In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

298 CODES
socialist Collectivity is supposed to have over Individuality. Toller cannot
quite approve of a legal system that sentences a young woman to ten
years of prison because she does not denounce her husband for being a
spy in the service of the Polish government: '''And why didn't you report
your husband? Why didn't you?' asked the supervisor who accompanied
me. 'I will not betray my own husband,' she replied. The supervisor, a
Communist, shook his head. For him the collective stands higher than
the individual. He would not hesitate, he told me, to shoot his best
friend, if this friend had betrayed the goals of the collective" (Toller,
142).
A literary example of this considerable instability in the relation between
Collectivity and Individuality is the heterogeneous style of the
letter which K. in Franz Kafka's Schloss receives from the castle's administration:
"It was not a consistent letter. In part it dealt with [K.] as with
a free man whose independence was recognized ... But there were other
places in which he was directly or indirectly treated as a minor employee,
hardly visible to the heads of departments" (23-24). In his book La vie
des termites, Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck works to develop
a scientific discourse which so eagerly stages itself as an allegory of
sociological problems and their different political interpretations that the
reader risks overlooking the primary biological content. This is Maeterlinck's
general characterization of the termites' social life: "A new sort
of destiny-perhaps the cruelest social destiny-has been added to those
which we already know and which hitherto sufficed for us. No rest
except in the final sleep; illness itself is not permitted; and every weakness
amounts to a death sentence. Communism has become cannibalism and
then coprophagy, for under Communism one feeds, so to speak, on
excrement. It is hell such as the winged hosts of a beehive could imagine
it" (Maeterlinck, 155-156). Nobody describes more clearly the situation
from which all these problems and discourses emerge than the literary
critic I. A. Richards. Like most intellectuals, he starts out by claiming a
hierarchical relation between Collectivity and Individuality: "We must
recognize that man is a social being, that only by a dehumanizing fiction
we do regard him as an individual." What makes Richards' statement
unusual, however, is his willingness to admit that a convincing model of
a new social order is not apparent in the current situation: "Tradition is
weakening. Moral authorities are not as well backed by beliefs as they