PARTISAN REVIEW
as
a humble and clumsy attempt at self-justification. When to
us
he
appears most brilliant and most effective, he is perhaps then most
guilty. Sometimes it seems to us-and perhaps he too believes it–
that he has been raised into the hierarchy of the Party and that he
has become its spokesman, but he is being tested or tricked; the levels
are faked; when he thinks he's high up, he's far down. You can read
his writings a hundred times but you'll never be able to decide on
their real importance. When Nizan, who
was
in
charge of foreign
politics for
Ce soir, was
in
all
honesty trying his utmost to prove that
our only chance for salvation lay in a Franco-Russian pact, his secret
judges, who let
him
talk on, already knew about Ribbentrop's con–
versations with Molotov.
If
he thinks that he can get out of it by a
corpselike obedience, he is mistaken. He is expected to have wit,
pungency, lucidity, and inventiveness. But at the same time that
these are required of him, he is penalized for these virtues, for they
are, in themselves, tendencies toward crime. How is he to practice
the critical spirit? The flaw is in him like the worm in a piece of
fruit. He can please neither his readers, his judges, nor himself. In
the eyes of everyone and even of himself he is only a guilty subjectivity
which deforms knowledge by reflecting it in his troubled waters. This
deformation can
be
useful;
as
his readers make no distinction between
what comes from the author and what from the "historical process,"
it is always possible to disclaim him.
It
is taken for granted that he
dirties
his
hands in his job, and
as
his
mission is to express C.
P.
politics from day to day, his articles still remain when the line has
long since changed, and these are what the opponents of Stalinism
refer to when they want to show its contradictions or versatility. The
writer is not only
fJresumed guilty in advance;
he is charged with
all
the faults of the past, since
his
name remains attached to the errors
of the Party, and he is the scapegoat of all the political purges.
Nevertheless, it is not impossible that he may hold out for a long
time if he learns to keep his qualities in leash when they run the
risk of pulling him too far. Yet he must not be cynical. Cynicism
is
as
serious a vice as good will. Let him know how to keep his eyes shut;
let
him
see what need not be seen, and let him forget sufficiently
what he has seen in order never to write about it, yet let him remem–
ber it sufficiently so that in future he may avoid looking at it; let him
carry his criticism far enough to determine the point where it should
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