638
PARTISAN REVIEW
quences of looking at those photographs and films are also instantane–
ous, fragmentary. A photograph or film is a comfortable form of truth
requiring no moral judgment on the part of the viewer, for an ethical
choice has already been made by the photographer himself when he
pressed the shutter release. For his conception of Dachau or Hiro–
shima, the average American is indebted to television, rather than to
his own deductions.
Unfortunately, photographers and cinematographers have not
been and still are not allowed within the territory of intensified-regime
camps; if in fact they are allowed to enter, they do so without cameras,
and they don't come back. Moscow in this respect, as in many others,
differs greatly from Saigon. In our civilized times, if something does
not appear on a television screen, it is treated as nonexistent. Therefore,
when we talk about "our brother" we continually stray into the
phraseology of Cain.
But man is not a monkey to be educated by pictures. As far as truth
is concerned, words are a better medium than images, for images, after
all, are artifacts.
Gulag
is certainly too long, as were
Das Kapital
and
The Interpretation of Dreams.
And in a way
Gulag
sums up these two:
together they make a modern man 's trilogy: without anyone of them
the portrai t of the human psyche is not complete.
Every book of evil is long and monotonous; but these are the
characteristics of the genre, since the genre is epic. And the writer under
discussion is an epic writer. The esthetic criteria of conventional belles–
lettres are inapplicable here, just as the ethical criteria of normal
society are inapplicable to the Gulag phenomenon itself. When we
subject this work to literary analysis and automatically arrive at an
unfavorable judgment, we are deceiving ourselves: Solzhenitsyn is not
out to create a work of fiction here, but a work of truth. Accordingly, he
uses literature and its devices as mere tools. Evil isn't aphoristic and
isn't concerned about harmony; its strength lies in routine. The same
may be said for this book. Yet, it is
not long enough,
and the two
volumes still ahead of the reader of the English- language edition will
not exhaust the subject: a complete account of sixty million people
driven to their death cannot be given even if one tries, like Solzhenit–
syn, to uncover stereotypes. A stereotype, after all, is a device-
something a writer has to resort to, whereas death resorts to no devices
\
and is individual every time.
Solzhenitsyn realizes this, I assume, and he also realizes that his
~
attempt is doomed. This explains the size of his book, and there is
abso lutely no reason to think that he sees himself as the author of
