Keeping a Nation in Line
An Eastern European writer does not have to look far to find his subject. The subject, most often, chooses him. In Poland, the Second World War, the country's turbulent history, the conditions created by an artificially imposed and often intolerably oppressive system—these are the given, the almost inevitable, matters which an author must confront if he is to understand his own and his countrymen's condition. They are matters which have preoccupied—even obsessed—Tadeusz Konwicki, one of Poland's eminent and more difficult writers. in his previous novels, such as "The Dreambook for Our Time,"… he treated "the Polish question"—or "the Polish complex"—with gingerly indirectness, often through fragments of personal and veiled memories. [In "The Polish Complex"], he approaches it head on, with full philosophical steam and not an ounce of rage held back. The result is a novel that has the energy and the weaknesses of obsession—and that did not pass the Polish censors.
At times the novel comes close to being a tract. But it's a powerful tract—an impassioned, furious polemic on Poland's impossible condition. Konwicki, who continues to live in Poland, forgoes all the techniques of coding—allegory, symbolism, allusion—that Polish writers critical of the system have been forced to resort to. He writes like a man who has nothing to lose—and who wants to use that freedom for the primary and urgent task of speaking the raw, unmediated truth.
But "The Polish Complex" is also a comedy of manners. The entire present-time action takes place in that most ubiquitous of Polish institutions, the queue. This one has formed on the day before Christmas, in front of a Warsaw jewelry store where a shipment of gold rings from the Soviet Union is supposed to arrive. The queue is made up of a motley crew of ordinary citizens, most of them intent upon pulling off some small con in the perennial Polish game of outwitting the system. There's a woman who feigns old age to get a better place in line; another who, under her peasant garb, is wearing a caracul coat and who, from her shopping bag, unearths several legs of veal for sale; there's a Government "stoolie"; a vaguely opportunist student; and a French anarchist who has come to Poland because he wants to dedicate himself to the revolution—any revolution that might come along. The line also contains three more important characters: Tadeusz Konwicki, a well-known author and the novel's narrator; Kojran, the narrator's pursuer and shadow self, who during the war fought in the same partisan resistance organization and was supposed to carry out a death sentence imposed on Konwicki by his former comrades when he changed political allegiance; and Duszek, another stoolie and Kojran's pursuer, part of whose task, it is hinted, has been to torture Kojran, the old anti-Communist. Waiting in line, in this novel, means in one sense taking one's place in the chain of victimization and oppression.
In spite of such a divisive past and a fractious present, the customers achieve a kind of grudging, sardonic camaraderie. They make wisecracks, fight, taunt Konwicki for being a boring and a pessimistic writer; Duszek delivers himself of such maxims on the Polish character as "A Pole gets sleepy when he thinks," or "When a Pole complains, he feels better right away." The electricity in the store goes off; a group of Soviet tourists arrive and are allowed to barge in ahead of the others; instead of the gold rings, a shipment of Soviet samovars is delivered.
Konwicki treats these vignettes of the tawdry daily reality with a salty, intimate, shrewd, colloquial humor that is, unfortunately, almost untranslatable....
(This entire section contains 1245 words.)
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It is a humor that he sees as intrinsic to Polishness: "In our country tragedy often walks hand in hand with buffoonery," he writes. "In this I see our strength. I love that ambiguous consanguinity, that risky symbiosis, that genius of a people enchanted in two directions."
The tragedy is given its due through essayistic set pieces in which Konwicki ruminates, sometimes with detachment, sometimes with impatience and a baffled desperation, on his own and his country's human condition. The narrator who is feeling the symptoms of a heart attack, is beset by nagging guilts—perhaps for having participated in a fratricidal conflict between the Home Army partisans and the indigenous Communist guerrillas toward the end of World War II; perhaps for temporarily turning Communist and writing in the "socialist realism" mode. He's also, as he repeatedly says, "waiting for a miracle"—the miracle which would absolve him from this haunting past, would give him peace and a full understanding, would free him from the limitations of his own situation.
But the contradictions and conflicts of the narrator's psyche are not merely his own; they are a piece, an inseparable part, of his country's collective biography. At the center of the novel is a long historical reverie in which Konwicki imagines a young soldier who in 1863 leads a small regiment in a failed uprising against the Russians. The young man returns to his native Lithuania (where Konwicki himself was born) inspired with the idea of a reborn Poland: "Just, noble, intelligent. An example for all of Europe. An uprising begun with the blood of our finest sons." He is welcomed with expressions of fraternal love—and the news that the peasant division he was promised has wandered off. The ragtag crew he manages to gather instead disappears in its first absurd encounter with the equally terrified Russians on Insurrection Hill—where Konwicki himself will fight some 80 years later. (pp. 3, 16)
In making the young soldier's story central to the novel, Konwicki seems at first to accept one standard diagnosis—which is that Poland's tragedy has been caused by romanticism, by a deep-rooted, heedless, patriotic, individualistic love of independence and freedom. But after looking at this interpretation, Konwicki angrily rejects it….
Any analysis of Poland's situation has to reckon with the proximity of [its] neighbors. They, at least as much as national character, have indeed been the country's fate—relentless, absolute and unjust. Against such forces, Konwicki can only raise an anguished cry. In one of the bitterest sections of the novel, thinly disguised as a letter about another country, he lashes out with Swiftian fury at a regime that "was on its last legs from the start. It was rotting, gurgling, disintegrating, moldering, rusting, choking, dying, and yet at the same time standing firmly on its feet, enduring due to the immense power of inertia, withstanding all storms, entrenched in bedrock by the weight of its own sins"—a regime that kills with boredom as well as with betrayals, and that has turned an entire country into a no-exit prison.
Novelistically, "The Polish Complex" is unfinished, full of loose ends, situations that go nowhere, characters only dimly realized. In the middle of the novel, Konwicki has a minor heart attack and then experiences something like a miracle when he makes love to a fey, sexy, mysterious salesgirl. But the scene is unconvincing. In this novel, politics is the immediate, primary reality, and it is the purely personal encounter that disrupts the action like a pistol shot.
The real miracle—for Poland as much as for Konwicki—doesn't come. As a philosophical inquiry, "The Polish Complex" is necessarily unresolved. (p. 16)
Eva Hoffman, "Keeping a Nation in Line," in The New York Times Book Review (copyright © 1982 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), January 10, 1982, pp. 3, 16.
