made to get the crowd to be silent so that the speech
coming from Rome may be heard
j
but those in the
adjoining streets still go on scanning the mystic
formula, continuing to call upon the great Duce, the
Sorcerer, the Wizard,
in whose hands lie the future
and the very life-blood of the poor.
The shouts of the throng together with the peal-
ing of the bells make it impossible for Don Paolo
to catch any of the radio address.
Down below, at
one corner of the Inn, he sees the women from
Pietrasecca squatting on the ground and the men
grouped about a cart; they with the rest of the
crowd are shouting those conjuror's syllables:
Cc dul Ce dul Ce dul Ce dul Ce dul
Upon the cart, towering above the throng,
sits a
witch staring up at the sky. Her lips move back and
forth and her gloom-laden face holds mysterious
presentiments.
The exorcism grows louder and
louder until it becomes a deafening roar, a fanatic
ecstasy, an oppressive obsession:
Cc dul Ce dul Ce dul Cc dul Ce dul
The multitude is chanting now, including those up
near the loudspeaker,
the carabinieri
and officials.
The latter have become convinced that it is out of
the question to hear anything of the broadcast from
Rome. The cry,
Cc dul Ce dul
goes on hammer-
ing the air with its measured beat, with the con-
tinuity and the verbal intonations of a mass of sin-
ners beseeching an angry god for grace and forgive-
ness. The two syllables end by losing all normal and
comprehensible significance and become no more
than a mY3terious formula,
mingling with the holy
chime of the bells.
From his post of observation behind the window
curtain, Don Paolo gazes down mournfully.
He re-
members the feeling of anxiety he had when as a
boy he' once witnessed certain experiments in mass
hypnotism.
He remembers having the same feeling
whenever he has viewed demonstrations
of those
p;rimitive and irrational
psychic forces which lie
slumbering in the individual and in the masses. How
can one ever hope to talk reasonably to these poor
creatures who have come under the influence of a
hypnotizing wizard?
Those standing near the radio now give the sign
that the broadcast
is at an end.
"War has been declared
I"
shouts Lawyer Zaba-
glione, and raises a hand to indicate that he has
something to say. But his voice, hoarse like the rest,
is lost in the rhythmic chant the wailing echoes of
which are still to be heard:
Ce dul C'e dul Ce dul Ce dul
The radio is silent, and no one has understood so
much as three words of what has come over it. No
one has taken the trouble to understand.
Noone is
sorry at not having understood.
For it is not neces-
sary to understand
j
and what is more, there is no-
thing to be understood.
Translated from the Italian
by
Samuel Putnam.
PARTISAN
REVIEW
Criticism
In Transition
LOUIS KRONENBERGER
CIUTICISM is constantly thwarted in its aspira-
tion to create absolutes. The point is not exactly that
there are no fixed values, but rather that they lend
themselves to no fixed applications; so that the "best"
critic-the critic least influenced by personal,
tem-
poral and extrinsic concerns-may seem at crucial
moments to live in a vacuum. The truths that he and
his kind have wrested from a refractory world may
prove of immense value in furnishing us with a back-
ground, but the battle near at hand will almost sure-
ly be waged over issues more immediate and unre-
solved. The Bible for anyone generation will al-
most never be the Bible itself. The most useful
critic will be something else as well-some one who
moves with the tides of his age. During one period
he will bring to his criticism the attitude of a
scientist, during another the attitude of a prophet,
during a third the attitude of a man of action. Or he
may display more than one of these attitudes,
or
some other attitude; the point is that the approach
to truth does not admit of a constant, and that the
roots of culture lie in a soil of shifting elements. In
other words, if the critic truly values his ideals, he
must be a realist in seeking to obtain them; and art
is perhaps not so much hostile to propaganda as
dependent upon it.
What distinguishes literary criticism today is that
it is under tremendous pressure from life, and cannot
remain isolated whether is wishes to or not. Social
consciousness in the contemporary critic is not simply
one of the tools of his trade, one of the avenues of
his knowledge,
but the inescapable galvanizer of his
thought. The world is not just too much, but
always,
with us; and so vital a fact is changing the face of
literature.
From the time of the French Revolution
until only a few years ago, creative writing largely
represented the struggle between the individual and
society: and since it was portrayed under the auspices
of the democratic ideal, which means a period of
growing freedom and scope for the individual, it was
upon the individual in a very personal sense that the
emphasis of the struggle rested. In romantic liter-
ature he might be the hero of some Icarian quest and
failure; in realistic literature he was more likely the
pigmy doomed in advance to annihilation.
Yet,
despite nineteenth-century interest in social problems,
whenever Society became the antagonist in fiction, it
assumed for critics hardly more than a vague sym-
bolic character.
A Balzac hero or a Julien Sorel was
5
