Plasma Meets Politics in 'Shedding Life'

Czech history is full of political polymaths--the nation's first president, T.G. Masaryk, was trained as a philosopher, while Vaclav Havel was well-known as a dissident playwright long before he ever took office. Miroslav Holub, a Czech poet and well-respected immunologist, is no exception to this tradition. His latest collection of essays, Shedding Life, investigates topics as disparate as animal experimentation, opera and civic engagement. Beneath the surface of these lapidary essays is a compelling political message, a crie-de-coeur against totalitarianism from a scientist who has witnessed ideology's perversion of the truth.

Holub's short essays in Shedding Life buck conventional genres: they're neither cultural studies nor conventional science writing in the Stephen J. Gould mold. Shedding Life could be best described as literary essays in a scientific mode--science, biology in particular, becomes a mirror in which to view society, politics and philosophy.

Although the first section of the book, "Angels of Disease," focuses primarily on events and personalities in the history of medicine, Holub's real interest is in the development of the social organism. Holub uses immunology, the study of what the body recognizes as "self" and "other," as model for studying the political problems of insiders and outsiders. His best essays in Shedding Life carefully tread this line between scientific fact and political metaphor.

In "This Long Disease," Holub calls our attention to the "importance" of retroviruses, which integrate their genetic code into the chromosomes of the hosts they invade. Scientists believe that a large portion of our chromosomes is composed of such retrovirus DNA--what the body recognizes as "other" has, through evolution, been incorporated into who we are. When we place this fact in the context of Holub's other essays, many of which deal with the injustice of social exclusion and persecution, it acquires a powerfully political resonance. While hardly an apologist for disease, Holub uses the analogy to suggest that our social conception of "self" and "other" is just as misleading as our naive conception of disease.

Of all the polemics in Shedding Life, most surprising is Holub's harsh criticism of contemporary humanities. One might find it odd that Holub, an established literary figure, prefaces his book with a George Steiner quotation that laments "the pretentious triviality which now dominate so much of literary theory and humanistic studies." If voiced by an American, Holub's barb might be interpreted as another sortie in the war between C.P. Snow's "the two cultures"--the hard sciences sniping from one side of the trenches, the humanities and social sciences from the other. In reality, however, Holub has no desire to accuse the humanities of some inherent lack of rigor. Rather, his goal is to expose the dangers of ideology masquerading as knowledge, whether it takes the form of Marxism-Leninism or politically correct dogma.

As a writer whose work was banned for twelve years by the Russians, Holub has a vested interest in combating ideology wherever he finds it. His wariness of contemporary humanistic academia is more understandable in this context. Under the Communists, the aesthetics of "socialist realism" forced history, literature and art into the service of Marxist ideology. For Holub, scientific research provided the only hope of objectivity in a world of Communist lies, fabrications and distortions.

Holub's most ascerbic essays lambast this spurious Soviet science, in which party-approved researchers concoct absurd theories to please their superiors. In their best form, these essays take the form of veiled political satire, an art perfected by the Czechs.

In "What Links Me With Ladislaus the Posthumous," Holub humorously recounts his successful attempt to pass his medical exams by flattering his examiners' egos. The cause of the death of King Ladislaus, an obscure fifteenth-century Czech monarch, is an unsolved mystery with political implications: a patriotic Czech is expected to agree with his nation's medical historians about the cause of Ladislaus' death (though no one is in agreement), rather than with the account of rival German historians. When Holub is quizzed on medical minutiae by his professors, he offhandedly conjectures that Ladislaus died from whatever ailment his examiner happens to be studying. The gambit works, winning him high marks in every discipline but one--gynecology.

Holub is less successful when he turns his hand to overt political commentary. The heading of the book's second section, "Trouble on Spaceship Earth," sounds like the title of a Discovery Channel special, and the subject matter is suspiciously similar. When Holub dispenses unqualified environmental advice and chastises trendy scientific theorists, his otherwise sparkling essays acquire the atmosphere of soapbox sermons. The otherwise pedestrian chapter is punctuated by a few gems, such as "What the Nose Knows," a Proustian reverie on the atavistic power of scent, and the powerful "Shedding Life," which might have been titled "Killing a Muskrat" in homage to Orwell. The final section, "No," manages to redeem the second by drawing on his experiences in Czechoslovakia to further his political and scientific crusade.

Even when Holub strays outside his boundaries, his writing remains quick and poetic. A team of six translators (including Holub himself) collaborated on Shedding Life, and they succeed admirably in capturing the terse, aphoristic quality of his prose. For instance, Holub likens the Vietnamese minipig, the Eastern bloc's lab animal of choice, to "a semibald porcupine caught in a frontal collision between two armored cars."

For those who can tolerate Holub's tendency to climb up onto his high horse, Shedding Life should prove a successful marriage of the two cultures, appealing to both poet and pathologist, without condescending to either. Most importantly, Shedding Life proves to be a valuable and surprising perspective on the political climate of Eastern Europe today.