Utz by Bruce Chatwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Living Within the Lie

How can one best deal with the reality of power, particllarly power which is obviously arbitrary and tasteless as well as unjust? This is an especially relevant issue during the regime of Trump and his vulgarising influence in world affairs. Utz is wonderful comedic farce about how to deal with power - at a personal as well as a political level - not by confronting it but by treating it with utter disdain.

The eponymous Utz is a Czech survivor - of two world wars and a subsequent communist regime. What sustains him is an aesthetic, specifically his appreciation for Meissen porcelain. “Wars, pogroms and revolutions', he used to say, 'offer excellent opportunities for the collector.” He is savvy enough to understand that power is never permanently held and that its machinations need not impede the life of the true aesthete. “Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber; a void where confused signals buzz about at random; where a murmur or innuendo causes panic: so, in the end, the machinery of repression is more likely to vanish, not with war or revolution, but with a puff, or the voice of falling leaves.” Power is its own worst enemy; if we can just leave it alone, it dissipates.

Utz is no avaricious materialist. Collecting is a spiritual endeavour that involves treating individual pieces as if they were icons that promote entry into another world. Such appreciation is impossible in a museum or public gallery where the pieces “must suffer the de-natured existence of an animal in the zoo. In any museum the object dies —of suffocation and the public gaze -whereas private ownership confers on the owner the right and the need to touch.” His obsession with porcelain is a quest “to find the substance of immortality.” But a collection of such objects is also a constant reminder of one’s own mortality: “These things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate. Nothing is more ageing than a collection of works of art.” The collection presents both concrete reality and existential hope for the one oppressed by power..

Even more, the pieces act much as the Golem in the Jewish legends of Prague - to protect, if not one’s body, at least one’s mind from the threats of power which abound in life. So, for Utz, “this world of little figures was the real world.” And like the Golem, and for that matter Adam himself, isn’t porcelain created from clay and water? These precisely crafted fragments of clay are our links to the supernatural which permit us to ignore the minor irritations of bureaucrats and customs officials no matter how expertly applied. “‘So you see,' said Utz, 'not only was Adam the first human person. He was also the first ceramic sculpture’.” Porcelain is a philosophy of primal mankind, of freedom.

Nevertheless, an aesthetic obsession, like a Golem, is prone to get out of hand unless there is a control mechanism. Utz In fact has two such controls: sex and an annual two weeks abroad. The first keeps him grounded, the second keeps him sane. It’s a clever therapy; and he recognizes his fortunate luxury. This is a luxury which allows him to avoid the main temptation to power, that is to say power as a remedy for power’s ills. “He knew that anti-Communist rhetoric was as deadly as its Communist counterpart.” In any case, his annual visits abroad served mainly to remind him of the venality and useless worry that were the essential conditions of living in the West.

Thus Utz’s aesthetic allows him to live comfortably and without undue stress “within the lie,” not just the lie of Czechoslovakian Communism, but also the lie that there is anything permanent or permanently obtainable in life. Not at all a bad way to deal with the power that envelopes one’s existence.

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