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PARTISAN REVIEW
after these have been weakened by the Sanitarium and the Cooler or
disillusioned by the defection of comrades to the Party line. Eventually
Bawler himself is arrested, declared mentally unfit, and brought to a
psychiatric hospital
to
be shown patients who have already suffered the
"cure" for which he is scheduled. "'What's the state of people who've
been treated?' asked Thinker. 'Oh,' said Brother, 'they 've got that well
worked out. A death sentence would be child's play compared to that. '"
In
Book III "The Ballad" is updated by the modern "Poem on
Boredom." Both are lavatory poems. "The Ballad" had been scribbled
on "that most ancient monument of Ibanskian culture, the Shithouse."
Now, with "a ruSty twelve-inch nail which was allegedly from that first
Shithouse" (the Revolution), on the plastic wall of the new Shithouse
(U .S.S.R. in the 1970s) is scratched " the words of a folk-song of the
distant future " :
I tried
to
clear my intestine
But first they made me stand in line
With the builders of socism.
They ordered me
to
shout 'Hooray!
Life's gelling beller every dayl'
And show no cynicism.
That is no art,' said Bug, wiping Lediban 's arse with a progressive
editorial from the Journal which had been specially written for this
purpose.
Toward the end of
The Yawning Heights
the Thaw is over
("Ibanskian society expelled the elements which were alien to it, and
reverted to its course toward a monolithic homogeneity") and the best
men acquiesce to Party doctrines while the worst rise to new positions
of sodden prominence. Dauber himself recants and now declares the
works of his earlier artistic allies, Slanderer and Schizophrenic,
to
be
"only superficially serious," interesting to no one. Only Chatterer
objects:
'You 're wrong.... monstrously, offensively wrong. They did arouse
interest. That is why their authors were so speedily and unanimously
eliminated and why no one ever mentions their names.'
Utopia itself has been a masquerade: anti-Utopia, like a baboon
wearing a crown, is cheered as emperor. The pall of a death wish–
death of society, death of man-begins to throb through the book like
a muscle twitching in a corpse. Neurasthenic puts the situation ex-
