534
PARTISAN REVIEW
against oppression, against its dark means and manipulations-anti–
semitism included.
I have always believed in a double, complementary integrity: that the
writer should remain, in his work, faithful to the artistic criterion and, in
his social life, in the public arena, he should keep his moral civic fortitude
in confronting the traps of public life. This was never and nowhere easy.
It
wasn't easy, of course, in the communist byzantine East; it is not easy in
the new age of Western capitalism.
There are, of course, huge differences between a closed society, dis–
torted by terror, fear, and misery, and an open society, distorted by selfish
competition and trivial publicity, between an artificial, hypocritical collec–
tivism and a well-trained individualism. But it is sometimes amazing to
discover the hidden similarities between a society obsessed with lies and a
society obsessed with money. To contemplate the free man and the not
always happy carnival of the free market after you have known the captive
man in the dark carnival of tyranny, to think about the different forms
demagogy, cynicism, and bigotry take in a closed and in a free society–
this often proves to be a quite rewarding human experience.
Mter the defeat of fascism and the collapse of communism, the open
society itself is also undergoing, it seems, a deep crisis, a loss of coherence,
of decency, of generosity and grandeur. The need for an enemy (ethnic
enemy, ideological enemy, gender enemy, religious enemy) drives and
confuses people as well in today's global, capitalistic world.
Communitarian narcissism generates suspicion and cult worship; sec–
tarian formations sometimes present staggering similarities to the
authoritarian model. Yet blasphemy-so powerful a concept in the social–
ist canon and a driving force in demonizing difference in the socialist
society-can operate only in restricted areas and more or less isolated
groups in the free world.
At the macro level of an open and heterogeneous society, blasphemy
cannot resonate except in the form of scandal-scandal that is instantly
carnivalized through commercial promotion and reduced to a routine
product.
As the power of blasphemy has grown more negligible, so the field of
the carnival has become all the larger in the public arena. The television
audience's Pantagruelian consumption-the omnipresent and omnipotent
monster of trivialization-compresses the earthly Babel into a huge vil–
lage fair. "Televised" reality becomes a self-devouring "proto-reality"
without which the real world is not confirmed and therefore seems not
to exist.
