BOOKS
639
ano th er
La comedie humaine.
We can onl y welcome the fact tha t he
had enough es theti c intuition-paradoxi ca l though it may seem-to
reject the "sense o f modera ti on " bred in us by nineteenth -century
litera ture. In
Th e Gu lag A rchipelago
bell etristic techniq ue has been
reduced to a purely fun cti onal ro le, for litera ture is simpl y not
adequa te in a wo rld of dea th . So lzhenitsyn sta rted as a conventional
noveli st, but in wo rk after work we see tha t the form o f hi s novel
expands, so to spea k. There is an enormous stylisti c difference between
One Day in the L ife of Ivan Denisovich
and
Cancer Ward,
and an even
g rea ter difference between
Cancer Ward
and
The First Circle.
From the
first book to the third we can see the bo unda ries of the genre being
eroded .
Gu lag
ma rks a to tal rejecti on of it.
It
is perfectl y pl ausibl e,
however, tha t the course of Solzhenitsyn 's development was the reverse,
that he wrote
Gulag
first and onl y then decided tha t he had ea rned the
ri ght to take on novels. In either case,
Gulag
stands apart from exi sting
genres and mocks bo th Ru ss ian and Eng lish literary tradition. It
a bsorbs genres in the same way the Gul ag Archipelago absorbed li ves.
T he mann er of Solzhenitsyn 's narra tive flu ctua tes widely; it
includes dry bureaucra ti c informa ti on , stream of consc iousness, imita–
ti o n of fo lk speech , the eleva ted tone o f a fo rmal elegy, the lingo of
criminals, parodies o f o ffi cial sta tements, Turgenev-like passages o f
beautiful prose. Often thi s occurs within one sentence, but thi s is the
way Russ ians speak.
If
it were no t in tran sla ti on , thi s book's lingui stic
fabric alone wo uld give its readers shi vers.
No do ubt literary criti cs would have been happier if So lzhenitsyn
had fo ll owed the class ical course o f deve lopment whi ch culminates
today in Beckett. (In fact, Solzhenitsyn was quite close to tha t in certain
chapters o f
Cancer Ward.)
But the whole point is tha t the absurd is
fa r from being th e las t word in human experi ence. After the absurd , a
man can still be put up aga in st a wall or hi s wife can be raped a t an
interroga ti on. Where, in tha t event, do bell es- lettres come in ?
In short, litera ture domesticates ev il. The intell ectu al superi ority
o f a writer, automa ticall y adopted by hi s readers, convinces them o f
th eir superio rity over the subj ect. Solzhenitsyn achieves just the oppo–
site effect. The mean s he uses a re extremely meager and borrowed in
their entirety from the arsenal of "socialist realism. " Here, however,
they could no t be more appropriate. Every litera ry trend has its own
periph ery and its own apexes: I would call the author of
Th e Gulag
A rchipelago
" the geni us of socialist reali sm." Sovi et rul e has perhaps
acquired its Homer in So lzhenitsyn .
Evil is no t a geographi c concept, but even if one reduces itto tha t,
