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PARTISAN REVIEW
suffice as a symbol. The reader has little need for the banal state–
ment that for forty years we Poles have been suffering "temporary
difficulties." Konwicki's trick is more treacherous. His line is not a
line in front of a food store but a jewelry shop, a "Jubiler." The heroes
await not a shipment of butter or meat but a delivery of gold rings
from Russia, investments for their devaluating zlotys. A line for gold
- an everyday scene in a socialist country! Thus the emphasis shifts
from the banality of an economic criticism of the system to a much
more interesting insight - in the artistic sense - into the system's
most significant feature - absurdity, the Great Nonsense which con–
stitutes the main theme of the novel.
3 .
I look at the queue in which I am standing, and, as always on
such occasions, I feel anxiety mixed with anger. I was 147th, but
what number am I now? The line has swollen; we are no longer
standing in single file. The queuers are joined by their friends and
the friends of their friends . Always the same. Nothing ever changes
in the phenomenology of a line. Take the elderly gentleman less than
twenty places in front of me who exclaims with prewar righteousness
and postwar helplessness , "But please, ladies and gentlemen, we
can't let this get out of hand. We must organize ourselves!" Even he
is a constant in a queue .
It
seems as though I've heard his words
many times before. And this old busybody right behind me who says
loudly and bitterly, "Yeah, get yourself organized, Grandpa. There
won't be enough goods anyway." She too never fails to appear on
such occasions. And, as always, the line responds in unison with
muted laughter- a laughter of people who at once realize the absur–
dity of their lives . Briefly this sad laughter unites them, hostile and
embroiled, in one big brotherhood.
4 .
And here we have our second reason: the line in Konwicki's
novel is more than a symbol of the Great Nonsense; it is both a
model and a cross section of a society approaching the condition of
"Madogism," a term coined by Alexander Zinoviev (a Soviet logician
who, forced by illogical reality , became a writer of satire) . In
Zinoviev's
The Yawning Heights,
the ominous sentence is uttered,
"Queuing is the highest possible form of Madogism ." Well, things
