Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— Of course one shouldn’t overlook that Solzhenitsyn’s basic pessimism has always made him a plebeian rather than a socialist writer—

— But how will we change the world without Marx? — (The engineer admitted as if smilingly confessing to have been a football first-leaguer, although his build wouldn’t credit it — I was out in the streets in ’68.—) — They do still agree it must be changed.—

— I wonder. Hardly. Even that. What have they between their legs, never mind in their heads. Political philosophers… They’ll capitulate entirely to individualism. Or get religion. Either way, they’ll end up with the Right.—

— Well, for a start, we must disown Marx’s eldest child. La fille aînée. We must declare the Soviet Union heretic to socialism. — Bernard Chabalier joined the group; she heard the interjection among others. He had the elliptical gestures of one who has slipped back into the shoal.

— No, no, let’s be clear: there’s a distinction between the anti-sovietism of the right and the new anti-sovietism of the Leftist intellectuals. The Left now may seem to define the evils of Soviet socialism just as reactionary thought always did: pitiless dictatorship over forced labour. But what they condemn isn’t the difference between Soviet socialism and Western liberalism — which is roughly speaking the thesis of Western liberalism and even of the enlightened Right — that’s true in England?

— M — y-es, I suppose one could say we believe we know what human rights we stand for but we don’t want nationalization and unrestricted immigration of blacks. That’s why the Labour Party’s going to come to grief. — The French laughed with the guest of honour this time and he tailed off into vague assenting, dissimulating, scornful umphs and murmurs that dissociated him from that particular political folly.

— Neither is it the orthodox apologist thesis that what’s happened to socialism in the Soviet Union has something to do with a legacy of Russian backwardness — that old stuff: her state of underdevelopment when her revolution came, the economic set-back of the war, the autocratic tradition of the Russian people and so on. The Left’s theory is that if Stalin was contained in Marx, it’s because the cult of the state and la rationalité sociale already were contained in Western thought — it’s this that has infected socialism. The phenomenon of Gulag arose in the Soviet Union; but its doctrine comes from Machiavelli and Descartes—

The distinctively-modelled forehead with the fuzz of hair behind each ear tipped back, the lids dropped, intensifying the gaze. — So all that’s wrong with socialism is what’s wrong with the West. The fault of capitalism again—

— Let me finish — therefore the anti-sovietism of the Western Leftists is an anti-sovietism of the Left , quite different.—

— and let me tell you — Bernard burst through the hoop of his own irony — it’s the tragedy of the Left that it can still believe all that’s wrong with socialism is the West. Our tragedy as Leftists, the tragedy of our age. Socialism is the horizon of the world, Sartre has said it once and for all — but it’s a blackout…close your eyes, hold your nose rather than admit where the stink is coming from.—

— The important thing surely is—

The architect’s voice ran up and down themes that pleased him: —I wish I could arrange my convictions with the genius of a new philosophe …and they talk about Manichean…they accuse Giscard…—

— Surely the important factor is — the Englishman had drawn up his belly and lifted his chest, holding his opinions above argument—…at least these fellows may have the sense to have done with total ideas and the total repression indivisible from such ideas. When you get someone saying the twentieth century’s great invention may turn out to be the concentration camp…when you start coming out with thoughts like that, we may be getting away at last from the lure of the evil utopia. If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.—

Bernard saw her, Rosa, looking at them all, at himself as one of them. Her cheekbones were taut with amazement; her presence went among them like an arm backing them away from something lost and trampled underfoot. — ‘You can’t institutionalize happiness’? —In all seriousness? As a discovery…? It’s something from a Christmas cracker motto…—

The architect was charmingly quick-witted. — Perhaps they meant freedom, somehow they‘re — I don’t know — a bit too shaken these days to use the word. In the Leftist view of life, anyway, the two are as one, more or less, aren’t they, they’re always insisting their ‘freedom’ is the condition of happiness.—

She weighed empty hands a moment — Bernard saw what was underfoot taken up and shown there — then hid fists behind her thighs. — Don’t you know? There isn’t the possibility of happiness without institutions to protect it.—

The Englishman smiled on a grille of tiny teeth holding a cigar. — God in heaven help us! And up goes the barbed wire, and who knows when you first discover which is the wrong side—

— I’m not offering a theory. I’m talking about people who need to have rights— there —in a statute book, so that they can move about in their own country, decide what work they’ll do and what their children will learn at school. So that they can get onto a bus or walk in somewhere and order a cup of coffee.—

— Oh well, ordinary civil rights. That’s hardly utopia. You don’t need a revolution for that.—

— In some countries you do. People die for such things. — Bernard spoke aloud to himself.

Rosa gave no sign of having heard him. — But the struggle for change is based on the idea that freedom exists, isn’t it? That wild idea. People must be able to create institutions — institutions must evolve that will make it possible in practice. That utopia, it’s inside…without it, how can you…act? — The last word echoed among them as ‘live’, the one she had subconsciously substituted it for; there were sympathetic, embarrassed, appreciative changes in the faces, taking, amiably or as a reproach, a naive truth nevertheless granted.

The Englishman set his profile as if for a resolute portrait. — The lies. The cruelty. Too much pain has come from it.—

— But there’s no indemnity. You can’t be afraid to do good in case evil results. — As Rosa spoke, Katya paused in passing and put an arm round her; looked at them all a moment, basking in the reflection of a past defiance, an old veteran showing he can still snap to attention, and went on her way to sponge a stain of spilt wine off the bosom of her dress. — This terrible balcony of mine, it catches every drip.—

The Englishman’s authority reared and wheeled. He took another pastis from Didier’s tray without being aware of the exchange of his empty glass for a full one. — Not a question of moral justification, we must get away from all that. The evil utopia — the monolithic state that’s all the utopian dream is capable of producing has taken over moral justification and made it the biggest lie of the lot.—

— Yes, yes, exactly what they are saying — whether it’s the Communist Party or some giant multinational company, people are turning against huge, confining structures—

— Our only hope lies in a dispassionate morality of technology, our creed must be, broadly speaking, ecological — always allowing the premise that man’s place is central—