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?

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.