The Revolt Against the Person
The Seizure of Power.
by Czeslaw Milosz.
Criterion. 245 pp. $3-50.
Surely, one of the realest terrors of Communism arises from our inability to imagine it, to find analogies for the particular brands of fear and subservience, devotion and loyalty it breeds. To confess openly the discontinuity we sense between the Communist mind and the mind of the past, between the Communist experience and traditional political or moral experience, is to feel ourselves utter fools. And yet at every level there is an awareness of this discontinuity—an uneasy demand that the demonstration trials of the Soviet Zone be “explained,” that the odd silence of the Rosenbergs be “explained.”
But journalistic explanations of “why they confess” or “why they don’t confess” cannot really satisfy us; not only are the answers banal, but the questions themselves seem somehow to avoid the real issues. And we are led in the West to mutter vaguely about the “Oriental soul”; while, for all I know, they have already begun in China to make similar baffled references to the “Occidental mind.” The point is, of course, that everywhere we feel a strangeness for which we try to find familiar metaphors—are aware that there is in process no mere social change but a revolution that touches the depths of the psyche.
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It is the intellectual, of course, who is most painfully conscious of this psychic crisis, and especially the artist with his vested interest in the dying tradition of the mind, upon which the very notion of his function depends. But the intellectual, insofar as he is also enlightened, is embarrassed by the concept of a soul, and committed to the theory of a single, developing ideal of the human. To talk of “psychic crises” and “abysmal differences” seems to him to play into the hands of the mystifiers and reactionaries. He is driven to argue that Communism is only an aberrant form of humanism, a mistake in emphasis, a difficult but passing phase, perhaps even a necessary step on the way for humanity. Finally, to prove to himself that there is no real discontinuity, he joins himself to the Movement—and loses his doubts by becoming the thing that troubled him. One does not have to imagine what one is.
Meanwhile, the attempt to come to terms with Communism is left to those to whom the possession of imagination is legitimate grounds for suspicion. To them the only point is to fight Communism; but they cannot dispel their own lurking bewilderment, ready to be exploited by the “brain-washer,” the sense that they do not really know the “secret,” the final strength of the enemy. This psychological doubt they objectify in terms of imaginary conspiracies—and the hunt is on. Doubt becomes inevitably panic; and doubt or panic, it conceals from us the degree to which we have already capitulated to the revolution of which the Soviet system is momentarily the most egregious form.
Everywhere, there is a retreat from those compelling myths of Responsibility and Freedom, from that fantastic notion of the Person, which since the Renaissance has been haunting Europe. We have in the past read this notion back into Christianity and the Prophets, back even into slaveholding Athens; but we are aware at last that we have (quite recently as history goes) invented these legendary forms, invented the selves we are. And with this realization comes a terrible fear and a terrible temptation: what was made we can unmake!
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What were once wandering demons of the earth and darkness we have forced inward into the id; what was the unchallengeable power of the gods and the sons of gods we have made part of ourselves in the super-ego; and between, we have reclaimed a larger and larger area of autonomous self. “Where id is, ego shall be . . . .” But we are weary; we have in some parts of the earth asked too much psychic development too quickly of too many men; in other parts, we have turned the newly discovered soul into a luxury item for the few—hated by the excluded like all symbols of privilege.
And now a time of reckoning has come, the hour of the rejection of the personality. Terror and power do not go back whence they came, but into the apparatus of the state, into the Leader and his ikon; and the person, left naked, slips into the warm anonymity of the crowd, murmuring to himself, “No one is responsible for anything!” and crying aloud, “Thank you, Stalin—or Malenkov or Bulganin or Chou or Tito—”
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It is this plight that Milosz has tried to render (and in rendering to mitigate) in The Seizure of Power, not abstractly, as I have been stating it, but in all of the complexity of its realization in the history of Poland in the five or six years after 1944. In terms of intellectuals and poets, workers and bureaucrats, actresses and Jewish merchants, socialists and fascists—in terms of scene: the wooden village church and the rubble of Warsaw, a group of naked bathers on a river bank and the song of a season’s first thrush—in terms of the scraps of culture shored by the fortunate few against their ruins: Valéry and Eliot and Thucydides—he has tried to imagine the passage into the terror. There are no heroes or villains; a handful of the imperfect pass from an imperfection we have known and grown weary of to a new imperfection we have foreseen in nightmares. They are not men in general who make the passage, but particular Poles in their particular landscapes; yet they are no exotics, they are us.
It is the honesty of the book that gives it special relevance and special beauty; for any human being regarded with unflinching candor looks in his insides like us all. Mr. Milosz’s honesty goes beyond the demands of historical truth, beyond what we as readers would have asked of him, beyond what most of us can use. It is this which makes the book finally not a document (despite certain thinly disguised portraits of historical persons, and the passages borrowed from contemporary accounts of the fighting in Warsaw), but a work of art. He has, in short, tried to imagine for us one moment of the critical transition that threatens us all.
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And after all, cannot the novel—especially that versatile hybrid “the political novel”—do for us what the journalists and commentators have fumbled—make Communism finally a fact of the imagination as well as of the journals. Mediating as it does between document and poetry, the actual and the mythic, the novel seems precisely the form for the job. Yet Mr. Milosz ultimately fails, despite his sensitivity and candor; for his book is fragmentary, without a narrative center or an organizing sensibility. At its heart is a not-quite-digested essay and a myth kidnapped from the legend Thucydides read into history; while around that heart swirl fractured scenes and images, random poetry, tangential insights.
Perhaps the novel, child of the bourgeoisie and the Enlightenment, that is to say, of the democratization of Personality, can never be adapted to a world which rejects the concept of the Person—and of the Character which is its literary equivalent. Indeed, Mr. Milosz’s narrative method seems to confirm this. It is one much favored in recent years in Europe, the “collective” or hero-less novel, patched together of separate, representative points of view, the portrayal not of men but of a society. But this approach, which seeks unity neither in the fable which underlies the story nor in the organizing mind that lends coherence to experience, gives away the game in advance; for in its flux, that definition of the person which is at stake in our present crisis has already been surrendered. The form of such a novel is not a victory over its subject but rather a symptom of it.
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Yet this is not the final cause of Mr. Milosz’s defeat; what disappointed me in the end is the sense of fiction limping after fact—of sensibility vainly trying to match the complexity and interest of history. When I call to mind certain older political novels which I especially like, The Secret Agent, The Possessed, The Castle, I become aware that to be great a political fiction must be “prophetic.” It is not a question of forecasting events, not really a matter of time at all. Dostoevsky’s book after eighty years and Kafka’s after thirty still manage to tell us more than we can know, for they tell us something other than what is knowable in the ordinary sense.
We may be tempted to say, “How true they are! How true! What they foresaw in terms of demonism or bureaucracy become a metaphysical system has turned into newspaper fact, our daily bread!” But this is not the real point. What matters is that today’s fact does not exhaust their meanings, nor will tomorrow’s and tomorrow’s and tomorrow’s make explicit all we imaginatively sense in reading them. At the moment before a great and terrible revolution of the spirit, they dreamed not a legend to explain history, but one which history can only illustrate. Of Mr. Milosz’s book this much cannot be said. Let it be praise enough to say that it is almost adequate to the horror to which it addresses iself. More than this we may hope, but we do not dare to ask.
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