In his 1978 book The Emperor: The Downfall of an Autocrat, an account of the final years of the reign of Haile Selassie I, Polish writer Jaroslaw Kapuściński invented a new subgenre of political reportage. Kapuściński himself called his work “literary reportage”. In the English-speaking world, his genre is sometimes characterized as “magic journalism”. In a series of linked, interpolated testimonies from former Ethiopian court officials he created an arresting picture of the accelerating collapse of an authoritarian regime.
This was a story that had special resonance for his audience in Poland, where dissent against its autocracy was growing. The Emperor was also the book that established Kapuściński’s reputation in the West. When it appeared in English translation in 1983 it was an immediate critical success. Questions about the reliability of Kapuściński’s reportage begin with The Emperor. His informants here are mainly former Ethiopian court servants labouring under anonymising initials, making them sound curiously like characters in an eighteenth-century English novel. Only one of those who assisted him is given a full name (that, we are told, is because he is safely dead), yet the power of the book derives to a large extent from the fact that the story is told almost entirely through the transcribed speech of these unnamed witnesses. Their antiquated cadences have a mesmeric quality. With courtly unctuousness they speak of “His Venerable Majesty”, “His Most Virtuous Highness”, “His Benevolent Majesty, “His Sublime Majesty”, “His Charitable Majesty”, “His Exalted Majesty”, “His Indefatigable Majesty”, “His Masterful Highness”, “Our Omnipotent Ruler”. These expressions of fealty acquire an air of increasing irony as the excesses of the imperial court are borne in on the reader. It is a subtle piece of reportorial rhetoric, yet native speakers of Amharic say that these honorifics correspond to no known expressions in their language. In particular, they say, they could not occur in the formal registers of speech that were employed at the court, where there were only one or two acceptable forms of address for the Emperor. So it seems these resonant phrases cannot have been spoken as transcribed. Some of the ceremonial titles that Kapuściński gives his sources are invented too. In the absence of proper names these inventions may be held to cast further doubt on the actual existence of these informants.
What Kapuściński and his unnamed translators created in The Emperor was a brilliant device, rumors rather than transcription, an imaginary archaic language, with touches of comic opera, one that bespeaks homage while conveying subversion. It falls short, though, of both scholarly and journalistic standards of verity, or even of verisimilitude. In answer to such criticisms it has been argued that The Emperor is not meant to be about Ethiopia at all, that it is an allegory of autocratic power in Poland. Certainly, the book is informed and deepened by such parallels; and its reception among literati in the West was conditioned by an awareness of its doubly exotic origin—a book about a far-off country by an author who was himself rara avis, a master of the new journalism sprung miraculously from within the Soviet bloc. Some apologists for The Emperor have located it, specifically, in a Polish literary genre where dissent masquerades as descriptive prose; and Kapuściński has subsequently endorsed this interpretation. Yet there is no indication in the book itself that it is meant to be read as an allegory—or as a traveller’s tale, or a parable (one in the same genre, say, as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas the legendary Abyssinian king, or the mediaeval European stories of Prester John, the Emperor of Ethiopia). Like Kapuściński’s other books, The Emperor is presented unambiguously as factual reportage and it asserts its claim on the reader’s attention as such. The dearth of other sources on the subject—no member of the Imperial court of Ethiopian survived to write a memoir of Haile Selassie—means that the book would have considerable documentary importance if the information in it could be relied on. At the time of first publication there was, of course, every reason for Kapuściński to maintain the confidentiality of any living sources he might have.
1.The aim of the author is to suggest that ________.
2. Despite the facts that The Emperor is unambiguously presented as factual reportage, the book should be read as ________.
3. The Emperor refers to ________.
4. Baroque description, exaggeration and hyperbole may be regarded as exemplary in ________.
5. This passage most likely takes the form of ________.
