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always a mask. When you're wearing a mask, it's difficult for people to
see your face.
The sanctimonious hypocrite is a mask, but does Tartuffe have a
real face? He is not who he pretends to be, and he pretends to be
someone he is not. He is an impostor, but what will happen if he
dissembles perfectly? He wears a mask, but what if he never takes
it off? A perfect hypocrite is a living contradiction: a person who
has become the role he plays. He no longer has a face; the mask has
become fixed to his face.
This is a kind of warning that Kott issued to himself. He was constantly
changing his mask, sometimes from necessity and sometimes because he
wanted to. There was a lot of "affectation and desire to please" in this,
but he never ceased being sincere in his own way. "The strangest thing
about him is that all his faces, all his masks are simultaneously genuine
and fake, that on the surface they don't fit together, they are incoherent
and in each of them there is a fragment of himself. Perhaps taken
together they constitute a whole epoch and its style." This sounds like
an apt description of our hero-narrator. In fact, this is Kott writing
about Ignacy Krasicki.
Kott utters the most fundamental truths as though in passing, always
concealed and encoded-as in Juliusz Slowacki's reflections on Poland
in his letters to his mother. He refused to admit to himself that, in an era
of enthusiasm for Progress, Reason, and Revolution, he believed in the
rule of an enlightened elite over the unreasoning, ignorant, and reac–
tionary Polish population. In this lay the greatest sin of
Kuznica:
they
wanted to bring enlightenment by force, under cover of dictatorship and
the Red Army. They understood all the pitfalls of nationalist mysticism,
but they didn't understand the close link between Voltairean reason and
the Jacobin guillotine. As for communism-they didn't want to under–
stand it. They knew the bourgeois hypocrisy of the
I930S
and wanted
to demystify it, to tear the mask from its face and reveal it for what it
was. All of Kott's writings, the whole of the intelligentsia's settling of
accounts, were focused on this unmasking. "The aim of the most varied
and changing constructs was always to show official history to be a
joke," wrote Hannah Arendt, "to demonstrate the existence of a sphere
of hidden influences, in light of which the observable historical reality
that can be followed and known is nothing but a facade erected for the
sole purpose of fooling people."
