BOOKS
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actly: "One generation and no one will understand Truth-teller any–
more. " Chatterer, the last surviving avatar of freedom, sees not the
slightest hope for a reversal of Soviet society's descent into a miasmic
nightmare. He decides to commit suicide to as to cease, at least, to
see "how the living are treating each other on earth."
And then , in a moment of final clarity he offers his last testament:
What is the foundation of the foundations of human existence? Alas,
the answer is a commonplace. It's been clear from the very start. Why
did I have to live my life through to be sure of it? I don't know. I
know only one thing: truth is the foundation of any truly human
existence. The truth about oneself. The battle for truth and against it
is the most ferocious and profound battle fought in society. And from
now on the level of the development of society from the point of view
of its humanity, will be defined by the degree of truth it allows.
Chatterer is right: the central conviction of the book
is
a common–
place, yet human history has consisted of forgetting that truth
is
at the
heart of human existence. Regarded from the point of view of its effect
upon the reader,
The Yawning Heights
is best understood not as a
novel , but as an education, a museum, an archive, a cathedral, a
gargantuan insistence on the Theory of Mistakes. Reading narrative
finion, after all, we always remain at a distance, merely suspending our
disbelief as the plot unfolds within characters. But to read
The
Yawning Heights
is to be educated by a text and absorbed into it. A text
so directed neither displays nor argues: it attacks mental processes
directly by unfolding within the reader's perceptions and obliging him
to face h is own easy compromises of self with "soc-ism" (the reverse of
individualism). Again and again, the reader is made to follow sham
thoughts-then to face them as his own, until he is forced to conclude
that a proper society does not derive from its modern idols: mathemati–
cal models , historicism, symbolic logic, linguistic paradigms, philo–
sophical idealism, poetic techniques, socio-mechanics, psychiatry,
politics, or economics. From these may be deduced nothing more than
a simulacrum of society, the masked ball from which all the other
distortions of human existence are projected. Only that organization
which is derived directly-and exclusively-from the individual's will
and moral principles may be called a real society. Anything less offers
merely a problem in control. Schizophrenic put the case very concisely:
And then a special kind of society is brought into being, in which
hypocrisy, oppression, corruption, waste, irresponsibility (individ–
ual and collective), shoddy work, boorishness, idleness, disinforma-
