CZESLAW MILOSZ
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entrenched and stable that they compel the contemporary artist to utter
freshness and sensitivity.
What is this disdained journalistic writing? The journalistic writer is
a person who fights with his pen against something or someone. We
know at least several thousand good literary works which were written
against someone, and perhaps that, in fact, is the reason why they are
good and have endured. Even Dante derived great pleasure from plac–
ing his enemies in Hell. A journalistic element is present in virtually
every literary work to a greater or lesser degree, and only the writer who
has developed to perfection the disappearance of heart and liver in him–
self can get rid of it completely.
Perhaps then, in condemning journalistic elements in literature we
have in mind particular variants, those which are closest to us, culti–
vated over the course of, shall we say, the last hundred years? We feel
that the new artistic means, which arose in the laboratories of the adher–
ents of pure art, are in conflict with the flood of words flowing freely in
the works of the Romantics.
Poetic language has become as pictorial as the language of primitive
peoples, and how to introduce concepts into it without depriving it of
its conciseness is a real puzzle.
It
is easy for me to agree with the con–
demnation of journalistic writing in the name of such reasoning. But
why should we not admit that we are using the word "journalism" in
too narrow a sense? There are significant differences between the jour–
nalistic
Dismissal of the Greek Envoys
by the late sixteenth-century
poet Jan Kochanowski and a Romantic tirade. No one is telling us to
hew to the latter as a model. Rather, we shou ld deplore the fact that in
Poland whenever someone wants to speak about the so-called great
themes, he falls into the Romantic manner, which is supposed to be a
matter of faithfulness to tradition, but to a tradition broken off well
over a century ago .
r
think that the key to the future should be found in considerations
of artistic irony, persiflage, the dramatic forms of poetry.
If
I am going
to be met with the rebuke that I am calling for mockery and a light tone,
then there's really no reason to continue speaking. Artistic irony, as I
understand it, rests first of all on the author's abil ity to inhabit the skin
of various people and, when he writes in the first person, to speak as if
not he were speaking but a persona created by him. The essential mean–
ing of a work is thus encapsulated in the author's relation to the per–
sona. This relationship may vary from cautious approbation to
heart-felt negation and on to venomous negation-thousands of varia–
tions are possible; what is attacked directly eludes us and can often be
