726
PARTISAN REVIEW
rebels because of what happens to a union leader who has been jailed.
Carried away by his thirst for justice (one of the masked values), he
reports to the police about the homosexuality of an industrialist
whom his magical thinking makes him see as a symbol of evil. That
same thirst forces him on another day to emigrate to America in
order to leave behind a country, his own, where "there is no order."
Since
all
values hide behind masks,
anything
can take on the ap–
pearance of a value (the Union, the Police, America), and Esch feels
torn between two fanaticisms, the progressive and the reactionary,
between sympathy for the Salvation Army and pornography. His
quest, as violent as it is confused, is what Broch calls "Anarchy."
The term is not political but anthropological. It describes the
situation of man confronted by a world in which there are no values,
in which values have lost their
archi.
It is in this situation that Broch
formulates his grand paradox: man prides himself on his reason, his
pragmatism, even his cynicism, but in vain, because in reality he is
caught up in the
clockwork
of
the irrational.
In the space occupied by the
masked values (Esch's world), a thirst for justice becomes a blind,
murderous force that the cynicism of the political churches easily
manipulates. But that cynicism (Hugueneau's world) also lacks ra–
tionality; it is merely a will deprived of power, that is, the irrational
in all its purity. The writings of Broch, like those of Kafka, have
always seemed to me of a highly premonitory nature.
Despite the dazzling novelty of his vision of things, Broch does
not in fact correspond to the usual idea of what we call modernity.
He never identified modernity with an extreme subjectivization of
the noyel, and he never considered the effort to understand the world
that begins on the other side of the ego a waste. He was convinced
that modernity is not based on the flashy negation of some earlier
phase of an evolution but rather on the discovery of a previously
unknown facet of being. When speaking of his projects he would of–
ten use the term "gnoseological novel" or "polyhistory." For him the
novel is, above all, an act of cognition (of "gnosis"). As regards the
term "polyhistory": Broch did not define it as a mandate in the way a
Balzac or a Zola would- that is, to write about a social totality. He
was closer to Joyce's project: to make use of the totality of the devices
and styles found in the novel as a genre. Even so, his project was
slightly different. I would sum it up by saying that for him poetry,
philosophy, and science were insufficient in themselves to make up a
novel, but that the novel in itself was capable of including within
itself poetry, philosophy, and the human sciences. The novel con-
