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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.  

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.