STANISLAW BARANCZAK
For me , conscience, the individual conscience, does not have
the power that it has for him as far as saving the world. Don't we
see again and again that the conscience has almost no voice in
the matter? Does man kill or torture because he has come to the
conclusion that he has the right to do so? He kills because others
kill. He tortures because others torture . The most abhorrent
deed becomes easy if the road to it has been paved, and, for ex–
ample , in concentration camps the road to death was so well–
trodden that the bourgeois incapable of killing a fly at home ex–
terminated people with ease.
95
This, in turn, sounds disturbingly close to the premises of the
Marxist philosophy of man, and Gombrowicz takes pains to define
the differences between himself and the Marxists as clearly and un–
equivocally as possible. Even though he is instinctively repelled by
the horrific cruelty that results from any application of Marxist prin–
ciples to a society's life, he dismisses this emotional response as
philosophically irrelevant. Equally irrelevant in this sense are all the
other traditional reasons - conservative, religious, libertarian - for
condemning Marxism. What matters for Gombrowicz is the ques–
tion of intellectual honesty, of which Marxism is totally devoid . As a
philosophy which claims to relentlessly unmask and demystify
everything, its ultimate proof of honesty would be
an
attempt to un–
mask itself as well. This is, however, exactly what Marxism slyly
avoids by refusing to apply its formidable dialectical apparatus of
demystification to its own dialectic :
Let us catch them red-handed. Let us check the cards, how they
are being dealt here , and reveal the trick with which this entire
dialectics becomes a trap. This dialectic and liberating thinking
stops exactly at the gates of Communism: I am allowed to cast
aspersion on my own truths as long as I am on the side of
capitalism, but this same self-checking is supposed to cease the
minute I join the ranks of the revolution . Here dialectics sud–
denly gives way to dogma as a result of some astounding about–
face.
As we read these works, it may be useful to remember that they
were written in the mid-1950s. Who else in world literature except
this unknown Polish writer stranded in Argentina was then able to
achieve, solely on the strength of his own inexorable honesty in ap-
