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upon all our social and political relations. Ancient concepts of
authority still dominate the modem family, and the schoolroom, the
State, and our personal pieties. Even more important, however, is the
fact that the principle of authority constantly takes fresh and living
forms from the modern industrial structure, which regiments the indi·
vidual and subjects him to a superstructure of commands that disap·
pears into the clouds. Thus authoritarian thinking can combine the
spirit of medieval ethics with the body of twentieth-century corporate
monopoly into a vision of the System Everlasting.
You might think that the ideal of the authoritarian capitalist
community has had it<> trial in Germany and Italy, and that everyone
now understands what the ideals of hierarchy and the law of social
dictation mean today in practice. But Borchardt, though a refugee
from these values, and even recommended to us by a session in a Nazi
concentration camp, is not satisfied. He would like to re-stage the
authoritarian pageant-seeking some "higher" motive of action than
anything visible in the contemporary world.
Such Utopian dreaming might no doubt be dangerous. Yet it
seems to me unnecessary to attack Borchardt for his "politics." His
regressive values and medicine-man methods constitute neither a politi–
cal theory nor a call to arms in the real world. He is the politician
of the fabulous, of government, 'of, by, and for shadows.
We should, however, be less tolerant of Borchardt's literary style.
For some reason it has seemed to him that his message would have
greater gravity if it were accompanied by an endless supply of
minutiae regarding the people and places that experienced the epic of
the Carpenters. The effect of this heavy load of trifles about the non–
existent is to m,ake
The Conspiracy
seem more like a dream than an
allegory-a tiresome dream filled with municipal politics, market-place
chatter, and outbursts of inconsequential and unreal violence.
Like Kafka, Borchardt has accepted the raw world produced by
the inner processes of his mind. But, unfortunately, his mountains of
detail have none of the magnetic power of Kafka's substances. In
Kafka, too, there is often an immense element of dull shadowy fact.
But in him boredom is overcome by the energetic conniving of forces
that wind up the reader as if on a spool, bringing him so close to the
object that it is repeated and enlarged in him with all the paranoia of
daily existence. Borchardt's .account completely lacks this polar force;
the reader is simply invited to visit a dream place and dream people
that he would avoid if they were a reality.
And as in all dreams, good or bad, fascinating or exhausting, the
primary quality of this 600-page almanac of reaction is
eccentricity.
Like· Wyndham Lewis'
Childermass,
a close contender for the title of
Most Unreadable Book of The Age,
The Conspiracy
has not a single
sequence without its oddities of reasoning, nomenclature, phrasing and
