24
PARTISAN REVIEW
twentieth-century literature, and in
The Secret Agent
(1907). What
symbolic titles! Let us recite them: the jungle, the iron heel, the city of
the yellow devil, the heart of darkness, the secret agent. Since such grim
forces as were described therein had led to the slaughter of the First
World War, one can hardly be surprised that writers from various
Western countries, raised on legends that remained in the wake of the
American Revolution and the French Revolution, enthusiastically
welcomed the Russian Revolution as the (final?) destruction of the
Bastille.
Regardless of its specific circumstances as a country that had gained
and defended its independence, Poland belonged to a system of linked
vessels; for example, the left-wing wave in America and Germany was
swelling in Poland precisely during the years from 1930 to 1933. I shall
leave aside the question of so- called convictions, because they are not the
issue here, although among the literati only a very few had any
"convictions." A more important issue is their grasp of reality. I was
filled with distaste during the rather short time that I produced social
poetry, because it is obvious that in these various collective movements,
whose participants beat the drum for each other, the poet betrays him–
self, out of pride, out of a need for recognition. They will walk right
past a good poem and not notice it, but give them a "theme" and
they'll respond immediately with shouts and bravos. Already at that time
a riddle had appeared that became more and more painful the further
along we moved into the twentieth century. If man is dehumanized and
diminished by social reality, is not his diminution confirmed by taking
him only and solely as a small part of that social reality? Whence the
dullness of all those works about "wrongs" that are, after all, so noble in
their intent? Many clamorous poems and not a few pages of comparable
prose were written in Poland and elsewhere at that time, but none of
this appears to have lasted. "Catastrophism" was an attempt at restoring
measure. A literary argument, the catastrophist poets' opposition to such
literary schools as Skamander or the Avant Garde, explains less in this
context than their renunciation of "social poetry"; their accusations,
which were never formulated as a theory, would have sounded like this:
You are preoccupied with reality but it is completely unreal, for you
keep on about your provincial world while everything is happening on a
planetary scale, the Apocalypse is imminent, and while you strive to re–
duce man to
homo economiws,
there is a hidden content in the historical
Apocalypse that we cannot comprehend. Perhaps a poem such as Jerzy
Zag6rski's "Ode on the Fall of the Pound" still belonged to social po–
etry, but there was more to it than just a prediction of the collapse of
the British Empire. The same poet's "The Coming of the Enemy" is a
surrealistic fairy tale about the advent of the Antichrist; the action takes
