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PARTISAN REVIEW
10.
Yes, from the viewpoint of an alien, one might comprehend the
proportions of human flights and falls. But at this point the deepest ,
most fundamental dilemma of the book appears . Among the many
absurdities of our civilization , the narrator discovers the most aston–
ishing one : instead of uniting rationally, humanity has ruptured it–
self into groups called nations , distinguishable only by the language
they use . This trifling difference has been the cause of bloody wars ,
imperial oppression, insurgencies, and uprisings.
And suddenly we must abandon the cosmic perspective; there
is no retreat from one's own earthly self. Konwicki's self is molded
from Lithuania and Poland, from their common and separate histo–
ries, from their suffering and hopes. At this point it becomes obvious
that not even the most intelligent alien will understand what our
freedom is and how people feel when deprived of it.
If
freedom did
not exist, it would be difficult to understand that the escape from the
absurd (which pushes us into the "highest form of Madogism-the
queue") should not be sought in naive expectations of miracles nor in
philosophical elevations but, ironically, in a domain which has known
so many absurdities, errors, failures, and betrayals . In other words,
a Polish writer - if he is not a blind nationalist - can see best that the
history of an oppressed nation abounds in irrationality. At the same
time, a Polish writer has more occasions to single out those situations
in which, against all odds, people have managed to conquer the ab–
surd and to create meaning. They are the unknown people who, in
Konwicki's words, "drowned in the sea of anonymity fulfilling their
tough human duty, people who, in the darkness of despair, barred
the roads against the floodwaters of evil, time, or history with their
own bones, who in pain and labor gave birth to me so that I could
shout as loud as I could, so that I could howl to the very ends of
heaven and earth, so that I could save myself and God."
To show those who fulfilled this "tough human duty," Konwicki
calls on history by way of two sudden and seemingly unmotivated
sub-plots set in 1863 . One story concerns Zygmunt Mineyko, the
leader of a handful of insurgents who disperse after the first shots are
fired . Mineyko himself is delivered by his compatriots into the hands
of a Russian gendarme. The other is about Traugutt, the dictator of
the failed uprising, who knows he has been defeated but, neverthe–
less, must fulfill his duties to the end . Both the minor insurgent and
the leader have lost, but in a sense they are both winners. When
