WRITERS IN EXILE
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became artificial , although I'm probably not being fair ; also Carson
McCullers . I think the Southern Renaissance is a revelation, because
it's an approach to harmony after disharmony , to tragic harmony, to
a harmonious sense of the world . The writer places himself some–
where next to God and is somehow resigned to the whole tragedy .
WILLIAM PHILLIPS : Can we hear from the non-Russians so that
this doesn't become a purely Russian session?
ERAZIM KOHAK : I was all set with a very clever answer about
Western authors: I would have named all Czech authors, because
they are all very much Western. One book that I would mention is
by a philosopher named Jan Patochka who was a student of Edmund
Husserl. After the war , he continued to study philosophy. He signed
the human rights declaration, was taken for interrogation, and was
interrogated until he died . I think his small book,
Heretical Essays in
the Philosophy of History,
is extremely valuable, because it has a sense
of the historic meaning of the West , of Europe, as a cultural reality.
The American authors we read, those who were translated ,
tended again to be of the older generation. I had an unfair advan–
tage, since I could read English, so I'm not typical. What we tended
to see in American literature was very much one side of our own
heritage.
If
you take the sense of the European heritage to be the
constant struggle between the affirmation of the sovereignty of indi–
vidual conscience and the cohesion of a community - the constant
tension between the liberty of the individual and the attempt to avoid
anarchy - we saw in America and in American letters very much the
affirmation of the irreducibility of the individual. We saw this in
Moby Dick.
And we also saw you coming to terms with the sense of
human cohesion - in the authors who were writing during the eco–
nomic crisis, in the translation of
Tortilla Flats.
(I've read this in En–
glish since, but I didn't think the English did justice to the Czech
original!) What we saw here was a country where humans still have
a certain unpretentious humanity.
The last thing that I will say is, I have read very little of recent
American literature . I pick it up, I start reading it, and I put it down .
Perhaps I'm getting too old. But what I'm seeing here is a people who
are becoming more and more absorbed with their own psychology.
An able fascination! I look at the incredibly Freudian novels that are
now being written: no longer the kind of earthy, confident humanity
that we saw in America, but rather a kind of problematic quest for
identity . Of late, I am more and more turning to Czech literature
