The Literary Afterlives of Enver Hoxha (Part 2)
On Ismail Kadare's The Palace of Dreams, Agamemnon's Daughter, and The Successor
Continued from Part 1.
The Successor: A Mehmet Shehu Murder Mystery
The Successor is a fictional portrayal of the events leading up to the mysterious death of Mehmet Shehu,1 Enver Hoxha’s right-hand man. In spite of the book’s disclaimer that:
The events of this novel draw on the infinite well of human memory, whose treasures may be brought to the surface in any period, including our own. In view of this, any resemblance between the characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable
Kadare definitely took more than a few liberties with this retelling. So, where does fiction depart from history in this case? The real Shehu had three sons, not a son and a daughter as is portrayed in the novel, and it was the engagement of one of these sons to a woman with a bad biography that spelled Shehu’s ultimate ruin and that of his entire family, not the engagement of a daughter to an “unapproved” man.
Conceptually, I absolutely love everything about this—a thinly-veiled fictional portrait of political intrigue and communist palace drama? Yes please!—but the execution, at least in the first half, largely falls flat, for a couple of reasons. Luckily, the novel is saved by a masterful last three chapters that are, simply put, Kadare at his absolute finest.
So where did The Successor fail and where did it succeed (no pun intended)?
While the “male gaze” works more or less well in Agamemnon’s Daughter, in The Successor, the perspective fails spectacularly and in a specifically male way. Suzana returns here, as fake Shehu’s nonexistent daughter, and is constantly (and sexily) bursting into tears. I get that her father was just suicided by the State, but can’t she do something besides cry and fantasize about her two previous sexual partners (the ex-lover from Agamemnon’s Daughter and the unsuitable fiancé)? Does she have any other hobbies or interests? A job, perhaps—one would assume that everyone in a communist country, even children of Party elites, would have a job—“workers state” and all of that? Or is she a student, and if so, what does she study? Does she have any other friends? If not, then why not (Kadare doesn’t mention any domestic issues that might preclude this)? Who is Suzana, then, other than a super hot, spoiled, sheltered, overly-emotional Party princess who likes to fuck, as sex is the only thing she is shown to be enjoying?
The key difference between these two “male gazes,” in my opinion, comes down to questions of point of view. Suzana’s idealization through the eyes of her first lover in Agamemnon’s Daughter makes perfect sense, and, in my opinion, makes for a tragically beautiful story, because he only sees—or wants to see—one part of her. In The Successor, Suzana is a point of view character whose inner thoughts and feelings we are ostensibly privy to; hence, her portrayal by Kadare falls completely flat, because it’s simply not believable. It would be wrong to call Kadare a misogynist, as I attribute his lack of insight into the female psyche more to simple ignorance than to any actual hatred or deep disdain for women. If anything, I was far more amused than offended (I wasn’t offended at all). Don’t we all sometimes feel like sexily bursting into tears like a woman in a Kadare novel?
Something else that didn’t quite work for me was the novel’s combination of genre elements. At times, the story seemed like a typical whodunit mystery, with an omniscient narrator that gives us insight into the feelings and motivations of all involved, from foreign intelligence agencies speculating on the reasons behind the Successor’s demise, to the doctor responsible for the Successor’s autopsy, to the aforementioned Suzana. At others, Kadare employs gothic elements, such as when a distant aunt, who may or may not have already died years earlier, visits the Successor’s family days after his death. I’m not opposed in theory to a combination of these genres and elements in a single tale, but in The Successor at least, they just didn’t congeal properly. I wanted Kadare to choose—will this be a gothic tale of past spirits returning to haunt the present, or will this be a communist Albanian noir?
But Kadare comes in at the last minute to elevate, and ultimately save, this middling novel, with chapters centered on the Guide (Hoxha), the architect responsible for remodeling the Successor’s house shortly before his death, and the ghost of the Successor himself, speaking from a Purgatory of other ill-fated successors that he is doomed to inhabit for all eternity. The architect’s chapter contains one of the most beautiful reflections on creating art under pressure, a pressure that, as Kadare explains, is not unique or exclusive to communist regimes:
Something quite different was at stake. Something a thousand times more secret and by the same token far more painful. It was my own hell, which I had sworn to divulge to no living being, to my dying day. That pain had to do with art. I had betrayed it. By my own hand I had stifled my own talent. We all did the same, and for the most part we all had the same excuse for our contempt of art: the times we lived in.
It was our collective alibi, our smokescreen, our wickedness. There was socialist realism, indisputably; there were laws, actually not so much law as a reign of terror, but in spite of all that, we could have drawn at least a few harmonious lines, even if only haphazardly, as in a dream. But our fingers were all thumbs, because our souls were bound.
I was probably one of the few who asked themselves the fateful question: Do I or do I not possess any talent? Was it the age that had turned my hands into clay, or was I so clumsy that I would have vegetated no matter what period I lived in — in the capitalist era, in the feudal age, at the end of paganism, at the dawn of Christianity, in the Paleolithic, under the Inquisition, or at the time of post-Impressionism? Would I not have exclaimed and lamented in all and any age that I would have been a great artist but for Pharaoh Thutmose blocking my gifts, but for Caligula, but for McCarthy, but for Zhdanov…
…An inner voice urged: If you want to save the master of the house and his relatives, hold back and give in to mediocrity. But the other voice answered back: They’ve got nothing to do with you; art is your vocation, its laws alone you should obey. Even if your art engenders murder, your hands will be clean. There is no art without grieving. Which is precisely what constitutes its somber greatness.
Blindness, too, returns as a motif in The Successor, though this time, it’s the Guide (Hoxha) who goes blind naturally.2 What should we make of the Guide’s blindness? Is it a blindness to his own crimes and the crimes committed in his name? Or is it a blindness in the name of the Party and State itself, a collective blindness embodied in one man? The blind Guide is dependent on his aides, especially the Minister of the Interior, Adrian Hasobeu, who the Guide instructs to check in on the Successor the night of the latter’s death. As was typical in Hoxha’s time, Hasobeu is later publicly humiliated and scapegoated before being purged from the Party—he even carries his membership card next to his heart, which is then brutally torn away from him—even though he did nothing but follow the Guide’s orders.
It’s also interesting to note that in all three books, Hoxha and his avatars are always referred to in regal terms. From Sultan to Emperor to Sovereign, Hoxha is always deliberately painted in a royal, communist red. In The Successor, Hoxha ascends to the level of a god, with Kadare capitalizing the pronouns used to refer to him, e.g. “The secretary waited for Himself’s guffaws to die down before going on.” (italics in the original). There is no God but Enver, it seems.
Finally, what I admired most about The Successor is the questions it asks, or I interpreted it to ask, about who can be considered a victim of state violence and terror. Was Shehu a victim, despite being far from innocent? Or does he not deserve this status, given his previous high-ranking position within the regime and direct responsibility for the deaths and suffering of many others? Do all victims have to be innocent? Can or should we even remember the ones who weren’t? If, for example, a monument were to be constructed containing all the names of every victim of communism in Albania, would Shehu’s name, along with those of the Sigurimi heads who were also physically eliminated by the State after they had outlived their usefulness, be included? Who or what is a ‘real’ victim, if such a thing even exists?
At its core, The Successor is a novel that makes us uncomfortable, which is something that all great art must do. It proposes that we see things from the point of view of the fatally flawed and interrogates the ways in which even the most brutal enforcers of totalitarianism can find themselves on its bad side. In such systems, in such regimes, literally no one is safe. While certainly not asking readers to sympathize with Shehu or any other perpetrators of state violence, or the bystanders who, with their silence or blindness, in this case, allow it to pass unabated, The Successor, like The Palace of Dreams and Agamemnon’s Daughter, provides us with a portrait of totalitarianism that is nuanced without seeking to explain or justify the regime and one that depicts these “bound souls” as they were, struggling to find a place for themselves within cages gilded and not.
Favorite quotes:
”We’ve had enough folklore, and to hell with your avian raptors!”
”You don’t get to be Successor for nothing, now do you?”
“The only way you can get a grip on a place overcome by paranoia is by becoming a little paranoid yourself.”
“The Successor would wander ad aeternam from one hypothesis to another like a damned soul wandering through the circles of Dante’s inferno.”
“Knowing the secrets of everybody around you was indisputably a blessing, but not knowing them was close to being sublime.”
“All they knew of the matter had been seen as through the eyes of an insect, in parts and fragments.”
“He riposted that liberal brains such as ours might find cooperative cow barns more profitable than studying for diplomas.”
“Regimes change, as do customs and cathedrals, but crimes are ever the same.”
“Touch does not allow you to tell the beautiful from the ugly.”
“You can’t understand that, just as you can’t understand so much else. You find it hard to realize that in this world, he and I hated each other even while we loved each other, and conversely, we adored each other even as each deplored the other.”
“In this bottomless and boundless space, in this desperate vastness where one soul meets another only too rarely — in the midst of this void, as I’ve told you again and again, we successors, escorted by our retinues, are, like the guides among us, no more than a paltry handful of pitiful beings.”
Though I’ve yet to read anything that confirms this, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the real Hoxha was, in fact, going blind around the time of Shehu’s death in December 1981, as he himself (“He Himself,” as Kadare would say) was in a state of rapidly declining health, dying only a few years later in 1985.