20
PARTISAN REVIEW
Yet with what skill does the novel also inhabit all the here and
HOW
of
government offices. Whoever has stood on line for an unemployment
check is ready to appreciate the following passage:
I found no way of explaining myself. What complicated things
was that only the hands of the employee concerned were visible . A
pane of bluish glass was at each of the windows, leaving an
opening ofonly two inches at the counter, and it was through this
that you saw the hands taking hold of your papers and
manipulating them with fascinating dexterity. In addition, the
glass reflected your image , which gave you the impression of talk–
ing to yourself.
Nor can anyone who has ever suffered through a search for their
missing records and been maddened by the friendliness of an official
who would help you ifhe could, but can't, fail to find the pertinence of
this paragraph
the poor inspector is caught between hammer and anvil. Yet he is
in no way
to
blame . He is nobody. My case, for instance : barely
ten minutes ago he had not even suspected its existence . There
was not a comma in my record for which he was responsible; he
did not even know who put in those commas. The records, once
set going , circulated of their own accord, one neither knew where
they came from nor where they were going to. . . . "So you see, ' ,
he pleaded, "we are merely a stage of the proceedings, here, just a
stage . The person involved and his record pause here a moment,
we try to find out if they fit each other, as you fit a shoe to a foot ,
no more or less, then someone else takes over. "
That is the middle ground of the marvelous anachronism
Malaquais has mixed, bureaucracy past, present, and future-comic ,
maddening, then terrifying. For terror is the heart of his book. It is the
terror of that future which passes beyond
Say any wordat all and I wzJl
have you hanged
to the final oppression of that day when technology
enters the brain, and the interface of all communication shifts from the
voice to the thought. Then, totalitarianism may say,
Think, and you
are gone.
It is part of the complex strength of
The Joker
that this possible
condition which inspires most of us with the imperative that of course
