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PARTISAN REVIEW
a writer open to the idea of radical change, whichever of many recipes
he chooses. But the change can be implemented only by the state.
Thence, not the opposition to the state but fascination with the state
is perhaps the characteristic feature of the contemporary writer. And
if that love is often or mostly unhappy, it is not because there is a
lack of ardor on the part of the writer.
The writer's hostility is directed against the state if the state
does not offer a utopian promise, in other words, if it exists to per–
petuate the status quo of suffering and injustice. In the postutopian
areas this means the force of inertia, of immobility, making the state
"La chose,"
the thing. In preutopian or nonutopian areas this means
the state that refuses to intervene in the mechanisms of the market.
Let me change my topic here and say a few words on censor–
ship. Censorship is not only an affair of the state. Writers themselves
have proved in this century to be masters in silencing those of their
colleagues who trespass the tacitly accepted norms of behavior. Truth
about certain facts is avoided because it would sound crude, tactless
and harmful. Gyorgy Konrad spoke here of a
chiaroscuro
surrounding
the consequences of Yalta for half of Europe. But such examples of
not calling a spade a spade can be observed in many other cases, and
it is especially depressing when it is applied to blur the notion of the
writer's responsibility.
Innumerable millions of human beings were killed in this cen–
tury in the name of utopia - either progressive or reactionary, and
always there were writers who provided convincing justifications for
massacre.
It
is difficult to understand why the poetry of Ezra Pound
has been separated from his having extolled publicly the rrime of
genocide, while that poetry is permeated by his philosophy that log–
ically led to his actions. Pound hated capitalistic America in the
clutches of
usura,
as he termed it, and he looked for a utopian solu–
tion. To take another tack, readers of George Orwell's essays and
letters discover his loneliness in telling the truth about the Russian
totalitarianism system, as he was breaking a taboo of the majority of
the British intelligentsia. A classical case of a debate around writers'
self-imposed censorship was the controversy opposing Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus. Today we are still divided into two camps
- those who think Sartre was right and those who think Camus was
right. Recently I read, in a French translation, an article by a West
German literary critic glorifying Sartre for his assault on Camus,
but not mentioning what was really at stake. Camus's offense was
mentioning the existence of gulags. Sartre was concerned with injus-
