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spirit of Voltaire, Hegel, and Marx-a eulogy to the rationality of His–
tory. There was also a eulogy to the rationality of Geography-the
people of the Home Army believed that "liberation would come from
the Allies...
.It
seemed to me this was simply a fantasy that people
wanted to believe in." Kott, however, knew that" liberation could only
come from the other direction." On the other hand, the occupation gave
him a fine sense of the absurd, of the perfect nonrationality of human
fate, of the Gombrowicz-like contest to make faces at the world. He
lived simultaneously in both these worlds-the world of Reason and the
world of the Absurd. When was he being sincere? Perhaps all the time.
Kott didn't want to die-that's why he rejected Conrad, his sense of
honor and morality, his notion of being true to oneself. He wrote that
this was "the heroism of the stupid. The heroism of a donkey pulling a
cart across a bridge full of land mines." And he added: "Conrad's ver–
sion of being true to oneself is that of the slave; a slave is someone who
obeys the master he despises, and is concerned only with his own inner
rectitude." The loyalty of a ship's captain is simply "blind obedience to
the great shipowners of the world." He was sincere when he wrote this.
And these were the kind of words needed by the Communist authorities
to destroy and defile the Home Army's mythology of resistance, honor,
and loyalty. These words were inscribed, then, in the Great Lie of the era
about "Home Army counterrevolution." Did he realize he was lying?
Our hero-narrator "is not a trickster. He does not lie intentionally,
and he forgets he is lying and is almost ready to believe everyone of his
words. He's in a fine mood, things are going well with him, people are
listening to him, and because of this his tongue unwinds and he chatters
away, ever more fluently. He bares his soul, he says what his heart dic–
tates, and lying in all sincerity, he shows himself as he really is.... "
Thus wrote Gogol, whom Kott cited.
It
wasn't Hegel who poisoned
Kott. He was poisoned by Gogol!
People tried to counter the challenge of totalitarianism with religious
faith and hope, with Conrad's principle of honor and loyalty, and also
with laughter and the absurd, the grotesque-tragic vision of Witkacy,
the wry face of Gombrowicz. One could counter the horror with a total
lack of seriousness by donning the mask of Harlequin and playing the
fool. Only Harlequin, Kott later remarked, manages to bring together
"humor and naIvete, cunning and madness." Was this a "captive mind,"
a case of reason infected by "Hegelian venom"? Not at all.
It
was rea–
son gone astray, seeking for a way to adapt.
It
needed a "face," an
expression to mimic that would allow it to survive. The mask of Diderot
and the grace of Harlequin, laughter instead of honor, the virtues of the
