CZESLAW MILOSZ
15
have had the experience.
It happens that we may walk, watch, be tormented by our compassion
or anger, and suddenly realize that what we are seeing, all that reality, is
beyond words. That is, there is nothing about it in newspapers, books,
communiques, nothing in poetry, fiction, or pictures on the screen . From
reality which is homely, perceived in a most ordinary way, another one,
autonomous, enclosed in language, has come off. Astonished, we ask our–
selves: is it a dream? A fatamorgana? The fabric of signs of speech envelops
us like a cocoon and proves to be strong enough to make us doubt the tes–
timony of our senses.
Such an experience does not incline us favorably towards literature. It
compels us to ask for realism, which usually leads to pseudo-realism or for
a veracity nobody could bear. In the nineteenth century it was said about
the novel that it should be a "mirror carried on a highway" but "realis–
tic" novels lied without scruple, clearing from the field of vision subjects
recognized as undesirable or forbidden. The true London of nineteenth–
century capitalism hardly exists in the novel, except a few pages of
Dickens, but what that Babylon of misery and prostitution was, seen
through the eyes of a foreigner in 1862, we may learn from Dostoevsky's
Winter Notes On Summer Impressions.
The twentieth century brought a fictitious reality constructed by the
political will.
It
was as a screen painted with "scenes from life" to hide
what was going on in back. It was called socialist realism. Yet orders and
prohibitions of the State are only one of the possible causes of this divi–
sion into the seen and the described. The fabric of language has a constant
propensity to come off from reality , and our efforts to glue them togeth–
er are in most cases futile - yet absolutely necessary.
Mrs. Danvin
Before Charles Darwin published in 1859 his work
On the Origin oj
Species,
he had to hear many reproaches from his wife, a deeply religious
person, who could not accept his decision to send to the printer so nox–
ious a book.
- Charles, she would say, God has told us that He created man in His
image and likeness. He did not say that about the ant, the bird, or the ape,
or the dog or the cat. He placed man above everything alive and subject–
ed the earth to his dominion. By what right do you deprive of his dignity
a being that has the face of God and is equal to angels?
The husband, then, would answer that if he did not do it, Wallace
would, since he had hi t upon a similar idea.
