18
PARTISAN REVIEW
in the same spirit of immunization, they surround themselves
with walls, constantly reinforced; already, counting from the
outer
to
the inner wall, the thickness has grown from simple to
double and even
to
triple, which , you can well imagine, cannot
but increase the general crowding . True, the horizontal space
taken up by these reinforcements is partially compensated for by
vertical space, since new stories are constantly being added to the
tops of the buildings; but it is likewise true that this pushing
upward cancels out at the top whatever attempts are made to
reinforce die structure at the bottom.
The image could serve as a metaphor of capitalism itself, that
Marxist view of capitalism in the final stages where every attempt to
solve a problem creates a new and worse one, but this is hardly the
author's first intent. He is more absorbed to write of bureaucracy, of a
bureaucracy which is established, old, almost in a neo-civilized tradi–
tion, a Soviet bureaucracy is what we will think of first, yet not as it was
in the early Fifties. The irony is that the Soviet has probably grown by
these years of the Seventies a little closer in spirit to the model
Malaquais provided for the Fifties.
So, as I read the book in the silence of all twenty years since last I
looked at it, the work was different. It had its own resonance now. The
faults may still have been there but they were less acute. If the dialogue
once again leaned on the edge of the absurd, foreign, stilted-one stilt
ever higher than the other-all the other absurdities seemed to have
come into place.
TheJoker
had its proportions. What looked bizarre in
,53 was now on the side of prophecy. I could recollect my indignation
when the hero, Pierre Javelin, at the end of the work confessed to a
friend that he was writing poems and leaving them in odd places for
people to read. What a puny way to resist the absolute totalitarianism
of the city through which he traveled; what a sentimental orgy
!
Yet
the first new sound to be heard in the age of conformity was a reading
of poetry. Out of San Francisco came a wind to tell us the Beat revolu–
tion was on its way. That revolution, for better or worse, and certain it
can hardly be for
wors~
(so soon as one recollects the intellectual
paralysis of the Fifties) was a movement which took us through Black
militancy and the campus rebellions, from Eisenhower precisely to
Watergate . A new totalitarianism may now be on its way, and more
pervasive-the computer will be the axis of the new ideology. Yet ifthe
