[The] Republic of Sarmeda is located somewhere outside the geography of history. It is the setting of Dan Jacobson's The Confessions of Josef Baisz, an account of a systematic traitor and police-spy whose confession of "my days as a petty functionary" is, at least partly, an allegory of the artist as political Judas. Like Judas, Josef Baisz "can love only through betrayal", and his justification of his sins contains occasional insights into the psychology of disloyalty. Baisz is disloyal to the bureaucrats who employ him, and his autobiography is offered as a translation…. It's a witty parody of the standard academic preface, and as Dan Jacobson lectures at an English university there are sound reasons for thinking that The Confessions of Josef Baisz is on one level an account both of the situation of a writer employed by an academic institution and of the spirit that now pervades many such institutions—a spirit of complacent irrelevance, bland scholarly courtesies, and outmoded, autocratic habits of thought.
What is remarkable about this story is the clammy, stifling atmosphere of the one-party state that is the Republic of Sarmeda…. It might be somewhere in the Balkans or an oblique vision of South Africa. The whole country seems "to lie in that trance-like state which so often precedes a great change." Everywhere "the pathos of inexpectancy, the fragile stillness that precedes a violent disruption" can be sensed. And on the afternoon of a coup by "the Armed Forces Purification Grouping" there is a sudden feeling of "attentive stillness … glittering silence and vacancy" which is the atmosphere of a state or institution which is about to be forcibly reconnected to the historical process…. (pp. 70-1)
This is a free excerpt of 279 words. There are 467 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Jacobson, Dan 1929–: Critical Essay by Tom Paulin Access Pass.
