46
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
and takes a confessional tone himself but has nothing to reveal
except some "illusions," which quickly turn out to be the illusions
of others. Joseph
K.
in Kafka's
Trial
is charged with no crime but
rather stands "accused of guilt"; Fiedler is not content to malign
the guilty: he indicts a whole generation for its "innocence."
What lies behind this puzzling assault on language and sense is
a psychodrama on the theme of "growing up," in which radicalism
and social hope equal childishness, while maturity demands the
acceptance of middle-class values, society as it is, the tragic ambi–
guity of all worldly commitment, all action.
4
This coming to
maturity for the once-alienated intellectual requires the traumatic
n:te de passage
of public repentance. Thus Whittaker Chambers
qualifies as a tragic figure, the "scorned squealer" who des erves
our empathy since he suffers for all of us. Alger Hiss, on the other
hand, is a "hopeless liar," "the Popular Front mind at bay." Why?
Not simply because he is guilty, though Fiedler hasn't the faintest
doubt of that, but because he refuses to put away childish things:
unwilling to "speak aloud a common recognition of complicity,"
he cuts himself off from "the great privilege of confession."
The religious (and markedly Christian) tone and fervor of
these bizarre comments is even more intense in the essay on the
Rosenbergs, which after twenty pages of vituperation concludes
that "we should have offered them grace," yes grace -- not
mercy or clemency but grace, "even to those who most blas–
phemously deny their own humanity" (that is, by refusing to
confess). The Rosenbergs should have been spared not for
their
sake but to ratify our own godlike virtue and superiority.
America ! America! indeed.
4. A glance through the back volumes of
Commentary
or
Encounter
would disclose
many curious playlets on this theme, for instance Alan Westin, "Libertarian Precepts and
Subversive Realities: Some Lessons Learned in the School of Experience,"
Commentary
Uanuary 1955), an article whose very title speaks volumes. Many civil liberties, it
suggests, are fine abstractions, but must bend to meet the hard realities of subversion.
Libertarians, however well intentioned, who insist on "an absolutist framework," who
are "unwilling to make the necessary compromises," risk leaving society "without the
means of
making necessary judgments and distinctions
in coping with the formidable
problem offered by the agents,
conscious or otherwise,
of a hostile foreign power." (my
italics)
