276
PARTISAN REVIEW
The lack
of
problematics of the problem
This batch of real problems bore just one fruit, and even that did not
affect art directly, only its situation. The situation of art, its point of view,
its place in society, even the role it was expected to play, its business, was
unequivocal. The writer had to take a heroic stand in the face of the gov–
ernment, hand in hand with the reader, of course, who in turn showered
the writer with love, at times even with misguided respect.
The problem
of
lying
We have said above that in a dictatorship there is no time. It is still,
frozen. Let us now contradict our metaphor, because, let's face it, time
did pass, one way or another. (Or if it didn't, it dragged itself along, or
went round and round the
present.)
In the meantime, coded speech be–
came less and less a matter of course, and the complicity too seemed
increasingly dubious: who or what are we hiding from when everybody
knows everything, the censors understand the oblique references better
than the readers; besides, you can't tell any more what refers to what. The
secret is so blatantly out in the open that it is shameful.
In short, silence, the invigorating, at times surrealistically lovely and
exclusive
(1)
chance for not speaking about
it,
turned into the voluntary
suppression of speech, while the resplendent and often-sung hide-and–
seek of semblance and reality became an obscene shifting in place. And as
we know, it's an outhouse the suppression of speech belongs in, not a
bulwark. A soft-core dictatorship makes men insatiable. They start asking
questions as if, as far as society is concerned, it was all right. Naturally,
they cannot ask these questions openly. But once they have asked them
inside,
of themselves, what they had before will no longer satisfY them.
We have grown sick and tired of the answers of the sixties and seventies
which led to the creation of the East European grotesque.
If everything was a lie, and we saw plainly enough that everything
was a lie, it was not the grotesque fantasticality of it that startled us. After
all, it really is spectacular when everything is a lie down to the last nail,
from our father's eyebrow to our
gulyas
soup, as we are fond of saying.
Rather, it was the awkward question, Where do we fit into all this? In a
world of wholesale lies, are we not liars ourselves? Can a word, a sen–
tence, a book be true in and of itself? If the reader is dishonest, what
would make the writer honest? We had our suspicions all along that be–
hind our courage there lurked a quantity of fear. But in the lukewarm
world which permitted us to go to the West once a year, etc., etc.(!),
how could anything else have existed besides fear, hidden, dismissed from
one's thoughts?
