai-ran-gou-rash. She is worried, of course, about causing the Japanese businessman to lose face if she asks, which is indeed a concern since throughout the episode when this happens to someone his or her face will literally disappear, apparently leaving a blotch of white-out. Everyone, of course, has a good laugh at the end, however, after the businessman has romanced only a mildly Asian-looking (didn’t want to have her looking tooooo Asian) stewardess, and it turns out all the businessman really wanted was “Hungarian Goulash,” but owing to his secretary’s accent…Everyone except that nosy next-door neighbor Mrs. Gladys Kravitz, who, we can deduce, must be spying on the Stevens’ household for “Dragnet” or “The FBI,” since “freak out” parties have been reported at that address…
Then, there was the show, “Green Acres,”…something was definitely up with that, but exactly what I didn’t know. Although I knew the character Lisa Douglas was eccentric, I didn’t know she was Hungarian, and I certainly did not know that she was Eva Gabor and not Zsa Zsa Gabor as is very frequently mistaken. As a kid, I thought I didn’t understand the show, precisely because I was a kid. Nope. Now, years later, I know: that wasn’t the problem.
How exactly does one describe “Green Acres?” The plot ostensibly was that Eddie Albert’s character wished to experience the “real livin’” of the countryside (today, this is known as a “r-e-a-l-i-t-y show,” starring a similarly famous-for-being-famous celebrity, Paris Hilton…who is actually related to the Gabors (see below), however, thereby causing us serious existential issues at this point in this sentence). Eddie Albert drags his reluctant Hungarian wife with him, and she is not very happy with the situation because, as we learn from the theme song, she would rather be shopping on Park Avenue. (The countryside theme was so common in CBS sitcoms during the 1960s, that some critics derisively referred to it as the “Country Broadcasting System”.) Anyway, they lived in some rural area, several hundred miles from Chicago, probably Illinois. Despite the small size of the town in which they lived, Hooterville was capable of hosting not one, but two sitcoms: Green Acres (1966-1971) and Petticoat Junction (1963-1970). (The town was apparently known best for the ample breasts of the young female stars of Petticoat Junction, since, as it turns out, the choice of name was not accidental). The two shows were united by the presence of Sam Drucker, apparently town grocer, postmaster, and banker, and the unforgettable character of George Jefferson (oh, sorry, no, too early, this was still the 1960s, strike that then). As the Wikipedia entry notes, Hooterville had Drucker’s grocery store and the hotel from Petticoat Junction…not exactly, Pixley material (to say nothing of Mount Pilot), and likely that giant sucking sound on the state’s budget. At least the town did not have Goober or Howard Sprague, clearly not local personalities the chamber of commerce wishes to advertise when trying to attract investment).
Moreover, I would venture to guess, this was one town where the locals did not “exceed the plan” or “break the harvest record,” despite Eva’s naturally collectivist tendencies. Instead, a lot of time was spent with fending off the vexing locals, including the featherheadded state bureaucrat, county farm agent Hank Kimball, a gender-ambiguous brother and sister painting team, and Arnold Ziffel, the “hilarious” TV-watching pig, apparently “Green Acres”s’answer to Mr. Ed (an insidious, but false, urban legend has it that the cast ate Arnold after the show was cancelled; the truth is just being on the set made him nostalgic for the sanity of the sty). The running joke of the series was that Mr. Douglas (Eddie Albert) wanted to be there, but nothing went right and the locals drove him crazy; while Mrs. Douglas, despite her love of fluffy negligees and diamonds, fit right in and understood the locals. Her Hungarianness in the show was alternatively exotic, haughty, sexy/ditzy (as connoted by her accent) and seemingly oblivious to reason—yes, a veritable goulash of “otherness.”
One would like to assume that “Green Acres” could be explained by recourse to more complicated analysis: that it was somehow a) a reflection of the drug culture’s first penetration of the creative intelligentsia (according to Alice, the wind was whispering, not yet crying Mary…“Green Acres” an accidental choice of title?!), or that b) there was some deep allegory at work here, suggesting pursuit of a utopian rural life is a chimera, and that instead you get electrification and a TV-watching pig. (Appropriately enough, when it and other such country broadcasting system shows were cancelled in 1971, it was referred to as the “Rural Puge.”) It is more likely that the show was merely escapist, almost unintentionally absurd—although it did leave a score that lent itself well to translation into Hungarian for a skit at a summer language camp years later. (One of the best indictments of “America’s Cold War realism” of the era can be found in the movie “Forrest Gump,” in a recovery room for injured soldiers during the Vietnam War…in the background “Gomer Pyle, USMC” plays on a TV…In 5 years, Gomer somehow never made it out of basic training to Vietnam…)
Through the Eyes of an American Child of the Television Age: Identifying Hungarians and Romanians as Hungarians and Romanians…through the Wide World of Sports
Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky
Speaking of Eva…I mean Zsa Zsa, no, I mean, for once this is right, Zsa Zsa Gabor…a guest spot on another rural-themed 1960s television show introduces us to our next theme: the Hungarians as “mad” or crazy (a la Lisa Douglas). In one episode (28 January 1962), Wilbur congratulates his talking horse, Mr. Ed, for having cured Zsa Zsa of her fear of horses, to which Mr. Ed responds: “She cured my fear of Hungarians” (“The Best of Mr. Ed,” multiple sites; Mister Ed aired from 1961-1966 on, you guessed it, CBS). In J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” (published as a whole in 1961), Mrs. Glass tells Zooey: “You could use a haircut, young man…You’re getting to look like one of these crazy Hungarians or something getting out of a swimming pool” (the section also contains a reference to Zsa Zsa Gabor and use of the descriptor “Balkan”; I remember now reading this book beneath leafy trees below the Pannonhalma abbey in Hungary in June 1990) http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/frannyandzooey.doc. (I would be curious to know here: this section first appeared in The New Yorker in May 1957, and the reference to a Hungarian “getting out of a swimming pool”—a rather strange comparison—inevitably brings to mind the famous bloody waterpolo match between the Soviets and the Hungarians on 6 December 1956 at the 1956 Summer Olympics (yes, that’s right, because the Summer Olympics were held in Melbourne, Australia that year). The Hungarians defeated the Soviets in a match with huge political overtones—angry Hungarian fans were reportedly ready to lynch a Soviet player for a punch to the eye of a Hungarian star—the match coming just a month after the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising.)
My first personal realization of Hungarianness as Hungarianness, however, came around 1976, with the ascribed “mad” quality of Hungarians, specifically and appropriately enough, Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky. Hrabosky was a relief pitcher for several different teams in the 1970s and early 1980s, but his best years were with St. Louis and Kansas City, with 1975 being his cardinal year in the record books. The mid-1970s were the days of colorful characters in baseball, especially among pitchers: the cigar-chomping Cuban of the Boston Red Sox, Luis Tiant, who looked like we was throwing toward the outfield rather than the catcher because of his pitching motion; Sparky Lyle for the New York Yankees, his cheeks like a blow-fish filled with chewing tobacco; and Mark “The Bird” Fidrych of the Detroit Tigers, who talked to the ball as if it were alive and whose boyish enthusiasm unfortunately couldn’t overcome injuries that strangled his career in its infancy.
Then there was Hrabosky who despite the Slovak-sounding last name claims Hungarian descent. Contrasting the absence of colorful characters among pitchers in today’s baseball, Gordon Edes wrote in a wonderful—if he were Hungarian, we might even say “sweet”—article in 2003 about Hrabosky as follows:
But for sheer theatrics, one reliever remains in a league of his own: Al Hrabosky, known as the “Mad Hungarian” when he pitched for the Cardinals, Royals, and Braves from 1970-1982. With his Fu Manchu mustache, long hair, and a silver ring, the Gypsy Rose of Death (“I don’t even remember the stupid story I made up for that, it was so far-fetched—probably a family heirloom of Dracula”), Hrabosky would turn every outing into performance art. He’d stomp off the mound toward second base, eyes blazing, the fury practically seeping through his uniform as he turned back to the hitter who was left waiting at the plate until he was done working himself into an altered state he called his “controlled hate routine,” then whirled around, pounding his ball into the glove while the home crowd generally went nuts. (Gordon Edes, “Hrabosky had a flair about him,” “The Boston Globe,” 28 March 2003, F9, reprinted on the Internet)
How did Hrabosky get his nickname? Again, Edes recounts:
The nickname, he said, came from a team publicist. No one was sure of his nationality—[the American film star] “Burt Reynolds once called me ‘The Mad Russian’”—and only the spelling-bee champions got his name right. But then one day, a Cardinals publicist, Jerry Lovelace, said “Hey, M.H.,” to the young pitcher from Oakland, Calif., and a nickname was born….I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “Mad Hungarian.” I said, “I like it.” (Edes, 2003)
Hungarians, I concluded from watching his television appearances and from his nickname, must be associated with craziness. That is how, of course, many images are passed on, not with malice, but as descriptors for individuals, a way of awarding identity and for marketing purposes. Hrabosky’s “mad” behavior was established before his nationality (as Burt Reynolds’ calling him “The Mad Russian” indicates, in itself a negative and positive reflection of “East European” ethnicity in the United States at the time—interchangeable, part of a melting pot, even if a separate one from those of West European ethnicity—although cultural constructionists would view such “everycountry” ascription more darkly (see below)), rather than his Hungarianness being identified first, and his behavior seen as reflecting his Hungarianness. Once the two become intertwined, however, and given the propensity for collective associations to outweigh individual associations, it was difficult and almost irrelevant to know which came first—the two were married and interchangeable in the popular imagination, or at least sports fan’s imagination.
Nadia…
It was also the Bicentennial Summer of 1976 when I was introduced to Romanians, also through sports. It was, of course, through Nadia Comaneci (“N.C. I”), an endearing young Romanian gymnast who scored seven perfect 10s, the perfection being driven home even more by the fact that the scoreboards only went up to 9.9, the perfect score of 10 being considered unattainable! (The scoreboard would show 1.0 because it could not go past 9.9….Spinal Tap’s invention of the 11 not having been invented yet.) Nadia spawned “Nadia-(Ro)mania” of a sort. ABC which carried the Montreal Olympics in the United States attached a musical theme to the gymnast’s performances; “Nadia’s theme” then climbed the pop charts! (It was actually the theme to an American soap opera, “The Young and the Restless,” but it was through its attachment to Nadia who used it for one of her floor performances that it became famous.)
Of course, I have asked myself since then: would the reaction, the outpouring of genuine warmth and admiration from Americans (Canadians, and Westerners in general) have been the same had Nadia been representing Bulgaria and not Romania—to say nothing of the Soviet Union? True, the USSR’s Olga Korbut generated enthusiasm four years earlier in Munich but nothing like Nadia. Was it Nadia’s comparative youth and “cuteness/sweetness/prepubescence?” Was it her coach, the charismatic, bear-like Hungarian, Bela Karolyi (their relationship presented as indicative of the “warm ethnic relations” fostered by “Ceausescu’s Romania”)? Perhaps, but I also think it was against the backdrop of Romania’s highly-crafted and the U.S. and West’s highly-courted image of Ceausescu’s Romania as the great thorn in the Soviets’ side, bravely standing up to Moscow and more Western in their culture and people (“a Latin people in a sea of Slavs”)—i.e. thus not Balkan or truly “Eastern,” somehow caught by accident “behind enemy lines.” It is simply difficult to believe that something approaching Nadia-mania could occur in the post-Cold War world; it was a reflection of the time in which it took place.
Certainly, the standing ovation for the Romanian delegation as it entered the Los Angeles Coliseum at the 1984 Summer Olympics—which unfortunately lent itself easily to continuous exploitation by Ceausescu thereafter, during the most-difficult years of his reign—and Nadia’s escape from Romania in November 1989, became metaphors for and barometers of Romania’s political situation and U.S.-Romanian relations. The appropriately surreal “1984” moment reflected the Chernenko, pre-Gorbachev nadir of Soviet-American relations in the 1980s—arms reductions talks’ were essentially put on ice between late 1983 and 1985—and the continued greater importance attached to Romania’s foreign policy over Ceausescu’s “Golden Era” domestic policy (the 1984-1986 period being perhaps the worst and most hopeless according to some, in part owing to brutal weather, and the weakness of reform currents at that moment elsewhere in the bloc). By 1989, with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in full swing—and with “Gorbymania” having changed the image of the Soviet Union extensively in the United States—the image of a transmorgified Nadia—as if 1976 had never happened—involved in a “tawdry affair” with a married man (Constantin Panait), escaping from Romania, seemed to symbolize the ills of Ceausescu’s Romania and how it now stood in stark contrast to the rest of the Eastern bloc. As the Seinfeld episode demonstrates, and as I will discuss in more detail below, the gymnast frame stuck in the popular imagination, however. It was Nadia who set that mold.
(A Romanian-American scholar once told me how surprised he was to look up on the television screen one day in November-December 1989, only to see the married father of four, the Romanian émigré for whom a now aging and plumper Nadia had allegedly left Ceausescu’s Romania: the scholar had tended bar with the guy…and the guy still owed him money! My first encounter with “real, live” Romanians from Romania also had a sad sports theme in a sense. It was in Keleti pu., the eastern train station in Budapest in May 1985. Amid the clapping of rusting toilet flanges and intermittent torrents of urine falling to the tracks below, Romanian boys in dingy blue track suits with trim that had once been white chased each other around the unmistakable “CFR” railcars of the time…)
Part II:
Back to Theory: The Inventions of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Ruritania
Over the years, there has developed a growing subfield across many academic disciplines that examines the construction of identities in the “region formerly known (primarily during the Cold War) as ‘Eastern Europe.’” This reflects the intersection of two trends, one political/historical, one intellectual/ideological. Part of the timing of the birth of this subfield owes to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the break-up of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia as well as of regional groupings such as the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, and the question of where the future of the countries of the region lies in the face of extensive political and economic restructuring and the prospect (and now for many, reality) of NATO and, in particular, European Union membership. Part of it lies in broader academic and cultural trends that look at the role of white Christian male Americans and (Western) Europeans in creating and imposing identities upon “others” in their home countries, but especially abroad—i.e. the so-called “Orientalism,” identified by Edward Said. The bottom line of such analysis is that the American and West European views of East Europeans and others says more about the owner of the view than the object of the view, about elaborately rationalized, but unjustifiable and often immoral superiority complexes, and about how those making the characterizations do so wittingly and unwittingly to establish and maintain control over those they characterize and categorize.
As a result, we have learned important conclusions such as the shift from a north-south mental geography of Europe to a west-east one (i.e. “Eastern Europe”) weighted with far more political, cultural, and moral baggage (Wolff), the similarly, historically-recent evolution and accepted use of the perjorative regional classification of “the Balkans” (Todorova), and more broadly of non-western Europe as a mythical and allegedly genetically-backward “Ruritania” (Goldsworthy). The Hungarian scholar Csaba Dupcsik has dubbed this set of studies collectively as a critique of “Euro-Orientalism” (Dupcsik, 2001). Much, perhaps most, of the literature in this burgeoning subfield—it is part of the contemporary bread-and-butter of universities and colleges, both outside and inside the classrooms, that is “identity politics,” the behemoth of research agendas—bases its conclusions on the reading of travel narratives, novels, poems, plays, operas, paintings, etc. In other words, the historic province of narrow, if traditionally influential, elite populations, that mirror to some extent the intellectuals who now are examining their works.
In a review of Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination and Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans, the journalist and historian Misha Glenny summarizes this body of literature for the lay-person as follows:
Both Goldsworthy and Maria Todorova, a Bulgarian historian who now teaches at the University of Florida, seek to explain the peculiar form of literary and ideological imperialism visited on the Balkans. While consciously drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism for inspiration, Todorova makes clear distinctions between Said’s consideration of the Middle East and her own of what used to be called the Near East. Both authors draw on a third academic, Milica Bakic-Hayden, to describe the process of imagining the Balkans as one of ‘nesting orientalisms’. On the one hand, the region is seen as ‘irreparably oriental’ because it spent nearly five centuries as part of the Ottoman Empire. On the other, it is indisputably part of Europe. The dichotomy is summed up by two further, now defunct names for the Balkans: Turkey-in-Europe and Ottoman Europe. Its inhabitants were in the main white and Christian, but in important contrast to the Middle East, the region was never colonised by Western powers, which allowed it to become the repository of any manner of fantastic imaginings. (Glenny, “Only in the Balkans,” London Review of Books, 1999)
In other words, the utility and great advantage of the Balkans and Eastern Europe for those in Western Europe and North America is that they are foreign enough as settings to host an allegory or morality play unobtrusively and yet familiar enough to make that allegory or morality play credible and understandable to a Western audience.
It should be noted here that within this literature there is a, never thoroughly resolved, tension between foreigners and locals lumping the whole region together (“Eastern Europe”) or making and placing emphasis upon distinctions between groupings of countries or parts of countries in the region. The larger, regional approach—the “everycountry” tendency discussed by Fleming below—is, not surprisingly, favored in the discourse of Westerners. Thus, the countries of “Eastern Europe” as a whole, or the “Balkans” as a whole, are viewed as virtually indistinguishable and interchangeable. Locals, understandably, or perhaps those who spend longer periods of time in the region, are likely to invoke the language of “nesting orientalisms” described by Milica Bakic-Hayden. That is, rank-ordering ethnonational groups within eastern Europe or the Balkans, or within the former Yugoslavia, or even among constituent ethnonational groups there (Serbs vs. Albanians as she suggests)—for Bakic-Hayden this is a reflection of the hegemony and internalization of the orientalist discourse among the region’s peoples and its replication in their dealings with each other and even more “oriental” peoples (the Turks, etc.) (see Bakic-Hayden, 1994, or online at http://www.zmag.org/balkanwatch/hayden_orientalisms.htm). The Romanian academic Sorin Antohi demonstrates how even within a country such as Romania, and among Romanians themselves, the roughly northwest to southeast “nesting orientalist” discourse exists and shapes views of those who live in these areas (Antohi, Transit 21, 2002).
Goldsworthy, Todorova, and Bakic-Hayden clearly believe that the role of Westerners in defining and characterizing those from the eastern part of the continent, the “lesser Europe,” or perhaps most appropriately “the Other Europe,” has led to the creation of cultural hierarchies, often then internalized to their own detriment by those who are being categorized, of negative and perjorative images and stereotypes of the peoples of “Eastern Europe” and “The Balkans.” In an interesting article entitled “Dracula and the Cultural Construction of Europe,” Jason Dittmer elaborates specifically on the role of “travel literature and the Enlightenment” in fostering negative images of Eastern Europe:
Larry Wolff attributes the construction of an Eastern Europe that is separate from the “civilized” portions of Western Europe to Enlightenment philosophers (in particular, Voltaire and Rousseau) who perpetuated and mythologized each other’s accounts of a backward and barbaric homogenous region (some of them despite never actually going there). For example, Voltaire’s History of Charles XII (1731) was critical in mapping Eastern Europe in the popular imagination by describing Charles’ march through Eastern Europe. This book was written in the first person and instilled a fantasy-filled image of Eastern Europe that later travelers would bring with them to Eastern Europe, inserting a lens of preconceptions in their imagination. We know that the book was extremely influential because it had several printings and translations, and its effect was far-reaching and long lasting. Later Voltaire would write a history of the Russian Empire under the rule of Peter the Great (1759) and he used the now popular image of Peter as a “modernizer” to paint Russia as innately backwards and in need of Europeanization (a representation of the Russian executive that was still dominant in the Western media during the more recent reign of Boris Yeltsin). Later correspondence between Voltaire and Catherine the Great (which was all published at the time) further established Russia as a “backward” land in the minds of readers. Rousseau played a similar role in the cultural construction of Poland, constructing Poland and its neighbors as chaotic, despotic, or both:
Poland is a large state surrounded by even more considerable states which, by reason of their despotism and military discipline, have great offensive power. Herself weakened by anarchy, she is, in spite of Polish valor, exposed to all their insults […]. No economic organization; few or no troops; no military discipline, no order, no subordination; ever divided within, ever menaced from without, she has no intrinsic stability, and depends on the caprice of her neighbors. (2: 431)
In addition to this representation from philosophers who may or may not actually have been to Eastern Europe there were similar depictions available to the public from completely fictional travelers, such as those of Baron Munchausen (Wolff 100-06). While there was a real Baron Munchausen who did travel through Eastern Europe, the stories published about his namesake were tall tales written by Rudolf Raspe that portrayed Eastern Europe as a ridiculous and fantastic place. This representation became fashionable just as travel to the region increased, which is interesting as evidence supporting the cliché “familiarity breeds contempt” because Southwest Asia and East Asia received a much more romantic image, perhaps because of their inaccessibility for most Europeans at the time. Similarly, Goldsworthy notes: “the Gothic plot [as of Dracula] requires a setting which is sufficiently close to the reader to appear threatening, while nevertheless being alien enough to house all the exotic paraphernalia—the castles, the convents, the caverns, the dark forests at midnight, the mysterious villains and the howling specters” (75). Todorova outlines a similar process of “discovery” for the Balkans, where diplomats and other travelers to the region came back with stories and descriptions that were rich in detail and description, especially of the beauty of the women and the “crudeness” of the men. Thus, Jonathan Harker’s journal entries must be viewed as they would have been viewed at the time they were written—as a throwback to a not-so-distant literary era, when Eastern Europe came to be known as a magical, timeless place, and Dracula serves as a part of that same politico-geographic project whereby Eastern Europe was constructed as something entirely different than the West. (Jason Dittmer, “Dracula and the Cultural Construction of Europe,”© Connotations 12.2-3 (2002/2003): 233-48 found at http://www.unituebingen.de/connotations/dittmer1223.html)
The Enlightenment brought with it the belief that we can rationally explain and understand the environment in which we live. Unfortunately, it also brought with it the ability and desire to justify in intellectual terms our visceral reactions and prejudices and preconceived notions. “Just because” is not an acceptable answer in Enlightenment thinking. The overlapping or reinforcing of visceral reactions, prejudices, and preconceived notions with rational argument instantly made such beliefs all the more difficult to challenge and falsify. In other words, the capacity for protecting one’s beliefs from attack and for deceiving oneself became infinitely greater and more complicated. Post-Enlightenment “prisms/prisons of the mind” have become every bit as sophisticated and difficult to escape as its prisons.
One of the features alluded to by Dittmer as characteristic of Western images of Eastern Europe is the alleged homogeneity and interchangeability of the countries in the region. In the following passage, K.E. Fleming examines the cultural baggage of the fictional settings of Syldavia (Hergé [George Remi], “King Ottokar’s Sceptre”) and Herzoslovakia (Agatha Christie, “The Secret of Chimneys”), where politics is inscrutable, and violence, brigandry, mystery, assassination, and revolutions are said to be the fabric of everyday life:
Syldavia and Herzoslovakia, then, are sort of Balkan “everycountries,” composites (both in name and character) based on several assumptions: that Balkan countries are more or less interchangeable with and indistinguishable from one another, that there is a readily identifiable typology of politics and history common throughout the Balkans, that there is such a thing as a Balkan ethnic or racial “type.” Yet even as Hergé and Christie assume that they know something fundamental about the Balkans—indeed, that they know the Balkans so well that they can effortlessly construct fictional Balkan worlds—both Herzoslovakia and Syldavia point to an even more pervasive, and apparently contradictory, assumption about southeastern Europe. This is the belief that the Balkans are so hopelessly and intrinsically confused and impenetrable that there is scarcely any point in trying to distinguish between them; a novelistic or cartoon substitute is, in fact, eminently more manageable and presents less of an authorial problem than does the real thing. Anything vaguely East or South-East Europeanish will do. Syldavia, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, Herzoslovakia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Borduria, Bohemia—what’s the difference, after all? Hermann Keyserling’s wry observation, “If the Balkans did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them,” was perhaps understated. Even though the Balkans do exist, they must be invented anyway. Simultaneously and tautologically, then, the Balkans are both fully known and wholly unknowable. (K.E. Fleming, “Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography,” The American Historical Review vol. 105, no. 4 (October 2000) found at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.4/ah001218.html )
There are many more recent examples through which to clarify Fleming’s point. There was the memorable 1984 Wendy’s fast-food commerical with generic East European frenetic fiddling and a communist bloc fashion show where the only thing that differentiates “dayvehr” from “eefningvehr” is the flashlight (spotlight) that accompanies a plump peasant woman in her drab, mass-consumption frock. In Mike Myers’ “Austin Powers” film series (spoofs of the Cold War era James Bond/In Like Flint spy thrillers), the fictional “everycountry,” the synonym for instability from the Balkans to Central Asia is the “breakaway Republic of” Kreplachistan (according to multiple websites, kreplach is in fact a Yiddish word for a type of fritter; similarly, Farbissina as in the series’character Frau Farbissina, apparently means “embittered” in Yiddish). Their difference from the West is their alleged monotony and monochrome nature and yet it is their monotony and monochrome nature that makes them indistinguishable from one another.
“Molvania”: How a Guide Book to a Fictional Country Can Illustrate the Euro-Orientalist Debate in the Post-Modern Age of Virtual Reality
It is telling and ironic in so many ways that a travel guide parody about a fictional East European country that has its own website and inspires not only imaginary travelers to swap stories about their trips there, but East Europeans themselves (!) to discuss what the country represents, can demonstrate for us what is at issue in the Euro-Orientalist debate. Moreover, it is a particularly good contemporary example of the “everycountry” phenomenon and shows us that the debate retains its relevance.
The Jet Lag Travel Guide to Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry (Overlook Press, 2003) is as much, if not more, a send-up and satire of the sometimes pretentious, trendy travel guide industry for young backpackers (e.g. Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Let’s Go), than it is a companion to traveling this fictional East European country (in interviews, the authors have described it as “a practical joke gone awry”). In fact, the parody has far outsold many a travel guide to a real country: as of March 2005, it had sold 500,000 copies, including 50,000 in the US, while Lonely Planet’s most popular guide, its Guide to Australia, sells about 140,000 copies a year (Wall Street Journal, 3 March 2005). (I was introduced to it by two non-east Europeanists; my thanks to my work colleagues Matt and Chris for doing so). Nevertheless, the parody’s authors had to place their country somewhere, and although sequels to this initial offering now include tourist resorts in the Far East (“Phaic Tan”), the fact is they chose “Eastern Europe” as the setting for their first venture. Indeed, “Molvania”’s “East Europeanness” is on display in that post-modern locus for gaining “reality” status, an entry in the online encyclopedia, “Wikipedia”:
The Republic of Molvania is a composite of many stereotypes and cliches about Eastern Europe. Historically, the nation was a desolate wasteland, torn by civil war and ethnic unrest. Eventually Molvania’s various warring factions were united as a single kingdom, ruled by a series of cruel despotic kings. In the late 19th Century the monarchy was overthrown, but the royal family remained popular in exile. During World War 2 the country was invaded by Nazi Germany, and then afterwards was occupied by the Soviet Union who set up a Communist puppet government. After the fall of European Communism in the 1990’s the country became a run of the mill dictatorship run by a corrupt government with heavy ties to the Mafia. Molvania is a very poor and rural country, heavily polluted and geographically barren. The infastructure is terrible, with necessities such as electricity, clean water, and indoor plumbing being rare finds, largely due to bureaucratic incompetence. Though the tour guide tries to explain otherwise, there is little to do in the country, as all hotels are tiny, filthy, and dilapidated, the ethnic cusine is disgusting, and the “tourist attractions” are all boring and overpriced. The Molvanian people, in turn are generally rude, dirty, and at times a bit psychotic, with numerous bizarre and illogical beliefs and traditions. The Molvanîan language is so complicated it is said to take an average of 15 years to learn. The Molvanian national flag, the “Molvanian Trikolor” is unique, in that it has only two colours. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Molvania was the only ex-Soviet state to retain the hammer and sickle. So enamoured were they with the symbols of workers’ unity, they added a third tool – the trowel. (Wikipedia)
Ironically, perhaps, because Molvania: A Land Untouched is in the first place a satire of the youth-oriented travel guide industry, the location of the guidebook’s subject in Eastern Europe is almost incidental. One of the authors, Tom Gleisner, told the BBC that he and his co-writers (Santo Cilauro and Rob Sitch) chose Eastern Europe because they felt “no-one, even those who live there, is even sure of the geography of the area” (“Molvania Spoof Mocks Travel Books,” BBC World Service Online, 2 April 2004). (Of course, we could argue, as Fleming’s passage above suggests, this latter statement—not even the locals know where they live, who they are, or where they came from…all is mystery, miscegenation, and confusion—indeed is itself reflective of the Euro-Orientalist mindset.)
The exact location of Molvania is, as can be imagined, never specified—that is, of course, a source of the power and allure of this traditional literary trope/stage device. We do know, according to its authors, Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch, that it lies “somewhere north of Romania and a little downwind of Chernobyl.” We learn from the country’s website ( http://jetlagtravel.com/molvania), that its most famous citizen, Szlonko “BuBu” Busjbusj (1891-1948), was responsible for tying the country’s currency (the strubl) to the “Latvian lit,” and attempted to bring the “Balkan 7” land-locked republics together in a loose regional confederation. We also learn that the official religion is Baltic Orthodox and that the country is the only ex-Soviet state to maintain the hammer and sickle in its flag—to which was added, in what I would call an East German-inspired touch (the old DDR flag with its engineering compass), a trowel. The language looks to be mainly slavic, heavily peppered by “j” s and “z” s, with a smattering of German (the country’s capital is Lutenblag; the national stadium, the Lutenstaad), although the spelling of the country could even have been influenced by the 1952-1964 slavicized orthography of Romînia (see the diacritical over the “i” in Molvanîa). The descriptions of the country’s environmental degradation can’t help but bring to mind exposes from the early 1990s, such as the memorable “Where Night Falls All Day Long” in the June 1991 issue of National Geographic, about Copsa Mica, Romania, a town where even the sheep and geese eggs were covered by the carbon black used by a tire manufacturing factory.
Given the name and vague location of the country, one might expect that Moldova is the template for the country. In fact, according to the authors, who are not American or Canadian or British, but rather Australian—in itself indicative of the more genuinely “cross-Western” character of some contemporary stereotypes—Eastern Europe did not inspire the project; they first came up with the idea of the guide book in Portugal in the mid 1990s (Susan Spano, “Taking the Backpacker Guide Books for a Ride,” Los Angeles Times, 2 May 2004). Moreover, certain factoids seem inspired by details from other parts of the world, such as in the case of Molvania’s electrical current of 37 volts, a figure we are told was chosen with the help of numerology—which sounds more like the use of the numbers 15, 35, 45, 90, etc. in the Burmese monetary system, allegedly based on the numerological preferences of the leader Ne Win (1962-1988).
Whatever the intentions of the authors to spoof the guide book industry, the controversial part of Molvania: A Land Untouched is, of course, the features ascribed to Molvanians and the characteristics of the land they inhabit. After reading the guide, a Financial Times reviewer summed up the country as follows: a land of criminals, bigots, and hairy women where garlic is sometimes accepted as legal tender and map keys include “chemical waste dump” and “unexplored due to landmines” (Naomi Mapstone, review, Financial Times, 19 April 2004). According to the guide, “Molvania prides itself on the fact [that]…most of its gypsies have been successfully driven abroad or incarcerated”—something which is hardly surprising when one reads the politically-incorrect, we are informed, now-infrequently-sung-because-it-clashes-with-EU standards, last line of the Molvanian national anthem, “We shall drive the gypsy curse from our land” (one wonders how much if at all the authors directly or indirectly were influenced by the British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” character on Da Ali G. Show). Pig, cabbage, and beets are fundamental components of the native cuisine, many desserts include parsnips, and elderly women spit in strangers’ faces to ward off evil spirits. Molvania is in essence a decaying post-Soviet land, with lots of hulking cement monstrosities and over-officious bureaucrats, and a crude and rude populace benighted by ignorance and poor hygeine.
Some of the commentary on this mock travel guide to a fictional country might as well have been about a real country, given the implicit accusations of “Euro-Orientalism” against its Australian (!) authors. For example, Richard Trillo, a spokesman and author for the London-based Rough Guides series, said of the book,
“I found the Molvania book offensive, with no redeeming features. It’s not funny; it’s boring and repetitive, with the same predictable jokes stereotyping Eastern Europe. And what stinks is the way local people have been derided through the unacknowledged use of their photos.” (The cover shot of the Australian edition, and the website, shows a gap-toothed old man in a furry hat, unidentified and grinning broadly.) (Susan Spano, review, LA Times, 2 May 2004).
As Jerry V. Haines wrote in the Washington Post, “the line between what’s funny and what’s just mean is often breached. The country may be imaginary, but the condescension and xenophobia are real” (Washington Post, 10 October 2004). Former UK “Minister for Europe” Keith Vaz said the book was a little “cheeky” because “it does reflect some of the prejudices which are taking root [in Europe]” (“Molvania Spoof Mocks Travel Books,” BBC World Service Online, 2 April 2004). Indeed, here we find the insinuation that art, literature, and apparently even mock guide books, cannot be separated from politics. In the context of the post-“Haider shock” (2000 elections in Austria), EU enlargement (the addition of the 10 in 2004 and Romania and Bulgaria in 2007), and post-9/11 scrutinization and suspicion of immigrants in the collective West, this Australian parody becomes a tool of xenophobic, anti-immigrant forces aiming to maintain and construct new walls for Eastern Europe.
Finally, the fictional Molvania has encouraged central and eastern Europeans themselves to weigh in on the country, what it represents, and what they believe it says about the real “Eastern Europe.” An apparently Polish poster wrote the following trenchant critique, that from the optic of the outsider highlights what for lack of a better term could be termed the nested political correctness that prevails in the West (I would add, especially on elite college and university campuses):
Why is it that the only people ‘liberals’ think it’s OK to laugh at these days are the white working class and Central and Eastern Europeans?
The best-selling spoof travel guide, Molvania: a land untouched by modern dentistry, has been described by the doyen of comedic travel writing, Bill Bryson, as, “brilliantly original and very, very funny.” But is the book a witty satire on the travel guide genre, or just a re-hash of some outdated stereotypes about Central and Eastern Europe?
Europe’s ‘white trash’
The authors – three Australians – have not only invented a history and culture for Molvania, but they also include some very confusing maps and some grainy old photos; one of which looks suspiciously like Krakow. The humor of the book – which, as you can see, is sometimes funny in a kind of sniggering, schoolboy type way - is mostly pretty harmless stuff. But they do, on occasion, go a little too far. In the section ‘Advice for Women Travellers’ they advise that woman who are traveling on their own can expect few problems, “aside from the usual assault, armed robbery and stalking that one usually sees in most eastern European countries.” Now wait a minute! That is not the experience of women travelers in this part of the world, at all. In fact, many feel much safer here than they do in most western-European or American cities.
Molvania: a land untouched by modern dentistry was brought to my attention by a Polish female friend of mine who had read the book and found it unfunny and ‘offensive’. She said the real butt of the joke was “Slavs in general.’ And she is right. The book is both a satire on Slavs and a satire on the sometimes toe-curlingly earnest travel writing so common to the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet. But mostly it just uses central and eastern Europeans as the butt end of some pretty nasty little jokes. Basically, on the receiving end of these jokes are the poor. For instance, the only people who I have seen around here with only one tooth in their heads are poor people from rural areas, who are untouched by modern dentistry because they simply can’t afford it.
There is something a bit strange happening in the West. If this sort of book had been written about, say, African people, then, quite rightly, there would have been uproar and outrage. Words like ‘racism’ would have been used by lefty-liberal reviewers. But it seems that Political Correctness extends to all groups these days except poor whites from urban, rural or semi-rural areas in America and Europe. Central Europeans are being presented as the Chavs of the continent. And that is just not funny at all. (see the post at “the beatroot: Politics and current affairs of Poland and Central Europe,” for Saturday, 21 January 2006 http://beatroot.blogspot.com/2006/01/molvania-land-untouched-by-modern.html)
On the Molvanian website’s forum (where you can also address questions to the Molvanian Ministry of Tourism!), a presumably ethnic Hungarian poster (“MocskosFurtoshajukisbogar,” which translates roughly into DirtyCulyHairedLittleBug(ger)) responded to the usual queries by some posters confused as to the reality of Molvania, as follows:
Molvania is the best place to leave…. Ezek a kretenek [author’s note: these cretins] :D
I know Molvania, I know it very well, actually we all know it here in Eastern Europe. Molvania is the concentrated Eastern world. We luckily have the chance to experience the human miserability every week, 24 hours a day. But thats not all. Westerners, you have to feel the historical pointlessness of our lives. You should understand this before you laugh at us. We know, we feel it in our veins that our future has nothing to do with great ideas, ideology or religious fate about our destiny. And no, poverty is not romantic, poverty is far from being cool. No it is a plague, that spreads in the body of society. Poor people are not just hardworking, they are burning their lives in these tunnels of ruthless work. they have to sacrafise their lives for their children or for tomorrow’s meal. Hopeless people overcharged by work sooner or later became arrogant, impatient, cruel or worse. Soon we all become insane in some way, and this is not something that can be saved by some idealistic aides or charity. This mentality kills us or eats us. We all turn against morality or be burned by the desperate attempts to break out or at least push out our children from this pit. Belive me, cruel we are, we need more than just Jhonny CASH , we need Steve WONDER. (“MocskosFurtoshajukisbogar,” 27 August 2005.)
The rumors of the Molvanians’ nonexistence appear to have been greatly exaggerated….
The Gift that Can Keep Giving an Entire Scholarly Career or…
How Imagining How Others “Invented” “the Other” “Jumped the Shark”
The colorful and bitter intervention of our slightly pessimistic (!) Hungarian poster, “MockosFurtoshajukisbogar,” brings us to one of the important misgivings about the constructionist school: is there no reality to these stereotypes of Eastern Europe? At what point do they themselves cross over into becoming merely rhetorical constructions and lose any basis in reality? In a review of Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania, Tony Judt highlights incisively some of the problems inherent in the constructionist literature of Eastern Europe as follows:
We used to study states, nations, classes. But for some time now, following a shift in fashion within the disciplines of anthropology and history especially, we study not the thing itself but the way it is represented—by the protagonists and by those who study them. Owing in large measure to the influence of the anthropologist Benedict Anderson, we investigate not nationalism but “imagined communities.” And since the publication in 1983 of a seminal collection of essays by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, it is not tradition but “the invention of tradition” that preoccupies historians of modern popular culture and political spectacle.
Eastern (or “Central”) Europe is a ready-made, heaven-sent playground for such notions. After all, the states of Eastern Europe either did not exist until recently, or else had to be reconstructed in the modern era following their obliteration by greater powers in earlier times. From a Western perspective (though not necessarily in the eyes of the locals), Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and Bosnians—to cite only the best known—are all invented nations. Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, the Baltic states, even Greece, whatever the real or imagined glories of their distant past, have all been constituted and reconstituted out of lands and peoples whose history was once submerged in someone else’s story. Eastern Europe, in short, has been both present and absent, real and unreal, depending on your perspective and location.
Neither Anderson nor Hobsbawm and Ranger paid much attention to the region, but their approaches (or at least the titles of their books) have inspired a growing literature charting the ways in which the West has “imagined,” “invented,” or (borrowing from postmodern styles in literary criticism) “(mis)represented” its Eastern Other. At its best—say in Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe, which appeared in 1994—the result has been an illuminating contribution to Western intellectual history, a fine excursion into uncharted waters that helps to map the ways in which Western European writers have frozen into place a certain topography of civilization, and thereby condemned Eastern Europe to a moral as well as a spatial marginality in the Western story.
But the constructionist approach has its hazards. Between “invention,” “imagination,” “representation,” and the invocation of “Otherness,” the story of the West’s failure to see Eastern Europe as it was and as it is runs the risk of sinking under the weight of overtheorized scholarly suspicion. Add “Orientalism” to the mix—the charge that Western writers have deployed patronizing, distancing devices to romanticize Eastern or Southeastern Europe, to better control it—and the region gets lost all over again, this time in a marshland of well-intentioned compensatory subtlety….
To pretend that the history of Eastern or Southeastern Europe would look like that of Western Europe if only Western observers didn’t “orientalize” the region is a grievous error. There are reasons for the sheer awfulness of Balkan conflicts, of course; but awful they are. There is nothing imagined, invented, represented, constructed, appropriated, or orientalized about such a claim. It is a fact.
(Tony Judt, Book Reviews, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. 21 September 1998, New York Review of Books; emphasis added)
A corollary to Judt’s critique of the constructionist literature as positing a rift between reality and Western representation, or better yet that Western representation has shunt aside Eastern reality or displaced it, is the argument that constructionist accounts often essentialize the West, assuming the “everycountry” timeless appraisal by the West of the East, that they so condemn in the (Euro-) Orientalist discourse. True, as a reaction by the weaker of the parties to this competition, essentializing the West is not quite the same as essentializing the East in its implications. Still, and here even in spite of the bow someone like Todorova takes to James D. Carrier on the issue of “Occidentalism” (Todorova, 1997, p. 10), scholars such as Todorova and Goldsworthy fall into the trap of essentializing the West, failing to make sufficient distinctions between governments and peoples, between policy debates among the political class in these countries, between the policies of different countries, and between one era and another.
Such views are no the less insulting, and more importantly, no less wrong than those leveled by the West against “Eastern Europe.” Moreover, and here is a major point made by Buruma and Margalit (Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, Penguin, 2004), the defense of “local” autochtonous values in the face of the Western expansion is a misnomer, for the critique of “Westtoxification”—no matter what the contemporary period—is itself often directly or indirectly an import from the West, specifically the Romantic rejection of the real and imagined excesses of the Englightenment. If for areas such as Japan, where lack of contact with the West makes it harder to argue that occidentalism is in fact a Western import, this is not the case, because of the proximity and interaction during this period, of Eastern Europe. (Indeed, in general, the new New Left, the anti-globalization movement, with its glorification of and wistfulness for a lost mythic community living at peace with pristine nature, owes a—appropriately enough, spritiual—debt to the European right of the 19th and early 20th centuries that it undoubtedly does not wish to acknowledge.)
Deconstructing “Euro-Orientalism,” Source Selection, and Intellectual Biases
It is perhaps a reflection of the condition and zeitgeist of research in the contemporary social sciences and humanities that authors desire and/or feel that purely historical accounts are not enough: history must “speak” to the modern condition and must tell us something important about the world in which we currently live. As a result, an account about the birth and the evolution of ethnonational images cannot stop sometime in the past: it has to be fast-forwarded to the present, where it must continue to have influence. (It is unclear exactly whom scholars are doing this for: for themselves, to demonstrate to their colleagues that what they are doing is relevant to today, to parents of undergraduates, to state legislators who hold the purse strings of higher education, to politicians and policymakers, to the broader non-academic market society (i.e. to include publishers)? At a certain level, much of this seems to “speak” to the perceived marginality, weak influence, and low social status of academics and intellectuals in American society, and their efforts to overcome this situation. The irony is that in seeking to be or become more “relevant,” they merely highlight and reinforce their isolation. It also perhaps leads to a “historicization” of the present, drawing far too much of the past into the present, something so many of the scholars themselves decry.)
In the literature on “Euro-Orientalism,” this situation has meant that scholars do not just examine works of the past, but they search for evidence to show that those older works continue to shape ethnonational images directly or indirectly today. The problem is that this leads them to take an almost exclusively “political” view of the phenomenon of contemporary ethnonational images. Thus, for example, in Imagining the Balkans Maria Todorova essentially abandons the comparative diversity of her source selection in examining the creation of Balkan images—say, plays by George Bernard Shaw—when she moves to examining contemporary portrayals of the region and invokes sources such as Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, articles in Foreign Affairs, and op-ed pieces in the New York Times. I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is very much an “intellectual complaint,” that because the topic is currently so serious, one turns to political (often academic/intellectual) writings to see the echo of these derogatory and dangerous ethnonational cliches. This is ironic, since the point of these same scholars about the past is that ethnonational images were conveyed through a diverse body of media and that if one seeks to look solely to the overtly political tract, one will miss the key conclusion that these ethnonational images entered the Western imagination by many routes, most of them not overtly political, and that in fact this is why they were so influential and have been so lasting. Such a realization and approach leads one to look beyond both the overtly political in today’s writings, but, even more so given the mass communications revolution over the period we are discussing, to look to other forms of media, particularly film and television, as avenues for ethnonational image creation and dissemination.
Less explicitly, both Judt and Glenny in the aforementioned reviews have highlighted this methodological oversight in the selection of sources in the constructionist literature. Judt thus observes on Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania, that “…the other [non-Karl] Marxes receive no mention in this book, but their film [“Duck Soup,” i.e. the mythical country of Freedonia] is by far the best-known ‘exploitation’ of Balkan images in Western popular culture…” Glenny uses a more recent media example to underscore the same point, the 1980s American prime time soap opera hit, “Dynasty.” Although I never watched the show when it ran, in an appropriately post-modern touch, I did see a made-for-TV—predictably execrable—movie about it in recent years. (That such movies are marketed as “unauthorized” and “behind-the-scenes” accounts is ironic, not to mention hypocritical, since a unifying theme of such movies—conveniently they always peer behind the curtains of a show carried by a competing network—is moralizing about how the “tyranny” of commericalism and ratings ultimately destroyed the show and ruined the lives of its stars. Sensationalism and appealing to prurient interest are, of course, effective ways to decry sensationalism and prurient interest.) According to this made-for-TV movie, one phrase became a mantra for Dynasty’s embarrassing and sudden plummet from popularity: “Blame it on Moldavia!” Let us pick up Glenny’s description from here:
In the mid-Eighties, when we still lived in that stable bipolar world, two American friends of mine were hiking in a remote part of Montenegro [in the former Yugoslavia]. As they surveyed the beauty of the mountains around them, a smiling shepherd boy, ten years old at most, approached in an evident state of excitement and keen to talk. Taking out an imaginary machine-gun, he sprayed make-believe bullets in a semi-circle and delivered a message that echoed around the Dinaric peaks: ‘Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh - Blake! Krystle! All dead!’
The boy bore news from distant Hollywood: the elders of the Carrington clan, the central characters in Dynasty, had met a sticky end. The crime that induced shock in audiences across the United States had not been perpetrated by a crazed Vietnam vet. If it had, perhaps Americans could have made some sense of the tragedy. But members and friends of Denver’s richest family had been gunned down by terrorists in the distant Balkans. The heinous act was carried out (in a house of God!) as Blake and Alexis’s long-lost daughter was marrying the Crown Prince of Moldavia. Most of the cast were brought back from the dead in the subsequent episode by the insatiable desire for network ratings. All this happened just a hundred miles from Dracula’s castle. Only in the Balkans.
Although Vesna Goldsworthy does not investigate the Dynasty affair in Inventing Ruritania, it is a rich example of what she calls the ‘imperialism of the imagination’. The television producer who had wanted to massacre the cream of Colorado society was Camille Marchette. ‘I’m responsible for Moldavia,’ she told America’s TV Guide in 1986. ‘I sat down one day and said: “I’m only going to be on the show a year and I’m going to end it with a shoot-out in Moldavia.”‘ Did she know that Moldavia was a real place which would gain its independence just five years after the wedding was filmed? Did she dream up the name King Galen? Were the terrorists who imprisoned Krystle and Alexis Communists? Nationalists? Romanian-speaking Serbs, perhaps? (Glenny, “Only in the Balkans, London Review of Books, 1999)
The Power of Images and Images of Power
Allow me to expand upon the themes that flow from the passages by Judt and Glenny cited above—1) that the constructionist literature imputes too much intent and not enough ambiguity to the formation of Western images of “Eastern Europe,” 2) that modern media such as a primetime soap opera can have as much if not greater influence in creating and shaping Western images than many a book by a journalist, intellectual, or academic, and 3) that, to use James Scott’s formulation in hyperbolic form, these images can be exploited as “weapons of the weak” to the commerical and intellectual advantage of those portrayed as “the weak.” This is important, because when scholars of this constructionist school write about current events, they often assume—or wish to argue—that these “constructed” images are a) influential and b) that the impact they have is almost automatically negative.
It is one thing to decry the negative content of images and stereotypes, and to highlight in the context of unequal power relationships; it is quite another to argue that the negative characterization is unidirectional—an outcome of power and control by one group of an object group, “the other.” Are these merely responsive?
Media-Created Stereotypes: Necessarily Intentional? Necessarily Negative?
Let us turn to an example that suggests both the influence of modern media in reshaping previous, long-established associations, and the fact that this impact is not entirely or even primarily negative or intended. The 1959 Walt Disney film Darby O’Gill and the Little People has been credited with—and predictably assailed for—introducing a very different image of the leprechaun than exists in Celtic folklore. Leprechauns were only minor figures in Celtic folklore, who mended the shoes of other fairies, and were known for their trickery—used to protect their treasure—and were notorious for their crankiness (see the entry at http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/stpatricksday/index.jsp?page=history8 ). Darby O’Gill and the Little People converted them into joyous, well-meaning souls. The image of the joyous leprechaun in American popular culture was reinforced in 1964 with the birth of the “Lucky Charms” cereal, which introduced marshmallows to the breakfast table, and is a widely-known enough pop culture icon that it could serve as a punchline for a character in the first Austin Powers comedy film. (Apparently, out of either marketing “wisdom” or concern over charges of ethnic stereotyping, a wizard briefly replaced the leprechaun as the character representing it in commericals, but audience reaction was such that they quickly conjured the leprechaun back (see wikipedia entry on “Lucky Charms”).)
(I can’t help but be reminded here in this context of the advertising campaign of the 1970s and 1980s for “Irish Spring”, that wonderful green soap. Now in elementary school I can remember for some kids this was the first thing that came to mind when they thought of Ireland. At the time it suggested to me the Irish must be an awfully clean race…complete with the Irish lass straight out of the pages of National Geographic or an ad by the Irish National Tourist board, and a rugged, jolly potato farmer or something. Little did I think of the subtext that the Irish were so dirty—all that lack of bathing thanks to the drinking and the roughhousing and the squalor—that they needed such a strong soap to kill or drown out the stench…)
Of course, if one is hyper-sensitive to any depiction of the Irish, it is not difficult to construct an argument that this revisionist image of the leprechaun as merry soul is scarcely better than the original in Irish folklore: i.e. 1) it is no longer authentic, 2) it was invented by outsiders for commercial purposes (hence, the inattention or disdain for authenticity), 3) the “happy-go-lucky” nature of the leprechaun masks and erases the memory of a history of oppression and misery at the hands of the English, 4) the leprechaun, like the Irish who see him, remains dominated by passion more than intellect, 5) the leprechaun remains obsessed with and hypnotized by gold and his good- naturedness may be the product of liquid assistance.
Indeed, one can even argue that the difference between the Disney portrayal and the anti-Irish newspaper cartoons of the 1800s is superficial—what remains unchanged are the qualities of susperstition and delusion ascribed to the Irish for believing in and “seeing” leprechauns in the first place, qualities to which can easily be read in a subtext about a fondness for “The Drink” and the influence of an insinuated irrationality and superstition of Catholicism. Certainly an ill-fated, lamentable, and quickly-cancelled NBC sitcom of the early 2000s “The Fighting Fitzgeralds,” complete with brawling, drinking, unemployment, etc. unleashed a torrent of Internet frustration at the perpetuation and resentment of Irish stereotypes of this kind. Pat Friend opined: “…The other day I tripped over my shillelagh as I was watching a leprechaun swing at a fairy because he was drunk and fighting having had too much Guinness on his way to find his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” (Pat Friend, “Irish Stereotypes Just Won’t Die” at http://allaboutirish.com/library/identity/stereotypes.shtm )
Nevertheless, I think many would be inclined to see the Disney portrayal as a propitious improvement, one from which the Irish tourism industry in more economically-difficult years (1960s-early 1990s) no doubt profited handsomely. For all their resentment at being the object of a stereotype they did not produce and control—and understandably since it reduces them to a caricature that makes for a cereal box cover (painfully ironic perhaps in the context of the history of the potato famine)—it is difficult to argue that the Irish themselves have not been a financial beneficiary of this inauthentic innovation. (Moreover, the “fighting Irish” stereotype has been manipulated to good effect—drained of its inebriated reputation somewhat—to mean steadfast, committed, and hardworking, whether that be in the context of University of Notre Dame sports, or as I recently saw on the road, the van of a plumbing company that promised a “fighting Irish” attitude to dealing with leaks.)
Idiosyncratic: The Unfolding of a Modern Tale/Meme
Scottish (Presbyterians) were “on earlier boats” so-to-speak and thus probably have never faced the same experience of discrimination as Irish Catholic immigrants to the United States (all of which, of course, pales in comparison to later immigrants, to say nothing of involuntary immigrants (Africans) and “native Americans”). Nevertheless, despite their earlier arrival and pride of place in the elite, is the stereotype of the Scot in American culture any qualitatively better than that of the Irish—to say nothing of the Hungarian, Romanian, or others?
The content and contours of ethnonational images are less predictable than the constructionists would have us believe. Take the image of the Scottish in contemporary North America. The character “Scotty” in the science fiction television series “Star Trek” has become a template for the portrayal of Scots in film and television ever since the show’s original airing in the late 1960s—just as William Shatner’s Captain Kirk has become a paradigm for overacting in countless spoofs. The story goes that James Doohan, whose parents were Irish Catholics who emigrated from Belfast to Canada, auditioned several different accents—a talent of his—for the role of the Starship Enterprise’s first engineer. When asked by the series’ inventor and producer Gene Rodenberry which accent he preferred, Doohan reportedly replied “If you’re going to have an engineer, you’d better make him Scottish” (or “All the world’s best engineers have been Scottish”) (wikipedia entry for “Montgomery Scott”). Thus was born Montgomery Scott, his Scottishness incidental to the character and the series. Scotty was by turns merry, crotchety, and hard-working/industrious. His signature phrase was usually in reference to the Starship Enterprise’s engines, something along the lines of “I cunnugh doo it cap’n…I’m givin it all I’ve got, but she cannugh take it anymore.” This line has been spoofed often, including in seemingly unusual places such as Jim Carey’s “Ace Venture, Pet Detective (1994).” The roots of “Groundskeeper Willy” on the long-running cartoon series, “The Simpsons,”—a fearsome character whose unpredictability and sharp temper scare the other characters—in James Doohan’s “Scotty” seem unambiguous.
Mike Myers, the Canadian comic—he brilliantly inserts an ice hockey pie-in-the-sky reference, “[Toronto] Maple Leafs win Stanley Cup” in a news ticker at the bottom of a fictional TV interview in one of the Austin Powers’ films (the Leafs last won the Cup in ’67)—who is of Scottish descent, has taken the modern Scottish template to a new level, with his “If’ iss no’t scu’ttish iss crrraapppp” shop skit on Saturday Night Live (SNL) and the bagpipe-playing, noxious character of “Fat Bastard” in the Austin Powers series.
The voice of the cartoon-character Shrek is also “accidentally” Scottish. The voice for Shrek was originally recorded by fellow Saturday Night Live cast member, Chris Farley, but after Farley’s death, Myers was brought on to replace him (see wikipedia entry for “Shrek”). After Myers had completed providing the voice for the character and the movie was well into production, he asked to be allowed to re-record all of his lines in a Scottish accent similar to the one his mother used when she told him bedtime stories (wikipedia entry for “Shrek”).
Even after Myers left SNL, the stereotype of the ornery Scot lived on in Darrell Hammond’s portrayal of Sean Connery in the recurring sketch, “Celebrity Jeopardy!”—Hammond’s Connery never missing the opportunity to insult the show’s host with some cheap sexual innuendo about the latter’s mother. Yes, this stereotype was dictated by Connery’s notorious personality, but it was presented as inseparable from his Scottishness. The crotchety stereotype throughout all of these television and film examples clearly has roots in older stereotypes, but as we can see the content and context of this stereotype has evolved in unforeseen and idiosyncratic ways that probably defy any linear analysis of the type found in much of the constructionist literature.
The Core West: Axiomatic Positive Images by Comparison?
“Where you stand is…where you sit,” so the saying goes. So even if the Irish and Scots are part of the core West from a “Euro-orientalist” perspective when they write and talk about eastern Europeans, within the “British Isles” they are “nested” and on the lower rungs vis-à-vis the English/Anglo-Saxons. But are celluloid depictions of the English any better, any less demeaning than those of the Irish and Scots? In other words, in terms of content, are the stereotypes of the powerful any “nicer,” any more pleasant and defensible than those of others? In updating images of Eastern Europeans, we also have to update stereotypes of the West.
The English are continuously associated with or portrayed as stodgy, selfish, hypocritical (as a result of their politeness and their respect for rules, while turning a blind-eye to injustice), killjoys, and sexually-repressed (read anything the French have to say about them). In what appears to me as an excellent piece of film analysis, Martin McLoone highlights, for example, how a memorable sequence in the 1997 film Titanic has the live-life-to-the-fullest character of Leonardo DiCaprio whisking Kate Winslett’s Rose beneath the decks to a party filled with Irish, who drink, dance, and exude a raw sexuality that contrasts with the stultifying, and very English life, above. As McLoone points out, this is not merely a story about class, it is a story about ethnicity, a contrast of the Irish and the English. The politically-correct constructionist—complete with an explicit, but more likely implicit, internal hierarchy of collective historical victims and victimizers—is, of course, tempted to fixate on the portrayal of the Irish, as the typical stereotype of “the poor” or of “the Irish,” more animalistic and primitive, but is the portrayal of the English any less insulting, any less painful than the stereotypes we see of others? For such stereotypes arguably neuter and desexualize a people, while suggesting that they do not and are incapable of enjoying life, and despiritualizing them, suggesting they somehow lack a soul (and even God) because they place the material before all else.
Moreover, ethnonational stereotypes are often far more internally diverse, and even contradictory, than the constuctionists suggest. Alongside the portrayal of the “emotionally-challenged” English, we have the image of “football hooliganism.” Whereas within England this may be treated as a problem of class—lower, working class, “yobbo” behavior—outside of England the class specification usually drops out, and they are referred to as “English football hooligans.” I remember back in May 1985—only a few weeks before the so-called Heysel disaster in Belgium which led to English soccer fans being banned from the Continent for a period—buying tickets to a soccer game in Innsbruck, Austria, and asking in English if I could take my small (day) backpack into the stadium. The woman looked at me as if I were from outer space asking such a naïve, stupid question and said: “Yes, why of course, we have no rowdies here!” It was very clear who she had in mind: the English. (Hard to believe in the old NASL, terrible acronym for the North American Soccer League, the team name of one of the most successful franchises, Tampa Bay, was “Rowdies.”)
Ironically, Goldsworthy herself, who negates the role of modern media in image creation and the accidental character of it, points to how as a young woman leaving Belgrade in 1986, her view of the English was decidedly negative!:
Goldsworthy reminisces at one point about how the British were seen in the run-up to her departure for Britain in 1986. The broadly held view was that they were “perfidious and treacherous” and “on the whole, ugly”. She writes: “For every British-born Cary Grant and every Vivien Leigh there were literally hundreds who looked downright weird. Belgrade television, with its endless repeats of programmes such as The Benny Hill Show, Are You Being Served? and Hi-de-hi!, did not help. Neither did the fact that members of the Royal Family were somehow thought of as typically English.” (Eve-Anne Prentice, “Life after meltdown,” The Times, 14 May 2005, http://www.arlindo-rreia.com/140805.html)
There is a great irony here, I believe. Benny Hill, Are You Being Served?—particularly the latter, a show whose surplus 1970s labor union mandatory employment at “Grace Brothers” is reminiscent of the Central in Cluj, Romania early 1990s or Unirea in Bucuresti—these were created at a time when, like footballers, crossing borders was rare, i.e. before today’s globalization, before as in 1990 when the overwhelming majority of the Irish national soccer team at the World Cup appeared to have emigrated from Africa. Yet, despite their “inside baseball” or I suppose “inside cricket (?)” production for the home market, their slapstick humor and especially in the case of Benny Hill, lack of verbal dialogue, made them great for export. (Benny Hill’s “do-do-do-do-doot do-do-do-do-doot…muhnuhmunuhp muhnuhnuhmup” (“Yakety Sax” by Boots Randolph) might as well me a foundational element of any international language. The show’s absence of dialogue and ability to “travel,” probably explain the later international mobility of “Mr. Bean” and “Baldy Man.” Benny Hill once said that no matter where he went in the world, people were most interested in the fate of the bald little guy with glasses whose head he would always pat—an Irishman as it turns out, I believe) Exported, without regard to ethnostereotyping, they nevertheless became the means by which foreigners formed their opinions of the English (as if to say: see, you thought no one was watching…now we know how you really are!)
Finally, just a brief foray into the amusement park of stereotypes that surround Americans and the United States—and emphasizing the role of visual media in shaping and disseminating those images. Marius Ursache writes in a Romanian daily of “Brand America”:
People are perceived as being wealthy and generous, outgoing and often loud, wasteful, boastful and impolite. They are often accused to be ignorant to other cultures and countries, and lacking skills out of their main area of interest. Hollywood has a huge role in portraying the stereotypical personalities, from government VIPs to mass-murderers, to red-necks, teenagers, promiscuous women and ordinary Americans involved in the daily rat race. (Marius Ursache, “Brandingul de naĊ£iune Brand America,” 6 July 2005, online edition.)
Not exactly the most flattering picture is it? And yet the source of these images are also ascribed to Hollywood—who apparently didn’t get the memo about the supposedly positive, romanticized vision of the West the orientalist monitors allege of them.
Dracula: Tourism and the Accidental East European?
Even the much-maligned “Dracula” image of Transylvania, Romania, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe seems to owe more to serendipity and idiosyncracy than many believe. The author of Dracula (1897), the Irishman Bram Stoker, had planned on writing a vampire novel before he ever came across the name “Dracula” (Miller, “Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Divorce.rtf. ). The villain of Stoker’s novel originally titled The Undead was to be “Count Wampyr.” Stoker’s use of the title “count” was in keeping with the Gothic convention of drawing villains from among the ranks of the aristocracy (Miller, “Filing for Divorce”). In fact, according to Miller, vampire counts in pre-Dracula fiction include Count Azzo von Klatka in The Mysterious Stranger and Countess Karnstein in Le Fanu’s Carmilla (Miller, “Filing for Divorce”). In The Mysterious Stranger, the vampire count terrorizes a family in the Carpathians! (Miller, “Vampire Hunting in Transylvania,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Trans.htm )
According to his notes for the novel, Stoker always had eastern Europe in mind as the setting for his story; but initially he placed the action in Styria, Austria and only later changed it to Transylvania (from Frayling as cited in Coundouritis http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/connotations/coundour92.htm). An article entitled “Transylvanian Superstitions” in the July 1885 edition of The Nineteenth Century by Emily de Laszowska Gerard, the Scottish wife of a Hungarian cavalryman (!), appears to have piqued his interest. As Miller recounts,
Gerard’s article also provided Stoker with some of the folklore surrounding Dracula and his castle: St. George’s Day, “the eve of which is still frequently kept by occult meetings taking place at night in lonely caverns or within ruined walls”; hidden treasures and “the light they give forth, described as a bluish flame”; and the wolf that “continues to haunt the Transylvanian forests.” Also from Gerard came the term “nosferatu,” as well as the use of garlic and the wooden stake. (Miller, “Vampire Hunting in Transylvania,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Trans.htm )
Stoker appears to have taken only the name of “Dracula” from his famous namesake in Romanian history—and then only because the source from which he took the name (William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820)) suggested, as Stoker recorded in his notes, that “DRACULA in the Wallachian language means DEVIL” (Miller, “Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Divorce.rtf.). Based on Stoker’s notes, Wilkinson was the source from which he got the name “Dracula,” and in Wilkinson’s brief three mentions of the name and one footnote, he only refers to “Dracula” or “Voivode” and never “Vlad,” “Vlad Tepes,” or “the Impaler” (Miller, “Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Divorce.rtf.).
Miller skillfully resolves the false contradictions created by believing that Stoker based his Count Dracula on the personage from Romanian history:
Another consequence of the insistence on connecting the two Draculas is the temptation to criticize Stoker for inaccurate “history.” Why, some ask, did he make Dracula a Transylvanian Count rather than a Wallachian Voivode? Why was his castle situated in the Borgo Pass instead of at Poenari? Why is Count Dracula a “boyar,” a member of the nobility which Vlad continuously struggled with? Why does Stoker make Dracula a “Szekely,” descended from Attila the Hun, when the real Dracula was a Wallachian of the Basarab family? There is a very simple answer to these questions: Vlad Tepes is Vlad Tepes, while Count Dracula is Count Dracula [emphasis added]…. We know that he read and took notes from a number of books and articles (for a complete list, see Leatherdale, Origins 237-9) and that some of this material found its way into his novel almost verbatim. But his research seems to have been haphazard (though at times fortuitous) rather than scholarly. What he used, he used “as is,” errors and confusions included. That his rendering of historical and geographical data is fragmented and at times erroneous can be explained by the fact that Stoker seemed content to combine bits and pieces of information from his sources without any concern for accuracy. After all, Stoker was writing a Gothic novel, not a historical treatise. And he was writing Dracula in his spare time, of which I doubt he had much. (Miller, “Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Divorce.rtf.)
Again Hollywood and happenstance combined in creating perhaps the most enduring popular image of Dracula: Bela Lugosi’s 1931 reprisal of the role. As Eric Harrison has written: “Ever since Lugosi donned a cape and rhapsodized about the howling of wolves outside his crumbling castle (‘What music they make!’), the classic prototype of a movie vampire has been an Eastern European aristocrat with a heavy accent and hypnotic eyes” (Eric Harrison, L.A. Times, “A New Reason to Get out of Dodge,” 30 October 1998, p. F-2). Lugosi succeeded in “making the count more debonair, less beastly” (Harrison) and Dracula scholar David Skal terms his portrayal of the part as “smooth, elegant, and seductive” (“In Search of Dracula” at http://www.abcnews.go.com/2020/Entertainment). Ironically, as Skal notes, Dracula’s memorable intonation was the consequence of a Hungarian actor with little command of English, who learned his lines phonetically (“In Search of Dracula”)! Lugosi’s Dracula was faithful to neither Stoker’s creation, nor to the historical personage of Dracula, nor to much of the vampire folklore. Nevertheless, it is the image that has endured most.
Would the Real Dracula Please Kindly Now Remove His Plastic Vampire Teeth!
Dracula is one of those rarities—an elite construct that has long since “gone public” and become a product of mass popular consumption—to the degree that its putative Transylvanian and even Romanian links have become routinized to the point of being mere background noise. The epitome of this phenomenon can be argued to have taken place in the film version of Anne Rice’s novel, “Interview with a Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles”—not to be confused, although understandably to be confused, with another film from 1994, “Reality Bites”—the angst-ridden tale of brooding, self-indulgent Generation X(Files) youth—harumph, was that whiff of teen spirit I just got….Bob Bankard’s review of “Interview with a Vampire” draws the appropriate pint of blood from this painful film:
The roots of modern Goth are all here; the narcissism, the romantization of death and times thereafter, all the the boo-hoo loneliness. The fact of the matter is, these characters are better off dead, because if they were alive they’d be taking Zanax, listening to ‘Alien Sex Fiend’ and working at McDonalds during the swing shift.
Brad Pitt is the poor widdle vampire boy who just hates being all undead and stuff, so he only eats people he doesn’t like. Horribly guilt-ridden, he tells his whole sob story to some imbecile with a tape recorder, creating the most obvious framing device in the history of cinema. (Bob Bankhard, “Intrerview with a Vampire,” PhillyBurbs Special Sections at http://www.phillyburbs.com/vamp/interview.shtml)
More recently, an American novelist married to a Bulgarian, Elizabeth (Johnson) Kostova, decided to dispense altogether with the traditional confusion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the historical figure Vlad Tepes, by spending ten years putting together a novel The Historian, that discusses the fictional and nonfictional personnae separately and uses Cold War Eastern Europe (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) as a backdrop for a historical search for the “real” Dracula. Julie Wheelwright describes Kostova’s Dracula thus as follows:
Her Dracula emerges as a figure so obsessed with the past that he lures historians into his master plan to colonise his undead followers throughout the globe.—author’s note: My reaction: oh, just great, as if there weren’t enough half-living, half-dead, living dead Ph.D.s floating around already, Dracula is out there trying to flood the market—Paul and Helen, a Romanian exchange student, become embroiled in an attempt to rescue Paul’s supervisor, an eminent historian, from Dracula’s clutches. Their story, set in the late 1950s, takes them into the farthest-flung corners of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. (Julie Wheelwright with Elizabeth Kostova, “Elizabeth Kostova. The Vampire Chronicler,” The Independent, 5 August 2005, online).
Kostova strenuously denies that her novel is opportunistic: “Some of it is about Dracula, not me; Dracula has eternal cachet. I wasn’t trying to cash in on that; I’m really fascinated by the Dracula legend—but it is kind of startling, you’re right, to see my name linked up with Dracula now”( http://www.powells.com/authors/kostova.html with Dave Weich).
Kostova, who studied in Bulgaria in the late 1980s, seems to argue that Cold War Eastern Europe was the new fictional Transylvania in a sense because “the iron curtain preserved the mystery of eastern europe for the rest of us” (Julie Wheelwright with Elizabeth Kostova, “Elizabeth Kostova. The Vampire Chronicler,” The Independent, 5 August 2005, online). Nevertheless, it is clear that Dracula is by now such a pop culture, recycled and reappropriated product that it is almost impossible to separate the post and post-post modern from this discussion as we see in the following exchange:
Interviewer: Growing up, did you ever wear those plastic vampire teeth?
Elizabeth Kostova: I did. I remember having a pair and loving them. The problem is they fall apart really fast. And I was delighted, on my book tour—at the Harry Schwartz store in Milwaukee, they handed out those plastic vampire teeth at the door to everybody. They gave me all the extras.
The bottom line here is that as the evolution of the Dracula character, metaphor, and meme suggest: the monopolistic, hegemonic “western” ownership, intentionality, and negative connotations ascribed by the orientalism monitors to “western” cultural producers is simply overwrought.
Recapitulation
Before moving on to the Hungarian and Romanian cases, let me pause here to reiterate some of my preliminary conclusions:
Part III: Images of Romanians
