PositiveThe NationThe only way out of the Cold War, Romance seemed to suggest, was to work through it. That’s what Gornick offered: a passage through and exit from a long and lonely corridor of mind ... Today, Gornick’s book reads differently, less bound by the genres and concerns of the Cold War. Her effort to reconstruct the communist experience seems less a rescue operation of the self than a reconfiguration of the self in classical terms ... Today’s left...is legitimately fearful of repeating the repression of the past; it is understandably, if less legitimately, fearful of taking on the responsibility—and judgment of history—that power entails. As a result, the left struggles to generate those force fields, seeking the warmth of solidarity without the cold and sometimes cruel poles of attraction and repulsion that sustain it ...This hesitation has liberated the left from the need to reconcile freedom and constraint. But it has also left it without power. At some point, that may change. The left may become intentional; it may become dangerous. If it does, these questions of freedom and discipline will once again become salient. For better and for worse.
