BOOKS
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its masquerade, its duplicity. To tell the truth he concocts anec–
dotes about masquerades.
The Yawning H eigh ts
consists of four books. In the first, a series
of heroic men who "didn ' t like writing and didn 't want to write," even
men who have lost belief in their responsibilities
to
others, are forced
by their own fierce integrities to speak out in protest. At the request of
Dauber, Schizophrenic sets forth his Theory of Disinformation in a
book called
Socia-Mechanics;
this composition calls attention to the
fact that Schizophrenic has written an earlier subversive treatise. After
both books are quoted and discussed in Book I, sections I and 2,
Schizophrenic is removed
to
a sanitarium. As Deleuze and Guattari
argue in
Anti-Oedipus,
anyone who protests against the conditions of
the modern technologization of desire and refuses
to
adjust to them is
. likely to be labelled ill. To remain free the individual must be willing
to
be regarded as schizoid. Without equivocation , this is crucial to
Zinoviev's critique of Soviet society. The sections that explore Schizo–
phrenic's anger and hostility also contain snatches of a supposedly
legendary obscene, insane poem called "The Ballad," which mocks
every thing and leaves no bridge between dissidence and adjustment.
Even the "Communist Manifesto" is not exempt from Satire in "The
Ballad" :
My
lillie sweetheart often talks
About her arsehole's schism;
Once again through Europe stalks
The spectre of the Ism .
Though Schizophrenic is placed safely away, other critics arise to fill
his place. Book I, 3 is dominated by Slanderer, and "The Ballad" is
rep laced by a book titled "The Rats, " which transparently comments
on post-Pavlovian social organization. Following Slanderer's impris–
onment, Chatterer appears, and his book on the dissident sculptor
Neizvestny,
The Legend of Dauber,
celebrates artistic independence.
The structure of
The Yawning Heights,
then , is a series of boxes, one
inside th e other; and each separate character is merely one in a
sequence of avatars of the quintessential Man-Who-Protests.
Bawler, the ironic, theatrical figure based on the comic victim in
Russian puppet shows, dominates Book II. Even more than the earlier
avatars his biography approximates the autobiography of the young
Zinoviev, who was expelled from the Komsomol for protes ting against
Stalin's cult of personality. This bumptious, indomitable character
arrives on the scene
to
replace Schizophrenic, Slanderer, and Chatterer
