It is the answer, ha. Is it?
“Homo Sapiens, thou art clay. Thy mind is a super-chaos. Thy soul is a petty mirage.”
II.
Przybyszewski transplants his readers from their ordinary mental environment into those astral regions where metaphysical subtleties are clothed with reality. Life is dealt with not on the surface strata of its expressions but at its base where motives and ideas and emotions have their source. And in spite of this fact, or rather because of the uncanny clairvoyance of its author there is no perversion or befogging of one’s point of view. These nebulous regions are lit up by the ruthless penetration of an artist who is a scientist as well.
One’s first sensations are like seeing for the first time with the naked eye the fan of nerves which spread out from the corona radiata, or touching the single nerve trunks with the dissecting knife. In the same manner the pathological Pole brings you into actual contact with the cargos of these nerves, ideas, emotions, sensations. All the concealing layers of evasions and of equivocations have been dissected away; there lies spread out before you sections of naked consciousness. And so subtle has been the dissecting work that there has been no disarrangement and no death. All is still living, still functioning. And your sensation of strangeness, almost of horror, is born out of revulsion against a self-consciousness so intense as to seem almost morbid. “I feel,” said a friend of mine, “as if I had been vivisected.” Not so much this as that one has been vivisecting. Przybyszewski compels you to co-operate with him in analysing psychological phenomena. At moments you lift your eyes from the page, panting, almost physically exhausted from the effort of concentrating on those tortuous, subtle reactions which occur in the farthest recesses of consciousness and spread upward in waves to the surface, where they often take on curious irrelevant expression.
But that is sheer morbidity, cries your friend the Philistine. It is introspection carried past the point of decency. But to the investigator there is no point past which it is indecent to press. In him there is no affectation of scruple to erect its artificial barricade. He must have transcended all such petty egotism and have depersonalized himself. He is constrained to this by that curiosity which is his master passion, which generates itself and is dynamic in him as hunger or sex are dynamic in the ordinary individual. This curiosity of the artist brooks no bounds, short of the facts against which it brings up abruptly. And so Przybyszewski for all his uncanny subtlety cannot be accused of morbidity since he uses it not to distort but merely to reveal the truth. If he has no false reverence neither has he irreverence. His scalpel, always flashing and leaping, pauses a moment on a state of emotion and, pointing, calls it by name. “For I am I,” says Falk. “I am a criminal diabolic nature.” Or again:
“And so a certain man is suffering from love induced by auto-suggestion. Very well. But at the same time he loves his wife unqualifiedly. And he loves her so much that there can be no doubt of the reality of his love. In a word he loves both the one and the other.”
But such a condition isn’t possible, the Philistine will cry out, wounded at his most vulnerable point, his inflexible principles. “A man can’t love two women at the same time.” This isolated case would undermine the whole monogamistic theory. He sees one of his cherished institutions tottering. And so he takes fright and refutes the fact. “It can’t be, it isn’t possible.” But Przybyszewski continues to stand with the scalpel wearily pointing. “My dear Sir, this is no question of postulates, it’s a question of an individual instance. It is possible, because it occurs. Falk does love two women at the same moment.” And the Philistine will doubtless turn away snorting furiously and unconvinced. “Przybyszewski,” he will sneer, “that degenerate Pole, always half drunk with cognac, a Slav to boot. What does he know of life or reality? They were all neurasthenics. Look at Artzibashev and Andreyev and Dostoevsky. Yes, let us look at them, and remembering Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, remember also Raskolnikov. A criminal’s psychology lifted onto paper out of the limbo regions of consciousness by the mammoth Russian’s bloody pen. Something more than neurasthenia, this gift of analysis.
What, finally, is Homo Sapiens? Who is this writer-fellow, Falk, with no conscience, with his “criminal, diabolic nature?” Does he only exist to analyse himself, and his tortuous, painful psychologizings? Why is he, what is he?—He is the self-conscious man, par excellence. This book is the epic of consciousness. “The thing must be thought out,” says Falk. And nuance by nuance it is thought out, rapidly but faithfully, under your very eyes. You are invited,—no, compelled,—to take part in the operation. Hence your feeling of fatigue. And again, after a page or two, “He examined his own feelings.”
“But why a Falk?” the Philistine demands. “Falk is no average man. He is a genius, and as such his psychology is specialized and distinct. Falk is a neurasthenic, victim of erotomania. Even his lucidity is not to his credit. Since he is a writer it is implicit in him, as muscle is in the circus rider. He is bound to analyse his acts, to trace them back to their motives. Falk presents an isolated case. If one is going to deal with consciousness why not choose a less precocious exponent? Why not the everyday consciousness of the average human being?”