Monday, November 7, 2011

Off the Beaten Path, On the Road

The Beat Generation of the 1950s, a precursor of the volatile counterculture of the following decade, seethed at America’s postwar prosperity and the repressive conditions of containment. It emerged, as Malcolm Bradbury points out, in an “affluent, conformist America where the individual seems superfluous, the outsider rages, the dominant culture seems oppressive and hostile.” Unwilling to conform, the Beats – of whom the core members were Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs—sought their own values and pursued their own vision in jazz clubs, in experimental art, through alcohol, drugs, liberated sexuality, and the ecstasies of Buddhism and Jewish and Christian mysticism. Insofar as it was a struggle against repressive norms, the Beat-life was an on-going quest, a journey to find a new mode of being in the remote corners of human existence. As John Tytell writes, “The Beat Movement was a crystallization of a sweeping discontent with American ‘virtues’ of progress and power. What began with an exploration of the bowels and entrails of the city – criminality, drugs, mental hospitals – evolved into an expression of the visionary sensibility.”

That sensibility first entered the American mainstream with Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. Published in 1957, this semi-autobiography became a manifesto for the new generation of dispossessed American youths starved for personal freedom. Without plot, or any other literary restraint, On the Road describes the nomadic life of two characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, as they crisscross the American continent over a period of two years (from 1947 to 1949), visiting major cities, having love affairs, working odd jobs, experimenting with drugs, frequenting jazz clubs – and always on the go. “We were all delighted,” the narrator Sal declares, “we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, [to] move. And we moved!” The theme of mobility is paramount in the text, but unlike other quest narratives, whose heroes strive towards a defined goal, On the Road is irreducible to any end other than the experience of aimless travel and discovery. For this reason it poses an interpretive dilemma, which seeks to answer the question: is On the Road simply an ode to a narcissistic culture, or does it offer an uncommon solution to societal repression?





Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist

There is a central paradox in all of Franz Kafka's tales that is never resolved or even fully explained. One consequence of that paradox is the impossibility of reducing Kafka to any single interpretation. The same has been said of the allegorical quality of the Bible. Many lenses have been used, but neither one appears sufficient.

"A Hunger Artist" is one such tale. The central figure, a public performer, has locked himself in a cage and fasts for weeks on end, practicing an art of starvation that beguiles and disturbs his spectators. Eventually, admiration and sympathy are mixed with general suspicion of the authenticity of the act, and guards are dispatched to ensure the hunger artist is not secretly feeding himself. What's more, his promoter insists on a forty-day fasting limit, believing that public interest could not be stretched or capitalized on any further. That distrust and cynicism irritates the hunger artist, and when his art finally outlasts its fame, he employs himself in a circus.

He is confined to a shadowy corner of the circus, surrounded by animals in cages. Crowds of spectators pass, noisily and indifferently, and the hunger artist, who had hoped to exceed his own powers, grows more and more depressed by his surroundings. But he continues to fast, losing count of the days. When an overseer looks into his cage one day and finds him near death, the hunger artist begs forgiveness for his act. In response to the inspectors' feigned admiration, he replies, "But you shouldn't admire it." He says he fasted only because "I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." He dies shortly after.

There's the paradox. And the only attempt at resolving it is vague--once the hunger artist's body is removed, a panther is placed in the cage. "And the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not want ever to move away."

For all its critics' assertions of the artist's solitude and alientation in modern society, "A Hunger Artist" escapes interpretation. It has an incompleteness that is typical of Kafka's other stories, as though refusing totality (or affecting a failure to achieve total understanding). Why are the hunger artist's final words so banal? Is he mocking the onlookers? Is he mocking life and the artist's struggle within it? Are we meant to understand? Kafka was making a statement, about art, interpretation, modernity, truth. The hunger artist was making a statement, too, but nobody could know for certain what it was.




Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Who's Afraid of the Enlightenment?

For the German social critics, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries advanced freedom at the cost of freedom. While the triumph of reason and rationality emancipated the individual from superstition, religion, and prejudice, it laid the ground for another kind of domination. In their essay, "The Dialectic of Enlightenment," Adorno and Horkheimer argued that, in subordinating the natural world to man's will, modern science and technology tended to convert reason into an instrument of domination, of which the Nazi death camps were a glaring testimonial. The empowerment of reason, in effect, was irrational. Reason for reason's sake, the condition for true freedom, was incompatible with modernity's hyper-capitalist, advanced industrial order.

Many post-war intellectuals in the arts and humanities were skeptical, not so much about science, but of scientism. They saw traditional forms of human community eroding, individuality and self-determination suppressed by technology. Urban centers in industrialized nations were particularly vulnerable. Accordingly, critiques of modern science often invoked the conformism and standardization which scientific progress supposedly entailed. The human being, for these thinkers, was becoming machine-like. His victory over nature was also a victory over his natural self; in its place, man developed a formalized morality, susceptible to external control and manipulation. As Adorno and Horkheimer theorized, this was indeed the negative legacy of the European Enlightenment.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Mr. Cogito Thinks of Returning to His Hometown

If I returned there
I surely wouldn't find
a single shadow from my house
or the trees from my childhood
or the cross with the iron plate
the bench where I whispered spells
chestnuts and blood
or anything which is ours

everything which survived
is a stone disc
with a chalk circle
I stand in the center
on one foot
a moment before jumping

I can't grow
although the years pass
and up above roar
the planets and wars

I stand in the center
unmoving like a monument
on one foot
before jumping into finality

the chalk circle reddens
just like old blood
mounds grow all around
ash
to the shoulder
to the mouth

--Zbigniew Herbert (trans. by blogger)

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Anarchy in the Deli Section

Mr. Cogito decided to buy some cheese in the deli, so he stood with several other customers and waited for his turn. On the other side of the meat menagerie, two ladies were engaged in a lengthy conversation. The corpulent one with the spider tattoo behind her ear was grumbling about an injustice someone had done her. Her companion, a slight, older woman with a scowl, listened with interest, neglecting the turkey carvings in her hands.

"Excuse me," a customer interrupted. "I'm in a hurry."

"I'm getting there, darlin'," said the spider lady, who then rolled her eyes and sauntered to the meat slicer. The other shuffled back to the scale, weighed the turkey carvings, wrapped them, and flopped them down on the counter.

"Anything else?" she asked, rather uncordially, brow furrowed, as though she had just carried out an order to kill and prepare a mastodon. The customer lifted the wrapped turkey suspiciously and noted with agitation that she had asked for a pound, not half a pound.

"Take it or leave it, Miss!" came the curt reply. The customer stood paralyzed for
a moment, then took her turkey and trotted off angrily.

Another customer saw this and demanded to know what was going on before being rudely admonished that if he wanted his salami, he would just have to stand there and be quiet.

Mr. Cogito, briefly forgetting the cheese he wanted, cast about for historical traces of what was happening. He recalled famous instances of anarchy, but could find nothing to compare with the deli insurrection. Before long, he was the only one standing at the counter. The others had left with a fraction of their order, or a completely different order, or without having been served at all. Something like this, Mr. Cogito thought, must have happened in the final years of the Roman Empire, under Caligula, or else during the Peasant Revolt of 1381. Didn't Napoleon once endure such a rebellion within his own ranks? He couldn't remember. It seemed unprecedented.

In any case, Mr. Cogito never got his cheese.

Monday, August 1, 2011

The Warsaw Uprising


Like most events of the past, the Warsaw Uprising in Poland exceeded its historical boundaries once the battle began to be waged on the field of history. A valiant, but doomed, attempt to free Warsaw from Nazi occupation, the Uprising began on August 1, 1944 and lasted two awful months, leaving the city in a heap of smoldering rubble, and over 200,000 dead. While the defeat of the Polish Underground was, for all intents and purposes, a fait accompli, in history and collective memory the truth of that struggle was contested for nearly fifty years, during and after Warsaw’s reconstruction. Why?

After the start of the Cold War, official memory of the Uprising had been appropriated by Poland’s Communist regime, under whose auspices it was savagely reinterpreted. It became, by turns, a criminal misadventure, a Nazi-collaborationist effort, a cry for Soviet liberation, a false memory -- in essence, whatever would both legitimize the new government, which entrenched itself after the Uprising, and discredit the old one and its many loyalists. In other words, it could not be what it ultimately was -- a moment of infamy for the Soviet Union, whose army stood on Warsaw's banks as the city burned, the better to rescue it once it had already been devoured.

There emerged in response a new resistance movement led by dissidents of all stripes – historians, writers, activists, artists, and especially filmmakers – all devoted to a singular purpose (which, in their view, was a continuation of the Warsaw Resistance): to reclaim the past and to tell it truthfully. At stake was both the collective memory of the wartime generation in Poland, which could be manipulated and corrupted, as well as the memory of the emerging generation, which could be altered or erased. As one may imagine, the odds they encountered were staggering. (The dystopian literature of the early 20th century offers a glimpse into the depradations, barbarism, and darkness behind the Iron Curtain). In Soviet-dominated Poland, as in the other Eastern bloc nations, a censorship bureau strictly regulated intellectual and artistic activity, while state-run media propagated the Soviet agenda on current and historical affairs. All attempts to diverge from the Party line were met with severe repercussions. Thus if the truth about the Uprising was to be sought and shared, dissidents would have to circumvent these structures, either underground, which was dangerous, or through oblique strategies, which demanded cunning.

Both channels were employed, but the use of the latter, i.e., the encryption of books, poems, paintings, songs, and films with veiled references, the deployment of symbol and metaphor, was much more common. A prominent example appears in Polish director Andrzej Wajda's wartime film, Canal (1957). In one of the final scenes, two survivors of the Uprising have been wading through the muck of the sewers, and they reach an exit grill on the bank of the Vistula. The last shot has them gazing at the other side of the river, depleted of all hope. No one, of course, could be in doubt as to who had been waiting so indifferently yet ravenously on the other side.

Control over creative output in Poland was alternately tightened and loosened as Soviet policy and leadership changed. By degrees, Poles had learned to distinguish imposed orthodoxy from wink-of-the-eye heresy in everything they read or heard. It was the persistence, though, of lies surrounding the Warsaw Uprising (and separately, the Katyn Massacre) that drove dissidents towards a more comprehensive and accurate retelling of the event -- an ambitious aim which seemed more realistic than ever during the Solidarity Movement of 1980. It was not, however, until the final convulsions of Soviet Communism had exhausted the system in 1991 that the historical record could finally be reconstructed -- and dramatically augmented. Censorship was abolished, state-run media organizations became independent, and state archives were opened. Like many other events in Polish history, the Uprising would undergo a transition from an event fraught with ideological distortion to the object of accurate historical representation, and the public at last was free to learn about it, or in many cases, to relearn it.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Professor Cogito or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Debt Ceiling

All fears that the nation today would fail to avert financial apocalypse should be laid quietly to rest. (Though this still leaves biblical apocalypse open for October). A new law to raise the debt ceiling has been passed, yet few soothsayers in the Beltway could really have doubted its passage. The lead-up to those eleventh-hour negotiations, a rather convenient bit of suspense in any political drama, was remarkable not simply for the intransigence of both sides, but for its theatricality. In staging this battle, congressional leaders proved themselves more invested in the narrative of their conflict with each other, than in the future of the country. What shall we call it? Unscrupulous political dramaturgy.

What shall we call the resulting compromise? A farce.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Lucian Freud Has Died



As told by one of his models:

The artist with the all too penetrating gaze, Lucian Freud, has died. What his eyes saw in the human form, his hands rendered, not as Michaelangelo or Titian had done -- that is, with a newborn reverence for the human body -- but more probingly, in long sessions, under the shadow of the first half of the twentieth century. What his portraiture revealed was his subjects' own stark humanity, shorn of grace in a graceless world.

Many years ago, I sat for my own portrait in Lucian's studio. If I remember correctly, the work lasted six months. But I rather enjoyed the time I spent with him. The man had a genius for story-telling and often regaled me, as I lay naked on a bed, with wonderful anecdotes and reminiscences. Of the early, hungry days in the East End, he had great picaresque tales. (I seem to remember a string of encounters with a devious landlord). Of artist friends, he was generous and kind; of predecessors, most discriminating, though often brazenly iconoclastic. (He had, for example, no mercy for the pre-Raphaelites). When I wasn't laughing, I was looking back at him, into his eyes, which I imagined always saw more than I saw in myself, at times seemed almost remorseless.

When Lucian first showed me my portrait, I nearly recoiled from it, much as Dorian Gray had from his decaying likeness. Though I'd seen and known other of his works, it almost never occured to me, at least not while I lay there and listened to him, that I could be exposed to the same scrutiny. But there I was, all of myself, swathed in nothing but the flesh tones of my body, lying uneasily on a bed. And in my anxious gaze, the faint recognition that I had never been so naked.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Something unlikely

It is unlikely for a tradesman to have the name Thornton Stanwick III. If a plumber introduces himself with that name, you could be certain that he has escaped from somewhere and is eagerly expected back. In the rare instance that Thornton Stanwick III really is a plumber, then you might wonder what tower of glory he has fallen from, how he came to his present condition, and what the other Thornton Stanwicks would say about him. Moreover, what on earth would possess someone to name a child Thornton Stanwick?

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Bloomsday


June 16, 1904 is legendary for two events, one of which never really happened. The date exists in reality and in fancy. On that day, the young author James Joyce escorted his bride-to-be, Nora Barnacle, to Ringsend, a village outside Dublin. In a separate iteration of that selfsame day, Leopold Bloom, advertising salesman and Everyman, embarked on the most sublimely banal excursion in modern literature. If Ulysses is an allegory of the modern experience, then it's all the more fitting that we, its readers, commemorate the journey of that novel's hero as though it really happened -- a veritable holiday. What a thing of wonders is our collective memory!

Saturday, June 11, 2011

The Black Spot: Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"


There are two related myths about history. One concerns the evolution of time, the idea that time is constantly unfolding in advance of some final incarnation, like utopia. The other is that man, who exists in time, is constantly outpacing the primal aggressions and irrational impulses of his prehistoric and uncivilized origins.

Shirley Jackson's haunting tale, "The Lottery," deconstructs these myths, though without the hopeless pessimism we might expect from such a deconstruction.

The story is set in a small, nondescript village during an annual "lottery." Neighboring villages, we learn, have a similar tradition, but some have been doing away with it. While the townsfolk gather in the square to take part in this ritual, a group of boys is piling up stones, as though in preparation for a game of war. The village official who organizes the lottery produces a black wooden box filled with slips of paper, from which every adult male will take several pieces and distribute them to the members of his family. An old man, under whose steely gaze this ceremony has been watched and conducted for generations, remarks that the lottery has always yielded a good crop, a hint of the superstitions underpinning the ceremony. Finally when the slips of paper have been meted out, the townsfolk will open their pursed hands and look inside. On one of these scraps is marked a black circle, betokening an act of brutality and inhumanity that belies the quaintness of this seemingly well-ordered village.

When "The Lottery" was published in 1948, it aroused a violent public reaction. Jackson received hate mail and harsh criticism, readers cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine in which the story was featured (The New Yorker), and in the following years, discussion groups were formed to better understand this bizarre story. In a sharp turn of critical awareness, "The Lottery" has since been integrated into school reading programs, having become an educational rite of passage for many young students.

Though one may not be able to imagine the shock produced by "The Lottery" when it first appeared, who can doubt it? Sneaking into public circulation amidst the growing anxiety of a "cold war," Shirley Jackson's haunting parable was not only a blow to American confidence in its own noble character and mission, but was inimical to the perception of man as innately good and capable of civilization. Earlier in the century, the Anglo-Polish writer, Joseph Conrad, challenged this myth in novels which evoked the barbarism latent in purportedly civilized Western society. The "Lottery" was, by analogy, America's own "Heart of Darkness," and caused its own reverberations.

In one sense, "The Lottery" overturns the hackneyed notion of the innocent and gentle countryside, the pastoral idyll as envisioned by Virgil and many Renaissance poets. But that assessment limits the story and its author's intentions too strictly. Jackson was writing an allegory of the human soul, and she was drawing on the wide span of human history to show that something was deeply wrong, particularly in the light of two devastating world wars. As the story suggests, there is a deep reservoir of irrational impulsivity in human society, a notion that had been gaining currency since the mid-nineteenth century, reinforced in particular by Sigmund Freud, who discovered an underworld of strange and largely unconscious menace lurking beneath genteel Viennese society.

For Jackson, as for Freud, that menace is an atavism of man's primal heritage. History and human enlightenment have failed to eradicate it. We must live with our innate barbarism and suppress it with layers of civilization (albeit to our discontent, as Freud theorized). Yet, like Freud, Jackson seemed to believe that this irrationality could be controlled. While the "lottery" symbolizes the antiquated traditions, rituals, and superstitions that man preserves against his better reason, it fails to hold man in perpetual sway, as seen in its repudiation by other villages. Thus as an allegory of the human soul, "The Lottery" also reflects, if meekly, an optimism about man's inclinations toward freedom and happiness.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Mr. Cogito greets you


To all newcomers and new readers, Mr. Cogito says hello. As you are now privy to secret knowledge, the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg will be watching.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

The Case of Alonso Quijano


No one ever asks what prompted Alonso Quijano, the legendary Don Quixote, to read so much fantasy literature in his late forties. We know he once infamously tilted at a windmill in his rusty armor on his old nag -- just one of a series of strange misadventures on his illusory quest -- because of what he read in that literature, and the prodigious doses in which he read it. It is generally known from Cervantes' great novel that Quijano, an impoverished Hidalgo of the village of La Mancha, went mad from excessive reading in a genre unsuited to reality. But we know almost nothing of his back story, save for what can be inferred from his status, age, and accoutrements. He is simply "one of those gentlemen with a lance in the lance-rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound." Do we need to know more? Probably not. Alonso Quijano is more recognizable to us through the things he owns than through a description of his past.

Which does not mean he has no past. What caused him then to devote all his waking hours to chivalric romances? Perhaps if we turn our gaze to the unused lance on its rack, the rusting shield festooned with cobwebs, and the old charger, we might understand that old gentleman more clearly. They are the traces of his noble lineage, the relics of a would-be knight errant whose own chanson de geste is sounded in his mind, a mind more expansive and clamorous with every novel he touches. Can you hear his song? It's becoming more audible as it becomes less reasonable. But it's no less reasonable than it is intensely satisfying, for Alonso Quijano's world to this moment has been a of tedium, disappointment, and resentment. He is at last becoming the hero of his own longed-for narrative, a hero of his time and ours, and the world around him seems to be changing for him -- dragons and giants are materializing across the land, notorious brigands are creeping off yellowing pages, fair ladies and duchesses are appearing in castle towers.

After setting aside the last book he will ever read, Alonso Quijano puts out the candle, lays himself on his straw-filled bed, and thinks of a new name with which to meet this new world. Before he falls asleep, he will murmur to himself a name as fitting to him as it is unusual and famous to the rest of us: Don Quixote.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Jacob Bronowski, The Identity of Man

In his series of essays, The Identity of Man (1965), Bronowski assumed the difficult task of vindicating science by humanizing it. His provocative question—is man a self or a machine?—set the stage for a thoughtful inquiry into the relationship between science and the humanities. What do they have in common? How are they different? Why does the self seek refuge from science? The answers, Bronowski hoped, would help restore the integrity of science and provide a total philosophy “which shows how a man thinks and feels, how he makes his values, what man is—which integrates afresh the experiences which always have been and are human.” The triumph of these essays lies in their illumination of man’s unique identity as a thinker and imaginer, whose unparalleled cognitive traits are the basis of his freedom. 

Sunday, May 1, 2011

1984: Between Memory and History

Few things are as disturbing to an historian as the future in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Here is a future of radical authoritarianism, where the state controls and monitors every aspect of human life, including memory. Events and experiences of past and present are salvageable insofar as they legitimize the regime’s dominance. In this dystopian world the historians are “ministers of Truth,” engaged daily in both the revision of artifacts and documents, and their systematic destruction. Nothing is free, not even the consciousness of history. The questionable O’Brien puts it distinctly: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

1984 raises very serious questions. What happens, for example, when memory is preempted and recreated? How does society change when the act of remembering has been restricted? What is the fate of a people’s identity when their past is confiscated? These questions are particularly relevant in the context of Pierre Nora’s article, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” in which the author suggests that a prominent condition of modernity is the replacement of lived memory with critical history, the substitution of sites of memory for real environments of memory. However, the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century—of which the hegemony of memory is a prime symptom—complicates Nora’s argument, especially where it equates modernity with the effort to achieve historical exactitude. 1984 is only a fictionalized model for a world in which collective memory and milieux de mémoire have been invented, but there are real examples, particularly in Germany under the Third Reich and in the Soviet empire after the Second World War. What this evidence suggests is that lived memory can be revived, though drastically distorted, if only to maintain the power of a ruling group. In turn, the will to remember is not necessarily endemic to the modern age, but must struggle with the will to reinvent the past.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Cry in the Orchard

At the far end of the orchard one night, Claire was plucking apples from a tree and dropping them into a burlap bag when, suddenly, a cry from the other side of the brick wall startled her. She waited silently to hear the cry again. She couldn’t tell if it was a human cry, or the cry of an animal. The night wind trailed briskly through the long grass and the dried fallen leaves, and touched Claire’s fingertips. The cry was indistinct. It could have been a cry of pain or a laugh. But Claire would never know. Silence crept back into the corner of the orchard, and the cry was heard no more.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Jacob Bronowski's Science

Jacob Bronowski identified a modern myth whose origins, he claimed, could be traced to the Industrial Revolution: the fear that man was becoming, ever more swiftly, a machine at the hands of modern science. When Bronowski entered the culture wars of the mid-twentieth century, sparked by C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures—addressing the breakdown in communication between scientists and literary intellectuals — he wanted to expose this myth, dispel false and antiquated notions of science, and illuminate the human being’s unique position in the natural world. His series of essays, The Identity of Man, is a valiant attempt to humanize science, and simultaneously, to popularize it. Only by discerning, as Bronowski believed, the inextricable relationship between science and the arts — by recovering the integrity of science — could one begin to appreciate man’s extraordinary, albeit material, nature. Unlike Snow’s treatise, whose political agenda bears the marks of Cold War anxieties and personal antipathies, Bronowski’s essays constitute a total philosophy of modern life, whereby a sound education in humanistic science is the basis for self-affirmation and the preservation of citizenship and democracy.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Reflections on 1968

In 1968, the world abounded with young idealists: student radicals, third world guerillas, disaffected intellectuals, Dany Cohn-Bendits, Rudi-Dutschkes, and Adam Michniks. They came out en masse in 1968 – symptomatic of the “eros effect,” as theorized by George Katsiaficas – initially to challenge local authority structures, and ultimately to attack oppression and injustice everywhere, especially in imperialist, hyper-capitalist, Communist, and underdeveloped societies. In the global revolution that ensued, the New Left – as this emergent vanguard of the socialist movement came to be known – recognized that its own interests lay in the equality and freedom of self-determination of all people: instinctual needs that, when realized, might culminate in utopia.

And yet, while the events of 1968 were wider in scope – politically, culturally, and geographically – than the liberal revolutions of 1830 and 1848, they ended nonetheless in disappointment, disillusionment, and shock. In popular memory, the failure of 1968 is attributed to any of several factors, like the overwhelming resistance of the state, the degeneration of revolutionary fervor into counterrevolutionary hedonism, and the lack of mass support from the working classes for the student movement. This last factor needs to be considered in detail, not least because it has provoked unwarranted criticism of the working class as an apathetic collective force resistant to revolutionary change. In reality, no single explanation can account for the breakdown of the student-worker alliances that manifested, to varying degrees of success, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The socio-political context in which each movement originated was significantly different from every other, so that each must be assessed and respected on its own terms. What these movements all had in common, however, was the student movement’s ability to identify existentially with oppressed peoples around the word, and in particular, with the working class. An alliance between these two parties, as national governments feared, could pose an irresistible threat to their dominance.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Dispatches: Remembering March 1968


As to the events of March 1968, I was in the eye of the storm, though I, like the rest of my peers, was oblivious to the political machinations and set-ups underlying the student movement. I was the classic representative and spokesperson for a spirit enslaved by communism, a national spirit, the Polish spirit—in pursuit of liberation from Soviet control, on the one hand, and on the other, freedom from the communism imposed on us by force.

I was in my fourth year of studies. One morning, on my way to a doctor’s appointment outside of the University, I picked up a leaflet on the ground in front of the library, a leaflet among many which someone had scattered like seeds. It was an announcement for a rally at 3pm that day, on that very spot in the courtyard, to protest the removal of a canonical play from the National Theatre (the play was removed for its incitement of anti-Soviet sentiment). As I returned from my check-up, I realized that all the streets leading to the university were blocked by militia squad-cars. Tension was rising.

The rally began with a protest in relation to the play, though immediately afterwards, we heard people shouting to each other to flee for the university buildings, for the militia had begun to attack.

We quickly rushed to a building and barricaded the doors. From the window I could see militia officers, not dressed in their regular uniforms but as workmen, beating students with batons and throwing them into police wagons.

Meanwhile, other schools were joining the student movement, and every day the movement was growing larger.

At the University I took part in a rally in the main auditorium, then in the departmental sit-ins, and in the marches through the Krakowski section of Warsaw; when threatened with police violence, we ran into Holy Cross Church.

But these are all minor details. Most important was the hope and joy we felt, that something would change, that we were fighting for Poland’s independence, that history was being made. The ability to express one’s hatred for the Soviet regime, thrust upon us against our will. And what’s more, the knowledge that we could express our deepest convictions without fear. I remember crying from happiness and pride, ecstatic that I could sing our national anthem in protest against the Soviet regime.

We belonged to the post-war generation, fighting for freedom despite our fear of the Stalinist repressions that so severely affected those of the wartime generation, our parents and grandparents.

In later years we discovered that, far from being agents of change, we were a bunch of dupes. The declaration of martial law in 1980, after the fall of the Solidarity movement, was the final blow to my ideals. After that, everything was an illusion.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral


Almost no critical study of T.S. Eliot’s religious drama, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), can fail to account for the link between its author and its protagonist, St. Thomas á Becket. Indeed, the religious experience at the center of the play represents all those elements with which Eliot was deeply concerned: “the crisis of doubt, the sense of guilt, the necessity of suffering, the experience of purgation, the subjection to the divine will and the immanent destiny.” However, few readers and critics direct their attention to the play’s social and political analogues, especially in relation to contemporary events, most significant of which was the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. In 1939, five years after Murder in the Cathedral was produced, and only months before Europe entered a second world war, Eliot gave a series of lectures on “The Idea of a Christian Society,” in which he examined the state of Christianity in the modern age, while envisioning a new Christian social order.

The play’s relationship to its author’s historical context—a religiously orthodox vision in an ideologically heterodox climate—is remarkable, anticipating ideas advanced in Eliot’s lecture, particularly regarding the division between church and state. These considerations all have a basis in one of Eliot’s most pressing questions, namely, whether modern liberal democracy or fascism poses the greater danger to religious orthodoxy. In answering this question, though, we inevitably uncover the poet’s own ideological prejudices.

After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, Eliot’s reputation as a cultural authority changed dramatically. Until that year, he had maintained the image of a poetic revolutionary, vindicating poetry like one of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Subsequently, though, in his essays, lectures, plays, and meditative poetry, Eliot came to be identified with religious restoration and right-wing politics, a transition aptly summed up in his self-proclamation as “a classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” His conversion astonished readers and friends alike, who hailed him as one of the leading proponents of the avant-garde, the cult of the new. But the seeds for religious transformation were present long before, as far back as his undergraduate years in Harvard, when the young Eliot pondered the relationship between body and soul, struggled against the distractions of physicality, and yearned for spiritual perfection through ascetic labor. His sense of sin and guilt, in particular, drew him to a stronger, more dogmatic theological structure than his Unitarian background could provide. Thus in a note that he scribbled around 1923 or 1924: “There are only 2 things—Puritanism and Catholicism. You are one or the other. You either believe in the reality of sin or you don’t—that is the important moral distinction—not whether you are good or bad. Puritanism does not believe in sin: it merely believes that certain things must not be done.” Eliot needed spiritual discipline, even self-abnegation, because he recognized the power of evil in human hearts. His conception of sin, severe and obsessive, braced him against the moral decadence, the death-in-life he perceived around him. According to biographer Lyndall Gordon, Eliot “felt the devil not so much in social wrongs, but within, and believed that the chief purpose of civilization was to cope with the notion of original sin. Lust seemed to him the most corrupting of all sins and, as a young man, he wished the flesh could be denied, burnt away by the refining fire.” Like Augustine, Eliot knew he was setting out on a path of no return, for it was a path remarkably similar to that of a saint.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

On a Tour of New Orleans During Mardi Gras


The window of my third floor walk-up in the French Quarter opens upon the shimmering slate rooftops and dormers of pastel-colored houses and the intricate lacework balconies, dripping from last night's rain. Beyond them rise the sun-bathed spires of a church, and beyond those, the blue shipping cranes on the Mississippi. From my little garret, I can hear the flourishes of a trumpet and the bellowing of a trombone, full-blooded jazz rhythms clamoring in the avenues below. From other rooms in the Vieux Carre, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams listened too, tapping away at their typewriters.

It is Ash Wednesday. The sudden downpour in the small hours of the night, which swept the merrymakers of Mardi Gras into their hotels and rented apartments, pushed the jazz musicos and washboard-and-fiddle bohemians into little dry corners, and drenched the hell-fire of the prophets of Bourbon Street, seemed appropriate, if not biblical. (I myself much prefer rain to brimstone.) I descend my serpentine staircase and go outside. The streets are nearly deserted, but the fragments of a day-long bacchanalia are scattered everywhere. Under grey skies, I and the other survivors wade through the rubbish and mud puddles on our way to the cathedral for mass.

Mardi Gras had begun early. The narrow streets, thickening and panting with life, gave me the impression of being in Pamplona during the running of the bulls. Setting out for the Marigny, where the parades were to begin, I walked through a gauntlet of men and women clad in strange and spectacular costumes. Each seemed to be a defiant gesture against something and anything: sexual norms, social conventions, traditions of decency, legacies of oppression, hierarchies of value. Never had I seen so many satyrs and fauns, pirates, crossdressers, brightly painted faces and bodies, stilt walkers -- it was as though we had all escaped from a circus!

Carnivale is a great human drama, someone told me. We cast ourselves in it, take roles, and act in them with startling conviction. If one is asked why, one might respond, "Because it's Mardi Gras! That's what is done." For one short season, we overturn the social order with aplomb, in accord with some invisible script, and when it ends, as it must end -- abruptly -- we return painfully to our former lives, to offices, classrooms, silent homes, routines, responsibilities, insecurities.

On that somber Wednesday morning, people materialize in the streets with ashes on their forehead, the church bell tolling at the beginning of another mass. The sun begins to dispel the clouds, but a vague memory of the night before remains. Why did we come here? What happens now? The jazz starts up again, but more softly. Artists again hang their wares on gates, and fortune tellers again set up tables in Jackson Square. Weaving through the few open spaces, we pass each other, see the smudged cross over each others' brows, and exchange knowing glances. But what is it that we know? Is the drama over, or does it continue?

And if it continues, when does it end?

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Anatomy of Dreams

Sigmund Freud was not the first to explore the unconscious, or to analyze the origin and nature of dreams. Before him, Homer imagined gods sending men to deliver messages into the minds of unwitting sleepers. Sophocles and Shakespeare both examined unconscious motivation in their plays. Among the most popular pre-modern tracts on dreams was Macrobius’s (ca. 360) Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. In the eighteenth century, Kant asserted that humans structure their world in the unconscious realm, and in the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer’s disciple, Eduard von Hartmann, wrote an influential treatise on the subject, known as The Philosophy of the Unconscious. But despite these inquiries and investigations, the human psyche remained a source of mystery, more amenable to philosophical speculation than to empirical observation.

When Freud began to study the structure of the mind, he reclaimed its properties for man. Although most modern thinkers were already doing this, Freud was committed to a medico-scientific understanding of the psyche. A rational explanation, therefore, must be free of romantic or providential assumptions, in which the mind is a medium for external forces, divine or demonic, and instead, find its basis in human psychology. By establishing a link between cognition and the operations of the body, Freud showed that the mind is distinctly human. And in one other respect, the mind is distinctly modern. “For Freud, human reason was not master in its own house but a precarious defense mechanism struggling against, and often motivated by, unconscious desires and forces.” As such, Freudian theory is consistent with the prevailing themes of modernism: apparent incoherence and meaninglessness, ambiguity, the absence of a deity. All are ingredients for an existential crisis, and yet the predicament posed by an unconscious falls short of absurdity. Though its activity is obscure, and perhaps even irrational, it is nevertheless comprehensible, particularly through dreams. Freud, taking his cue from the ancients, demonstrated the narrative value and figurative significance of dreams, thereby enabling us to uncover truths not visible to empirical observation.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

The Logic of Snobbery

Until 2001, Jonathan Franzen was an emerging American novelist with two books to his name. Following the release of his best-selling novel, The Corrections, Franzen became a famous American novelist with renewed intellectual and cultural clout. The Corrections won critical acclaim, earning its author the National Book Award and a seat in the pantheon of postmodern American literature. Then, in October of that year, Franzen unwittingly courted notoriety by snubbing Oprah Winfrey. After The Corrections had been selected to appear in Oprah’s Book Club – a dubious honor, but one which would surely have expanded his readership – Franzen rejected the offer, fearing the aesthetic integrity of the book would be jeopardized by a corporate imprimatur. Humiliated, Oprah publicly withdrew her offer, and Franzen was subjected to criticism for his apparent snobbery, pretension, and lack of gratitude. One thing was certain: no one snubs Oprah and gets away with it. However, the controversy brought Franzen instant publicity, and his novel saw a dramatic boost in sales.

What seemed like mere arrogance on Franzen’s part, Sean Latham would likely attribute to the more complicated logic of snobbery. According to Latham, snobbery is a byproduct of the commodification of culture, and was exemplified by modernist writers, as well as consumers, in an attitude of arch contempt. In his book, “Am I a Snob?” (2003) Latham claims, “Snobbery evolved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century as a historical and narrative strategy for negotiating literature’s place in a mass-mediated and highly segmented cultural marketplace.” Amid the decline of aristocratic hierarchies and the growth of middle-class power, the literary market was deluged with large numbers of new readers. Before long, cultural goods were transformed into icons of social prestige and economic success. Anyone could be an aristocrat with the proper learning; anyone could counterfeit sophistication. For intellectuals, however, the thought that the entire artistic enterprise could be commercialized, that the signs of authentic and artificial cultural capital could become nearly indistinguishable, was unnerving. In response, writers became more obscure and more élitist, contributing ultimately to Modernism’s defining gesture: to isolate aesthetic value and innovation from the broader marketplace.

Latham’s book is a careful examination of the figure of the snob as it appears in literary and historical contexts from the mid-nineteenth century to around 1930. As originally conceived, the word “snob” referred to a lowly social climber who rather poorly mimicked the tastes and fashions of the upper classes. It was not until 1848, however, with the publication of William Thackeray’s The Book of Snobs, that this figure would pose a threat to the Victorian moral universe. Using social masquerade to his advantage, the snob became a master of taste, a refined bourgeoisie able to interpret and manipulate the signs of social distinction. With this new-found acumen, the snob could circulate freely among the British upper classes, challenging the ancient aristocratic codes of bloodline and tradition. Alas, how was one to distinguish a true gentleman from a poseur? What Thackeray revealed was that “in a mass-mediated cultural marketplace, modern social power derives neither from the ideologically structured interiority of the gentleman nor the snobbish preservation of class boundaries,” but from a command of the fluid signs of social and cultural distinction. In short, the aristocracy was becoming an open institution.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

The Dystopian Novel

The dystopian novel has a very short pedigree, emerging at the turn of the twentieth century with H.G. Wells’s novels, The Story of the Days to Come and When the Sleeper Wakes, both published in 1899. In the decades to follow will appear the triumvirate of dystopian novels—Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—all uniquely modern in their diagnosis of and prognostications for Western civilization. But more importantly, the dystopian genre is a distinctly twentieth century phenomenon, a symptom of an era undergoing rapid change, and of a world that seemed on the verge of self-annihilation. The threat was not unfounded either, for the cornerstones of the modern experience—mass production, technological acceleration, world war, and totalitarianism—irrevocably changed the nature of society, and established something approximating the World State, as envisioned by Zamyatin and Huxley, through global commerce and communication.

Unlike its progenitor the utopian novel, dystopias illustrate a future world of chaos and madness, often operating under the guise of a rational state. Lacking Renaissance faith in human reason, progress, and man’s capacity to create a world of peace and justice, these novels question human nature and civilization. However, what distinguishes Huxley’s novel from the others is the fact that his own anxiety is not motivated by contemporary totalitarianism, but increasing capitalization and cultures of excess. In his comparison of Brave New World with Nineteen Eighty-Four, social critic Neil Postman wrote:

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

While all dystopian novels alert the reader to an irrational future, Huxley did not believe—as Orwell and Zamyatin did—that existing dictatorships, like the Soviet Union, are palpable signs or pathogens of that future. Rather, the ingredients for disaster are already present in capitalized culture. Indeed, the virtues of his World State, “Community, Identity, Stability,” the perversion of which Huxley demonstrates through reproductive technology and behaviorism, are the same for all bureaucracies; democratic governments are no exception. The irony, of course, is that these virtues are meant to ensure productive efficiency and universal well-being. As the character Mustapha Mond explains, the shift from the past state to the future demanded the subordination of knowledge and truth to comfort and happiness, a transition which must, necessarily, suppress individuality. Only in blissful ignorance can the people be ruled.

And yet, how can there be “bliss” without freedom? Can man be made to forget that he is human? These are problems with which all three novelists were primarily concerned, but only Huxley finds the threat developing in our own society and our own efforts to conform to it. Thus, the dehumanization of Brave New World occurs not when freedom and happiness are deprived, but when they are supplied in overabundance. In that regard, capitalism is a powerful instrument.  


Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Beatrice Webb


On 22 February 1883, Beatrice Webb penned the following entry in her diary: “A conflict has been going on within me. Shall I give myself up to Society, and make it my aim to succeed therein, or shall I only do so as far as duty calls me, keeping my private life much as it has been for the last nine months?” For all her intelligence, will power, assertiveness, and individualism, Beatrice Webb’s early diaries testify to the deep rift that runs through this future reformer’s life. The conflict she alludes to, between a public and a private life, is one of many dilemmas Beatrice faces in the pursuit of a social vocation. Often, it is a choice between reason and instinct, liberal and conservative political orientation, love and duty, dependence and independence. But she does not allow them to constrain her; rather, she seeks compromise. As an adolescent, Beatrice claims to have “shaken off the chains of the beautiful old faith” on her ascent to “something higher.” That higher level, as will become increasingly clear, is the calling to an active life in society.

Though Beatrice Webb was a woman with conflicting interests, what is more startling is her recognition of a choice. Despite her womanhood and the patriarchal norms of Victorian England, which she acknowledges in her diary, Beatrice is aware that she can either submit to the narrow world of the “angel in the house,” or assume the prominent role of a public intellectual. Her inclination towards the latter sphere – controlled predominantly by men – strikes many of her contemporaries as audacious and unbecoming of a woman. Indeed, how many could express the sentiment of the following entry from 15 February 1890, on her conversion to socialism: “I have become a socialist not because I believe it would ameliorate the conditions of the masses (though I think it would do so) but because I believe that only under communal ownership of the means of production can you arrive at the most perfect form of individual development, at the greatest stimulus to individual effort; in other words complete socialism is only consistent with absolute individualism. As such, some day, I shall stand on a barrel and preach it.”

For Beatrice, individualism is all-important in the transition from a monarchy to a socialist democracy. While the removal of sexual inequality was certainly a catalyst of her conversion, it became the vehicle for the more comprehensive cause of lifting the barriers to individual happiness. Whether socialism is even compatible with individual development, Beatrice never has to question. It is a given, and for her, eminently worth fighting for.

Friday, January 14, 2011

The Beat Dilemma


The postwar experience of the mid-twentieth century marked a significant turn in global politics and social and economic culture. As the old order passed away, a new one followed, in which cold war, atomic proliferation, competing forms of modernization, and advanced capitalism prevailed. In the United States – which had now become a global juggernaut – an empowered bourgeoisie revitalized the so-called American Dream, turning its archetypal ideals into realizable goals. The nuclear family, a quaint home life, higher education, financial wealth, consumer freedom – all constituted a hegemonic order that demanded conformity while it marginalized dissidents. Among those on the periphery were Communist sympathizers and ethnic and racial minorities, but also an emerging youth movement united by a deep sense of alienation and dissatisfaction, a state Jack Kerouac trenchantly described as “beat.”

The Beat Generation of the 1950s, a precursor of the volatile counterculture of the following decade, seethed at America’s postwar prosperity and the repressive conditions of containment. It emerged, as Malcolm Bradbury points out, in an “affluent, conformist America where the individual seems superfluous, the outsider rages, the dominant culture seems oppressive and hostile.” Unwilling to conform, the Beats – of whom the core members were Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs—sought their own values and pursued their own vision in jazz clubs, in experimental art, through alcohol, drugs, liberated sexuality, and the ecstasies of Buddhism and Jewish and Christian mysticism. Insofar as it was a struggle against repressive norms, the Beat-life was an on-going quest, a journey to find a new mode of being in the remote corners of human existence. As John Tytell writes, “The Beat Movement was a crystallization of a sweeping discontent with American ‘virtues’ of progress and power. What began with an exploration of the bowels and entrails of the city – criminality, drugs, mental hospitals – evolved into an expression of the visionary sensibility.”

That sensibility, enshrined predominantly in literature, first entered the American mainstream with Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. Published in 1957, this semi-autobiography became a manifesto for the new generation of dispossessed American youths starved for personal freedom. Without plot, or any other literary restraint, On the Road describes the nomadic life of two characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, as they crisscross the American continent over a period of two years (from 1947 to 1949), visiting major cities, having love affairs, working odd jobs, experimenting with drugs, frequenting jazz clubs – and always on the go. “We were all delighted,” the narrator Sal declares, “we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, [to] move. And we moved!” The theme of mobility is paramount in the text, but unlike other quest narratives, whose heroes strive towards a defined goal, On the Road is irreducible to any end other than the experience of aimless travel and discovery. For this reason it poses an interpretive dilemma, which seeks to answer the question: is On the Road simply an ode to a narcissistic culture, or does it offer an uncommon solution to societal repression?

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

The ambiguity underlying scientific progress is perhaps no where more creatively expressed than in utopian literature and science-fiction. In both genres, science is depicted variously as: the indispensable element of a perfect society; a field prone to misuse and destructiveness, its product a nightmarish reality; and the conceptual framework of a world—often projected into the future—remarkable not for its moral quality but its metaphysical curiosity. The boundaries between these interpretations are blurred in the dystopian narrative, a hybrid of both genres, of which Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We—a tale set in the twenty-sixth century A.D., in the regimented totalitarian society of OneState—is the modern exemplar.

Written in 1921 and published in 1924, We stakes its claim to the modernist tradition of the early twentieth century by virtue of its experimental boldness in form and content, its open-endedness, and self-reflexivity. These aesthetic strategies also reinforce the novel’s negative image of scientific progress, and by extension, underscore Modernism’s reaction to scientific rationality. Thus, We effectively deconstructs the metanarrative of late nineteenth-century Positivism—a total worldview of human society and the natural environment—by casting it in a dystopian world, in which freedom and individuality have been abolished. Nevertheless, though the novel dramatizes Modernist anxiety over scientific rationalism, it does not repudiate science itself; rather, it cautions against the excesses of science and its potentially dangerous relationship with the state.