438
PARTISAN REVIEW
self from the ennui. Therefore, not even love is a real escape, and
not even death-neither the death that seeks the hero (a coronary),
nor the death that the hero pursues at the end of the novel.
Should there be no refuge from the symbolic queue? Is there no
escape from the nonsense? There is. Or there might be . But ...
7.
In the meantime, news reaches us that the carp has been deliv–
ered . As if the pressure wasn't enough, the crowd tries to force its
way into the shop . Dantesque scenes take place in the bottleneck of
the single half of the door that is opened. (Ilf and Pietrov's law can be
applied to all Eastern European countries: When an architect plans
a number of entrances, only one, at best, is opened.) Cries and in–
sults fly in the air. One other aspect of the phenomenology of the
line: the participants push forward as though this could hasten their
access to the goods. Therefore, I push too. Besides, being pushed
from behind, I have little choice .
8.
There is an escape from Konwicki's line. Or rather, there is a
way to rise above the level of the line, rise in the most literal sense.
In a previous issue of
Zapis,
Lech Dymarski wrote about the "cosmic
perspective" adopted by the narrator to explain the rules governing
our planet and our civilization as though to an audience of intelligent
aliens who had strayed into our galaxy. Abandoned after the first
pages, this perspective might appear as a rather unmotivated literary
device. But in Konwicki's case it is not. The narrator acts as if he
were, despite the burden of his fifty years, the only man for whom
nothing is obvious: he is a man no longer surprised by anything who
suddenly decides to understand and explain everything anew, to get
down to the bedrock. This perspective appears in Konwicki's earlier
books as well.
It
so happens that it reveals itself most clearly in the
two novels which I consider- of course, not only for this reason - to
be Konwicki's best achievements prior to
The Polish Complex, Wniebo–
wstapienie (The Ascension)
and
Anthropos-Specter-Beast.
In both, the nar–
rator appears tabula rasa, as a person with a limited knowledge of
the world's rules . In both, this innocence is provided with a rational
explanation: the narrator of
Anthropos-Specter-Beast
is a child; and the
story of
Wniebowstapienie
is told by a man, who wakes in the center of
