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PARTISAN REVIEW
period, repeating the stilted phrases of official propaganda. Our hero
becomes a critic and a rebel, a star attraction in literary salons and at
theatrical opening nights, a bitingly witty polemicist, whose work is tol–
erated and confiscated in turn. Finally, he becomes an emigre. All of this
is recorded day by day-a tale to rival
Wilhelm Meister's Travels,
as well
as
The Confessions of a Child of the Century.
Without Kott's writings
it would be difficult to understand the bitter taste of this era, its fasci–
nation and its horror, its hopes and fears. But we need to remember that
they constitute a literary fiction, so that it makes no sense to check quo–
tations, dates, or names, to look for precision in the details or to correct
errors of fact. Kott's "human comedy" is a creation of his imagination.
Kott wrote more modestly about himself and his colleagues at
Kuznica.
In March
I945
he proclaimed in this aggressive Marxist
weekly,
History has become a public matter. History is taking place before
our eyes! The hierarchy of events is now visible. The great issues of
the Third Independent Republic must find expression in literature.
From Lodz and Krakow we must follow and transmit to our read–
ers the struggle that is being waged in the countryside, at the front,
in Warsaw. We must depict the mainstream of history.
To be in the mainstream was Julien Sorel's dream.
It
was the dream
of people who felt unsure of their position when the old regime was
decaying and when Napoleon and other outsiders were making spec–
tacular careers. The life stories of these people-although each was dif–
ferent-came to constitute
A Study of Customs of the Era .
Their
morals were appropriate to a period of massive upheavals. People who
had been marginalized and hunted as criminals, stalked like animals,
now landed on Mount Parnassus. They took revenge for years of degra–
dation and humiliation. They repeated the prayer of Daniel Defoe:
"May the Lord keep me from hunger, that I may not steal." They
dreamed the dream of Julien Sorel, who knew that "one must know
how to wear the uniform of one's era" and that "only the strong and the
cunning are victorious." The hero of Kott's "human comedy" is not,
however, "a common
arriviste
and small-time rascal." He wanted, like
Voltaire, to wage war on "ignorance, fanaticism, and obscurantism," to
battle against slavery and the Inquisition, against syphilis and the extor–
tion of the tax collectors, against the military dictatorship of the Jesuits
in Paraguay and the absolutist rulers of German principalities. Like
Diderot, he was excited by politics, even when writing about literature or
