386
PARTISAN REVIEW
They wanted to reveal the inner workings of History. But History
isn't just inner workings, and morality isn't just a hypocritical mask of
high-mindedness concealing a network of dirty interests and shabby
behavior. The attack on the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy gave rise
to a specific alliance between the elite and the rabble. The rabble, too,
hates the hypocritical world in which it has been deprived of privileges
and is looked down on. According to Hannah Arendt, "The alliance
between the elite and the rabble could be explained by the unfeigned
delight that the elite took in the rabble's destruction of anything con–
sidered decent." An apt example is provided by the fate of Brecht's
The
Threepenny Opera,
which portrayed gangsters as respectable business–
men and businessmen as gangsters. The rebellious elite applauded the
play for its courageous and bitter irony: "exposing hypocrisy was such
irresistible fun ." Nevertheless, notes Arendt, when "the rabble greeted
this playas signifying artistic approval of gangsters, the irony disap–
peared." Furthermore, "the only political result of Brecht's revolution
was to encourage everyone to reject the inconvenient pressures of
hypocrisy and to adopt openly the standards of the rabble."
Quite early on, Kott discovered-albeit from a novel perspective–
the ambiguity contained in Andre Gide's writings. Lafcadio was a dan–
gerous rebel, although Kott was equally irritated by Gide's anti-Soviet
stance. He didn't detect the ambiguity inherent in his own stance: his
hero-narrator, a Voltairean-Bolshevik, "dug his own grave" when he
rejected Conrad and Malraux, Kisielewski and Golubiew, and thus
paved the way for cultural barbarism and vulgar philistinism.
Years later, in
1971,
Kott came to see this:
Among the titans, artists, and demons, scoundrels and poseurs are
always lurking. The scoundrels are young and of the people. They
can be divided into two groups: the metaphysical and the ordinary.
The metaphysicals resort
to
cruelty and meanness to drown out the
mystery of life. The ordinary scoundrels want to have money and
women,
to
use the world and take charge. They throw their weight
around and have absolutely no inhibitions. They pretend
to
be
meek and mild in order
to
worm their way in everywhere. Edek in
Mrozek's
Tango,
a modern-day Fortinbras who kills a modern-day
Hamlet with a blow of his fist, is from the same family as all of
Witkiewicz's common scoundrels. The poseurs-gigolos and petty
crooks-sometimes pretend to be artists and are ready to provide
whatever service might be called for, no matter how despicable.
