The Mountains of Parnassus Read online

  The Mountains of Parnassus

  The Mountains of Parnassus

  Góry Parnasu

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Translated from the Polish by Stanley Bill

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Stanley Bill.

  Originally published as Góry Parnasu. Science fiction in 2012 by

  Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej.

  Copyright © 2012 by The Czeslaw Milosz Estate.

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016937572

  ISBN 978–0-300-21425-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

  (Permanence of Paper).

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  Contents

  Translator’s Introduction: Science Fiction as Scripture

  A Note on the Translation

  The Mountains of Parnassus

  Introductory Remarks

  Describing Parnassus

  Karel’s Adventures

  On Methods of Governing

  The Cardinal’s Testament

  An Astronaut’s Tale

  Appendix: Ephraim’s Liturgy

  Part One: Commentary Explaining Who Ephraim Was

  From Part Two: The Mass of the Catechumens

  Translator’s Introduction

  Science Fiction as Scripture

  The image of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) as a science fiction writer is strange and incongruous. Even in the context of Poland’s highly literary tradition of science fiction writing, it is difficult to imagine this archetypal European intellectual immersing himself in the world of space travel and alien planets. Milosz was a profoundly historical writer, poring over the past in its personal, political, and philosophical dimensions, while science fiction focuses on the future. Milosz identified himself above all as a lyric poet, evincing deep suspicion for the novel as a genre, while science fiction has largely found expression in creative prose. Milosz was a poet of nature, or the “unattainable earth,” finding words to capture the idealized landscapes of his native Lithuania or the wilder expanses of later American exile, while science fiction envisions new technologies, cosmic voyages and distant stars. And yet between 1967 and 1971 Milosz worked sporadically, and for brief periods even intensively, on a science fiction novel entitled The Mountains of Parnassus (Góry Parnasu).1

  Milosz abandoned the project in March 1971, but initially he seemed determined to do something with the fragments he had already written. From a manuscript of 112 pages, he produced a more streamlined typescript, comprising five edited chapters and an explanatory preface of “Introductory Remarks.” In 1972, he sent the typescript to his longtime publisher and supporter, Jerzy Giedroyc, editor in chief of the émigré Polish publishing house Instytut Literacki in France. Giedroyc offered his honest opinion in a letter, describing the work as a “not very successful attempt at a novel,” to which Milosz responded: “If you don’t like The Mountains of Parnassus, then don’t print it. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t print it. My own attitude to the work remains undetermined.”2

  Whether or not Milosz ever clarified his opinion of his fragmentary novel, he made no further attempt to publish it. He deposited both the manuscript and the typescript in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where—as he wrote in a later poem—he had “decided to dwell when nothing any more/Would be revealed by his ashes.”3 Several years after Milosz’s death in 2004, the young Warsaw intellectual Sławomir Sierakowski, founder of the left-wing think tank and publishing house Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique), stumbled upon the typescript while on a fellowship at Yale, and decided that it deserved to see the light of day, arguing that the work was “unpublished rather than unfinished.”4

  In 2012, Krytyka Polityczna brought out a hardback edition of the novel, with the blessing of the Milosz estate, including an introduction and appendix by Sierakowski, an afterword by the poet’s former personal secretary Agnieszka Kosiñska, and facsimiles from both the manuscript and typescript. The edition also included “Ephraim’s Liturgy,” a short text published separately by Milosz in Giedroyc’s Kultura magazine in 1968, though clearly connected through theme and character to the larger work. Kosiñska took editorial responsibility, generally following the typescript and the author’s handwritten amendments to it. Given Milosz’s towering stature in Polish culture, the posthumous publication of a previously unknown work, even one in fragmentary form, was inevitably a significant event in Poland. All the major daily newspapers and literary magazines published reviews, most of them concurring that the work was not an unqualified artistic success but that it still offered a disturbingly plausible vision of the future decline of Western civilization and valuable insights into Milosz’s creative process.

  In the Introductory Remarks, Milosz himself begins with an admission of defeat, describing his chapters as “a science fiction novel that will never be written.” He gives two main reasons for his failure: first, the novel as a genre has become impossible, since the modern demands of formal experimentation conflict with the original narrative instinct that conceived it; and second, his depiction of the future would be unrelentingly dark, and it is—in his view—immoral for art to oppress people with such bleak visions of human life. These explanations are consistent with arguments that Milosz makes elsewhere about the fate of the novel and the writer’s responsibilities to his or her readers, though he also offers a self-deprecating account of his own justifications as “the grimaces of a fox pronouncing that the grapes were sour because they were too high up.”

  Despite his apparent misgivings, Milosz still went to the considerable trouble of selecting material from the manuscript, typing it out, writing an introduction, and then sending it across the ocean to Jerzy Giedroyc. Clearly he saw something of potential interest to readers in this rough collection of chapters, even if he changed his mind in the wake of Giedroyc’s blunt assessment. In fact, it seems that it was precisely in the work’s formal looseness that Milosz detected certain intriguing opportunities. He even suggests that he might have “stumbled upon an experimental genre.”

  In this context, we should note that Milosz was working on The Mountains of Parnassus during a period of intense preoccupation with the broader problem of how to liberate literary form from the limitations of the established genres. In 1968, a year after he had commenced work on his abortive science fiction side project, Milosz included a quasi-programmatic statement of this ambitious general intent in an important poem entitled “Ars poetica?”:

  I have always aspired to a more spacious form

  that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose


  and would let us understand each other without exposing

  the author or reader to sublime agonies.5

  Later, in 1974, three years after abandoning The Mountains of Parnassus, Milosz published the long poem From the Rising of the Sun (Gdzie wschodzi slłońce i kędy zapada), which many critics have regarded as the triumphant realization of his earlier stated aim. This lengthy multipart work includes a mixture of poetry and prose; direct citations from philosophy, literature, family chronicles, folk songs, and conversations; and extracts from legal documents written in the Polish-Belarusian hybrid language of the sixteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, along with key lines in Lithuanian, French, English, and liturgical Latin. In this self-declared magnum opus, Milosz sought to reinvent lyric poetry as polyphony, while still submitting the diverse voices of the poem to the guiding authority of a strong lyric speaker.

  We find a less ambitious form of controlled polyphony in The Mountains of Parnassus. Indeed, Polish commentators have observed that all the characters seem like versions or aspects of Milosz himself. Karel and Lino Martinez confront existential crises familiar from biographical and autobiographical accounts of Milosz’s youth, including a suicidal game of Russian roulette attested by biographer Andrzej Franaszek. Cardinal Vallerg and Ephraim echo many of the older Milosz’s views on the decline of Western civilization, and especially on the United States, where the poet was a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, for several decades, including the turbulent 1960s. The attentive reader can easily recognize arguments and observations from his contemporaneous collection of essays on America, Visions from San Francisco Bay (Widzenia nad Zaatoką San Francisco, 1969).

  Of course, multivoicedness in itself is hardly an innovation in a mid-twentieth-century novel. Instead, the “experimental” activity of The Mountains of Parnassus takes place in a peculiar variety of prose lying somewhere on the border between novelistic exposition and essay. The fragments that Milosz prepared for publication detail the characters’ backgrounds and the structure of a future world ruled by a totalitarian planetary state, while offering only the vaguest hints of a plot. We know that some kind of religious community in opposition to the ruling Astronauts’ Union has been established in the wilderness of the Parnassus Mountains, but otherwise the chapters present Milosz’s predictions of a dystopian future based firmly on the civilizational trajectories he observed in his own time, especially in California. The work is incomplete as a story—in fact, the story never really begins—but perhaps complete as an exercise in speculative world creation.

  In the essays of Visions from San Francisco Bay, Milosz analyzes the trends as he sees them in contemporary America; in the fictionalized descriptions of The Mountains of Parnassus and “Ephraim’s Liturgy,” he imagines their future consequences. According to his predictions, the increased automation of production will make the vast majority of human beings essentially superfluous, reliant on the prodigious surpluses yielded by advanced technology and left to occupy themselves with trivial amusements. At the same time, the decline of religion and the degeneration of art create a void of meaninglessness that unbridled sex, drug use, and electric current stimulation cannot fill. In this empty world of material feast and spiritual famine, the authoritarian planetary state devises radical measures to deal with increasing numbers of suicides, as people choose death over a life deprived of any higher meaning.

  In short, the imaginative extrapolation of a science fiction novel allowed Milosz to extend the temporal field of his social and political reflections from the present into the future. At times, the essayistic discursiveness of the prose slows it down, as the narrator and characters rather unceremoniously dump exposition on the reader. Yet the strongest passages resound with the urgent conviction of prophecy. Indeed, at around the same time, Milosz was directly exploring the potential connections between science fiction and prophecy in an essay entitled “Science Fiction and the Coming of the Antichrist.” In this short piece, he even likens science fiction writing to religious scripture, arguing that both genres use the same basic grammatical conceit to make their prognostications of the future more plausible:

  We would include here any narrative that pretends to be written in the past tense, whereas it should have been written in the futur accompli; it should have been, but cannot be, because grammar itself stands in the way. . . . A prediction (since we are dealing with predictions) is disguised grammatically: a hero living in the year 3000 “did” and “went.” But we find the same thing in the Revelation of St. John: that which is predicted is told as something that has already occurred—in a vision on the island of Patmos.6

  The essay also reveals the probable influence of Russian theologian Vladimir Solovyov’s Three Conversations (Tri razgovory, 1900) on the development of The Mountains of Parnassus. In particular, we should note the similarities between the testament of Cardinal Vallerg and, in Three Conversations, a mysterious manuscript supposedly written by a monk named Pansopheus, which Milosz discusses in his essay. Solovyov’s monk sets out the dramatic history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tracing a process of religious decline and transformation that shares a great deal with the steady erosion of Christian faith articulated by Milosz’s cardinal. On a more metaphysical level, Pansopheus describes the coming of the “Antichrist,” while Vallerg refers to a “malevolent presence” growing in force and even becoming a direct object of worship. At certain key moments, the cardinal reveals this presence as the “Prince of This World,” or “diabolos”—the Devil.

  Admittedly, Cardinal Vallerg’s testament is not especially typical of science fiction writing in either style or substance, and the theological problem of evil runs through Milosz’s oeuvre in various guises. In other words, he does not stray far from his literary comfort zone in this chapter. By contrast, the descriptions of space travel, new technologies, and biological adaptation in the chapter entitled “An Astronaut’s Tale” represent much less familiar territory for the Polish poet. His handling of the new material is occasionally awkward, especially in the account of Lino Martinez’s mission to the planet Sardion, which Milosz probably intended to develop further. Nevertheless, the chapter also includes some illuminating transpositions of certain abiding Miloszean themes, as he utilizes the conventions of a foreign genre to open fresh perspectives on old preoccupations.

  In particular, the “time travel” made possible by relativity and a ship that can reach 99.5 percent of the speed of light allows Lino Martinez to attain a perspective that Milosz’s poetry frequently captures: an isolated subject observing the ravages of time on fragile human bodies from an objective distance, seemingly beyond temporality. This poetic “I” actively seeks to separate itself from the world of the vulnerable flesh, overcoming its own delimited and ephemeral nature by transforming itself into a “pure seeing” that would soar above the world and describe it. Through the character of Lino Martinez, Milosz restages this disembodied perspective within the realist conventions of science fiction, bringing experiential immediacy to the imagined scenario.

  The effects of time dilation allow Martinez to abstract himself from the natural processes of aging and death. After the mission, he returns to his home planet to find that many more years have passed for his earthbound acquaintances than for himself, a difference augmented by his access to life-prolonging biotechnologies reserved for the astronaut elite. The eternally youthful Martinez feels a mixture of sorrow and contempt as he meets “a gray, shriveled old woman” who had once entranced him as a young, “olive-skinned” lover. The fact that he does not share her undignified fate greatly distresses him. His own “triumph” over mortality seems hollow and morally suspect, leading him to experience a profound crisis. In an earlier chapter, Karel—another privileged member of the state elite—faces a similar dilemma induced by a sense of forced separation from human corporeality: “Senseless material, senseless brutality. How could he begin to coexist with it? Could he cease to be an
unearthly spirit observing it from beyond?”

  Karel’s path remains uncertain, but Martinez makes a fateful decision. He abandons his position in the Astronauts’ Union, losing access to the regular medical procedures that have kept him young and thus reaffirming his solidarity with suffering humanity. This decision to embrace mortality is tantamount to suicide—a recurring motif throughout the novel. Martinez explains: “If the whole human species had the choice either of losing or winning as we have won, then winning wouldn’t be worth it.” Martinez discovers that the incarnate, impermanent, and delimited nature of human life is precisely what gives it meaning, while aspirations toward a purer and more enduring existence in separation from these material realities can only lead to alienation and even to contempt for the wretched human herd. As Slawomir Sierakowski puts it in his appendix to the Polish edition: “Longevity is inhuman; it is reserved for God.”7

  Once again, these discoveries echo a regular preoccupation of Milosz’s poetry and essays: a counteremphasis on embodied existence against the “pure seeing” of certain poetic visions. In some of his essays of the same period, he argues that the desire to separate oneself from the material world can easily degenerate into indifference and even malevolence toward human life, an attitude he partly finds in himself, but also in the radical Russian intellectuals who prepared the way for the Bolshevik Revolution and even in American left-wing thinkers of the 1960s.8 Indeed, Martinez’s crack unit in the all-powerful Astronauts’ Union is probably intended to bear some resemblance to the party elite of the Soviet Union. As Milosz comes to conceive it, the “disembodied” perspective is not just existential but also strongly political. His characters’ revelations reflect his own poetic oscillation between what he sees as a quasi-totalitarian desire for purified distance and a poetry rooted in the mortal “rhythms of the body,” confirming the poet’s physical connection with humanity in all its frailty and impermanence.