Adam Zagajewski: The Wry Metaphysician

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2005 by Lewis, Tess

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.

Yet one has the sense in the pages that follow that Zagajewski, impeccable and refined humanist that he is, occasionally must remind himself that others are not in fact hell after dawn has ceded to the glare of the midday sun or in the endless black hours of a sleepless night. But his conviction that consolation or even salvation is to be found in the beauty created by others needs no shoring up.

Zagajewski is an acutely sensitive reader. His earlier books offered glimpses of his critical gifts in small essays and asides within his memoirs. The writers presented in brief essays in Two Cities are, with the exception of Schulz, men who intrigue rather than inspire Zagajewski. He sees Paul Léautaud, Gottfried Benn, and Ernst Ji'mger as writers of exceptional artistic vision who nonetheless proved surprisingly myopic when faced with brute reality. Each drew, in his own fashion, his ethics from aesthetics but were hobbled by their deficiencies: Léautaud by his lack of imaginative versatility, Benn by his extreme aestheticism, and Junger by his perverse ambivalence. Zagajewski values these writers, largely ignored today, not only for their relative achievements but also for their skirmishes in "the permanent conflict between 'beauty' and 'honesty.'"

Only in Zagajewski's latest collection of essays, A Defense of Ardor, do we have extended considerations of other writers. The volume opensafter a brief invocation of Lvov-with a manifesto of sorts. It is a call to defend ardor, metaphysical seriousness, and beauty from the corrosive irony of our skeptical age. This is not another facile, tub-thumping attack of the Earnest upon the Ironic. Irony as a species of metaphysical wit, an awareness that Truth is an elusive, protean quarry, is an essential element of Zagajewski's writing. He is concerned rather that the humanist irony Thomas Mann directed against the ideological violence and simplifications of Nazism and fascism and the more pointed irony with which East European writers goaded totalitarianism has been hardening into a dogmatic, obtuse sense of certainty. Zagajewski is wary of broad generalizations but nonetheless asserts that "writing and thinking in recent years have come to seem meager, gray, anemic." Poetry, in particular, once a bastion of unselfconscious inspiration and love of beauty, "is marked by a disproportion between the high style and the low, between powerful expressions of the inner life and the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen." He attributes the decline of literary style in great part to the poetry of World War I, which tried to describe inexpressible horrors as bluntly and simply as possible. The horrors of World War II simply upped the ante. Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam did find their solutions to this challenge. Yet they are exceptions. Stylistic simplification depends for its effect on contrast with a more elevated counterpart, and the high style has largely been drowned out by the "tepid, ironic, conversational" drone of the low.