562
STEPHEN SPENDER
tence ordering someone to be shot we can never be
absolutely
certain, but
only approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain sense,
that we are punishing a
guilt'l
person .
.. "
The proofs of guilt were rela–
tive, approxImate, and tbe mterrogator could find them, even when
there was no evidence and no witness, without leaving his office, "basing
his conclusions not only on his intellect but also on his Party sensitivity,
his moral
forces"
(in other words, the superiority of someone who has
.slept well, has been well fed , and has not been beaten up) "and on his
character"
(i.e. his willingness to apply cruelty!).
From what I have written above it will be seen that in the absence of
"absolute truth" there
is
an absolute: the decision made, or the history written,
by the Party when there is the complete fusion of ideology with power and
when this is embodied in one committee, or, better, in one person: Stalin.
If
literature means bringing the material of truth about life that has been
suppressed into the light of consciousness and creating it in forms which
reveal it as named things which can be dealt with, then this book is great
literature. We should not be put off by the fact that the material which
Solzhenitsyn has, for the most part, created as anecdote, happens to
be
mil–
lions of people's lives, and that it is not the suppressed material of the Freud–
ian unconscious. A life can be just as much repressed as a hidden wish: and is
not a murdered life, reduced to non-being by the police state, a suppressed
wish? It is difficult to think that this gigantic transformation of ghosts into
palpable and living stories and evidence will not have some effect in Russia,
and is not a blow against threatening tyrannies elsewhere on behalf of us all.
