Eastern Lights
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing EASTERN LIGHTS BY BARRY GEWEN The East European intellectual who settles in the West is different from other immigrants. Because his transition has not been voluntary in any...
...He is too ironic, too diffident—almost embarrassed —about his beliefs...
...Moreover, he is aware of the danger, and specifically dissociates himself from the 19th-century Romantics, who attempted to deal with the encroachments of science by retreating into irrationalism...
...A major satisfaction of Milosz' book is his radicalism, his willingness to pursue his ideas to their breaking point...
...This Cassandra, insisting on the truth while those around her preferred comforting lies, is an early feminist—"the first professional working woman in literature" says Wolf in one of the essays that follow...
...The book is a mosaic of idiosyncratic concerns, united by its author's perception of the overriding danger facing contemporary man—the scientific ethos that threatens to turn everything into lifeless mechanism...
...After a story where sanity rested with a woman considered unrealistic, the reader is left to wonder if we are modern Trojans, unwilling to believe our own Cassandras...
...Milosz chooses his forebears carefully: Besides Blake and Dostoyevsky, they include his cousin Oscar Milosz, Mickiewicz, Goethe, and Swedenborg...
...To the degree that modern science's deterministic, mathematical view of the universe, its positivism, extends its influence, the centrality and sanctity of the human being are diminished...
...Strikingly, he draws links between the escapist Romantics and the atheistical Modernists, whom he opposes for their capitulation to science and consequent despair...
...His problem is to find some ground to stand on...
...Milosz cautions in his Preface, "I gave free rein to my meditations and didn't try to reach anybody in particular...
...The United States, he declares in Visions from San Francisco Bay, is "the testing ground for all mankind," a nation of the uprooted in an age of global alienation...
...Because his transition has not been voluntary in any genuine sense (it is not the carrot of capitalist prosperity that sets him in motion but the stick of Communist oppression), he cannot wholly embrace his new country nor, in the normal pattern of immigration, bury his past through assimilation...
...Milosz may appear to be open to the accusation of religious mysticism...
...He continues to write in Polish to maintain his distance...
...The Charles Eliot Norton lectures that he delivered at Harvard in 1981, published under the title The Witness of Poetry, are an expression of his firm, if complex, commitment to the future...
...Against technology, Milosz poses imagination, against the general, the specific...
...More than once he cites Dostoyevsky's haunting choice of human freedom above all else, "even if it be shown that truth is on the side of scientific determinism...
...Another of the pieces, in the form of a diary, details Wolf's utter desperation at the prospect of nuclear war...
...Still, Milosz did issue his warning at the start...
...After leaving Poland, he settled in France and achieved a reputation with a book about the Communist experience, The Captive Mind, and a novel, The Seizure of Power...
...No one would ever call this flag-waving, yet Milosz is scarcely a cynic...
...and the discursive essays touch on several points of interest in literature and politics...
...But simply to list these names is to indicate the exoticism of The Land of Ulro for American readers...
...I hesitate: In spite of the Reagan Administration...
...It is not for the individual to fit into a scheme formulated by abstract science, inevitably a death warrant, but for science to fit into the individual's scheme...
...Although he frequently becomes a critic of the shallow, hedonistic world he has entered, his emergence from a Socialist future that decidedly does not work prevents him from joining with the Left...
...The novel, a novella really, is a demythologized version of the tale of the Trojan princess who prophesied the downfall of her city to the Greeks...
...Other emigres—Tom Stoppard may be an example —accept their exile and find refuge in art for art's sake...
...Since he is a highly cultivated man of letters, a type that commonly turns up its nose at American society in general and California's surf- and skateboard culture in particular, his choice of a home is little short of remarkable...
...He has little patience for the retreat of thought into an ivory tower, and he worries that as a maturing U.S...
...A more interesting case is the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czes-law Milosz...
...Wolf connects the Minoans to Troy, and goes on to create a world in which the Greek triumph signals the beginning of male dominance...
...He has not promised more than he delivers, and is entitled to the last word: "I would have this book confirm the awareness of our common fate, wherever we live on our planet...
...Milosz' new book, The Land of Ulro (Farrar, Straus & Gi-roux, 287 pp., $17.95), writtenin 1977 but only now translated into English, may be read as his attempt to construct a foundation for that hope...
...His prose is not that of a mystic...
...But the book is weighed down by its feminism...
...Milosz can be as hard on the imbecilities of American life as any patrician intellectual...
...Ten years later, in 1960, he moved to the United States, becoming a Professor of Slavic Literatures at Berkeley...
...The disintegration we are witnessing cannot last forever, he insists, "and here is where hope enters...
...Milosz is doubly an immigrant...
...Much of his writing is a plea for optimism of a peculiar, knife-edge kind that he calls at one point "ecstatic pessimism...
...Yes, since I see no other way out: In spite of it...
...She, too, sees a Europe in decline...
...Armed with nothing but the intractable desire to allow my children and grandchildren to live, I conclude that the sensible course may be the one that holds out absolutely no hope: unilateral disarmament...
...Perversely, its flaws are advantages :' 'It truly is a privilege to live in California and every day to drink the elixir of perfect alienation...
...He takes his title from William Blake, who saw the world in a grain of sand and gave the name "Ulro" to the "realm of spiritual pain" where man is reduced to a mere number, worse, where man accepts himself as a mere number...
...If he is a Solzhenitsyn, the most extreme example of an involuntary immigrant, he may, an occasional jeremiad notwithstanding, turn his back completely on his adopted nation, focusing all of his energies on the salvation of his homeland in the hope of an eventual return...
...acquires the culture of Europe, it will accept as well the nihilism that lurks behind much 20th-century art...
...Neither does Western conservatism, increasingly a movement devoted to 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism, hold any allure for him, except perhaps in the undiluted vehemence of its anti-Communism...
...Milosz' paths to his highly abstruse subject matter are no less foreign than the subject matter itself, and just how much is actually communicated by this volume is a genuine question...
...Though Wolf warns against sectarianism—"autonomy is a task for everyone"—she believes that women have been enslaved to men for 3,000 years...
...His exile, therefore, is unusual, the second part of it being self-chosen...
...She, too, tries to walk that thin line of criticizing the positivist ethos without falling into irrationalism...
...There are masters and slaves aplenty on both sides of the gender gap...
...If a real challenge to Darwinian evolution, with its implicit repudiation of human consciousness and human will, is ever mounted, it will come not from semiliterate fundamentalists but from such quarters as these...
...But Milosz is persuaded that his native Europe, in its enervated state, is the past: "The museum is not what counts...
...One of his favorite analogies is to Rome in its decline, awaiting the revolution of Christianity...
...The charge will not stick...
...We have heard much of this before, often from other Central Europeans...
...For her, however, there is the safety net of feminism, and when she complains about onesided rationalism, it is with the qualifying adjective "male...
...Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 305 pp., $ 17.95) stands at the juncture of her involvement in the women's movement and her fear of a nuclear holocaust...
...Readers who stay with this difficult and unyielding work at least as far as the dense discussion of Adam Mickiewicz' theory of metempsychosis will understand the reason for the warning...
...Christa Wolf, the East German novelist, has not emigrated to the West, but many of her concerns are similar to those of Milosz...
...even if we apply modes of thinking stemming from different traditions, we comment upon one universal civilization...
...For, even assuming that the human race is more resourceful than is generally supposed, it can begin to extricate itself from the traps it has itself constructed only when forced to by some ultimate affliction...
...He has been vindicated by the grave consequences of the antinomy between science and the world of values...
...Milosz is convinced that the same stark alternatives confront us today: "We cannot treat Dostoyevsky's religious thought as a relic of the past...
...The fiction is a bit of a lark, with the traditional male heroes —Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon—cast as brutes and incompetents...
...This is not a view that commends itself to common sense or to anyone who has watched the ongoing battle between the sexes...
...One is reminded of Nietzsche's admonition that we must pass through decadence to conquer it...
...Two of these commentaries explain the genesis of the story, describing the author's trip to Greece and her pursuit of a suggestion by two American friends that the ancient Minoan civilization on Crete was a matriarchy...
...It is an intensely personal volume, a private testament befitting an exile who is obliged to wage a lonely struggle for coherence outside of the politics of the Cold War, without the solaces of nationalism, ideology, art, or organized religion (though Milosz is a Roman Catholic of sorts) to fall back on...
...Not every victim has a name that ends in "a...
Vol. 67 • October 1984 • No. 18
