Where the Stress Falls (30 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
T
O LOOK BACK
on writings of thirty or more years ago is not a wholesome exercise. My energy as a writer impels me to look forward, to feel still that I am beginning, really beginning, now, which makes it hard to curb my impatience with that beginning writer I once was in the literal sense.
O LOOK BACK
on writings of thirty or more years ago is not a wholesome exercise. My energy as a writer impels me to look forward, to feel still that I am beginning, really beginning, now, which makes it hard to curb my impatience with that beginning writer I once was in the literal sense.
Against Interpretation,
my second book, was published in 1966, but some essays in it date from 1961, when I was still writing
The Benefactor.
I had come to New York at the start of the 1960s—eager to put to work the writer I had, since adolescence, pledged myself to become. My idea of a writer: someone interested in “everything.” I’d always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis than in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent universities I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren’t more people like me.
my second book, was published in 1966, but some essays in it date from 1961, when I was still writing
The Benefactor.
I had come to New York at the start of the 1960s—eager to put to work the writer I had, since adolescence, pledged myself to become. My idea of a writer: someone interested in “everything.” I’d always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis than in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent universities I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren’t more people like me.
I’m aware that
Against Interpretation
is regarded as a quintessential text of that now mythic era known as the Sixties. I evoke the label with reluctance, since I’m not keen on the omnipresent convention of packaging one’s life, the life of one’s time, in decades. And it wasn’t the Sixties
Against Interpretation
is regarded as a quintessential text of that now mythic era known as the Sixties. I evoke the label with reluctance, since I’m not keen on the omnipresent convention of packaging one’s life, the life of one’s time, in decades. And it wasn’t the Sixties
“Thirty Years Later …” was written in the summer of 1995 as the preface to the republication the following year in Madrid of the Spanish translation of
Against Interpretation.
Against Interpretation.
then. For me it was chiefly the time when I wrote my first and second novels, and began to discharge some of the cargo of ideas about art and culture and the proper business of consciousness which had distracted me from writing fiction. I was filled with evangelical zeal.
The radical change I’d made in my own life, a change embedded in my moving to New York, was that I was not going to settle for being an academic: I would pitch my tent outside the seductive, stony safety of the university world. No doubt, there were new permissions in the air, and old hierarchies had become ripe for toppling, but not that I was aware, at least not until after the time (1961 to 1965) these essays were written. The freedoms I espoused, the ardors I was advocating, seemed to me—still seem to me—quite traditional. I saw myself as a newly minted warrior in a very old battle: against philistinism, against ethical and aesthetic shallowness and indifference. And I could never have imagined that both New York, where I had come to live after my long academic apprenticeship (Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard), and Paris, where I had started spending the summers, in daily attendance at the Cinémathèque, were in the early throes of a period that would be judged as exceptionally creative. They were, New York and Paris, exactly as I’d imagined them to be—full of discoveries, inspirations, the sense of possibility. The dedication and daring and absence of venality of the artists whose work mattered to me seemed, well, the way it was supposed to be. I thought it normal that there be new masterpieces every month—above all in the form of movies and dance events, but also in the fringe theatre world, in galleries and improvised art spaces, in the writings of certain poets and other, less easily classifiable writers of prose. Maybe I
was
riding a wave. I thought I was flying, getting an overview, sometimes swooping down to get close.
was
riding a wave. I thought I was flying, getting an overview, sometimes swooping down to get close.
I had so many admirations: there was so much to admire. I looked around and saw importance to which no one was giving its due. Perhaps I was particularly well fitted to see what I saw, to understand what I understood, by virtue of my bookishness, my Europhilia, and the energy I had at my disposal in the search for aesthetic bliss. Still, it surprised me at first that people found what I said “new” (it wasn’t so new to me), that I was thought to be in the vanguard of sensibility and,
from the appearance of my very first essays, regarded as a tastemaker. Of course, I was elated to be apparently the first to pay attention to some of the matters I wrote about; sometimes I couldn’t believe my good fortune that they had waited for me to describe them. (How odd, I thought, that Auden hadn’t written something like my “Notes on Camp.”) As I saw it, I was merely extending to some new material the aesthete’s point of view I had embraced, as a young student of philosophy and literature, in the writings of Nietzsche, Pater, Wilde, Ortega (the Ortega of “The Dehumanization of Art”), and James Joyce.
from the appearance of my very first essays, regarded as a tastemaker. Of course, I was elated to be apparently the first to pay attention to some of the matters I wrote about; sometimes I couldn’t believe my good fortune that they had waited for me to describe them. (How odd, I thought, that Auden hadn’t written something like my “Notes on Camp.”) As I saw it, I was merely extending to some new material the aesthete’s point of view I had embraced, as a young student of philosophy and literature, in the writings of Nietzsche, Pater, Wilde, Ortega (the Ortega of “The Dehumanization of Art”), and James Joyce.
I was a pugnacious aesthete and a barely closeted moralist. I didn’t set out to write so many manifestos, but my irrepressible taste for aphoristic statement conspired with my staunchly adversarial purposes in ways that sometimes surprised me. In the writings collected in
Against Interpretation
this is what I like best: the tenacity, the succinctness (I suppose I should say here that I still agree with most of the positions I took), and certain psychological and moral judgments in the essays on Simone Weil, Camus, Pavese, and Michel Leiris. What I don’t like are those passages in which my pedagogic impulse got in the way of my prose. Those lists, those recommendations! I suppose they are useful, but they annoy me now.
Against Interpretation
this is what I like best: the tenacity, the succinctness (I suppose I should say here that I still agree with most of the positions I took), and certain psychological and moral judgments in the essays on Simone Weil, Camus, Pavese, and Michel Leiris. What I don’t like are those passages in which my pedagogic impulse got in the way of my prose. Those lists, those recommendations! I suppose they are useful, but they annoy me now.
The hierarchies (high/low) and polarities (form/content, intellect /feeling) I was challenging were those that inhibited the proper understanding of the new work I admired. Although I had no programmatic commitment to the “modern,” taking up the cause of new work, especially work that had been slighted or ignored or misjudged, seemed more useful than defending old favorites. In writing about what I was discovering, I assumed the preeminence of the canonical treasures of the past. The transgressions I was applauding seemed altogether salutary, given what I took to be the unimpaired strength of the old taboos. The contemporary work I praised (and used as a platform to relaunch my ideas about art-making and consciousness) didn’t detract from the glories of what I admired far more. Enjoying the impertinent energy and wit of a species of performance called Happenings did not make me care less about Aristotle and Shakespeare. I was—I am—for a pluralistic, polymorphous culture. No hierarchy, then? Certainly there’s hierarchy. If I had to choose between
the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then—of course—I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?
the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then—of course—I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?
The great revelation for me had been the cinema: I felt particularly marked by the films of Godard and Bresson. I wrote more about cinema than about literature, not because I loved movies more than novels but because I loved more new movies than new novels. It was clear to me that no other art was being so widely practiced at such a high level. One of my happiest achievements in the years when I was doing the writing collected in
Against Interpretation
is that no day passed without my seeing one, sometimes two or three movies. Most of them were “old.” My absorption in cinema history only reinforced my gratitude for certain new films, which (along with my favorites from the silent era and the 1930s) I saw again and again, so exalting were their freedom and inventiveness of narrative method, their sensuality and gravity and beauty.
Against Interpretation
is that no day passed without my seeing one, sometimes two or three movies. Most of them were “old.” My absorption in cinema history only reinforced my gratitude for certain new films, which (along with my favorites from the silent era and the 1930s) I saw again and again, so exalting were their freedom and inventiveness of narrative method, their sensuality and gravity and beauty.
Cinema was the exemplary art activity during the time these essays were written, but there were astonishments in the other arts as well. Artists were insolent again, as they’d been after World War I until the rise of fascism. The modern was still a vibrant idea. (This was before the capitulations embodied in the idea of the “post-modern.”) And I have said nothing here about the political struggles which took shape around the time the last of these essays were being written: I mean the nascent movement against the American war on Vietnam, which was to consume a large part of my life from 1965 through the early 1970s (those years were still the Sixties, too, I suppose). How marvelous it all does seem, in retrospect. How one wishes some of its boldness, its optimism, its disdain for commerce had survived. The two poles of distinctively modern sentiment are nostalgia and utopia. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the time now labeled the Sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian moment.
The world in which these essays were written no longer exists.
Instead of a utopian moment, the time we live in is experienced as the end—more exactly, just past the end—of every ideal. (And therefore of culture: there is no possibility of true culture without altruism.) An illusion of the end, perhaps—and not more illusory than the conviction
of thirty years ago of being on the threshold of a great positive transformation of culture and society. No, not an illusion, I think.
of thirty years ago of being on the threshold of a great positive transformation of culture and society. No, not an illusion, I think.
It is not simply that the Sixties have been repudiated, and the dissident spirit quashed, and made the object of intense nostalgia. The ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote—indeed, impose—the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons. No recommendations exist outside a certain setting. The recommendations and enthusiasms expressed in the essays collected in
Against Interpretation
have become the possession of many people now. Something was operating to make these marginal views more acceptable, something of which I had no inkling—and, had I understood better my time, that time (call it by its decade-name if you want), would have made me more cautious. Something that it would not be an exaggeration to call a sea change in the whole culture, a transvaluation of values—for which there are many names. Barbarism is one name for what was taking over. Let’s use Nietzsche’s term: we had entered, really entered, the age of nihilism.
Against Interpretation
have become the possession of many people now. Something was operating to make these marginal views more acceptable, something of which I had no inkling—and, had I understood better my time, that time (call it by its decade-name if you want), would have made me more cautious. Something that it would not be an exaggeration to call a sea change in the whole culture, a transvaluation of values—for which there are many names. Barbarism is one name for what was taking over. Let’s use Nietzsche’s term: we had entered, really entered, the age of nihilism.
So I can’t help viewing the writings collected in
Against Interpretation
with a certain irony. I still like most of the essays—a few of them, such as “Notes on Camp” and “On Style,” quite a lot. (Indeed, there’s only one thing in the collection I don’t like at all: two theatre chronicles, the brief result of a commission I had accepted, against my better judgment, from a literary magazine with which I was allied.) Who would not be pleased that a collection of contentious writings from more than three decades ago continues to matter to new generations of readers in English and in many foreign languages. Still, I urge the reader not to lose sight of—it may take some effort of imagination—the larger context of admirations in which these essays were written. To call for an “erotics of art” did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to then as “popular” culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its complexities. When I denounced (for instance, in the essays on science-fiction films and on Lukács) certain kinds of facile moralism, it was in the name of a more alert, less complacent seriousness. What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this)
was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, unrealistic, to most people, and when allowed—as an arbitrary decision of temperament—probably unhealthy, too.
Against Interpretation
with a certain irony. I still like most of the essays—a few of them, such as “Notes on Camp” and “On Style,” quite a lot. (Indeed, there’s only one thing in the collection I don’t like at all: two theatre chronicles, the brief result of a commission I had accepted, against my better judgment, from a literary magazine with which I was allied.) Who would not be pleased that a collection of contentious writings from more than three decades ago continues to matter to new generations of readers in English and in many foreign languages. Still, I urge the reader not to lose sight of—it may take some effort of imagination—the larger context of admirations in which these essays were written. To call for an “erotics of art” did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to then as “popular” culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its complexities. When I denounced (for instance, in the essays on science-fiction films and on Lukács) certain kinds of facile moralism, it was in the name of a more alert, less complacent seriousness. What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this)
was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, unrealistic, to most people, and when allowed—as an arbitrary decision of temperament—probably unhealthy, too.
I suppose it’s not wrong that
Against Interpretation
is read now, or reread, as an influential, pioneering document from a bygone age. But that is not how I read it, or—lurching from nostalgia to utopia—wish it to be read. My hope is that its republication now, and the acquisition of new readers, could contribute to the quixotic task of shoring up the values out of which these essays and reviews were written. The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values underlying those judgments did not.
Against Interpretation
is read now, or reread, as an influential, pioneering document from a bygone age. But that is not how I read it, or—lurching from nostalgia to utopia—wish it to be read. My hope is that its republication now, and the acquisition of new readers, could contribute to the quixotic task of shoring up the values out of which these essays and reviews were written. The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values underlying those judgments did not.
[1996]
BOOKS ABOUT TRAVEL
to exotic places have always opposed an “us” to a “them”—a relation that yields a limited variety of appraisals. Classical and medieval travel literature is mostly of the “us good, them bad”—typically, “us good, them horrid”—sort. To be foreign was to be abnormal, often represented as physical abnormality; and the persistence of those accounts of monstrous peoples, of “men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (Othello’s winning tale), of anthropophagi, Cyclopes, and the like illustrates to us the astonishing gullibility of past ages. But even this gullibility had its limits. A Christian culture could more easily believe in the existence of the monstrous than of the perfect or near perfect. Thus, while the kingdoms of freaks appear century after century on maps, exemplary races figure mostly in books of travel to utopia; that is, nowhere.
to exotic places have always opposed an “us” to a “them”—a relation that yields a limited variety of appraisals. Classical and medieval travel literature is mostly of the “us good, them bad”—typically, “us good, them horrid”—sort. To be foreign was to be abnormal, often represented as physical abnormality; and the persistence of those accounts of monstrous peoples, of “men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (Othello’s winning tale), of anthropophagi, Cyclopes, and the like illustrates to us the astonishing gullibility of past ages. But even this gullibility had its limits. A Christian culture could more easily believe in the existence of the monstrous than of the perfect or near perfect. Thus, while the kingdoms of freaks appear century after century on maps, exemplary races figure mostly in books of travel to utopia; that is, nowhere.
Not until the eighteenth century are there many examples of a more daring geography: literature about model societies which describes purportedly real places. Documentary literature and fiction were, of course, closely related in the eighteenth century, with nonfiction narratives in the first person an important model for the novel. It is the heyday of travel hoaxes, as well as of fiction in the form of travel books. And the greatest of the imaginary voyages,
Gulliver’s Travels,
mixes the two main fantasies of the wholly alien. Consisting mostly of visits to a series of monstrous races, it ends with its burnt out hero settled among
an ideal race: a high moment in the soon-to be-flourishing “us bad, them good” tradition.
Gulliver’s Travels,
mixes the two main fantasies of the wholly alien. Consisting mostly of visits to a series of monstrous races, it ends with its burnt out hero settled among
an ideal race: a high moment in the soon-to be-flourishing “us bad, them good” tradition.
The travel literature that can be understood as premodern takes for granted the contrast between the traveler’s society and those societies defined as anomalous, barbaric, backward, odd. To speak in the persona of the traveler, a professional (or even amateur) observer, was to speak for civilization; no premodern travelers thought of themselves as the barbarians. Modern travel literature starts when civilization becomes a critical as well as a self-evident notion—that is, when it is no longer so clear who is civilized and who is not.
Travel is a didactic fantasy in the discourse of the
philosophes
(the first intellectuals in the modern sense), who often invoke distant non-European societies, described as either more “natural” or more “rational,” in order to illuminate the evils of their own. Tales of physical anomaly attested to by voyagers to remote lands still circulate in the late eighteenth century—the nine-foot-tall giants of Patagonia, for example—but the sense of anomaly is increasingly the moral one. And “we” become the moral defectives. There is a large literature of journeys to exotic places whose fanciful virtues are recounted to point an instructive contrast with Europe. The journey was out of civilization—the present—to something better: the past or the future.
philosophes
(the first intellectuals in the modern sense), who often invoke distant non-European societies, described as either more “natural” or more “rational,” in order to illuminate the evils of their own. Tales of physical anomaly attested to by voyagers to remote lands still circulate in the late eighteenth century—the nine-foot-tall giants of Patagonia, for example—but the sense of anomaly is increasingly the moral one. And “we” become the moral defectives. There is a large literature of journeys to exotic places whose fanciful virtues are recounted to point an instructive contrast with Europe. The journey was out of civilization—the present—to something better: the past or the future.
America was the beneficiary of many trips, real and fabricated, of this kind. “In the beginning,” said John Locke, “all the world was America.” Crèvecoeur and Chateaubriand found in the New World something better than, unspoiled by, civilization: health, vigor, moral integrity, a refreshing naïveté and directness. After such fantasies came the inevitable counter-literature, that of acerbic British travelers of the mid-nineteenth century like Fanny Trollope and Dickens, who found us simply not very civilized, in a word, vulgar; Harriet Martineau in the 1830s, sensing abolitionism and feminism on the march, had liked us rather better. Much of modern judgments about exotic places is reactive. Turks were one of the model races in the eighteenth century; in the 1850s the intrepid Martineau actually visited two examples of the “Turkish” harem and described its inmates as the most injured, depressed, and corrupted human beings she had ever seen.
Although these travel judgments—the idealizing of an exotic society
, and the report on its barbarity—seem to alternate in cycles of hope and disillusionment, certain countries (following the mysterious laws of stereotyping) have proved more susceptible to idealizing than others. China has been a fantasy kingdom since Marco Polo’s visit; and in the eighteenth century it was widely believed that in China, a land of reason, there was no war, debauchery, ignorance, superstition, or widespread illness. America, too, for all its denigrators, keeps recurring as an object of idealization. In contrast, Russia is a land whose customs and energies have been perennially deplored. Since Ivan the Terrible, the first Muscovite monarch to capture the imagination of Europe, reports on the infamy of Russian society have constituted a flourishing branch of travel literature in the West. The only memorable counterreports—those made by some foreign visitors from the 1930s to the 1950s, precisely the period of the Greatest Terror, about the unprecedented heights of freedom and justice attained in the Soviet Union—have strengthened this tradition.
, and the report on its barbarity—seem to alternate in cycles of hope and disillusionment, certain countries (following the mysterious laws of stereotyping) have proved more susceptible to idealizing than others. China has been a fantasy kingdom since Marco Polo’s visit; and in the eighteenth century it was widely believed that in China, a land of reason, there was no war, debauchery, ignorance, superstition, or widespread illness. America, too, for all its denigrators, keeps recurring as an object of idealization. In contrast, Russia is a land whose customs and energies have been perennially deplored. Since Ivan the Terrible, the first Muscovite monarch to capture the imagination of Europe, reports on the infamy of Russian society have constituted a flourishing branch of travel literature in the West. The only memorable counterreports—those made by some foreign visitors from the 1930s to the 1950s, precisely the period of the Greatest Terror, about the unprecedented heights of freedom and justice attained in the Soviet Union—have strengthened this tradition.
One cannot imagine anyone being exactly disillusioned by the Marquis de Custine’s account of the barbarism and despotism he found when he went to Russia in 1839, as many people were sharply disillusioned by Simon Leys’s account, in the mid-1970s, of the barbarism of China’s Cultural Revolution. And this centuries-old propensity to think the best of China and the worst of Russian society still has its echo today, when, though by many criteria Chinese communism is infinitely more repressive, more (literally) totalitarian than Soviet communism, the Chinese version still enjoys a far better press than the Soviet one. (Indeed, most self-righteous anti-communists at the highest reaches of the American foreign policy establishment behave as if they are not supposed to notice the tragically Stalinist character of current Chinese political life.) Some countries are perennial objects of fantasy.
THE
PHILOSOPHES
HAD ATTRIBUTED
ideal virtues not only to a noble savage—the Hurons of Voltaire and Rousseau, Diderot’s wise old Tahitian—but also to existing non-European (“Eastern”) peoples such as Turks, Persians, and Chinese. The fantasies of succeeding generations of writers were not so easily disconfirmed. The only “ideal”
civilization allowed by the Romantic poets was a thoroughly dead one: the Greek.
PHILOSOPHES
HAD ATTRIBUTED
ideal virtues not only to a noble savage—the Hurons of Voltaire and Rousseau, Diderot’s wise old Tahitian—but also to existing non-European (“Eastern”) peoples such as Turks, Persians, and Chinese. The fantasies of succeeding generations of writers were not so easily disconfirmed. The only “ideal”
civilization allowed by the Romantic poets was a thoroughly dead one: the Greek.
Once travel was itself an anomalous activity. The Romantics construe the self as essentially a traveler—a questing, homeless self whose true citizenship is of a place that does not exist at all, or yet, or no longer exists; one consciously understood as an ideal, opposed to something real. It is understood that the journey is unending, and the destination, therefore, negotiable. To travel becomes the very condition of modern consciousness, of a modern view of the world—the acting out of longing or dismay. On this view everyone is, potentially, a traveler.
The generalizing of travel results in a new genre of travel writing: the literature of disappointment, which from now on will rival the literature of idealization. Europeans visited America, prospecting the possibilities of a new, simpler life; cultivated Americans journeyed to Europe to appraise the Old World sources of civilizations—both often profess to be disappointed. From the early nineteenth century on, European letters resound with the sentiment of being
Europamüde,
tired of Europe. Travelers continue, in ever larger numbers, to make trips to exotic, non-Western lands, which seem to answer to some of the old stereotypes: that simpler society, where faith is pure, nature pristine, discontent (and its civilization) unknown. But paradise is always being lost. One of the recurrent themes of modern travel narratives is the depredations of the modern, the loss of the past—the report on a society’s decline. The nineteenth-century travelers are noting the inroads in the idyllic life in, say, the South Seas made by the modern moneyeconomy, for travelers who would never dream of living like the natives generally still want the natives to stay wholesome, rustic, sexy, and uncomfortable.
Europamüde,
tired of Europe. Travelers continue, in ever larger numbers, to make trips to exotic, non-Western lands, which seem to answer to some of the old stereotypes: that simpler society, where faith is pure, nature pristine, discontent (and its civilization) unknown. But paradise is always being lost. One of the recurrent themes of modern travel narratives is the depredations of the modern, the loss of the past—the report on a society’s decline. The nineteenth-century travelers are noting the inroads in the idyllic life in, say, the South Seas made by the modern moneyeconomy, for travelers who would never dream of living like the natives generally still want the natives to stay wholesome, rustic, sexy, and uncomfortable.
Another characteristic modern incitement to travel, what makes a country worth seeing, and describing, is that a revolution has taken place in it. That most unromantic and profound of travel writers, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw in America the vanguard of a radical process soon to transform Europe as well, irrevocably destroying the past; it was to examine that revolution, democracy, that Tocqueville traveled about the United States. Trips to countries to see how they
have been transformed by a revolution, a revolution which claims to be about the enactment of ideals, have been one of the great subjects of modern travel literature. In the twentieth century these are trips to specific revolutions, seeking that ideal homeland, revolution-in-general. Much of the literature of travel from the “West” to communist countries reads as a late variant of the old genre, in which visitors from corrupt, oversophisticated Europe hail the healthy energies of a “new world”—now a self-designated “new man.”
have been transformed by a revolution, a revolution which claims to be about the enactment of ideals, have been one of the great subjects of modern travel literature. In the twentieth century these are trips to specific revolutions, seeking that ideal homeland, revolution-in-general. Much of the literature of travel from the “West” to communist countries reads as a late variant of the old genre, in which visitors from corrupt, oversophisticated Europe hail the healthy energies of a “new world”—now a self-designated “new man.”
In this version of the ideal destination, “revolutionary” has replaced “primitive” but still retains many of the attributes of what was once understood as primitive. “I have seen the future and it works,” notoriously declared Lincoln Steffens after his visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s—perhaps the high point of identifying communism with modernization. But as the Soviet model was discredited, and revolution became the fate of struggling agrarian societies more or less under siege, it seemed that what the travelers really felt was: I have seen the past and it is … moving.
Trips to those grievously poor countries are perceived as journeys backward in time: leaving affluent, doubt-stricken civilization for the simplicities, pieties, and materially spartan life of an earlier age. Writing of her visit to China in 1973, Barbara Wooten avowed: “To anyone coming from a world which threatens to strangle itself in its own complications it is the apparent simplicity of Chinese life which makes an irresistible appeal.” This reaction is not just fantasy. Communist revolutions tend not only to occur in peasant societies but, for all the energy devoted to bringing about a certain modernization, to preserve tenaciously much that is premodern in them, such as old-fashioned family life and the central role of a literary culture; and to abort or at least slow down—in part due to the intractable failures of the economy—the onset of the consumer society, with its affluence, its “permissive” values, and its degraded mass culture. Even the unfortunate countries of Central Europe (now paradigmatically relocated in the “East”), though hardly backward societies when they fell under Russian hegemony, are not exceptions to the rule of delayed advance into the modern which communism enforces; and still visibly preserve more of Europe before World War II than do the countries of Western Europe.
A good deal of the favorable reaction of foreign visitors has been precisely to this.
A good deal of the favorable reaction of foreign visitors has been precisely to this.
In almost all accounts of modern reflective travel, the master subject is alienation itself. The trip may support a skeptical, acutely sensuous, or speculative view of the world. Or the trip is an exercise in overcoming alienation in which travelers celebrate virtues—or liberties—found in a distant society that are lacking in their own. In another trip that has become common with the enlarging possibilities of travel to non-European countries, the affluent traveler, on vacation from bourgeois restraints, explores the “picturesque,” takes advantage of unlimited sexual opportunities. One celebrated nineteenth-century example is the trip that Flaubert, in the company of Maxime Du Camp, made to Egypt in 1850—1851. (In the twentieth century, homosexual writers have been specialists in this kind of libertine travel to colonies and ex-colonies.) In the trip to the revolution, another kind of picturesque is in evidence. Part of what is perceived in communist countries as old-fashioned is the sexual decorousness. Untrammeled sexuality is now associated not with the primitive but with decadence. The revolution represents itself as a kingdom of virtue, and visitors have been ready to believe that behavior in a revolutionary society really has been thus transformed. In the early 1970s many Western visitors accepted the solemn assurances of their Chinese hosts that there was no theft, no homosexuality, and no premarital sex in China.
Though travel for debauch is the opposite of the high-minded, edifying trip made to a poor country in the throes of a revolution, the latter trip often inspires similar condescensions and detachments. Sympathetic visitors who cannot even imagine the local hardships often have a high standard of revolutionary consciousness, and when, for example, the ghastly rigors and lethal zealotry of Chinese communism in the time of the Cultural Revolution were somewhat abated, starting in the mid-1970s, first-time visitors were known to commiserate with each other that they had missed the really good period, when the natives were pure, pious, uncorrupted by consumerism.
Many of the earlier travelers to the capitals of the revolution were, as in an old-fashioned literary journey, going to an exotic land in order to return home and write about it. Travelers to these countries were
conscious of traversing a formidable barrier. (Beyond the Great Wall. Behind the Iron Curtain.) They came to write about an exotic country; what they actually wrote about was their itinerary, the strenuous program that is laid out for privileged visitors. Indeed, the common form of these books was the record of the trip, as in
China Day by Day
, the notably ingenuous account Simone de Beauvoir wrote of her trip to China in 1955. By the early 1970s, with an increasing volume of travel to China, travelers were reporting not only similar trips but identical ones: the same tea-growing commune near Hangchow, the same bicycle factory in Shanghai, the same “lane committee” in a Peking neighborhood—the sameness of the trip having not deterred a large number of them from coming back and writing virtually the same book.
conscious of traversing a formidable barrier. (Beyond the Great Wall. Behind the Iron Curtain.) They came to write about an exotic country; what they actually wrote about was their itinerary, the strenuous program that is laid out for privileged visitors. Indeed, the common form of these books was the record of the trip, as in
China Day by Day
, the notably ingenuous account Simone de Beauvoir wrote of her trip to China in 1955. By the early 1970s, with an increasing volume of travel to China, travelers were reporting not only similar trips but identical ones: the same tea-growing commune near Hangchow, the same bicycle factory in Shanghai, the same “lane committee” in a Peking neighborhood—the sameness of the trip having not deterred a large number of them from coming back and writing virtually the same book.
Isolated, secretive, besieged—all communist countries have elaborate procedures for receiving foreign visitors, pampering them while putting them through some well-chosen paces, then dispatching them back, laden with trinkets and books, to the outside world. Like the most modern tourist venture in any remote land, the experience in which the traveler to the revolution is enrolled eliminates all risk, denies enigma. Mystery, risk and unpleasantness, isolation are traditional ingredients of travel to remote lands. Even the most independent lone observer needs help in deciphering an exotic country. Such an observer may take on a native cicerone, who will be the traveler’s principal interlocutor for part of the trip—as in V. S. Naipaul’s
Among the Believ
ers, about his travels in revolution-convulsed Islam. But the lone observer is unlikely to take at face value the attitudes of this native friend. Group travel to a communist revolution is designed to produce a different result. These are trips organized by travel officials to make the country seem intelligible. And many visitors to communist countries have been easily persuaded to consider the aspirations and needs of their inhabitants to be fundamentally different from ours, when they are all too similar, and institutions and practices to be comparable to our own, which are in fact radically different.
Among the Believ
ers, about his travels in revolution-convulsed Islam. But the lone observer is unlikely to take at face value the attitudes of this native friend. Group travel to a communist revolution is designed to produce a different result. These are trips organized by travel officials to make the country seem intelligible. And many visitors to communist countries have been easily persuaded to consider the aspirations and needs of their inhabitants to be fundamentally different from ours, when they are all too similar, and institutions and practices to be comparable to our own, which are in fact radically different.
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