by Susan Sontag
Zagajewski, himself no longer young and now a teacher of American students, is committed to not replicating, in his turn, that kind of despair and incomprehension. Nor is he content to write off an entire older Polish generation of intellectuals and artists, his generation’s “enemy”—the true believers and those who just sold out—for turpitude and cowardice: they weren’t simply devils, any more than he and his friends were angels. As for those “who began by serving Stalin’s civilization” but then changed, Zagajewski writes: “I don’t condemn them for their early, youthful intoxication. I’m more inclined to marvel at the generosity of human nature, which offers gifted young people a second chance, the opportunity for a moral comeback.”
At the heart of this assessment is the wisdom of the novelist, a professional of empathy, rather than that of a lyric poet. (Zagajewski has written four novels, none as yet translated into English.) The dramatic monologue “Betrayal” in Two Cities begins:
Why did I do that? Why did I do what? Why was I who I was? And who was I? I am already beginning to regret that I agreed to grant you this interview. For years I refused; you must have asked me at a weak moment or in a moment of anxiety … What did that world look like? The one you were too late to get to know. The same as this one. Completely different.
That everything is always different … and the same: a poet’s wisdom. Actually, wisdom tout court.
Of course, history should never be thought of with a capital H. The governing sense of Zagajewski’s memory-work is his awareness of having lived through several historical periods, in the course of which things eventually got better. Modestly, imperfectly—not utopianly—better. The young Zagajewski and his comrades in dissidence had assumed that communism would last another hundred, two hundred years, when, in fact, it had less than two decades to go. Lesson: evil is not immutable. The reality is, everyone outlives an old self, often more than one, in the course of a reasonably long life.
Another Beauty is, in part, a meditation on easing the clamp of history: liberating the self from “the grimaces and caprices” of history. That should not be so hard in the less flagrantly evil public world that has come into being in Poland since 1989. But institutions may be more easily liquidated than a temperament. Zagajewski’s temperament (that is, the dialogue he conducts with himself) is rooted in an era when heroism was at least an option, and ethical rigor still something admired and consecrated by the genius of several national literatures. How to negotiate a soft landing onto the new lowland of diminished moral expectations and shabby artistic standards is the problem of all the Central European writers whose tenacities were forged in the bad old days.
The maturing that Zagajewski chronicles can be described as the relaxing of this temperament: the finding of the right openness, the right calmness, the right inwardness. (He says he can only write when he feels happy, peaceful.) Exaltation—and who can gainsay this judgment from a member of the generation of ’68?—is viewed with a skeptical eye. Hyperemphatic intensity holds no allure. His end of the religious spectrum does not include any notion of the sacred, which figures centrally in the work of the late Jerzy Grotowski and the theatre center in Gardzienice led by Wlodzimierz Staniewski. While the sacralecstatic tradition is still alive in Polish theatre—but then theatre, especially this kind of theatre, is compulsorily collective—it has no place in contemporary Polish literature. Another Beauty is suffused with the humility of a spiritual longing that precludes frenzy, and envisages no large gestures of sacrifice. As Zagajewski notes: “The week isn’t made up only of Sundays.”
Some of his keenest pages are descriptions of happiness, the everyday happiness of a connoisseur of solitary delights: strolling, reading, listening to Beethoven or Schumann. The “I” of Another Beauty is scrupulous, vulnerable, earnest—without a jot of self-protective irony. And neither Zagajewski nor this reader would wish it otherwise. Irony would come at the cost of so much pleasure. “Ecstasy and irony rarely meet in the world of art,” Zagajewski observes. “When they do it’s usually for the purposes of mutual sabotage; they struggle to diminish each other’s power.” And he is unabashedly on the side of ecstasy.
These descriptions are tributes to what produces happiness, not celebrations of the receptive self. He may simply describe something he loves, or quote a favorite poem: the book is a sampling of appreciations and sympathies. There are penetrating sketches of admired friends such as Adam Michnik, a beacon of resistance to the dictatorship (who while in jail wrote about the poet Zbigniew Herbert, among others, in a book he titled From the History of Honor in Poland); there is a reverential salute to the ancient doyen of Polish émigrés in Paris, the painter, writer, and heroic alumnus of Soviet prison camps Józef Czapski. L’enfer, c’est les autres. No, it is others who save us, Zagajewski declares in the poem that gives the book its title and serves as its epigraph.
Here is “Another Beauty” in the new version by the book’s translator, Clare Cavanagh:
We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
This is why I pause: which word
to use, you or he. Each he
betrays some you, but
calm conversation bides its time
in others’ poems.
And here it is as it appeared in 1985 in Tremor: Selected Poems, Zagajewski’s first collection of poems in English, translated by Renata Gorczynski, where it is entitled “In the Beauty Created by Others”:
Only in the beauty created
by others is there consolation,
in the music of others and in others’ poems.
Only others save us,
even though solitude tastes like
opium. The others are not hell,
if you see them early, with their
foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams.
That is why I wonder what
word should be used, “he” or “you.” Every “he”
is a betrayal of a certain “you” but
in return someone else’s poem
offers the fidelity of a sober dialogue.
A defense of poetry and a defense of goodness, or, more exactly, of good-naturedness.
Nothing could take the reader in a more contrary direction to today’s cult of the excitements of self than to follow Zagajewski as he unspools his seductive praise of serenity, sympathy, forbearance; of “the calm and courage of an ordinary life.” To declare “I believe in truth!” and, in another passage, “Goodness does exist!” (those exclamation points!) seems, if not Panglossian—one American reviewer detected a touch of Panglossian uplift in the book—then at least quixotic. This culture offers few current models of masculine sweetness, and those we already possess, from past literature, are associated with naïveté, childlikeness, social innocence: Joe Gargery in Great Expectations, Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. Zagajewski’s persona in Another Beauty is anything but innocent in that sense. But he has a special gift for conjuring up states of complex innocence, the innocence of genius, as in his heartrending portrait-poem “Franz Schubert: A Press Conference.”
THE TITLE MAY MISLEAD. Another Beauty makes clear at every turn that, worshipper of greatness in poetry and other arts that he is, Zagajewski is not an aesthete. Poetry is to be judged by standards still higher: “Woe to the writer who values beauty over truth.” Poetry must be protected from the temptations to arrogance inherent in its own states of elation.
Of course, both beauty and truth seem like frail guideposts left over from a more innocent past. In the delicate negotiation with the present which Zagajewski conducts on behalf of the endangered verities, nostalgia would count as a deficit of argument. Still, even absent the old certainties and license to perorate,
he is pledged to defending the idea of “sublime” or “noble” achievement in literature—assuming, as he does, that we still need the qualities in art that are praised by such now virtually unsayable words. Zagajewski’s most eloquent, summative defense is “The Shabby and the Sublime,” an address he delivered at a Dutch university in 1998 which posed the pseudo-naïve question: Is literary greatness still possible?
The belief in literary greatness implies that the capacity for admiration is still intact. When admiration is corrupted, that is, made cynical, the question as to whether greatness is possible simply vanishes. Nihilism and admiration compete with each other, sabotage each other, struggle to diminish each other’s power. (Like irony and ecstasy.)
Disheartened though he is by “the mutation downward of European literature,” Zagajewski declines to speculate about what has given the advantage to subjectivism and the revolt against “greatness.” Perhaps those brought up on the fierceness of state-administered mediocrity find it hard to be as indignant as they might be about the extent to which mercantilist values (often sporting the mask of “democratic” or populist values) have sapped the foundations of the sublime. “Soviet civilization,” a.k.a. communism, was a great conservative force. The cultural policies of communist regimes embalmed the old, hierarchical notions of achievement, seeking to confer a noble pedigree on propagandistic banalities. In contrast, capitalism has a truly radical relation to culture, dismantling the very notion of greatness in the arts, which is now most successfully dismissed by the ecumenical philistinism of both cultural progressives and cultural reactionaries as an “elitist” presumption.
Zagajewski’s protest against the collapse of standards has nothing analytical about it. Yet surely he understands the futility (and indignity) of simply denouncing the collapse. Orphaned pieties overheat sometimes: “Without poetry, we’d hardly be better than the mammals.” And many passages assert a familiar dismay, especially when he succumbs to the temptation to see our era as uniquely degraded. What, he inquires rhetorically, would “the great, innocent artists of the past, Giotto or van Eyck, Proust or Apollinaire, have done if some spiteful demon had set them down in our flawed and tawdry world”? Don’t know about Giotto or van Eyck; but Proust (d. 1922) and Apollinaire (d. 1918) innocent? I should have thought the Europe in which that colossal, senseless slaughter called World War I took place was, if anything, a good deal worse than “flawed and tawdry.”
The idea of art as the beleaguered vehicle of spiritual value in a secular age should not have been left unexamined. Nevertheless, Zagajewski’s utter absence of rancor and vindictiveness, his generosity of spirit, his awareness of the vulgarity of unremitting complaint and of the self-righteous assumption of one’s own cultural superiority, mark off his stance from that of the usual professional mourners of the Death of High Culture, such as the ever portentous George Steiner. (Once in a while he slips into facile assertions of the superiority of the past over the present, but even then he is never grandiose or self-aggrandizing: call it Steinerism with a human face.)
Inveterately prescriptive, occasionally sententious, Zagajewski is too shrewd, too respectful of common or ordinary wisdom, not to see the limits of each of the positions that surround and make sense out of his abiding passions. One can be elevated, deepened, improved by works of art. But, Zagajewski cautions, the imagination can become one of its own enemies “if it loses sight of the solid world that cannot be dissolved in art.”
Because the book is notational, juxtapositional, it is possible for Zagajewski to entertain quite contradictory assessments. What is valuable is how divided Zagajewski is, as he himself acknowledges. The reflections and the stories in Another Beauty show us a subtle, important mind divided between the public world and the claims of art, between solidarity and solitude; between the original “two cities”: the Human City and the City of God. Divided, but not overthrown. There is anguish, but then serenity keeps breaking through. There is desolation and, as well, so many fortifying pleasures supplied by the genius of others. There was scorn, until caritas chimed in. There is despair, but there is, just as inexorably, consolation.
[2001]
Writing Itself
On Roland Barthes
The best poetry will be rhetorical criticism …
—WALLACE STEVENS (in a journal of 1899)
I rarely lose sight of myself.
—PAUL VALÉRY, Monsieur Teste
TEACHER, MAN OF LETTERS, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean autobiographer … of all the intellectual notables who have emerged since World War II in France, Roland Barthes is the one whose work I am most certain will endure. Barthes was in full flow, incessantly productive, as he had been for over three decades, when he was struck by a van as he started across a street in Paris in early 1980—a death felt by friends and admirers to be excruciatingly untimely. But along with the backward look of grief comes the awareness that confers upon his large, chronically mutating body of writing, as on all major work, its retroactive completeness. The development of Barthes’s work now seems logical; more than that, exhaustive. It even begins and falls silent on the same subject—that exemplary instrument in the career of consciousness, the writer’s journal. As it happens, the first essay Barthes ever published celebrates the model consciousness he found in the Journal of André Gide, and what turned out to be the last essay published before he died offers Barthes’s musings on his own journal-keeping. The symmetry, however adventitious, is an utterly appropriate one, for Barthes’s writing, with its prodigious variety of subjects, has finally one great subject: writing itself.
His early themes were those of the freelance partisan of letters, on the occasions afforded by cultural journalism, literary debate, theatre and book reviews. To these were added topics that originated and were recycled in seminars and from the lecture platform, for Barthes’s literary career was run concurrently with a (very successful) academic one, and in part as an academic one. But the voice was always singular, and self-referring; the achievement is of another, larger order than can be had even by practicing, with thrilling virtuosity, the most lively and many-tracked of academic disciplines. For all his contributions to the would-be science of signs and structures, Barthes’s endeavor was the quintessentially literary one: the writer organizing, under a series of doctrinal auspices, the theory of his own mind. And when the current enclosure of his reputation by the labels of semiology and structuralism crumbles, as it must, Barthes will appear, I think, as a rather traditional promeneur solitaire, and a greater writer than even his more fervent admirers now claim.
HE ALWAYS WROTE full out, was always concentrated, keen, indefatigable. This dazzling inventiveness seems not just a function of Barthes’s extraordinary powers as a mind, as a writer. It seems to have almost the status of a position—as if this is what critical discourse must be. “Literature is like phosphorous,” he says in his first book, which came out in 1953, Writing Degree Zero; “it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die.” In Barthes’s view, literature is already a posthumous affair. His work affirms a standard of vehement brilliance that is indeed one ideal of a cultural moment which believes itself to be having, in several senses, the last word.
Its brilliance aside, Barthes’s work has some of the specific traits associated with the style of a late moment in culture—one that presumes an endless discourse anterior to itself, that presumes intellectual sophistication: it is work that, strenuously unwilling to be boring or obvious, favors compact assertion, writing that rapidly covers a great deal of ground. Barthes was an inspired, ingenious practitioner of the essay and the anti-essay—he had a resistance to long forms. Typically, his sentences are complex, comma-ridden and colon-prone, packed with densely worded entailments of ideas deployed as if these were the materials of a supple prose. It is a style of exposition, recognizably French, whose parent tradition is to be found in the tense, idiosyncratic essays published between the two world w
ars in the Nouvelle Revue Française—a perfected version of the NRF’s house style which can deliver more ideas per page while retaining the brio of that style, its acuteness of timbre. His vocabulary is large, fastidious, fearlessly mandarin. Even Barthes’s less fleet, more jargon-haunted writings—most of them from the 1960s—are full of flavor; he manages to make an exuberant use of neologisms. While exuding straight-ahead energy, his prose constantly reaches for the summative formulation; it is irrepressibly aphoristic. (Indeed, one could go through Barthes’s work extracting superb bits—epigrams, maxims—to make a small book, as has been done with Wilde and Proust.) Barthes’s strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure. A method of condensed assertion by means of symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries and complementarities of situations or ideas—their design, their shape. Like a markedly greater feeling for drawings than for paintings, a talent for aphorism is one of the signs of what could be called the formalist temperament.