CZESLAW MILOSZ
27
an organizing idea. This idea does not have to reside within the writer's
head, because his epoch's air permeates him. The nineteenth century still
lived with the great hope of the rebirth of man. It was no accident that
I referred to utopian socialism, whose significance was enormous. To–
day's ideas of social justice promise everything that anyone might want,
but not that the oppressed will be liberated from the power of people–
things; they are therefore insufficiently exciting and their semi-paralysis
turns descriptions sour while they are still in embryonic form, since they
are inseparable from a sense of direction, of striving. An unseen law of
phenomena turns out to be more powerful here than the wishes of nu–
merous Western adherents of revolution, whose sense of reality appears to
be on the wane, since they are unable to gain even as much recognition
as their predecessors in the thirties:
There is in all these works a certain atmosphere of universal doom;
especially in
Ulysses,
with its mocking
odi-e{-al1lo
hodgepodge of the
European tradition, with its blatant and painful cynicism, and its
uninterpretable symbolism - for even the most painstaking analysis
can hardly emerge with anything more than an appreciation of the
multiple enmeshment of the motifs but with nothing of the purpose
and meaning of the work itself. And most of the other novels which
employ multiple reflections of consciousness also leave the reader
with an impression of hopelessness. There is often something con–
fusing, something hazy about them, something hostile to the reality
which they represent. We not infrequently find a turning away from
the practical will to live, or delight in portraying it under its most
brutal forms. There is hatred of culture and civilization, brought out
by means of subtle stylistic devices which culture and civilization have
developed, and often a radical and f,lnatical urge
to
destroy. Com–
mon to almost all of these novels is haziness, vague indefinability of
meaning: precisely the kind of un interpretable symbolism which is
also to be encountered in other forms of art of the same period.
Erich Auerbach,
Mil1lesis
[translated by Willard
ft.
Trask]
Auerbach's book about mimesis or the reflection of reality in Euro–
pean literature, beginning with the Greeks, was written in 1942-45 in Is–
tanbul, where the author, an emigre from Germany, happened to be liv–
ing. His above-quoted observations refer to the years before World War
Two. Since they are just as apt a characterization of postwar literature
up until the present (except that the features he noticed have become
even more obvious), we should not take his judgments lightly, nor those
of writers like him when they place the twentieth century under the sign
of a destructive movement that demonstrates its own continuity.
