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A Slovenian Forewarning: Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut

This month, Seattle’s Scala House Press offers a landmark release- the first-ever English translation of Slovenian author Vladimir Bartol’s 1938 classic, Alamut. This unsettling novel stands out for its timelessness and propensity to make us reflect on issues weighty and complex - as readers may discern from the following review by Balkanalysis.com director Christopher Deliso.For anyone who has ever read, or, better yet, written a treatise that threatens the epistemological presumptions upon which our world often depends, Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut will come as no little source of entertainment. For others, it may be terrifying or even, baffling. Yet it would do the book a disservice to summarize it as merely a warning against the rise of fanaticism (in this case religious), despite the apparent parallels between the then-imminent ascension of the Third Reich or the current rise of Islamic terrorism which, even if it has existed long before that date, achieved notoriety only since Sept. 11, 2001.

Indeed, that apparent analogies between the book and today’s external events pop up so readily is just as accidental as is the doctrine which the book’s protagonist, Husan ibn Sabbah, expounds and actualizes in the course of the narrative. It is a marvelous coincidence indeed, one that would have brought a certain satisfaction to the author, had he made provisions for such an eventuality. However, it is not likely that he did. Thus, first of all, a major question that emerges from Alamut is that of whether a work can be greater, or at least have greater implications, than the author intended. The question itself is perhaps an abreaction, certainly neither the first nor the last of its kind, to Alamut’s confirmed existence as a work of Modernist fiction. The most interesting coincidence here, from a historical point of view, is that Bartol the Slovenian lived for much of his life in Trieste – the same Trieste haunted by James Joyce and Italo Svevo, and not far from Klagenfurt, Austria, which was made famous by Robert Musil.

While Bartol cannot be said to inhabit this celebrated pantheon, historically speaking his experience of the same seminal world events does make his literary reaction to them comparable with those of his more illustrious peers. Yet stylistically speaking, his book is not particular auspicious. The author shows little interest in experimenting with the rules of dialogue, ekphrasis, and the narrator’s relationship with the narrative at hand. The first and more sluggish half of the book is distracted by an overuse of diminutives in the dialogue between characters, primarily to describe the female ones (”little gazelle,” “little peacock,” etc.). It is unclear as to whether this was an unintentional side effect of the original Slovenian, or whether the author was intentionally trying to mimic whatever he understood to be the mannerisms of 11^th-century Persian dialects. In any case, the overuse of such terms and the concomitant uninspired narrative unfortunately draw attention to these deficiencies and thus inspire a mixture of bemusement and irritation in the modern-day reader.

The plot of the book is quite simple: in the year 1092, in the north of Iran, stands the castle of Alamut, overtaken by a man who remains a mystery to those within – Hasan ibn Sabbah, said to be a prophet greater than all save the Prophet himself. As the book unfolds, so does Hasan’s plan to overthrow the regime of the Seljuk invaders in Baghdad. This elaborate and minutely-detailed plan involves training an elite force of fedayeen fighters, of unquestionable loyalty and happily prepared to die to further Hasan’s aims. What fuels their motivation, it turns out, is the promise of paradise in the afterlife. The suspense generated largely derives from the fact that the reader only learns in stages the full dimensions of this diabolical plot.

Unbeknownst to the fighters, far on the other side of the castle lies a garden of earthly delights staffed by lovely, well trained young women, domesticated leopards, endless jugs of wine and tables overflowing with delicacies. All it takes for Hasan to make the fighters actually feel that they have gone to paradise is a quick ingestion of hashish, the hallucinatory soporific effect of which knocks them out for long enough to get them to the gardens and back without being aware of where they had been. When both the drug and memories of perfect bliss prove addictive, the fighters quickly lose their minds and long only for death – convenient enough for Hasan, as he can then use them for suicide assassination missions against his enemies abroad.

Rather than give away any more of the plot, we might suggest that Alamut is best characterized as a set of philosophical hypotheses let loose to run free to their natural conclusions. (As such, Bardol is perhaps closest to the grand finale of Modernism, Borges. However, the latter did of course experiment with the above matters and also famously proclaimed that if an idea can be expressed cogently in five pages, there is no reason to spend five hundred pages on extrapolating it. Alamut is not 500 pages long, rather, almost 400, but here again a distinction arranges between its author and his contemporaries).

The philosophical case Bardol does make is richly infused with contributions and references (stated and unstated) to previous philosophers. The stated tend to be ancient Greek. Of the unstated most obvious is Nietzsche. However, as with the protagonist’s oft-stated relativism regarding the fundamental consonance of “truth” between the different major religions shows, we can say that Alamut also proposes solutions to the same fundamental problem that also animated Buddhism, Hinduism, the Bogomils and certain Gnostic sects: that is, the trustworthiness or lack therefore of sense-perceptions, the limits of human knowledge, the apparent injustice of life, and the relationship between these dilemmas and ethics, i.e, what we should do about it. The ultimate maxim that Hasan’s Ismaelite sect asserts- that ‘nothing is true, everything is permissible’ – is put to the test by the protagonist, who spends 20 years devising a way to put this theory in practice. The deadly games at Alamut see the realization of the theory. As he admits to confidantes at various points, this may be a cruel, even evil pursuit, but in the absence of a higher force to provide order, symmetry and meaning to an essentially chaotic, unjust and illusory world, what punishment or reward should frighten a would-be demiurge such as Hasan fancies himself to be?

The question that Alamut keeps returning to is the following: presupposing that humans are inevitably deceived by their senses and thoughts into believing that their choices and desires correspond to truth in the outside world, should they be left to happily enjoy a life of illusion? And, if so, will their enjoyment be real enjoyment? If they have a choice between that and a life of enlightened misery, aware that there is nothing to hope for or believe in, which would they pick? And what is the responsibility towards the ignorant masses on the part of those few lonely souls who know the difference? Broadly speaking, this is the dilemma proposed much later by The Matrix with its colored pills.

The characters’ various fates serve as hypotheses driving from these propositions. What happens to the fedayeen who believed so fervently in the illusion of Hasan’s paradise that they sought death to get it? They happily and voluntarily go to their deaths for it. And what happens to the one who is enraged to find he has been duped, after the fact? He becomes reconciled with Hasan, who is proud to welcome a “spiritual son” to the terrifying hopelessness of his intellectual freedom. The feday then goes off to explore the world with “new eyes,” having become dead to the world and desirous of nothing.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, we have a third scenario: what would happen to one who somehow managed to understand Hasan’s deception of paradise, precisely when he was meant to be enjoying its fruits? This fourth feday seems to be liberated by the awakening: not caring whether or not his enjoyment is real, he goes on to enjoy the pleasures of the earthly paradise as voraciously as possible, like a man aware of his mortality and the nothingness beyond. Of course, he is killed when Hasan’s collaborators realized that he understands the deception and could therefore break the faith of the other fedayeen by telling them about the scam.

This last example gives rise to the book’s most serious omission: the author’s failure to state how Hasan and his inner circle explained to them the death of this fourth feday. Since he was the only one not to return from his overnight sojourn into paradise, it seems that his peers would have been quite curious. To be sure, there are numerous possible ways in which his disappearance could have been explained, and this could have proven philosophically interesting. However, this loose end was unfortunately overlooked by Bartol.

In the end, it turns out that Hasan ibn Sabbah is not completely atheistic: in an impassioned soliloquy, he describes his view of divinity in light of the essential irrational unfairness of the world (p. 313):

“…Neither Jehovah, nor the Christian God, nor Allah could have created the world we live in. A world in which nothing is superfluous, in which the sun shines just as gently on the tiger and the lamb, the elephant and the fly, the scorpion and the butterfly, the serpent and the dove, the rabbit and the lion, the blossom and the oak, the beggar and the king. Where both the just and the unjust, the strong and the weak, the smart and the stupid fall victim to disease. Where happiness and pain are blindly strewn to the four winds. And where the same ending awaits all living beings-death. Don’t you see? That’s the god whose prophet I am.”

Different traditions have found different responses to this problem, the irrationality and apparent lack of fairness of the world. The Bhagavad Gita expressed Hinduism’s firm response: the unquestioning obligation of duty. Also with a view towards karma, Buddhism proposed compassion and detachment from the world and from sensual desires. Jainism, with its injunctions against killing even the most insignificant of creatures, went even further.

However, since the heavens do not rebuke him even as his plan grows more and more evil, Hasan cannot be convinced of the idea of karma or a just God. His understanding of the problem is also more informed by the logic of Western doctrines, such as Skepticism and Stoicism. And this is why he comes to different conclusions. The Eastern and Western philosophies agree on the impossibility of humans’ having true knowledge of reality; however, whereas for the Buddhists the outcome of this is an injunction against forming attachments to things or mental concepts, for Hasan it becomes a carte blanche to manipulate the ignorant masses. With the Stoics, Hasan believes in the impermanence of all things and the human inability to control the outcome of one’s desires. However, whereas for the former this meant limiting one’s happiness at successfully controlling one’s mental intentions, for the latter – unlike them a believer in chance, not fate – this limitation only spurs him on to introduce into an essentially chaotic, remorseless world a substitute for reality, one tightly symmetrical and controlled and – in his mind at least – ultimately compassionate, in that it spares the people of the heavy burden of needing to think. They can be happier in the delusion of their desires, their beliefs and their faiths. It is for the very few like Hasan to devise a system with all the appearances of rationality and justice, to make up for the essential lack of such concepts in reality. And this for no other reason than to see what would happen.

We should reject the idea that Bartol was aiming to be prescient about a specific future outburst of fascism beyond perhaps the one he saw imminent in 1938 Europe. That the characters in his book are Islamic extremists should not be taken as being prophetic in the slightest. Rather, it seems that rather than declaring omnipotence about the course of future events in stating that his book would perhaps be most relevant in 50 years’ time, Bartol was probably merely implying that fascistic tendencies such as Hitler’s would always be around. Indeed, rather than marvel at the apparent analogous situation between his book’s characters and modern-day Islamic terrorism, we might consider a far more likely reason why Alamut is populated as it is: for the purpose of constructing his allegory, it made sense for Bartol to invoke something as remote as possible from the experience of his presumably Western audience. Analogy requires relating, and to relate requires distance. At the time, the use of exotic, medieval Iranian extremists would certainly have seemed novel. And it would have been laughable for the West to expect much real trouble from such people.

Besides, Alamut is a philosophical exercise disguised as a novel, with the trappings of a certain historicity and topography. But it does not correspond with today’s reality (or lack thereof) in precisely the way it has been assumed. Rather than representing the outcome of any diabolical plan hatched by a terrorist evil genius, today’s world is a confused one in which analogies between the book and events quickly break down. Aspiring suicide hijackers, apparently too impatient or too uncertain in their faith, drink and go to strip shows before their fatal mission. Some suicide bombers in the Muslim world are created because of poverty; others because their loved ones are killed indiscriminately by American or Israeli troops, and they no longer have anything to live for. This is hardly the joyfulness with which Bartol’s (all male) fedayeen go to their death, longing for the sensual pleasures of an easily visualized afterlife.

Of course, there are many other cases in which Islamic rebels do seem very clearly to be happy to die (as in Alamut) as martyrs for the cause – but, it seems, with an eye to the immortal stature they hope to then attain in the legends of the living, and not with a view towards the afterlife. Perhaps in the book, the fedayeen just don’t hate their opponents enough to be relatable with today’s mujahedin.

And so if anything, it seems that today’s terrorists have grasped the truth behind Hasan ibn Sabbah’s nihilistic message – and not the one with which he made fanatics of his fedayeen at Alamut. The latter rests on the concept of self-interest and the ancient Greek presumption that every man desires the Good. Plato and the Stoics augmented this by adding that every man desires what he perceives to be the Good for him. Aware of the discrepancy, Hasan ibn Sabbah, like so many charlatan prophets, artfully satisfied the self-interest of his fedayeen: paradise in the afterlife. For them, death became a means to this end. However, above and beyond this, Hasan’s higher wisdom is the nihilistic one: nothing is true, everything is permissible.

And so, events taking place in today’s world are indeed analogous to Bartol’s vision. It is troubling that the world has latched on to his higher wisdom. When the lower one held sway, things were not less bloody. But they were somewhat more predictable.