Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives [1 ed.] 0415885418, 9780415885416

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Global Cold War Literature

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

1 Testimony from the Nazi Camps French Women’s Voices Margaret-Anne Hutton 2 Modern Confessional Writing New Critical Essays Edited by Jo Gill 3 Cold War Literature Writing the Global Conflict Andrew Hammond 4 Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty Andrew John Miller 5 Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction Peta Mitchell 6 Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption Eating the Avant-Garde Michel Delville 7 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema Jason Borge 8 Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall Ideology, Conflict, and Aesthetics Les Brookes 9 Anglophone Jewish Literature Axel Stähler

10 Before Auschwitz Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France Angela Kershaw 11 Travel and Drugs in TwentiethCentury Literature Lindsey Michael Banco 12 Diary Poetics Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962 Anna Jackson 13 Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change Race, Sex and Nation Gerardine Meaney 14 Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern Neil R. Davison 15 Travel and Modernist Literature Sacred and Ethical Journeys Alexandra Peat 16 Primo Levi’s Narratives of Embodiment Containing the Human Charlotte Ross 17 Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis Letizia Modena

18 Aesthetic Pleasure in TwentiethCentury Women’s Food Writing The Innovative Appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David Alice L. McLean 19 Making Space in the Works of James Joyce Edited by Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop 20 Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature Edited by Michelle M. Tokarczyk 21 Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders Edited by Ana Cristina Mendes 22 Global Cold War Literature Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives Edited by Andrew Hammond

Global Cold War Literature Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives Edited by Andrew Hammond

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Taylor & Francis The right of Andrew Hammond to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Global Cold War literature : western, eastern and postcolonial perspectives / edited by Andrew Hammond. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature ; v. 22) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Cold War in literature. 3. Politics and literature. I. Hammond, Andrew, 1967– PN771.G59 2011 809'.933582825—dc23 2011025258 ISBN13: 978-0-415-88541-6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-14772-6 (ebk)

Contents

Acknowledgements On the Frontlines of Writing: Introducing the Literary Cold War

ix 1

ANDREW HAMMOND

1

Anti-Communism on the American Stage

17

BRENDA MURPHY

2

Factography and Cold War Ideology in the Cuban Detective Novel

30

IGNACIO LÓPEZ-CALVO

3

Cross-Border Representation in South and North Korean Literatures of the Cold War Period

43

JOANNA ELFVING-HWANG

4

Endangered Nation: The Literature of Soviet-Occupied Afghanistan

58

WALI AHMADI

5

Hiroshima, or Peace in a ‘City of Cruelty and Bitter Bad Faith’: Japanese Poetry in the Cold War

72

ANN SHERIF

6

Reflections of the Cold War in Modern Persian Literature, 1945–1979 NASRIN RAHIMIEH

87

viii Contents 7

The ‘Boom’ Novel and the Cold War in Latin America

100

NEIL LARSEN

8

Contested Nationalisms and Socialisms: The Role of Theatre in Seeking Liberation for and between Ethiopia and Eritrea

113

JANE PLASTOW

9

‘With Friends Like These . . . ’: Soviet Travel Writing about Czechoslovakia during the Khrushchev Era

128

MARGARITA MARINOVA

10 Russian and American Satirists and the Exposure of Cold War Fictionalities

141

DEREK C. MAUS

11 Cold War Protest in East and West German Political Song

156

DAVID ROBB

12 Chinese Women’s Autobiographical Practice in the Early PostMao Era

171

LINGZHEN WANG

13 A Corneillian Cold War: Mainstream French Political Drama of the 1950s 184 JAMIE ANDREWS

14 East-Central Europe and the Search for a Literature of the ‘Third Way’

199

MARCEL CORNIS-POPE

Works Cited Contributors Index

213 235 239

Acknowledgements

The permission for reprinting Neil Larsen’s ‘The “Boom” Novel and the Cold War in Latin America’ is gratefully acknowledged. This was fi rst published in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3 (© 1992 Purdue Research Foundation) and is reproduced with the permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. An earlier version of Lingzhen Wang’s ‘Chinese Women’s Autobiographical Practice in the Early Post-Mao Era’ appeared in Wang’s Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in TwentiethCentury China (© 2004 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University). Sections of the chapter are printed here with the permission of Stanford University Press (all rights reserved). Thanks are also due to publishers and individuals for the reprinting of extracts in two of the essays. For poetry cited in Ann Sherif’s ‘Hiroshima, or Peace in a “City of Cruelty and Bitter Bad Faith”: Japanese Poetry in the Cold War’ permission has been granted by the University of Michigan Press, Princeton University Press, University of Chicago Press and Iwanami Shoten. For song lyrics quoted in David Robb’s ‘Cold War Protest in East and West German Political Song’ permission has been granted by Reinhold Andert, Hartmut König, Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, Wolf Biermann, Floh de Cologne and Franz Josef Degenhardt. Further permission has been received for ‘Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkindern’, music and lyrics by Franz-Josef Degenhardt (© 1965 by Masterphon Musikverlag GmbH, Bergisch Gladbach) and for ‘Sag mir, wo du stehst’, music and lyrics by Hartmut König (© 1967 by Harth Musik Verlag GmbH, Bergisch Gladbach). Many of the Afghan publishing houses that originally printed the material examined in Wali Ahmadi’s ‘Endangered Nation: The Literature of Soviet-Occupied Afghanistan’ have vanished during the last thirty years of upheaval. Although different attitudes to ‘copyright’ exist in Afghanistan, the contributor and editor express their appreciation for having such publications from which to quote in this volume.

Andrew Hammond Brighton 2011

On the Frontlines of Writing Introducing the Literary Cold War Andrew Hammond

The links between the current campaign against the ‘axis of evil’ and the Cold War opposition to the ‘evil empire’ are numerous and well documented. The two have revealed the same Manichean worldview, the same fear of enemy infiltration, the same restriction of civil liberties, the same mixture of nuclearism and muscular Christianity and the same sense of a ‘never-ending, all-encompassing, worldwide sweep’.1 Indeed, the latest incarnation of total, permanent warfare even claims its point of origin in a ‘ground zero’, now the site of the devastated World Trade Center but formerly the sites of atomic detonation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 2 Although the notion of an antagonistic Islam emerged out of the vacuum created by the end of the Cold War, it had long been developing amongst right-wing think-tanks and ideologues. For example, the substitution of the ‘iron curtain’ with the ‘clash of civilizations’ may be associated with the 1990s work of Samuel Huntington (a former co-ordinator of security planning under President Carter), but the phrase was fi rst used by the historian and policy advisor Bernard Lewis as early as 1957.3 With the presence of so many former cold warriors in the George W. Bush administration, it is not surprising that this administration itself argued for geopolitical continuities after 1989 in a bid to resuscitate the Cold War image of the US as the guardian of civilisation. This was seen in Bush’s statements on the global problem after 9/11, which ‘drew parallels between radical Islam and Communism (both are elitist, cold-blooded, totalitarian, disdainful of free peoples, and fatefully contradictory)’, and in Stanley Weiss’s location of the global solution in a ‘Marshall-like plan for [ . . . ] regimes in the Muslim world’ that can ‘win the hearts, minds and wallets of billions worldwide’.4 The continuum between the Cold War and the ‘war on terror’ has much to teach us about contemporary geopolitics, not least the dire consequences of superpower conduct for the developing world, a subject often omitted from Cold War historiography. As Robert McMahon rightly insists, ‘one simply cannot write a history of the second half of the 20th century without a systematic appreciation of the [ . . . ] repercussions of the superpower conflict on the world’s states’.5 Underlying the ideological struggle between the US and Soviet Union was a territorial competition for control

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of decolonised regions in the wake of European imperial retreat. This entailed military interventions, covert operations and economic pressures across Asia, Africa and Latin America that exacerbated—or were exacerbated by—local confl icts whose origins were marginal or unrelated to the US-Soviet stand-off. The contest for spheres of influence began in the mid-1940s. Although Truman and Stalin were unprepared for further war, mutual suspicion led to Soviet encroachment on eastern Europe and to US engagement in Germany, Turkey and Greece, soon prompting the Truman Doctrine (1947). By the time Moscow had tested its fi rst atomic device in 1949, the world was split by an East-West rivalry fuelled by a nuclear arms race. The 1950s and early 1960s witnessed both the globalisation of hostilities, with superpower involvement in Hungary, Iran, Laos, Vietnam, Guatemala, Egypt, Lebanon, Indonesia and the Congo, and their rapid militarisation, as seen during the Korean War, the Taiwan Strait Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis, all of which entailed US consideration of the nuclear option. It was partly the anxieties caused by Cuba that encouraged Moscow and Washington to ease international tensions. Although détente was initiated by European leaders, it was assisted by the deteriorating relations between Khrushchev’s Russia and Mao’s China, whose crossborder skirmishes lessened Moscow’s willingness to antagonise the West. Nevertheless, East-West rivalry continued, especially via US involvement in south-east Asia, and was soon exacerbated by the Brezhnev Doctrine (1968), a policy of intervention for the preservation of communist regimes, as later practised in Angola, Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan. By the late 1970s, Zbigniew Brzezinski was locating a Soviet-inspired ‘arc of crisis’ that ranged through Africa, the Middle East and south-east Asia.6 The result was increased military spending under Carter and, after the Iranian Hostage Crisis, increased interventionism under President Reagan, most obviously in Grenada and Nicaragua.7 By the time Reagan and Gorbachev had negotiated an end to the ‘second Cold War’, the world had been parcelled out into a series of client states. In short, the nucleus of the Cold War was the concurrence of US-Soviet tensions in the northern hemisphere with the rise of national liberation movements in the south. For David Painter, the ‘two momentous processes had a profound and reciprocal effect on each other’, the former making ‘decolonization more difficult and more violent’ and the latter stimulating competition for ‘access to raw material, oil, food sources, and markets’.8 This recognition of the global reach of the Cold War needs to be central to any study of the period’s cultural production. Alongside historiography’s tendency to view the confl ict as ‘predominantly a Soviet-American affair’ is its preferred focus on international relations between governmental elites, one that rarely strays from foreign policies, military engagements, arms talks and summitry.9 This has allowed little discussion of the Cold War as a lived experience, of its psychological impact on populations or of its determining influence on patterns of belief, identity, cultural practice and social

On the Frontlines of Writing 3 formation. Writing in 2004, Patrick Major and Rana Mitter lamented the failure of historiography ‘to focus attention on Cold War home fronts’, arguing for a ‘change in our boundaries of what Cold War history means’ and calling for ‘scholars to take culture seriously as a category’ of study ‘rather than as an afterthought to the analysis of high politics’.10 The point is augmented by David Caute’s The Dancer Defects (2003), which shows Cold War culture to be a vital stratagem in the global struggle. For Caute, the Cold War was ‘a traditional political-military confrontation between empires, between the pax americana and the pax sovietica, and at the same time an ideological and cultural contest [ . . . ] without historical precedent’, one in which Moscow and Washington, battling for ‘hearts and minds’, attempted ‘to out-educate, out-perform, out-write, out-produce, out-argue, outshine the other’.11 On the one hand, the Soviet Union expanded literacy, accelerated book production, increased state subsidies of the performing arts and issued Zhdanovite edicts on the correct framework for creative practice. On the other hand, the US sponsored a modernist, avant-garde aesthetics that symbolised American political freedoms and that was exported, via CIA-funded magazines, exhibitions and music festivals, to its allies in western Europe.12 As Caute concludes, the superpowers ‘dispatched their best ballerinas, violinists, poets, actors, playwrights, painters, composers, comedians, and chess players into battle’, supplementing traditional weaponry with the new armaments of ‘sculpture, theatre, cinema, classical music, jazz, rock, ballet [and] national exhibitions’.13 Within the cultural wars of the period, literature had a special status. While abstract art, classical music and ballet reached only a small percentage of the population, literature continued to attract wide audiences, with even western societies evolving a Cold War genre fiction—sci-fi, thrillers, spy novels—that could compete with the growing power of fi lm and television. Caute considers the enduring relevance of the political novel, for example, to lie in its enhancing of ‘diplomatic and military history’ with accounts of ‘the life experiences of populations living under the Soviet and Western political and socio-economic systems’, thereby achieving ‘fictional interventions in the historians’ long debate’.14 That novelists were not only social commentators but also foot-soldiers in a global Kulturkampf is evidenced by the superpowers’ choice of authors for translation, for inclusion on educational syllabi and for the receipt of Nobel Prizes. The most frequently cited canon of Cold War writers—Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Arthur Koestler, Arthur Miller, JeanPaul Sartre, George Orwell—were revered or reviled depending on one’s political alignment to the bloc one found oneself in. The last of these writers exemplifies the politicisation of literary reception. Orwell’s fi nal fictional works, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were rapidly translated and adapted into radio serialisations and feature-length films by the CIA, the US Office of Policy Coordination, the US Information Agency and Britain’s Information Research Department, all eager to

4

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promote the anti-communist cause across the emerging blocs. In particular, Nineteen Eighty-Four became an ‘ideological superweapon’, in Isaac Deutscher’s phrase, one that explained so precisely ‘why we must drop the atom bomb on the Bolshies’ that the John Birch Society inserted the digits ‘1984’ into its Washington telephone number.15 In the Soviet Union, conversely, the figure of Big Brother was read as a portrait of J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI during the ‘fi rst Cold War’, a reading that drew on Orwell’s own placement of totalitarian Britain in a US-led Oceania.16 The ability of literature to mediate social and political events persisted during the tensions of the 1950s, through the years of détente to the renewed tensions of the 1980s. If it is true that ‘[u]nderstanding the Cold War is central to understanding the history of the second half of the twentieth century’, then understanding the lived realities of those decades requires a comprehensive study of Cold War poets, dramatists and novelists.17 As the above mentioned canon indicates, the fact that literature’s involvement in the cultural Cold War was a truly global phenomenon is often overlooked in English-language criticism. The typical focus is on American literary production, with the occasional comparison of US-Soviet writing and the even more occasional allusion to a Sartre, Koestler, Christa Wolf or Milan Kundera.18 The implication that Cold War literature is a solely Euro-American one has recently been challenged by Adam Piette’s The Literary Cold War (2009). On a general level, Piette repeats Major and Mitter’s call for a culturalist turn in scholarship on the period, fi nding literary studies ‘bafflingly indifferent to the importance of the Cold War in shaping cultures’.19 Moreover, the focus on American literature ignores the history of superpower involvement in the Third World and the multiplicity of responses to that involvement on the part of indigenous writers. As a consequence, Piette argues, criticism needs to address a more international ‘set of texts, events and histories’ and to attend ‘to the interrelations between Anglo-American texts and the key dissident books of the Cold War [ . . . ], as well as the creative work from the decolonizing cultures of the Third World’. 20 Assuming, as Irving Howe does, that ‘[p]olitical fiction requires wrenching confl icts, a drama of words and often blood, roused states of being’, one would expect exemplary material from those regions where the Cold War was at its most chilling.21 Across the Second and Third Worlds, literature was a continual presence in times of crisis, with drama performed on frontlines, poetry recited at street protests, philosophy culled for revolutionary slogans and poets and novelists positioned in the vanguard of political insurgency. Amongst the multitude of genres, movements and associations offering insight into global events are African agitprop, Latin American testimonio, south-east Asian war poetry, eastern European samizdat, Maoist theatre and Soviet socialist realism, not to mention the understudied fields of autobiography and travel writing. The last twenty years have seen a steady stream of publications on non-American Cold War cultures, including those of France, Germany, China, Japan, east-central

On the Frontlines of Writing 5 Europe and Latin America. 22 Yet such work remains unreferenced in mainstream studies, an omission that—one cannot help but feel—is due to the left-wing orientation of much of the primary material. Two decades after the end of the confl ict, many critics still view Second World texts as such ‘ideological tripe that there [is] no point in reading them’ and still ‘shy away from an emphasis on the socialist commitment of much postcolonial literature’. 23 It is the selectivity of research into the period that the present collection and its companion volume, Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (2006), seek to address. The focus here is fi rmly on worldwide responses to the events, ideologies and processes of the Cold War as they developed over the course of forty-five years. 24 The collection will work from a definition of Cold War literature as an international, multi-generic set of socio-political concerns and textual practices produced by, and productive of, the historical conditions of the times. In order to indicate the multiplicity of the field, the content of the fourteen essays will encompass writings from Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America, and will range through the genres of fiction, poetry, drama, song, autobiography and travel writing. For the purposes of comparative study, the collection will organise discussion around six literary-historical themes that gained primacy in the majority of cultures embroiled in the Cold War, as detailed below. 25 The aim is not an exhaustive account of the literary period, but an introduction to its diversity and dynamism, as well as an indication of future directions in the field. Due to their marginalisation in scholarship, authors from the Second and Third Worlds will be given prominence, although examples of American and Soviet writings will be studied in order to illustrate their interaction with literary and ideological phenomena from other parts of the world. Of special interest will be the manner in which forms of military and economic pressure exerted by the superpowers were replicated in the cultural sphere, and the ways in which subordinate regions wrote back both to hegemonic literary prescriptions (whether market-led or state enforced) and to dominant Cold War genres. 26 This study of cultural exchange will extend to how literary styles and concerns travelled within and between regions and blocs and, in doing so, became influenced by alternative cultural traditions. Indeed, in their analyses of the six primary themes, many of the following essays reveal that literature, as practised in the Second and Third Worlds, facilitated a form of covert resistance to superpower authority that was impractical in the political, military and economic spheres. The fi rst of the volume’s themes is the participation of writers in the propaganda, public persuasion and psychological warfare of the era. Although more than just a ‘war of words’, the hostilities between East and West were often conducted via rhetorical exchanges and ‘persuasive acts of representation’, a form of international relations that became ‘encrusted, over the years, with successive layers of routine, custom, tradition, myth, and

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legend’. 27 In the US, George Kennan’s ‘long telegram’ of 1946 did much to construct the foreign enemy, offering the ideological basis for containment for the next forty-five years, while Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade in the 1950s helped to initiate US fears of the ‘enemy within’. Brenda Murphy’s essay looks at how McCarthyist hysteria entered American drama in the late 1940s and 1950s. Here, right-wing playwrights insisted on an absolute opposition between US democracy and Soviet authoritarianism, and charged liberal intellectuals with facilitating communist infi ltration into the country. As Murphy illustrates, the structures of the House Committee on Un-American Activities also shaped the formal devices of the plays, which centre around plots, trials, interrogations, denunciations and dramatic stand-offs between figures of authority and leftist subversives. Of course, this circulation of ‘free world’ discourse by American writers did not go unchallenged. As early as 1945, Stalin determined to promote the ideological alternative at home and abroad, making Andrei Zhdanov ‘responsible for shaping a Cold War mentality inside the Soviet Union as well as [amongst] Communist followers and sympathisers all over the world’. 28 The next contribution examines such propaganda in the context of Cuban detective and counter-espionage novels from the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on Juan Ángel Cardi’s El American Way of Death (1980), Ignacio López-Calvo reveals how crime writing was governed by ideological dictates issued by the Cuban Ministry of the Interior. The result was a uniform and highly orthodox ‘revolutionary literature’ which pitted the nation’s law enforcement agencies against the machinations of CIA operatives and which, assisted by the techniques of Soviet ‘factography’, accused the US of many of the evils (violence, disorder, moral corruption) being projected onto the communist world. ‘At the ideological level’, John Mason summarises, ‘Moscow’s Manichean communist world-view, which saw capitalism as an absolute evil, fed off Washington’s Manichean world-view, which saw communism as an absolute evil, and in this way each helped to sustain the other’s prophecy’.29 The act of peering through the ‘iron curtain’ and finding only a reflected image of oneself was all the more inevitable in nations physically divided by Cold War hostilities. The Korean Peninsula witnessed the inaugural ‘hot war’ of the 1945–1989 period and the one most conducive to superpower antagonism, the US backing the nationalist Syngman Rhee in the south and the Soviet Union and China supporting the communist Kim Il-Sung in the north. After three years of fighting, and some half a million dead, the two authoritarian regimes returned to the 38th parallel from whence they began (a border that McCarthy, in a speech to the US Congress in 1950, termed ‘one of the frontiers of freedom’ against ‘international atheistic Communism’30). Joanna Elfving-Hwang, in the next essay, analyses cross-border representation in North and South Korean novels, and finds them equally reliant on the kind of demonic imagery found in Cold War discourse elsewhere, only adding to it aspersions about the other’s reliance on superpower patronage.

On the Frontlines of Writing 7 Yet the essay shows that novelists did not limit themselves to constructions of alterity. Deploying Bracha L. Ettinger’s concept of ‘matrixial metamorphosis’, Elfving-Hwang locates a strand of representation grounded in notions of self-sameness, one that acknowledges the linguistic and ethnic unity of the peninsula and that seeks to remind both populations of a shared, authentic Koreanness. The fact that Korean novelists were always obliged to negotiate official rhetoric, however, indicates the pivotal role of state propaganda during the era, as was the case in cultures internationally. Gary Rawnsley’s point that ‘any discussion of the Cold War which [ . . . ] denies the relevance of propaganda is guilty of overlooking one of its most important dimensions’ is as relevant to the literary critic as it is to the historian.31 The same can be said about the relevance of ‘hot wars’ to social and cultural currents, the second theme of the volume. To avoid overestimating the rhetorical content of the Cold War it is worth recalling both the horrific death toll of its military engagements and the fact that ‘all but 200,000 of the more than 20 million people who died [ . . . ] were casualties in the more than one hundred wars that took place in the Third World’.32 The scale of the carnage makes a mockery of the notion of the Cold War as a ‘long peace’, a common designation in US historiography that relies not only on Orwellian newspeak (‘war is peace’?) but also on a dismissive qualification of Third World confl icts as ‘limited’, ‘localised’, ‘peripheral’, ‘proxy’ or ‘minor’. That these were far from ‘minor’ for the beleaguered populations is clear from the next essay, Wali Ahmadi’s study of Afghan responses to the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. Focusing mainly on poetry in the Dari language, Ahmadi begins by examining the communist verse that acclaimed the ‘revolution’ and by surveying the competing poetics of Islamic insurgency aligned to the US-backed Mujahideen. Ahmadi then locates a ‘dissident’ strain of writing that, refusing partisanship, highlighted the destruction and suffering that the occupation produced and, in doing so, formulated many of the themes and styles of contemporary Afghan literature. While the essay accentuates a broadly postcolonial literary consciousness, many post-imperial nations shared the concerns that this had about superpower intentions, albeit for different motives. During the late 1940s and 1950s, what Paul Kennedy terms ‘the illusions of Great Power status’ persisted in many parts of Europe, with France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands all ‘discovering a new taste for empire for economic and international power-political reasons’. 33 The shattering of those illusions is most dramatically seen in the case of Great Britain, whose ‘Big Three’ status in 1945 was predicated as much on overseas possessions as on victory in the Second World War. By the 1960s, however, the rise of anti-imperial movements, the entanglement in costly wars in Egypt, Malaya and Kenya and the exertion of US pressure on the sterling area reduced it to a ‘senescent empire’ that had ‘contracted almost to vanishing point’.34 Although restricted space in this volume prevents their study, the resentment expressed towards superpower hegemony and the ambivalence

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felt towards western European involvement in post-1945 imperial wars are important themes in Cold War European literatures. A further feature of Cold War militarism was nuclear proliferation and the increasing dangers of military technologies. Although many populations had evaded the horrors of ‘hot war’, the doctrine of absolute sacrifice implied by nuclear brinkmanship extended even to Euro-American citizens who, made to feel ‘the special target of the Cold War’s punitive defence systems’, internalised the wider mood of antipathy, belligerence and ‘permanent war psychosis’.35 The US field of Nuclear Criticism, developed in the 1980s, marked an important advance in understanding the impact of nuclearism on textual production, although book-length studies by Martha A. Bartter, Nancy Anisfield, Patrick Mannix, Ken Ruthven and Peter Schwenger, amongst others, leave non-American literatures largely unreferenced. Ann Sherif’s essay regains the proper balance by examining how the experiences and fears of the new armaments have been explored in Japanese poetry, particularly that of Kurihara Sadako and Tôge Sankichi. As hibakusha, or A-Bomb survivors, who witnessed at first-hand the destruction of Hiroshima, the two poets used haiku, tanka and free verse forms to bear witness to the physical and psychological effects of the A-Bomb and to indicate the threat which nuclearisation posed for all nations. Yet the social criticism contained in A-Bomb poetry went beyond anti-nuclear protest, as Sherif details. Both Kurihara and Tôge were left-wing poets, and used their work to condemn social injustice, rampant consumerism and Japan’s imperialist past, as well as the increasing cultural and political influence that America wielded over the nation after the US-Japan Security Treaty of 1960. The left-wing poetry of the hibakusha leads onto the third theme of Cold War literature, which is its engagement with revolutionary socialism. In a two-volume reassessment of socialist cultures, Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker argue that left-wing sentiment in the western, eastern and non-aligned worlds resulted in ‘some of the most valuable and impressive works of world literature’ and ‘injected vital energies into global culture at a time when the political climate was decidedly inimical to the production of radical literature in the West’.36 By 1989, for example, rich literary legacies had been left by writers in the communist bloc and the postcolonial world, although these are typically disregarded (in the case of the former) or depoliticised (in the case of the latter) by western scholarship. Their importance to Cold War culture is underlined in Nasrin Rahimieh’s essay on Iranian intellectual life between 1945 and the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In these years, several generations of authors found in socialist realism— which ‘demands of the sincere writer a historically accurate presentation of reality in its revolutionary development’37—an ideal vehicle for exploring national identity in the face of US-British hegemony and for denouncing the poverty and powerlessness experienced by many Iranians. Yet as Rahimieh emphasises, the politics of such writers and thinkers as Bozorg Alavi, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Simin Daneshvar and Ali Shariati were not tied to Soviet

On the Frontlines of Writing 9 models, but combined those models with local cultural and religious influences, a feature exemplified by Shariati’s Marxist Shi’ism. An equivalent merger took place elsewhere, as Neil Larsen illustrates in his essay on Latin American fiction. Here, writers sought a form of expression that eschewed both ‘the rigidity of Soviet-inspired aesthetics’ and ‘the withdrawal of the U.S. intelligentsia from “committed” art [ . . . ] to a depoliticized avantgrade’.38 Larsen addresses the Latin American ‘boom’ novel, in which a mixture of modernist, socialist and nativist influences produced the internationally renowned ‘magical realism’. While acknowledging the impact of the Cuban Revolution on regional culture, however, Larsen argues that the genre fi nally retreated from revolutionary aesthetics. As evidence, he examines the Brazilian novelist, Jorge Amado, who wrote socialist-realist novels in the 1940s and early 1950s, but who, after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism in 1956, turned to the modernist experimentation of the ‘boom’ novel out of a wish to retreat from the complexities of class struggle. Instances of disenchantment notwithstanding, the diversity and vigour of socialist literary production oppose the assumption of many western critics that ‘political commitment (especially socialist political commitment) is inimical to [ . . . ] genuine art’. 39 In many parts of the world, it was rare that communist ideology was not mixed with some form of nationalism, the fourth theme of the volume. Although mid-twentieth-century nationalism is usually associated with the emerging nations, it also motivated superpower aspirations, informing both ‘the tsarist-Soviet colonial continuity’ and the ‘international capitalist economic system dominated by the United States’.40 During the 1950s and 1960s, it was inevitable that US-Soviet aggression, combined with western European attempts to retain imperial influence, would galvanise national independence movements across the colonised world. Despite stating that at no point had ‘decolonization become a significant issue during the Cold War’, John Lewis Gaddis admits that the ‘demise of European colonialism [ . . . ] paralleled its early development’ and that, in the new bi-polar order, the loyalty of the emergent post-colonial nations was the issue ‘over [which] it would now be fought’.41 The complex interplay of nationalist currents is captured in Jane Plastow’s essay on playwrights’ treatment of the Ethiopia-Eritrea War. Combined in a single country after 1945, Ethiopia and Eritrea had, by the 1970s, clashed over federal procedure, with the communist regime in Eritrea waging a separatist war that lasted until 1991. In Ethiopia, which had shifted from US to Soviet backing after a Marxist coup d’etat in 1974, a propagandist theatre was developed to advocate the national, as much as the socialist, cause, a phenomenon mirrored in the Eritrean military camps, where agitprop was used in part to promote a unique and separate Eritrean identity. The American concern at Soviet involvement in such African countries as Ethiopia, Somalia and Angola was also felt at Soviet activities in east-central Europe.42 One of these was the Red Army’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, motivated by Alexander Dubček’s

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reformist communism which Moscow interpreted as a counter-revolution sponsored by West Germany and America. As Margarita Marinova relates in her essay, Soviet travel writing had a part to play in vindicating the Kremlin’s foreign policy to domestic audiences. In the Khrushchev era, the processes of travel and tourism were utilised as tools of nationalist propaganda and, underlying their discourse of socialist fraternalism, was a concerted drive to champion Russian cultural and political organisation. The essay concentrates on the Czechoslovakian travelogues of Vladimir Nikolaevich Druzhinin, which, published in the years leading up to 1968, offered an archetypal portrait of a reliant, underdeveloped satellite state grateful for Soviet leadership, a mode of representation which explains the bemusement that many Russians felt towards the events of the Prague Spring. The invasion of Czechoslovakia caused deep concern for western communist parties and eastern communist regimes. Amongst the latter, Ceauşescu’s Romania, Tito’s Yugoslavia and Mao’s China all submitted official complaints, although many communist states were alarmed to find their citizens also involved in protests, including a demonstration in Moscow’s Red Square outside Lenin’s mausoleum. Indeed, the 1960s witnessed a groundswell of political discontent worldwide: in 1968 alone, Jeremi Suri relates, ‘urban protests produced a crisis of authority in nearly every society’, with marches, strikes, rallies and riots in both the blocs amounting to ‘a truly “global disruption”’.43 The existence of dissent during the Cold War is the fi fth theme of the volume, although one that was not always linked to a clear political agenda. Commenting on the western experience, Tobin Siebers considers these forty-five years as the ‘era of suspicion par excellence’, marked by expressions of ‘distrust [ . . . ], paranoia, and skepticism’ towards state secrecy and conspiracy, not to mention ‘wariness about the military-industrial complex, obsessions about espionage and infi ltration in government, and fears about brainwashing in the arts’.44 In the literary text, this scepticism often manifested itself in a postmodernist aesthetics of indeterminacy, self-reflexivity and ontological instability, with ‘historiographic metafiction’ taking its place alongside socialist realism as a specifically Cold War literary mode. The subject is taken up in Derek Maus’s contribution, which treats American and Soviet satirical fiction between the 1950s and the 1980s. Drawing on the work of Paul Maltby and Wolfgang Iser, Maus fi nds in such writing a shared ‘dissident tendency’ towards subversion of the totalising claims and linguistic distortions found in the mass media, state propaganda and military-industrial complexes of each superpower. As part of this dissidence, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Voinovich and Alexander Zinoviev, amongst others, foreground the fictionality of their texts to expose the fraudulence of the worlds constructed by official rhetoric. The essay establishes not only the international extent of disbelief and dystopianism in the period, but also the extent of ‘the connection between postmodern innovation and the deconstruction of Cold War ideologies’.45

On the Frontlines of Writing 11 The scepticism of postmodernist literature destabilised all philosophical bases for truth and obstructed the emergence of oppositional politics. In contrast, a more idealistic resistance to state institutions emerged in societies throughout the world and, in many instances, allied the intelligentsia to popular radical movements. The most famous example was the eastern European ‘revolutions’ of 1989, which Fred Inglis has described as a ‘surge of public opinion over on the eastern side of the iron curtain that recaptured something of the early promise of democracy’.46 This promise was also evident in indigenous resistance to the oppression and violence of USsupported regimes across Latin America, Africa and Asia, a resistance that was echoed by ‘the reluctance on the part of large sections of the population of the West to tolerate the programs of aggression, subversion, massacre, and brutal exploitation [in] much of the Third World’.47 David Robb’s essay illustrates the processes of resistance to both left- and right-wing regimes by analysing protest music in divided Germany from the 1960s onwards. Influenced by the traditions of anti-establishment cabaret and workers’ song, both of which had been outlawed during the Third Reich, singer-songwriters in the two nations developed a more contemporary lyrical content that harmonised with the radicalism of the student movement. In West Germany, this entailed criticism of the market-led economics of the pro-American Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, and advocacy of political subversion and class warfare. In the East, populist left-wing song chimed with the ideals of the communist state, although also allowed for veiled censure of the government’s failure to live up to its revolutionary promise, particularly during the economic stagnancy of the 1980s. In the following essay, Lingzhen Wang examines Chinese women’s autobiographical writings during this latter decade, when the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution failed to produce the new liberties for which many women had hoped. Whereas gendered identities had been submerged in previous decades, deemed irrelevant to the class foundations of revolutionary society, pressure was now placed upon women to assume social and professional roles inferior to those of men. With reference to works by Zhang Xinxin, Zhang Jie and Yu Luojin, the essay looks at how female authors used autobiographical modes to argue for a woman’s right to seek professional success and emotional fulfi lment, a form of dissent which, while not designed to challenge state socialism per se, was met by censorship and slander from the male literary establishment. The final theme of the volume is what Patrick Major has termed the location of ‘“third ways” which often transcended the binary logic of the Cold War’.48 Underlying much of the political protest was a belief in alternative programmes for social and political development that could offer non-totalitarian solutions to the nuclearism, militarism and materialism which characterised western capitalism and ‘actually existing socialism’. That such idealism could influence functioning systems is evidenced by the merger of market economies with centralist welfare programmes in many western

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nations and by the quest for autonomy from Washington and Moscow pursued by the non-aligned movement of Second and Third World states.49 In literature, the way these projects could fracture the bipolar order has already been indicated in the contributions of Elfving-Hwang and Ahmadi, and is taken up in Jamie Andrews’ essay on French political drama of the 1950s. Even before de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, France had resisted US designs for Europe, with many French politicians, thinkers and writers envisaging the nation as a ‘third force’ in continental and global politics. As Andrews analyses, one manifestation in kind was the return in French drama to the classical tradition of structuring plays around a moral dilemma; Pol Quentin, Thierry Maulnier, Jules Roy and Georges Soria each drew upon Cold War scenarios, but soon transcended them via a dramatisation of individual choice which, by foregrounding a specifically French aesthetic practice, reconfirmed national space and restored national pride. In the final essay, Marcel Cornis-Pope turns from the ‘third way’ aesthetics of the West to those of the Baltic, Balkan and east-central European cultures. Historically positioned as an interface between empires, the former satellites of the Soviet Union developed a range of cross-cultural perspectives and hybrid narrative styles that challenged both imperial and anti-imperial nationalisms. Ranging through fiction, drama, poetry and cultural theory, Cornis-Pope argues that the region’s writers, many of them exiles and dissidents, exchanged Cold War polarities for a vision of a multicultural, democratic and undivided continent, a project demanding reemphasis after 1989, when nationalism and ethnocentrism reemerged across the region. The essay helps to underscore the enduring relevance of Cold War literature to the contemporary age. It is not only that many of the flashpoints of 1945–1989 history—eastern Europe, Cuba, Iran, Korea, Afghanistan—have been at the centre of international crises over the past two decades, but also that many of the socio-literary themes of the age remain pertinent today, particularly across the Third World, where the Cold War continues to exert ‘a long-term deleterious effect on economic and political development’.50 This collection of essays offers a wealth of insight into how writers from the latter half of the twentieth century speak to present-day concerns, as does the companion volume, Cold War Literature, whose coverage extends to such topics as Russian and American representations of the ideological other, left-wing radicalism in African fiction, ‘hot war’ in Chinese drama and Vietnamese poetry, dissent in eastern European and South African poetry and the search for a third way in Latin American writing. The two volumes also provide a corrective to Cold War historiography’s privileging of ‘high politics’, which, after all, has so often been a record of the superpowers’ ‘misperceptions of each other’s intentions and the overestimation of each other’s capabilities’.51 The vast archive of literary texts published between 1945 and 1989, much of it still understudied, sheds light both on the responses to historical events of individuals and communities and on the commonality of experience and interest amongst populations worldwide. It is this understanding that offers

On the Frontlines of Writing 13 the foundations for a contemporary literature of resistance to the ‘war on terror’, a campaign which, like the Cold War before it, denies any possibility of neutral ground. To do so, of course, a genuinely global literary scholarship of the period is needed, one that acknowledges in its research and teaching the integral contribution to Cold War literature of eastern European, Latin American, African and Asian authors. NOTES 1. Alex Danchev, On Art and War and Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 172. 2. See Marc Redfield, The Rhetoric of Terror: Refl ections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), p. 23. 3. See Richard Bonney, False Prophets: The ‘Clash of Civilisations’ and the Global War on Terror (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 53–68. 4. Ibid., p. 75; Weiss, ‘The War on Terror and the Lessons of the Cold War’, in Jussi M. Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad, eds, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 659. Despite the Bush-Blair rhetoric of an ‘axis of evil’ and ‘alliance of values’ being ‘quietly cancelled by Obama and Miliband (the British foreign secretary)’ in 2009, ‘the hegemonic discourse still persuades us that “terrorism” and terrorists are our antagonists’ (Bob Brecher and Mark Devenney, ‘Introduction: Philosophy, Politics, Terror’, in Brecher, Devenney and Aaron Winter, eds, Discourses and Practices of Terrorism: Interrogating Terror (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 1). 5. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 105. 6. See Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 220–4. 7. The Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, had no doubt ‘that détente was [ . . . ] buried in the fields of Soviet-American rivalry in the Third World’ (quoted in McMahon, Cold War, pp. 141–2). 8. Painter, The Cold War: An International History (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 1, 116, 117. 9. Sean Greenwood, Britain and the Cold War, 1945–1991 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 2. 10. Major and Mitter, ‘East is East and West is West? Towards a Comparative Socio-Cultural History of the Cold War’, in Mitter and Major, eds, Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2004), pp. 3, 1, 1. 11. Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 1, 4. 12. The CIA’s ‘mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of “the American way”’ (Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 1). 13. Caute, Dancer Defects, pp. 3, 5. 14. Caute, Politics and the Novel during the Cold War (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2010), pp. 2, 76. As Caute later puts it, ‘[t]he novel rode escort to contemporary history’ (ibid., p. 351).

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15. Deutscher, ‘1984—The Mysticism of Cruelty’, in Raymond Williams, ed., George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 119, 132. As Caute argues, Orwell’s novel ‘exercised a greater impact on the culture of the Cold War than any work of history, political science or reportage’ (Caute, Politics and the Novel, p. 132). See also Malcolm Pittock, ‘The Hell of Nineteen Eighty-Four’, in Harold Bloom, ed., George Orwell’s 1984, new edn (1987; New York: Chelsea House, 2007), p. 109. 16. See Daniel Lea, ‘Modes of Criticism 1’¸ in Lea, ed., George Orwell: Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 65. 17. Painter, Cold War, p. 1. 18. As an example, Steven Belletto’s 2007 survey of culturalist contributions to Cold War Studies omits mention of any critical work on non-American literature (see Belletto, ‘Curbing Containment: Cold War Studies in the Twenty-First Century’, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 48, No. 1 (2007), pp. 150–64). 19. Piette, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 5. Similarly, Ann Douglas notes the failure of cultural critics to appreciate the historical context of postmodernity and postcoloniality, which ‘are both roughly coterminous with the cold war, and even inexplicable outside the context it supplies’ (Douglas, ‘Periodizing the American Century: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism in the Cold War Context’, Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1998), p. 75). 20. Piette, Literary Cold War, p. 212. 21. Quoted in Caute, Politics and the Novel, p. 351. 22. Amongst other examples, see Ted Freeman, Theatres of War (1998), Rhys W. Williams, Stephen Parker and Colin Riordan, eds, German Writers and the Cold War (1992), Ann Sherif, Japan’s Cold War (2009), Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part (2002), Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, eds, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (2004–10) and Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (2002). 23. Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker, ‘Introduction’ to Juraga and Booker, eds, Socialist Cultures East and West: A Post-Cold War Reassessment (Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 2002), p. 5; Juraga and Booker, ‘Introduction’ to Juraga and Booker, eds, Rereading Global Socialist Cultures after the Cold War: The Reassessment of a Tradition (Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 2002), p. 4. 24. For the sake of convenience, the volume focuses on the 1945–1989 period; the dates of the beginning and ending of the Cold War are, of course, a subject of heated debate, and literary studies can fi nd further scope in extending the timeframe back to 1917 and forward to the present day. 25. This thematic approach is also pursued in Piette’s The Literary Cold War and Mitter and Major’s Across the Blocs, although is extended in the current volume to include the essential processes of imperial intervention and antiimperial resistance in the Third World (see Piette, Literary Cold War, p. 5, and Major and Mitter, ‘East is East’, in Mitter and Major, eds, Across the Blocs, pp. 6–17). 26. The genres that attained international status include socialist realism, postmodernism, science-fiction and espionage fiction. With criticism on Cold War sci-fi and spy novels having burgeoned over the last twenty years, the two genres are not studied in depth in this collection. 27. Charles E. Nathanson, ‘The Social Construction of the Soviet Threat: A Study in the Politics of Representation’, Alternatives, Vol. 13 (1988), p. 443;

On the Frontlines of Writing 15

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 20. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 112. Mason, The Cold War, 1945–1991 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 71. McCarthy, ‘McCarthy on US War in Korea, December 1950’, in Hanhimäki and Westad, eds, Cold War, pp. 194, 196. Rawnsley, ‘Introduction’ to Rawnsley, ed., Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 8. Painter, Cold War, p. 1. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, new edn (1987; New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 368; Nicholas J. White, Decolonisation: The British Experience since 1945 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), p. 89. John Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 52. Piette, Literary Cold War, p. 210; Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 2nd edn (1999; Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006), p. 32. Juraga and Booker, ‘Introduction’ to Juraga and Booker, eds, Socialist Cultures, p. 6; Juraga and Booker, ‘Introduction’ to Juraga and Booker, eds, Rereading Global Socialist Cultures, p. 5. Zhdanov, quoted in Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter, new edn (1987; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 11. Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 4, 2. Juraga and Booker, ‘Introduction’ to Juraga and Booker, eds, Socialist Cultures, p. 5. Ewa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2000), p. 46; S. J. Ball, The Cold War: An International History, 1947–1991 (London and New York: Arnold, 1998), p. 2. As Klaus Larres and Ann Lane remind us, the US-Soviet contest over Third World markets and resources often resembled the ‘contest for hegemony and the balance of power which had characterized earlier periods of colonialism’ (Larres and Lane, ‘Cold War Origins’, in Larres and Lane, eds, The Cold War: The Essential Readings (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), p. 16). Gaddis, The Cold War, new edn (2005; London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 123, 122, 124. As Dobrynin later wrote, such confl icts ‘persuaded Americans that Moscow had undertaken a broad offensive against them for control over Africa’ (quoted in ibid., p. 208). Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 164, 211. Siebers, Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 5, 36, 36. Marcel Cornis-Pope, Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 4–5. Inglis, The Cruel Peace: Everyday Life in the Cold War (London: Aurum Press, 1992), p. 438.

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47. Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There (London: Sinclair Browne, 1982), p. 188. 48. Major, ‘Future Perfect? Communist Science Fiction in the Cold War’, in Mitter and Major, eds, Across the Blocs, p. 93. 49. The Non-Aligned Movement was formulated at the Bandung Conference of 1955 and included a ‘bloc of nations [that] feared external interference in their affairs and sought to avoid this by not becoming embroiled in the confl icts between the superpowers’ (Joseph Smith, The Cold War 1945–1965 (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 69). 50. Roger E. Kanet, ‘The Superpower Quest for Empire: The Cold War and Soviet Support for “Wars of National Liberation”’, Cold War History, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2006), p. 343. In the western context, David Holloway sources post-9/11 culture in the ‘revitalisation of established approaches and traditions that had languished since the end of the Cold War’ and Mathias Nilges fi nds genres that once offered ‘a thinly-veiled vehicle for the fear of Communism reappear[ing] in the context of the contemporary fear of terrorism’ (Holloway, 9/11 and the War on Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 7; Nilges, ‘The Aesthetics of Destruction: Contemporary US Cinema and TV Culture’, in Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula and Karen Randell, eds, Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the ‘War on Terror’ (New York and London: Continuum, 2010), p. 24). 51. Michael L. Dockrill and Michael F. Hopkins, The Cold War, 1945–1991, 2nd edn (1988; Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 163.

1

Anti-Communism on the American Stage Brenda Murphy

When the American theatre is spoken of in the context of the Cold War, the play that immediately springs to mind is Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953). The best-known and most-effective theatrical treatment of American politics in the post-1945 period, its historical camouflage and its liberal, anti-McCarthyist stance may be seen as typical of American plays that sought to make a political statement during the repressive period between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1960s. Plays that used similar strategies to treat Cold War politics from the left side of the American political divide include treatments of Joan of Arc, such as Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark (1955), treatments of Galileo, such as Barrie Stavis’s Lamp at Midnight (1947) and Eric Bentley’s The Recantation of Galileo Galilei (1973), and treatments of historical events, such as Hellman’s Montserrat (1949), Miller’s Incident at Vichy (1964) and Saul Levitt’s The Andersonville Trial (1959). After 1968, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) lost most of its power to intimidate witnesses, more direct attacks on its agenda and methods, such as Bentley’s Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been (1972), were possible in the new alternative political theatre that also welcomed such plays as Megan Terry’s anti-war Viet Rock (1966) and Barbara Garson’s satire of Lyndon Johnson, MacBird (1966).1 Plays that attacked communism and the Soviet Union and that supported the anti-communist Right are less well known. There were several attempts to dramatise the conservative stance, however, and they reflect a range of ideological positions from liberal anti-communist to authoritarian, as well as a range of dramatic aesthetics from high-energy spy melodrama to thesis play, with a mistrust of intellectuals, particularly left-liberal intellectuals, being a common feature. The most authoritarian thinking is reflected in the work of Herman Wouk, who contributed two anti-communist plays to the American theatre during the Cold War. The fi rst, The Traitor (1949), is a spy melodrama in which a Navy intelligence officer triumphs over a liberal college professor who has been deluded into thinking that giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union will serve the cause of world peace. The second, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1954), was by far the greatest popular

18 Brenda Murphy success of these plays, running for 415 performances on Broadway. With the play’s villain being an intellectual who undermines authority, it was also the most controversial, arguing that in times of war, including, presumably, Cold War, figures in authority must be obeyed without question if the country is to survive. Another popular success was Darkness at Noon (1951) by the liberal anti-communist Sidney Kingsley. This was an adaptation of Arthur Koestler’s penetrating study of the intellectual and emotional process by which former revolutionaries may have been brought to repudiate their old beliefs and abase themselves during the Moscow trials, now transformed into a melodrama salted with quotations from the writings and speeches of Soviet politicians. A few years later, Molly Kazan, another liberal anti-communist and former leftist, wrote The Egghead (1957), a thesis play about a college professor who is deceived by a communist former student into defending him as a good liberal and inviting him to give a lecture to the students, but who is fi nally enlightened by his wife’s discovery of the man’s Party affiliation. Kazan was the wife of Elia Kazan, the wellknown stage and fi lm director, a former communist whose agreement to name names before HUAC and whose aggressive stance in favour of this action afterwards made him, in the mind of the American Left, the iconic image of the Informer. Molly Kazan had not only advised her husband to take this action but had also authored the controversial statement about it that he printed in the New York Times in 1952. 2 Together, these plays dramatise many of the issues in a fundamental American ideological debate of the late 1940s and 1950s. Anxiety about nuclear warfare and espionage came to a head with the Rosenberg trial in 1951: as historian Walter Goodman put it, ‘[t]he arrest and trial of the Rosenbergs gave substance to the general unease and afforded the satisfaction of having flesh-and-blood people to punish for the disturbing realization that our enemies too possessed an atom bomb’.3 The anxiety remained throughout the period, its focus a general fear and hatred of the Soviets and of American communists. Many liberals warned against the erosion of free speech and thought that was taking place under the Congressional hearings of Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, with the investigations and their demands that witnesses name names also provoking debate about the morality of informing and blacklisting. Nevertheless, conservatives argued that such measures were justified in the context of the Cold War and that the political oppression of the Soviet system was in direct opposition to American democracy and freedom. One manifestation of this viewpoint was a seemingly congenital American anti-intellectualism, as evident in the treatment of liberal ‘eggheads’, who were seen by many people on the Right as gullible, weak and easily susceptible to emotional manipulation. Wouk’s melodramatic The Traitor is a good example of the Right’s anti-intellectualism, particularly in relation to the intellectual’s newest and most threatening manifestation, the nuclear scientist, who, through his arcane knowledge of mathematics and physics, possessed the power

Anti-Communism on the American Stage 19 to create atomic weapons that could destroy the world. Melodrama, with its simple schema of good and evil and its affi rmation of the current social and political order, flourishes in unsettled times, and the national anxiety over nuclear weapons and espionage after World War Two was naturally suited to melodramatic treatment. In The Traitor, the figure of the intellectual is split between a wise philosopher of the older generation, Professor Tobias Emmanuel, and a rather hot-headed young scientist, Allen Carr, who is his figurative son. Emmanuel, who personifi es the ethical scruples that were expressed about such anti-communist measures as loyalty oaths and blacklisting, comes across as decent, but powerless and ineffectual in the new atomic world, while Carr, who is morally and politically naive, represents the danger of placing power over the world in the hands of the scientists. At the beginning of the play, Emmanuel is faced with a demand by his university that he sign a questionnaire that the trustees are introducing as a requirement of employment. Emmanuel is aware that ‘questionnaire’ is a euphemism for ‘loyalty oath’, and he shows his determination to resign rather than sign it despite the visit of a trustee who pressures him. Meanwhile, Carr is in the process of turning over atomic secrets to some Russian espionage agents, despite having a contempt for communism. As he reasons, ‘Russia’s acquiring the bomb must bring a peace conference that means business—and a real world government’.4 He tells the Russian agent, identified only as ‘Baker’, ‘I’m using you. I want to prevent another war. I believe if your side has the bomb, there won’t be one, because each side will be afraid to start’ (102). The intellectuals are countered by two naval men of action, the young Lieutenant Henderson, who fi rst discovers Carr’s espionage activity, and his boss, Captain Gallagher, who takes charge of the operation and talks Carr into helping him capture Baker. Wouk complicates the loyalty oath issue somewhat. He makes clear what is at stake in signing the ‘questionnaire’ by establishing that Emmanuel’s graduate student, who was a student radical in the 1930s but has since become quite conservative, will lose the secretarial job that supports her and her mother if she has to list all the radical groups she once belonged to. Emmanuel decides to sign after he finds out about Carr’s espionage, because he has come to believe that it is ‘a serious public danger [ . . . ] to allow Communists in the guise of educators to recruit among the immature for their secret work’ (92). It is Lieutenant Henderson, the most aggressively anti-intellectual character in the play, who asserts that he would be damned if he would sign in Emmanuel’s place: I think the Communists are all fouled up. But I think they’ve got a right to live their lives like anybody else, unless they commit a crime, and to hold their ideas. What’s the difference between this country and Russia if they can’t do that? (92)

20 Brenda Murphy Thus, while Wouk uses the wise philosopher to establish the danger of allowing intellectuals free reign to express their ideas, it is the man-ofaction who expresses democratic tolerance, even if he is, as he says, ‘too dumb for these subtle distinctions’ (93). Doubt is shed on science from the beginning of the play, as Emmanuel, with language reminiscent of Santayana and Plato, establishes its limitations for guiding human action: ‘Our science is a smoky candle in the black mammoth cave of the universe. It dimly shows us the colors of the stones near us; it keeps us from falling into pits; but it can never light the way’ (8). While Carr is a high-level scientist who is trusted at the upper echelons of political decision-making, his downfall is his intellectual arrogance in believing that his scientific knowledge qualifies him to run the world. Calling him an ‘arrogant boy’, Emmanuel asks, Are the United States and Russia guided by logic? Are they chlorine and nitrogen, certain to behave according to scientific analysis? They’re nations, led by men, haunted by illogical impulses of anger, suspicion, envy and fear. (75) More specifically, Emmanuel explains that Carr’s mistake has been to share the communists’ contempt for the people: ‘They think the common man’s too dumb to vote himself a just society. It has to be imposed on him by the clever few’ (81). After Captain Gallagher reminds Carr that his treachery will justify all the interrogations in Washington, the young scientist is given the chance to redeem himself by helping to catch the spy, Baker. Carr decides to cooperate, just as Emmanuel decides to sign the loyalty oath, although, in the spirit of melodrama, Carr has to pay for his mistake, being shot by Baker as the Navy closes in on him. Thus the threat of the intellectuals is defused, their power domesticated in one case and liquidated in the other. The only actual communists in the play are a misguided writer and his girlfriend who, with Carr, bungle the espionage assignment so that Baker has to step in himself. Wouk does not waste opportunities to denigrate communists and communism, using many of the descriptors put forward in pamphlets by entities like HUAC. For example, early in the play Emmanuel refers to communists as a ‘religious minority’: The basic books have become canonized. A system of major and minor prophets, and of leading heresies, has evolved. Now add a hierarchy with a supreme head on earth—and blind devotion to interpretation and orders from above—and you have what we call Communism. It’s a faith without a God or a hereafter.5 When Henderson questions Carr’s girlfriend about him, he asks a series of questions such as citizens were invited to ask about neighbours to determine whether the neighbours’ behaviour indicated closet communists. Has

Anti-Communism on the American Stage 21 there been an alteration in his manner toward increased secretiveness? Has he tried to conceal letters or phone calls or been ambiguous about their contents? Is he nervous, and given to impulsive or unusual departures for appointments? Are large blocks of his time unaccounted for? Is he associating with new people whom he is reluctant to discuss? Wouk, of course, sees to it that Carr’s behaviour shows all these features, presumably suggesting to the audience that any such behaviour amongst their own associates is worth their scrutiny. Baker explains to Carr that there are three kinds of ‘personnel’ involved in espionage: ‘Those who do it for money—and they are by far the best—those who do it from devotion to the cause [ . . . ] and those like you, who have no visible motive, and whom I lump as cranks’ (101–2). In the play, all three types—the mercenary, the crank and the true believer—prove no match for the US Navy, but Wouk is careful to establish the threat of their presence among us. The Traitor ran for a lacklustre sixty-seven performances on Broadway in 1949. Although several reviewers characterised it as an exciting suspense drama, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, the most respected theatre critic of the period, likened it to the plays written under the aegis of the Russian Agitation and Propaganda Committee, being ‘superficial in characterizations, mentioning big subjects without exploring or analyzing them dispassionately, portraying the enemies of the state as either stupid or cynical and glorifying the courage and omniscience of the military or security forces’.6 In his view, ‘the characters represent current intellectual attitudes that are worth more thoughtful inquiry than Mr. Wouk has brought to them’.7 For similar reasons, Atkinson was also disappointed in Sidney Kingsley’s adaptation of Darkness at Noon. He complained that, ‘for Arthur Koestler’s haunting terror, Sidney Kingsley has substituted a complicated melodrama’ and that ‘somewhere between the novel and the theatre the intellectual distinction has gone out of the work’.8 Like The Traitor, Kingsley’s ‘melodrama comes with elements of the glib propaganda play that we fi nd so distasteful when it is on the other side’.9 Koestler’s novel, published some ten years earlier, is a brilliant tour de force. It is the record of the experience, internal and external, of Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, as he endures imprisonment and interrogation during one of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. Although Rubashov is in solitary confi nement, communicating with neighbouring prisoners only through a system of wall tapping, Koestler manages to create a riveting and suspenseful novel out of the character’s memories and his anguished internal debate over the failure of the Revolution and his personal responsibility for it. Evoking the degeneration of the early ideals of the communist movement, Rubashov’s obsessive memories of what he has done to three individuals, Richard and Little Loewy, who were loyal Party workers, and his lover Arlova, whom he was forced to betray in order to maintain his usefulness to the Party, bring him to a contemplation of the humanity he has sacrificed for the larger goals of the Revolution. At

22

Brenda Murphy

the end of his meditations, and of the novel, Rubashov comes to see the roots of the Party’s failure in its denial of the ‘I’, its defi nition of the individual being ‘a multitude of one million divided by one million’, and in the precept that the end justifies the means, for ‘it was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them all run amuck [ . . . ], sailing without ethical ballast’.10 Through manipulation of his feelings of guilt and responsibility, the interrogator Gletkin gets Rubashov to confess in an open trial to crimes he has not committed and he is unceremoniously shot in the head. In adapting the novel, the most immediate problem was the staging. As Kingsley said, ‘Koestler does a wonderful job of recreating Rubashov’s history and of presenting his philosophy almost entirely through reveries, plus a couple of talks with his examiners. But not even Claude Rains can hold an audience through two hours of monologue’.11 For the scenes in which Rubashov communicates with other prisoners, Kingsley worked with designer Frederick Fox to create a set that included a line of adjoining cells and that allowed the prisoners to speak their messages as they tapped on the walls in order that the audience could hear them. For scenes in Rubashov’s memory, the walls, established by lighting, disappeared, and he walked to another part of the stage, which represented a bedroom scene with Luba (Arlova), an office scene, and so forth. Atkinson pointed out that the production failed to achieve the major effect of the novel, despite the use of such expressionistic techniques, because of the basic limitations of the theatre: the need to materialise everything that in fiction can be simply thought. While ‘Mr. Koestler’s novel is subjective’, Atkinson wrote, ‘Mr. Kingsley’s theatre style is objective [and] the theatrical device of shifting to many isolated scenes inevitably keeps the story on a lower level. Everything is present except the fine working mechanism of Rubashov’s brain’.12 Kingsley, a former leftist who had joined the ranks of the liberal anticommunists, saw in Darkness at Noon ‘the most important issue of today’, which to his mind was ‘that the institutions of government must foster human rights, or else these precious rights will vanish and the principle of the all-important state will become dominant’.13 He said that his adaptation was ‘a play for liberals who know that one must be anti-Communist in order to be whole-heartedly anti-Fascist’.14 Kingsley’s emphasis is more on communism’s denial of the individual and its belief in historical necessity than on the corruption of idealism that Koestler conveys. The trajectory of Koestler’s novel is from darkness to illumination, as Rubashov comes to realize the precepts that are at the roots of his loss of humanity, and then to darkness again, as he sacrifices himself to the Party. In converting the novel to melodrama, Kingsley had to emphasise the confl ict between good and evil forces, focusing on the internal battle within Rubashov between a sense of guilt for those he has betrayed and a loyalty to the Party. Nevertheless, he retained one of the recurring tropes of the novel, which is the repayment of debts. In the novel, Rubashov comes to believe that

Anti-Communism on the American Stage 23 he had paid, his account was settled. He was a man who had lost his shadow, released from every bond. He had followed every thought to its last conclusion and acted in accordance with it to the very end.15 But asking himself ‘[f]or what actually are you dying? he found no answer’.16 In the play, when Rubashov asks ‘[h]ow can I die till I find out what I’m dying for?’, he answers with similar uncertainty: ‘My hundred eighty million fellow prisoners, what have I done to you? What have I created? [ . . . ] Where in your mathematics, Rubashov, is the human soul?’17 There is nothing in Koestler’s Rubashov that would suggest a belief in the human soul, but Kingsley introduces this religious-tinged language to heighten the conflict between the godless communist tyranny that the Revolution has wrought and the liberal values that stand in opposition to it. In one of the scenes representing his memories, his lover Luba cries, We’re human beings. We feel, we think, we see—we dream—we’re a part of God—Why have you done this to us? You say God is dead—but you’ve made your own God. Out of darkness—out of misery—lies— pain—Why? Why are you doing this to us? (89) Rubashov can only respond: ‘We wanted to build a new and better world’ (89). Kingsley’s Rubashov is the site of ideological confl ict between two systems of belief, and liberalism wins the debate as communism destroys its loyal servant and imprisons its people. Darkness at Noon ran for 186 performances on Broadway and won the New York Theatre Critics Circle Award for best play of the 1950–1951 season. One of the voters praised it as ‘a powerful and timely exposition of the utter heartlessness of communist philosophy’.18 In 1952, HUAC held a second round of ‘Show Business Hearings’, following the same pattern as the 1947 hearings during which actors, directors, producers and others from the film industry were forced, under threat of blacklisting and prosecution for Contempt of Congress, to confess publicly, express repentance and name others who had participated with them in activities which might have taken place as much as twenty years earlier and most of which were perfectly legal in the United States.19 The American interrogations did not by any means have the ruthlessness or the dire consequences of the Moscow Trials. Although several suicides and heart attacks were attributed to its methods, no one was executed as a result of HUAC’s proceedings; no one was tortured into testifying. Nevertheless, the HUAC investigations strained the boundaries of cherished American values such as freedom of thought, speech and assembly. The spectacle of Americans having to turn in their fellow participants for activities that were not illegal stuck in the craw of many left-liberals in the early 1950s, and many admired and supported those who resisted the committee. It was partly this reaction against authority that Herman Wouk addressed in his best-selling novel, The Caine

24

Brenda Murphy

Mutiny (1951), and in his dramatic adaptation of it, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Wouk’s 500-page novel is about the takeover of the Caine, a World-WarTwo minesweeper, by Lieutenant Stephen Maryk under Article 184 of the naval regulations, which permits the executive officer to assume authority from the captain in an emergency. The emergency occurs during a typhoon, when Maryk believes that Captain Philip Queeg has become mentally unstable and has lost his ability to command the ship, placing it in grave danger. Maryk is court-martialled for his actions, and defended by Lieutenant Barney Greenwald, who tells him he would rather be prosecuting him than defending him, but wins the case by causing Queeg on the stand to display the panic and irrationality that would have characterised his behaviour during the typhoon.20 After the trial, Greenwald goes to a party being held for Maryk and makes a speech in which he blames Lieutenant Thomas Keefer, the ship’s resident left-wing intellectual, for planting the idea that Queeg was unstable in Maryk’s mind and for egging him on to undermine the Captain, while failing to take responsibility for his actions. In a lengthy speech, Greenwald says that Maryk was wrong to unseat Queeg, and goes on to praise Queeg and other officers in the regular Navy for saving the country from Nazi invasion while people like Maryk were still being trained, a speech that emerges from the way Greenwald, as a Jew, ‘just can’t cotton to the idea of my Mom melted down into a bar of soap’.21 Wouk said that, in the book, he ‘set up Captain Queeg to represent [the object of] all the gripes against the Navy and a skipper that a person might have; then in a larger framework tried to give the case for the Navy. The Navy in the war was simply terrific’. 22 Adapting the novel for the stage in 1954, Wouk created a forensic drama using only the trial and the party scene, ending with Greenwald’s speech. Charles Laughton, who collaborated with him on the adaptation and directed the play on Broadway, said that Wouk intended for people to ‘see beyond the court martial to certain fundamental ideas he holds about authority, about defiance of authority, about respect for our Navy—and by implication, about respect for the other institutions of authority in American society today. This play expresses Wouk’s respect for authority’.23 In the context of the debate over McCarthyism and the HUAC hearings, Wouk was clearly placing himself on the Right, in support of obedience to institutional authority, no matter how unjust or deranged, and in opposition to leftist intellectuals and writers who would question it. In the play, Wouk focuses on the lawyer Greenwald, a minor character in the novel, and places him squarely in opposition to Tom Keefer, the leftist intellectual. At the beginning, the ingenuous Maryk tells Greenwald that Keefer has ‘the keenest mind on the ship. About the keenest I’ve ever run into’ and says that he’s glad Keefer will testify because he can explain the aspects of psychiatry that Maryk only vaguely understands. 24 Greenwald replies that Keefer won’t do him any good on the stand and that he

Anti-Communism on the American Stage 25 would really enjoy prosecuting him (13). When Keefer testifies, he abandons Maryk, saying that Maryk acted on his own when he took over the ship and that he did not agree with the idea that Queeg was insane (26–7). When the court recesses, Greenwald tells Maryk that he is sure Keefer’s forthcoming novel, Multitudes, Multitudes, ‘exposes this war in all its grim futility, and shows up the regular army and navy officers—just a lot of stupid sadists, bitching up the campaigns, and throwing away the lives of fatalistic, humorous, lovable citizen-soldiers’ (58). The peroration of Greenwald’s long speech at the end of the play is an indictment of Keefer for filling Maryk’s head ‘full of paranoia and Article 184’ (94). Without him, he says, Maryk probably would have convinced Queeg to give the right orders to save the ship, but instead the Caine has been taken out of action: ‘That’s your contribution to the good old U.S.A., my friend. Pulling a minesweeper out of the South Pacific when it was most needed. That, and Multitudes, Multitudes’. 25 As for Queeg, Wouk establishes that he actually is clinically paranoid, exhibiting ‘rigidity of personality, feelings of persecution, unreasonable suspicion, withdrawal from reality, perfectionist anxiety, an unreal basic premise, and an obsessive sense of self-righteousness’ (50). On the stand, he falls apart under Greenwald’s questioning, delivering a rambling and disjointed monologue that displays his inability to think clearly under pressure and the impairment of his judgment by his various obsessions and delusions. Nevertheless, the effect of Greenwald’s speech is to argue that Queeg should not have been replaced, no matter how crazy he was, because he was in authority, and that Maryk’s job was unquestioning obedience. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial was a major hit show, due partly to the brilliant acting of Lloyd Nolan as Queeg and Henry Fonda as Greenwald, but also due to the spirited debate about the play’s political implications that was carried out in newspapers and magazines. 26 The opinion on the Right may be summarised by Theophilus Lewis’s statement in the magazine America: Mr. Wouk makes some pertinent, trenchant and highly original observations on the iconoclasts who rouse the intellectual rabble. As Keefer undermined the confidence of the crew in their commander, the civilian image-breakers are continually magnifying the flaws in venerable traditions, discrediting the motives of men in authority and disparaging their efforts. By sniping at every man who climbs to a conspicuous place in society, they create an atmosphere of distrust of all authority and a spirit of revolt against discipline.27 From the liberal side, such well-known critics as Brooks Atkinson, Harold Clurman, Eric Bentley and Richard Hayes critiqued Wouk’s authoritarian stance, while British critic Kenneth Tynan suggested bluntly that ‘Mr. Wouk’s standards of human conduct differ from those of the Nazi Party only in that Mr. Wouk is not anti-Semitic. One wonders, neither idly nor

26

Brenda Murphy

for the fi rst time, just how many thinkers of his stamp would have opposed Hitler if Hitler had not indulged in racial persecution’. 28 The most directly anti-communist play of the period, Kazan’s The Egghead, was the least successful, closing after just twenty-one performances. The play attacks the leftist intellectual overtly in the person of the rather bombastic sociology professor, Hank Parson. Hank, driven to ‘a healthy rage’ by the FBI’s questioning of him and his family about the political beliefs of Perry Hall, a former student, invites Hall to come and lecture at the campus, creating the expected controversy. 29 Hank’s young wife Sally becomes increasingly suspicious of Hall and communism, reading up on leftist literature and searching her husband’s fi les for letters and other writings that might implicate the former student. When Sally fi nds that Hall has concealed the fact that he has been writing communist propaganda under a pseudonym, her response clearly evokes the rugged individualism of the American frontier: I’m mad. Just get me Gramma’s shotgun off the rafters! I’m from Nebraska. What they used to do to horsethieves! I’d like to shoot the varmint! Tar and feathers! (58) Later she asks Professor Gottfried Roth, a German immigrant who was a communist in his youth, what makes a man do such a thing, and he gives her a brief lesson on communist psychology: At the beginning, it is ideals. [ . . . ] For the sake of the future dream, a man accepts a little poison, a little more poison, and more. [ . . . ] He must develop a tolerance for any kind of methods, for any kind of sophistry. These, in the beginning, they would make him sick. But in the end, he will accept the slave labor camps, the faked trials, the murders. [ . . . ] In the beginning, a man will say, there are no labor camps, there is no murder, it didn’t happen. Even Hungary, it didn’t happen. The next stage, he makes excuses. Suppose it happened? The future will justify it. The last stage, he becomes professional. Then the fi ne future is far away. It is a slogan for new people: suckers. (59, Kazan’s italics) When Hall is exposed through the efforts of Roth and Sally, Hank is forced to recognize that he is a communist and has been lying to him. In a confrontation with the professor, Hall threatens to implicate him as well, making sure that he will be fi red from the university and blacklisted. In the end, Martin Donahue, the FBI agent, assures Hank that the other men at the factory where Hall is organising will ‘take care of the situation’ if he tells them that Hall is a communist (76). Hank resigns from the university, saying that he is going to be smeared by both the communists and the vigilantes, but Sally persuades him to take back his resignation because he is ‘needed’ (77, Kazan’s italics). When Hank says that ‘the idea of political investigation

Anti-Communism on the American Stage 27 still turns my stomach’, Donahue tells him that ‘if there weren’t any Communists, why, then your climate of suspicion would be over. [But] we’ve got ‘em and that’s why I’m here, sir’ (77). The play ends with Donahue saying, ‘[t]he saints protect us from such eggheads! Save us from soft-boiled liberals!’ and with Hank telling Sally, ‘from here on, we’re going to have to train ourselves to be hardboiled—not softboiled!’ (78). There are strong autobiographical elements in The Egghead. Both Molly Kazan and her husband had the same radical background as her character, Gottfried Roth, having been part of the workers’ theatre movement in the 1930s and having gone on to reject communism before 1940, disgusted by its authoritarian methods towards writers and artists.30 In the Kazan household, it was Molly who took the lead in political and intellectual matters, and this is reflected in the empowerment of Sally, as she goes from what one reviewer called an ‘abnormally stupid’ wife in the first two acts to the expert analyst of communist rhetoric and unmasker of communist disguises in Act III.31 Elia Kazan has written of his own experience of being attacked by both Right and Left after his testimony, and of his determination ‘not to look for support or friendship where I’d once had it’, but rather ‘to look everyone in the eye [ . . . ] and tough it out’, a determination that Hank expresses at the end of the play.32 As for the figure of the intellectual, the voluble Hank is clearly bested in the business of politics by his more practical and hard-headed wife, but shows a possibility of improvement if he follows her advice. The implication is that the liberal intellectual is dangerous, but can be made useful if curbed by those with more common sense. The audience response to the play was described as ‘lukewarm’.33 Both Karl Malden, who played Hank, and Lloyd Richards, who played Perry Hall, were well-received by the audience, and Richards received a round of applause at his last exit, despite the fact that Perry Hall left the stage an unregenerate communist. Jesse Walker wrote in the New York Amsterdam News that ‘this is a play for thinkers, or eggheads, if you will. Whether the ordinary playgoer will feel at ease as it progresses is, however, something else again. [ . . . ] Oftentimes the line between drama and propaganda seems thinly drawn’.34 In a similar vein, Atkinson complained that the final act was ‘blameless propaganda’ and even Elia Kazan wrote that ‘[t]he conclusion was predictable’, lacking dramatic tension.35 The common summation to which these analyses of the play’s failure tend is that The Egghead is ultimately ineffective, even as propaganda, because the anti-communist viewpoint it espouses is so rigid and so convinced of its own validity that it cannot begin to reach anyone with its argument except an already true believer. The implication of all four of these anti-communist plays is that the left-liberal intellectual is a danger to American society. Whether it is the weakness of Tobias Emmanuel, the arrogance of Allen Carr, the cowardly treacherousness of Tom Keefer or the gullibility of Hank Parsons, the intellectual always displays a fatal weakness of character that makes it dangerous for the nation to place power in his hands, whether in the form of

28 Brenda Murphy nuclear secrets or access to vulnerable young minds. The greater danger, however, is the Communist Party, with its insidious ability not only to lead an Allen Carr or a Perry Hall astray, but also to break down a brilliant man-of-action like Rubashov into a tool of the state. The prevailing solution to the danger in this melodramatic world is an unquestioning loyalty to ‘American values’ and an affi rmation of institutional authority, as vested in such metonymic figures as the military officers Captain Gallagher and Commander Queeg and the FBI agent Martin Donahue. The faith in the methods of interrogation practiced by HUAC and McCarthy’s Senate committee are also represented metonymically in Lieutenant Henderson’s questioning of Carr’s girlfriend and Donohue’s questioning of Sally, which help to produce the witness’s enlightenment as well as the demise of the communist. The precept that ‘the end justifies the means’, to which Koestler ascribes the failure of humanity in the Communist Revolution, is affi rmed by Herman Wouk and Molly Kazan as justification for political blacklisting, for the purging of academic faculties through loyalty oaths and for the other tools of McCarthyism. In these anti-communist plays, the communists and the Far Right prove to have been in agreement about at least one thing, the utility of these Machiavellian precepts. NOTES 1. For a detailed analysis of the leftist plays, see Brenda Murphy, Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 75–255. 2. See Elia Kazan, ‘A Statement’, New York Times, 12 April 1952, p. 7. Elia Kazan attributes authorship of the statement to Molly: see Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 464. 3. Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), p. 310. 4. Wouk, The Traitor (New York: Samuel French, 1949), p. 74. Subsequent page references appear in the text. 5. Ibid., pp. 27, 28. The official HUAC version of this may be seen in its publications, such as 100 Things You Should Know about Communism and Religion (1951). Using a catechetical model, it asks, ‘[w]here is the headquarters of the Communist faith?’, responding ‘The Kremlin, Moscow, Russia’ (House Committee on Un-American Activities, 100 Things You Should Know about Communism and Religion, 82nd Congress: House Documents, Vol. 7 (3 January–20 October 1951), p. 35). It goes on: ‘Who is the head of that faith? Joseph Stalin, because he is the head of the Government of Russia and Chief of the Communist Party of Russia. To a Communist in the United States or any other country, Stalin’s word is fi nal. For a Communist to defy Stalin is as scandalous to other Communists as for a religious-minded person to blaspheme God’ (ibid., p. 35). 6. Atkinson, ‘The Traitor’, New York Times, 10 April 1949, Section X, p. 1. 7. Ibid., p. 1. 8. Atkinson, ‘At the Theatre’, New York Times, 15 January 1951, p. 13. 9. Ibid., p. 13.

Anti-Communism on the American Stage 29 10. Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy, new edn (1940; New York: Bantam, 1941), pp. 208, 210. 11. Quoted in Harry Gilroy, ‘Anti-Communist Novel Dramatized’, New York Times, 7 January 1951, p. 81. 12. Atkinson, ‘Darkness at Noon’, New York Times, 21 January 1951, p. 81. 13. Quoted in Gilroy, ‘Anti-Communist Novel’, p. 82. 14. Ibid., p. 82. 15. Koestler, Darkness at Noon, p. 205 16. Ibid., p. 210. 17. Kingsley, Darkness at Noon: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1950), pp. 93, 94. Subsequent page references appear in the text. 18. John Chapman, ‘Critic Awards are Added to Growing List’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 April 1951, Section H, p. 4. 19. See Eric Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason (New York: Viking, 1971), pp. 461–569, Goodman, Committee, pp. 313–32, and Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980), pp. 361–98. 20. See Wouk, The Caine Mutiny: A Novel of World War II (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), pp. 356, 426–38. 21. Ibid., p. 446. 22. Quoted in Nash K. Burger, ‘Talk with Herman Wouk’, New York Times, 16 September 1951, Section BR, p. 9. 23. Quoted in Seymour Peck, ‘Play from the Log of the “Caine”’, New York Times, 17 January 1954, Section II, p. 1. 24. Wouk, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (New York: Samuel French, 1954), pp. 12, 13. Subsequent page references appear in the text. 25. Ibid., p. 94. The play ends with Greenwald throwing a glass of wine in Keefer’s face, saying ‘you can wipe for the rest of your life, mister. You’ll never wipe off that yellow stain’ (ibid., p. 95). 26. For a summary of the debate, see Murphy, Congressional Theatre, pp. 244–7. 27. Lewis, ‘Theatre’, America, Vol. 90 (13 February 1954), p. 516. 28. Tynan, ‘The Caine-Mutiny Court-Martial’, in Tynan, Curtains: Selections from the Drama Criticism and Related Writings (New York: Atheneum, 1961), p. 273. See also Brooks Atkinson, ‘Caine Mutiny’, New York Times, 31 January 1954, Section 2, p. 1; Eric Bentley, ‘Cpt. Bligh’s Revenge’, New Republic, Vol. 126 (15 February 1954), p. 21; Harold Clurman, ‘The Mutiny That’s Raising Cain’, The Nation, Vol. 178 (27 March 1954), pp. 260–1; and Richard Hayes, ‘The Stage: The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial’, Commonweal, Vol. 58 (26 February 1954), pp. 523–4. 29. Kazan, The Egghead (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1958), p. 15. Subsequent page references appear in the text. 30. See Kazan, Elia Kazan, pp. 127–33, and Barry B. Witham, ‘Eggheads and Witches: Molly Kazan Boils the Left’, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2008), pp. 9–28. 31. Brooks Atkinson, ‘Theatre: “The Egghead”’, New York Times, 10 October 1957, p. 39. 32. Kazan, Elia Kazan, p. 482. 33. Jesse H. Walker, ‘Richards Applauded for “Egghead” Role’, New York Amsterdam News, 19 October 1957, p. 11. 34. Ibid., p. 11. 35. Atkinson, ‘Theatre’, p. 39; Kazan, Elia Kazan, p. 573.

2

Factography and Cold War Ideology in the Cuban Detective Novel Ignacio López-Calvo ‘Art is a weapon of the Revolution’ Fidel Castro

The sub-genres of detective and counter-espionage novels became much more popular in Cuba once the revolutionary government had decided to offset British and US political propaganda in films and novels, such as the James Bond series by Ian Fleming, with literary awards like the Anniversary of the Revolution Contest (Concurso Aniversario de la Revolución) and the National Award on Detective Literature (Premio Nacional de Literatura Policial). Established in 1972 by the Ministry of the Interior, these literary awards ended up creating a series of aesthetic and political precepts for these sub-genres that were obeyed by the hundreds of crime writers during the period. In José Fernández Pequeño’s words, ‘[t]he Ministry of the Interior published, in 1972, some rules to help anyone interested in writing detective novels that seemed extracted from the most orthodox inductive tradition’.1 According to Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura Fuentes, such precepts ‘were imposed through [ . . . ] the panel of judges’ whims and ideas about literature’, with the panel in turn ‘formed by civil writers supervised by a high officer of the Ministry of the Interior’. 2 At the fi rst Anniversary of the Revolution Contest in 1973, the two novels that won—La ronda de los rubíes (The Ruby Necklace, 1973) and La justicia por su mano (Taking Justice into His Own Hands, 1973)—were both written by lieutenants of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, Armando Cristóbal Pérez and José Lamadrid Vega, for the simple reason that only members of the Ministry were invited to participate.3 The following year the contest was extended to civilian participants with the explicit understanding that work would need to accord to the rules of revolutionary literature, with any fiction submitted for publication placed under meticulous surveillance to avoid the circulation of anything that was not aligned with governmental ideology. As Fernández Pequeño comments, this was apparent not only in the censorship ‘of works that attempted any deviation from the openly ideological schemes canonized by this literature’, but also in ‘the censorship of novels carrying a critical vision of a Cuban social structure’.4 In this sense, detective novels published during the 1970s and 1980s cannot be understood without taking into account the governmental protocols that governed cultural production on the island. In an

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interview with Doris Wieser, Padura Fuentes explained the impact that censorship had and still has on Cuban literature, admitting that the Cuban political novel has been obliged to see reality in ‘a narrow and prejudiced way’.5 Since the 1990s, he argues, society may have changed dramatically, but governmental censorship still imposes limitations on writers: I know that I can write with absolute freedom, always keeping in mind that there exist limits that I must not transgress so that my books can circulate in Cuba. But I am not interested in transgressing these limits, because [then] I would fall into the open field of politics. I do not want my literature to become political, because whether you write for or against, the literature that enters the field of politics is devoured by it.6 There has been little opportunity to avoid political repercussions, however. For example, even though Padura Fuentes is not a political dissident, his determination to write novels that reflect Cuban life more accurately, and ‘to carry out a much deeper analysis of Cuban society’, have often tested Cuban censorship, and two of them, Pasado perfecto (Past Perfect, 1995) and Mascaras (Masks, 1997), were temporarily banned. Evidently, revolutionary detective and counter-espionage narratives of the Cold War period responded to an ideological apparatus that, as Fidel Castro’s epigraph indicates, had decided to make literature a weapon of the Revolution and of the cultural confl ict that took place during those decades. In any case, thanks to the literary contests, the publication of detective stories increased dramatically. Among other Cuban detective novels to emerge during the Cold War period were Manuel Cofiño López’s La última mujer y el próximo combate (The Last Woman and the Next Combat, 1971), Bertha Recio Tenorio’s Una vez más (One More Time, 1980), Luis Rogelio Nogueras’s and Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera’s El cuarto círculo (The Fourth Circle, 1980), Luis Rogelio Nogueras’s Nosotros, los sobrevivientes (We, the Survivors, 1981), Daniel Chavarría’s and Justo E. Vasco’s Completo Camagüey (Complete Camagüey, 1983) and Rodolfo Pérez Valero’s and Juan Carlos Reloba’s Confrontación (1985). In these works, the often idealised Cuban counter-intelligence agents, law enforcement agencies and Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs) prove the invincibility of the revolutionary process by inexorably outsmarting depraved CIA infiltrators and their collaborators. Carmen González Hernández’s Viento Norte (Northern Wind, 1980), for example, devotes several pages to the inner workings of a CDR and provides examples of the successful results of individual reports on suspects.7 By the same token, Alberto Molina Rodríguez’s Los hombres color del silencio (The Silence-Colored Men, 1975) refers to CIA engagements with the Cuban intelligence services as ‘the persecution of the big fish after the small fish’, but insists that ‘the small fish was too intelligent’.8 In turn, counter-revolutionaries are always moved by selfish economic reasons (such as a character named Arencibia in Los hombres color del silencio, who

32

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dreams of returning to the US with enough money to start a gambling business) or by reactionary ideological convictions, as is the case of the counterrevolutionaries Osuna and Orihuela in Viento norte.9 Revolutionary detective novels of the 1970s and 1980s, therefore, display an overtly politicised antiyanqui discourse that condemns capitalism as well as US imperialism and interventionism in Cuba. The underlying aim of the genre, exemplified in Rodolpho Pérez Valero’s No es tiempo de ceremonias (It’s Not Time for Ceremonies, 1974), was to raise awareness about the need for a collective defence of the Revolution and to convince readers about the infallibility of the national security forces. Although some stories deal with covert intelligence operations in the United States, as is the case in Luis Rogerio Nogueras’s Y si muero mañana (And If I Die Tomorrow, 1984), most take place in Cuba. Often with pamphlet-like overtones, they blend anti-American propaganda with high praise for the Revolution, and focus on national security professionals and heroic, regular citizens who devote their time to detecting and then counteracting the enemy’s espionage and acts of sabotage or terrorism. Through the CDRs, Cuban civilians become one with the law enforcement and intelligence units, a collaboration that replaces the traditional private detective to the point of becoming a cliché in Cuban crime fiction. Alongside the state agencies, Claudia González Marrero points out, ‘a second agent in the fight against crime appears: the people, a union that, by osmosis, becomes a collective hero’.10 As a third feature, counter-espionage novels provide a character that typifies faithfulness to the Revolution, the New Man, who is willing to withstand public accusations from his peers of being a counter-revolutionary gusano (worm) in order to infiltrate real counter-revolutionary groups abroad. The character of Lieutenant Villa Solana in Nogueras’s Y si muero mañana is a case in point of the socialist hero who sacrifices his reputation for the Revolution. The aim of these optimistic and didactic works is diametrically opposed to the pessimistic, oppositional message delivered by works dealing with the so-called ‘Special Period in Peacetime’ (the official name given to the steep economic decline during the first half of the 1990s) and published, for the most part, outside Cuba, such as Daína Chaviano’s El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Man, Woman and Hunger, 1998) and Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera (I Gave You All I Had, 1996). In this essay, I will concentrate on one representative detective novel, El American Way of Death (1980) by the Cuban humorist and writer Juan Ángel Cardi.11 While its aesthetic and literary merits are quite limited, it remains a valuable document with which to critically re-examine the ideological complexities and cultural wars that took place during the 1945–1989 period.12 As the global phenomenon that it was, the Cold War instigated an extensive exchange of discourses in cultural production throughout the world, and El American Way of Death, as one example in kind, typifies the influence of Soviet ‘factography’ on Cuban writing. This term was coined in the 1920s to describe the inscription and creation of facts in cultural

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33

production for the working class. As Devin Fore explains, rather than creating the most objective description of reality possible, as was the intention of western documentary work, factography’s main concern was sign production, the composition and reconstruction of reality. In this sense, it redirected its focal point to what was known as ‘operativity’: that is, to a process that aimed ‘not to veridically reflect reality [ . . . ] but to actively transform reality through it. The objectivism of an indifferent documentary had no place in the interventionist practices of the factographers’.13 As Fore continues, ‘operativity’ ‘designate[s] a situational aesthetics that conceptualized representation not as an objective reflection of a static world, but as an operation that by defi nition intervenes in the context of the aesthetic act’.14 In the literary field, the most recognisable factographic form is the ocherk: a prose genre that was part scientific inquiry, part literary composition, and whose closest approximates in the Western European tradition would be the essay or the short sketch. [ . . . ] Somewhere between science and literature, this ‘experiment in form’ could be more accurately described as a rhetorical practice than as an identifiable class of aesthetic work.15 In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, factography and the ocherk were, in fact, the answers to the dilemma of how to modernise literature in line with industrial and revolutionary advancements. It would not be too far-fetched to assume that Cardi, who wrote a brief history of the press, was aware of and influenced by this Soviet creation. El American Way of Death follows factographic precepts by pointing out with asterisks all the events and characters that have been taken from real life, as Cardi explains in a footnote: The names and facts marked with an asterisk (*) correspond to real-life characters and true events, although its location in the plot is a narrative choice. On the other hand, said names and events—taken from newspapers published in Havana in 1977—do not coincide with the time of the action in the novel—January 1957—, but undoubtedly—and this is the author’s goal when using them—can be considered to coincide in the contemporary space of the decadent American society.16 Curiously, alongside this factographic narrative strategy is the inclusion of fictional investigators drawn from Agatha Christie and American detective novels (Perry Mason, Nero Wolfe, Mike Hammer and Sam Spade, the hero of the fi lm The Maltese Falcon (1941)). It is plausible that Cardi’s motivation for including these characters was to mock the traditional detective novel and film as products of capitalist mentality and propaganda.17 In any case, his inclusion of real-life characters, events and organisations represents an

34

Ignacio López-Calvo

attempt to offer, with verisimilitude, an ultra-nationalistic historiography of a prolonged Cold War whose consequences continue to affect the island nation of Cuba today. In his defence, Cardi’s aforementioned author’s note affi rms his ideological positionality as a fi rm supporter of the Revolution: he will try to demonstrate, through a purportedly accurate description of American society and institutions, the failures of consumer society and of the capitalist system in general. At the same time, he presents, without ambivalence, what he perceives as the achievements of the revolutionary process, a former utopian dream that has become a palpable reality in Cuba. Taken together, this footnote, the title, the dedication of the novel to his children and ‘the honourable uniform they wear’ and the two antiAmerican poems by Nicolás Guillén that open and close the narrative leave no doubt that, beyond the detective story, the reader will find an unforgiving criticism of American society of the late 1950s and, by extension, of the 1970s as well.18 Although the novel begins and ends in Cuba, most of the action takes place in New York City in January 1957, two years before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The macho protagonist, Pedro Pizarro del Pradoameno, is a Cuban lawyer who spent his teenage years in America (and thus has no accent in English) and whose hobby, after having read many detective stories, is solving crimes in seven days as if he were a professional detective. While he is the focal character in action scenes, his inseparable and cerebral uncle, Amiel, who shares the same hobby, collaborates mostly by reasoning and coming up with logical deductions from his room. To criticise what he sees as the decadence of contemporary American society, Cardi chooses to place the action during the era of McCarthyism, when anti-Communist hysteria was rampant in daily life. Accordingly, Nero Wolfe (one of the fictional detectives who become characters in the novel) has worked for the Pentagon and was involved in the McCarthyist witch hunt, and is soon asking the protagonists, without preamble, about their political affiliation. The fictional detectives also set up the dialogues so that the Cuban protagonists can easily disarm them with responses that prove the inequalities created by capitalism and the superiority of communist societies. For instance, when Wolfe justifies American society’s flaws as the price one has to pay for enjoying this type of civilisation, Pedro explains to him that not everyone enjoys those benefits equally. Likewise, when the lawyer Perry Mason defends his profession, the protagonist’s uncle points out the absurdity of supporting a social mechanism that is full of contradictions when he could be using his talent for more noble causes. The satire continues with cynical observations on many facets of American society, including the press, corrupt politicians, gangsters, the CIA, the FBI, the New York police, prostitution and the porn industry. The excuse for these diatribes against American immorality is the assassination of a Brazilian actress and prostitute, Amorinha do Portobelo, whom the protagonist had met a few days earlier. While investigating this crime, Pedro and Amiel will

Factography and Ideology in the Cuban Detective Novel

35

uncover a seemingly never-ending network of evil and corruption that go, for the most part, unpunished. One of the fi rst criticisms of American society that appears in the novel is the pervasive and conspicuous consumption that dominates every aspect of life, including newspaper sales: The extravagant logic that serves as the base for consumer society justified very well the extraordinary waste of ink and paper, as well as the amazing pile of more or less absurd hypotheses and incredible, contradictory theories. It is necessary to understand that not every day is there a topic that can exacerbate the noxious curiosity of a nation that takes pleasure in consuming scandals with the same satisfaction as in ingesting pop corn and toasting peanuts, and as in chewing gum. Even more: the nth sense of that society—the hyperdeveloped and perverse sense of publicity—is capacitated as much for launching detergents with fabulous additives to the market, highly explosive chewing gum and corn fl akes with mystical vitamins, as it is for selling stories about fabulous robberies and legendary narrations of hair-raising crimes.19 The protagonist derides New York newspapers as mere ‘yellow press’ and criticises the prominence they give in their pages to the assassination of an international prostitute, while ignoring the hunger and misery of developing nations, the oppression and torture of innocent people living under dictatorship and the children who are devoured by voracious rats in pestilent Harlem.20 Within the context of ‘the rottenness of the so-called consumer society’, El American Way of Death claims that everything in the US, including death (hence the title), is for sale (225). Thus, after Amorihna dies, a hysterical crowd gathers in front of the funeral home hawking mementos: necklaces made with raw coffee beans, imitations of the emerald jewel she owned, little bundles of hair, remnants of bloody gowns and photographs in which her face has been superimposed on other women’s naked bodies. Along the same lines, a character called Aaron Levsky claims that a major publisher, William Smithson, has sold him films with macabre scenes from the Dachau concentration camp that are intended for the purchaser’s entertainment. 21 Considering the large number of assassinations that take place throughout the plot, the title of the novel also refers to the lack of value that life purportedly has in the United States. As a Spanish character who has lived in Cuba and then moved to the US explains, ‘[i]n New York, we are all enemies of one another. Here death strolls happily through the streets. No one is safe from a stabbing, a gun shot, or, at least, a blow’. 22 Cardi also lists sexual depravation as one of the main features of the American way of life. Senators, millionaires and gangsters have all been photographed naked surrounded by prostitutes, and Cornelius Morgan-Mellow, one of the suspects in the murder of the Brazilian actress,

36

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participates in orgies, supports Amorihna’s drug addiction and takes advantage of her nymphomania and masochism by using her in a pornographic fi lm that was going to be titled Contemporary Decameron. 23 The publisher William Smithson, another suspect, confesses to Pedro that he can only continue to publish luxury editions of regular books by selling pornographic books. He also admits to having made a fortune by fi lming and selling child pornography: I confess that it is a malign good idea; but I didn’t invent it. All I have done is to represent in my film bits and pieces of real life. In San Francisco, in Chicago, in New York, thousands of children are prostituted in specialized brothels.* This morning, a merchant confessed to me that he pays up to two hundred dollars for each hour of a show in which couples of children execute the most sophisticated obscene practices.* There I have an advertising agent’s letter, in letterhead paper, in which one can see the story, illustrated with photographs, of a twelve-year old girl who, after being drugged, was made available to dozens of men and women who carried out a true marathon of libidinousness. And don’t doubt for a moment that this may be one day legalized. (247) As seen, the passage includes asterisks to indicate that it is based on real facts. Subsequently, in another paragraph with an asterisk, Pedro narrates how he saw Verónica Brunson, a twelve-year-old girl who had been turned into a prostitute at the age of eleven, being thrown from a tenth-floor window of a hotel (247). At the risk of further endangering the text’s verisimilitude, Cardi strategically allows Smithson, who claims to be anti-communist, to explain the reasons behind so much degeneracy in American society: ‘we are seeing the full decadence of a society that needs, in the middle of its death rattles, the stimulus of vice and moral depravation in order to better endure the anguish caused by its imminent collapse’ (246). Incidentally, Fernández Pequeño has noted how verisimilitude in the novel is ‘sacrificed by the demands of the inductive game, which the profuse use of chance and the manipulation of events and characters make incredible’. 24 As characters like Morgan-Mellow and Smithson would suggest, Cardi’s America is defi ned by greed, ostentation and economic injustice. Manhattan places its ‘monument to the exploiting efficiency of the Rockefeller’ alongside ‘insolent perpetuations in concrete and steel to expensive names of consumer society: General Electric, Chrysler, Woolworth, Metropolitan Life Insurance, RCA, Bank of Manhattan and the New York Stock Exchange—stone heart of Wall Street’ (99). Churches are dwarfed by the exorbitant growth of high-rises erected to the seven deadly sins, and monuments to genocides and reactionary colonialists exist side by side with an underworld of prostitution, gambling, drugs, crime and slums. Harlem denizens complain about not being able to afford health care and avoid returning to their sordid, depressing neighbourhoods, choosing

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instead to daydream whilst loitering in Central Park. Another asterisk attests to the veracity of the havoc created by rioting and arson in Harlem, Brooklyn and Bronx, when two hundred policemen and twenty-fi re fighters are injured and two thousand looters arrested (155). Later, the protagonist actually helps an elderly lady to steal a coat, feeling that the looting will bring justice for the underprivileged, and also condemns a scene that takes place in wealthy Fifth Avenue, in which two police offi cers beat a looter who has stolen a mattress for his dying mother. According to Pedro, thousands of New York police officers refuse to help during the emergency, yet still fi nd time for charging commissions to brothels, inventing communist conspiracies and protecting corrupt politicians and gangsters. The drastic contrast with Cuban law enforcement and justice is subsequently exposed: Pedro and his uncle are reluctant to collaborate with policemen because they are not ‘organs of what we understood for justice; that is, the congruent legal structure upon which the intrinsic confidence that a people has in its social security, its economic welfare and its political freedoms is based—as it happens in our country’ (23). Pedro also accuses the head of the New York Police Department, Captain Jonathan Murphy (who is humorously described as ‘fat, slow, fl abby, big-headed, and ugly’ (195)), of being responsible for racially motivated beatings and assassinations of black people, of killing journalists who investigate their wrongdoings and of considering Latinos subhuman. As a Cuban in the US, Pedro realises that he could never be considered a suspect in the murder of Amorihna because it was too sophisticated and enigmatic: ‘they are forced to fi nd a super-genius who looks as American as possible’ (29). Most directly, rampant racism in the United States is epitomised by Bill Wilkinson, great wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who hopes that the next world war will eliminate blacks, Indians and Mestizos. 25 More so than the New York Police Department and the FBI, the CIA is depicted as an evil organisation that commits gross abuses of human rights. Allan Welsh Dulles, the director of the agency, is sponsoring mind control research projects in which underprivileged students and common inmates become guinea pigs in experiments with hypnosis, electric shocks and new drugs (again, the truth of this statement is marked with an asterisk (156)). CIA agents also force prostitutes in Greenwich Village to drug their clients with LSD so that its effects on the human mind can be tested, and even try to drug the protagonist, who successfully avoids the trap. 26 Pedro has access to documents that prove the collaboration of the CIA with Aaron Levsky, who turns out to be one Adolph Lunger, a notorious jeweller, gambler and former Nazi officer in charge of the Jewish genocide, specialising in human head reduction and the fabrication of lamps and wallets from the bodies of dead prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp. Most significantly, the CIA recruits Captain Murphy for special missions in Latin America, as well as Joseph Barelli, a procurer who has murdered three men. Along with representatives from the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon, Captain Murphy

38 Ignacio López-Calvo forms part of a commission that goes to Havana on an official trip to advise Batista’s army and police on how to prevent the spread of communism and Soviet influence. Following on from such Cold War references, El American Way of Death establishes a direct correlation between capitalism and the desire for nuclear war. Thus, Morgan-Mellow and other American characters have an invested interest in the continuation of the Cold War because they own shares in the arms industry. Their investment is subsequently equated to their faith in the free market: one character, for example, ‘had faith in nuclear war, because she had invested capital in the General Dynamics Corporation [ . . . ], a bar in Greenwich Village, a warehouse in East Drive, and a beauty parlor in Lexington Avenue’ (107). Joseph Alsoph, a reporter on the New York Herald Tribune, is as much a supporter of the Cold War as Frank Pace, Jr., President of the General Dynamics Corporation. The leftist American lawyer James Donovan, a friend of the protagonists, establishes connections between free-market capitalism and the arms race when he informs them about Samuel Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb:27 This Cohen is a diabolic being. As a physician of the Rand Corporation, he visited the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where they were currently experimenting with the fabrication of weapons with low atomic radiation and more expansive and caloric power. And do you know what he came up with? Inverting the process; that is, creating more radiation with less heat and expansion, using a hydrogen bomb as the element of fusion and a bomb of fission as detonator. That way, and here is the diabolic part, they can kill living beings in, say, a city, without destroying the buildings and other facilities. (157) As we have seen, to make all these arguments more convincing, Cardi has American characters confess the moral crisis of their own society. So it is that James Donovan tells the protagonists about the nightmare of McCarthyism and about his deposition in favour of world peace in one of the notorious hearings of the American Congress. His conclusion is that the direct result of the mirage called the ‘American Way of Life’ is the relentless spread of criminality and the citizens’ indolence about it: ‘In truth, we are before the spectacle of an insensitive society that seems only anxious to beat its own records of pillaging and violence’ (344). This American epidemic of vice and violence is also exported to other countries, most obviously to Cuba. The novel portrays Havana immediately before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution as a hellish pit flooded by prostitution, gambling and drug rings controlled from the United States. In fact, the general American image of Cuba in the novel is that of a new Sodom and Gomorrah, with most US characters viewing Hispanics as illiterate and subhuman, thinking that all Cubans work in the sugar cane or tobacco industries and failing to conceive that there could be a Cuban poet.

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39

It is paradoxical that Cardi criticises the absurd US stereotypes about Hispanics while concomitantly dedicating most of the 446 pages of his novel to stereotypes about American society. On this topic, in his analysis of revolutionary detective short stories, Fernández Pequeño points out the lack of subtlety in characterisation: ‘Counter-revolutionary characters are always corrupt, cowardly, servile, and [ . . . ] caricatured. [ . . . ] On the other hand, revolutionary characters are—always as well—determined, fi rm, loyal, owners of a trajectory and a valor that does not even make them bad silhouettes’. 28 Although the same can be said of Cardi’s characters, which construct irreconcilable differences between the two nations, the author still offers an apparently happy ending. In spite of all its corruption, not everything is lost for the United States (and this, according to the fi rst-person narrator, is ‘the true message of this book’ (367)). After creating a committee in support of the young revolutionary Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement, Pedro and his uncle are invited to an event in which a massive group of young American students and workers sing slogans—hymns of hope to the protagonists’ ears—to promote the participation of the United States in the Sixth Festival of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Moscow, which will take place in the spring of 1957. Indeed, months after the action in New York takes place, both Pedro and his uncle will join Fidel Castro’s successful insurrection in the Sierra Maestra. Besides blending Soviet and American influences by incorporating Soviet factography and fictional American detectives into his writing, Cardi attempts to Cubanise his novel (with little success, in my opinion) through a use of humour centred on the quintessentially Cuban choteo and relajo, both of them perceived aspects of the national character. Cuban historian and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz summarised the quality of relajo as the ‘relaxation of discipline, lack of respect, mocking of authority, evasion of laws, admiration for vulgarity, flippancy, lack of restraint, impunity of crime, tolerance of baseness, avoidance of all forms of sacrifice’.29 Cuban choteo is a traditional penchant for refuse, filth and other scatological matters, although some commentators, such as Jorge Mañach in his Indagación del choteo (An Examination of Choteo, 1928), attempted to ‘clean up’ the concept and bring it closer to relajo, ‘filtering out [ . . . ] its baseness and filth [and] glossing over its scatological subtexts’.30 However, rather than creating a truly Cuban version of the traditional American detective novel through the incorporation of choteo and relajo, Cardi only uses such concepts to exaggerate even more his overt anti-Americanism and to radicalise an already Manichaean perspective of the contrasts between capitalist and socialist societies. The potential comedic effects of his prose are, therefore, limited by his reluctance to camouflage the pamphletary message of the novel. This case study has shown both the impact of Cold War mentalities on the fictional construction of the ideological other and the negative consequences of official censorship for Cuban cultural production. The propagandistic, Manichaeistic and didactic nature of this orthodox literature

40 Ignacio López-Calvo seems to take precedence over the aesthetic value and the verisimilitude of the work. As a result, characters often become simplistic types (heroic, intelligent and patriotic Cubans versus cowardly and unintelligent counterrevolutionaries) whose only role is to demonstrate the inevitability of the triumph of the Revolution or similar pre-established ideological theses. 31 This essay also reveals the application of Soviet factographic techniques, which are then Cubanised through the use of humour (as well as through the Cuban choteo and relajo). This hybrid product is then blended with the narrative devices of traditional crime fiction, including the incorporation of American fictional detectives, who are mostly used to satirise the bourgeois origins of the detective novel. These traditional traits of the American/capitalist detective novel are then transgressed by the use of a collective protagonist (often the CDRs) and by prioritising the consciousness raising mission of the text. Overall, El American Way of Death, together with the other novels mentioned here, is an example of the negative consequences of state censorship and of the Cold War structures that imposed ideological premises on detective novel writing in Cuba. NOTES 1. Fernández Pequeño, Cuba: La narrativa policial entre el querer y el poder (1973–1988) (Santiago de Cuba: Oriente, 1994), p. 11. 2. Quoted in Claudia González Marrero, ‘La novela policial en Cuba durante la década del 70. Una Literatura comprometida’, Foro Abierto de Novela Negra, http://foroabiertodenovelanegra.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/la-novela-policial-en-cuba-durante-la-decada-del-70-una-literatura-comprometida (accessed 26 April 2010). 3. See José Antonio Portuondo, ‘Prólogo’ to Alberto Molina Rodríguez, Los hombres color del silencio (Havana: Arte y Literatura, 1975), p. 7. 4. Fernández Pequeño, Cuba, p. 21. An example of this censorship was that of the novel Allá ellos (That’s Their Problem, 1992) by the Uruguayan Daniel Chavarría, published a full twelve years after it participated in the 1980 Anniversary of the Revolution Contest. 5. Quoted in Wieser, ‘Leonardo Padura: “Siempre me he visto como uno más de los autores cubanos”’, Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios, http://www. ucm.es/info/especulo/numero29/padura.html (accessed 29 May 2010). 6. Ibid. 7. The Committees for the Defence of the Revolution were established on 28 September 1960 to deter ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities and to promote social projects. The alleged 7.6 million participants monitor the political and moral backgrounds of citizens in each housing block and report on suspicious activities to the Cuban authorities. Amnesty International has accused these organisations of human rights violations in their ‘acts of repudiation’ against those considered enemies of the Revolution (Anon, ‘Committees for the Defense of the Revolution’, http://committees-for-the-defense-of-the-revolution.co.tv (accessed 11 February 2011)). 8. Molina Rodríguez, Los hombres color del silencio, p. 214. 9. Revolutionary crime fiction of the 1970s and 1980s also demonised the ‘fratricidal’ activities of Cuban exiles in Miami, who were portrayed as lackeys of capitalism, and viewed the United States as the imperial other whose

Factography and Ideology in the Cuban Detective Novel

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

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aggression needed to be repelled at all costs through the collaboration of all loyal Cubans on the island. González Marrero, ‘La novela policial en Cuba’. Cardi (1914–1988) was born in Havana and worked as a journalist and illustrator for different journals and magazines. He wrote a collection of short stories, a testimonial, four essays and the following novels: El amor es cosa de dos (1966), Viernes en plural (1981), Una jugada extraordinaria (1982), Dos casos de un detective (1983), El caso del beso con sabor a cereza (1987) and La llave dorada (1989). One year after the publication of El American Way of Death, another Cuban humorist and writer, Héctor Zumbado Argueta, published a satire of the American way of life titled El American Way (1981). Fernández Pequeño seems to agree with this assessment when he states that Cardi’s attempt to ‘create humorous detective literature through novels such as El American Way of Death (1980) represents a step back, as it leans toward the re-animation of myths that were already exhausted by the stale literature of enigma’ (Fernández Pequeño, Cuba, p. 21). Fore, ‘Introduction’, October, Vol. 118 (Fall 2006), p. 4. Fore adds that factography ‘pursued an art whose task was not to reflect human experience, but to actively construct and organize it’ (ibid., p. 5). Fore, ‘The Operative Word in Soviet Factography’, October, Vol. 118 (Fall 2006), p. 105. Fore, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. Cardi, El American Way of Death (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1980), p. 9. Subsequent page references appear in the text. All translations from Cardi’s novel are my own. In fact, a note on the back cover of the book states, ‘[t]he book is a funny and demystifying satire of the traditional procedures of the bourgeois detective novel, caricaturizing, in the combination nephew-uncle, the two archetypes of the detective’ (ibid., jacket blurb). Ibid., p. 5. By ‘honourable uniform’, Cardi refers to the uniform either of the ‘pioneers’ or of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. In Cuba, the ‘pioneers’ are youth organisations affiliated to the Communist Party and grouped together in the Organización de Pioneros José Martí. Ibid., p. 36. Cardi tries to increase the verisimilitude of the story by showering his writing with English terms, such as ‘smog’, which often represent reprehensible aspects of the ‘American way of life.’ However, he occasionally uses terms incorrectly, such as ‘humour sense’, instead of ‘sense of humour’, or fails to understand others, such as ‘slang’ (ibid., pp. 25, 113). Ibid., p. 79. He obviously does not include Fidel Castro as one of the dozen dictators he mentions. Ibid., p. 381. Later we learn that Smithson suffers from a double personality and that, before becoming an editor, he had been a beggar, a peddler, a marine, a waiter in a brothel, an extra in fi lms and a model in commercials, among other professions. Ibid., p. 381. Pedro also mentions (with another asterisk) an American magazine, Assassin, which teaches readers how to murder a president and asks readers to invent their own methods of assassinating important people (ibid., pp. 345–6). According to the protagonist, this explains why every minute there is a robbery or a homicide in the United States and why citizens remain indifferent to them. We fi nd out that his fortune comes from a muddy past of gambling, cotton growing and slave trading. Rumour has it that, in his Fifth Avenue mansion, he keeps a wooden leg, a bloody whip, a sheriff ’s badge and the scalp of a Sioux Indian (ibid., p. 43).

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24. Fernández Pequeño, ‘La novela policial cubana ante sí misma (1979–1986)’, Universidad Veracruzana Catálogo Digital, http://cdigital.uv.mx/bitstream/ 123456789/1931/1/198970P205.pdf (accessed 28 May 2010). 25. Curiously, the Cuban protagonists themselves seem to make anti-Semitic remarks (for example, when they refer several times to Aaron Levsky as ‘the Jew’, before fi nding out that he was only pretending to be one) and to acquiesce with silence when they hear American characters, such as Morgan-Mellow, refer to Menachem Begin as ‘[t]he one with the notable nose’ (Cardi, El American Way, p. 308). 26. Likewise, in Molina Rodríguez’s Los hombres color del silencio the CIA threatens to kill the protagonist’s child if he does not provide information requested (Molina Rodríguez’s Los hombres color del silencio, pp. 38–9). 27. Among the participants in a meeting with Samuel Cohen are listed (with an asterisk) Lawrence Livermore, an executive of atomic laboratories in California, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, and Lewis Straus, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (Cardi, El American Way, p. 156). 28. Fernández Pequeño, Cuba, p. 39. 29. Ortiz, ‘The Relations between Blacks and Whites in Cuba’, Phylon (1940– 1956), Vol. 5, No. 1 (1944), p. 28. 30. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, ‘Riddles of the Sphincter: Another Look at the Cuban Choteo’, Diacritics, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Winter 1984), p. 76. 31. Fernández Pequeño argues, however, that the revolutionary detective has been successfully humanised in novels such as Luis Rogelio Nogueras’s Y si muero mañana (And If I Die Tomorrow, 1984), Daniel Chavarría’s Joy (1977) and Ignacio Cárdenas Acuña’s Preludio para un asesinato (Prelude for a Murder, 1981) and Con el rostro en la sombra (With His Face in the Shadows, 1981). See Fernández Pequeño, Cuba, pp. 18, 21.

3

Cross-Border Representation in South and North Korean Literatures of the Cold War Period Joanna Elfving-Hwang

INTRODUCTION1 The Cold War on the Korean peninsula has been one with a difference, if only because its end still seems far off. Although the initial confl ict, which began with localised skirmishes on both sides and eventually led to the Korean War (1950–1953), is often characterised as a clash between communism and liberal democracy, the real picture was more complicated. Many participants, and particularly ordinary people, had no clear understanding of the respective political ideologies and were often drawn into the fighting by localised grudges or by the need to choose one side over another as the fighting intensified. 2 It was a war that not only devastated the country materially, but also left enduring scars as communities and families were divided and destroyed. Although the division has never been absolute, in that the two opposing sides still perceive each other as ethnically and linguistically homogenous, the politics of national identity have broadly followed Cold War structures from the 1950s, with both Koreas pursuing discursive strategies which necessitate either the exclusion of the other or the highlighting of the other’s perceived blind servitude (if not enslavement) to an oppressive superpower. For both nations, national security and the survival of the state have overridden all other considerations, including freedom of speech. As a result, on the level of official discourse, the two sides have exercised thought control legislation in order to enforce certain kinds of cross-border representation, as the decades after the war witnessed growing paranoia about an enemy lurking on the other side of the 38th parallel. In the South, the enemies have been the ppalgaengi (‘Reds’ or ‘Commies’) and in the North the ultimate enemies have been the US and successive South Korean governments who are perceived as collaborators and as the reason for the continuing presence of ‘occupying’ forces on the peninsula. It is within this context that the post-war literary fictions of the two Koreas emerge as narrative spaces within which cross-border discourse is both enforced and contested. This essay discusses the representations of the ‘enemy’ population in South and North Korean literatures during the Cold

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War era, and particularly during the 1980s. In the Republic of Korea (henceforth, South Korea) this decade witnessed increasing political and social unrest under the repressive Chun Doo-hwan administration (1980–1988), while in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (henceforth, North Korea) a reunification agenda was pursued with renewed fervour under the direction of the ‘Great Leader’, President Kim Il-Sung (1972–1994), not least because of the apparent political discontent in the South. The essay will analyse how literary fiction provided an opportunity for authors to emphasise the self-sameness of Koreans in both countries, as well as to explore ways of approaching the ‘other’ who paradoxically cannot be approached, or perhaps even spoken of, but who continues to be part of one’s core identity and thus constantly present through its unarticulated absence. I will draw on Bracha L. Ettinger’s concept of the ‘matrixial metramorphosis’, for which she borrows signifiers from the maternal body, and from the coaffecting relationship between the foetus and the mother, in an attempt to consider the extent to which subjectivity could be imagined, not as a rupture from the other, but as formed through an encounter with the other.3 She notes that within the maternal body the identities of both the mother and the child co-emerge as the two subjects exist in a co-affecting relationship, so that it is not a question of only one subjectivity (that of the child’s) being in formation, but of two separate subjectivities that influence each other in this process of ‘becoming-subject’.4 This matrixial space, she argues, ‘conceptualises the difference of what is joint and alike yet not “the same”, of what is unrecognised yet recognisable within a shared trans-subjectivity.’5 The borderline between self and other thus becomes a threshold for mutual sustenance that renders it impossible to imagine the relation between the two in rigidly oppositionary terms. To understand the relationship between the two Koreas in literary narratives, Ettinger’s concept of the matrixial is particularly helpful because it provides a structure for considering the potential of embracing the ‘other’ in difference and for using narrative space to subvert enduring Cold War divisions.

THE OTHER KOREAN IN SOUTH KOREAN LITERATURE In the South, the focus of much narrative literature and poetry written in the 1950s was on describing the trauma and all-encompassing sense of loss that followed the Korean War.6 Another key concern related to what Suh Ji-moon has quite fittingly called the ‘brother enemy’.7 While many works describe the pitiful existence of refugees from the North who attempted to rebuild their lives in the South, others exhibit a distinctly aggressive stand toward the ‘communist other’. For example, Yi Pǒmsǒn’s ‘Hak maŭr ŭi saramdŭl’ (The People of Crane Village, 1957) portrays Korean communists as nothing more than vicious thugs who see the war as an opportunity to seize power under the pretext of ideology.8 Kim Tongni, Cho Chihun

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and Cho Yǒnhyǒn were also prominent anti-communist authors who, when depicting the war experience, drew heavily on the prevailing Cold War ideologies and blamed the communists for the tragedy.9 This said, there were also a number of works in the 1950s that attempted to portray the humanity of all Koreans and laid the blame for the civil war on alien ideologies which the general population often did not understand, but was forced to fight for. One such author was Hwang Sunwǒn, whose fiction typically describes simple country people caught up on opposing sides of the confl ict, but who still possess the capacity for empathy and forgiveness.10 It is telling, however, that while in many of these works the other Korean is presented as a victim—just as Koreans in the South are—there is an overwhelming focus on the southern subject’s experiences, as well as on the experiences of those who had fled the North and were now reduced to refugee status, eking out a wretched living in shantytowns. What is emphasised in such texts as Yi Hoch’ǒl’s ‘T’arhyang’ (Far from Home, 1955) and Yi Pǒmsǒn’s ‘Obalt’an’ (A Stray Bullet, 1957) is the humanity of the northern refugees who have been forced to uproot from their native villages because of some vague notion of ideology. The implication that the communists have created this misery, however, returns one to the notion of an ideological other who threatens the existence of all ‘authentic’ Koreans, both in the North and South.11 Many writers also located the tragedy of the Korean War in its status as a ‘proxy war’ between the superpowers. One of the earlier assertions in kind is Ch’oe Inhun’s Kwangjang (The Square, 1961), in which the protagonist Lee Myong-jun is forced to move north amid the growing tensions following the end of the colonial period, only to become disaffected with communist ideology and with the necessity of dividing people into the politically ‘sound’ and ‘unsound’. If in ‘North Korea all he got was disillusion[ment]’, Lee reflects, then in the South ‘he had never discovered anything except disdain’, a state of non-allegiance that leads him to ask, ‘“Where on earth are the enemies of the people?”’12 After the war, Lee is able to return to the South, but chooses to take a boat bound for a third country in search for what he calls a ‘square’, a space that he could call his own: What is this physiological make-up of man that without a square of his own, unshared by others, no matter how shabby, he cannot draw his breath? [ . . . ] ‘All I ask is a hand’s breath of a square and a friend. And whoever is going to step into this hand’s breath of a square, let them move with due respect for me, and only after receiving permission. Without my permission don’t slaughter that single companion. But even this was said to be so difficult.’13 Realising that his dream of fitting into any society is wishful thinking, Lee commits suicide by drowning himself at sea instead of settling in the new country, suggesting that in the emerging two Koreas, increasingly

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informed by Cold War ideologies, there is no place for those who believe in neither cause. The Square was published at a time when an authoritarian government had just been toppled by a popular student-led uprising. In the year of publication, a coup d’état led by General Park Chung-hee was followed by 18 years of military dictatorship, which were marked by a heavy-handed censoring of the arts. This made it a complicated task for authors to explore the place of the ‘other’ Korean in the national consciousness in ways other than government-sanctioned representations.14 Park himself also believed that the Korean War had been a ‘proxy war’, but since South Korea was not strong enough to stand on its own against the ‘Red enemy’, it was crucial to cultivate strong ties with its capitalist allies, especially since the alternative—siding with the communist bloc— was simply unthinkable.15 In the South, any positive representation of North Korea, its people or communism in general, could potentially mean imprisonment or, in a worst case scenario, being charged with high treason. The ideological basis of the state was illustrated by the 1968 Charter of National Education (Kungmin kyoyuk hŏnjang) which decreed that every school textbook had to include the following proclamation: ‘We are born with the historic mission of national resurrection and prosperity [ . . . ]. The love of the state and nation based on an anti-Communist and democratic spirit is the way of our life’.16 As South Korea was increasingly imagined as an anti-communist country, national identity came to be defi ned in part as not-North Korean. Moreover, the South was imagined as the preserver of ‘authentic Koreanness’, while the North was imagined as somehow tainted by communist ideology, a move that required a kind of collective amnesia about the culturally and historically shared elements between the two Koreas.17 Nevertheless, despite the official politics of exclusion, literature became a space for representing ‘Koreanness’ in a way that included the northern subject. In the 1970s, there were a significant number of literary works which dealt with the Korean War, written by authors who had mainly experienced the war as children or teenagers, and which sought to describe events from a non-ideological perspective. Examples include Kim Wŏnil’s Noǔl (The Evening Glow, 1977–1978) and Hong Sǒngwǒn’s Nam gwa puk (North and South, 1977), in which Koreans on both sides of the border are shown to be equally responsible for the confl ict, as well as Yun Heunggil’s ‘Changmach’ǒl’ (Rainy Spell, 1970), in which indigenous Korean religious practices are shown to transcend modern ideologies. Fostered within the minjung munhak (‘people’s literature’) movement, which grew as a response to the repressive and authoritarian political regime, such texts showed a renewed interest in considering how literature could contribute to the overcoming of national division. In these works, division is often juxtaposed with the hope of reunification, and to this end shared notions of perceived ‘Koreanness’ are emphasised in the hope of

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fi nding common ground for a unified future. In the 1980s, the so-called ‘division literature’ (pundan munhak) or ‘reunification literature’ (t’ong’il munhak) arose from the need not only to achieve some kind of cathartic relief from the trauma of the war through the act of writing, but also to question the foundations upon which South Korean national identity discourses were built. Through giving voice to the other Korean, it sought to question the legitimacy of the government’s anti-communist laws, which allowed for the vilification of the North to be used as a pretext for perpetuating Cold War structures on the peninsula. The pundan munhak narratives appealed to national homogeneity, to the perceived cultural and historical unity of the divided nation and to the shared humanity of all Koreans regardless of ideological stance. More significantly, literary works that dealt with the trauma of division emerged as narrative spaces within which the existence of the unspoken other was recognised as part of one’s core subjectivity. Contrary to official discourses, the idea of ‘authentic Koreanness’ was embedded within a co-emerging subjectivity which necessitated the recognition of the other Korean, rather than its absolute exclusion. The writers utilised a variety of strategies to achieve this, most notably, an emphasis on the fact that the other Korean, rather than being a threat contained on the other side of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), was present in the lives of those south of the border, in ‘the flesh’, so to speak, as well as in form of (equally real) ancestral ghosts which were continuing to affect people’s lives. Cho Chǒngnae’s ‘Yunhyǒng ǔi ttang’ (Land of Exile, 1981) is an example of such a narrative. Significantly, the point of view is given to a former ‘Red’, the demonic other of government propaganda, who is here a pathetic and weak old man by the name of Ch’ǒn Mansǒk. Despite having carried out some rash and cruel actions in his youth, the man is ultimately only concerned for his son and holds onto a futile wish to return to his home village before his impending death. Set in modern-day South Korea, the fragmented narrative time, which includes frequent analepses giving insights into the protagonist’s violent past, evokes the image of a man who has been a victim of both class oppression and historical turmoil. As a consequence, he has spent his life in a state of flux, inexplicably drawn to his home village where he once committed terrible crimes, but doomed to live a wraithlike existence, disconnected from his place of origin and unable to care for those closest to him: What do people mean by ‘living a lifetime’? Where am I going? What am I doing in this strange land where I don’t know anybody? They call you a human being, but this is how you end up [ . . . ]. Where in the hell did they get the idea of nobles and commoners, anyway? We’re just the same—same faces, same minds . . . So, what’s the difference? Was it my mistake? Just because you’re born low class, do you have to live like you are?18

48 Joanna Elfving-Hwang Through Mansǒk’s internal monologues, the author weaves an intricate picture of a village where everyone’s actions and fortunes are connected to a much older and multifaceted set of conflicts, particularly lower-class antagonism towards upper-class privilege and exploitation. For instance, when Mansǒk remembers how ‘[t]hey said rich men and landlords would be eliminated and all power would go to the commoners’, he has ‘no need to think [ . . . ]. He waved a freshly sharpened sickle and a bloodthirsty glint shot from his eyes’.19 Through acknowledging the presence of the other Korean as part of the very fabric of modern society, the story creates a narrative threshold that allows for different voices to emerge, specifically those of a forgotten underclass that continues to be exploited in a supposedly free and democratic land. Im Ch’ǒr-u’s ‘Abǒji ǔi ttang’ (My Father’s Land, 1984) is an evocative narrative where the other exists as a lingering presence which haunts the protagonist’s childhood memories, as well as his present-day experiences. The story is set in the 1980s and describes a day in the life of an unnamed South Korean soldier on a field exercise. When a fellow soldier accidentally digs up a skeleton of a presumed communist executed and buried in a shallow grave during the war, the narrator-protagonist is brought face-to-face with his own burden of a communist father, missing since the war and presumed dead. The father’s communist affiliation has never been openly acknowledged; indeed, the father himself is rarely mentioned by the protagonist’s family, even by the mother, for fear of retribution from the community. This is particularly significant in the context of Korean society where one’s family, including the ancestors, are considered a crucial part of one’s identity. For the protagonist, it presents an enormous dilemma and he feels as if the spectre of his absent father has followed him like a curse through his life: ‘Bearing this stigma in my breast’, he laments, ‘I could never escape from the great sense of guilt and the ominous sentiment that draped around me’. 20 Yet Im’s narrative goes beyond a simple description of transgenerational trauma by creating a narrative space where the protagonist, as well as the reader, is able to come to terms with the existence (whether past or present) of the other Korean. In a key scene, the soldiers’ initial scorn toward the unearthed corpse is abruptly silenced by the words of an elderly man who, having himself been injured and suffered personal loss during the fighting, rebukes them for their disrespect toward the deceased: ‘What on earth does it matter? Even when they are dead [ . . . ] do you have to fuss about whether they belonged to one side or the other? What do the dead care? [ . . . ] Should we, the living, disturb the sleep of the dead? We mustn’t. These sorrowful departed ones should be helped to lie in peace even in their death. That’s the obligation of us, the living . . . ’21 Here, Im invites the reader to consider the absurdity of ideologically based division as a motive for continuing hate and denial. In opposition to the

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‘tight knots’ and ‘cold inhumanity’ of the steel wire wrapped around the dead body, the old man posits the traditional, shared understanding of the necessity for the living to facilitate the safe passage of the dead to the netherworld, thus blurring the boundaries between subjectivities previously separated by ideological affiliation. 22 The afterlife becomes a transcendental space within which both the protagonist and those around him fi nally come to recognise the interconnectedness of all Koreans through positing the great absolute of death against the futility of political ideologies. These stories are representative of many others published in the 1980s which explore this paradoxical presence-in-absence of the other Korean through describing the trauma of division. 23 A later example, Kim Minsuk’s ‘Pongsunga kkonmul’ (Scarlet Fingernails, 1987), again portrays a protagonist with a convicted communist father, whose existence is both a constant burden and a source of fear. Kim juxtaposes the weak and emancipated figure with the government’s condemnation of him as a dangerous communist criminal, exposing the absurdity of the anti-communist discourse to the reader. The extent to which authors like Kim, Im and Cho could challenge government-endorsed propaganda is remarkable, as were the candidly positive representations of North Koreans and southern socialist activists circulated in the print media and in the underground theatrical movements for which many of these so-called minjung writers provided scripts. 24 Contrary to official anti-communist rhetoric, ‘division literature’ emerged in the 1980s as a co-affective narrative space which, in the words of Ettinger, ‘disables the pretence of an absolute separation between subjects’ and demands the recognition of how northern or communist Koreans can never be reduced to absolute ‘otherness’ because they already exist inside southern subjectivity. 25

THE OTHER KOREAN IN NORTH KOREAN LITERATURE After the Korean War, literature also played an increasingly important role within the cultural politics of the North, which aimed at the complete realisation of a socialist society. In the 1950s, while North Korean writers were encouraged, at least ostensibly, to pay literary homage to the USSR through pursuing Soviet-style socialist realism, actual literary production took its own course, with less emphasis on proletarian internationalism and more on a Korean-style socialist revolution which highlighted the superiority of the Korean ‘way’, as embodied in Kim Il-Sung’s Chuch’e (self-reliance) ideology.26 Consequently, the Cold War ideologies that governed national identity formation were pursued differently to those of South Korea, relying not on excluding the other Korean but rather on a paranoiac projection of the US and the South Korean military dictatorship as the ultimate enemies of the nation and the reason for continuing division. 27 Moreover, there was a determination to evoke any foreign presence on the peninsula

50 Joanna Elfving-Hwang as detrimental to Korean people, as seen in texts set in the Japanese colonial period such as the collaboratively authored P’i pada (The Sea of Blood, 1972), Ryǒksa ǔi saebyǒk kil (The Dawn of a New Age, 1972) and the twenty-volume Pulmyǒr ǔi ryǒksa (Immortal History, 1975–1994). These constructed North Koreans as successful in their independence struggles and South Koreans as continually subdued by foreign occupation. The difficult living conditions in the South were frequently described in works from the 1950s onwards, and while there may not be any clear native villains (as there were none in works located in the North), no effort is spared in painting a vivid (albeit burlesque) image of bloodthirsty ‘US imperialists’ who are by defi nition beyond redemption. For example, Han Sǒrya deploys lupine imagery in works such as Sǔngnyang’i (The Jackals, 1951) to highlight the perceived depravity and absolute malevolence of Americans (in this case American missionaries), while Cho Chin-yong uses works such as ‘Saebyǒk’ (Dawn, 1963) to present a fictional account of how South Korean soldiers, particularly those who take a stand against injustice, suffer under the cruel leadership of their army generals. This stands in stark contrast to the unselfishness and consideration that General Kim Il-Sung is typically depicted as having shown to all members of his troops. 28 From 1967, North Korean literature took a more defined direction as all literary production came under the direct control of the Korean Workers’ Party.29 Reflecting the spirit of the Chuch’e ideology of self-reliance, there was a move toward an even greater ethnocentrism in literary depictions of revolutionary feats, as well as a reaffirmation that literature was to exist only to propagate Party ideals.30 An increasing number of works depicted the heroic exploits of General Kim Il-Sung, and from the mid-1970s a number of authors helped to establish the personal cult of his son, Kim Jong-Il. One method was to focus on his personal intervention in the everyday problems faced by North Koreans, with a particular interest in grand development schemes like land reform and construction projects. In Pyǒn Hǔigǔn’s Saengmyǒngsu (The Water of Life, 1978) and Ch’oe Haksu’s P’yǒngyang si’gan (Pyongyang Time, 1976), both typical of the genre, a labour force unit follows the instructions of the ‘Great Leader’ and together they construct something that would have been unthinkable without such collective effort. In the 1980s, the majority of works published also tended to focus on reformist depictions of Korea’s history: major examples here would be Hong Sǒk-chung’s Nop’ sae param (The Easterly Hot and Dry Winds, 1983) and Pak T’aemin’s Sǒngbyǒg e pikkin pulgil (The Fire on the City Walls, 1983).31 As Marshall R. Phil notes, ‘North Korean fiction is less a reflection of social reality than it is a statement of social ideas; it is expressed in characters, settings, and themes that, while recognisable to the reader, do not photographically reproduce his [sic] own life experience’.32 The function of North Korean literature has therefore been to educate and to present a picture of an ideal socialist world order to which the readers can aspire. However, what is telling in the context of this essay is that since the South Korean subject is never excluded from being part of

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North Korean subjectivity, literature has always been faced with something of a paradox. For writers obliged to present the benefits of the DPKR social system, it may be easy enough to depict an ideal society and characters who invariably come to realise the virtues of the state-endorsed chuch’e ideology in the North; it is less easy to explain the continuing state of division and the failure of socialist revolution to catch on in the South. In part, the intractability of South Korea was explained by the presence of ‘American imperialists’ and their indigenous puppets (typically referred to as nomdǔl; literally, ‘scum’), who emerge as the ultimate other of all Koreans, whether southerners or northerners. More tellingly, national division is contested by highlighting the innate qualities which the ‘good’ people of North and South are presumed to share. This fitted with another feature of Korean literary production which, unlike Soviet socialist realism, was not so much concerned with representing a class struggle as it was with representing what were considered as authentic Korean virtues, as passed down to the Cold War era from an older literary imaginary. As Myers notes in the context of Han Sǒrya’s works, this involves ‘typical Northern Korean heroes, designed not to represent a particular ideology or social class, but to embody “truly Korean” qualities, foremost among them sobak ham, with all its connotations of benevolent naiveté, innocence, and spontaneity’. 33 An example is Ryu Chǒng-ok’s ‘Norae ǔi taehan ch’uǒk’ (Memories of a Song, 1983), which depicts a typically morally upright main character who is subjected to torture by the invading US ‘imperialists’ and their deplorable nomdǔl. Narrated by a former pupil of a simple village school, the story recounts the unwavering kindness of the narrator’s former teacher (Song-i) toward her pupils, as well as her demise at the hands of the invading forces. The climax comes when the nomdǔl (who are rather phantasmal creations in their utter unscrupulousness) subject the beautiful teacher to a form of psychological torture: namely, having to sing to her captors, not the uplifting socialist songs that she has been teaching her pupils, but decadent songs offering low entertainment. One of the public peace and security corps scoundrels turned to the officer in charge and said: ‘This is the woman.’ The officer scum glanced at the teacher with a sinister look on his face. The public peace and security corps scoundrel spoke again. [ . . . ] ‘I hear you sing well. Sing to us!’ The teacher, frozen with fear, turned away from the rascals. ‘No need to be afraid, we’ve not come here to arrest you. We’ve come here to ask you to do something that you would do every day anyway. [ . . . ] Just sing us one song and that’ll be it.’ [ . . . ] Teacher Song-i shrank back and murmured to herself quietly. Even if such an act was to be kept a secret from other people, one cannot deceive one’s own conscience.34

52 Joanna Elfving-Hwang As her refusal to sing eventually leads to her death, she epitomises the self-sacrifi cial Korean woman, a martyr to her cause possessing all the qualities of the ideal Korean socialist heroine: beauty, modesty, spontaneity and fighting spirit. Since the location of the story is never articulated, the narrative also illustrates the dialectic between the two imputed human types on the peninsula: the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Korean (although again no suggestion emerges that any undesirable Korean characters exist in the North). However, there is never a question of having any kind of narrative ‘threshold’ similar to that discussed earlier in the context of South Korean fiction. On the contrary, this narrative is ‘othering’ par excellence, where the dichotomy between the foreign (or assimilated) other is juxtaposed to the self-same Korean and where no meaningful intersecting of the two would seem possible, a typical strategy of North Korean literature of the 1980s. 35 Moreover, a number of works in the decade depicted the pitiful lives and experiences of fictional characters based in South Korea, particularly after the Kwangju massacre in May 1980. 36 The massacre occurred when the citizens of Kwangju took to the streets to join student demonstrators who were responding to the government’s brutal crackdown on an earlier protest that had left many students and innocent bystanders wounded or dead. The citizens took control of the city for ten days until the government, under the orders of then-president Chun Doo-hwan, dispatched some 20,000 troops and commenced on a round of indiscriminate killing that left around 200 people dead and thousands injured. The events are frequently referred to in stories that deal with the division of the two Koreas and are used as evidence of the utter depravity of the southern leadership and its American backers. For example, Sǒk Yu-gyun’s ‘Pom uroe’ (The Spring Thunder, 1984) describes the experiences of young South Korean students caught up in the violence. While the main characters, Hyǒn-u and Suyǒng, seem not to profess an allegiance to any specific ideology, the Kwangju youth are eager to see the liberation of the underclasses from the ruthless oppression of the foreign invaders. As the protagonists join the street demonstrations, the love interest between the two (something that never openly features in the literature of this period set in the north of Korea) serves to illustrate their humanity and capacity for strong emotions, but also to show that their personal desires are secondary to their wish to rid the country of the Chun Doo-hwan government. When the male character, Hyǒn-u, wavers in his determination to fight for fear of losing his loved one, the female protagonist Suyǒng admonishes him: ‘“If you wish to do something for me, fight together for the cause”’. 37 She thus emerges as a stereotypical revolutionary heroine, identical to the ones that are often featured in the texts set in the North. She never wavers in her conviction, and her self-sacrifice and heroism reveal to the male character that collective victory is more valuable than individual happiness: as Sǒk writes, ‘[t]he blood that had flowed in Hyǒn-u’s veins so sluggishly

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now began to boil’. 38 This striking similarity between the typical North Korean character (who realises the wisdom of the Party line) and Hyǒn-u (who realises the necessity to take up arms against US aggression) indicates the shared revolutionary potential of people on both sides of the 38th parallel. To further emphasise this, the phantasmal nomdǔl in the story are, again, caricature-like ‘collaborators’: A sinister looking creep with a scar running across his face tore off Suyǒng’s bag sending [anti-government] leaflets flying in the air. [ . . . ] Two of the scoundrels were already running to get her. [ . . . ] Without time to think, Hyǒn-u spread his arms to block their way. ‘Get rid of that one too. We have orders to kill all young men.’ The true character of the scoundrels was reflected in these words. One of the rogues raised his bayonet.39 Alongside texts that imagined a kind of a proto-revolution in the South, there were others that chose to compare the human qualities of North and South Korean populations. O Yǒngjae’s ‘Paegir-u e Ttwiwǒpone nǔn maǔm’ (My Heart, Sent to You by Sea, 1985), for example, is written in the form of a letter from a North Korean man to a childhood friend across the border, which after their forty-year separation recalls the friend’s kind-heartedness in an otherwise unforgiving South Korean society. The narrator reveals that the only reason his friend has stayed in the South is because he was too ill to travel north when he had a chance, and he believes that their brotherly love and devotion remain as strong as ever: ‘People often say that you cannot forget your fi rst love. But isn’t it equally impossible to forget the pure and honest friendships tied in one’s youth in the time before one has come to know the love between men and women?’40 Here the other Korean is presented as a lost part of the self without which the northern Korean is incomplete, and is only unreachable because of political interference by ‘US imperialists’ and a ‘puppet government made up of gangsters’.41 The narrator’s admission that he is originally from the South (albeit after listing his and his children’s achievements and criticising the South’s lack of democracy to prove his revolutionary pedigree) is used as further evidence of the shared ancestry and inherent goodness of all Korean people. Ri Taesam presents a similar line of thought in ‘Cho’guk ǔi chido rǔl tugo’ (Laying out the Map of the Fatherland, 1984), although also goes on to reveal a core weakness of many of these texts. When the narrator fi nds his two sons arguing over a piece of homework—the younger son has been drawing a map of Korea and the older one demanding that he erase the line drawn to divide the two Koreas—he explains in detail the Great Leader’s wisdom in advocating a single, unified nation. The self-sameness of the South Korean subject is reinforced time after time in passages such as: ‘“We are the same people, who through everlasting history of more than 5,000 years have shared the same customs, culture and language”’.42 The familiar fairytale

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structure of good and evil is repeated as the story evokes how absurd the US and the nomdǔl are to ignore the rationale for reunification when even the young children are able to see the absolute moral and historical justification for it. Despite appealing to a shared ‘Koreanness’, therefore, the narrative’s censure of deviation from the communist line works to deny co-affective subjectivities and to erase any threshold within this imaginary which would allow for an encounter apart from one which subsumes the identity of the other subject.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS At best, the representation of the other in North and South Korean Cold War literatures of the 1980s showed signs of attempting to occupy a narrative space within which ideological discourses become blurred and subjectivity is created not in terms of exclusion, but as an encounter with the other. It is telling, however, that the desire to provide positive representations on the two sides of the DMZ is less apparent in official cultural politics, as evidenced by the general failure of ‘cultural collaboration’ (munhwa t’onghap) over the years.43 Until the late 1980s, cultural exchanges organised by the two governments were notably scarce and restricted to the promotion of ‘authentic’ Korean culture as found in traditional p’ansori singing or dance performances.44 While the exchanges were implemented to foster goodwill, many were used as a way of showcasing the perceived superiority (as well as irreconcilable difference) of one side or the other, the South pointing to the ‘ideology-tainted’ performances of their northern counterparts and the North criticising the southern performances for their decadent foreign (particularly American) influences.45 In literature, similarly, the official discourse of ‘cultural collaboration’ focused on defining a paradigm for some unified, or at least similar, literary form, which became less a process of collaboration than of normativity and of who got to set the norms. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, literary and cultural exchanges briefly flourished with a thaw in cross-border relations. In 1988, the South’s President Roh Taewoo embedded cultural exchanges in governmental policy with the ‘7.7. Special Declaration for Unification’ and in 1992 the fi rst democratic election of a civilian president heralded an era of greater openness, as seen during President Kim Daejung’s ‘Sunshine Policy’ period (1998–2003) and during the subsequent Roh Moo-hyon administration (2004–2008).46 In the North, the death of Kim Il-Sung in 1993 led to the leadership of Kim Jong-Il, whose unification politics included the state endorsement of cultural exchanges and the emergence of the ‘literature on the topic of reunification of the Fatherland’ (chokug t’ong’il chuje sosǒl). At the time of writing, however, this has all come to a sudden halt with the sinking of the South Korean military freighter Ch’ǒnan in March 2010 and the North Korean shelling of a South Korean village in December of that year. On the

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level of official cultural politics, Cold War structures remain fi rmly in place on the Korean peninsula, and, 60 years since the start of the hostilities, the realisation of subjectivity-in-encounter seems very far off indeed. NOTES 1. The research for this essay was supported by a research grant from the Daesan Foundation. 2. See Suh Ji-moon, ‘Whether Enemy or Brother: Patriotism in Confl ict with Brotherhood in the Korean War Poems by Korean Poets’, in Philip West and Suh, eds, Remembering the ‘Forgotten War’: The Korean War through Literature and Art (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), p. 23. 3. See Ettinger, ‘Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial EncounterEvent’, Theory, Culture and Society Journal, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2004), pp. 76–7. 4. Ibid., p. 78. 5. Ibid., p. 78. 6. Yu Imha notes that in addition to describing the suffering of individuals, the texts also raise the difficult question of why the confl ict took place (Yu, ‘T’ajahwa toen kiǒg ǔi sangsangjǒk pogwǒn’, in Tong-guk taehakkyo han’guk munhak yǒguso, ed., Chǒnjaeng ǔi kiǒg, yǒksa wa munhak (Seoul: Wǒnil, 2005), I, 236–7). 7. Suh chose this phrase for the title of her edited anthology, Brother Enemy: Poems of the Korean War (2002). 8. See Yi Pongbǒm, ‘Kǒmyǒr ǔi naemyǒnhwa wa chǒngj’ijǒk palhyǒn’, in Kim Chin-ki, ed., Pan’gongjuǔi wa han’guk munhak ǔi kǔndaejǒk tonghak (Seoul: Hanulbooks, 2008), I, 314–24. 9. Most writers who took this stance subscribed to the so-called ‘pure literature’ (sunsu munhak) movement, believing that writing should be grounded in a politics of exclusion, particularly in terms of socialist influences. See Kim Hansik, Hyǒndae munhaksa wa minjog iranǔn inyǒm (Seoul: Somyǒng, 2009), pp. 99–125. 10. In works like ‘Hak’ (Cranes, 1953), ‘Nŏ wa naman ǔi si’gan’ (Time for You and Me Alone, 1964) and K’a’in ǔi huye (The Descendants of Cain, 1954), Hwang argues that the war was caused by outside forces and has brought no benefits for the common people. 11. This sense of ‘authentic’ Koreanness was discursively created during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945) by patriotic writers and others engaged in cultural production, often focusing on representations of simple village folk in countryside untouched by colonisers. 12. Choi (Ch’oe Inhun), The Square, trans. Kevin O’Rourke, new edn (1961; Devon: Spindlewood, 1985), pp. 122–3. 13. Ibid., pp. 142–3. 14. Ki-Jung Kim and Jae-min Park note that South Korea ‘maintained the toughest anti-Communist policy stance during the world history of the Cold War era’ (Kim and Park, ‘Paradox of Dismantling the Cold War Structure: Domestic Barriers after the Summit Talk’, in Chung-in Moon, Gyoo-kyoung Kang and Odd Arne Westad, eds, Ending the Cold War in Korea: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 2001), p. 327). 15. Park, The Country, the Revolution and I, 2nd edn (1962; Seoul: Hollym Corporation Publishers, 1970), pp. 163–4. It is possible that Park had personal reasons for preventing the growth of communism in South Korea. In

56

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

Joanna Elfving-Hwang the 1930s, as a member of the Japanese Imperial Army in Korea, he may have been involved in the campaign to hunt down and punish Korean communist guerrilla forces operating in the North (see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, new edn (1997; New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005), p. 355). Similarly, The National Security Law (Kukka poanpǒp) and the Anti-Communist Law (Pan’gong poanpǒp) prohibit any communist or anti-American activities in the Republic of Korea (see Lim Chae-Hong, ‘The National Security Law and Anti-Communist Ideology in Korean Society’, Korea Journal, Vol. 46, No. 3 (2006), pp. 80–102). See Gi-wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Geneaology, Politics and Legacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 26, and Gi-wook Shin, James Freda and Gihong Yi, ‘The Politics of Ethnic Nationalism in Divided Korea’, Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1999), pp. 465–84. Cho, ‘Land of Exile’, in Marshall R. Phil, Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton, eds, Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction, trans. Marshall R. Phil, Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton (Armonk, NY: M.E Sharpe/UNESCO Publishing, 1993), pp. 218–9. Ibid., p. 227. Im (Im Ch’ǒr-u), ‘My Father’s Land’, in Agnita Tennant, ed., The Star and Other Korean Short Stories, trans. Agnita Tennant (London: Kegan Paul, 1996), p. 23. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 26. While these narratives contest the discourse of anti-communism, they do not promote communism either, a typical tendency of the South Korean minjung movement. See Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (New York: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 106–8, 154. The minjung writers were associated with the democratisation movement which developed as a protest against the authoritarian rule of successive governments. Hwang Sǒg-yǒng, for example, scripted a number of plays for underground theatre performances in the 1980s (see Eugene van Erven, ‘Resistance Theatre in South Korea: Above and Underground’, TDR, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1988), pp. 156–73). Ettinger, ‘Weaving a Woman Artist’, p. 78. See Brian Myers, Han Sǒrya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPKR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 77–83. See Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York and London: The New Press, 2004), pp. 51–7. Typically, all fiction which features Kim Il-Sung goes to great lengths to describe his kindliness and paternal concern for his people, whether it be soldiers, factory workers or children orphaned in the Korean War. See Kim Chaeyong, Pukhan munhag ǔi yǒksajǒk ihae (Seoul: Munhak gwa chisǒngsa, 1994), pp. 256–7. Kim Il-Sung, ‘Let Us Embody the Revolutionary Spirit of Independence, SelfSustenance and Self-Defense More Thoroughly in All Fields of State Activity’, in Kim, Selected Works, ed. and trans. The Party Institute of the C. C. of the Workers’ Party of Korea (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1971), IV, 568–72. See Kim, Pukhan munhag ǔi yǒksajǒk ihae, p. 263. Phil, ‘Engineers of the Human Soul: North Korean Literature Today’, Korean Studies, Vol. 1 (1977), p. 89.

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33. Myers, Han Sǒrya, p. 95. 34. Ryu, ‘Norae ǔi taehan ch’uǒk’, Chosǒn munhak, Vol. 12 (1983), pp. 39–40. 35. Another example is Kim Ryǒnhwa’s ‘Uri ǒmǒni’ (My Mother, 1984) in which a child narrator describes how her mother sacrifices herself to save the children of the village from certain death at the hands of the advancing Southern forces during the Korean War. 36. Lee argues that it was this event, and the US support of the South Korean government’s decision to put down the uprising, that radicalised the democratisation movement in Korea, also turning it notably anti-American (Lee, Making of Minjung, pp. 44–53). 37. Sǒk, ‘Pom uroe’, Chosǒn munhak, Vol. 3 (1984), p. 73. 38. Ibid., p. 77. 39. Ibid., p. 76. 40. O, ‘Paekir-u e Ttwiwǒpone nǔn maǔm’, Chosǒn munhak, Vol. 1 (1985), p. 77. 41. Ibid., p. 78. 42. Ri, ‘Cho’guk ǔi chido rǔl tugo’, Chosǒn munhak, Vol. 1 (1984), p. 79. 43. See Kim Chong-hoe, ‘T’ong-il munhwa ǔi silch’ǒnjok kaenyǒm gwa nam bukhan munhwa ijilhwa ǔi kǔgbok pang’an’, in Kim, ed., Pukhan munhak ǔi ihae (Seoul: Ch’ǒngdong kǒul, 2004), III, 15–17. 44. Haksoon Yim, ‘Cultural Identity and Cultural Policy in South Korea’, The International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2002), pp. 42–4. 45. See Chu Mun-gŏl, ‘Namchosǒn kweroe yesuldan kongyǒn ǔi pandongjǒk ponjil’, Chosǒn munhak, Vol. 12 (1985), pp. 65–8. 46. This included the publication of some North Korean literary works in the South, most notably Hong Sǒk-chung’s Hwang Chini (Hwang Chini, 2004), as well as a number of works which dealt openly with South Korea’s repression of socialist sympathisers and its negative representation of North Korean people. Southern texts from this period which determined to approach the other in difference include Hwang Sǒk-yǒng’s Oraedoen chǒngwǒn (The Ancient Garden, 2000) and Sonnim (The Guest, 2002).

4

Endangered Nation The Literature of Soviet-Occupied Afghanistan Wali Ahmadi

The following essay deals with literature in Afghanistan during the occupation of the country by the Soviet Union in the final years of the Cold War (1979–1989). The Afghan conflict during this eventful decade was perpetuated by the policies and apparatuses of the Kabul regime and its Soviet patrons locked in a devastating confrontation with the armed Mujahideen forces supported by the United States and its regional allies, principally Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.1 The essay sheds light on how literature reflected upon ten years of a violence that proved only the harbinger of a further two decades of violence that has engulfed the nation to the present day. One may suppose that the absolute ideological rivalry during the 1980s between the regime and the opposition engendered a cultural climate in which two irreconcilable objectives and conflicting discourses were competing for absolute dominance. While this conjecture is valid to some extent, the discussion that follows aims to establish that literary production was not limited to a clearcut binary division along such discursive lines as emergent versus residual, revolutionary versus regressive, officially sanctioned versus dissenting, conformist versus resistant or pro-communist versus pro-Islamist, but included a crucial ‘third wave’ literature; that is, a substantial corpus of literary works that may at first appear marginal in the larger political and ideological polarisation of Afghan cultural and intellectual discourse. This subterranean, and essentially dissident, literature, which transcended the narrow channelling of the creative imagination, can be of enormous interest to both literary critics and cultural historians.2 It is worth mentioning at the outset that the examples in this essay are drawn from works by Afghan writers and poets in the Persian (Dari) language; the genealogy, morphology and thematology of the Pashtu literature in Afghanistan during the 1979–1989 crisis differed little from those of Persian. The crisis began on the morning of 28 April 1978, when a group of petty officers affiliated with the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)—a small communist organisation divided into two rival factions with strong political and ideological ties to the Soviet brand of MarxismLeninism—stormed the Presidential Palace in Kabul and proclaimed the victory of the ‘proletarian’ Sawr (April) Revolution in the largely peasant

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society of Afghanistan. The early excesses of communist rule alienated the vast majority of the population, leading to significant revolts throughout the country and seriously threatening the survival of the regime. In December 1979, the Soviet Union, under the pretext of performing its ‘internationalist duty’, sent a large contingent of troops to invade Afghanistan in order to save the regime from its internal squabbles. However, the magnitude of the rebellions dramatically increased following the occupation. As the Soviets augmented the level of their campaign in the early 1980s, the United States directed military and fi nancial assistance to the Afghan guerrilla groups, the Mujahideen, and the traditional neutrality of Kabul in the post-1945 international political arena effectively came to a close.3 Soon after the coup d’etat, the ideologues of the PDPA embarked on an ambitious and wide-ranging cultural campaign to celebrate the achievements of the revolution and to transform the masses into a vigilant and supportive proletariat, a campaign that intensified after the Soviet invasion. Thus ‘all poets, writers, story writers, playwrights, and patriotic prolocutors of the country’ were required, among other tasks, to ‘help arouse and motivate the peace-loving masses of Afghanistan [and] instigate hatred, malevolence, and anger against reactionary forces and war-mongering imperialist circles’.4 They were also asked to actively strengthen international solidarity with established ‘fraternal’ socialist states, above all the Soviet Union. Inspired by Soviet official literary and cultural institutions, Afghan communist leaders sanctioned the formation of the Writers’ Union of Afghanistan, which was inaugurated in Kabul in October 1980. Prior to the Sawr Revolution, most Afghan writers subscribed to a theory of realism that glossed over the intricacy of the realist tradition of fiction, as well as the complexity of fictional narrative as an artistic-literary form. Realism was generally thought to best represent objective social reality and to best address the problems, dilemmas and aspirations of the people. Drawing upon this view of the genre, the Writers’ Union advocated a form of grand socialist realism that posited the authoritative ideological transformation of the masses through consciousness building and education, and that praised the contributions of the ‘heroic’ armed forces (assisted by Soviet troops) in their defence of the ‘workers’’ regime. 5 The founding (and Party-appointed) president of the Writers’ Union was Asadollah Habib, an academic and established fiction writer, whose sentimental novella, Sapid-Andam (Fair Skinned Beauty, 1965), and collection of short stories, Se Mozdur (Three Labourers, 1967), were seen as demonstrative works of realist fiction in modern Afghan literature. In the period immediately following the Soviet occupation, Habib’s short stories were meant to inaugurate the writing of ‘revolutionary’ and ‘class-conscious’ fiction within an overall realist literary framework.6 For example, his ‘Gozargah-e Atash’ (The Pathway of Fire, 1982), celebrates the deeds of heroic soldiers and volunteers who defend the regime against the remnants of the pre-revolutionary order. The story describes the travails of a military unit that desperately

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attempts to bring reinforcement to its comrades in an adjacent village, who have been besieged by ruthless counter-revolutionaries. After an emotional appeal by the commander of the regiment, a courageous military truck driver named Hamrah Qol volunteers to deliver bullets to the trapped soldiers, and, while successful in the task, is fatally wounded en route. His courage, however, is acknowledged by his fellow soldiers firing a salute in his honour: ‘The rumbling of guns in the dark, blood soaked sky of that summer day affirmed the immortality of Hamrah Qol’s life, the immortality of all the heroes’.7 In Babrak Arghand’s story ‘Nana-ye Ta’uus’ (Ta’uus’s Mother, c.1983), the depiction of the communists’ battle against reactionaries is widened to include their ‘internationalist’ Soviet comrades. A village that has been the beneficiary of the regime’s land distribution program is attacked by a band of vicious mercenaries paid by the feudal landowners. When the outgunned villagers are on the verge of defeat, an old woman (Nana-ye Ta’uus) defies all odds and, believing that ‘a life of servitude to the [reactionary] landowners is not worth living’, leaves to seek Soviet assistance: She returned in an hour, with two tanks and a military jeep and armed men. Nana was sitting in the front seat, next to the driver who had blue eyes and trimmed blond hair [ . . . ]. Even though she did not speak the language of the soldiers, she said a lot about herself, her son Ta’uus, and the village. ‘Enemy! You help! Us kill enemy!’8 The battle rages once more, until, in a rather interesting reference to Soviet military superiority, ‘the fi ne sound of [Russian-made] Kalashnikovs resolutely overcame the crude, fading voices of Chinese- and American-made machine guns’.9 Although it is the ‘benevolence’ of ‘internationalist’ Soviet soldiers that has safeguarded the revolution, the heroic deed of an old village woman is indicative of active Afghan participation in the war. That the Sawr Revolution eventually succeeds and the counter-revolution is bound to failure is also the theme of Qadir Habib’s ‘Zamin’ (The Land, c.1982). The story describes movingly the psychological dilemma of a landowner, Malek Kamaloddin, whose huge vineyards are soon to be confiscated by the revolutionary regime and distributed to landless peasants. The likelihood that the peasants will ‘be so ungrateful as to forget my kind, generous patronage in order to gain a piece of my land’ torments him greatly.10 He hence organises a militia and intends to kill Gol Mohammad, the young, idealistic representative of the revolutionary regime who is also the local head of state regulated cooperatives. Kamaloddin orders Hanif, his ever loyal servant and himself a landless peasant, to carry out the murder. However, the story reaches its climax when, through a process of coming-to-consciousness of his own class interests, Hanif is able to refuse the wishes of his feudal landlord. Seeing how the latter brutalises the wife and child of Gol Mohammad, Hanif resolves to side with the new ‘egalitarian’ regime and kills his brutal benefactor, thereby facilitating the rural reform program.

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The communist regime was soon turning its attention from fiction to other literary genres. The question of poetry expressing political ideals had preoccupied the Afghan literati well before the Sawr Revolution, with modern verse having been, implicitly or explicitly, a purposive and committed art that resisted (if not rejected) dominant forms of discourse disseminated by the authoritarian state apparatus. Thus, poetry had been bound to some form of social didacticism or activism, even though it had also seen itself as an expression of aesthetic subtlety. After the coup of 1978, largely because of the guidelines set by the Writers’ Union and enforced by PDPA ideologues, contemporary poetry was required to devote itself in a formulaic and unambiguous manner to the ideals of the revolution. Such established and versatile ‘revolutionary’ poets—and veteran leaders of the Party—as Sulayman La’iq, Dastgir Panjshiri and Bareq-Shafi‘i turned into forceful campaigners for the new pro-Soviet state and produced a body of writing that served mainly as a prototype to be emulated by others. The result was the overabundance of an officially authorised poetry that was in essence little more than a well-regulated register of polemics, political slogans and rhetorical clichés. Nationalist and patriotic sentiments had long constituted an important component of Sulayman La’iq’s poetry. After the Sawr Revolution, La’iq continued to praise national independence, but only in terms set by the new regime. In an early poem entitled ‘Dost Daram in Watan Ra’ (I Love this Homeland, c.1969), the poet had pronounced with some significant degree of pride: I love this homeland I love its rocks, its mountains I love my own heart, the abode of my nation’s sorrows I love this homeland: Its earth, its mighty, subliminal clouds The spotless sky upon its mountains.11 The same poet was soon suggesting that the real history of the nation only started with the ‘thunderous’ Sawr Revolution, which he considered the single most important event the country had ever witnessed.12 In a clear shift in lyrical voice (from the individual ‘I’ of the poet to the collective ‘we’ of the Party), La’iq boasts: Armed only with the weapon of the glorious Sawr We broke the snare, the spell, and all fear of darkness We burned all bridges and severed all affinities With old world ideas and actions. [ . . . ] Only when we fought the Sawr Revolution Did we gain true appreciation for art, The zeal to persevere and the desire to succeed.13

62 Wali Ahmadi For La’iq, while nationalist feelings may remain personal and individual (and essentially romantic), revolutionary action can only be achieved collectively through a solidarity of purpose within the PDPA. The theme of the Sawr Revolution delivering the nation from ‘centuries of destitution and slavery’ also runs through many of the poems of BareqShafi‘i, for whom the revolution was of far-reaching consequence precisely because, for the fi rst time in history, In this land The peasant and the worker The men of struggle Aided by the great Party’s light of knowledge [ . . . ] Tore to shreds the curtain of the old order And created a new order, a new world, a new age.14 The revolution is the harbinger of a new system (‘a new order, a new world, a new age’) and is not reversible, precisely because it is led by enlightened Party leaders. When the revolutionary order is resisted, then the annihilation of all ‘reactionary forces’ becomes justified, a sentiment captured in BareqShafi‘i’s ‘Ba Pish!’ (Forward!, c.1979), which proclaims, ‘any head which does not nod in agreement with the revolution / should be severed!’15 This sloganeering tendency was also found in the poetry of Dastgir Panjshiri, the third of the established troika of poets with a strong political pedigree within the PDPA’s leadership. Although lacking some of the talents of La’iq and Bareq-Shafi‘i, Panjshiri—as his collection of poetry Dar Milad-e Khorshid (The Birth of the Sun, 1984) clearly shows—was intent on rendering into verse the aims and tactics of the Sawr Revolution and on emphasising that the revolution in Afghanistan was a concrete continuation of the path paved by the October Revolution of 1917. As he writes, ‘the people of Afghanistan have chosen the path of the Soviets’ and ‘friendship with the Soviets is the treasure of the Afghans’.16 For Panjshiri, as for most supporters of the Sawr Revolution, the decisive victory in the Cold War of the Soviet camp over the ‘imperialist’ enemy is inevitable, and Afghanistan will remain central to this struggle: The victorious Sawr brought a new order, It buried into dirt the old enemy. [ . . . ] We successfully traverse this long path, although in our passage, The CIA and the White House constantly conspire.17 There soon emerged a group of younger poets who wrote extensively the kind of poetry that La’iq, Bariq Shfi‘i and Panjshiri championed and that the official Writers’ Union sanctioned. With the Soviet troops caught in the Afghan quagmire, it was incumbent upon poets to pronounce that the revolution would be achieved only if the Afghan revolutionaries kept to the

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course set by their fraternal Soviet prototypes, for whose sacrifices in the name of ‘peace’ all ‘patriots’ in Afghanistan—whose blood was now intrinsically mixed with that of the Russians—should remain forever grateful. In the following poem by ‘Abdol-Jamil Zarifi , for instance, this ‘historical friendship’ appears as a cardinal criterion of what made Afghan poetry, as well as Afghan society, revolutionary: In sustaining the Sawr Revolution Our noble Soviet brothers have lost blood. Our two nations are united through Historical friendship, trade, the arts, even poetry. [ . . . ] Long live our friendship with the Soviet people So that peace is preserved, and justice.18 The declared political themes of Soviet-Afghan amity, the importance of ‘Legendary Lenin’ and the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and the inevitable success of the Sawr Revolution were treated, almost verbatim, in the writings of such pro-PDPA poets as Fazl-Haq Fekrat, Rahim Elham, Aziz Royesh, Saleh-Mohammad Khaliq, Pozhuhan Gordani and Abdollah Na’ibi.19 As may be imagined, the horrific nature of the Soviet occupation and the stifling social and cultural atmosphere created by the regime drove numerous Afghan intellectuals (including many poets and writers) to choose life in exile, either in the neighbouring countries of Iran and Pakistan or in Europe and America. The degree of the commitment and contribution of these intellectuals to the anti-occupation struggle varied considerably. Those who took refuge in Iran and Pakistan, where the military resistance was headquartered, were often involved in literary activities that showed, to a large extent, explicit affi nity with the Mujahideen forces. 20 Understandably, the resistance poetry dealt primarily with questions of nationalism, military ambition and the Islamic identity of Afghans. The writings of Abdol-Ahad Tarshi, Jalal Farhikhta, Wahid Mozhda, Delju Hosaini and Abdol-Karim Tamana, among others, were exemplary in this regard. Yet despite the political explicitness of their works, one can hardly discount the shared tone of nostalgia, expressed in a symbolic language of despair, for a homeland now in ruins as a result of the Soviet invasion. The latter motif especially characterises the writings of younger poets such as Mohammad Kazem Kazemi, Qanbar Ali Tabesh and Abo-Taleb Mozaffari. The Islamic component of the Afghan struggle against the Soviet invasion found its most vociferous proponent in Khalilollah Khalili, a critically acclaimed poet who, in exile in Pakistan, produced highly refi ned and technically unblemished resistance poetry. Khalili contended that the Afghan movement for liberation would be most effective when strongly imbued with religion, and that an adherence to the tenets of the Islamic faith would offer sufficient grounds for formulating a historically specific

64 Wali Ahmadi modality of resistance. Sceptical of the imposition of modern ideology (that is, communism) on the tradition-bound society of Afghanistan, he saw the Soviet occupation as a violent act of western colonial aggression, a ‘deadly hurricane’, that not only destroyed the traditional fabric of Afghan society, but also failed to institute a new order. 21 Correspondingly, the poet found himself forced to abandon the writing of ‘melodious and passionate songs of the dawn’ in favour of ‘belligerent, hard battle chants’ that call for ‘justice’ and ‘revenge’ against the Soviets. 22 Now, the homeland, inhabited by ‘sorrowful’ people, has turned into a ‘land of bloodied burial robes’ where even ‘the rays of the sun emanate the smell of death’, and the poet urges his reader to see in ‘stream upon stream, the blood of martyrs’, and in ‘field upon field, piles and piles of corpses’. 23 It should be noted that Khalili wrote his poetry of Islamic resistance entirely in exile, and a sense of homelessness and nostalgia plays prominently in his poetic compositions. He considers himself in exile a ‘wandering eagle’ seeking his lost ‘native summits’, a ‘messenger of pain and sorrow, / A poet of tears, an ambassador of lament’.24 The poetry is expressive of a triumphal ideology of patriotism merged with the collective destiny and experience of the people, yet seems to evade enunciating a single voice or coherent discourse of insurgency. His poetry does not avoid mention of the complexity of the resistance movement and its potential for fragmentation and decay. Often falling into a contemplative, overtly pessimistic perspective, he seems dismayed by the fact that regional, ethnic and sectarian divisions have hindered the emergence of a truly unified national struggle. For Khalili, the challenge the nation faced was even greater because Soviet imperial ambitions found an opportune and submissive ally, a fi fth-columnist force, in the People’s Democratic Party. 25 The poet further ponders: ‘Have we torn our national heart with the blade of our own dagger? / Is it the foreigner, or we ourselves, who has brought this terrible calamity?’26 In a sense, by maintaining that ‘the enemy is hidden in our own midst’, the poet destabilises the ideologies of the times that insisted on clearly demarcated binary oppositions.27 By implication, a literature of resistance, perhaps in opposition to its own stated objectives, cannot be a simple recounting of a neatly defi ned battle between colonial domination and anti-colonial liberation. It has to put into perspective the forces that fragment the resistance and threaten the liberation struggle. If this was not done, Khalili predicted, the anti-Soviet movement could—and, as subsequent events established, indeed would— degenerate into a subservient tool of other, equally destructive foreign powers (namely, the United States). That is why he implores his countrymen to Take a new path, but rely on your own strength. Like a lion, carry your own weight. The way is long and arduous, but you must walk On your own two feet.

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If you don’t, Others will drag you along like a cripple, Taking from you whatever they desire, Cheating you out of what’s rightfully yours. 28 Whether optimistic about the resistance or pessimistic about its performance and prospects, Khalili wanted to be an emblematical poet of Afghanistan in a crucial period of its history. The poetry he wrote in the last decade of his life was an admixture of the individual voice of the poet—the inner subjective life of consciousness—and the data of objective contemporary reality, and included the charting of national collectivity in the anti-colonial struggle and the envisioning of a potent post-colonial identity. As Khalili’s late work shows, there was a largely subterranean trend in the literature of the 1980s that attempted to transcend the convenient binary divisions found elsewhere. This form of literature can arguably be termed dissident literature: dissident in relation both to the socialist strictures of the official Writers’ Union and to the prescriptions of the Islamic insurgent cultural formulas. Through a complex process of appropriation and incorporation, and a multitude of contrasting forms, this body of literature pointed to the diversity of the anti-occupation and anti-imperial imagination, to the multiplicity of visions of liberation and emancipation, and to the incongruity of views on how to realise an ideal post-colonial, post-Soviet, condition. The opening up of political and cultural conditions in the Soviet Union during glasnost and the subsequent qualified changes in the leadership of the PDPA in 1986—which led to the promotion of Dr. Najibollah, the head of the regime’s notorious secret police, to the position of presidency of the Party, and paved the way for the eventual departure of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989—enabled poets and writers to guardedly defy the regime’s cultural apparatuses. Precisely in this period, unofficial literary associations (anjoman) started to appear both in Kabul and in some provinces and attracted many dissident voices, including a number of disillusioned former pro-regime writers. Above all, these associations provided a forum for the literati to voice their antipathy towards the Soviet-installed order without necessarily ascribing to the poetics of resistance emanating from the cultural propagators of the Mujahideen. The poetic compositions of Latif Nazemi illustrate the fi nely nuanced quality of literary production in occupied Afghanistan. His writings initially betrayed some affinity to ‘revolutionary’ poetics: For example, in a poem welcoming the Sawr Revolution he states confidently that, as Afghans, ‘we are slaves newly freed from bondage / We are explorers of the path of light’.29 Such commitment soon turned to bitterness. Drawing upon a striking imagery of colours and shades, the following lines demonstrate how he saw noble ideals betrayed and splendid hopes destroyed by ‘evil doers from the progeny of the night’ (ahrimanan-e tabar-e shab):

66 Wali Ahmadi The naked, bloodied body of our helpless city Has been buried under a deluge of red snow And night darkens her eyes with gunpowder [ . . . ]. Barren clouds are adrift and afraid. Every tall pine in the garden of freedom Is burning in night’s brutal kiln.30 In a later collection of poetry published in exile in Germany, Nazemi evokes, in a rather personal way, how, as the revolutionary course proceeded, ‘many an arch of triumph [was] never erected’ and ‘many a wall of certainty crumbled’.31 In the same vein, he mounts an uncompromising indictment of the messengers of ‘false dawns’ (alluding to the leaders of the revolution) who ‘came to the city proclaiming joyfully’ the ‘coming of spring’.32 He insists that this proclamation proved illusory for, in reality, ‘spring never arrived’: ‘The tulip gardens remained barren and lifeless’ and ‘joyful poems turned to bloody odes on our lips’.33 The theme of the Sawr Revolution proving itself a failure runs deep in the striking work of the dissident woman poet, Laila Sarahat-Roshani. In a poem written in the mid-1980s, the revolution is compared to ‘destructive winds’ that blow away ‘the progeny of flowers’ and install ‘the chill of nights’.34 Nevertheless, while the historical grounding of this poem is explicit, Sarahat-Roshani keeps the context of other poems vague through a skillful use of irony and poetic ambiguity, to the extent that the horrific conquest of ‘our city’ in ‘Marsiya-yi bara-ye Bagh’ (An Elegy for the Garden, c.1993) could refer either to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan or to the subsequent capture of the country by US-supported Mujahideen forces in 1992: Yet again, let us mourn the garden of no spring: Let us mourn the destruction of our homeland. [ . . . ] The bird sings songs of mourning The wind, the lord of the autumn, rages And exposes our city to the chill of the nights. 35 The most distinguished poet to remain inside Afghanistan during the occupation and, against all odds, to write lyrics in praise of the armed resistance to the Soviets and the Soviet-installed regime in Kabul, was Qahar Asi. From an avowedly romantic, sentimental perspective, Asi initially viewed the Mujahideen as a genuine anti-colonial movement, a broadly national guerrilla force motivated by noble religious sentiments. He lauded the stubbornness and bravery of the ‘freedom fighters’ and celebrated their struggle for independence: From the heart of the mountain resound the voices of freedom fighters High atop the peaks fly their proud banners

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From the horizon sparks a green flame To welcome these providential heroes [ . . . ]. May my heart and soul be ransomed countless times For those who desire to drink from the cup of martyrdom.36 However, when the ‘freedom fighters’ victoriously marched onto Kabul and plunged the country into a vicious internecine war, Asi’s poetic voice vividly changed. In one poem, he addresses ‘the killers of the people of Kabul’ with defiance: ‘May death come to you who pillaged and burned / The house that deserved to be worshipped’.37 Elsewhere, it is less defiance than despondency one senses as Asi depicts the misery that the Mujahideen caused: Again the nation, shedding blood from head to toe, Enumerates its dead, Again the nation, scarred and sorrowful, Weaves bloodied shrouds. Again the night in the guise of blood Creeps darkly all over, Again from the morning’s bed of lead The day slowly melts feet and head.38 The latter years of the Soviet occupation also witnessed the emergence of a dissident strain in the realm of fiction. A number of established and emergent writers began to oppose the propagandistic writings of both the Writers’ Union and the Mujahideen via an increasingly open narrative structure and polyvocal language, producing a modernist, yet politically conscious, corpus of narrative fiction. This included work by such writers as Rusta Bakhtari, Rahnaward Zaryab, Qader Moradi, Zalmay Babakohi, Gholam Haydar Yagana and Razzaq Ma’mun, but is best embodied in Sepuzhmay Zaryab, the period’s foremost woman short story writer. In the stories collected in Dasht-e Qabil (Cain’s Plain, 1988), she produced some of the most powerful anti-war fiction to be written during the 1980s. In ‘Satlha-ye Ab va Kharita-ha-ye Arzan’ (Buckets of Water and Sacks of Millet, 1988), the narrator tells of a group of village women who, after losing sons in the Soviet-Mujahideen war, take water and millet to attract birds to their sons’ graves in the local cemetery, but only manage to summon up ‘enormous vultures’ that drive the women back to their impoverished houses. 39 As such, the story seems to register that war has no ‘heroes’; it only leads to the futile death of young men and to the devastation of the living. The profound historical crises that contemporary Afghan writers have been enduring make the novel—a hitherto largely unexplored genre—of particular use to them. In the context of the Cold War, the appearance of a novel such as Asr-e Khodkoshi (A Time of Suicide, 1379/2000) by Razzaq Ma’mun proved especially noteworthy. The principal character is Nader, a truck driver, who is engulfed in the violent events that follow the coup

68

Wali Ahmadi

d’etat of April 1978, including the murder of his older brother at the hands of the local Party secretary. With the help of a group of Mujahideen sympathisers, Nader succeeds in avenging the murder, and, having passed this important rite of passage, he is trusted by the armed opposition to deliver in his truck some sensitive material to the Mujahideen in the northern Shomali region. The material is discovered by the regime’s secret police and Nader is imprisoned in a solitary cell and repeatedly tortured. The importance of the novel lies in the way it interweaves depictions of the brutality of foreign occupation with portraits of the individual psychological experiences of ordinary people, and does so in a stylistically refi ned and intricate manner. At times, the successful use of such devices as internal monologue and stream of consciousness make the novel a self-reflexive modernist work, at odds with more conventional works of realistic fiction. In this respect, Asr-e Khodkoshi is not alone. Atiq Rahimi’s short novels Khakestar wa Khak (Earth and Ashes, 1999) and Hazarkhana-ye Khwab wa Ekhtenaq (A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, 2002) also revolve around the catastrophic impact of the Sawr Revolution and the Soviet occupation on the lives of a handful of characters who, in allegorical fashion, signify Afghan society at large. The fi rst novel, narrated in the secondperson singular, deals with the dilemmas of an old man, Dastgir, who, accompanied by his injured grandson, is on his way to inform his son, who works in a faraway mine, that the Russians have recently bombarded their village and indiscriminately killed members of their family. Throughout what proves to be a futile journey, the old man is constantly tormented by the devastating experience of witnessing horrors that he cannot verbalise: ‘Your thoughts pull you inwards, to where your own misery lies’, he realises, yet ‘you can’t describe your sorrow; it hasn’t taken shape yet’.40 The second novel narrates, in the fi rst-person singular, the terror endured by a young student, Farhad, when he is taken away by government soldiers and tortured by police agents. In a state of delirium, his discovery that even ‘[t]rying to speak is absolute agony’ expresses the nightmarish destiny of all victims of the senseless wars and ideologies that have engulfed contemporary Afghanistan.41 Reflecting on his own fate, in a surrealistic fashion, he can only determine that ‘I’ve been taken over by the forces of darkness [ . . . ]. The djinn have imprisoned my voice in my chest [and] have stolen my voice from my throat’.42 The two novels may appear sparse in terms of characters and incidents, but the intricate description of the state of the main characters’ minds, along with the cinematic depiction of landscape in the fi rst novel, make Rahimi’s treatment of Cold War Afghanistan both experimentally innovative and stylistically unique. A full discussion of literature in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops falls outside the time-frame of the present essay. The contemporary writings of many younger novelists and poets (both inside Afghanistan and in exile) are clearly influenced by the violence and destruction caused by the Soviet invasion and its catastrophic aftermath, including

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the horrific era of Mujahideen rule (1992–1996), the Taliban reign of fear (1996–2001) and the US-led occupation of the country. There seems to be a common element that runs through most of the poetry and fiction published in the post-Cold War era: the slow and painful journey from misery to more misery of a nation brutalised by the monstrosity of an apparently incessant war.43 Literature in Afghanistan offers few clear-cut analytical solutions to the horrific maelstrom that surrounds it. In fact, while it envisions the inevitable termination of the present traumatic order, it offers—so much unlike the literature of the pre-Soviet period—no unified or harmonious alternative to replace it. Here one discovers both the promise and the predicament of contemporary literature in Afghanistan. NOTES 1. For revealing studies of the war in Afghanistan (and some of its consequences), see William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars (2002); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004) and Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (1995). 2. For comprehensive studies of modern and contemporary Persian poetry in Afghanistan, see Abd al-Qayyum Qawim, Moruri bar Adabiyat-e Mo‘aser-e Dari (1385/2006) and Wali Ahmadi, Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan: Anomalous Visions of History and Form (2008). 3. See M. Nazif Shahrani, ‘Introduction: Marxist “Revolution” and Islamic Resistance in Afghanistan’, in Shahrani and Robert L. Canfield, eds, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1984), pp. 3–57, and Rasul Bakhsh Rais, War without Winners: Afghanistan’s Uncertain Transition after the Cold War (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 25–65. 4. Fahima Abdali, ‘The Sawr Revolution and Revolutionary Literature in Afghanistan’, Afghanistan Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1983), p. 75. 5. See Dastgir Panjshiri, ‘Adabiyat-e Dawra-ye Enqelab-e Sawr’, Zhewandun, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1367/1988), p. 31. Throughout this essay, all translations from the Persian/Dari are the author’s own. 6. Habib’s other ‘revolutionary’ literary works include the collections of poetry Khatt-e Sorkh (The Red Line, 1362/1983) and Weda‘ ba Tariki (Farewell to Darkness, 1364/1985), as well as the plays Shab wa Shallaq (The Night and the Whip, 1357/1978) and Khashm-e Khalq (The Fury of the Masses, 1360/1981). These two plays were performed in the period mentioned, but did not appear in printed formats. 7. Habib, ‘Gozargah-e Atash’, in Habib, ed., Gozargah-e Atash (Kabul: The Writers’ Union of Afghanistan, n.d.), p. 9. 8. Arghand, ‘Nana-ye Ta’uus’, in Mahmud Khafi , ed., Dastan-ha-ye Emruz-e Afghanistan (Mashad: Tarana, 1376/1997), p. 32. 9. Ibid., p. 35. 10. Habib, ‘Zamin’, in Habib, Zamin (Kabul: Writers’ Union, 1364/1985), p. 6. 11. La’iq, ‘Dost Daram in Watan Ra’, in Gholam Mohammad La‘lzad, ed., She‘r-e Mo‘aser-e Dari dar Afghanistan (New Delhi: Center for Afghanistan Culture and Civilization, 1377/1998), p. 220, lines 1–6.

70 Wali Ahmadi 12. La’iq, ‘Tarkib-band: Welcoming the Tajik Poet La’iq Shir-Ali’, in La‘lzad, ed., She‘r-e Mo‘aser, p. 217, line 17. 13. La’iq, ‘Badban’, in La‘lzad, ed., She‘r-e Mo‘aser, p. 217, lines 18–21, 23–25. 14. Bareq-Shafi‘i, ‘Shaipur-e Enqelab’, in Mo’men Qena‘at, ed., Paywand (Dushanbe: ‘Erfan, 1366/1987), p. 24, lines 25, 21–24, 26–27. 15. Bareq-Shafi‘i, ‘Ba Pish!’, in Qena‘at, ed., Paywand, p. 26, lines 1–2. 16. Panjshiri, ‘Jashn-e Azadi’, in Panjshiri, Dar Milad-e Khorshid (Kabul: Writers’ Union, 1363/1984), p. 39, lines 12, 15. 17. Panjshiri, ‘Sarbaz-e Enqelab’, in Panjshiri, Dar Milad, p. 37, lines 5–6, 9–10. 18. Zarifi , ‘Manba‘-e Solh wa Safa’, in Qena‘at, ed., Paywand, p. 77, lines 29–32, 41–42. 19. See Abdolqader Abhar, ‘Payam-e Dosti’, in Qena‘at, ed., Paywand, pp. 8–9, lines 3–8. See also such anthologies as Anon, ed., Dar Kocha ha-ye Sorkh-e Shafaq (1360/1981), Asadollah Habib, ed., Khatt-e Sorkh (1362/1983) and Gholam Nazari, ed., Tarana ha-ye Dosti (1359/1980). 20. To rival the official Writers’ Union in Kabul, there was founded in Pakistan the Writers’ Union of Free Afghanistan (WUFA), a cultural association that published (from 1985 to 1991) a journal and several books of note. The range of works published by established cultural figures affi liated with Mujahideen groups include the philosophical allegorical narrative by Sayyed Baha’oddin Majruh, Azhdaha-ye Khodi (1384/1985) and the collection of short fiction by Sayyed Makhdum Rahin, Sogwaran (1361/1982). In Iran, too, attempts were made to create viable associations of Afghan poets and writers who lived in exile there during the Soviet occupation. For specimens of resistance poetry from Iran, see Mohammad Kazem Kazemi and Mohammad Asef Rahmani, eds, She‘r-e Moqawamat-e Afghanistan (1370/1991), and for a collection of short stories, see Sayyed Eshaq Shoja‘i, Sal-ha-ye Barzakh wa Bad (1377/1998). 21. Khalili, ‘Tufan-e Marg’, in Khalili, Kolliyat-e Ash‘ar, ed. ‘Abdol-Hayy Khorasani (Tehran: Balkh, 1378/1999), p. 9, line 3. 22. Khalili, ‘Watan wa Darrah-ye Ziba-ye Marri’, in Khalili, Diwan-e Khalilollah Khalili, ed. Ebrahim Shari‘ati (Tehran: ‘Erfan, 1378/1999), p. 186, lines 55–56. 23. Khalili, ‘Bahar-e Khun’, in Khalili, Diwan, p. 269, lines 3–8. 24. Khalili, ‘Nawruz-e Awaragan’, in Khalili, Diwan, p. 324, lines 3, 4, 11–12. 25. See Khalili, ‘Goharwar’, in Khalili, Kolliyat, p. 13, lines 19–20. 26. Khalili, ‘Jenaza-ye Mazlum’, in Khalili, Kolliyat, pp. 12–13, lines 6–7. 27. Khalili, ‘Goharwar’, in Khalili, Kolliyat, p. 13, line 5. 28. Khalili, ‘Etemad ba Khod’, in Khalili, Kolliyat, p. 464, lines 22–29. 29. Nazemi, ‘Bar Fatehan-e Fasl-e Baharan’, in Nazemi, Saya wa Mordab (Kabul: Writers’ Union, 1365/1986), p. 94, lines 17–18. 30. Nazemi, ‘Barf-e Sorkh’, in Nazemi, Saya wa Mordab, p. 107, lines 21, 1–3, 24–26. 31. Nazemi, ‘Payambaran-e dorughin’, in Nazemi, Bad dar Fanus (Munich: n.p., 1991), pp. 17–18, lines 5–6. 32. Ibid., p. 18, lines 9–10. 33. Ibid., p. 18, lines 11, 12, 14. 34. Sarahat-Roshani, Tolo‘-e Sabz (Kabul: Writers’ Union, 1365/1986), p. 21, lines 5–7. 35. Sarahat-Roshani, ‘Marsiya-yi bara-ye Bagh’, in Sarahat-Roshani, As Sang-ha wa Ayyina-ha (Peshawar: n.p., 1376/1997), pp. 34–35, lines 1–2, 5–7. 36. Asi, ‘Mojahed’, in Asi, Az Atash az Barisham (Slovakia: Asef Baraki, 1995), pp. 53–54, lines 1–4, 23–24.

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37. Asi, ‘Ba Qatelan-e Mardom-e Kabul’, in Asi, Az Atash, p. 95, lines 3–4. 38. Asi, ‘Baz Kabul dar Aza Benshasta-ast’, in Asi, Az Atash, p. 80, lines 21–28. 39. Zaryab, ‘Satl-ha-ye Ab va Kharita-ha-ye Arzan’, in Zaryab, Dasht-e Qabil (Kabul: Reyasat-e Nasharat, 1367/1988), p. 33. 40. Rahimi, Khakestar wa Khak (Paris: Khavaran, 1378/1999), p. 27. 41. Rahimi, Hazarkhana-ye Khwab wa Ekhtenaq (Paris: Khavaran, 1381/2002), p. 11. 42. Ibid., p. 15. 43. For some representative works of this era, see Khaled Nawisa, Tasawworat-e Shab ha-ye Boland (Deliriums of Long Nights, 1378/1999), Mohammad Asef Soltanzada, Nawroz Faqat dar Kabul ba Safa-st (New Year is Pleasant Only in Kabul, 1382/2003) and Mohammad Hosayn Mohammadi, Anjir ha-ye Sorkh-e Mazar (The Red Dates of Mazar, 1383/2004).

5

Hiroshima, or Peace in a ‘City of Cruelty and Bitter Bad Faith’ Japanese Poetry in the Cold War Ann Sherif

INTRODUCTION In July 1963, 28-year-old novelist Ôe Kenzaburô1 arrived in Hiroshima to do research for a series of essays about the A-bombed city. His fi rst stop was the Ninth World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. As he sat in the vast hall taking notes, Ôe felt tremendously gloomy about the contention among delegates over the proper anti-nuclear stance. The positions staked out reveal the extent to which the ideological battles of the Cold War transpired in Japan: At that time, some of the leftist groups [ . . . ] were strongly influenced by China and others by the USSR. The Soviet-influenced groups wanted to believe that Soviet nuclear arms were somehow clean, the armaments of justice. The Maoists were attacking both Soviet Russia and the USA, saying that all nuclear arms were menacing world peace, so there could be no such thing as ‘clean’ nuclear arms. [ . . . ] The viewpoints of these groups were incompatible, could not be reconciled in any way, and these various incompatible factions were all assembled in Hiroshima. 2 Far from being an amicable gathering in the ‘City of Peace’ (as Hiroshima officially dubbed itself in 1949), the conference resulted in major divisions between anti-nuclear groups, the Japan Socialist Party and the Japan Communist Party over some of the core ideological and political debates that characterised the era. Such in-fighting could hardly have come as a surprise to the young Ôe. The huge movement against the US-Japan Security Treaty (1960), only a few years before, had featured a divided Left battling with an increasingly conservative government. Prime Minister Kishi’s forced ratification of the treaty in the Japanese Diet, in the face of massive protests from progressives and ordinary citizens, fi rmly defi ned Japan as an American Cold War ally. Although the country had renounced offensive war in Article 9 of the post-1945 constitution, it rested safely within the US-led western bloc and hosted many US bases essential to American containment

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strategy. In Kurihara Sadako’s poem ‘Dôshinen’ (Concentric Circles, 1971), she offers a scathing critique of government policy: ‘Japan: one-time ally of the Nazis. / Japan: current ally of atomic imperialism’.3 By the time Ôe arrived in Hiroshima, anti-nuclear protest had become a central part of global Cold War discourse. Just the year before, the world was terrified by the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most alarming and sobering instance of nuclear brinksmanship between the US and the Soviet Union. Citizens of many nations had spoken out against the dangers of atmospheric testing of thermonuclear devices, and, by the terms of the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), the American, Soviet and British governments fi nally saw fit to put an end to nuclear testing in the air, water and outer space (though not underground). Yet Ôe’s experience at the anti-nuclear congress only served to confi rm his suspicions about much of the empty rhetoric surrounding the issue. ‘As an intellectual—or as a free, nonaffi liated novelist—I felt compelled to create another point of view, an independent one, repudiating all the factions at the conference’.4 It was this desire that led Ôe to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Survivors Hospital, where he found himself transformed by his encounters with A-bomb survivors, people who had witnessed the apocalypse that he had grown up hearing about. Based on these experiences, Ôe wrote Hiroshima nooto (Hiroshima Notes, 1965), which helped to give voice in the mainstream to the hibakusha (atom bomb survivors), who had great medical and social needs, and to valorise their testimony. He continued his anti-nuclear activism even after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.5 Ôe never pretended to be the most important literary writer to represent 6 and 9 August 1945. Indeed, he championed the many authors of A-bomb literature (hibaku bungaku) who had come before him, and especially the hibakusha among them. Ôe knew that he was a latecomer, an outsider. Literary writers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—poets in particular, but prose writers too—had for nearly two decades been writing about the bombings, as well as about the larger Cold War issues that confronted their counterparts in other nations. Ôe read hibakusha authors such as Hara Tamiki, Tôge Sankichi, Ôta Yôko and Kurihara Sadako, and wrote admiringly of their works, thus using his status as a canonical writer to raise their profiles in mainstream culture. In the early 1960s, many people still held prejudices against the hibakusha for their supposedly tainted bodies, and in some eyes they were a shameful symbol of Japan’s defeat in World War Two. Ôe elevated them to the status of morally superior beings who ‘maintained their human dignity amidst the most dreadful conditions ever suffered by mankind’.6 The novelist abhorred the widespread desire to forget the violence of Hiroshima, now a shared dirty secret between two new friends, Japan and the US, and attempted to highlight its global relevance in a nuclear age. In 1964, for example, Ôe would likely have understood the ‘you and I’ (bokura, literally ‘we’) of Tôge Sankichi’s poem ‘Keikan’ (Landscape, 1951) as referring to people around the world, regardless of

74 Ann Sherif ideology and national boundaries, all equally enraged about the nukes, all equally potential victims: You and I carry with us a landscape always in flames [ . . . ]. You and I rise in terror even at tests on atolls far across the Pacific. Each bomb they build hangs suspended from a black parachute over this cauldron in which we live [ . . . ]. Hiroshima blazing in the middle of London.7 This essay explores the diversity of Cold War resonances in Japanese culture, as manifest in poets working within the genre of A-bomb literature and criticism. This genre in Japan encompasses a vast number of literary texts and groupings, which oscillated between two competing narratives: the notion of Japan as a victim of western militarism and the Left’s critique of Japan’s imperialist past and its complicity with American Cold War strategy.8 I begin by looking at the compelling literary voices that arose in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the immediate aftermath of the bombings of August 1945, some of whom were amateur poets, such as Kanda Masu and Kono Chizuko. I then go on to focus on the poetry of professional writers Kurihara Sadako (1913–2005) and Tôge Sankichi (1917–1953). Kurihara and Tôge’s blend of writing and social activism can be understood as part of the highly polarised political atmosphere of the post-1945 era, but also as an interaction with canonical literature and literary modes of production. Kurihara creates a poetic space that evokes the contradictions and agony of America’s Cold War agenda of fashioning Hiroshima and Nagasaki as cities of peace, even as the superpowers’ nuclear regime gained hegemony. Tôge’s poetry speaks to protest in the street, vividly revealing the political struggles of the early Cold War, as well as the human cost of the nuclear arms race.

FINDING A VOICE The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki function as pivotal points between two regimes of war. In the framework of World War Two, citizens of those Japanese cities shared the experience of aerial destruction of their homes, workplaces and persons with people in numerous Axis and Allied cities. Strategic bombing aimed at robbing enemy citizens of the will to fight and, theoretically, at paving a sure path to victory; yet none of the conventional bombings of urban areas were a ‘decisive’ factor in ending the war, and, similarly, the political and military impacts of the atomic strikes of August 1945 remain subjects of debate. Nevertheless, poets and writers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki quickly recognised that their cities had gained new identities in the chaotic formation of a new world order. On August 6,

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President Truman heralded the US atomic inventions as ‘usher[ing] in a new era in man’s understanding of nature’s forces’ and as the ‘greatest destructive force in history’.9 Along with American pride in its nuclear capability, however, came scrutiny from all corners concerning the ethical dimensions of use and exclusive possession of such unfathomably destructive weapons. Once the superpowers commenced the arms race, the normalisation of nuclear weapons was pursued by both the Soviet Union and the US through accentuating the ‘good atom’ (nuclear power, medical applications) and denying the dangers of radiation. Almost as soon as they landed on Japanese shores in 1945, the Allied occupiers established the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD), which banned in the Press Code any ‘destructive criticism’ or any publication that might ‘disturb public tranquility’.10 This directive was interpreted to include representations of bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and discussions of the effects of the atomic bombs.11 Despite occupation censorship, poets started writing about the bombings within days of the event. Some of their work was published locally or in ways that escaped the eyes of the censor. In his youth, Ôe could read the words of prominent writers such as Hara Tamiki and Tôge Sankichi, and came to identify literary writers as most capable of signalling the dangers of the nuclear age, much like the canary in the coal mine. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was poets who fi rst searched for an appropriate idiom to capture the disaster, at fi rst gravitating toward pre-existing genres such as haiku and tanka (5-7-5-7-7 syllable verse). Many found these genres effective in evoking the survivor’s experiences: the bodily sensations of extreme thirst; the agony and regret over the loss of loved ones; and the moments of horror at the death and pain surrounding them. At times, haiku and tanka were adhered to precisely because the poets could not treat the experiences in a sustained manner, lest they succumb to madness. This is suggested in the poems of amateur writer Masuda Misako: Charred beyond recognition yet The shoes he wears are my boy’s shoes12 Had I been here an hour earlier my hand Feels a faint trace of the warmth of the flesh13 The poems share with much other verse about the bombings a mobilisation of ‘the metonymical authority of the pathetic anecdote [ . . . ] to generate an appreciation of the fundamental loss that permeates the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’.14 Tanka and haiku did not, because of their extreme brevity, offer the possibility of extended narrative, epic or lyrical exploration of the bombings and their aftermath. For a poet to grapple with death and destruction in these modes also required violation of decorum and long-standing aesthetic values, yet poets such as the well-known Shôda Shinoe did exactly that:

76 Ann Sherif Like the temple’s Guardian Deva Kings Swollen big and scorched black Naked corpses Piled atop each other15 Even the short tanka could become a vehicle for expressing the ethical dilemmas faced by survivors who walked through the cities, confused about the proper way to help the badly injured or, in their own flight from the spreading flames, unable to rescue those trapped in collapsed houses and buildings. Amateur poet Kono Chizuko writes: Palms joined my friend asked for water That I gave none has become my lifelong regret16 At the same time, brief forms did not entirely exclude political commentary. Tanka poet Kanda Masu remembered Japan’s recent history of colonialism and empire building by including images of Korean forced labourers who were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the days of the bombings: Voice serene she sang the Song of Ariran The Korean maiden was soon dead17 Poets also evoked the new nuclear order that regarded the bodies of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s hibakusha as data for research into the medical effects of nuclear weapons. The Truman administration formed and dispatched to the cities the staff of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) and the organisation’s scientists and physicians examined and photographed many survivors, but controversy arose because treatment of those suffering from radiation sickness and other new types of A-bomb injuries was not part of their practice. As in many instances of nuclear weapons testing, data collection took precedence over ethical concerns. Hiroshima poet Narusawa Kaken’s haiku reads: Autumn at night ABCC’s lights dominate18 The poet plays on the haiku’s invocation of seasonal words (kigo) and conventional seasonal images: in this case, the long ‘Autumn at night’ when one expects a clear harvest moon to illuminate the darkness, resonating with centuries of poetry that represent autumn as a time of longing and endings, and the moon as transcendent and beautiful. In its place, the lights of the office windows of the ABCC ‘dominate’ or ‘reign’ over the city of Hiroshima, suggestive of the new nuclear regime that privileged scientific progress. The same critical awareness is present in the work of Tôge Sankichi and Kurihara Sadako, both of whom were hibakusha or survivors of the atomic bombings and wrote as trained poets before that experience.

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TÔGE SANKICHI During the 1930s and 1940s, Tôge had written extensively in the tanka and haiku forms on a variety of themes, from family bonds to romantic love, but it was not until he experienced the Hiroshima A-bomb that he began to view ‘poetry as a weapon, as a means to personal and political change’.19 Describing himself as a ‘poet who stands against war and for peace and with the proletariat’, Tôge became dedicated to political and cultural activism soon after the war, when the Allies’ victory over fascism offered Japan the potential to transform into a just, democratic society. 20 Born into a politically progressive family and then, encouraged by his sister, baptised as a Christian during the Second World War, he joined the Japan Communist Party in 1949 as a means of addressing issues of social justice. As John Treat notes, Tôge’s verse is ‘simultaneously lyrical and, reflecting his family’s political biases, suggestively polemic’. 21 Tôge turned to free verse after 1945, doubtless fi nding haiku and tanka inappropriate media due to their brevity and to their association with affect and pre-existing clusters of images and poetics. With the loosening of occupation censorship from 1949, Tôge was able to publish in mimeograph what would become one of the most famous collections of its kind, Genbaku shishû (An Anthology of A-Bomb Poetry, 1951). Amongst its raw and evocative verse is one of the best-known texts of A-bomb literature, ‘Jo’ (Prelude, 1951), which now appears on a stone stele situated in the Hiroshima Peace Park: Give me back my father. Give me back my mother. Give me back the old people. Give me back the children. Give me back myself. And all those people Joined to me, give them back. Give me back mankind. Give me peace A peace that will not shatter As long as man, man is in the world. 22 The poet uses the phonetic hiragana syllabary (rather than a mix of the syllabary and Chinese characters) in order to emphasise a straightforward yearning for the people and ideals that were obliterated by the bomb. The speaker addresses, makes demands of, the bomb itself, or, by the time of publication in 1951, of the two possessor nations then locked in a fierce arms race. As Treat comments, the dead cannot be returned: the command ‘give me’ is ultimately rhetorical and even unintentionally, one can imagine, pathetic. With this

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Ann Sherif line Tôge throws open the poem to one of the more radical consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, namely the abrogation of man’s place at the center of the world. 23

Straightforward as the poem may seem, even the phrase ‘A peace that will not shatter’ (kuzurenu heiwa) raised a highly contested notion in Cold War Japan. The United States, in its role as occupier, portrayed itself as the victor who had brought peace to the world by using the atomic bombs and ending the war. In contrast, anti-nuclear activists who called for ‘peace’ during the occupation were often associated with the Japan Communist or Socialist Parties which condemned US ‘imperialist’ aggression. Tôge, who was quickly associated with the peace movement, advocated in the early 1950s a ‘society in which capitalism is crushed and in which people are freed from worry about their daily bread’.24 As did many intellectuals and artists in this era, Tôge found compelling the democratic ideals expressed by the labour movement, even as it clashed with the increasingly anti-communist authorities. The labour movement was much in the public eye in 1949 and 1950, both for its widespread strikes (and attempted strikes that were banned by the occupation) and for its jubilant rhetoric about creating economic opportunity and social justice for the workers of Japan. Tôge turned out to march with the union members and to read his encouraging poems aloud to them. His well-known poem ‘Kage’ (The Shadow, 1951) evokes the myriad concerns and diverse publics that intersected on the recovering, yet haunted, soil of Hiroshima: Cheap movie theaters, saloons, fly-by-night markets, Burned, rebuilt, standing, crumbling, spreading like the itch— the new Hiroshima [ . . . ]; already visible all over the place, in growing numbers, billboards in English; one of these: ‘Historic A-Bomb Site.’ Enclosed by a painted fence On a corner of the bank steps, Stained onto the grain of the dark red stone: a quiet pattern. That morning a flash tens of thousands of degrees hot burned it all of a sudden onto the thick slab of granite: someone’s trunk. Burned onto the step, cracked and watery red, the mark of the blood that flowed as intestines melted to mush: a shadow.

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Ah! If you are from Hiroshima and on that morning, amid indescribable flash and heat and smoke, were buffeted in the whirlpool of the glare of the flames, the shadow of the cloud, crawled about dragging skin that was peeling off, so transformed that even your wife and children would not have known you, this shadow is etched in tragic memory and will never fade. 25 In the late 1940s and 1950s, nuclear anxiety in the US and Europe was such that ‘planning for nuclear war reached down to every home in the country’.26 The new arms race with the Soviet Union and extensive civil defence programs in many nations only served to exacerbate fears. In contrast, the speaker of Tôge’s poem suggests that the Hiroshima authorities did nothing to prevent amnesia of the A-bomb. The local residents are so occupied with their daily lives that they are ‘well-meaning but utterly indifferent’ to this trace of the bombing. 27 Tôge also portrays a younger generation ignorant of the dangers of nuclear weapons: a shoeshine boy— doubtless a war orphan—‘peers over the fence’ to look at the shadow, but then ‘wonders why all the fuss, / and goes on his way’. 28 Only the ‘foreign soldiers in white leggings’, identified vaguely in the original text as ‘sailors from over there’ (achira no suihei), take the time to preserve the memory of what, for them, is the moment of victory, as they ‘come to a stop with a click of their heels, / and, each having taken a snapshot, go off ’.29 Tôge’s evocation of the recovering city of Hiroshima also suggests his awareness of the implication of his hometown for Cold War politics. Cautious of the Allied censors, he describes the occupation indirectly via the ‘billboards in English’ and via the gaudy commercial joints and black markets, viewing the city’s hasty recovery not as healthy but as ‘spreading like the itch [ . . . ], barefaced in its resurgence.’30

KURIHARA SADAKO In contrast to Tôge, who died in 1953 from the combined effects of radiation sickness and longstanding illness, Kurihara enjoyed a long career as an outspoken poet and essayist of Hiroshima. Many Japanese readers know her as the author of the famous verse, ‘Umashimen ka na’ (Let Us Be Midwives!, 1945). The poem’s optimistic message of hope, as expressed by a group of strangers in a dank bomb shelter where a baby is born (‘People forgot their own pains [ . . . ] / And so new life was born in the dark of that pit of hell’31), made it one of the few A-bomb poems to enter school textbooks.

80 Ann Sherif Yet despite the fame of ‘Let Us Be Midwives!’, she did not become a canonical writer or cultural figure in Japan.32 Many of her poems and essays deliver stinging sarcasm and frankness; some read her writing as polemical or didactic. Throughout her life, Kurihara was involved in a variety of oppositional movements, protesting the US-Japan Security Treaty, the arms race and the Vietnam War, and often participating in political rallies and speaking out in public venues. Kurihara also wrote many lyrical poems in tanka and haiku forms, which respond to her experiences during the Hiroshima bombing that started 2.5 kilometres from the hypocentre. In October 1945, only three months after the event, she composed this tanka, the fi rst in a sequence called ‘Yakareta machi’ (City Ravaged by Flames, 1945): City of rubble ravaged by flames: wind blows restlessly; has autumn deepened?33 However, she soon turned to free verse as a more suitable medium both aesthetically and politically. As Richard Minear points out, Kurihara’s decision to stop writing in the tanka form—she regarded them as ‘small in scope’ and restricted ‘in content’—demonstrates the depth of her ‘political commitment [in] that one so adept at tanka would forgo the pleasures of a verse form that had given expression to her deepest emotions’.34 Specifically, the brevity and lyricism of traditional Japanese verse did not allow Kurihara to critique political claims that Japan was primarily a victim of the fi rst use of nuclear weapons on a city, claims which tended to elide Japan’s responsibility for deeds done during its period of empire building in Asia and the Pacific. For Kurihara, a powerful symbol of this amnesia was the Shôwa Emperor, who reigned from 1926 to 1989 and in whose name millions of subjects had perished and so much violence been perpetrated from Nanjing to the Philippines and beyond. She used her verse to explore the failure of the occupiers and Japanese citizens to hold him accountable. As the Emperor lay on his deathbed in 1988, Kurihara challenged the support for his reign in ‘Shôwa ga owaru hi’ (The Day the Shôwa Era Ends, 1988): . . . those husbands and sons went to their deaths singing, ‘At sea be my corpse water-soaked; on land let grass grow over it. Let me die beside my lord.’ The one-time lord—while wandering the borderland Between life and death, Does he make his way To the battlefields of Greater East Asia [ . . . ].

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Even after the war ended The one-time commander-in-chief Never showed contrition for his sins.35 By quoting an eleventh-century classical poem from an ancient aristocratic culture, Kurihara offers a glimpse of the lyrical and traditionalist rhetoric of loyalty to one’s master and the aestheticisation of sacrifice for the nation that characterised Japanese imperial expansion in the 1930s and 1940s. Despite the Allies’ insistence that the Emperor renounce his divinity after Japan’s defeat in World War Two, they then decided to obscure the extent of his role as leader of a militarist empire. This refusal to acknowledge the ethical and political responsibilities of the Emperor in turn seemed to absolve the people of Japan from charges of complicity and to encourage an amnesia about the suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The resulting ‘peace’ that allowed Japan to drop easily into American plans for conducting the Cold War in East Asia was thus riddled with contradictions. In ‘Hata 1’ (The Flag 1, 1952), the speaker addresses the red-and-white Japanese flag, a seemingly straightforward symbol of the nation, to critique this amnesia: Yet today the flag flutters again, shameless all those bloody memories gone; fluttering, fluttering in the breeze, it dreams once more of redrawing the map.36 Kurihara also used her poetry to scrape away at the ideological veneer of peace that allowed Prime Minister Sato Eisaku to visit Hiroshima on August 6 each year for the ceremony in memory of the bombing. These commemorations of peace took place even as the Japanese government furthered its remilitarisation in contradiction of the post-1945 Japanese constitution, a process that the US supported out of a need for Japan’s partnership in the Vietnam War. The contradiction is addressed in Kurihara’s ‘Nippon: Piroshima’ (Nippon: Piroshima, 1971), which conflates an alternative pronunciation of the country’s name, ‘Nippon’, with the place name Hiroshima and the Japanese pronunciation of the English word ‘peace’ (piisu) to create the neologism ‘Piroshima’. The mayor of Hiroshima is portrayed as a ridiculous man in love with ceremony, and his hollow promises of ‘piisu’ and declarations that Japan’s ‘Self-Defense Force is not an army’ are strongly satirised: [t]he mayor of Piroshima stands before the saddle-shaped cenotaph, has the bells rung and the doves released, and reads his address. ‘The mistake will not be repeated.’

82 Ann Sherif ‘Piisu.’ ‘Piisu.’ In the fall he reviews the line of heavy tanks and artillery that rushes ahead toward the fourth five-year plan and tramples on the layers of human bones beneath the cenotaph. At that time the mayor of Piroshima becomes the mayor of Fortress Hiroshima and strikes a pose.37 Kurihara sustains the tone of biting humour throughout the poem. The figure of the mayor is described metaphorically as a fox (a trickster figure in Japanese folklore) who cares more for ceremonies and dressing ‘up in tuxedos’ than contemplating either the bombing or the memory of the dead. 38 The mayor invites exotic animals to the ceremony, including a rhino, a camel and a ‘bug-eyed monster’ from Tokyo, clearly an image evocative of then Prime Minister Sato. 39 As is often the case in her longer verse, Kurihara creates a memorable sense of rhythm through repetition of phrases and images; for example, the phrase ‘the mayor of Piroshima’ is repeated in six stanzas. But the speaker also disrupts this simple rhythm, much like that of a children’s poem, with a stanza describing the tens of thousands of people ‘broiled to death by rays’ who, in the mind of the shallow mayor, mean nothing more than dead fish ‘piled up, / soaked in gasoline, cremated / May their souls fi nd rest. / “Piisu.” “Piisu.”’40 He has sold out to the rhetoric and ritual of 6 August and acquiesced to the Cold War political arrangement that associates ‘peace’ with nuclear weapons, the nuclear umbrella and the alliance with an America embroiled in the Vietnam War. In the 1950s, the media covered two issues that were deeply implicated in the Cold War and that concerned many Japanese citizens: fallout and US military bases. The testing of thermonuclear devices felt increasingly oppressive because of the revelation of something that people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki already knew much too well: Human beings and animals can be harmed if exposed to high dosages of radiation. In Japan, the problem of radioactive fallout from the tests had been a matter of national concern since the 1954 ‘Lucky Dragon Incident’ (Bikini jiken) when, after the US Test Bravo, a contaminated Japanese fi shing boat alerted the public to the potential toxicity of radioactive ash falling from the sky. People throughout the country cried foul when they learned of the exposure of the fishing crew and the contamination of thousands of ton of tuna catch, a mainstay of the Japanese diet. Kurihara hesitated to portray Japan as a victim, and, in ‘1961-nen Nihon no fuyu’ (Japan’s Winter of 1961, 1961), chose a lyrical mode to evoke the issue of fallout and its alarming proximity to everyday life. Notably she employs female figures to suggest innocence in this verse:

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And now dark winter comes to the islands of Japan particles the eye can’t see fall onto petals of chrysanthemum still in bloom, onto leaves still clinging to roadside trees; they fall onto the soft hair of children, onto the shoulders and backs of farm women in the fields [ . . . ] they fall onto the cenotaph in Peace Park, onto the grassy mound over the mass grave, And the patients in the atomic hospital shake in terror.41 In the same poem, Kurihara resurrects the memory of the massive antiSecurity Treaty protests of the previous year. Citizens of many political stripes had risen to speak out against the renewal of the treaty, objecting that it tied Japan’s future too tightly to that of an increasingly belligerent United States. A central issue was the treaty’s stipulation that the US be allowed to operate military bases on Japanese soil after Japan achieved post-occupation sovereignty, a controversy exacerbated by their usage during the Korean War. In the poem, Kurihara mentions the place names Miho and Niijima, which were airbases on Honshu where local citizens marched in protest against US bombers taking off and landing from next to their homes and fields. As part of these protests, a ‘sea of banners . . . surged under the June sun’, but ‘the voices from Niijima and Miho that sang out so’, Kurihara notes mournfully, have ‘rippled away’, implying that so too have the hopes of many people that Japan could tread a third way, aligned with neither superpower in the Cold War.42 Notably, two decades after the end of that conflict, the considerable US military presence in Japan remains one of the most pressing concerns among the Japanese public and a key sticking point in US-Japan and East Asian relations.

CONCLUSION Kurihara’s poem ‘Hiroshima to iu toki’ (When We Say ‘Hiroshima’, 1972) offers a vivid picture of the dilemma of the A-bomb poets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki over the course of the Cold War: When we say ‘Hiroshima,’ do people answer gently, ‘Ah, Hiroshima’? Say ‘Hiroshima,’ and hear ‘Pearl Harbor.’ Say ‘Hiroshima,’ and hear ‘Rape of Nanjing.’ Say ‘Hiroshima,’ and hear of women and children in Manila

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Ann Sherif thrown into trenches, doused with gasoline, and burned alive. Say ‘Hiroshima,’ And hear echoes of blood and fi re. [...] That we may say ‘Hiroshima’ And hear in reply, gently, ‘Ah, Hiroshima,’ we must fi rst wash the blood off our own hands.43

For Kurihara, then, Hiroshima was not a pathetic victim, or a peaceful oasis where children folded origami paper crane and prayed for peace. She instead evokes her hometown in this, one of her most famous poems, as a ‘city of cruelty and bitter bad faith’ inhabited by ‘pariahs burning with remnant radioactivity’.44 For writers in Japan, the anti-nuclear activism of Hiroshima and the anxiety over the bomb were not the only points of intersection with global Cold War cultural discourses. The A-bomb poets also worked in dialogue with dominant social and cultural currents in ‘Free World’ Japan, such as the nation’s turn away from other parts of Asia and its involvement in America’s proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, as well as issues connected with youth culture, the changing tropes of gender and the conflict between capitalist values and the lure of Marxist idealism, even as that idealism faded with the news of Stalinist atrocities in Russia. Other poets such as Tomioka Taeko and Hara Tamiki, and prose writers Oda Makoto, Hayashi Kyoko and Ôta Yôko, are notable examples of people whose writing explored such concerns and who helped to shape a Cold War discursive field in Japan. NOTES 1. I use Japanese name order, with the family name fi rst and given name second. For example, in the name Ôe Kenzaburô, Ôe is the writer’s surname and Kenzaburô his given name. 2. Lindsley Cameron and Kenzaburo Oe, ‘Starting from Zero at Hiroshima: An Interview with Kenzaburo Oe’, Virginia Quarterly Review, http:// www.vqronline.org/webexclusive/2005/06/24/cameron-starting-from-zero (accessed 30 December 2010). 3. Kurihara, ‘Concentric Circles’, in Kurihara, Black Eggs: Poems by Kurihara Sadako, trans. Richard H. Minear, new edn (1946; Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies/University of Michigan, 1994), p. 311, lines 15–16. 4. Cameron and Oe, ‘Starting from Zero’ (accessed 30 December 2010). 5. Ôe eventually gained a new perspective on how limited his frame of reference had been in 1963. In the 1990s, he reflected, ‘I have since revised my views of Hiroshima. I have focused more on Japan’s wars of aggression against Asian peoples, on understanding the atomic bombings [ . . . ] as one result of

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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those wars’ (Ôe, ‘1994 Introduction’ to Ôe, Hiroshima Notes, trans. David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa, new edn (1965; New York: Marion Boyars, 1995), p. 9). Ibid., p. 16. Tôge, ‘Landscape’, in Richard H. Minear, ed., Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, trans. Richard H. Minear (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 355–6, lines 1, 37–40, 45. Even in 1984, it required fi fteen volumes to collect major works of A-bomb literature in Japanese: see Kaku sensô no kiki o uttaeru bungakusha, ed., Nihon no genbaku bungaku [Atomic-Bomb Literature in Japanese] (1984). I have chosen to discuss poets whose works are available in English translation. Truman, ‘Statement by the President of the United States’, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/small/mb10.htm (accessed 31 December 2010). General Headquarters United States Armed Forces, Pacific, ‘Code for Japanese Press Issued 21 September 1945’, The Gordon W. Prange Collection, University of Maryland, http://www.lib.umd.edu/prange/pdf/japanese_ presscode.pdf (accessed 30 December 2010). Numerous scholars and critics have written about the effects of Allied censorship on the development of post-war Japanese literature and narrative in general: see Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (1991), Etô Jun, Tozasareta gengo kûkan: Senryôgun no ken’etsu to sengo Nihon (1989) and Horiba Kyoko, Kinjirareta genbaku taiken (1995). Masuda, Untitled, in Yoshinaga Sayuri, ed., Hiroshima no kokoro (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2008), p. 134, line 1 (author’s translation). Most of the haiku and tanka here do not have titles and in the original are mostly one line, sometimes written vertically. Masuda, Untitled, in Yoshinaga, ed., Hiroshima no kokoro, p. 134, lines 1–4 (author’s translation). John W. Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 19. Shôda, Untitled, quoted in ibid., p. 191, lines 1–4 (trans. John Treat). Kono, Untitled, in Yoshinaga, ed., Hiroshima no kokoro, p. 137, line 1 (author’s translation). Kanda, Untitled, in Yoshinaga, ed., Hiroshima no kokoro, p. 134, line 2 (author’s translation). Narusawa, Untitled, in Yoshinaga, ed., Hiroshima no kokoro, p. 145, line 1 (author’s translation). Minear, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Minear, ed., Hiroshima, p. 280. Quoted in ibid., p. 287. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. 174. Tôge, ‘Prelude’, quoted in ibid., p. 172, lines 1–9 (John Treat’s adaptation of Richard Minear’s translation). Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. 183. Ibid., p. 172. Tôge, ‘The Shadow, in Minear, ed., Hiroshima, pp. 339–40, lines 1–3, 6–30. William Cocroft and Roger Thomas, Cold War: Building for Nuclear Confrontation 1946–1989 (London: English Heritage, 2003), p. 3. Tôge, ‘Shadow’, p. 340, line 32. Ibid., p. 340, lines 49–50. Ibid., p. 340, lines 47–9. Ibid., p. 339, line 7; p. 340, lines 2, 5.

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31. Kurihara, ‘Let Us Be Midwives!’, in Kurihara, When We Say ‘Hiroshima’: Selected Poems, trans. Richard H. Minear (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies/University of Michigan, 1999), p. 5, lines 12, 16. 32. Due to Kurihara’s capable and knowledgeable translator Richard H. Minear, she may have achieved greater fame in the English speaking world than in Japan. Wayne Lammers has also produced an accomplished translation of Kurihara’s poem with the title ‘We Shall Bring Forth New Life’ in Kurihara Sadako, The Songs of Hiroshima (Hiroshima: Anthology Publishing Association, 1980), p. 3. 33. Kurihara, ‘City Ravaged by Flames’, in Kurihara, When We Say ‘Hiroshima’, p. 7, lines 1–5. 34. Minear, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Kurihara, Black Eggs, p. 27. 35. Kurihara, ‘The Day the Shôwa Era Ends’, in Kurihara, When We Say ‘Hiroshima’, p. 51, lines 11–18, 21–3. 36. Kurihara, ‘The Flag 1’, in Kurihara, When We Say ‘Hiroshima’, p. 38, lines 1–5. 37. Kurihara, ‘Nippon: Piroshima’, in Kurihara, When We Say ‘Hiroshima’, p. 44, lines 2–15. 38. Ibid., p. 42, line 3. 39. Ibid., p. 43, line 33. 40. Ibid., p. 42, lines 15, 21–4. 41. Kurihara, ‘Japan’s Winter of 1961’, in Kurihara, When We Say ‘Hiroshima’, p. 39, lines 1–8, 12–15. 42. Ibid., p. 39, lines 16–18. 43. Kurihara, ‘When We Say “Hiroshima”’, in Kurihara, When We Say ‘Hiroshima’, pp. 20–1, lines 1–10, 27–32. 44. Ibid., p. 20, lines 25–6.

6

Reflections of the Cold War in Modern Persian Literature, 1945–1979 Nasrin Rahimieh

The history and culture of modern Iran is deeply enmeshed in the development of the Cold War. Iranian representations of the international confl ict demonstrate how the Persian literary institution, to say nothing of the fate of specific writers, was shaped by the rivalry between superpowers, which initially fuelled the nation’s desire for social and political reform but subsequently produced a sense of national powerlessness. The intellectuals and literati who continued to search for a means of achieving a degree of political self-rule were caught up in a contradictory impulse, believing Iran to be, simultaneously, at the mercy of foreign powers and capable of overcoming its subservience by drawing on ‘authentic’ sources of spiritual power. The movement from genuine national autonomy after the Second World War to long periods of subjection to the whim of superpowers profoundly influenced the literary and cultural scenes, exemplifying M. R. Ghanoonparvar’s point that ‘[s]ocial and political factors [are] of vital importance to virtually all modern Persian writers and have had substantial effects both on their work and the reception of their art’.1 To lay bare the contours of this influence, I will trace the turn of events that rendered the nation a pawn in the Cold War before turning to the analysis of predominantly leftleaning writers and their works. Long before the advent of the world wars Iran had been subject to foreign contestations for control of its resources. In the early twentieth century, the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 had divided the country ‘into zones of political and economic influence: a northern zone, which was Russia’s sphere; a southern zone, which was Britain’s sphere; and a central zone which was neutral’. 2 Although Great Britain and Russia had agreed to respect Iran’s independence, the very fact of partition made the presumption of national autonomy untenable. Iran’s own internal political turmoil, particularly the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911, weakened its ability to face the great powers with a united front. Against this backdrop, Iran declared neutrality during the Second World War, although demonstrated leanings toward Germany, which ultimately led to occupation by the Allies in 1941. The reigning monarch of the time, Reza Shah Pahlavi, had welcomed German assistance in building the country’s infrastructure

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and had opted for close trading relationships between Iran and Germany. The notable presence of Germans in Iran during the war concerned the Allies who feared an encroachment of the Soviet Union through Iranian soil. As Kristen Blake relates, Great Britain and the Soviet Union sent a letter to Reza Shah in July and again in August 1941 to expel the Germans. Reza Shah’s refusal to comply led to the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran on August 25, 1941. The Soviets occupied the northern part of the country while the British occupied the south. The central part, which included Tehran, was declared neutral and left under the Iranian government’s control.3 The occupation, pivotal to the conduct of the war and transportation of supplies to the Soviet Union, destabilised Reza Shah’s reign and led him to abdicate in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah. The arrival of the Allies opened a new chapter in foreign intervention and was one of the factors that initiated the Cold War. The crisis began when the Soviet forces not only failed to honour their agreement to leave Iran after the end of the war, but also supported local Kurdish and Azeri separatist movements. This led the Iranian government to fi le a complaint against the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1946 and to seek US backing at the UN Security Council. While Iran attained its objective, the Soviet departure did not bring an end to the regional rivalries between the Soviet Union, the United States and the British, who controlled the country’s oil through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Tensions came to a head in 1951 when the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosadeq, who opposed British control of local oil reserves, took the step of nationalising Anglo-Iranian Oil. With Washington fearful that nationalisation was the fi rst step to communism, the CIA masterminded in 1953 a coup that toppled Mosadeq and propped up the weak young monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah, who cracked down on communist sympathisers and effectively made the country a US client state until the revolution of 1979. As Steve Marsh argues, The US achieved short-term objectives but the methods by which it stabilized Iran [ . . . ] carried a terrible ‘blow-back’ legacy. It substituted for the yoke of British imperialism association with a brutal and repressive regime that leeched large and sometimes unaccountable amounts of economic and military aid. [ . . . ] More significant still, the US became the focus of popular Iranian hatred for sponsoring the coup against Mosadeq and supporting the Shah’s dictatorship.4 The far-reaching consequences of these confrontations are evident even today, but what is sometimes neglected is the brief moment of respite Iranians experienced between 1945 and 1953 before the Cold War foreclosed

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the possibility of the nation becoming a viable player on the international geopolitical scene. There is no better embodiment of this brief chapter in modern Iranian history than Bozorg Alavi, a writer who had fi rst-hand experience of the abrupt changes that swept the nation. Alavi had received part of his education in Germany and in the 1930s had emerged as one of the promising writers of a literary generation that included Sadeq Chubak, Ali Mohammad Afghani and Mohammad Etemadzadeh, known by his nom de plume, Behazin. Along with many of his contemporaries, Alavi focused on fictional representations of the prevailing social and political conditions of the nation, addressing the fate of downtrodden and disadvantaged groups and exploring fiction for its potential to address the masses. Deploying naturalist and socialist-realist techniques, Alavi’s generation emerged not only as literary artists but also as social critics and politically committed intellectuals dedicated to raising awareness among their compatriots and to inciting resistance against foreign and native forms of domination. Alavi’s major novels and short stories, Chamadan (Suitcase, 1934), Varaq pariah-ye zendan (The Scrap Papers from Prison, 1941) and Cheshmahayesh (Her Eyes, 1952), were inflected with an overriding concern for the suffering of the lower classes and for laying bare the economic and political subjugation of ordinary men and women. In a manner that reveals the atmosphere of the times, he was arrested in 1937 along with fifty-two others on charges of being a Marxist, an event immortalised in his account of prison experience, Panjah-o se nafar (The Fifty-Three, 1942). Alavi denied that he was a Marxist and, decades later, described the individuals who had met, read Marx together and subsequently underwent arrest as ‘want[ing] to become familiar with Marxist ideas’ rather than as being committed communists or Marxists. 5 Alavi spent four years in jail until he was released in 1941 after Reza Shah’s abdication and subsequently became one of the founding members of the left-wing Tudeh Party. Literally meaning ‘the masses’, the Tudeh were rooted in a long history of social democratic movements and focused their platform on the defence of Iran’s national sovereignty, on resistance to foreign intervention and on political and social reforms that would improve and guarantee the rights of individuals. Alavi attributes his own politicisation and membership of the Tudeh Party to his imprisonment: ‘Whether I liked it or not, I had been thrown in prison. I had been thrown into political life. Those things I was writing . . . well, they had to reflect what was there in society. And in my opinion, I have never since veered from this course—even to this day’.6 When speaking of a steadfast adherence to his political principles years after these events, he clung to a distinction between being a member of the Tudeh and serving Soviet masters: Some people will say that these Tudeh members are nothing but communists: they are the lackeys of Russia and do whatever Russians tell

90 Nasrin Rahimieh them; their leaders are those who are doing this knowingly, and the followers are those who are doing this unknowingly: in any case, they have no minds of their own: they are traitors, turncoats, and so on. But if you ask these people themselves, they will say, no, it’s not that way at all: we support the nation’s welfare: we support the good of the people.7 The defensive tone of Alavi’s response betrays the writer’s struggle to carve out a space in which Iranians could choose between different models of social and political reform without having to take sides in the Cold War. Alavi is not simply engaged in revisionist historiography in the answers he provides, but insists on remembering the short-lived potential and hope in the early post-1945 period that he witnessed fi rst-hand after his release from prison. A report he wrote about the First Iranian Writers Congress, held in Tehran in 1946, gives us a glimpse of the distinctiveness of the pursuit and ambitions of the Iranian intellectuals and writers of the time. The Congress was attended by prominent writers, critics, poets and scholars like Sadeq Hedayat, Mohammad Taqi Bahar, Behazin, Ali Akbar Dehkhoda and Parviz Natel Khanlari. As Alavi reports, it ‘was formed on the initiative of the Iranian Cultural Association and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the assistance of the Literary Commission Association and [ . . . ] the representative of the Vaks House [the Soviet Cultural Institute in Tehran] which had taken the necessary actions to invite the Soviet writers to Iran’.8 Alavi’s rhetoric places Iran and the Soviet Union on equal footing and represents the Congress as a meeting of minds, with no indications of political tensions between Iran and its northern neighbour. In fact, in the presence of the Prime Minister and countless other notables, the Iranian host, Mostasharodolleh Sadeq, spoke of the need to set aside the politics of the moment: Between two friendly and neighboring nations, the fi rst condition in continuing any friendship is the strengthening of relations. Undoubtedly, a part of relations are cultural relations [ . . . ]. It is cultural relations which [have] a profound influence from the depths of hearts to the heights of respect. So, in order to attain this valuable purpose, [we look] towards the masters of grace and ideas and the servants of learning and literature.9 If the asymmetry in power relations between Iran and the Soviet Union was set aside, a certain asymmetry soon emerged in the discussions of the state of Persian letters. Many of the Iranian speakers addressed the perceived shortcomings of the Persian literary arts in engaging a wide audience with ideas of social and political change. For instance, the Minister of Culture and Poet Laureate, Mohammad Taqi Bahar, maintained that literature,

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read only by an elite, could and ought to play a prominent role in the development of a new national consciousness: Literature must attempt to free itself from the courts and governments. Its beautiful product must be handed over to the general public and [practised] in the marketplace of the people. This will only be realized when words are used in the service of the public for the people’s purposes according to the general public and in the language of the general public. Today, we are standing at the crossroad of history itself. One way leads to the ancient past and stagnation [while] the other direction leads the people towards innovation and dynamic change.10 Change in this context becomes synonymous with improved social and political conditions for the majority of Iranians. The concept of literature as a vehicle for social change, espoused by Bahar and other writers at the Congress, is not necessarily identical with the objectives of socialist realism and does not imply that they were politically aligned with the Soviet Union or believed that Iran’s problems could be resolved by drawing on Soviet literary models. Nevertheless, the utilitarian and didactic aims espoused by the writers were seen as shared goals of the Russian and the Iranian literati. The dominant area of concern for the Iranian participants was how to circumvent the perceived elitism of Persian literary forms and widen the readership beyond the royal court. Already in the 1920s Mohammad Ali Jamalzadih, known as the father of modern Persian prose literature, had advocated the simplification of writers’ language ‘to give the common people the benefit of learning and knowledge’ and to pave the way to ‘literary democracy’.11 As Alavi’s own trajectory was to reveal, the possibility of open discussion between the Iranians and their neighbours to the north was shortlived, as was the appearance of neutrality in superpower considerations of Iran’s future, literary or otherwise. In the coup of 1953, the shifting terrains of power had replaced the USSR with their American counterparts, who were determined to root out any trace of communism from Iran’s political scene. Unlike the heady days after Reza Shah’s abdication, the post-coup era was marked by a profound sense of loss. Alavi was among countless other writers and intellectuals who found resonances between his ideals and those of Mosadeq, and, based in Germany at the time of the coup, his response to news of arrests of the supporters of Mosadeq and members of the Tudeh Party was to move to East Berlin, where he remained to the end of his life in 1997. Alavi was not the only writer to feel the pangs of exile. Even his contemporaries who stayed in Iran lived a form of inner exile that barred them from writing against the country’s apparent enslavement to the United States. Those who dared to speak out had their work banned and, as a result, retreated into an imaginative realm where they could construct alternatives to their lived experiences of the Cold War.

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This was the fate of the writer and political activist Jalal Al-e Ahmad after he composed the famous essay Gharbzagedi (West-Strickenness, 1962). Taking its title from a coinage made by the Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid (translated as ‘westitis,’ ‘west-strickenness’ or ‘plagued by the west’), this was originally a report submitted to the Council on the Educational Goals of Iran and was deemed inappropriate for publication due to its critical assessment of the country’s conditions. Al-e Ahmad, who was for a period a member of the Tudeh Party, was deeply influenced by intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, as well as by the decolonisation movements of the time. In addition to essays, he wrote novels and short stories, among them Modir-e madreseh (The School Principal, 1958) and Nun val ghalam (By the Pen, 1961), many of which lean toward the mobilisation of his compatriots against imperialism. This is seen in the opening sentence of Gharbzagedi where Al-e Ahmad describes an illness he ascribes to the whole of the nation: I speak of being afflicted with ‘westitis’ the way I would speak of being afflicted with cholera. If this is not palatable let us say it is akin to being stricken by heat or by cold. But it is not that either. It is something more on the order of being attacked by tongue worm [ . . . ]. We are dealing with a sickness, a disease imported from abroad, and developed in an environment receptive to it.12 Using terms that pit the developed and the underdeveloped worlds against one another, he expands the definition of the ‘West’ to ‘almost all of Europe and Soviet Russia and all of North America’, or all ‘industrialized countries which, with the aid of machines, are capable of converting raw materials into something more complex and marketing it in the form of manufactured goods’.13 By lumping together all major global powers, Al-e Ahmad communicates the sense of powerlessness experienced on the level of the nation. This is particularly so when he extends the metaphor of the disease beyond raw materials to include ‘myths, principles of belief, music, and transcendental realities’,14 which, when imported into Iran, are emptied of meaning and express only a desire to mimic those who control the means of production without acquiring the necessary expertise to shed the yoke of dependency. He levels his harshest criticism at Iran’s educational system, singling out the university faculties and departments devoted to the study of literature. These are marked not only by ‘the flight of scholars to old, worn-out literary texts and figures and the dead glories of classical literature’ but also by a ‘reliance on the views of western orientalists’.15 As Al-e Ahmad concludes, ‘[w]e educate pseudo-westerners [ . . . ], a people alienated from themselves’.16 The period between Alavi’s report on the First Congress of Iranian Writers and Al-e Ahmad’s treatise has been so saturated by the Cold War that Al-e Ahmad sees Iran’s very culture at risk. Gone are the hopefulness and naïve belief in the possibility of Iran being an equal interlocutor and participant in a global

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meeting of minds, as well as the notion of literary studies as a vehicle for social transformation. The banning of Al-e Ahmad’s treatise bears out his denunciation of the country’s neglect of the present and of the possibility of challenging the status quo. There is an interesting link between Gharbzagedi and the novels of Al-e Ahmad’s wife, the accomplished writer Simin Daneshvar. Adhering to the social and political ideals she shared with her husband, Daneshvar’s style of writing shows clear convergences with realism, albeit laden with pointed social criticism and class analysis. In the simplicity of her prose she follows in the footsteps of an earlier generation of writers responsible for simplifying Persian literary texts and for advocating the use of the spoken idiom in short stories and novels. More pointedly, her best-selling novel Savushun (Mourning for Siavash, 1969) is set during the Allied occupation of Iran and uses wartime history to explore the country’s contemporary lack of political autonomy. The opening scene, detailing the wedding of the daughter of a Governor, cannot disguise the suffering of the nation at the hands of the British occupiers. The ostentatious celebrations, at a time of extreme food shortages, juxtapose the Iranians and the British army officers and underline the central tension of the novel. Seen through the eyes of the female protagonist, Zari, the narrative also lays bare the local collusion with the British occupiers, echoing Al-e Ahmad’s view that Iranians during the Cold War have resigned themselves to their powerlessness and participate in their own enslavement to the US. To do this, the narrative strips both the Iranian sell-outs and the occupying powers of their disguises. One of the British characters singled out for his chameleon-like ability to don an identity befitting the circumstances is Sergeant Zinger, whom Zari remembers in a prior incarnation as Mr. Zinger, a Singer sewing machine salesman who used to give lessons on the use of the machines to the young girls in Shiraz to whom he sold them. But when the war began, ‘Mr. Zinger had overnight donned the braids and stars of an officer’s uniform’.17 Shedding a cover, he reveals himself as the undercover British military officer he has been all along: ‘What self-control he must have had to live with these lies for seventeen years’, Zari thinks: ‘A fake profession, fake clothes, all lies from head to toe. And how skillful an impostor he was’.18 Zinger’s presence at the wedding is complemented by other reminders of the Governor’s capitulation: The five-tiered wedding cake, flown in by an airplane, was a gift from the Head Command of the Foreign Troops. The cake was placed on a table on the veranda. A bride and a groom were standing hand in hand on its top layer. Behind them was a British flag.19 The cake, competing with the loaf of bread that adorns the traditional Iranian wedding spread, reminds Zari of her husband Yusof’s opposition to the terms under which the opulent wedding takes place, particularly at ‘a time when this single loaf could make a whole family’s evening meal’.20

94 Nasrin Rahimieh The lines of allegiance, so sharply drawn in the opening chapter, harden through the novel, leaving Zari, Yusof and those who are concerned for the well-being of the nation in opposition to the occupying forces and their native sympathizers who see the occupation as an opportunity to reinforce their own might and wealth. As if to underline the appeal of collusion, Yusof’s own brother has begun to serve the British. As he says to Yusof about the wheat grown on the family’s land, ‘Brother. You’re being stubborn for no reason. After all they are our guests. They won’t be here forever. Even if we don’t give it to them willingly, they’ll take it by force. They’re not deterred by the locks and seals on your warehouses. And besides, they don’t want it for free. They’ll pay cash for it. I’ve sold everything in the warehouse in one shot.’21 By the end of the novel, Yusof has learned the futility of his position and finally loses his life in his attempt to resist the forces of occupation (‘forced to shout louder and louder until he got himself killed’).22 The complete hold on power achieved by the British is driven home when a mourning procession for Yusof is not permitted. In death as in life, such figures of opposition cannot be tolerated. The police force’s attempt to break up the procession leads to a riot, preventing the mourners from attending the ceremony and leaving ‘[t]he coffin covered with flowers [ . . . ] at the side of the road next to a wall’.23 The absence of prayers and the requisite funeral rituals shows how resistance is foreclosed in the public sphere and leaves Zari pondering whether she should bother to mark Yusof’s name on his gravestone, suggesting that his loss and sacrifice might well be effaced from collective memory. What saves Zari from utter despondency is a message of condolence sent by an Irish war correspondent, MacMahon, who has a penchant for poetry and tales of his own making, and who identifies Iran and Ireland as sharing a fate of oppression at the hands of the British. His message is imbued with a romantic idealism which hints at a distant and as yet unrealisable future: ‘Don’t weep, sister. In your home, a tree shall grow, and others in your city, and many more throughout your country. And the wind shall carry the message from tree to tree and the trees shall ask the wind, “Did you see the dawn on your way?”’24 Ironically, the novel ends with this declaration from a foreigner, highlighting the internalisation of the seemingly inextricable ties between the nation’s future and the words and deeds of non-native actors. The novel’s sharp division between the oppressor and the oppressed and its sense of the impossibility of escaping the structures of domination suggest that the alternative to Yusof’s form of resistance is a retreat from the public and political arena. For Zari, this retreat takes the form of returning to the

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inner sanctum of her family home; for others it so often involves a retreat into madness. In fact, the narrative is punctuated by visits to an insane asylum and a hospital, underscoring the extent of the nation’s ill-health and echoing Al-e Ahmad’s words. What is missing from Daneshvar’s fictional representation is the possibility of occupying a viable position of agency, revealing the extent to which, by the end of the 1960s, the Iranian national imagination had succumbed to the effects of the Cold War. The disaffected, the martyred and the mad men and women of Danehsvar’s novel create a profound sense of loss, which is also invoked in the title of the novel, ‘savushun’ being a local mourning ritual with deep pre-Islamic and Islamic Iranian cultural resonances. The impossibility of voicing any criticism of the way in which Iran became a pawn in the Cold War struggle between the US and the USSR incited other writers and intellectuals to search for a ‘native’ and ‘authentic’ form of cultural resistance capable of withstanding the seemingly invincible superpowers. They found this refuge in Islam, and more specifically in Shi’ism. Al-e Ahmad ends his treatise by citing a passage from the Koran, while others, like his contemporary Ali Shariati, took up the challenge and offered a new movement to reverse the effects of ‘westitis’. Shariati based this movement on the concept of a return to a presumably lost self, a process that, he argued, was ‘the only hope which can enable the wandering generation to stand tall against the intimidating monster of the West’.25 The self that became the object of the return journey was revolutionary Islam: ‘Islam is what we must return to, not only because it is the religion of our society, the shaper of our history, the spirit of our culture, the powerful conscience and the strong binder of our people, and the foundation of our morality and spirituality, but also because it is the human “self” of our people’.26 While concurring with Al-e Ahmad about the apparent impossibility of reversing Western domination in terms of the modes of production, Shariati located the power of religious belief as an effective cultural counterforce, one that could create a site of national autonomy. Despite an insistence on disengaging Iran from all external sources of influence, he drew on concepts of resistance and social equality he found appealing in the anti-colonial movements, as well as on aspects of Marxism. The years Shariati spent in France continuing his studies shaped much of his thought. For instance, he speaks about his personal familiarity with Fanon and claims to have ‘convinced him that in some societies where religion plays an important role in culture, religion can, through its resources and psychological effects, help the enlightened person to lead his society toward the same destination toward which Fanon was taking his own through non-religious means’. 27 In a similar vein, he wove his own concept of revolutionary Shi’ism with elements of Marxism, although his idiosyncratic interpretation of Marxism drew heavy criticism from the Iranian left, a criticism matched by challenges he received from the Shi’ite clergy, equally concerned about his interpretations of Islam. 28

96 Nasrin Rahimieh In Shariati’s example we see the extent to which the Iranian intellectual movements of the time were shaped by the very political polarities they aimed to oppose. We also see the elusiveness of literary attempts to carve out an autonomous Iranian self. The spiritual core of the nation, as conceived by Shariati, existed in the realm of ideas, a domain of interiority that seems to reaffi rm the imbalance of power underlying the malaise that both Shariati and Al-e Ahmad located in Cold War Iran. This disjuncture between the real and the imaginary contributed to a highly polarised construct of national identity that vacillated between a belief that the nation was perennially at the mercy of foreign actors and an exaggerated sense of the nation’s inner resolve. This manifests itself in Persian literature of the 1960s and 1970s, where we fi nd characters shuttling between the two poles, either barely clinging to reality or else attempting to surmount reality through acts of heroic selflessness. Most famously, the popular novel by Iraj Pezeshkzad entitled Daii jan napoleon (My Uncle Napoleon, 1973) portrays a nation poking fun at its paradoxical sense of subjection and exaggerated self-importance. The psychopathology subtly hinted at in Daneshvar’s novel moves centre stage in Pezeshkzad’s work and becomes the object of pity and amusement. Like Daneshvar, Pezeshkzad refrains from depicting contemporary reality directly, reflecting the period’s fears of imprisonment, heavy censorship and the banning of works, and sets My Uncle Napoleon during the wartime occupation by the Allies. 29 Nevertheless, the novel follows the conventions of realism, drawing on detailed portraits of social types and extended family relations, with the use of humour and lively dialogue veiling social commentary, political critique and oblique references to Iran’s lack of political autonomy. The story revolves around the figure of a family patriarch who in his dotage exaggerates his role as a low-ranking officer of the Iranian Cossack Brigade into that of a national hero who fought the British Empire during the period of Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911). Magnifying his stature to that of Napoleon, his imagined tales of battles against the British—further amplified by his devoted servant Mash Qasem—are privately ridiculed by the members of the family, but are humoured to his face. With the arrival of the British in Iran, Uncle Napoleon convinces himself that they wish to settle old scores with him: ‘“That hypocritical wolf called England hates everyone who loves the soil and water of his own country. What sin had Napoleon committed that they harried him like that? [ . . . ] Their enmity for me started when they saw that I love my country [ . . . ]. I am a freedom fighter [ . . . ], a supporter of the constitution”’.30 The family members, fearing the deterioration of his health, have no choice but to play along with his delusions. In one scene, he insists on meeting a representative of the British Army, and the family, to his horror, claim that a meeting has been arranged at their house: ‘Dear Uncle Napoleon, who appeared to consider himself as being in the same situation as Napoleon at Fontainebleu before the representatives of the Allied armies arrived, did

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not set foot outside of his room as he awaited the moment of encounter’.31 The pathetic figure of the helpless and fearful Iranian patriarch who falls for scenes devised by the family provides comic relief while also capturing the nation’s exasperation at being at the mercy of foreign powers, accepting its own powerlessness and making an exaggerated notion of agency into an object of derision. Uncle Napoleon’s imaginings prove to be delusional on many levels. He not only fails to achieve the courageous heroism necessary for standing up to foreign occupiers, but also fails to tell the difference between friends and foe. While he spends his time imagining that the British are spying on him, the British and other foreign powers do take charge of the country (with no concern for any imagined or real anxieties on the part of the native Iranians). Quite apart from the historical realities of the time, the narrative itself proves Uncle Napoleon’s assumptions misplaced. The narrator and the narrative give little credence to Uncle Napoleon’s suspicion of individuals he believes to be agents of the British, but the dismissal of all suspicion proves to be equally misguided: Out of all those ‘accused of being a lackey and a spy of the English, there was [ . . . ] one real spy and that was the Indian Brigadier Maharat Khan, who had passed on news of the movements of the English to the Germans, and who was arrested by the English before the end of the war’.32 The comic nature of My Uncle Napoleon and its tremendous popularity as a novel and television series tell us how deeply saturated the nation’s sense of helplessness vis-à-vis foreign powers had became. Its central figure, an ineffective self-appointed Iranian leader, also resonated with a nation which was to undergo a revolution in a matter of a few years. But while waiting for that moment of release from the clutches of the United States, the nation continued to enjoy a laugh at the expense of the delusional patriarch, equated with the reigning monarch. Years after that monarch was toppled in a revolution, the novel continues to speak to Iran’s current realities. The ban placed upon it by the Islamic Republic points out that Pezeshkzad’s satirical representations of the country being consumed by conspiracy theories and tales of impending foreign intervention still resonate deeply. But the paranoia has also proven to be at least partially rooted in reality. The occupation of the country by Soviet and British forces in 1941, their refusal to leave and their attempt to control land and resources, left an indelible mark on the national psyche. The legacy of the Cold War is evident in the Islamic Republic’s profound lack of trust in the possibility of engaging in dialogue with the United States, a superpower that demonstrated its will to control Iran by orchestrating the 1953 coup and removing a democratically elected prime minister. Contemporary Persian literature has in many ways moved away from the resistance literature of the pre-revolutionary era, but it continues to work through the heritage of the early Cold War writers who shaped a literary idiom marked by that global confl ict.

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NOTES 1. Ghanoonparvar, Reading Chubak (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2005), p. 2. 2. Bruce Robellet Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 131. 3. Blake, The U.S.–Soviet Confrontation in Iran, 1945–1962: A Case in the Annals of the Cold War (Lanham: University Press of America, 2009), p. 13. 4. Marsh, Anglo-American Relations and Cold War Oil: Crisis in Iran (London: Palgrave, 2003), p. 170. 5. Donné Raffat, The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi: A Literary Odyssey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), p. 74. The interview is part of a series that Raffat, an Iranian-American author and literary critic, conducted with Alavi and that he published in translation, along with his English translations of Alavi’s stories from prison, in the above volume. 6. Ibid., p. 67. 7. Ibid., p. 85. 8. Alavi, ‘The First Iranian Writers Congress, 1946’, in Thomas M. Ricks, ed., Critical Perspectives on Modern Persian Literature (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984), p. 8. 9. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 10. Ibid., p. 11. 11. Haideh Daragahi, ‘The Shaping of Modern Persian Short Story: Jamalzadih’s “Preface” to Yiki Bud, Yiki Nabud’, in Ricks, ed., Critical Perspectives, pp. 111, 110. 12. Al-e Ahmad, Plagued by the West (Gharbzagedi), trans. Paul Sprachman, new edn (1962; Delmar: Caravan, 1982), p. 3. 13. Ibid., p. 3. 14. Ibid., p. 3. 15. Ibid., p. 91. 16. Ibid., p. 33. 17. Daneshvar, Savushun: A Novel about Modern Iran, trans. M. R. Ghanoonparvar, new edn (1969; Washington, DC: Mage, 1990), p. 21. 18. Ibid., p. 21. 19. Ibid., p. 26. 20. Ibid., p. 20. 21. Ibid., p. 32. 22. Ibid., p. 365. 23. Ibid., p. 373. 24. Ibid., p. 378. 25. Shariati, What Is To Be Done: The Enlightened Thinkers and an Islamic Renaissance, trans. Farhang Rejaee (North Haledon, NJ: Islamic Publications International, 1986), p. 47. The essays translated and compiled in this volume are based on lectures Shariati delivered which were later printed in his collected works. 26. Ibid., p. 53. 27. Ibid., p. 19. 28. For detailed analysis of Shariati’s works and the evolution of his thought, see Ali Rahnema’s An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariati (2000). 29. As mentioned, Alavi, Sadeq Chubak, Ali Shariati and others served time in prison for critiquing the prevailing political climate. Pezeshkzad, a career diplomat, would have had other pressures to consider.

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30. Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon, trans. Dick Davis, new edn (1973; New York: Modern Library, 2006), p. 68. 31. Ibid., p. 438. 32. Ibid., p. 496.

7

The ‘Boom’ Novel and the Cold War in Latin America Neil Larsen

One of the collateral if perhaps somewhat fortuitous benefits of the current preoccupation with postmodernism in the humanities is that it has now become much more difficult to sustain what was for decades the dominant mode of apology for modernism itself and the underlying ideology of its ‘canonicity’: the idea that modernism and modernity were consubstantial categories, that modernism was somehow already precontained in the raw and immediate experience of contemporary life. But modernist burnout has also made it easier to begin to think about the politics of modernism without in turn feeling obliged to erect it into a metapolitics with its own unique pertinence to modern experience. Perhaps, after all, modernism did serve the interests of some while effectively thwarting those of others. And perhaps there were, or are, other modernities, unexpressed and unsuspected in canonically modernist aesthetic categories and practices. In any event, the relation of modernism both to modern experience and to other aesthetic and cultural practices has come increasingly to be seen as hegemonic and exclusionary rather than transparent and totalising. One of the many areas opened up for critical investigation by this line of thinking is the historical connection between modernism and the anti-communist politics of the Cold War. (In fact, this connection was already drawn by, among other Old Left intellectuals, the Lukács of the early 1950s, but the ‘one-two punch’ of Cold War thinking itself, together with the generally pro-modernist stance of the New Left, had until recently kept this question outside the limits of acceptable discourse.1) Serge Guilbaut, in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983), argues, for example, that the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the United States after World War Two was less the result of some spontaneous shift of aesthetic sensibility on the part of artists and critics than the product of a self-consciously political drive to de-canonise the old Popular Front realism of the 1930s and replace it with a depoliticised art compatible with the US imperial elite’s new image of itself as the guardian of aesthetic culture. 2 A similarly political connection is uncovered in Lawrence H. Schwartz’s Creating Faulkner’s Reputation (1988). Here, Schwartz analyses the shift in Faulkner’s literary fortunes from relative obscurity in the 1930s and early 1940s to the superstardom of

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the 1950s and after as a function of the same Cold War cultural campaign to delegitimise the left-leaning social and proletarian realism that thrived in the pre-Cold War United States through the creation of a new, distinctly ‘apolitical’ and purportedly authentic ‘American’ novelist. 3 Guilbaut and Schwartz emphasise the key role played in both instances by the New York Intellectuals gathered around the Partisan Review, as well as, in the case of Faulkner, by New Critics such as Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks. James F. Murphy, in his valuable study The Proletarian Moment (1991), argues similarly that the current neglect of the proletarian fiction of the 1930s stems directly from an institutionalisation of the politically aggressive promodernism of the New York Intellectuals.4 And one should also note Barbara Foley’s important reading of the North American proletarian novel itself in Radical Representations (1993), in which she has shown that the initial reception of works by authors such as Erskine Caldwell, Josephine Herbst, Mike Gold and Richard Wright, not only by left-wing but by more ‘mainstream’ critics as well, was generally enthusiastic.5 If this major body of literature, stigmatised for its supposed aesthetic crudity and propagandism, later languished in the shadow of modernists such as Faulkner, this, she shows, was at least as much a result of the Cold War conversion of formerly friendly critics and publishers as it was of any properties intrinsic to the novels themselves. What these and other studies point to is certainly not, let it be said, a conspiracy theory of modernism as an anti-communist plot, but rather to the tendency for cultural and literary institutions on the ‘western’ side of the Cold War divide to promote the canonisation of modernist works, many of which long predated or had no direct relationship to the aggressively anti-communist policies of the post-1945 years. These works suited the cultural dictates of the Cold War not so much for what they said or represented but for what they did not say or represent, for their scrupulously maintained neutrality as purely self-referential languages of form, or what Guilbaut calls their ‘political apoliticism’.6 The politics of the Cold War do not create modernism. To suppose this would be to fall into an obvious historical fallacy. But it bears considering whether or not it is the politics of the Cold War that create the institutional and cultural forces that in turn have inculcated into several generations, including my own, the creed of a modernist consubstantiality with contemporary life, of modernism, even, as historic-aesthetic telos. The question I wish to pose in the present essay is whether or not something analogous to the aesthetic-political change traced by Guilbaut, Schwartz, Foley and others in the United States takes place in Latin America. More particularly, can a correlation be drawn between the global ideological demands of the Cold War, above all the elevation of anti-communism into a virtual touchstone not only for political but for virtually all cultural practice as well, and the canonisation of Latin American modernism, especially modernist narrative? Straightaway, some clarifi cation

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is required. ‘Modernism’ is in some ways an unaccustomed term in the sphere of Latin American literary discourse. Its Spanish cognate—modernismo—refers to a literary movement appearing in Spanish America at roughly the turn of the twentieth century, mainly in poetry, and with affi nities for French symbolism and Parnassianism. By any account, however, modernismo would have to be deemed a pre- or at best proto-modernist phenomenon, if the more Eurocentric or metropolitan designation is maintained. Vanguardismo probably comes closest to translating the English term. But the lexical difficulty aside, there remains the question of whether there is a Latin American modernism directly assimilable to some metropolitan, or would-be global, modernist canon. Much of Latin American critical debate during the Cold War decades has dwelled on this general issue, often claiming that such an assimilation does considerable violence to a modern Latin American body of literature that, while not quite outside the orbit of canonical modernism, nevertheless turns on its own unique substrate of contemporary, lived experience. For a time, the preferred term became ‘magical realism’, in reference to a mode of literary narrative that, while resembling modernism in its penchant for formal experiments, also differed from it by virtue of its purportedly mimetic relationship to a Latin American reality said to exceed traditionally realist modes of representation.7 But with the proviso that the Latin American variant typically declares its autonomy of form having fi rst declared its autonomy of content, I think it can be agreed that, at least in the narrative sphere, a Latin American modernism has its origins in the works of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Mario de Andrade, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo and João Guimarães Rosa. There can also be little dispute that the so-called ‘boom’ phase of Latin American fiction that, beginning in the 1960s, follows on the work of the latter—comprising works by, inter alia, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez—fully merits the modernist designation. Indeed, as Gerald Martin has written, the ‘boom’ should be regarded not only as the ‘product of the fiction that had gone before’ but even more so as the ‘climax and consummation of Latin American Modernism’.8 But I would, in fact, go even further and maintain that it is only after the onset of the ‘boom’, and the vastly enhanced visibility of its representative authors and works both within the Latin American ambit itself and internationally, that the pre‘boom’ modernists themselves come to be tacitly regarded as belonging to a uniform literary current. It is now a standard ‘truth’ of Latin American literary historiography that without a Borges, no Cortázar, without a Rulfo or Asturias, no García Márquez, and so on. The ‘boom’, if I am right about its effective success in rewriting Latin American literary history with itself as telos, might be seen as achieving, vis-à-vis its literary prehistory, what the rise of Faulkner or of Abstract Expressionism achieve in their respective North American spheres: the decisive and a priori exclusion from (or

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marginalisation within) the canon of non-modernist works, movements, and so on. But does this elevation of modernism to a hegemonic position likewise obey, even if only indirectly, a Cold War political logic? Here the analogy to North American developments appears much more problematic. Certainly, the standard theories of the ‘boom’ would not appear to support such a view. These theories can, very schematically, be classified as belonging to three different types. The fi rst, and probably still the most commonly alleged theory, may be termed the ‘aestheticist’. Typically advanced by the ‘boom’ authors themselves, the aestheticist account of the ‘boom’ explains it, not as a historically or politically inspired rupture, but as simply the discovery of a new literary language in which to express Latin American reality with, for the fi rst time, complete authenticity.9 A second theory of the ‘boom’ is what might be termed the ‘vulgar sociological’ standpoint, which, as the term ‘boom’ itself implies, holds that the ‘aesthetic’ revolution was really nothing more than a major expansion of Latin American literary commodities into domestic and international markets. Its best-known advocate has been Angel Rama, whose essay ‘El “boom” en perspectiva’ (The ‘Boom’ in Perspective, 1979) remains one of the most informative pieces of criticism ever to be written on the subject. Rama equates the ‘boom’ with the emergence in Latin America of a larger reading public, together with the production and the marketing of tools required to service it. The ‘boom’ marks the ‘absorption of literature within the mechanisms of consumer society’ and, along with it, the appearance of the author not only as professional but as media star.10 This is certainly a useful corrective of the aestheticist myth, but it will likewise not take us very far in the exploration of the links between the ‘boom’ novel and the global politics of the Cold War. Rama regards the political orientations of the ‘boom’ authors—ranging, at different times, from socialist to liberal to conservative—to be, by reason of this very plurality, of secondary importance. What mattered was exclusively the new reading public; the ‘boom’ novel, by virtue of its ability to command this new market, supplied it with a set of self-images that, for whatever reason, met a pre-existing demand. Finally, there is the theory that sees the ‘boom’ novel as the literary manifestation of the new political consciousness generated in Latin America by the Cuban Revolution. This we might designate the ‘revolutionary-historicist’ tendency. The Colombian critic Jaime Mejía-Duque, for example, concedes the significance of both the purely formal and the commercial aspects of the ‘boom’, but regards these as ‘overdetermined’ by the new political reality supposedly inaugurated in 1959.11 The fact that, particularly after the Padilla affair of 1971, many of the ‘boom’ authors withdrew their initial support for the revolution demonstrates the ‘constitutive ambiguity’ of the politics of the ‘boom’, but does not negate the objective historical connection.12 The ‘boom’ is, in Mejía-Duque’s words, ‘something exterior to [the] revolution, but not foreign to it’.13 More recently Gerald Martin, while

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not discounting the ‘market’ theory, has taken a similar position, seeing the ‘boom’ as A confused and contradictory moment, marked deeply by the Cuban revolution [ . . . ]. The sense of diverse ideological alternatives offered by Cuba and the various social democratic experiments of the day, combined with the new cosmopolitanism bred by a consumption-orientated capitalist boom and an expansion of the Latin American middle classes (nouveau read?)—buyers and consumers of novels—created a period of intense artistic activity throughout the subcontinent.14 Within the theoretical trend there might also be included those more negative assessments of the ‘boom’—see, for example, Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán (1971)—that indict the ‘boom’ novelists for being too ‘exterior’ to the revolution, but without ceasing to insist on the Cuban experience as the historical precondition for the aesthetic developments as such, however they are to be evaluated. From the standpoint of basic methodology, it is this latter, revolutionary-historicist approach to the ‘boom’ that I think brings us closest to the complex truth of the phenomenon itself. Here, at least, in contrast to the aestheticist approach, an effort is made to historicise and politicise modernist aesthetic categories, but without thereby succumbing to the ‘vulgar sociological’ tendency to treat the aesthetic aspect as intrinsically arbitrary. But the insistence on the Cuban Revolution as the principal historical determinant of the ‘boom’ novel has always seemed somewhat dubious to me. The profound subjective impact of the revolution and the events it unleashed on Latin American intellectuals and artists certainly cannot be denied. And in a sense it is through Cuba, especially after 1961, that the Cold War exerts its most direct influence on Latin America. But how does one proceed from the anti-imperialist, and later would-be socialist, revolution to the modernist ‘revolution’ in literary form (or, if one prefers, the un-controversially capitalist revolution in book publishing and marketing) without converting the analogous term here into the thinnest of abstractions? Such a notion does not answer but merely begs the questions: what was there particularly ‘modernist’ in the Cuban Revolution, and what particular anti-imperialist or socialist objectives were furthered through the consecration of modernist narrative as the authentic mode of contemporary Latin American literary expression? In this regard it will be useful to give an account of still another critical-theoretical approach to the ‘boom’, in this case belonging to the Latin American historian Tulio Halperín Donghi. In his wonderfully incisive and lucid essay, ‘Nueva narrativa y ciencias sociales hispanoamericanas en la década del sesenta’ (New Narrative and Spanish American Social Sciences in the 1960s, 1980), Halperín notes the curious contradiction between the initially pro-Cuban, and generally radical anti-imperialist, stance of the

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‘boom’ authors and the fact that the same authors ‘elaborate a literature that scarcely alludes to the dramatic conjuncture from which it stems’.15 The ‘boom’ novel, according to Halperín, ‘rests on a renunciation of a certain image of the reality of Spanish America as historical, that is, as a reality collectively created through a temporal process whose results are cumulative’.16 He attributes this renunciation in part to the fact that attempts to create a historical novel in Latin America had been predominantly the work of the pathological-determinist view of history embodied in naturalism, a view that, given the political effervescence of the 1960s, could only seem perversely out of date. But the ‘boom’, in Halperín’s account, answers naturalism not with a deeper historical realism but rather with an adoption of ‘new techniques’, that is, with modernism. This, in the politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s, leads to the ‘paradox’ that ‘this literature, neither militant nor escapist, and seeming to evoke what was once viewed as Spanish America’s historical calvary as if its governing fatalities had entirely lost their potency—this literature is nevertheless recognized as being the most akin to a mass readership increasingly militant in spirit’.17 And he continues: The readers of García Márquez were those who found it easy to believe that a landowner from Rio Grande, educated in the political school of gaucho factional disputes and in the no less ambiguous one of populism, was in fact the unexpected Lenin required by his country to lead the revolution to victory, or that the Chilean propertied classes were prepared to swallow, and even savor as delectably traditional in flavor, the revolutionary medicine wisely prescribed for them by Dr. Allende.18 But, continues Halperín, alluding to the violent military repression of the 1970s, ‘there is no need to be reminded of what bloody horrors were effectively required in order to destroy a set of illusions too pleasing to be easily renounced; “magical realism” now appears as an echo of a time in Spanish America whose magic those horrors have dispelled for ever’.19 With some extrapolation, the emergent picture here is of a modernism that, while remaining, as the Old Left might have put it, ‘right’ in essence, nevertheless fi nds itself for a time in the peculiar historical conjuncture of being ‘left’ in appearance. Unlike its North American analogue of roughly a decade earlier, this modernism refuses the mantle of ‘political apoliticism’ and, at least at fi rst, openly encourages an image of itself as somehow engagé. Why? Perhaps because, putting it bluntly, the Latin American ‘boom’ modernist is an anti-yanqui nationalist before he or she is an anticommunist. When the populist illusions of the 1960s are dispelled by the brutal reaction of the 1970s in Latin America (in fact, the death of Che Guevara in 1967 can be taken as the symbolic inauguration of a period of counterinsurgency and repression that begins as early as 1964 in Brazil), the seeming right/left aphasia of the ‘boom’ vanishes with it. (It is at this

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point, some have argued, that the moment of the ‘boom’ passes, giving way to that of the more politically motivated testimonio¸ or ‘testimonial novel’. 20) But Halperín adduces another factor here as well. This is that, again in contrast to the North American situation, the modernism of the ‘boom’ appears to answer not the elite need to counterhegemonise a tradition of increasingly left-tending realism but rather the outwardly progressive impulse to overcome a much older tradition of naturalistic portrayal in Latin America. It was in and through this tradition—stretching, conservatively, from Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo (Facundo, 1845) to the novels of the Mexican Revolution and even, perhaps, into Spanish America’s scattered experiments with ‘socialist realism’ itself—that the neo-colonial intelligentsia had articulated its deep-seated pessimism regarding the capacity of the masses to overcome their purportedly pathological ‘backwardness’ and usher Latin America onto the threshold of modern civilisation. In novels as otherwise diverse as Eugenio Cambaceres’s En la sangre (In the Blood, 1887), for instance, and José Revueltas’s El luto humano (Human Mourning, 1943)—the former a frankly reactionary screed, the latter a supposedly progressive, even revolutionary one—there operates much the same reduction of social agencies in Latin America to the irresistible working out of a naturally, even racially or biologically predetermined, tragedy. It is against this background, Halperín argues, that the fl ight from historical portrayal into the modernist ‘boom’ novel’s utopias of form and language can appear liberating. The key factor in Halperín’s own rather tragic view of Latin America’s literary destiny, however, is that the moment of authentic, historical realism is missing. While, in Halperín’s view, the Latin American social sciences do effect a rupture with naturalist historicism—for which he above all thanks the path-breaking work of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui—no such breakthrough occurs in literature. If the ‘boom’ enacts a ‘revolution’, it remains, for Halperín, a ‘Revolución Boba’, a ‘fool’s revolution’, that ‘solves’ the basic difficulty by resolutely turning its back on it.21 But is the literary breakthrough into a modern historical realism in fact an unrealised moment in Latin America? Here, I think Halperín, although correct insofar as the particular ‘boom’ authors he has in mind do not work either out of or against such a tradition of realism, nevertheless risks error by omitting what may be one of the grand exceptions to the rule: the literature of Brazil. 22 Without at this point undertaking a full exploration of the case to be made for a Brazilian exceptionalism, I do nevertheless wish to devote additional consideration, in the light of my original query regarding modernism and the Cold War, to one Brazilian author in particular, namely, Jorge Amado. One of the reasons for this is that Amado’s narrative fictions of the 1940s and 1950s, specifically from Terras do sem fi m (The Violent Land, 1943) to Gabriela, cravo e canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, 1958), represent one of the greatest achievements of modern historical realism in Brazil, if not in Latin America as a whole. To say

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this is not to discount the serious flaws that distort some of these works, perhaps especially his more orthodox socialist-realist novels. 23 These flaws notwithstanding, however, I think Amado’s work of this period effectively refutes the postulate of Latin America as condemned to choose between a naturalist, pathological realism and a modernist anti-realism. This is not the place to engage in a lengthy analytical presentation of the sources and specific configuration of Amadian historical realism. Suffice it to suggest that Amado’s intense personal involvement in the class struggles that led up to the ‘revolution’ of 1930 and subsequently ushered in the period of the fascist-inspired ‘New State’ of Getulio Vargas, together with his strong literary debts to Brazil’s ‘Northeastern’, and distinctly antimodernist, school of rural proletarian realism, is what ultimately makes possible the qualitative departure of a work such as Terras do sem fi m, together with its sequel in the ‘cacao cycle’, São Jorge de Ilhéus (São Jorge de Ilhéus, 1944): that is, the fully epical portrayal of Brazil’s evolution out of a state of semi-feudal land tenure and rural clientelism (the Brazilian term is coronelismo) into one of modern, dependent capitalism. What, in the naturalist tradition, presents itself as the iron subjugation of human agency to the pre-historical factors of environment and ‘race’—and, in the later ‘boom’ novel, appears as the ‘magical’ incongruity of life in the traditional, ‘backward’ sector with the other, increasingly urbanised and hypermodern Latin America—emerges in Amado’s fiction as the economically determined distortion suffered by human beings who do live in thrall, not to ‘nature’, but to commodities, in this case, to a single export commodity: cacao. Amado is obviously not the fi rst, nor the last, Latin American novelist to grasp the reality of neo-colonial, dependent capitalism. But he is, I would argue, one of the, if not the, fi rst to discover the most effective artistic means for portraying this reality as something fully historical and dynamic; that is, as the cumulative product of human agencies. This fact alone makes the writer an interesting foil to the various versions of the ‘boom’. But there is still another reason for bringing Amado into the picture, which is that Amado himself undergoes a suspiciously ‘boom’-like transformation at a very discrete moment not only in his own literary and political career but also in Cold War historiography. The story merits telling in some detail. 24 Amado had spent the latter half of the 1930s in militant opposition to the Vargas dictatorship, an opposition that resulted in several jailings, in a period of exile, and even in the public burning of his works in the capital of his native Bahía province, Salvador. In the 1940s he formally joins the Brazilian Communist Party and is elected, in 1945, to the Chamber of Deputies on the Party slate. Renewed repression sends him into a European exile in 1948, from which he is not to return until 1952. In 1954 he publishes the militantly socialist-realist trilogy of underground life under Vargas, Os subterrâneos da liberdade (Freedom’s Underground, 1954). In February 1956 there occurs an event, however, that was to shake not only Amado’s political convictions but also

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the ideological foundations of the international communist movement of the time: Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ speech denouncing Stalin, delivered at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. The speech itself turns out to be a vague, obviously self-serving harangue in which Khrushchev advances the absurd thesis that all the ills of Soviet society up to the present moment are to be blamed on Stalin and the mystical ‘cult of personality’ that he had somehow been able to instigate. But few, if any, party loyalists around the world seem to have been in a position to perceive this at the time, awed, as most were, by the supreme political and ideological authority of Khrushchev himself. Amado is, by all accounts, devastated by the sudden political turn. His personal friend and fellow communist Pablo Neruda records in his memoirs that the revelations [in Khrushchev’s speech] had broken Amado’s spirit. From then on he became quieter, much more sober in his attitudes and his public statements. I don’t believe he had lost his revolutionary faith, but he concentrated much more on his literary work, and eliminated from it the directly political aspect that had previously characterized it.25 For several months after the speech, Amado maintains a political silence. Then, in October 1956, he publishes a letter in a Brazilian party newspaper calling for open discussion of the Khrushchev report and condemning the ‘cult of personality’. Although he remains a party member, from this point on Amado begins to withdraw from political life and, as Neruda noted, to devote all his energies to his literary career. The result, published in 1958, is the novel for which he is still probably best known, Gabriela, cravo e canela. Set, like the earlier ‘cacao cycle’, in the southern Bahian port of Ilhéus, Gabriela is the ludic, mock-epical and, as some have termed it, ‘picaresque’ love story of Nacib, a local Syrian merchant, and the novel’s heroine, a beautiful ‘cinnamon’-skinned refugee from the drought-stricken north-east whom Nacib fi rst hires to be his cook. Through the vagaries of this cross-class and inter-‘racial’ liaison— from premarital to marital and fi nally to postmarital—Amado weaves the narration of the changing sexual and gender mores of Ilhéus as it gradually undergoes the transition (previously portrayed in Terras do sem fi m and São Jorge de Ilhéus) from coronelismo to modern commercial capitalism. The novel ends with the landmark legal conviction of one of the local cacao ‘colonels’ for the murder of his adulterous wife, the fi rst time in local memory that such a conviction has been obtained. But the story Amado had previously told through epic means, in which a series of personal destinies is presented in such a way that their determination by historical and economic factors is made tangible and concrete, becomes, in Gabriela, a kind of domestic idyll, or, to adopt Doris Sommer’s term in Foundations Fictions (1991), a ‘romance’. 26 No longer depicted as necessary, if likewise tragic and contradictory in its outcome, the transition to modern capitalist

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dependency, symbolised by the fall of the colonels and the rise of the portbased trading houses, becomes, in Gabriela, a subject for farce. Politics recede into the background, to be replaced in the foreground by the theme that is to characterise Amado’s fiction from 1958 on: the exotic, eroticised piquancy of Bahía’s African-Brazilian culture, most often as epitomised in women, music and food. With Gabriela, Amado achieves almost instantaneous acceptance by the Brazilian bourgeois literary establishment. His past sins, above all his orthodox socialist-realist or ‘Zhdanovite’ phase, are forgiven, and he is welcomed into the literary circles and salons that had for years excluded him. The record here is dramatic indeed. Up until 1959, Armado, despite becoming both nationally and internationally famous, had received only two literary prizes: the Premio Graça Aranha in 1936 and the Stalin Prize in 1951. In 1959 alone he receives for Gabriela four major awards, with more to follow in 1961. And, most dramatic of all, in April 1961, he is unanimously elected to a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters, a seat for which, in a historical fi rst, he is the sole and uncontested candidate. Sales of Gabriela are unprecedented for a Brazilian work of fiction. Critics, from the Catholic conservative Tristão de Athayde to the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, hail the Party ‘dissident’ Amado as a literary genius. And, as Wagner observes, those who rush to valorise Amado’s new departure invariably discover in Gabriela a wealth of ‘advances’ in literary form and technique.27 Only a few old communist stalwarts object to the political apology clearly being enacted in Amado’s new novel. 28 Even high-level Brazilian politicians, including presidents Juscelino Kubitschek and Jânio Quadros, eager as they are to plug into Amado’s mass readership, declare themselves fans of Gabriela. Do we not thus have in Gabriela what may virtually be the fi rst ‘boom’ novel? Many of the requisite characteristics seem to be there: the selfconsciously ‘literary’ concern for new formal techniques, the mass sales, the conversion of the author into a national celebrity. It must be admitted that Gabriela, despite its retreat from Amado’s earlier epic and politically impassioned mode of narration, is still a work concerned with the historical portrayal of Brazilian society at a decisive phase. Amado the realist remains very much present in this work despite the new tone of preciosity and farcical remove from history as ‘grand récit’. The obsession with purely formal experiments and ‘language’ has not reached (nor will it in Amado’s subsequent work) anything like the extreme of, say, García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975). There is no Joycean or Faulknerian imprint here. It would perhaps even require some imagination to characterise Gabriela as a work of ‘modernism’ in the full sense of the term. But there can be, to my mind, no doubt about the novel’s distinctively Cold War modernist subtext: above all, the careful retreat from the objectives of social or socialist realism and the avoidance of any open signs of political engagement.

110 Neil Larsen Needless to say, Gabriela will not satisfy the revolutionary-historicist theory of the ‘boom’ novel by sheer virtue of chronology. Amado was certainly to become a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, but in the years 1956–1958 the crucial historical experience for Amado is clearly the Cold War itself and its political impact on the very considerable left-led mass movement in Brazil. But perhaps this suggests a closer link between the canonical ‘boom’ novel and the Cold War than is typically thought to exist. Certainly none of the standard ‘boom’ authors duplicate Amado’s history of intense political activity. Nor do they, like Amado, emerge into modernism out of a prior tradition of historical and social realism. The new political and ideological reality that in 1956 rushes upon an author such as Amado, with catastrophic effect, becomes, for the somewhat younger and more politically disengaged figure of a Fuentes or Cortázar, something more in the nature of a horizon of ideologically unquestioned assumptions. The budding ‘boom’ novelist is more likely an existentialist—via readings of Sartre and Camus—than a militant Leninist. But if the Cuban Revolution results in a sudden, seemingly left-wing inflection within the generally rightward evolution, then its effect, it seems to me, is largely superficial and temporary. As Halperín justly notes, it seems not to have induced the new phase of historical realism that might have been expected if the ideological impact of Cuba were really as profound as is sometimes claimed. What Cuba elicits from the ‘boom’ is, I would argue, a somewhat more militant version of a Latin American nationalism that just as easily supports a Perón or an Omar Torrijos as it does a Fidel. The value of rereading the ‘boom’ through a technically post-canonical novelist such as Amado is, at the very least, that it gives us a clearer picture of what was politically at stake in a literary generation about which there has grown the myth that it was both inevitable and expressive of a Latin American essence. By looking at Gabriela as a virtual ‘boom text’—but also within the context of the Amadian historical realism with which it breaks—the myth of essence, or what we have also termed the myth of modernism itself as consubstantial with a raw, pre-political level of contemporary experience, is more easily shattered. And shattering this myth remains, in my view, a vital task. For if, as we are told, the Cold War is over, its ideological and cultural legacy is still very much with us. NOTES 1. See, inter alia, György Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) and Lukács’ epilogue to his The Destruction of Reason (1954). 2. See Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, new edn (1983; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 101–64. 3. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), p. 94.

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4. See Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 149–90. 5. Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 9–15. 6. Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, p. 2. 7. The classic argument for ‘magic realism’—or the ‘real maravilloso’—is to be found in Alejo Carpentier’s original 1949 preface to El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World): see Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, new edn (1949; Barcelona: Biblioteca del Bolsillo, 2002), pp. iv–xxii. 8. Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1989), p. 239. 9. Cortázar, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa all made notorious pronouncements to this effect, and there has been no lack of critics to echo it back. Even if one were inclined to give some credence to it, it would have to be observed that the formal ‘revolution’ had already in large measure been carried out by pre‘boom’ modernists such as Borges, Asturias and Guimarães Rosa. 10. Rama, ‘El “boom” en perspectiva’, Escritura, Vol. 7 (1979), p. 17. All translations in the essay are my own. 11. Mejía-Duque, Narrativa y neocoloniaje en América Latina (Bogotá: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1977), p. 86. 12. I refer here to the bitter controversy surrounding the jailing of poet Heberto Padilla by the Cuban government for purportedly subversive activities. 13. Mejía-Duque, Narrativa y neocoloniaje, p. 86. 14. Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth, pp. 204–5. 15. Halperín, ‘Nueva narrativa y ciencias sociales hispanoamericanas en la década del sesenta’, in David Viñas, ed., Más allá del boom: Literatura y mercado (Mexico: Marcha Editores, 1981), p. 149. 16. Ibid., p. 150. 17. Ibid., p. 154. 18. Ibid., p. 155. 19. Ibid., p. 155. 20. See Neil Larsen, Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 8–16. 21. Halperín, ‘Nueva narrativa y ciencias sociales hispanoamericanas’, p. 164. 22. To be sure, the naturalist tradition finds as fi rm an anchor here as elsewhere in Latin America. One thinks, above all, of Euclides da Cunha’s vastly influential work Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands, 1902). So, indeed, does modernism, as witness the examples of a Mario de Andrade or what is perhaps the Joycean urtext of Latin American modernism, João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1956). But then what does one do with a Machado de Assis? One might argue the case for a nineteenth-century anomaly here, were it not for the strong claims to realism attributable in turn to a whole series of twentieth-century authors as well, among them Lima Barreto, Rachel de Quierós, Graciliano Ramos and Jorge Amado. 23. See Amado’s Seara vermelha (Crimson Harvest, 1946) and the urban trilogy Os subterrâneos da liberdade (Freedom’s Underground, 1954). 24. For much of the information in what follows I rely on Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida’s highly informative study, Jorge Amado: Política e Literatura (1979). 25. Quoted in Wagner Berno de Almeida, Jorge Amado: Política e Literatura (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Campus, 1979), p. 240.

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26. See Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991). For further commentary on Sommer, see Larsen, Reading North by South, pp. 140–52. 27. Wagner, Jorge Amado, p. 246. 28. Wagner cites the criticism of Paulo Dantas, who sees in Gabriela not a process of ‘maturation’ but rather one of ‘accommodation’, implying a ‘substantial loss in the most primitive and authentic qualities [of Amado as] novelist’ (quoted in ibid., p. 248). Jacob Gorender writes that ‘in Gabriela there disappears the revolutionary sense of the whole that characterizes Amado’s earlier works: the social conflicts are superficial, and the workers come to occupy a very remote and secondary plane’ (quoted in ibid., p. 249). Gorender agrees that in Gabriela Amado transcends some of the schematism of Os subterrâneos da liberdade, but not without paying the price of a political shift to the right.

8

Contested Nationalisms and Socialisms The Role of Theatre in Seeking Liberation for and between Ethiopia and Eritrea Jane Plastow

INTRODUCTION The affect on Africa of the power struggles between the USSR and the US can hardly be overestimated. The continent was the site of ‘proxy wars’ that from the 1960s to the 1990s devastated nations such as Angola, Mozambique and the Congo, while cynical western backing of a range of unscrupulous leaders, such as Joseph Mobutu in the Congo by the US and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia by the USSR, for ideological and strategic reasons, allowed those nations to be economically and militarily plundered. Millions of Africans died, killed by famine and poverty, but also by arms donated freely or sold by superpowers eager to fight with anybody’s bodies but their own.1 The Horn of Africa was a major site of the ideological struggle, and drew in non-African powers ranging from the USSR and the US to the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Cuba and Israel. The Horn consists of five nations—Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti— but throughout the prize was always seen as Ethiopia: large, populous and strategically placed at the centre of its region, close to the Red Sea and straddling the Sahel, the land that links the Arab north to sub-Saharan black Africa. As in so much of the rest of the continent, the roots of the Cold War in the Horn of Africa go back to colonisation by Europe, to growing resentment and resistance to that colonisation after many Africans fought in the Second World War, and to the rise of socialist thought in the intellectual classes from the 1940s as a focus for liberation struggles. However, the situation was complicated in the case of Ethiopia since that nation alone in Africa had never been colonised, but was instead ruled from 1930 to 1974 by its last emperor, Haile Selassie I, a man who claimed direct descent over three thousand years from King Solomon and who was seen by Christian Ethiopians as the divinely ordained leader of God’s chosen people. 2 As an absolute monarch Haile Selassie had no sympathy for socialism, and from 1951 he became a major beneficiary of American aid. By the 1960s the US was paying for the upkeep of 40,000 Ethiopian soldiers, by far the largest army in black Africa, and towards the end of the decade Ethiopia was

114 Jane Plastow receiving 60 per cent of all US military aid given to the continent.3 The origin of that aid brings me to the central theme of this essay: the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea that became the longest war to be fought in twentieth-century Africa, lasting from 1961 to 1991, and the use of theatre by both sides as a major tool of socialist propaganda, politicisation and debate.

THE EARLY YEARS The theatre in modern Ethiopia and Eritrea has always been linked to politics. Ethiopia’s fi rst scripted drama, Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia (Fable: The Comedy of Animals), was a political satire written by a nobleman, Tekle Hawariat, in 1921. The play upset the empress of the time, Zauditu, who promptly banned theatre at court. On his accession in 1930, Haile Selassie reversed this ban and instead promoted and patronised drama throughout his life, building a 1,500-seat theatre in the capital of Addis Ababa and making playwriting a fashion that extended to the country’s fi rst prime minister, Ras Bitwodded (Prince Beloved) Makonnen Endalkatchew, in the 1940s and 1950s. Personally censoring all plays submitted for public performance and regularly attending premieres, he also ensured that this theatre supported his rule, and, from 1930 to 1960, the Ethiopian stage was dominated by plays that celebrate imperial and nationalist history and glorify the links between state, crown and Orthodox Christianity. All plays were written in Amharic, the mother tongue of around 25 per cent of Ethiopians, and were performed for an elite audience initially in hotels and later in the theatres of Addis Ababa.4 During the same period, theatre was also developing in Eritrea amidst political transformation. The country had been created by Italian colonialism—constituted as it now is in 1890—and in 1920 the Italians built an elaborate opera house in the capital, Asmara, although Eritreans were forbidden entry either to watch or to perform on stage. In 1941 the British drove the Italians out of both Eritrea and Ethiopia—which had been occupied in 1935—and after 1945 were given a United Nations mandate to oversee Eritrea until its future could be decided by the international community. The great powers had to consider what to do with the former Italian colonies: The US favoured union for Eritrea with Ethiopia on the basis of a shared history, at least of the Christian highlands, while the Soviet Union argued for independence. Eventually a five-nation commission set up by the UN decided to award Eritrea to Ethiopia, but under federation rather than by simple union. In post-independence Eritrea it is often elided or even denied, but there is evidence that many Christian Eritreans in the early 1950s wanted to join with Ethiopia. One source of such evidence is the work of Alemayehu Kahsay. 5 Although Alemayehu had worked backstage at the Italian opera house and had fallen in love with theatre, it was

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only in 1946, under the British administration, that he was permitted to set up the fi rst Eritrean arts organisation, Mahber Tewasew Dekabat (Native Theatre Association), which hosted a range of events from beauty contests to musicals, concerts and plays.6 Alemayehu was also a political activist and was briefly imprisoned by the British for his role as chairman of the Unity Association of Eritrea with Ethiopia. There is no evidence that Alemayehu was influenced by capitalist or communist ideology; rather he was a Christian nationalist who felt he had links to Ethiopia rather than to Eritrea’s other neighbour, Arabic Sudan. Alemeyehu sought to stem the influence of Sudanese music by developing an Eritrean concert group and by putting on plays such as Ali ab Asmara (Ali in Asmara, 1951), a script by Gebremeskel Gebregzibher which mocked Arab traders and sought to promote a boycott of their shops in Asmara. Other plays called for Eritrean freedom from western domination, such as Berhe Mesgun’s N’bret Z’halefe Eritrea (Eritrea’s Past Property, 1946), or argued overtly for union with Ethiopia, as in Aden Gualn (Mother and Daughter, c.1950), which portrayed Eritrea as the child of Ethiopia.7 Alemayehu and the Unity Association got their preferred outcome, but America was also a major beneficiary of the deal. Ethiopia started to get US arms and military training, and in return the Americans got Kagnew Station, established in 1953, which hosted some 3,000 US personnel on the edge of Asmara and was an important site in their global radio monitoring and communications. Ethiopia even sent a battalion, equipped and transported by the US, to help in the Korean War.8 Within Ethiopia itself, as in Eritrea, there is little evidence of cultural awareness of the ideological struggles of the great powers. Haile Selassie maintained strict censorship of all media and few of his citizens were literate, so knowledge of international affairs was very limited. As in Eritrea, theatre tended to be nationalist, pro-Christian and heavily moralistic. I have found only one pre-1960 play that sought to engage with global politics, Kebede Mikael’s Hannibal (1956–1957), which uses historical metaphor to question relations between Africa and the West and to critique the ever-bickering Ethiopian court. Kebede’s play is set in the Second Punic War and portrays the eponymous hero as a brilliant, well-loved leader who wins a stunning victory against the Romans. However, back in Carthage the senate is so jealous of his success that they refuse to send him reinforcements or fi nance, allowing internecine squabbling to so weaken the state that it falls to Rome. It would have been unthinkable at this time to overtly criticise Haile Selassie’s government, but Kebede’s play hints at such in a speech given by an ordinary Carthaginian citizen: It [the battle] is also a question of race and the future. If the Romans are victorious the white men will take control. They will have wealth and knowledge, and their empire over the world will endure. Europe will long be mistress of the universe; she will have prosperity, science,

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As in Berhe’s Eritrea’s Past Property, Kebede Mikael’s argument is about Europe versus Africa rather than about socialist ideology, but he does look outside national borders for historical parallels in an attempt to broaden socio-political debate.10

POLITICISATION OF THE ETHIOPIAN STAGE In the late 1950s, Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, Tesfaye Gessesse and Mengistu Lemma were all sent to study in the West with the Emperor’s personal blessing. In Britain, France and America, the young Ethiopian playwrights saw both classical and contemporary western theatre and became interested—to varying degrees—in movements for left-wing political change. With a raft of socially progressive ideas, they returned ready to implement new notions about form and content in their drama, representing the first generation of professional playwrights and directors the country had produced. Until the fall of the Emperor in 1974, they were to dominate the Ethiopian stage, particularly Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, who used his position as vicedirector of the Haile Selassie I Theatre to put on a number of his own plays, as well as translations of Molière and Shakespeare. The great change was that for the fi rst time ordinary people and their concerns became central, a feature augmented by a move towards greater naturalism in staging. So one of Tsegaye’s most famous plays, Ye Kermasow (A Man of the People, 1966), deals with two poor urban brothers demoralised by their poverty and the depravity of the city. Going back to the rural past is rejected as a solution, and instead the playwright hints at the need for concerted action by the people. One of the brothers, fi nding his nephew in tears, is clear in his reproach: ‘Anger and insurrection’ is the answer to current misery, for ‘[a] boy will not be strong and cured with lamentations, unless he stands up with a will’.11 Tsegaye’s strongly felt need to challenge the old order was mirrored in plays such as Mengistu Lemma’s satiric Yelacha Gebacha (Marriage of Unequals, 1963) which features a clash between a naive young western educated teacher and his appallingly snobbish antediluvian aunt. The concerns of such plays were summarised in Tsegaye’s comments on Ye Kermasow: ‘The theme raises the then burning issue of the socio-economic gap between the old and the young rising generation. It looks back at the old class structure [and] raises the bitter and avoided question of what the future should be’.12 However, like so many Africans seeking control over their own destiny, Tsegaye looked for a specifically African renaissance and warned of the dangers of both communism and western capitalism.

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‘[T]he problem’, he wrote, is ‘how to bring about a modern image of Africanist thought without having to succumb to the materialistic hands of a technological civilisation, or without having to gamble with the possible contamination of a Marxist ideology’.13 Throughout this period, Ethiopian theatre grew increasingly popular with middle-class and youth audiences, despite playwrights experiencing more and more problems in getting their socially and politically critical work on stage. However, the revolution of 1974 would dynamise this theatre further and make it a leading site of political debate. The story of the ‘creeping coup’, that saw army officers gradually strip the Ethiopian court of its personnel until, in March 1974, they removed the strangely passive and aging emperor in a Volkswagen Beetle, has been told by many commentators.14 The coup was led by the Derg, an association of discontented army officers, which, when assuming power, held no particular political ideology and were happy to continue to accept military support from the US. Nor were they initially committed to maintaining military rule. As a result, for the next three years Addis Ababa was the site of political ferment as various groups and ideologies competed for political dominance. In 1974 there were no Marxist movements in Ethiopia, but by 1976 all contenders for power were calling on some kind of socialist ideology, and indeed the period ended with the Red Terror of 1977–1978 which saw Mengistu Haile Mariam, a Derg member, seize power as a hardline Marxist military dictator.15 During the four years of turmoil, the now uncensored theatre became a key site of political debate, with audiences—in search of information and ideas—queuing round the block for popular plays. Anecdotal evidence asserts that Ethiopian theatre was a major forum for debating political alternatives, and playwrights and theatre workers took active roles in seeking to influence political direction both on and off the stage.16 The fi rst theatrical shot was Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin’s Ha Hu Ba Sidist Wore (ABC in Six Months, 1974).17 Ha Hu was written in thirteen days and tells in episodic form the story of a young teacher who is driven almost insane by a toxic compound of love and fi nancial problems. He fi nally rejects the traditional Christian-influenced notion that one should accept one’s lot with resignation and calls for radical if unspecified change in the whole fabric of society. Crucially, hope is seen to reside in a soldier relative who, as a representative of the revolutionary military, shows the way to sanity and salvation. The play ran for an unprecedented six months and filled the National Theatre for every performance. Meanwhile Tesfaye Gessesse had taken charge of Addis Ababa’s oldest theatre, the Ager Fikir, and produced a range of experimental plays. Mengistu Lemma’s Balekabara Baledaba (The Mighty and the Lowly, 1974) follows the careers of two idealistic young men as they return from higher education in Europe. One becomes a minister, rejecting his peasant father and background, while the other remains in poverty, even losing his aristocratic girlfriend as the price of retaining his integrity. Tesfaye also put on a

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musical by Taddele Gebre-Hiwot called Man Now Etiopiawe? (Who is the Ethiopian?, 1975). This play openly engages with Cold War politics, asking whether Ethiopia should give its allegiance to the Soviet Union or the western capitalist powers. Harking back to Kebede’s Hannibal, the playwright argues that Ethiopia should take a non-aligned position and seek a specifically Ethiopian solution in relation to future political decisions. A fi nal example of the range of this early anti-imperial theatre is Tesfaye’s own play, Iqaw (Thing, 1975). Strongly reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial (1925), Iqaw purports to be set in southern Africa and follows the history of a young man, Zaki, sometimes called Iqaw, imprisoned for an unspecified but apparently political crime. Zaki, who is uninterested in politics, cannot confess to a crime that he is not sure he has committed. The author mocks proliferating and often competing revolutionary movements in this early speech: I knew nothing about what they were after. All their jargon was new to me: PLF, ZeePLF, DPU, WAPU, ZAPU, QUAPU. Shit! Little they knew that I didn’t give a damn for their political causes or programs they associated me with. To hell with their isms—busy—body—or goody— goodisms. All I care for is love. Making love, not making war.18 As with so many Ethiopian and Eritrean playwrights, the primary political feeling of the hero is one of patriotism. ‘Loyalty to one’s self and loyalty to one’s people’, he states, is the ideal: ‘I may not know what I am—but surely I know what I want to be! A patriot! That’s right! A lover of his people and his country’.19 Zaki is tried by figures ranging from the white Lord Ha Ha through to a group of senile tribal leaders, all of whom are portrayed as corrupt and self-serving, and eventually he is driven insane. Iqaw’s main targets are obviously colonial and indigenous traditional leaders, but, as with a number of plays of this time, no solution is proffered, just the suggestion that continuation of the old ways is stultifying and driving the younger generation into madness. 20 In 1974, the Derg had spoken of a rapid handover of power to civilian rule, although when they showed little sign of relinquishing authority, discontent grew and opposition civilian groups established themselves. By 1976, these movements were organising demonstrations, one of which was led by the actors of the National Theatre, who in the early days of the revolution had been inspired to garland army tanks with flowers. Actors in Ethiopia had always been poorly paid and viewed as lower class, so given Tsegaye’s left-wing rhetoric they had hoped he would work for improved conditions, possibly giving up some of the 40 per cent box office receipts that routinely went to writers and directors. By April 1976 none of this had happened and the actors took to the streets, to be joined by personnel from the Ager Fikir, demanding job security, guaranteed wages, pensions and union rights, and shouting such slogans as ‘Art for the people’, ‘Down

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with Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin’ and ‘Tsegaye is a bourgeois at heart’. As they neared Derg headquarters the military opened fi re: a musician was killed, eighty people were arrested and the rest fled. The subsequent actions of the Derg demonstrated that they were wary of losing popular sympathy. Most actors were let go, and only ten were held for interrogation, with even these set free after six months. 21 Tsegaye was held for three weeks and lost his job, while the actors won most of their demands and emerged as full state employees. The violence that met the demonstration was a warning of what was to come. In September 1976, civilian parties started fighting with each other in a situation that rapidly escalated into a form of civil war, at least in the capital. By 1977, the military had joined in and indeed spearheaded the violence: According to Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, some 30,000 people, mostly left-wingers, were imprisoned and thousands killed in the Red Terror.22 It was during this period that Ethiopia officially switched allegiance from the US to the USSR. Initially, America had maintained support for the new regime, but the Derg kept pressing for more military hardware and America grew wary, especially after a wave of nationalisations of key industries. In February 1977, President Carter announced his decision to suspend military assistance to regimes that did not respect human rights. The Derg had already approached the USSR for military aid, and severing links with the US was one of the conditions laid down by the Kremlin. In May 1977, Mengistu returned from Moscow with a secret agreement for military aid, and almost immediately massive consignments began to arrive in the biggest military operation undertaken by the USSR since World War Two.23

THEATRE AND THE WAR IN ERITREA Only a few of the imported arms were needed to maintain order in Addis Ababa. The majority were needed for the major battles the Derg were fighting elsewhere: on the border with Somalia, where irredentist forces were demanding the Ogaden, a southern Ethiopian region inhabited by ethnic Somalis, and above all in Eritrea where a liberation struggle had been developing since 1961. In terms of the Cold War, it is significant that both Somalia and Eritrea had declared themselves Marxist long before the Ethiopian revolution. Somalia had become communist in 1969 under Siad Barre, who attracted substantial Soviet support until he invaded the Ogaden in July 1977. The USSR then found itself in the embarrassing position of arming both sides, until it made the strategic decision that Ethiopia represented the more ‘genuine’ Marxist-Leninist state and cut off supplies to the Somalis. In Eritrea, the liberation struggle began when Haile Selassie manoeuvred to end the federation agreement and make Eritrea simply another Ethiopian region. In the early years, limited support was offered to the Eritreans by Cuba, Syria and Iraq, and the liberation movement gradually grew in

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strength via two competing organisations, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), which would eventually fight a civil war. By 1977, the EPLF had gained the ascendency and was poised to drive Ethiopian forces out of the country. However, a massive USSR operation, now supported by a Cuba which had changed sides, drove the EPLF into a ‘strategic withdrawal’ to the northern mountains of the Sahel.24 Here they would regroup, reorganise and eventually defeat eight huge offensives, until they began an advance in the late 1980s that led to liberation and to the overthrow of Mengistu’s regime in 1991. 25 Throughout this crisis, theatre was one of the many weapons called upon by both sides to conscientise and propagandise the Eritrean population. As Haile Selassie’s high-handed approach to federation with Eritrea became apparent, theatre associations expressed their nationalism through resistance to Ethiopian takeover and through a promotion of the idea of a unique Eritrean identity. From 1961 to the mid-1970s, the Mahber Theatre Asmara (Asmara Theatre Association) took the cultural lead in promoting the cause of Eritrean independence, often through allegorical plays that could evade censorship. A common theme was that of an abused mother and her nine children, these representing the nine different language groups of the country. Solomon Gebregzhier’s play Zeyweres Habti (Uninherited Wealth, 1973) is a typical example where the ‘mother’—Eritrea—is forcibly married to a man—Ethiopia—who desires her wealth, and her children are forced to murder the man to set her free. Such plays were hugely popular and there are descriptions of crowds of thousands trying to get in to Saturday afternoon performances. However, as Solomon himself explained in an interview with the author, the playwrights were always aware of the looming presence of governmental censors: There were political songs and theatres always, but they had to be performed on the theme of love or of admiring the beauty of nature. We were always being thrown in prison; the prison was like a second home for us. We were visiting there all the time, once or twice a week sometimes. Whenever we performed they would call us and remove us for it.26 Eventually the Derg consolidated its power, and the censorship rules, reintroduced in 1975, became almost impossible to evade. Indeed, building on experiences in Ethiopia, the Derg sought to appropriate theatre as its own propaganda tool. One of the opposition civilian groups, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), had fi rst used agitprop theatre in 1975, and even though the Derg crushed these intellectual socialists in the Red Terror, they learnt much of their Marxism from its members and took up the idea of agitprop for their own purposes. In 1976, the big theatres of Addis Ababa were turned over to agit-prop productions with titles reminiscent of the early USSR socialist-realist theatre: Damachin (Our Struggle, c.1977), Tigil Ledil (Struggle for Victory, c.1977) and Keyu Machid (The

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Red Sickle, c.1977). 27 Little detailed information is available about these pieces, but they did experiment with forms new to the Addis Ababa stage: Damachin, for example, was a mime-dance production, and the former iron grip of the playwright-director was challenged with a number of pieces being credited as cooperatively created. The Derg also set up nationwide Peasants Associations and encouraged these groups to put on short propaganda plays about governmental objectives. It was this range of genres and techniques they then attempted to transpose to Eritrea, where arts activists such as Solomon Gebreghzier were forced to change sides and make theatre for the state. As he has commented: It was part of the government’s policy that theatre associations be established in every town [ . . . ]. It was thought I was a dangerous man who needed to be carefully controlled, but that I would also make a good propaganda weapon. So I prepared everything under strict control, but sometimes I relaxed things a little [and] would sneak in some Eritrean politics and people would understand them. 28 Informants have told me that since everyone knew these plays were put on under duress no-one blamed the play-makers unduly. An interesting side effect was that these theatrical campaigns by the Derg brought drama for the fi rst time to the ordinary villages of the Ethiopian empire.

THE EPLF’S THEATRE FOR LIBERATION If in Ethiopia the only amateur or professional plays that could be staged were those that toed the Derg line and advocated strict Marxist-Leninist ideas, in Eritrea radical theatre fled to join the liberation forces. Both the ELF and the EPLF saw the value of using the talents of famous performers who joined their ranks; the ELF, for example, attracted some star musicians who regularly performed for the troops. However, the major development of the arts as a recognised part of the liberation struggle took place within the EPLF after the ‘strategic withdrawal’. A Division of Culture was set up to promote the Front’s political and military objectives, establishing performance groups at every level of the organisation. Each platoon was tasked with putting on an entertainment on rest days, exceptional performers were seconded to brigade cultural troupes, and from these were selected the members of the Central Cultural Troupe, who worked as artists fulltime except in periods of most pressing military need. However, groups were also established in other EPLF organisations. The Red Flowers were the children’s groups developed in the EPLF revolutionary schools, while the women of the displaced camp followers had their own group, as did the personnel of the ‘The White House’ medical centre famous for their productions of Shakespeare. Disabled fighters set up a troupe, as did Ethiopian

122 Jane Plastow prisoners of war who were renowned for their female impersonations. 29 A typical EPLF entertainment was conducted on a hillside at night for fear of the Russian MiG fighter planes, and would often go on for up to four hours, featuring the traditional music and dance of all nine Eritrean nationalities, plus more ‘modern’ music and comedy.30 As few people knew about theatre beyond the urban elites, drama initially played only a small part in these entertainments. The man charged with changing this was Alemseged Tesfai, a lawyer by training who had left his doctoral studies in America in 1975 to join the EPLF. Alemseged was one of only a tiny number of highly educated Eritreans at this time and he spent most of his fi rst years with the Front developing educational curricula for revolutionary schools. To his great surprise, in 1981 he was assigned to the Division of Culture with particular responsibility for advancing theatre and literature. After conducting research with the limited books at his disposal, Alemseged wrote the fi rst Eritrean textbooks on drama and literature; he also wrote and directed some of the most renowned plays of the liberation struggle.31 Not only Alemseged, but all those involved in this developing Eritrean theatre said they learnt through ‘trial and error’. 32 Obviously the plays had a strong propaganda element since they were meant to hearten the troops for continuing a war in which they knew they were likely to die. Solomon Dirar’s thriller, Metsawedia (The Snare, c.1983), for example, is about a heroic liberation fighter who has been trapped in Ethiopian occupied territory and needs to escape. He cunningly outwits a double-crossing Eritrean traitor and is always presented as cool, calm and highly intelligent. Even at the beginning of the play when our hero, Demsas, is trapped up a tree, we are told: ‘He’s happy, relaxed and not a bit afraid. He sits proudly among the trees. He has a nice red rifle’.33 What is unusually interesting about emerging EPLF theatre is that, by interweaving nationalist propaganda with social education and by prioritising social issues, it sought to discuss the kind of revolutionary society Eritrea was seeking to build. As most recruits to the EPLF were illiterate peasants, and uniquely a third were women, the EPLF sought to use culture as a tool in the mission to transform the country from a feudal, ethnically divided nation into a progressive socialist state. An example of one of a number of plays that sought to address gender issues is Afewerki Abraha’s Kemsie Ntazachrewn Nehru (If It Had Been Like This, 1980). Opening with an announcer asking ‘[i]f it was like this . . . ?’, the play goes on to show a woman behaving as many traditional Eritrean men might, beating her husband after going to work, staying out late and engaging in promiscuous sexual relations. The comic element was exaggerated by the actress playing the wife being unusually small while her abused husband was very tall. Farce this may have been, but underlying it was a serious endeavour to grapple with a major theme in Eritrean liberation theatre, the promotion of women’s rights and gender equality, made all the more urgent by the presence of so many female fighters.34

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The most famous playwright of this period is undoubtedly Alemseged Tesfai, although initially, like all others in this regime of socialist equality where individualism was to be subsumed in communal effort, his name was not publicised as the writer of plays attributed solely to the Central Cultural Troupe. Alemseged wrote three plays in the early 1980s: Luul (Luul, 1983), about a female factory worker who operates as an undercover EPLF agent; Anqtzi (Meningitis, 1983), which warned of the endemic disease and spoke of doctors’ struggle to contain it; and above all Eli Kal’a Quinat (The Other War, 1984), Alemseged’s acknowledged masterpiece.35 The Other War, taken on a year-long tour in 1984, is based on a true story and tells of the family of Letiyesus, an Eritrean woman living in Asmara under Ethiopian occupation. Her unseen son is a liberation fighter in the mountains, but her daughter, Aster, has married an Ethiopian officer and at the beginning of the play returns with her family to live with Letiyesus. Aster has two children, a daughter from an abusive marriage to an Eritrean man, arranged by her mother, and a baby son by her new union with the officer. The strength of the play lies in the exploration of complex family and national loyalties. Aster has turned against Eritrea because of the abuse she suffered as a young woman in her first marriage and has no scruples about acting as a local official on behalf of Ethiopia. Despite the unease this caused among colleagues who wanted more straightforward propaganda, Alemseged insisted on critiquing aspects of Eritrean society through exposure of Letiyesus’ character flaws, but also spoke to the anti-feudal politicising agenda of the EPLF. This is seen in the inter-generational conflicts in the text, as captured in a speech by Aster: If you think you are losing me now, you are mistaken Mother. Remember that day, when I was only a child, when I could not tell good from bad, when the taste of knowledge was still fresh in my mind . . . remember when you married me off to Zacharias? That’s when you lost me. Yes, Mother, you and father gave me to a drunkard, just because his parents had money and some fancy titles. You didn’t even notice that I was only half his age. Now, who are you to give me any advice?36 The play’s focus gradually turns to the next generation as embodied in Aster’s half-Eritrean, half-Ethiopian baby son, Kitaw. Letiyesus’ continuing prejudices mean that she sees her new grandson as ugly and vile simply because he is half-Ethiopian, while the officer-father views him as a tool for breeding out Eritrean identity. The real heroine of the play is Aster’s teenage daughter, Solomie, who identifies with the Eritrean liberation struggle but who can still love her little brother. Eventually Letiyesus agrees not only to smuggle both her grandchildren out to the liberated areas, but also, significantly, to rename Kitaw (meaning ‘punish them’ in the imposed imperial language of Amaric): ‘Don’t ever call him Kitaw again’, she demands, ‘Call him ‘Awet’ . . . that means victory, you know’.37 Eritrean socialism and language—‘Awet’ is a Tigrinya word—triumph over Amhara imperialism as

124 Jane Plastow the officer is left raging and Aster desolate, but The Other War raises complex issues and does not allow the simple binary of ‘good’ Eritrea and ‘evil’ Ethiopia. Ideology and propaganda are ever present but mediated through family relationships and social history. Notably the play is seen primarily through the eyes of strong female characters, a trope that is predominant in Alemseged’s theatre, as he plays his part in the drive to improve women’s standing in Eritrean society.

CONCLUSION The fi nal collapse of the USSR and the consequent end of the Cold War coincided very closely with the defeat of the Derg and with the achievement of Eritrean independence from Ethiopia in May 1991. In both nations, theatre had been a major weapon of the war between the two, although its role as a vehicle for social and political change had lessened over time. In Ethiopia, even by the mid-1980s when I fi rst arrived in the country, Dergsponsored theatre was seen as self-serving propaganda and attracted little interest, with people preferring the non-political comedies and translations that were allowed through the censors’ net. After 1991, the government has continued to espouse socialist ideas, although the promised liberalisation of government control of the theatres has not materialised and there is today little socially or politically critical comment in Ethiopian theatre, which has tended to focus on comedy, uncontroversial history and translations from abroad.38 In contrast, Eritrea’s post-independence government of Isaias Afwerki at fi rst promoted a range of arts practices, including theatre, that were free to engage with social and political issues, and encouraged community debate, albeit within a broadly socialist framework. 39 However, after the Eritrea-Ethiopia war of 1998–2000, the president has become increasingly authoritarian and dictatorial, closing down all free debate and refusing to implement the promised multi-party constitution. In recent years, theatre has become little more than state propaganda and a flourishing community arts movement has all but closed down. In both nations, theatre is currently of little socio-political significance as writers and performers exercise self-censorship for fear of severe political repercussions. However, in both places there are also plenty of activists biding their time and looking for spaces where they will once again be able to use the arts to engage with and critique the politics of oppression, whether they go under the name of capitalism or communism.40 NOTES 1. For more information on the Cold War in the Horn of Africa, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions in the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 250–87.

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2. For further information, see Wallis Budge’s translation of the Kebre Negast, the national myth of origins, entitled The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menelik (1932). 3. John Markakis, Ethiopia: Anatomy of a Traditional Polity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 257–8. 4. For information on Ethiopian theatre under Haile Selassie, see Jane Plastow, African Theatre and Politics: The Evolution of Theatre in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 50–9, 91–105. 5. Eritreans and Ethiopians are all known by their fi rst name since the second name is the father’s fi rst name. I have adhered to this usage in this essay. 6. For my information on this period of Eritrean theatre I am greatly indebted to Christine Matzke’s unpublished PhD thesis, ‘En-gendering Theatre in Eritrea: The Roles and Representations of Women in the Performing Arts’ (2003). 7. With the exceptions of two of Alemseged Tesfai’s plays printed in his Two Weeks in the Trenches: Reminiscences of Childhood and War in Eritrea (1997) and one act plays by Mesgun Zerai, Solomon Dirar and Esaias Tseggai in Jane Plastow’s edited Three Eritrean Plays (2005), I know of no published Eritrean drama. Dates given therefore always refer to fi rst productions. 8. Markakis, Ethiopia, p. 257. 9. Kebede, quoted in Stephen Wright, ‘Amharic Literature’, Something, Vol. 1. No. 1 (1963), p. 14. 10. For more on Kebede Mikael, see Albert S. Gerard, Four African Literatures: Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, Amharic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 321–30, and Plastow, African Theatre and Politics, pp. 56–60. 11. Tsegaye, Ye Kermasow (Addis Ababa: Berhanenna Press, 1966), p. 76. 12. Quoted in Debebe Seifu, ‘Ethiopian Literature in English’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Addis Ababa University, 1980), unknown pagination. 13. Tsegaye, ‘Literature and the African Public’ (1967), Tezeta.net, http://tezeta. net/18/literature-and-the-african-public (accessed 11 March 2011). 14. See Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (1978), Rene Lefort, Ethiopia: An Heretical Revolution? (1983) and Christopher Clapham, Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia (1988). 15. See Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, The Ethiopian Revolution (London: Verso, 1981), pp. 99–104. 16. I researched the topic extensively in Ethiopia in the late 1980s and this information is drawn from conversations about theatre during the revolution, both casual and more formal, with many theatre workers. 17. Many Ethiopian plays were unpublished or else I have been unable to track down publication details. Therefore, unless otherwise specified, dates given refer to fi rst performances. 18. Tesfaye, Iqaw, trans. Tesfaye Gessesse (1975; unpublished translated manuscript, 1986), p. 2. 19. Ibid., p. 5. 20. For more information on theatre in revolutionary Ethiopia, see Plastow, African Theatre and Politics, pp. 144–62, 203–31. 21. One of these ten, the actor and later director Debebe Eshetu, says he was accused in detention of working for the CIA: see Debebe, ‘A Note on Post Revolution Ethiopian Theatre’, in Anatoly Gromyko, ed., Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Moscow: Novaka Publishers, 1986), p. 112. 22. See Halliday and Molyneux, Ethiopian Revolution, p. 123.

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23. Rene Lefort, Ethiopia: An Heretical Revolution? (London: Zed, 1983), pp. 207–8. 24. See Awet T. Weldemichael, ‘The Eritrean Long March: The Strategic Withdrawal of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), 1978– 1979’, The Journal of Military History, Vol. 73, No. 4 (October 2009), pp. 1231–71. 25. For more information on the Eritrean liberation struggle, see Alemseged Tesfai, Two Weeks in the Trenches (2003), Dan Connell, Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution (1993) and Ruth Iyob, The Eritrean Struggle for Independence: Domination, Resistance, Nationalism, 1941– 1993 (1995). 26. Author interview with Solomon Gebregzhier, Asmara, August 1995. 27. Information on precise dates for these plays’ production appears to have been lost. Damachin was a co-operatively created mime-dance piece directed by Taddele Worku at the National Theatre; Tigil Ledil was produced at the City Hall Theatre and written by Denekew Assaye; and Keyu Machid was written by Tesfaye Abebe, who put on most of his plays at his private theatre company Tesfaye Abebe Ye Theatre Budn. 28. Author interview with Solomon Gebregzhier, Asmara, August 1995. 29. For more information on liberation theatre in Eritrea, see Christine Matzke, ‘Shakespeare and Surgery in the Eritrean Liberation Struggle: Performance Culture in Orota’, Journal of Eritrean Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2004), pp. 26–40, Christine Matzke, ‘Gender Drama: Cross-Dressing and Role Reversals in the Eritrean Performing Arts’, in Susan Arndt, Eckhard Breitinger and Marek Spitczak von Brisinski, eds, Theatre, Performance and New Media in Africa (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2007), pp. 51–88, and Jane Plastow, ‘Theatre of Confl ict in the Eritrean Independence Struggle’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 50 (1997), pp. 144–54. 30. EPLF cultural shows were not just for fighters; they were toured to the liberated and semi-liberated areas that the Front increasingly controlled, out to the huge diaspora living over the border in Sudan, and in the later 1980s on to the substantial Eritrean communities in Italy and the USA. Shows by the Central Cultural Troupe could tour for up to a year. 31. For more information on Alemseged Tesfai, see Jane Plastow, ‘Alemseged Tesfai: A Playwright in Service to Eritrean Liberation’, in Martin Banham, James Gibbs and Femi Osofisan, eds, African Theatre in Development (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), pp. 54–60, and Christine Matzke, ‘“Life in the Camp of the Enemy”: Alemseged Tesfai’s Theatre of War’, in Ernest N. Emenyonu, ed., War in African Literature Today (Oxford: James Currey, 2008), pp. 15–32. 32. See Jane Plastow and Solomon Tsehaye, ‘Making Theatre for a Change: Two Plays of the Eritrean Liberation Struggle’, in Richard Boon and Jane Plastow, eds, Theatre Matters: Performance and Culture on the World Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 36–54. 33. Solomon, The Snare, trans. Solomon Dirar, in Jane Plastow, ed., Three Eritrean Plays (Leeds: Alumnus, 2005), p. 39. 34. For more on this play, see Plastow and Solomon, ‘Making Theatre for a Change’, pp. 38–42. 35. Both Luul and The Other War are available in English in Alemseged Tesfai, Two Weeks in the Trenches Reminiscences of Childhood and War in Eritrea (2003), and The Other War is also in Martin Banham and Jane Plastow, eds, Contemporary African Plays (1999). Anqtzi has not been translated into English or published.

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36. Alemseged, The Other War, trans. Alemseged Tesfai, in Martin Banham and Jane Plastow, eds, Contemporary African Plays (London: Methuen, 1999), p. 275. 37. Ibid., p. 295. 38. Despite his claims to socialism, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zadawi has been closely associated with and greatly approved of by such western leaders as Britain’s Tony Blair. 39. See Jane Plastow, ‘The Eritrea Community-Based Theatre Project’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 52 (1997), pp 386–95; Ali Campbell, Christine Matzke, Gerri Moriarty, Renny O’Shea and Jane Plastow, ‘Telling the Lion’s Tale: Making Theatre in Eritrea’, in Martin Banham, James Gibbs and Femi Osofisan, eds, African Theatre in Development (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), pp. 38–53; and Christine Matzke and Jane Plastow, ‘Children’s Theatre in Eritrea’, in Martin Banham, James Gibbs and Femi Osofisan, eds, African Theatre: Youth (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), pp. 138–50. 40. This conclusion is based on my ongoing discussions with theatre artists in both nations who cannot be named for political reasons.

9

‘With Friends Like These . . . ’ Soviet Travel Writing about Czechoslovakia during the Khrushchev Era Margarita Marinova

In a recent book about the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Leonid Shinkarev mentions a little-known fact about Soviet attempts to deal with the crisis a few months before the involvement of the army. In May of that year, the KGB authorised the dispatch to the politically troubled country of thirty Soviet spies who, under the guise of western tourists, were expected to infiltrate the counter-revolutionary forces. ‘People from the West’, Moscow reasoned, would surely earn the trouble-makers’ trust a lot faster than certain ‘neighbours from eastern Europe’, and could successfully help to uncover and thwart future conspiracies.1 The anecdote allegorises the wideranging Soviet use of travel and tourism as official ideological tools. Never intended or experienced as purely a ‘leisure activity’, as a simple means of taking the traveller to ‘sites outside the normal places of residence or work’, sovetskii turizm was a ‘ritual of reassurance for the state’, a powerful propaganda weapon meant to confi rm the Soviet citizens’ perception of themselves as politically and culturally superior to the peoples of visited lands. 2 The act of ‘spying on the other’ promoted the military, psychological and physical betterment of the self, and was an implicit part of the job of the conscientious traveller both within and beyond the actual borders of Soviet Russia.3 The KGB’s choice of cover for its agents following the events of the Prague Spring thus serves as an explicit reification of the symbolic meaning of the act of touring other cultures in the eastern bloc. Naturally, the processes that governed Soviet travel and tourist practices and perceptions are much more complicated than any extended metaphors would imply. There is precious little published scholarly work about tourism in the Soviet context and, as the pioneers in the field, Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, have noted, the existing material is not only varied but also contradictory in terms of the conclusions drawn about whether official Soviet tourists succeeded or failed to achieve their overall goals of educating and emotionally uplifting their fellow citizens abroad and the armchair travellers back home.4 Part of the problem is the very public nature of the primary sources available for academic study. For instance, there exists a repository of the reports (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii) that tour leaders, after a completed trip, needed to submit to Inturist and

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the Tourist Excursion Bureau (Turistsko-ekskursionnoe upravlenie) of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (Vsesoiuznyi tsentral’nyi sovet professionalnyikh soiuzov). Although these reports offer us the best chance to study the fi rst-hand experiences of Soviet citizens elsewhere, as Gorsuch has argued, they are still shaped by their specific audiences and therefore self-censor much (if not most) of the personal responses to the discovered differences between home and abroad.5 The official proceedings from yearly conferences held by Inturist and the Tourist Excursion Bureau offer an even less reliable basis for assessing the varied nature of Soviet encounters with alterity. Still, both of these kinds of source merit further investigation if we hope to attain a more complex understanding of the history of tourism and travel in the USSR. Although the present essay also seeks to contribute to this goal, it chooses a different path to do so. It concerns itself with published travel accounts about Czechoslovakia from the period between Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, and investigates the extent to which imperialistic desires for subjugation and domination were present in writings about the satellite states. For primary material I turn to the work of Vladimir Nikolaevich Druzhinin, a reputable Soviet travel author and an established writer of fiction. In travel accounts such as the popular U chekhoslovatskikh druzei (Visiting Our Czechoslovakian Friends, 1956), Puteshestvie po Chekhoslovakii (A Journey around Czechoslovakia, 1956), V Chekhoslovakii (In Czechoslovakia, 1957) and Bez perevodchika (Without a Translator, 1965), Soviet readers met with stereotypes of their east-central European ‘brothers’ that helped to establish ideas about the solid foundations of the friendship between the two countries, and that later provided an alibi for the military invasion and the continued presence of USSR forces in Czechoslovakia. Undoubtedly, Druzhinin’s texts reflected contemporary anxieties about the strength or otherwise of the wider Soviet bloc. The key slogans of the Soviet propaganda efforts to regulate official and unofficial relationships between the socialist states (‘Friendship of the People’, ‘Socialist Internationalism’) aimed to summon ideas about peaceful coexistence and commitment to social justice in classless societies around the world. However, the implicit message went beyond the concern with the future of the proletariat. Because such propaganda addressed people not just along the lines of class but also, more importantly for the present argument, across national divides, it established the national as central to the internationalist movement.6 Scholars of Soviet literature have already noted a particular obsession with the topic of national identity during the studied period, arguing that it should be viewed as a by-product of the USSR’s continued efforts to assert its imperialistic primacy. Soviet travel writing about territories beyond the Russian ‘motherland’ (rodina) provides an especially clear example of how the concern with the national translates into what Ewa Thompson has termed ‘expansive nationalism’: specifically, a kind of nationalism that looks ‘outward, rather than toward itself’ and, as a result,

130 Margarita Marinova that is ‘less aware of its own chauvinism and its colonial desire’.7 Marked by an awareness of ‘present glories and successes in imposing on Others one’s own self-perception’, it harbours cravings for territorial appropriation and for the imposition of cultural and institutional modes of thinking.8 When viewed from this perspective, Druzhinin’s work sheds the pretence of adhering to the officially endorsed discourse of unadulterated fraternalism towards the fellow socialist nation and exposes chauvinistic ideals and colonial yearnings, thereby complicating our understanding of the symbolic practices employed in service of the Soviet Empire’s dealings with its periphery. The extension of travel writing as a medium of nationalist sentiment was in part a consequence of Khrushchev’s famous ‘Secret Speech’ delivered on 25 February 1956 to an unofficial, closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress. The speech marked the advent of a new era in the history of Soviet international travel: simply put, the ‘thaw’ cracked open the tightly shut gates of the USSR and allowed for a steadily growing stream of travellers to move more freely in both directions.9 Stalin had made travel beyond the borders of the motherland a virtual impossibility for its citizens, urging them instead to explore the attractions of their own country through organised domestic tourism, the only kind of travel that guaranteed the warm reception they deserved. By contrast, under Khrushchev people were encouraged to leave home and discover new places. The propaganda efforts, which began in 1956 as part of a new Party plan for international tourism, quickly led to satisfactory results, with the numbers of Soviet men and women who travelled abroad rising steadily during the late 1950s and the 1960s.10 Whereas in 1956 only 561,000 Soviet citizens journeyed to foreign countries, the numbers increased to 730,000 in 1960 and to almost 1.2 million in 1965.11 Although some fortunate citizens (mostly party functionaries and trusted white-collar workers) could now visit western countries as part of organised excursions, the majority travelled to countries within the Soviet bloc. Initially, those who could afford the high cost of such journeys were members of the privileged strata of Soviet society: university professors, cultural workers, writers, factory managers and party leaders.12 It was only in the 1960s that the percentage of blue-collar workers (rabochie) travelling to east-central and south-eastern Europe reached the numbers planned by Inturist and Komsomol (the Communist Party Youth Organisation) a decade earlier: in 1961, from 50 to 80 per cent of the members of such organised excursions were already rabochie.13 In the Khrushchev era, individual travel abroad was still very rare since it did not allow for the kind of controlled itinerary that an organised tour headed by a ‘trip leader’ (rukovoditel’ gruppy) always entailed. When it did happen, it involved ideologically reliable (ideologicheski vyderzhannye) persons (the majority of them journalists representing particular Soviet publications) who were encouraged to share their experiences in public lectures or written texts upon their return. If in the decades before 1956 there

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were very few published travelogues about foreign locales, during the second half of the 1950s and the 1960s there were on average 100–150 books annually that focused primarily on socialist life beyond the borders of the USSR. Only a handful of these can be generically classified as ‘travelogues’, however, since the majority presented their information in the form of political treatises on the current state of the surveyed land.14 In terms of popular textual destinations, China and Bulgaria dominated the public imagination, most probably because the former was perceived as the most exotic of all socialist states, while the latter appeared the closest to the national Russian self. A survey of relevant publications recorded in Ezhegodnik knigi SSSR (USSR Book Publications by Year) reveals that Czechoslovakia was third as far as the number of books on the topic of foreign travel is concerned. Between 1955 and 1968 printed works about Czechoslovakia and its people averaged ten per year, usually with print runs in the 5,000– 10,000 range. Texts such as V. Kvesh’s V druzhnoi sem’ie stran sotsializma: Chekhoslovatskaia Narodnaia Respublika (In the Close Family of Socialist Countries: Czechoslovakia, 1959), M.S. Shaginian’s Chekhoslovatskie pis’ma, 1955–1960 (Letters from Czechoslovakia, 1955–1960, 1960) and I. Gromov’s U blizkikh druzei: Putevye zametki o Chekhoslovakii (At Our Close Friends: Travel Notes about Czechoslovakia, 1961) tried to satisfy the Soviet readership’s curiosity about the young socialist republic, while making sure that the presented information confi rmed established ideas about the ‘older-younger sibling’ dynamics underlying the symbolic relationship between the two countries.15 As a textual version of the omniscient ‘trip leader’, each author-traveller served in the capacity of a ‘cultural guide, political leader, and informant’ to the best of his/her abilities.16 Vladimir Nikolaevich Druzhinin performed all of these roles as he took his readers on virtual tours of various distant places. Born in 1908 in Yaroslavl, a city located at the confluence of the Volga and the Kotorosl Rivers some 155 miles north-east of Moscow, he joined the Communist Party in his youth, fought in the Second World War and then chose for his permanent place of residence Leningrad, about whose history he wrote numerous articles, short stories and novels.17 A respected journalist, as well as novelist, who often worked as a foreign correspondent for Soviet periodicals, he journeyed both within and beyond the borders of the USSR.18 Most of his travel narratives appeared during the Khrushchev era and it so happens that four of the books that helped to create and sustain the official image of Czechoslovakia for domestic readers came from his pen. In U chekhoslovatskikh druzei, Puteshestvie po Chekhoslovakii, V Chekhoslovakii and Bez perevodchika, Druzhinin’s depictions of that particular country constitute a significant contribution to the construction of its alterity in the Soviet context and as such deserve close examination as specific examples of an overall trend in Soviet travel literature about the satellite socialist states.19 Although published separately, Druzhinin’s accounts of his 1956 journey around Czechoslovakia present remarkably similar material, so much so

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that they can be treated as virtually the same book. The only differences (mostly of omission) come from the fact that they target different audiences (adult readers for U chekhoslovatskikh druzei, Puteshestvie po Chekhoslovakii and Bez perevodchika, and children and young adults for V Chekhoslovakii). For the sake of convenience, I will use the most complete of these works, Puteshestvie po Chekhoslovakii, as the main reference text in the following analysis. All four travelogues display the characteristics of what Mary Louise Pratt has called the narrative of ‘anti-conquest’, a term referring to a collection of imperial textual practices which aim to ensure the colonial power’s innocence ‘in the same moment as they assert [its] hegemony’. 20 The travelogues attempt to mythologize Russian splendour (very much along the lines of western orientalism) in a manner consistent with the post-1945 drive in Soviet letters to valorise the beginnings of the Russian state and to exalt the cultural growth that supposedly accompanied its subsequent transformation into a world power. 21 Consequently, the travel accounts transport the reader into his/her own Russian past at the same time as they profess to illuminate the foreign present of the visited land. In the process, all markers of Czechoslovakian difference retreat into the background of narrations that return to the self time and time again in order to demonstrate its superiority and to assuage any anxiety about its future. Ultimately, the Soviet traveller transforms the other into an imperfect mirror image of his own self and, satisfied with the observed ‘sameness’, hurries back to the safety of national existence. The symbol of the train journey to east-central Europe found at the opening of Puteshetsvie po Chekhoslovakii offers an interesting example of the ‘anti-conquest’ strategy of depicting the invasion of foreign space both as an arrival in a welcoming land and as an actual return to one’s own place of origin. Unlike more traditional appropriations of the trope of the train ride as an opportunity to meet face to face with various representatives of alterity, in this case the experience is one of retreat into personal memory. 22 As the train approaches the physical border of Czechoslovakia, Druzhinin succumbs to ‘that strange feeling’ (to osoboe chuvstvo) which blends the particular ‘sorrow of farewell and the anticipation of the new’ (grust’ rasstavania i ozhidanie novogo).23 ‘Motionless’, he continues, ‘you look out the carriage window intent on not missing a thing, seeing everything’ (3). Yet the promise of a faithful portrayal of the foreign, succinctly captured in the image of the lonely traveller absorbed in the strange landscape outside his train window, is broken in the very next sentence, which informs readers that the journey does not really begin at this point at all. It already started many years ago during the author’s childhood visits to the humble hut of his grandmother, whose most prized possession, ‘dearer to her than her own eyes’ (berezhet pusche glaza) was a beautifully delicate vase made of the famed Bohemian glass (3). This magical object sparked the child’s curiosity about the land that produced it and he went on to collect any

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information about Bohemia he could glean through books. Among them was a collection of stories called Bohemian Fairytales, which helped to solidify the vision of the foreign land as a mythical space. A few years later, the twelve-year-old boy fi nally received the proper key to understanding the place when he read the biography of Alexandra Goncharova, the sister of Pushkin’s wife, who married an Austrian count and moved to a castle in Slovakia near the town of Nitra. There she spent her days looking at Pushkin’s portrait and ‘pining for her Russia’ (toskovala po Rossii, 4). In this way, an emotive depiction of nostalgia for the homeland not only underlies the interpretation of the Russian encounter with Bohemia in the past, but also marks the traveller’s experiences in the present. It establishes nineteenth-century Russian life as the superior mode of existence, and then seamlessly transports that idea into the twentieth century in order to emphasise Soviet Russia’s achievements, which make anything encountered in Czechoslovakia pale by comparison. In this particular version of the colonial journey, then, the narrator is not only a ‘time traveler’ to ‘a younger and less advanced version of the Soviet Self’; 24 he goes much further back into the nation’s historical past in order to ascertain the symbolic continuity between the Russian and the Soviet Empires and thus to justify the latter’s current and future domination over the colonial periphery. The travelogue abounds in examples of such textual expressions of ‘expansive nationalism’. For instance, a visit to Karlovy Vary creates the opportunity to discuss Peter the Great’s vacations at the famous hot springs and to highlight the Tsar’s humility and generosity (106). Druzhinin also mentions that Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev lived there briefly while working on some of their most important works, and that Turgenev read from his Zapiski okhotnika (A Sportsman’s Sketches, 1852) to his friends in the reception hall of his Karlovy Vary hotel (107). In a similar way, a night at the opera in Prague brings to mind an 1886 production of Eugene Onegin, with Piotr Ilych Chaikovski himself on the conductor’s podium. The travel guide then informs its readers that, in 1892, Chaikovski was once again present for the premiere of The Queen of Spades at the National Theatre, which was received with great enthusiasm (36). More recently, the composers Sergei Taneev and Sergei Rakhmaninov have worked closely with the well-known ‘Czech Quartet’, and the collaboration has led to a successful tour in Russia (36). The author concludes: It is obvious that the cultural connections between Russia and Czechia [sic] have deep and extremely strong roots. The reactionary forces persistently tried to undermine them, to embitter and turn the Czechs away from us. Futile efforts! Is it possible to negate the influence of our Art Theatre, which visited Prague as early as 1906, on the Czech stage? How can you ignore the importance of plays by Gorkii, Chekhov, that have been performed in Czechia since the beginning of the century? The geniuses of the two nations were linked by the commonality of their

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Even when the traveller does note the genuine artistic achievements of the visited people, he still fi nds a way to privilege his own culture. For example, he discusses Jaroslav Hašek’s Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války (The Good Soldier Švejk, 1923) and the Czech author’s creative output as a whole, but tells the reader that Hašek learned a lot from Maxim Gorkii and that Hašek’s love for the Russian language was such that he even wrote letters to his fiancé Jarmila in Russian. Druzhinin’s brief biography of the Czech writer continues to highlight his connection to the Russian motherland: after getting drafted in the army, Hašek is captured by the Russians and spends some time in POW camps; upon his release, shortly before the Soviet Revolution of 1917, he joins the Bolshevik Party and, later, the Red Army, and becomes a devotee of Lenin. The years in the Soviet Union are not only interpreted as formative as far as Hašek’s personal development is concerned, but are also presented as having a profound effect on the evolution of the character of his most famous creation, the eponymous Švejk. Once again, Druzhinin sums up his claims in a predictable manner: ‘Not all materials about Hašek are collected and studied properly, but we can confidently say one thing: the influence of revolutionary Russia on his work cannot be denied’ (43). Clearly, everywhere the traveller looks, he uncovers only his own country’s grandeur and importance. The ultimate effect of such an approach to the delineation of the other is the emblematic erasure of the significance of Czechoslovakian intellectuals to their own national history. The heroes of this history prior to the incursion of the Soviet system do not fare much better. True, they are given their textual due in a series of vignettes (mostly about the history of Prague) in the early chapters of all Druzhinin’s Czechoslovakian travelogues, but are presented as larger than life characters more at home in a fairytale than in a work of non-fiction, and are thereby robbed of any relevance to the present moment. National heroes such as Jan Hus, Jan Žižka and the knight Bruncvík are praised for their resemblance to the fairy giant Krkonoše, who had fi rst captured the author’s imagination through Bohemian folk tales; like him, these heroes are ‘tall’, ‘furious’ in the face of human injustice and devoted to ‘punishing those who are evil and protecting the insulted’. 25 Summarily dealt with, their bravery is highlighted only as an opportunity to stress the historical inability of this small nation to defend itself from the onslaught of formerly powerful European empires: ‘Knowing that they had their Hus, their Žižka, helped the people of this small country, suffering in the grips of the AustroHungarian monarchy, trust in their own strength’.26 The irony of the traveller’s current situation, which relies upon a similarly aggressive imposition of ideological and economic dependencies between the Soviet Empire’s centre and periphery, is completely lost on our erudite ‘trip leader’.

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This is no surprise given Druzhinin’s complete confidence in the desirability of his presence in Czechoslovakia. His fi rst ‘visit’ to the country in 1945 as an army officer had already convinced him of the warm reception that the Russian ‘liberators’ could depend upon in this part of the world. The nostalgic story of the ‘Two Pragues’ which opens the section on the capital city in Puteshestvie po Chekhoslovakii valorises the Soviet soldiers’ presence in Czechoslovakia as timely, necessary and, most importantly, welcomed by the locals (9–15). The special treatment he had received after the war from an elderly musician in a restaurant still patronised by members of the bourgeois classes, is repeated numerous times during his tours of socialist Prague and of ‘brotherly’ (bratskaia) Czechoslovakia as a whole. Everywhere the traveller goes, he is reminded by peasants and workers that they know how much they owe to the USSR and are thankful for the love and support of the Soviet people. (This is exactly the kind of propagandistic effort that a decade later would make Soviet citizens respond to the news of the Prague Spring with complete puzzlement and with appeals to the ‘fraternal debt’ the Czechoslovakians owe them.27) One scene serves to exemplify the nation’s reputed gratitude for Soviet assistance with political and industrial development. During a visit to a Plzeň factory, the author is queried about the current whereabouts of Vasilii Azhaev, the author of Daleko ot Moskvy (Far from Moscow, 1948), whose inspired depictions of the heroic endeavours involved in the building of an oil pipeline in eastern Siberia have helped to initiate dramatic changes in the factory’s own controller’s office: ‘One engineer told me, “If on a big construction site, in the taiga, across dozens of kilometers, there was a controller’s office [dispetcherskaia sluzhba], then having it on a factory site is even more realistic”’ (96). The implications are clear: the Czechoslovakian version of the office is belated and on a much smaller scale than the Soviet model, and national industry as a whole needs to catch up with Soviet achievements. The conversation then turns to another writer, Aleksei Pantielev, whose Pervaia nedelia (The First Week, 1949) has inspired not only a re-organisation of the factory shop, but also a play script, which has been transmitted by the local radio station. Russian books, moreover, serve as guides for life in general: ‘From our books they expect answers to all questions—about living [byt’], morality, production’ (96). A more personal account of the profound influence of Soviet letters on Czechoslovakian existence is presented through an encounter with a local work hero, Aloise Shneider. This is a man who, despite the misfortune of losing his legs at the age of five, has still gone on to become an award-winning tractor driver. The inspiration for his private achievement once again came from a Russian text, Boris Polevoi’s hugely popular novel about the amazing determination of a legless man to learn how to fly planes, Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke (A Story About a True Man, 1947). Considering ‘a tractor less complicated than a plane’, Shneider proves fully capable of emulating the success of his older Soviet brother (131). The derivative

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nature of his triumph comes through not only in Druzhinin’s report about Shneider’s life, but also in the way the national media presents the local hero, with newspaper articles spreading the story of the ‘Czech “true man”’ (131). In person, Shneider proves to be modest and painfully shy, but although he does not want to talk with the Soviet guest for too long, Druzhinin finds nothing offensive in his behaviour: Shneider’s work and communist convictions speak louder than words. The author-narrator’s total comprehension of the motivations of the various representatives of Czechoslovakia encountered during his journey underlies all of their interactions. Because always conceptualised as an earlier version of the Soviet self, the Czechoslovakian other comes across as simple-minded, childish and easily amused. Consider, for instance, the local sense of humour that Drushinin addresses in the previously mentioned chapter, ‘Two Pragues’. Invited to a public variety show, he takes the opportunity to observe the behaviour of the audience, fi nding their reaction to a stand-up routine especially revealing. While the visitor fi nds the jokes predictable and somewhat unsophisticated, the locals ‘guffaw, for a long time, diligently, giving [themselves] over to the experience completely, whole-heartedly’ (14). ‘How simple, flexible, precise, truly Slavic [prostoi, gibkii, metkii, istinno slavianskii] is Czech humour’, the author exclaims: ‘It is an integral part of their national character’ (14). The attention given to the specifically ‘Slavic’ nature of Czechoslovakian identity further exposes the Soviet colonial power’s efforts to naturalise their domination over the subjugated nation. The move is especially evident in the way the virtual ‘trip leader’ envisions the close relationship between the Russian and Czech languages, the latter having been mastered by the author—we are told—with admirable speed. As a writer of fiction and a student of life, he boasts a penchant for acquiring foreign languages across the whole of the continent, a confidence most obviously expressed in Bez perevodchika, as the title already suggests. In the case of the trip to Czechoslovakia, however, the reason for his linguistic success is much more prosaic: Czech is simply an archaic version of Russian. ‘Here is what becomes readily obvious’, he hastens to share with his readers, after having completed a short course in conversational Czech with a young, shy, female university student: ‘much of the Czech vocabulary consists of words that to us sound archaic, resembling parchment chronicles, ancient books with leather binding and copper fastenings’. 28 Centuries ago the two languages were even closer. As legend has it, the forefather of the Czechs fi rst lived with other Slavs on the land between Dnieper and Vesla; although this figure later decided to leave the mythic territory in which Rus’ had its linguistic origins, in search of his own geographical home, the implied homeland (rodina) for all Slavic tribes, and the Czech one in particular, forever remains on Russian territory. 29 The prominence given to rodina, as the place ‘where one was born or to which one bears an allegiance that surpasses all allegiances’, is a peculiar feature of

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Russian nationalism, as Thompson has argued. 30 Druzhinin’s recreation of Czechoslovakian origins as a version of matushka Rossiia accomplishes the symbolic re-territorialisation of the Soviet satellite state as Russia itself. Not all attempts to fold Czechoslovakian alterity into a totalitarian Soviet existence are always so successful, however. Signs of trouble appear whenever the traveller notices certain features of the surveyed reality that do not show the USSR in the best light. As two examples, the roads in Czechoslovakia are in much better condition than those at home (a comment excised from the youth-oriented version of the travelogue), and the author is discomforted by the lack of Soviet equivalents for the Czechoslovakian professional storytellers whose skillful public performances he admires so much.31 More worryingly, there are occasions on which he meets individuals whose enthusiasm for the socialist way of life does not blind them to some of the negative effects that collectivisation has had on the country.32 Perhaps the most glaring example of the perseverance of a different (read, non-Soviet) kind of thinking involves a hitchhiking incident. The author tours the country by car, driven by a Czech man by the name of Palichek. Along the way, they pick up different hitchhikers (an activity very popular at the time) and one of them happens to be a nameless and faceless (the narrator sees his back most of the time) native tourist who dares to express the opinion that not everything that you read in the newspapers is true, and that domestically produced cars may not be better than foreign makes, as a widely publicised race between the Czechoslovakian ‘Tatraplan’ and the American ‘Ford’ supposedly proved. The man gets thrown out of their car by Palichek, his fellow countryman (there is no need for Russian intervention in this particular case of Czechoslovakian dissidence), and the two comrades continue their journey in peace. This episode is not recounted in other versions of Druzhinin’s travelogue. The narration of difference from the Soviet centre was not only discouraged during the Cold War; it was interpreted as a betrayal of the fundamental principles at the heart of socialist internationalism. And if travel writing about Czechoslovakia before 1968 could still register moments of less than perfect mutual understanding, in the two decades following the Prague Spring Soviet delineations of Czechoslovakian national identity followed a much safer model: they only took the reader on a virtual tour of the country’s socialist present and imaginary future, mostly through encounters with trusted party workers from various walks of life.33 Yet, as I have argued in this case study, the ‘magical thinking of Soviet Marxism’ found expression through all types of travel writing, even (or, perhaps, especially) those that claimed to remain more firmly grounded in the traditional conventions of the genre, which prescribed a close connection with the toured past.34 In the fi nal analysis, it mattered little if the authors demonstrated knowledge of the history of the visited people or professed fraternal love for that people’s collective ‘character’. Their vision of the other remained distorted by aggressive nationalistic demands whose main concerns were

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always with the self and with their sense of privilege and overall security. The last two sentences of Druzhinin’s travelogue capture this idea well: ‘Hello, Motherland!’, he announces upon re-arrival in the Soviet Union: ‘How splendid are your friends!’ (Zdravstvui Rodina! Chudesnye u tebia druzia!).35 The Czechoslovakian people could hardly say the same. NOTES 1. Shinkarev, Ia eto vsio pochti zabyl . . . : Opyt psihologicheskikh ocherkov sobytii v Chekhoslovakii v 1968 godu (Moskva: Sobranie, 2008), p. 15. (All translations from Russian are my own, unless noted otherwise.) For more about this initiative, see Oleg Gordievsky and Cristopher Andrew, KGB: Razvedyvatel’nye operatsii ot Lenina do Gorbacheva (Moskva: Tsentrpoligraf, 1999), p. 488. 2. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd edn (1990; London: Sage, 2002), pp. 2–3; Anne E. Gorsuch, ‘“There’s No Place Like Home”: Soviet Tourism in Late Stalinism’, Slavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter 2003), p. 785. 3. Travel abroad in the Soviet context always implied multiple layers of surveillance not only of the other but also of the self. That KGB agents often accompanied tourist groups abroad is ‘a fact widely known as suggested by the use of the colloquial term nian’ka (nanny) to denote such a person’ (Anne E. Gorsuch, ‘Time Travelers. Soviet Tourists to Eastern Europe’, in Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, eds, Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 209). 4. See Gorsuch and Koenker, ‘Introduction’ to Gorsuch and Koenker, eds, Turizm, pp. 1–16. 5. See Gorsuch, ‘Time Travelers’, p. 207. 6. For an early critique of the Soviet myth of denationalised internationalism, see Ivan Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification: A Study in the Soviet Nationalities Problem (1968). Dzyuba was particularly disenchanted with the Soviet nationalities policy, which in his view misused Lenin’s internationalist principles in order to ‘Russify’ different nations. While his main focus is on his native Ukraine, the ideas he takes issue with (such as ‘national nihilism’, the notion that fraternalism makes national distinctions unnecessary) are relevant to the wider socialist community. For a more recent study of the role of ideology in maintaining Soviet influence in the eastern bloc, see Jonathan Valdez, Nationalism, and the Ideology of Soviet Infl uence in Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 24–57. 7. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge, p. 9. 8. Ibid., p. 9. 9. For discussions of the scale of and constraints on international tourism in the post-Stalin era, see Denis Shaw, ‘The Soviet Union’, in Derek R. Hall, ed., Tourism and Economic Development in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (London: Belhaven Press, 1991), pp. 137–8, and Grigorii Usykin, Ocherki istorii Rossiiskogo turizma (Sankt Moskva, Peterburg: Izdatel’skii Torgovyi Dom ‘Gerda’, 2000), pp. 157–8. For a more general account of the dramatic changes to Soviet lifestyles during the Khrushchev era, see Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 321–67. 10. Gorsuch, ‘Time Travelers’, p. 210.

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11. G. P. Dolzhenko, Istoria turizma v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii i SSSR (Rostov na Don: Izdatelstvo Rosstovskogo Universiteta, 1988), p. 154. 12. See Gorsuch, ‘Time Travelers’, p. 210. In 1955, the cost of a trip to a socialist country such as Romania or the German Democratic Republic ran to thousands of rubles at a time when the average annual income was a little over 9,500 rubles. The increase of the minimum wage in 1957 coupled with fairly constant living costs meant that more people could consider travel abroad (see ibid., p. 211). 13. They had 200 different itineraries to choose from, and the nature and ostensible purposes of their vacations abroad were just as varied. These included hard-currency travel (for which participants were allowed to purchase the appropriate currency), non-hard-currency exchanges with tourist groups from a foreign country, and ‘relaxation and healing’ trips to popular sea, mountain or spa resorts (see Dolzhenko, Istoria turizma v derevoliotsionnoi Rossii i SSSR, p. 154). 14. The ideological value of travel writing during the period is further underscored by the fact that the category under which it was usually listed in Ezhegodnik knigi SSSR (USSR Book Publications by Year) was ‘Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenia. Politicheskoe i ekonomicheskoe polozhenie zarubezhnykh stran’ (Foreign Relations. The Political and Economic Situation of Foreign Countries). 15. The Czechoslovakian people were always interpolated as younger ‘brothers’ to Soviet visitors. 16. This description of the trip leader’s responsibilities comes from Gorsuch, ‘Time Travelers’, p. 208. 17. For instance, in the novel Grad Petra (Peter’s City, 1987) he traces the history of the city through the lives of such important historical figures as Piotr Pervyi, Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov and the architects Domenico Tresini and Mikhail Zemtsov. Alongside Grad Petra, his published fiction includes Chiornyi kamen’ (Black Stone, 1955), K vam idiot pochtalion (The Postman is Coming, 1960), Iantarnaia komnata (Amber Room, 1970) and Derzhavy rossiskoi posol (Russian Embassies Abroad, 1982). 18. See, for instance, V nashem kvadrate taifun (A Tornado in Our Part of the World, 1962), which narrates his cruise around Asia, Puteshestvie s Trollem (Journey with a Troll, 1968), about his journey around the Baltic States, and Sredne-evropeiskoe vremia (Middle-European Time, 1973), which takes its readers to Belgium, France, Italy, Luxemburg and Sweden. 19. Taken together, the four books had a print run of well over 150,000 copies, an impressive number for the genre of travel literature in the USSR. 20. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 7. Gorsuch has made the same point in the Soviet context, and my own essay should be viewed as a further elaboration on her ideas and as a companion piece to her excellent research into Soviet travel reflections about countries from the eastern bloc (see Gorsuch, ‘Time Travelers’, p. 213). 21. As Thompson has noted, this process began in 1945 with the publication of an article in Istoricheski zhurnal by the famous Soviet scholar Dimitrii S. Likhachev and continued to the end of the twentieth century (Thompson, Imperial Knowledge, pp. 45–6). As a result, Russia can now boast of ‘an authoritative corpus of academic books and articles inscribing in Russian and Western memory the splendor of Rossiia. Only empires can accomplish this’ (ibid., p. 46). 22. For an illuminating investigation of an earlier Soviet utilisation of the ‘train ride’ trope, see Michael David-Fox, ‘Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr

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23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

Margarita Marinova Arosev’s Literary and Political Depictions of Europe’, Slavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter 2003), pp. 753–4. Druzhinin, Puteshestvie po Chekhoslovakii (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1956), p. 3. Further page references will be given in the text. Gorsuch, ‘Time Travelers’, p. 207. Druzhinin, V Chekhoslovakii (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo detskoi literatury, 1957), pp. 17, 17; Druzhinin, Bez perevodchika. Putevye zametki (Moskva: Mysl’, 1965), p. 12. See also Druzhinin Puteshestvie po Chekhoslovakii, pp. 3–4, 15–17, Druzhinin Bez perevodchika, pp. 11–13, and Druzhinin, V Chekhoslovakii, pp. 3–4, 17–18. Druzhinin, V Chekhoslovakii, p. 18. For a recent analysis of Soviet responses to the events of 1968, see Alexei A. Gordin, ‘Chekhoslovatskie sobitia 1968 goda: sovetskaia propaganda i nastroenia rosiiskoi provintsii’, Otechestvennaia istoria, Vol. 6 (November 2008), pp. 108–16. Druzhinin, Bez perevodchika, p. 7. Ibid., p. 9. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge, p. 8. See Druzhinin, Puteshestvie po Chekhoslovakii, pp. 62, 153. See, for example, the chapter entitled ‘Semia Bochekov’, which tells the story of the break up and subsequent re-union of conservative and progressive members of a peasant family (ibid., pp. 148–56). In a chapter entitled ‘Anna Obozova’, the eponymous heroine complains to the visitor (as ‘you would to a relative’) that not everyone in Slovakia knows what is best for him and that ‘not everything is going the way it should’ (ibid., p. 237). For an example of this kind of post-1968 travel writing, see H. Dzhalalov, Na beregah Vltavy: Po marshrutam poezda ‘Druzhby’ (On the Shores of Vltava: On Route by Train ‘Friendship’, 1976), I. N. Mel’nikova and S. Prunitsa, Sotsialisticheskaia Chekhoslovakia (Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1976) and Igor’ D. Biriukov, Chechoslovakia, Liudi i gody (Czechoslovakia, People and Years, 1986). Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P. S. Falla, new edn (1987; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), III, 95. Druzhinin, Puteshestvie po Chekhoslovakii, p. 284.

10 Russian and American Satirists and the Exposure of Cold War Fictionalities Derek C. Maus

In Dissident Postmodernists (1991), Paul Maltby argues that recognition of a ‘dissident tendency’ is essential for understanding a subset of ‘postmodernist writers, [for whom] the problem of meaning has a contextual dimension insofar as they perceive language as bearing the imprints of the institutions, projects, and confl icts in which it is imbricated’.1 Maltby’s explicitly politicised thesis—essentially, that much postmodern play with narrative form is a means of social/political resistance—as well as his terminology suggest an intentional connection between the American authors that he discusses, such as Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, and Soviet-era Russian dissident satirists, such as Sergei Dovlatov, Alexander Zinoviev and Vladimir Voinovich. In the context of Russian literary criticism, the notion that fictional works could surreptitiously subvert Soviet authority is hardly new. Maltby’s identification of the ‘dissident’ strain in postmodernist American literature, however, is an attempt to answer a question that he claims is unanswerable using the established critical models: Why should the fictionality of meaning become a major issue at a particular time, in a particular place (i.e., in late-capitalist America)? [ . . . ] No coherent model of postmodern culture underpins neo-formalist studies of postmodernist fiction. [ . . . ] An explanation of the postmodernist writer’s preoccupation with fictionality requires, inter alia, acknowledgement of his/her situation in a culture pervaded by illusory use-values and simulacra. 2 I contend not only that such an acknowledgment is integral to a comparison of post-1945 Russian and American satire, but also that this ‘fictionality of meaning’ is symptomatic of the cultural mindset that created and sustained the Cold War. Wolfgang Iser’s ‘The Significance of Fictionalizing’ (1997–1998) cogently outlines how and why this issue is relevant when examining the cultural effects of textual language. Although Iser does not treat satire specifically in his essay, the distinction he makes between literary and non-literary fictions

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is invaluable for discussing the nature of Cold War satire. Iser suggests that a wide variety of non-literary modes are predicated on fiction: ‘with epistemological positing, it is a premise; with the hypothesis, it is a test; with worldpictures, it is a dogma whose fictional nature must remain concealed if the foundation is not to be impaired; and with our actions, it is anticipation’.3 While noting that literary fictions necessarily disclose their own fictionality, Iser points out that non-literary fictions are not governed by any such requirement. In fact, just the opposite is true; non-literary fictions are required to conceal their fictionality for a number of possible reasons: The masking, of course, need not necessarily occur with the intention to deceive; it occurs because the fiction [within the non-fiction] is meant to provide an explanation, or even a foundation, and would not do so if its fictive nature were to be exposed. The concealment of fictionality endows an explanation with an appearance of reality, which is vital, because fiction—as explanation—functions as the constitutive basis of this reality.4 Although Iser rightly allows for potentially innocent motivations in some of these cases, it was the grand-scale fictionalising processes to which Cold War subversive satirists objected most vehemently, both because of the high stakes involved and because of the suspicion that these fictions were not intended as forthright explanations, but rather as elaborately constructed and assiduously maintained distortions of reality. Given Iser’s claim that ‘literary genres are the most obvious and durable signs’ for fictionality in an explicitly literary context, it makes sense that the satires of the Cold War often include parodies of the non-literary ‘genres’ of social and political discourse (for example, denunciations, loyalty oaths, political speeches, economic reports, court proceedings, official government documents). 5 Linda Hutcheon’s assertion that ‘historiographic metafiction appears to be willing to draw upon any signifying practices it can fi nd operative in a society’ provides insight into how textual parody functions in Cold War satire.6 Parody is an inherently fictive literary form, deriving its efficacy from the reader’s recognition of the text being parodied. Parodic satire moves one step further, not just imitatively recontextualising the original text, but also attaching a moral value judgment to it.7 In the case of the works I examine here, this judgment is that the ‘truths’ of which Cold War ‘world-pictures’ consist are absurd counterfeits. An overt and often comically grotesque declaration of fictionality distinguishes these satires from the social constructs they imitate, thereby becoming an integral part of their authors’ treatment of ‘illusory use-values and simulacra’. The obscured fictionalities that American and Soviet power elites relied upon in public rhetoric can be invalidated either by attempting to refute their fundamental premises or by revealing their underlying fictive nature. The potential for subversion contained within the former, however, is inherently

Russian and American Satirists 143 limited: as demonstrated by the binaristic clichés of both American and Soviet Cold War culture (for example, ‘Better dead than Red!’ or ‘vrag naroda’ (‘enemy of the people’)), the ideological fictions of the Cold War were designed to withstand counterargument. Revelation of the fictions behind the dogma, then, offers a more promising alternative, just as exposure of the ‘man behind the curtain’ undermined the fictive image of the ‘great and powerful Oz’. As I will demonstrate, most of the subversive satirists of the Cold War era chose this path. Maltby isolates the specific forces he fi nds responsible for the persistence of Cold War ideologies and in doing so articulates a framework I will use for my examination of the specific strategies employed by Russian and American satirists in exposing the fictionalities within Cold War rhetoric. Maltby refers to language as ‘a medium of social integration’ and claims that such a status ‘calls for attention not only to the ideological inflection of everyday and socially privileged forms of language, but also to other components of the “discursive field” like the ensemble of institutions and apparatuses that regulate the use of language’.8 Among the components he mentions are ‘the erosion of the public sphere; the enlargement of the state’s propaganda agencies; the impact of technical rationality on language; and the spread of conceptually impoverished discourses that impede critical reflection on society’.9 He states that these four factors ‘have all been explained in the context of the restructuring and growth of capitalist economies in their postwar phase’, but each of them is equally, if not more, prevalent in Soviet society in its post-war phase.10 In discussing the fi rst factor, Maltby somewhat idealistically defi nes the public sphere as having historically been ‘a domain in which established forms of power and authority (ecclesiastical, aristocratic, etc.) could be subjected to the critical scrutiny and judgment of the public’.11 He proceeds to note the deleterious effects of the US mass media thereupon: Today, the mass media are the main source of public information. This in itself need not damage the health of the public sphere if media provision included critical inquiry and commentary from a standpoint outside the spectrum of the consensus. However, under the prevailing structure of monopolistic ownership and control, the presentation of events from genuinely alternative perspectives is a rare and marginal practice. [ . . . ] [T]here is, simply, no public sphere.12 In a similar way, Soviet control of the media was legendary in its restrictiveness, whether in the form of the state-controlled news agency (TASS) or of newspapers like Pravda (Truth) and Izvestiia (News). As Thomas F. Remington wrote in 1988, ‘[t]he view that the job of gathering and reporting information must be justified by service to the collective good rather than a diff use civil right to know is integral to Soviet doctrine’.13 When this principle was contravened—for example, by acknowledging the secrecy and

144 Derek C. Maus deliberate misinformation surrounding the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in April 1986—the results were usually problematic for the regime. If ‘private censorship’ of the kind that Maltby describes can result in ‘erosion of the public sphere’, the far-reaching control of information exerted by the Soviet state produced even more pronounced effects. The mass media’s abdication of its power to critique the ‘established order’ is a prominent theme in Fazil Iskander’s Sozvezdiye kozlotura (The Goatibex Constellation, 1966), Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), Vasily Aksyonov’s Ostrov Krym (The Island of Crimea, 1981) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), among others. It is Sergei Dovlatov, however, who most directly addresses the topic. His Nevidimaia kniga (The Invisible Book, 1978) and Kompromiss (The Compromise, 1981) are based on his experiences as a professional writer in the Soviet Union, and both works demonstrate the range of absurdities present in Soviet mass media. In The Compromise, Dovlatov exposes the falsity of Soviet journalism by reproducing several articles he wrote for an Estonian newspaper, each of which is followed by an explanatory anecdote that uncovers the omnipresent ideological filter. For example, the chapter entitled ‘The Fifth Compromise’ begins with an article Dovlatov wrote for Soviet Estonia in 1975. In the story that follows, the somewhat fictionalised version of Dovlatov who serves as the book’s narrator lays bare the series of inaccuracies and outright fabrications that pervade the entire article. His editor assigns him the task of fi nding a baby appropriate for use in a propaganda piece marking the anniversary of the liberation of Tallinn from Nazi occupation: According to data issued by the Bureau of Statistics, the city has around four hundred thousand inhabitants. This figure is somewhat relative, just as the city limits are. So here’s what it comes down to. We talked it over and decided: the four-hundred-thousandth inhabitant of Tallinn is about to be born on the eve of the jubilee.14 Dovlatov fi rst suggests the infant son of an Estonian woman and an Ethiopian student at the Soviet Merchant Marine Academy and is angrily rebuffed by his editor, who tells him to fi nd a ‘normal human baby’, implying that the child’s national and racial characteristics make him abnormal and/or inhuman.15 Dovlatov’s next attempt is equally unsuccessful, as the child he chooses is the son of Jewish—and thus tacitly unacceptable—parents, with even the father’s status as a renowned official poet being insufficient to merit the baby’s selection. The only seemingly positive characteristic of the father whose child is eventually chosen is his Russian last name; other than that, he is an obnoxious and politically unenlightened drunkard, characteristics that are, of course, excluded from the eventual article. The parents want to name the child Volodya but agree to the editor’s suggestion of Lembit—a name taken from Estonian folklore—after a paltry bribe of twenty-five rubles. By the time Dovlatov concludes his tale about

Russian and American Satirists 145 the article’s production, practically every word of it has been revealed as a deliberate fabrication of reality. By the end of the book, Dovlatov has repeated this process of revealing the ‘compromised’ truth within eleven of his articles, in the process explaining why he ‘said farewell to journalism’.16 On the fi nal page, Dovlatov recounts with dark irony a conversation that drives home his point about the debasement of Soviet journalism: My fi rst cousin, who has been convicted twice (once for unpremeditated manslaughter), often says to me: ‘Take up some useful kind of work. Aren’t you ashamed of what you do?’ ‘You’re a fi ne one to lecture me!’ ‘All I did was kill a man,’ my cousin says, ‘and try to burn his body. But you!’17 Throughout The Compromise, Dovlatov demonstrates that the credibility of Soviet journalism has been negated by the absurdities required to produce ideologically palatable articles. Nevertheless, he also believes that there exists ‘a hard road from the reported facts to the truth’ if one searches deep enough: ‘behind magnificent theatrical decorations you can learn to see the brick wall, the ropes, the fi re extinguisher, and the drunken stagehands. All this is well-known to anyone who has been behind the scenes, even if only once’.18 Maltby’s second factor is the expansion of the organs of state propaganda, which is naturally linked to the aforementioned erosion of the public sphere. Although the word ‘propaganda’ was almost exclusively associated with totalitarian states in the American popular imagination after 1945, Maltby argues that the US government ‘justified the excessive cost, risks, and secrecy of its armament program by deploying its primary propaganda strategy—the Cold War’.19 The main stratagem of such propaganda was ‘a kind of ideological/rhetorical process one might call “dichotomization,” whereby political issues are simplified into emotionally charged pairs of opposing terms; superpower rivalry translated into a confl ict between Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, God and Godlessness, Freedom and Slavery’. 20 Coover personifies and satirises these particular pairs in The Public Burning, imagining Richard Nixon as a buffoon caught out of his depth in the midst of a epic battle between the ‘Sons of Darkness’ and the ‘Sons of Light’. John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins (1971) and Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1971) perform similar satirical functions, albeit by dislocating the propagandistic dichotomies of the Cold War into new contexts. Barth does so by recasting the Cold War as a rivalry between two colleges—Nikolayan and New Tammany—for supremacy within a larger university. Percy’s novel involves a psychologist who has diagnosed a pervasive schism within Americans’ individual and collective psyche resulting in large measure from a proxy war in Ecuador

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reminiscent of the Vietnam War. DeLillo parallels the quasi-martial language of American football with political discourse of the early 1970s. His satirical intentions become clear when coach Emmett Creed’s constant enjoinders to ‘Hit somebody. Hit somebody. Hit somebody’21 result in players whose ‘thoughts are wholesomely commonplace, [whose] actions uncomplicated by history, enigma, holocaust or dream’.22 Such an unsophisticated mindset may be appropriate for the simple offense-versus-defense confl ict of scrimmage in football, but is wholly inadequate for a world that is subject to each of the factors the players’ actions ignore. Coover, Barth and DeLillo all suggest that a pervasive and calculated ‘us-versusthem’ mentality cultivates ignorance and propagates violent confl ict. The Soviet government under Brezhnev similarly aimed to create public support for military spending through massive anti-American propaganda campaigns, even as the populace suffered from endemic shortages of food and other necessities. The massive system of political education in the Soviet Union had always sought to shape public opinion and to assure its conformity with Marxist-Leninist philosophy. As Remington observes, it was ‘not understanding or belief that the propaganda system aspire[d] to achieve in its audience but the standardization of public discourse’. 23 Andrei Sinyavsky points out in Soviet Civilization (1990), however, that certain cognitive dissonances demanded a refi nement of this goal during the early years of the Cold War: Everything pointed toward chauvinism: the Soviet Union’s aggressive policy, the cold war with the West, the abrupt increase in anti-Western sentiment. Propaganda’s job was to present yesterday’s allies—the British and the Americans—as accomplices of fascism. [ . . . ] It was necessary to compensate ideologically and psychologically for the terrible losses incurred during the war and camouflage with extravagant phraseology the low standard of living. [ . . . ] Thus the patriotic hysteria began, the limitless self-glorification. 24 As relations with China worsened during the 1960s, the economy sputtered in the 1970s and the Red Army became bogged down in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the need for such fictionalised rhetorical ‘camoufl age’ only intensified. Given its ubiquity in Soviet culture, it is no surprise that propaganda is a common theme in Russian subversive satire, as seen in a range of novelists. Alexander Zinoviev’s satire of official Soviet language, for example, is encyclopedic and blunt. Ziiaiushchie vysoty (The Yawning Heights, 1976) is a mock-sociology of Ibansk (‘fuck-town’), a society governed largely through the utterly irrational tenets of ‘soc-ism.’ The novel’s title begins this process by punning on a stock phrase of Soviet propaganda, siiaiushchie vysoty sotsializma (‘the gleaming heights of socialism’). In Svetloe budushchee (The Radiant Future, 1978), Zinoviev makes an elaborate physical grotesque out

Russian and American Satirists 147 of another stock phrase by depicting the desecration and decay of a metallic monument that spells out the words ‘Long Live Communism—The Radiant Future of All Mankind!’25 Yuz Aleshkovsky’s novels focus more on the producers of propaganda. In Ruka (The Hand, 1980) he creates a protagonist whose cleverness allows him to turn the duplicitous power of official Soviet language against the same system that killed his father and destroyed his childhood village, while Kengeru (Kangaroo, 1981) tells the absurd story of a two-bit criminal and the elaborately managed, hyper-propagandistic show trial in which he is charged with raping and murdering a kangaroo. Fazil Iskander’s Kroliki i udavy (Rabbits and Boa Constrictors, 1981) is a complex parody of an animal fable concerning a society of rabbits beginning to realise that the hypnotic power exerted upon them by preying boa constrictors is a myth. This recognition alarms the rabbit king, who has long used the myth as the foundation of his authority: All of the King’s activities were tied to the fact that, together with his aides among the courtiers, he personally decided how much fear and caution the rabbits should experience when facing a boa, depending on the season, the atmospheric conditions in the jungle and many other factors. [ . . . ] The King knew that by using hope (the cauliflower) and fear (the boa constrictors), he could direct the rabbits’ lives in an orderly way. But you can’t stay alive for long on cauliflower alone.26 Iskander’s depiction of how both the rabbits and the boas contribute to the creation and constant renewal of this myth examines how propaganda enables the chauvinism that Sinyavsky describes. Finally, Vladimir Voinovich’s Moskva 2042 (Moscow 2042, 1986) satirically envisions what the USSR’s ‘radiant future’ might look like, in the process illustrating how propaganda is used to mask Soviet society’s flaws. Voinovich parodies Soviet administrative language both for its extensive use of needlessly bureaucratic euphemism (a toilet, for example, has become a ‘natfunctbur’, short for ‘Bureau of Natural Functions’27) and for its necessary role in masking the flaws in the system. In doing so, he depicts a Potemkin village of a state in which propaganda is so pervasive that individuals have ceased even to discriminate between food and excrement, obliged as they are to exchange their ‘secondary matter’ (faeces) for governmental coupons redeemable for proportional amounts of ‘primary matter’ (food). Taken together, these satires form a comprehensive critique of Soviet propaganda organs and their products. The third factor that Maltby sees deforming American language during the Cold War is the ‘technologist-rationalist ideology [that] is understood to acclaim the benefits of systematization, “cybernetization” [ . . . ] and global planning, the goal being the technical-bureaucratic organization of production and consumption’. 28 An essential component of this ideology

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is ‘the tendency to think of all social practices in systemic terms—wholes to which all parts (“subsystems”) must be adapted or adjusted in order to optimize the system’s “performance”’. 29 Such systemic thinking also served as the organising principle of the state-controlled Soviet economy, which worked until its end from intricate Five-Year Plans. Mikhail Epstein discusses what he calls the ‘hyperreality’ of Soviet economic reports, stating that ‘[n]o one knows [ . . . ] whether the harvests reported in Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s Russia were actually reaped, but the fact that the number of tilled hectares or tons of milled grain was always reported down to the tenth of a percent gave these simulacra the character of hyperreality’. 30 This hyperreality existed because the harvest reports were needed by the government more for the abstract purpose of validating the systemic thinking behind Soviet economic policy than for the ‘real’ purpose of feeding the populace. In Voinovich’s Zhizn’ i neobychainye prikliucheniia soldata Ivana Chonkina (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, 1976), forged harvest figures are used to satirise the insubstantiality of a Soviet bureaucracy which conspires, at all levels, to obscure the dismal failure of agricultural collectivisation. Ivan Golubev, the inefficient chairman of the kolkhoz (collective farm) in the town of Krasnoye, is introduced in a drunken stupor that has resulted from ‘questioning Granny Dunya on the subject of her home brew’.31 The intrusive narrator becomes immediately hazy about Soviet realities by pointing out that ‘things at the kolkhoz were going poorly. Not what you would call very poorly, you could even say things were going well, except that they were getting worse and worse every year’.32 The narrator states that Golubev, as would be assumed in a system that putatively abhors corruption and slackness, ‘lived in constant expectation of the arrival of some committee of inspection—then he’d pay for everything, and in full’.33 In fact, although Golubev still fears that ‘someday a Maximum Responsibility Committee of Inspection would suddenly appear’, his experiences with the ‘various district inspectors’ who have inquired after the affairs of the kolkhoz involve nothing more than ‘drink[ing] vodka with him while munching on lard and eggs, [after which] they’d sign the documents of certification and drive off, everything still in one piece’.34 Later, as Golubev is composing one of his rosy crop reports to Borisov, the official above him in the Soviet hierarchy, the narrator again discloses the complicity of the entire hierarchy of power in maintaining this illusory productivity: Borisov cursed him [Golubev] out on the telephone and demanded that the plan be fulfilled. Naturally, he knew that, in times like these, he was demanding the impossible, but the paper signifying work completed was more important to him than the work itself—Borisov was also being cursed out by those over him. And so Borisov collected papers from all the kolkhozes, compiled the figures, and sent them off

Russian and American Satirists 149 to the province, where further reports were compiled on the basis of the district reports, and so it went, all the way to the top.35 In a development that recalls Gogol’s Revizor (The Government Inspector, 1836), Golubev originally mistakes Private Ivan Chonkin, a rather inept and simple-minded Red Army soldier, for a member of the expected Maximum Responsibility Committee, and confesses to the befuddled Chonkin, preparing himself to be shipped off to prison. The incongruity between the physical truth and the ideological fiction of collective farming was just one aspect of Soviet systemic thinking that Cold War satirists exposed. Tertz/Sinyavsky’s Liubimov (The Makepeace Experiment, 1963) and Aksyonov’s Zolotaia nasha zhelezka (Our Golden Ironburg, 1980) address other aspects of social and industrial planning with similar scorn. The Makepeace Experiment details the rise and fall of Lenya Tikhomirov (‘Leonard Makepeace’ in the English translation), a would-be enlightened despot who rules a nondescript village through a combination of pseudoscience, marvellous gadgetry and dynamic personality (literalised in the novel as a form of psychic power). Tikhomirov calamitously transforms the entire town of Liubimov (‘Love-town’) into a proving ground for his oxymoronically rational-yet-mystical political philosophy, which aims to improve upon on Soviet communism. His ‘experiment’ ultimately fails, though, having created only a façade of utopia: [Tikhomirov] walked the familiar streets, seeing everywhere the traces of his unfulfilled dreams. Here was the site of the Stadium—one ditch had been dug and half the monastery wall demolished for bricks; over there were the foundations of the Matrimonial Palace with its Fountain of Love [ . . . ]; and further along the Avenue, still hidden by the mists of the future, were the projected Palaces of Science, Youth, Labor, Realistic Art, and a small and unassuming Palace of Bicycle Production and Repairs. 36 Like Brezhnev, Tikhomirov cannot provide enough basic necessities for his subjects to balance his grandiose projects, a problem that Tertz satirically implies will plague any social system that conceals its inherent contradictions through rhetorical ‘mesmerism’. Aksyonov’s Our Golden Ironburg parodies the form of the propagandistic Soviet ‘industrial novel’ in telling the story of a group of scientists searching for a utopian sub-atomic particle, the nebulous value of which (the scientists speculate that it can ‘maybe treat malaria, maybe cut steaks, maybe [ . . . ] inspire the creative act among the elderly population’37) reveals it as more of a rhetorical tool than a practical reality. Through metafictional destabilisation of a narrative form whose sole purpose was to lionise Soviet industry and science, Aksyonov exposes the vapidity of both the literary sub-genre and the politicised and dubious scientific knowledge described therein.

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Systematisation in American Cold War culture takes on a variety of forms as well, but none was more prominent than the development of the ‘military-industrial complex’. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address against ‘the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power’ inherent in ‘[t]his conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry [whose] total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government’. 38 A host of American works satirise this development by suggesting that its costs—both literal and figurative—do not justify its supposed benefits. Whereas Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe (1962) and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) both satirically refute the underlying rationales for nuclear deterrence policies, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) decry the logical, ethical and rhetorical deformations created by the sustained militarism of the Cold War. In different ways, each of these novels points out that the military, political and economic interests that were intertwined out of necessity during World War Two have remained so, often clandestinely, in the ostensibly peaceful years thereafter, with deleterious implications not only for democracy but potentially for the entire planet. In the earliest days of the Cold War and well before Eisenhower’s cautionary speech, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) had already questioned the ways in which life was being routinised and degraded by the post-war industrial economy. The novel depicts a thoroughly mechanised United States that has arisen after a war won by technology: ‘It was the miracle that won the war—production with almost no manpower’.39 The outwardly tranquil society of the novel’s early pages has been achieved only after ‘the men and women had come home, after the riots had been put down [and] after thousands had been jailed under the anti-sabotage laws’, a wholesale abandonment of the individualist and humanist values upon which the country was founded.40 The novel’s hero Paul Proteus manages a giant factory, the Ilium Works, although as the novel progresses, he gradually rejects the values that have made him ‘the most important, the most brilliant man in Ilium’.41 The best alternative to technological society appears to be the Ghost Shirt Movement, a group of neo-Luddite saboteurs whose goal is the destruction of the machines that produce and run everything.42 Proteus is ordered by his superiors to infi ltrate and inform on this group, but instead he joins them and is eventually proclaimed to be (and set to be sacrificed as) their Messiah. They begin a rebellion, which collapses after a few minor successes; by the novel’s end, Proteus is disillusioned by the complete undesirability of either system, a rejection of binaristic structures that prefigures works like Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and Percy’s Love in the Ruins. Maltby’s final factor, the ‘conceptually impoverished discourses that impede critical reflection on society’, is perhaps the overarching subject

Russian and American Satirists 151 matter for subversive Cold War satire, especially given his view that it is central in shaping societal consensus: ‘this (perceived) deadening of the critical impulse in language facilitates the integration of the subject into the social order’.43 Whether articulated in Maltby’s terms or as Iser’s ‘masked’ fictions, intentionally debased modes of expression buttress the Cold War status quo, both within the respective superpowers and from a geopolitical standpoint. While Maltby blames America’s ‘phenomenal profit-motivated expansion of mass-media broadcasting and publishing’ for spawning modes of expression that ‘inhibit reflection and lack the perspectives necessary for critical analysis of the social order’, governmental control of the media and of cultural production in general led to a similar situation in the Soviet Union.44 Arguably, such ‘syntactical abridgements’ form the core of all Cold War satires given that both of the parties involved in the ideological conflict relied on the continuation of a cultural mindset that did not waver, much less collapse, in the face of glaring absurdities.45 Among the Russian works that explore such themes most fully are Iskander’s The Goatibex Constellation and Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights and Gomo Sovietikus (Homo Sovieticus, 1982), as well as many of the shorter pieces collected in Voinovich’s Putiom vzaimnoi perepiski (In Plain Russian, 1979) and Antisovietskii sovietskii soiuz (The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union, 1985). Thematically similar American works include Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Galápagos (1985), Barth’s Giles GoatBoy, Ishmael Reed’s The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), DeLillo’s White Noise and Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age (1985). The narrator of Zinoviev’s Homo Sovieticus examines the issue of ‘deadened’ language self-reflexively by musing at length on the nature of the book he is writing. Unable to settle on a single representative genre, he decides to classify the work as a ‘novel-denunciation-Report-tract’ and discusses the ways in which each of these constituent parts is a sham under the Soviet system. For example, he mentions that ‘Soviet people are trained to write reports about everything [as] an indispensable element of the Communist organization of work’.46 This work proves to be as empty an exercise as Golubev’s agricultural reports, since it is guided not by the desire to ‘do a summing-up or extract lessons, but by virtue of certain higher, mystical considerations’.47 These satirically exaggerated considerations turn out to be simply the length of reports, wholly exclusive of the ludicrous content of the subject matter: In my Quarterly Report I once wrote that I had discovered ten new elementary particles. I did this with the purely cognitive intention of checking my theory of Reports. The director of the section sent for me. I was on the point of thinking that my theory was mistaken, but I needn’t have worried. My Report, Director said, was too short. Would I add a couple of pages? [ . . . ] And so I added a couple of pages to the Report in which I communicated that I had discovered a method of converting the contents of Moscow’s rubbish-bins into fi rst-class

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Derek C. Maus foodstuffs. ‘Well done!’ said Director, filing my Report in a bundle of other unread Reports by my colleagues. ‘The man who can write a good Report is a good worker.’48

The narrator provides the same sort of explanation for the three other genres in his formula, ultimately making his own work a paragon of meaninglessness since it is representative of four distinct yet ultimately ‘impoverished discourses.’ In addition, Zinoviev savagely mocks the emptiness of Soviet Russian thought and language from the beginning of Homo Sovieticus. In the second of the more than a hundred chapters that make up the book, the narrator states, ‘I have a wish to get something done; but I rarely have the wish actually to do what I want to get done’, and then cautions the reader not to mistake this for ‘a piece of dead sophistry’, claiming instead that it is ‘living dialectics’.49 This section ends with the narrator’s disclosure that ‘[t]he wish to do nothing arises in me even more often’, causing him paradoxically to ‘make titanic efforts to accomplish my wish’.50 The propagandistic hyperbole of this passage provides the satirical contrast to the narrator’s claim that ‘Western thinkers see in this “typical Russian laziness.” And they are wrong, as always’.51 He is right; this is not ‘typical Russian laziness’, but the uselessness that Zinoviev sees as endemic to Soviet society and its ideological modes of thinking. This point frames the discussion of the absurdity of Soviet life that takes up the remainder of the book. A gloomier satire on cultural hollowness can be found in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, in which a mysterious holy man named Bokonon is repeatedly invoked as an antithetical voice to the passionate positivism expressed by other characters, including businessmen, banana republic dictators and scientists working for the defence industry. Bokonon freely admits that his philosophy is a necessarily limited construct—in Iser’s terms, he ‘self-discloses’ the fictionality of his words—in the opening line of his quasi-gospel, The Books of Bokonon: ‘All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies’. 52 He also asserts that even though the quest for understanding is noble and proper, it is also folly to believe that such understanding is perfectible: ‘Nowhere does Bokonon warn against a person’s trying to discover the limits of his karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do. Bokonon simply observes that such investigations are bound to be incomplete’. 53 The invented notion of the karass—a ‘free-form’ grouping of humans ‘that [does] God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing’54 —is central to the novel, both because of the term’s ultimate incomprehensibility and because of Bokonon’s claim that humans invariably and consciously order themselves into other groups (granfalloons) which are ‘meaningless in terms of the way God gets things done’. 55 Among the granfalloons that Bokonon singles out are ‘the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere’. 56 Vonnegut’s satire

Russian and American Satirists 153 places the blame for the apocalypse that occurs at the end of the novel on those characters whose actions are guided by their inflexible adherence to one or more such constructs. As in many of Vonnegut’s other works, the advice offered to the reader is not only to be more critically discerning about one’s surroundings but also to put love for humanity at the centre of one’s personal philosophy. Although the specific social ills of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War differ greatly, the nature of subversive satirical fictions arising from both cultures is remarkably similar in its attention to the (mis)uses of language. Absurdist parody devalues official modes of discourse by revealing the meaninglessness of ideas ostensibly important enough to warrant the risk of nuclear destruction. Satirical subversion is achieved by fi rst making the language itself seem absurd and then rejecting as false the ideology that creates the system from which such meaningless language springs. Because the historical reality of the Cold War was predicated at least in part on fictionalised constructs presented as truth, it is only through scrutiny and, if necessary, renunciation of such constructs that humanity can again achieve some measure of serenity and assurance. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell have suggested a prognosis for ‘renewal’ based on a candid attitude toward the past, an attitude that they, like the Russian and American subversive satirists mentioned here, argue has been missing: It can enable us to emerge from nuclear entrapment and rediscover our imaginative capacities on behalf of human good. We can overcome our moral inversion and cease to justify weapons or actions of mass killing. [ . . . ]. We can also free our society from its apocalyptic concealment, and in the process enlarge our vision. We can break out of our longstanding numbing in the vitalizing endeavor of learning, or relearning, to feel. And we can divest ourselves of a debilitating sense of futurelessness and once more feel bonded to past and future generations.57 Lifton and Mitchell contend that the end of the Cold War should not simply occasion a celebration of survival; rather, it should lead to solemn and honest reflection on the reasoning that unleashed the nuclear genie with which the world must henceforth contend. This process of refl ection is abetted not only by a review of past expressions of dissent, but also by study of artistic engagements with the Cold War that are afforded the perspectival benefits of hindsight. In the last two decades, most of the writers mentioned here as well as younger writers including Lydia Millet, Philip Roth, Gerald Vizenor, Colson Whitehead, Mark Kharitonov, Vladimir Makanin, Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin and Svetlana Vasilenko have added to the substantial body of work that re-examines the assumptions and rhetorics of recent history with a sceptical eye in order to avoid the blunders of the past.

154 Derek C. Maus NOTES 1. Maltby, Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 39. 2. Ibid., p. 21. More recent studies of the links between postmodern literary techniques and the politics of the Cold War include Tobin Siebers’s Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (1993), Marcel Cornis-Pope’s Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After (2001) and Daniel Cordle’s States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (2008). 3. Iser, ‘The Significance of Fictionalizing’, Anthropoetics: The Electronic Journal of Generative Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall 1997/Winter 1998), p. 2. 4. Ibid., p. 3. 5. Ibid., p. 3. 6. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 133. 7. For an extensive overview of the complex relationship between parody and satire in postmodern literature, see Steven Weisenburger’s Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 17, 257–8. 8. Maltby, Dissident Postmodernists, p. 30. 9. Ibid., p. 30. 10. Ibid., p. 30. 11. Ibid., pp. 30–1. 12. Ibid., p. 31. 13. Remington, The Truth of Authority: Ideology and Communication in the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), p. 134. 14. Dovlatov, The Compromise, trans. Anne Frydman, new edn (1981; Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1990), p. 26. Turonok, Dovlatov’s editor in the story, uses the word polnotsennyi (literally, ‘fully-valued’) to describe the ideal child he seeks (Dovlatov, Kompromiss (New York: Serebrianyi Vek, 1981), p. 25). 15. Dovlatov, Compromise, p. 35. 16. Ibid., p. 147. 17. Ibid., p. 148. 18. Ibid., p. 4. 19. Maltby, Dissident Postmodernists, p. 33. 20. Ibid., p. 101. 21. DeLillo, End Zone, new edn (1971; New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 10. 22. Ibid., p. 4. 23. Remington, Truth of Authority, p. 86. 24. Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History (New York: Arcade, 1990), pp. 251–2. 25. Zinoviev, The Radiant Future, trans. Gordon Clough, new edn (1978; New York: Random House, 1980), p. 7. 26. Iskander, Rabbits and Boa Constrictors, trans. Ronald E. Peterson, new edn (1981; Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1989), pp. 31–2. 27. Voinovich, Moscow 2042, trans. Richard Lourie, new edn (1986; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), p. 135. 28. Maltby, Dissident Postmodernists, p. 34. 29. Ibid., p. 34. 30. Epstein, ‘The Dialectics of Hyper: From Modernism to Postmodernism’, in Epstein, Alexander Genis and Slobodanka Vadiv-Glover, eds, Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), p. 5.

Russian and American Satirists 155 31. Voinovich, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, trans. Richard Lourie, new edn (1976; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 9. Reflecting a common Soviet practice, the name of the town has been changed from the very apt Griaznoye (‘dirty’ or ‘muddy’) to Krasnoye, which means both ‘red’ and, in a folksy colloquialism, ‘beautiful’. 32. Ibid., p. 10. 33. Ibid., p. 10. 34. Ibid., pp. 10–11. 35. Ibid., p. 218. 36. Tertz, The Makepeace Experiment, trans. Manya Harari, new edn (1963; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), p. 176. 37. Aksyonov, Our Golden Ironburg: A Novel with Formulas, trans. Ronald E. Peterson, new edn (1980; Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1989), pp. 45–6. 38. Eisenhower, ‘Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People’, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1960–1961 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1961), p. 1038. 39. Vonnegut, Player Piano, new edn (1952; New York: Delacorte, 1973), p. 1. 40. Ibid., p. 1. 41. Ibid., p. 1. 42. The Ghost Shirt Movement’s opposition to machines is reminiscent of the ‘Mephi’ in Evgeny Zamyatin’s My (We, 1924). The Mephi, who live outside the technocratic and rigidly organised society of the ‘One State’, also unsuccessfully attempt to foment a revolt against the mechanisation of human life, although, unlike Vonnegut, Zamyatin ends his novel with a glimmer of hope that his revolutionaries are not utterly defeated. 43. Maltby, Dissident Postmodernists, pp. 35–6. 44. Ibid., p. 36. 45. Ibid., p. 35. 46. Zinoviev, Homo Sovieticus, trans. Charles Janson, new edn (1982; Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985), p. 14. 47. Ibid., p. 15. 48. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 49. Ibid., p. 9. He simplifies his problem as follows: ‘I want to do something, but I don’t want to make the effort to accomplish what I want’ (ibid., p. 9). 50. Ibid., p. 10. 51. Ibid., p. 10. 52. Iser, ‘Significance of Fictionalizing’, p. 2; Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, new edn (1963; New York: Dial, 2006), p. 5. All italics in quotations from this work appear in the original. 53. Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, p. 4. 54. Ibid., p. 2. 55. Ibid., p. 91. 56. Ibid., pp. 91–2. 57. Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Putnam, 1995), p. 356.

11 Cold War Protest in East and West German Political Song David Robb

From the 1960s the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany enjoyed thriving cultures in political song, mostly inspired by the ideological confl ict of the Cold War. Despite the vastly contrasting natures of the political systems, many of the most prominent singers of East and West Germany during the 1960s and early 1970s were—with admittedly different agendas and to varying extents—preoccupied with the notion of the communist utopia. In West Germany this began with the young singers of the early 1960s who reacted to the entrenched conservatism of the ‘Economic Miracle’ by reinvigorating the lost tradition of socially critical German songs banned under the Nazis. By the student movement of the late 1960s, singers such as Franz Josef Degenhardt were embracing a militant Marxist stance against capitalism. In the GDR, where subversive song was outlawed, Wolf Biermann incurred an eleven-year ban from 1965 to 1976 for singing about how the Stalinist practices of the state fell far short of the utopian ideal. On the other hand, the ideologically infiltrated singing group, Oktoberklub, extolled the virtues of the GDR as if this contradiction between ideal and reality did not exist. By the 1980s, however, political song in both states reflected the fracturing of the belief in a communist utopia, and by the time of unification it had become marginalised in German culture. It is from this post-utopian perspective that we reassess the significance of the genre during the Cold War. After 1945, songwriters felt a common need to distance themselves from the cultural legacy of the Third Reich. This resulted in singers from both East and West identifying with a previously existing German literary tradition of protest song ‘from below’. The tradition was quite distinct from the conservative and nationalistic folk song genres favoured by the Nazis. Rather it included the socially critical songs of the Vormärz (the period from 1830 leading up to the 1848 Revolution) by writers such as Heinrich Heine, Ferdinand Freiligrath and Georg Herwegh, the satirical cabaret songs of Kurt Tucholsky and Walter Mehring in the Weimar Republic, and the workers’ songs of Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler. The revival of the subversive tradition after its virtual eradication during the Third Reich was led by the GDR, formed in 1949, which saw itself as the natural heir to the

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workers’ song and the socially critical song in general. It nurtured these through the records of the legendary Brecht singer and actor Ernst Busch, who had spent much of the Second World War in Nazi jails, as well as through developments at an institutional level. In 1954 the Workers Song Archive of the Academy of Arts was founded in East Berlin, where from 1957 song collector Inge Lammel was to bring out many edited pamphlets of songs. These functioned as ‘utility song books’ for schools, for the Free German Youth and for society in general, and had the distinct purpose of promoting a socialist consciousness. Another major influence on the political song and folksong scenes of both East and West was the publication in the GDR of folklorist Wolfgang Steinitz’s two-volume Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten (German Folksongs of a Democratic Character from Six Centuries, 1954, 1962). This was an extensive critical edition of songs going back to the fifteenth century which, opposed to ‘das Volk’ propagated by the Nazis, was concerned with the folksongs of such ordinary working people as peasants, craftsmen and soldiers.1 To make this distinction Steinitz coined the new term ‘democratic folksong’.2 The concept struck a chord with young singers in West Germany, including Peter Rohland and the twins Hein and Oss Kröher, who had emerged from the choirs of the Bündisch German Youth Movement.3 Originally conservative in orientation, many groups of the Bündisch movement had by the 1960s swung towards the left, a trend that was reflected amongst the youth as a whole. This cultural reorientation expressed itself in the search for the anti-establishment folksongs which were no longer sung. Rohland and the Kröhers henceforth became major players in the West German folksong revival, the focal point of which was the annual Burg Waldeck Festivals in Hunsrück from 1964 to 1969. One of the historical ‘democratic’ folksongs which they popularised was ‘Das Blutgericht’ (The Blood Court, 1844), written anonymously and sung during the Silesian weavers revolt in 1844. The song is an emotive attack on factory owners, like the Zwanzigers and Dierigs, who because of international competition in the weaving industry reduced wages to the point where workers were facing starvation. Clearly West German workers of the Economic Miracle did not endure such conditions, but the new wave of folk singers identified with the gesture of defiance against authority and injustice expressed in the lyrics. A blood court is what we have here harsher than Vehmic law with verdicts cruelly more severe than death plain, swift and raw. Relentless torture is our fate, and we are on the rack. Hear our sighs from morn to late while they are on our back.

158 David Robb The Zwanzigers execute all day, the Dierigs by their side. They grind us, sweat us, skin and flay, and nothing do they hide. You villains, oh, you devil’s brood, infernal monsters you, getting fat off the poor man’s good— damnation will be your due. It’s you who cause pain, grief, despair for the poor man in this land, and even snatch with zero care his dry bread from his hand.4 While such anti-establishment songs (particularly those from the 1848 Revolution) became popular amongst the new singers, the folksong revival faced considerable prejudice from the outset. For many Germans, the connotation of the term ‘Volk’ with National Socialism had rendered a whole folksong culture virtually unsingable. At the same time, the new wave of popular folk and protest songs from the USA and Britain were challenging native German forms, with anthems such as ‘We Shall Overcome’ dominating the anti-nuclear Easter Marches which were held in Germany from 1960 onwards. As Franz Josef Degenhardt sang in response to the question ‘Where are your songs?’ from international visitors, Our songs are dead, dead are our old songs. Chewed and spat out by teachers, crucified by boys in short trousers, Screamed to death by the brown hordes, trampled in the dirt by jackboots. 5 As a result, a movement emerged with the declared objective of creating a contemporary German political song, one that could match, for example, the satirical chanson of George Brassens and Yves Montand in France. In the 1960s, the self-penned songs of Degenhardt, Dieter Süverkrüp and Walter Mossmann heralded the emergence of the Liedermacher (song-makers), a term allegedly coined by the East German protest singer Wolf Biermann in reference to Bertolt Brecht’s term ‘Stückeschreiber’ (play-writers). Degenhardt was the early star of this new movement in West Germany. His work reflected the new cultural non-conformism which was emerging among the intellectual youth in general, who rejected the complacency of a mainstream society celebrating the Adenauer post-war Economic Miracle. In ‘Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkindern’ (Don’t Play with the Scruff y

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Children, 1965), a middle-class boy’s development is examined against the background of an underprivileged fringe existence: after the command of the title, the boy is urged to ‘Stay in the upper side of town / Just like all your brothers’.6 Here, Degenhardt’s insights into the class-character of Adenauer society contradict the view that a prosperous West Germany had dissolved class boundaries, with the constant opposition of the proletarian district and ‘the upper side of town’ implying the necessity of being in the right social tier and playing by its rules.7 The songs of the Liedermacher became increasingly radical with the emergence of the student movement and the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO). The APO had formed in 1966 as a response to the ‘Grand Coalition’ between the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), an alliance that reinforced perceptions that there was no longer an effective opposition in the Federal Republic. The radicalisation also reflected the heightened tension of the period. This was fuelled by the demonstrations against the US-Vietnam war, the passing of the Emergency Laws, the shooting and killing of the student Benno Ohnesorg by a policeman at a demonstration in Berlin in June 1967, and the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke, leader of the student movement, in April 1968. This last event was blamed on the alleged monopoly of the conservative Springer publishing house, whose newspapers, such as Bild, Die Welt and Berliner Morgenpost, were virulently anti-student.8 Now Degenhardt went on the offensive, embracing Marxist ideology and advocating a united front between the SPD and the newly formed German Communist Party (DKP) with the aim of overthrowing the capitalist system.9 His political transformation entailed a change of artistic form. Degenhardt now came up with the maxim ‘[w]hen the classes fight, subtlety is just not right’, distancing himself from the nuances of his earlier songwriting and producing a more hard-edged, less ironic, music.10 This echoed Hanns Eisler’s manifesto for the political song from the early 1930s in which he had advocated a worker’s style of music that had to rid itself of the trappings of bourgeois music before it could become truly revolutionary.11 From now on Degenhardt’s songs were no longer for the aesthetic gratification of an educated audience, but for explicit agitation in the class struggle, as seen in ‘Manchmal sagen die Kumpanen’ (These Days the Guys Might Say, 1968), premiered at the Essen Songtage in September 1968: These days the guys might say to me, what is this crap? Where is your subtlety? Black-white is all you tap. Okay, I say, that may be so, but it’s the only way to go, because when the classes fight, subtlety is just not right.

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Old customers complain, is your sense for poetics muted? Figurative language, imagery, allusions are what you’re good at. Okay, I say, that may be so, it’s just not the way to go, because when the classes fight, allusions and imagery are not right.12 The extremist stance was foreshadowed by events at the Burg Waldeck Festival in May 1968, where the crowd had been bolstered by members of the German Socialist Students Association (SDS) who had little interest in music and saw the festival as a vehicle for furthering their political agenda.13 Among the acts was Floh de Cologne, a radical rock cabaret group influenced by an agitprop tradition that had its roots in the politically volatile Weimar Republic of the 1920s.14 With their montage of rock music, political lyrics, humour and lunacy, they became known as the German answer to the American rock groups The Fugs and The Mothers of Invention. The sleeve of their album Fliessbandbabys Beat Show (Conveyor Belt Babies’ Beat Show, 1970) gives a nineteen-point guide to becoming politically active, while their most acclaimed album, Profitgeier (Exploiter, 1971), was a ‘rock opera’ in which ‘the group members, in typical agitprop fashion, enacted the roles of different social types within the class-divided society’.15 At Burg Waldeck, and later that same year at the Essen Music Festival, Floh de Cologne shocked their audience with the extreme imagery of their fi rst album, a collaboration with the communist Liedermacher Dieter Süverkrüp entitled Vietnam (1968), all royalties of which were transferred to a foundation to benefit the Vietnamese. Markus Schmidt’s song ‘Jack Miller’ (1968), for example, functioned as a bitter, grotesque satire of the relationship between capitalism and the barbarism of war: Jack Miller went to Vietnam, went to the Holy War, because he learned from every man that ‘Freedom leads to victory’. He kissed his wife goodbye. She said: send me, seeing as I am your wife, a souvenir. Hardly had the fi rst week gone by, he sent her a parcel, of a skull wound gone septic and stitched up, the burnt skin of a child,

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the gonorrhea of a whore, a skull half rotten and blind and an umbilical chord. And Jenny opened a shop, sold there the stocks and bonds. And everyone bought by the ton the dead and the perished. For in the end there is a moral, we know as good Christians, the best communist is of course the dead communist [ . . . ].16 The late 1960s and the 1970s were undoubtedly the highpoint for political song in West Germany. Degenhardt even had a hit single with a double A-side, ‘Sacco und Vanzetti/Verteidigung eines Kriegsdienstverweigerers’ (Sacco and Vanzetti/Defence of a Conscientious Objector, 1972), that appealed to the pacifistic alternative scene. The Liedermacher retained their popularity throughout the 1970s despite losing their unity of purpose in the wake of the disintegration of the student movement and the emergence of various left-wing political factions. For example, Walter Mossmann performed with an independent agenda in the solidarity campaigns known as the New Social Movements, and sang utility songs distributed as leaflets during the protests against the building of the nuclear reactor at Wyhl on the Rhine. Amidst a general liberalisation of society, folk festivals and socio-cultural centres received government funding in the 1970s and 1980s, creating a milieu in which the political song flourished. Such initiatives by the SPD-led governments had the effect of successfully integrating ‘the alternative cultural scene, which had initially been on a course of confrontation with mainstream society’, and reflected how important it was for the Federal Republic to be seen as an open, tolerant and selfcritical society in contrast to the Third Reich.17 In this respect the political song became virtually institutionalised, as exemplified by the release of an official cassette compilation entitled Liedermacher in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Liedermacher in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1983) by the Goethe Institute, a government sponsored organisation responsible for disseminating German culture worldwide. A similar process had already taken place on the other side of the ideological divide. As stated, the GDR had been the fi rst of the two German states to actively promote the tradition of socially critical song. The battle songs (Kampflieder) of Brecht and Eisler and songs from the Spanish Civil War were learned in schools and in the army, while so-called ‘construction songs’ (Aufbaulieder) were newly written for the GDR youth, encouraging diligence and a joyful common purpose in the building of the socialist state.18 Nevertheless, the political song genre did not prosper in the 1950s:

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it was a serious, sacred tradition not to be tampered with, and the writing of new songs critical of the GDR was unthinkable. By the early 1960s, however, a completely new kind of protest culture was developing. The American civil rights song was filtering over the air waves via West Germany through to East Berlin, and the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 gave the GDR government a sufficient sense of security to relax censorship in the arts. An independent folk scene soon emerged in East Berlin, based on the informal Hootenanny model made famous by American folk singers such as Pete Seeger. It was during the political thaw of the period that Wolf Biermann made his name with his uniquely critical political songs. His credentials as son of a communist Jew who was murdered in Auschwitz gave him a certain invulnerability that other songwriters did not possess. Moreover, he came from Hamburg in West Germany, where he had been brought up by a communist mother, and had taken GDR citizenship at the age of seventeen of his own free will. Two of Biermann’s songs about the military, one written before the building of the Wall and the other after, document his turn to oppositional commentary. The first one, ‘Soldaten-Lied’ (Soldier’s Song, 1960), was already controversial by GDR standards in that it was by no means propagandistic, but presented the theme of war in the form of a debate. As Holger Böning comments, ‘[s]uch delicate issues as this were supposed to receive agitprop treatments. Serious discussion was not desired’.19 In the final verse, however, Biermann concludes that war could be waged to defend socialism: ‘My son, there are men / who are arming themselves for war / against the workers’ states, / so I can only advise you: / Go, become one of our soldiers’.20 In the later ‘Soldat, Soldat’ (Soldier, Soldier, 1963) there is a marked shift in his claim that there can never be any sense to war: ‘Soldier soldier, please use your head / Soldier soldier, no one will win / Soldier soldier, in war again’.21 The song is reminiscent of Brecht’s ‘Legende des toten Soldaten’ (Legend of the Dead Soldier, 1918) in referring to the facelessness of soldiers in life and in death: as Biermann sings, ‘Soldiers are identical / The quick, the dead and all’.22 In the same year, he incurred his first performance ban and was also controversially thrown out of the Party. His response was to write ‘Ballade vom Mann’ (Ballad of the Man, 1963), which parodies the self-defeating policies of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). A man steps in a pile of faeces and finds a solution in chopping off his foot: Now once there was a man a man who put his foot who put his naked foot into a lump of shit It sickened him so much to see his shitty foot he vowed this shitty foot would carry him no more.

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[...] So picking up his axe and swinging at his foot he then chopped off his foot in haste with his axe. 23 He cuts off the wrong foot and then, in his rage, cuts off the other one too. Biermann makes clear the parallel to his own expulsion from the Party: ‘The party has chopped off / a good few of its feet / a few of its good feet / the party has chopped off ’.24 But at this early stage in his career, he still held onto the possibility of reform, singing that unlike ‘the above-mentioned man / the party sometimes grows / its feet back on again’.25 As time progressed, however, his criticism of the GDR, which in his opinion was still in the clutches of Stalinism, became increasingly bitter. His second ban lasted from 1965 until 1976 when he was fi nally allowed out to do a tour of West Germany. After a widely publicised concert in Cologne, televised live on West German TV, which could be picked up by the majority of East Germans, the GDR government stripped him of his citizenship, effectively exiling him to the West. 26 The political thaw came to an abrupt end with the 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party in December 1965. The whole singing movement (Singebewegung) was reformulated as an agent of state propaganda. For example, pop groups were banned for their absorption and dissemination of Western influence, and in late 1966 it was decided at the highest level that the Berlin Hootenanny-Klub was to be taken over by the Free German Youth (FDJ), its name changed to Oktoberklub (in memory of the Russian Revolution of October 1917) and the writer Gisela Steineckert, former cultural editor of the GDR magazine Eulenspiegel and later president of the Committee for Popular Art in the 1980s, installed as a supervisor. From 1968, under the slogan DDR-Konkret, the FDJ encouraged young students and workers to write new songs dealing with their everyday lives from a more conformist position. The following defi nition of the political song in the GDR by Inge Lammel shows how its traditional role of subversion had been inverted: The new songs are written for the policies of the Party and the government. They are no longer the means of struggle of a suppressed class against a class of exploiters, but rather the expression of the common interests of all workers. 27 The songs of DDR-Konkret aimed to create a strong GDR identity amongst the youth and to instil a sense of pride in its achievements. The most famous example is the unofficial anthem of the GDR Singebewegung, Hartmut König’s ‘Sag mir, wo du stehst’ (Tell Me Where You Stand, 1968). It has been claimed that this was originally not intended as a pro-GDR song, but

164 David Robb rather represented the Hootenanny-Klub’s solidarity with the sentiments of the American civil rights movement, as captured in the latter’s ‘Which Side Are You On?’28 This is unconvincing, however, in the light of the slightly threatening tone and the dogmatic call for loyalty to the socialist cause in lines such as ‘We have the right to recognise you, / Nodding masks are no use to us’.29 It is clear that the objectives of the narrative voice are synonymous with those of the state, and phrases such as ‘We’re making history’ present the ultimate victory of communism—in keeping with SED Marxist rhetoric—as an inevitable outcome.30 For the realisation of this historical goal, focus and discipline are required: the song challenges GDR youths to choose between ‘us and them’ (a clear reference to the capitalist West), otherwise they will ‘linger behind’.31 Such dogmatism naturally produced dissent. Bettina Wegner, co-founder of the Hootenanny-Klub and later a leading dissident Liedermacher in the 1970s, left the group in 1967 as a result of the FDJ takeover. 32 Yet despite these differences it appears clear that all these singers—not unlike Biermann, who always claimed to be living ‘in the better half’ of Germany (‘in der bessren Hälfte’33)—preferred their own side of the ideologically divided world. This was reflected in the songs of the early Singebewegung, one of whose main songwriters was Reinhold Andert. In his ‘Lied vom Vaterland’ (Song of the Fatherland, 1971), a parody of Goethe’s poem ‘Mignon’ (1795), he proclaims: ‘Do you know the land where the factories belong to us, / where Prometheus gets up as early as five, / [ . . . ] where the people repair everything themselves, / because they have the tools, the knowledge and the power’.34 From the early 1970s, the singing-club culture, faced with increasing public indifference, found itself in an irretrievable decline. 35 Nevertheless, the Singebewegung spawned a wealth of talent, and singers and songwriters such as Barbara Thalheim, Gerhard Schöne, Werner Karma, Gerhard Gundermann and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel enjoyed popularity right up until the Peaceful Revolution of autumn 1989. The focal point for this scene was the annual Festival of Political Song in East Berlin which between 1970 and 1990 was a showcase event for socialism that simultaneously permitted a forum for considerable artistic interchange. The attraction for many fans lay in the Liedermachers’ exploitation of a basic contradiction within GDR cultural policy, one that kept them on a permanent tightrope between prohibition and tolerance. On the one hand, political song was nurtured at an official level as a proudly coveted revolutionary heritage. In the absence of an open media, GDR Liedermacher enjoyed an elevated status as bearers of unofficial tidings: concert halls, student clubs and informal gatherings were invariably packed, and editions of the records released on the state record label Amiga were snapped up immediately. On the other hand, political song was constantly suspected as a potential means of subversion. Some of the most critical productions, such as Karls Enkel, Wacholder and Beckert & Schulz’s Die Hammer-Rehwü (The Hammer-Revue, 1982), were only

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released after the fall of the GDR, while works such as Jürgen Wolff and Dieter Beckert’s ‘Booten des Todes’ (Death’s Messengers, 1982), banned at the Leipzig Folk Festival of 1982, have never been released at all. A song by Hans-Eckardt Wenzel and Steffen Mensching from the group Karls Enkel illustrates the developments of the early 1980s. This was a parody of Ferdinand Freiligrath’s well known 1848 adaptation of ‘For a’ That’ (1795) by Robert Burns, and was written for the Liedertheater production of the folk group Wacholder entitled Trotz Alledem: 1848 Revolutionslieder (For a’ That: Songs of the 1848 Revolution, 1984). According to Karen Leeder, this young generation of writers, which included authors of Liedertheater (experimental political ‘song theatre’) and poets from the alternative Prenzlauer Berg scene, was characterised by a dialectic between the motifs of acknowledging the established GDR structures into which they were born and of attempting to break out of them.36 While the GDR’s highly vaunted socialist heritage, of which the revolutionary song ‘Trotz alledem’ was a part, is paid respect, this same heritage is used to criticize GDR reality: the spirit of the historical revolution provides the reference point against which the stagnation of the revolutionary ideal in the present is measured. Too soon, too late, as it always was, never enough, for all that, we laughed at the rebellion of the citizens today, for all that. For all that and all that, For Wagner, Weerth and Bakunin, the chilling, cold winter wind blasts in our face for all that. And if you turn the date around, The 4, the 8, for all that, They don’t shoot any more with lead At you and me and all them. For all that and all that, For stupidity, craft and all that, No one other than ourselves Can set us free, for all that. The fridge it hums, how warm we are, For Marches, Mays and all that; The bowel digests, so well behaved, For rapeseed, schnapps and all that. For all that and all that, For stomach cancer and all that, We’d rather be hungry And not so full, for all that.

166 David Robb The bread turns mouldy in the bin, For Africa and all that, Dressed in exquisite rags But we are sad, for all that. For all that and all that, For Pershing 2 and all that: We’d like to make liveable The world we have, for all that. The fridge it hums, the champagne’s cold, And we drink, for all that, The legacy of those who perished, They defied all that and that. For all that and all that, For all that and all that, Come let’s drink for all that, To March and Marx. For all that.37 The ‘Trotz alledem’ motif relates to the fact that there is no trace in the GDR of the revolution which Marx had predicted: the cold winter wind ‘still blasts in the faces’ of the population ‘for all that’. Even if the GDR continues to function (‘The fridge it hums, the champagne’s cold’) the revolutionary heritage of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State has—metaphorically—been drunk along with the schnapps. The lines ‘For stupidity, craft and all that, / No one other than ourselves / Can set us free, for all that’, relate to the people (the leading politicians as well as the normal citizens) who through their own failings have spoiled the socialist experiment. Interestingly, the only reference to the capitalist ‘class enemy’ comes with the Pershing 2 missiles, which at that time were being stationed in West Germany. This was a typical attempt to appease the state censors, although the words ‘and all that’ after ‘Pershing 2’ were, according to Wacholder member Matthias Kießling, a disguised allusion to the Soviet SS-20 missiles being stationed in the GDR (at least, that was how they were meant to be understood: ‘Those (in the audience) who wanted to notice it, did notice it’).38 This may appear harmless in itself, with little risk involved, but anyone who directly challenged the GDR state in the post-Biermann era would have been immediately banned from performing.39 Nuances and subtleties were essential for artistic survival, and it was only after Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that the Liedermacher found the inspiration to adopt a more openly critical stance.40 An example was Die Sichel-Operette (The Sichel-Operetta, 1987), a production staged by former members of Karls Enkel with a larger ensemble of musicians and actors. Eradicating all reference to utopian communism, the work addressed the political cul-de-sac that the GDR had entered in the Gorbachev period two years before the fall of the Wall, a period in which

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countless citizens (among them many actors and musicians) were applying to leave for West Germany. Indeed, the main subtext of the production is the intransigence of the state with regard to its prohibition on travel to the West. The passage from Offenbach’s Orphée (1858), ‘When I was a prince in Arcadia, / I lived in richness, splendour and power’, is transformed by Dieter Beckert, playing the role of the ‘Kaiser’ (alluding to the leadership of the GDR), into: ‘When I was in Binz with Bernhardy, / We swam to the horizon’.41 Binz is on the island of Rügen on the Baltic Sea just off the GDR coast, a place from which frequent attempts were made to escape by swimming to Denmark. With the plot taking place in an imaginary country ‘in the East’ and being based upon the love between the native Hans Sichel and Princess Tiffany from Monaco, it is also a parody of the (in most cases) romantic dream of marrying a westerner and legally departing the GDR. It is potential exiles, as much as the socialist illusions of the state, that are satirised by the ironic leitmotif: ‘Happiness is a loose woman / She doesn’t like to linger long’.42 As such themes would suggest, the Liedermacher suddenly had a heightened relevance during the Peaceful Revolution,43 and after the fall of the Berlin Wall a singer like Biermann was able to return to the GDR for a triumphant concert in Leipzig after a thirteen-year absence. But the loss of power of the Politburo and the Stasi meant that Liedermacher quickly had to look around for new themes to write about. Suddenly stripped of their function as the bearers of truth for a public deprived of credible news reporting, many of the singer-songwriters were to endure difficult times in the forthcoming years. The respective conditions in the two German states during the Cold War had given rise to a particular counterculture in which the political song had prospered.44 It resulted from a situation in which mainstream political and cultural discourse was thoroughly at odds with unofficial discourse; that is, with the opinions and debates of the people. One could argue that by the mid to late 1970s in West Germany this crisis was already considerably mitigated by a political system that was flexible enough to integrate many countercultural initiatives into mainstream public policy. In the GDR, on the other hand, the crisis persisted up until 1989. By the onset of unification, made possible by the end of the Cold War, it was clear that the conditions for a broad, popular political song movement no longer existed in any part of Germany. The younger generation, sceptical of the political utopias their parents had believed in, were interested in other forms of music.45 The Berlin Festival of Political Song, discontinued after 1990, was revived in 2000 and, under the new name of Festival Musik und Politik, has striven to encompass a greater variety of musical styles (other than purely Lied). The festival has seen, for example, a number of artists drawing on hiphop styles, some of which have been linked to the organization Attac, which sees itself as an international, extraparliamentary, anti-globalisation movement and network. The festival is for the most part, however, frequented by the old guard of Liedermacher who annually debate the reasons for the flagging

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public interest in their genre. A panel in 2007 agreed that the popularity of protest song in the 1960s was a reflection of the cultural revolution of the time. It was argued that the political reductionism and simplification evident in the songs of the 1960s were no longer possible in the face of the complexities of current society. It remains to be seen whether in such times of cultural disorientation and social fragmentation the traditional political song can present a clear enough vision to unite a sizable majority of people and thus have renewed social relevance. NOTES 1. See Eckhard John, ‘Die Entdeckung des sozialkritischen Liedes. Wolfgang Steinitz als Wegbereiter eines neuen “Volkslied”-Verständnisses’, in John, ed., Die Entdeckung des sozialkritischen Liedes: zum 100. Geburtstag von Wolfgang Steinitz (Münster: Waxmann, 2006), VII, 15. 2. The term emerged from the title of Steinitz’s book and became a widely known description. Unless otherwise indicated, translations in the main text of the original German titles and lyrics are by the author. 3. See Eckard Holler, ‘The Burg Waldeck Festivals, 1964–1969’, in David Robb, ed., Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s (Rochester and New York: Camden House, 2007), pp. 98–103, 115–16. 4. Anon, ‘Das Blutgericht’ (translated by Sabine Tober), in Inke Pinkert-Sältzer, ed., German Songs: Popular, Political, Folk, and Religious (New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 26, lines 1–20. The original German text of the song is cited in Steinitz, Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten, 2 vols (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1954, 1962), I, 231. Its fi rst German folk recording was on Peter Rohland, 48er Lieder: Lieder deutscher Demokraten, LP (Teldec, 1967). 5. Degenhardt, ‘Die alten Lieder’ (The Old Songs, 1966), on Degenhardt, Wenn der Senator erzählt, LP (Polydor, 1966), lines 1, 13–18. 6. Degenhardt, ‘Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkindern’, on Degenhardt, Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkindern: Chansons, LP (Polydor, 1966), lines 3–4. 7. The notion of a classless society had been further encouraged by the SPD’s Godesberg Program of 1959, where, in order to make itself electable, the party had distanced itself from its working-class roots by omitting references to Marxism and by dropping demands for the nationalisation of industry. 8. Holler, ‘Burg Waldeck Festivals’, p. 118. 9. The Communist Party of Germany (KPD), a major political party in the years 1918–33, had been banned in West Germany in 1956. 10. See David Robb, ‘Mühsam, Brecht, Eisler and the Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Heritage’, in Robb, ed., Protest Song, pp. 54–7. 11. See Eisler, Musik und Politik. Schriften 1924–1948 (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1973), p. 170. 12. Degenhardt, ‘Manchmal sagen die Kumpanen’ (translated by Sabine Tober), in Pinkert-Sältzer, ed., German Songs, pp. 139–40, lines 1–16. The song can be found on Degenhardt, Degenhardt Live, LP (Polydor, 1968). 13. See Holler, ‘Burg Waldeck Festivals’, pp. 120–1. 14. For a wider examination of agitprop rock see Annette Blühdorn, Pop and Poetry—Pleasure and Protest: Udo Lindenberg, Konstantin Wecker and the Tradition of German Cabaret (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 135–7. 15. http://digilander.libero.it/mguitarweb/KrautRock/F1.htm (accessed 17 January 2011).

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16. Floh de Cologne and Süverkrüp, ‘Jack Miller’, on Floh de Cologne and Süverkrüp, Vietnam—für fünf Sprech—und Singstimmen Streicher, Bläser, Orgel, Baß, Schlagwerk, Klavier und Gitarren, LP (pläne, 1968), lines 1–24. For commentary on the song, see Holler, ‘Burg Waldeck Festivals’, p. 122. 17. Eckhard Holler, ‘The Folk and Liedermacher Scene in the Federal Republic in the 1970s and 1980s’, in Robb, ed., Protest Song, p. 162. 18. For a summary of the beginnings of the GDR youth singing movement (Singebewegung) see Lutz Kirchenwitz, Folk, Chanson und Liedermacher in der DDR (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1993), pp. 16–33; for a discussion of Aufbaulieder see Holger Böning, Der Traum von einer Sache: Aufstieg und Fall der Utopien im politischen Lied der Bundesrepublik und der DDR (Bremen: Lumière, 2003), pp. 185–91. 19. Böning, Der Traum von einer Sache, p. 194. 20. Biermann, ‘Soldaten-Lied’, in Biermann, Alle Lieder (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1991), pp. 36–7, lines 13–17. 21. Biermann, ‘Soldat, Soldat’, in Biermann, Poems and Ballads, trans. Steve Gooch (London: Pluto Press, 1977), p. 41, lines 10–12. 22. Ibid., p. 41, lines 23–4. 23. Biermann, ‘Ballade vom Mann’, in Biermann, Poems and Ballads, p. 75, lines 1–8, 13–16. 24. Ibid., p. 77, lines 29–32. 25. Ibid., p. 77, lines 34–6. 26. The concert in Cologne was captured on record: Biermann, Es geht sein sozialistischen Gang, LP (CBS, 1977). 27. Lammel, Das Arbeiterlied (Leipzig: Reclam, 1970), p. 82. 28. Lutz Kirchenwitz interviewed on Axel Grote and Christian Steinke, Sag mir wo du Stehst: Die Geschichte vom Oktoberklub, TV Documentary (ORB, 1993). 29. Oktoberklub, ‘Sag mir, wo du stehst’, on Oktoberklub, Unterm Arm die Gitarre, LP (VEB Deutsche Schallplatten, 1963), lines 11–12. 30. Ibid., line 4. 31. Ibid., line 6. 32. In 1993 she still talked with bitterness about this, claiming that group members had allowed themselves to be manipulated: Wegner, interviewed on Grote and Steinke, Sag mir wo du Stehst. 33. Biermann, ‘Es senkt das deutsche Dunkel’ (The German Darkness is Setting, 1967), in Biermann, Alle Lieder, p. 198, lines 7–8. 34. Oktoberklub, ‘Lied vom Vaterland’, on Oktoberklub, Das Beste, CD (Edition Barbarossa, 1995), lines 17–18, 23–4. 35. Kirchenwitz, Folk, Chanson und Liedermacher, p. 64. 36. Leeder, Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 4. 37. Wacholder, ‘Trotz alledem’, on Wacholder, Trotz Alledem: 1848 Revolutionslieder, unpublished manuscript and video recording collected by Karin Wolf (Berlin: Liedzentrum der Akademie der Künste der DDR, 1984), unpaginated, lines 1–40. 38. Kießling, in interview with David Robb, 26 November 2003. See also David Robb, ‘Political Song in the GDR: The Cat-and-Mouse Game with Censorship and Institutions’, in Robb, ed., Protest Song, pp. 227–54. 39. See David Robb, Zwei Clowns im Lande des verlorenen Lachens. Das Liedertheater Wenzel & Mensching (Berlin: Ch.Links Verlag, 1998), pp. 156–65. 40. See ibid., pp. 107–21. 41. Das Sichel-Kollektiv, ‘Als ich in Binz war mit Bernhardy’, from Das SichelKollektiv, Die Sichel-Operette, unpublished manuscript and video recording

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42. 43.

44. 45.

collected by Karin Wolf (Berlin: Liedzentrum der Akademie der Künste der DDR, 1984), p. 29, Act 3, Scene 2, lines 1–2. Das Sichel-Kollektiv, ‘Das Gluck ist eine leichte Dirne’, from ibid., p. 16, Act 1, Scene 5, lines 1–2. Wenzel and Mensching’s cabaret production Letztes aus der Da Da eR (Latest from the Da Da eR, 1989) provided satirical commentary on the daily fate of the beleagured government: see Wenzel and Mensching, Letztes aus der Da Da eR, in Andrea Doberenz, ed., Allerletztes aus der Da Da eR/Hunderkomödie (Halle and Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1991), pp. 11–63. Böning, Der Traum von einer Sache, pp. 5–6. See David Robb, ‘The Demise of Political Song and the New Discourse of Techno’, in Robb, ed., Protest Song, pp. 255–78.

12 Chinese Women’s Autobiographical Practice in the Early Post-Mao Era Lingzhen Wang

1

INTRODUCTION

The arrest of the Gang of Four on 6 October 1976 officially brought an end to China’s broadly defi ned Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and eventually to the Maoist era (inaugurated on 1 October 1949, when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had been founded). 2 In 1978, Deng Xiaoping’s newly consolidated socialist government launched a series of economic and cultural reforms, ushering China into the age of post-Mao reformism. In the initial stage of transformation, the role of literature was double-edged: It pioneered the creation of a public space curtailed during the previous era of socialism, but also implicitly prescribed new boundaries for literary production. Closely linked with other social forces, literature, the importance of which had been fi rmly established in the Maoist era, remained a powerful and influential public discourse. It played a significant role in meeting and orienting social consciousness toward the new needs of a decentralised society, in which the critique of and reflection on the previous political regime and its ideologies become possible. But, on the other hand, even though the new literary public differentiated itself from the previous one by loosening its bonds with the state, the function of literature as both the representation of and engagement with centralised social and political realities delimited by the dominant state ideology was still regarded as the most legitimate ideal for literature and thus was strongly endorsed by existing social and literary institutions. 3 In the early 1980s, the state also relaxed its control over people’s identity formation and stepped back from over thirty years of gender equality policies as pursued under Mao, leading to the (re)emergence of different discourses and practices. Traditional gender values began to regain public currency and, more significantly, gender difference with a biological and psychological bent became an important category for regulating new social roles and new divisions of labour in China. According to Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, the trend towards applying scientific discourses (biology, physiology, psychology) to define female intellectual, physical and emotional differences produced spheres in which women were deemed inferior to men.4

172 Lingzhen Wang Within these discourses, not only did biology become destiny, but women’s destiny was also measured in terms of men’s biology, with gender differences being presented in terms of an implicit discrimination of one over the other. Many educated Chinese women gradually came to the painful realisation that, if they had been officially ignored as gendered beings during the Maoist era, they were now to be publicly devalued, silenced and even slandered. The process of differentiation coincided with and reinforced the division of labour and the social construction of the domain of private life that sought to confine women in places perceived to require less intellectual, rational and physical capability, notably, the domain of the household. In this way, Chinese women of the early 1980s were caught once again in the discrepancy between the demands of the public and the private spheres. For a woman, the achievement of public life meant exposing herself to charges premised on the vulnerable and personal mark of the female gender and to rumours about her private life, which was sexually connoted and repeatedly emphasised as the most important realm for investments of both state interest and conventional values. 5 Women who wrote or otherwise performed in public more directly faced the dangers inherent in their social existence as gendered beings. In its reception, women’s writing was very much determined by the gendered embodiment or signature of its authors. This essay explores Chinese women’s autobiographical practice in the radically changing context of the early post-Mao era, examining specifically how a group of Chinese women actively participated in the transformation of Chinese literature and, at the same time, challenged newly prescribed literary boundaries and rising gender prejudices. I argue that this group of Chinese women writers not only successfully voiced its subjective concerns but also critically constructed, through a personal mode of writing, an alternative public realm that was gender specific and that decentralised the dominant literary representation of the time.

LITERARY POLICY AND WOMEN WRITERS’ MASQUERADE In the late 1970s and early 1980s, literary policy was somewhat relaxed by shifting the original principle, ‘Wenyi wei zhengzhi fuwu’ (literature in the service of politics), to the modified ‘Wenyi wei renmin fuwu, wei shehuizhuyi fuwu’ (literature in the service of the people and in the service of socialism).6 Nevertheless, the fundamental structure remained: literature should serve society (its people and political system) and the Party-state would set the yardsticks. At the level of practice, although the early reformist era saw socialist realism (praising the bright and positive side of Chinese society) give way largely to critical realism (exposing the dark and negative side of Chinese society), the latter was still restricted by its exclusive concern with centralised social matters mostly formulated by dominant ideologies. Consequently, in the process of literary publication and reception, public

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policy and official moral judgment still played significant roles in determining the fate of the author and the book. What was politically incorrect or irrelevant was, for the most part, still regarded as morally tainted or inappropriate and therefore required control. As Jeffrey Kinkley has observed, most ‘[o]f the serious post-Mao works of literature [ . . . ] remain “literature of purpose”’ in which ‘[s]ociety is still the subject’.7 It was through complex negotiations with contemporary literary policy and mainstream literary practice—relaxed but still constraining—that Chinese women writers articulated their individual and gendered voices, and constructed an alternative literary space. Living in the new post-Maoist China, most women writers did not envision themselves as antagonistic toward state politics and the dominant modes of literature, but their insistence on telling diverse personal and gendered stories indirectly questioned and challenged those modes. Chinese women writers’ relationship to dominant cultural production was thus complex, resisting reductive assumptions that posited them as simply conforming to, or fighting against, the literary and social public of their time. In reality, with various degrees of intent, most women writers of the early 1980s tried to cope with the central demands of political and literary norms, and strove to convey and articulate their particular experiences in public through various kinds of ‘masquerade’. Masquerade has been a subject of discussion for both psychoanalytic and feminist theorists in the context of western capitalist societies. For example, Joan Riviere shows how ‘women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men’.8 In her formulation, the women who wish for masculinity are those attempting to occupy the place of the father in public discourse as speaker, lecturer, writer; that is, as a user of signs rather than as a sign object. But by transgressing their socially sanctioned roles, women risk provoking hostility and moral charges. Masquerade, which certain women have intentionally adopted to present themselves in public, can therefore function to provide legitimate and conventional identities under which these women are able to appropriate and subvert the dominant codes of gender. Riviere further points out that, through women’s active performance of the expected cultural role in public, the differences between genuine womanliness and masquerade gradually diminish (‘they are the same thing’) and that any identity is, to a large extent, its appearance.9 In other words, women’s personal desires are expressed through both adopting (becoming) and appropriating (using) conventional and socially approved roles. Although Riviere’s account centres on professional, bourgeois western women in the period of early capitalism, her conceptualisation of masquerade as the appropriation of legitimate public discourses for articulating women’s personal desires, and for achieving their professional success, resonates with Chinese women’s experiences in both the Maoist and early post-Mao eras. But the Chinese case took an alternative direction because of the different historical roles sanctioned by Chinese society. Instead of

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taking up femininity as a mask, most Chinese women (writers), who had been officially ‘equal’ to men throughout the Maoist period, presented themselves via a ‘neutral’ or even masculine appearance (which under Mao was indeed based on a masculine standard, devised for both men and women) to legitimise their attempts to share their gendered experiences and stories. The traditional prejudices that resurfaced after 1978 also contributed to women writers’ conscious acts to defend themselves with the masquerade of a universal (non-gendered, but implicitly male) identity. Zhang Xinxin, in her story ‘Wo zainaer cuoguole ni?’ (How Did I Miss You?, 1980), explicitly reveals the necessity and significance of the logic of masquerade in women’s everyday life in Maoist and early postMao China. The heroine, pondering how the man she loves expects a more feminine and gentle girlfriend, asks herself the eponymous question, and reflects: I have to cope with the pressure of society and protect myself against people spying on my private affairs out of curiosity or jealousy, and so I am obliged to put on a mask, even a masculine one [ . . . ]. God, if there is one, made me a woman, but this society has demanded that I be like a man! So often I preferred to deliberately conceal my feminine traits just to survive, just to keep on going. And so, quite unconsciously, I’ve become like this!10 In the story, a masculine mask brings the heroine the power of independence and success as a playwright, but she confronts a painful dilemma in the reemerging double standard set for women: to be masculine in public and in pursuit of a career, but feminine, or gentle, in private life. The story thus illustrates not only how women in socialist China were constructed according to the dominant gender code, but also how they empowered themselves via an acceptable mask to survive and to achieve their ambitions in public. Furthermore, it reveals how women constructed as such go further to question and expose the complicity between the dominant political discourse and the social convention that works to control women in the public and private realms respectively.11 This logic of masquerade, as an appropriation of legitimate discourses, played a more significant role in transmitting women’s individual and gendered voices at the level of autobiographical representation. Individual voices had been negatively perceived and prohibited since the early years of the PRC. Firstly, they were branded as bourgeois individualism, and were suppressed as politically improper and even dangerous. Secondly, it had always been regarded as self-indulgent to write stories divorced from, or out of step with, current social and political issues, particularly those issues deemed relevant to the broad masses. Thus, in the hierarchy of socialist aesthetics, writings that focused on individual experiences were criticised for being self-centred and socially insignificant and for failing to transcend

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particularities in order to reach the level of the universal, especially as these self-oriented writings were negatively associated with women authors.12 Finally, writers whose stories depicted themselves and the people around them faced accusations ranging from personal spite to the violation of the privacy of others. All these accusations were levelled against women writers like Zhang Jie and Yu Luojin in connection with their autobiographically oriented publications. In their own defence, most women writers of the early post-Mao period consciously or unconsciously adopted mainstream and politically endorsed discourses to argue their case. In Zhang Xinxin’s public response to Wang Chunyuan’s criticism of ‘Women zhege nianji de meng’ (The Dreams of Our Generation, 1984) as narrowly individualistic, full of subjective imaginings and lacking any discernible form of social reality, she directly quotes Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (1929–1930), arguing that literature contains a unique, imaginary dimension that cannot be reduced to the function of a mirror.13 While many people have formed similar arguments about the imaginary and even dream-like qualities of literature, Zhang intentionally used Lenin’s unchallengeable status to endorse her own writing, politically and morally. Later, in an introduction to an anthology of her stories, Zhang also cited passages from Lenin’s Collected Works (1960–1970) to elaborate on her ideas about literature.14 Zhang Jie, another well-known woman writer of the time, was fully aware of the potential for moral charges to be brought against her when she published ‘Ai, shi buneng wangji de’ (Love Must Not Be Forgotten, 1979), a personally oriented love story. She publicly opposed any reading of the work as autobiographical and defended its love theme by appealing to Marxist theory. In an interview with a literary journal editor, Zhang stated that the story functioned as her reading notes on Frederick Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), quoting Engels’s idea that only a marriage based on love is moral (from the original sentence, ‘[i]f only the marriage based on love is moral, then also only [is] the marriage in which love continues’).15 Her application of Marxist theory in a Chinese context was, however, less to establish a universal ideal or theory of love, than to appropriate a legitimate and powerful discourse to assist in challenging conventional moral codes and in conveying a personally felt need for a different moral standard. In the case of Yu Luojin, a daring and passionate woman writer of the early 1980s, ‘truth-telling’ became the trademark of her stories, which were otherwise considered insignificant and self-obsessed. In the preface to her fi rst autobiographical work, Yige dongtian de tonghua (A Chinese Winter’s Tale, 1980), Yu coins a special term, ‘literature of truth’, to categorise her story, appropriating the absolute rhetoric of truth which was reinstated in the early post-Mao era as a social reaction to the extreme emphasis on political ideology during the Cultural Revolution.16 The ‘literature of truth’ granted Yu a legitimate discursive frame to articulate her own, more personal, stories.

176 Lingzhen Wang The mobilisation of various socially sanctioned ‘masculine’ discourses to communicate with readers on multiple levels became a regular pattern for most women writers, conveying, among other things, their gendered messages. A new literary space was thus initiated by these women writers through their multi-level engagements with mainstream discourses, with new social demands and with their own experiences and emotional needs. Their central message on gendered matters was immediately received by other generations of women writers, especially the younger generation, who continued the development of this personally oriented literary practice until the mid- to late 1990s when the market became a major player in reorienting literary and cultural production.

CONSTRUCTING AN ALTERNATIVE GENDERED SPACE Among women writers of the 1980s, Zhang Jie was the fi rst to touch upon the public literary representation of women’s personal experiences, feelings and pursuit of ideals. Her semi-autobiographical ‘Love Must Not Be Forgotten’ inaugurated her departure from the political concerns of the time. The story depicts romantic love as an individual quest of the female protagonist, and is written in a personal tone fundamentally differentiating it from other love stories of the time. Instead of using the theme of love as a political denunciation of the Cultural Revolution and as a liberating force for reconstructing people’s lives, as many authors do in the early post-Mao era,17 Zhang implies, through evoking a mother’s lifelong belief in a personal ideal of love, the separation of the experience from dominant social and conventional ideologies. As a divorcee with a daughter, Zhong Yu’s emotional life centres on her idealised love for another woman’s husband. Her love is expressed only in her writing, and, in reality, she is unable to share even a brief time with the man, the two having never even shaken hands. In fact, the two lovers distance themselves from each other because of the high rank of the lover in the Communist Party and because of pervading moral rules. Yet, as Zhong Yu says to the man, the love that has been planted in their hearts continues to grow: We agreed to forget about each other. But I deceived you, I have never forgotten. I don’t think you’ve forgotten either. [ . . . ] I often stay far away from Beijing, hoping time and distance will help me to forget you. But on my return, as the train pulls into the station, my head reels. I stand on the platform looking round intently, as if someone were waiting for me. Of course there is no one. I realize then that I have forgotten nothing. Everything is unchanged. My love is like a tree the roots of which strike deeper year after year—I have no way to uproot it.18

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The search for love between a man and a woman, no matter what the form, was a radical move in the late 1970s, when the topic had been silenced in public discourse for over a decade. The central relationship in Zhang Jie’s short story challenges both the conventionalised view of marriage as a reproductive union and the socialist principle of sacrificing all personal interest and emotion for revolutionary goals or class affi liation. Zhang’s narrative calls for a new moral code in human relationships that centres on mutual love rather than on familial or political obligations, while also voicing the necessity of fi nding a new language to explore personal experiences in a society moving away from tight social and political control. In the story, the gendered nature of these experiences is underlined by the way that the pursuit of ideal love constitutes the core maternal legacy passed on to Zhong Yu’s daughter, Shan-shan, who is also the narrator. Indeed, ‘Love Must Not Be Forgotten’ was one of the fi rst endeavours in the postMao era to carve out a personal space for exploring mother-daughter relations.19 Shan-shan narrates the spiritual and emotional life of her mother, as witnessed before Zhong Yu passes away and as (re)discovered through reading her diary, also titled ‘Love Must Not Be Forgotten’. The mother’s writing thus forges a loving bond and identification between mother and daughter: As Shan-shan remarks, ‘she was not just my mother but my closest friend. I loved her so much that the thought of her leaving me makes my heart ache’.20 Through reading her late mother’s diary, Shan-shan is empowered to defer her own marriage, going against the grain of social pressure in order to live an independent and uncompromising life as a woman: Maybe we should take the responsibility for the old ideas handed down from the past. Because if someone never marries, that is a challenge to these ideas. You will be called neurotic, accused of having guilty secrets or having made political mistakes. [ . . . ] In short they will trump endless vulgar and futile charges to ruin your reputation. Then you have to knuckle under to those ideas and marry willy-nilly. But once you put the chains of a loveless marriage around your neck, you will suffer for it for the rest of your life. I long to shout: ‘Mind your own business!’21 Zhang’s story generated nationwide debates on love, marriage and morality, and the personal voices transmitted through her story reached many women of the time and particularly inspired those women who desired to write. For example, Yu Luojin once claimed that her second autobiographical piece, Chuntian de tonghua (Springtime Tale, 1982), was intended to continue and complement Zhang’s ‘Love Should Not Be Forgotten’.22 In their endeavour to carve out a public space for personal expressions, however, women writers’ gender became a marked sign for public scrutiny and even for personal attacks. Public debates about both Zhang Jie’s and Yu Luojin’s autobiographical writing went beyond the literary domain: both writers

178 Lingzhen Wang faced serious moral charges as divorced women in a way that male writers never encountered. The fact that Yu had been twice-divorced produced a particularly negative influence on public reception of her writing. Yu rose to fame after the major Beijing literary magazine, Dangdai, published A Chinese Winter’s Tale, which also contains biographical sketches of her late elder brother, Yu Luoke, who was executed during the Cultural Revolution as an anti-revolutionary and rehabilitated posthumously as a national hero in the early post-Mao era.23 The wide readership achieved by A Chinese Winter’s Tale was partially because of its private accounts of Yu Luoke and partially because of the extramarital love affair that occurred between Yu Luojin and Wei Ying—a young man from Beijing—in the Great Northern Wilderness of Heilongjiang Province during the Cultural Revolution. (Yu Luojin had been forced to marry a stranger there a few years earlier because of her family’s political and economic problems.) Such an affair was controversial in 1980 and, in order to justify their publication of the piece, the editorial staff of the magazine added a preface to emphasise that Yu Luojin was the sister of ‘Comrade Yu Luoke’, a national hero and martyr. The preface further argued that A Chinese Winter’s Tale was not simply a story of personal misfortune, but also one that depicted phenomena embedded in a general, political context and which must be understood as the ‘necessary consequence of [the] theory of blood lineage, the fascism of the “Gang of Four” and traditional feudal metaphysics’.24 Furthermore, the editors expurgated many paragraphs of Yu’s original writing that centred on her emotional, sexual and marital frustrations.25 When A Chinese Winter’s Tale was published as a book in 1985, Yu Luojin fought hard to restore critical passages that detailed painful experiences during her first marriage, passages without which her desire for divorce and her extramarital love affair would be either difficult to understand or else totally misunderstood. With regard to one instance of expurgation, she stated in a letter to the publisher: If you must insist on removing this passage, I would rather the book was not published at all. You have all read it with the greatest of interest and not been poisoned, so why are you worried about the ordinary reader being ‘polluted’? You insist on editing my work, blurring its original intent, and making it ambiguous, thus forcing the reader off onto flights of fancy of his own. This is the real ‘poison’ created by your feudal mistrust of other human beings! [ . . . ] It is truly tragic when an author’s rights are not respected. If there is no respect for the author, how can we possibly talk about respecting the reader?26 Yu became ‘notorious’ in the early 1980s, a period in which she was not only actively pursuing a second divorce but also attempting to publish her second autobiographical novel, Springtime Tale. On 21 January 1981, the middle-level court published a note in Renmin ribao (People’s Daily)

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stating that Yu was not serious about her marriage, that her lifestyle was careless (bujiandian) and that she lacked moral integrity. A month later, Huang Zhimin publicly vilified her in an article entitled ‘Yige duoluo de nüren’ (A Decadent Woman, 1981), and soon Yu’s second divorce became one of the hottest topics in China, eventually leading to slander against her in both private and official quarters. 27 The appearance of defamation in one of the most important and widely distributed newspapers, and in the CCP’s internal magazine, which circulated among high-ranking Party cadres, led to two literary award committees dismissing her writing and to the suspension of a project to adapt her writing to fi lm. She also suffered delayed publication of A Chinese Winter’s Tale in book form and the delayed appearance of Springtime Tale, as well as continued difficulties with the publication of her later writings. Yu’s Springtime Tale tells the story of an abortive love relationship between Yu Shan (representing Yu Luojin herself) and He Jing, a married man and chief editor of one of the most important newspapers in China (representing the real-life Ma Peiwen, an associate editor of the Party newspaper Guangming ribao (Guangming Daily)).28 During her lonely fight to restore the name of her late elder brother, Yu Luoke, and her personal struggle over her second marriage, Yu Shan finds that He Jing demonstrates extraordinary political foresight and strength in helping rehabilitate Yu Luoke as a national hero in the early post-Mao era. At the same time, he also shows great affection for Yu Shan, and they fall in love and produce many long love letters. While He wants to keep their relationship completely private, Yu Shan desires a publicly recognised form of love, namely marriage. Ignoring He’s request, Yu applies for divorce from her husband (her second), while He secretly betrays her and defames her in public as a ‘fallen woman’ in order to safeguard his own social reputation and political interests. 29 In reality, Ma Peiwen not only discredited Yu Luojin as ‘a decadent woman’, but also used his influence to silence her, blocking the publication of Springtime Tale. As a result, Yu could not fi nd a publisher for her autobiographical novel in cities close to Beijing, and the novel fi nally came out after a year in a literary magazine in the southern city of Guangzhou. This publication created a great uproar that extended from the top to the bottom of Chinese society, as it not only exposed the behaviour, and love letters, of a powerful and important figure of the early post-Mao era, but also unabashedly promoted the search for personal love. The CCP’s propaganda department convened a special meeting to discuss the issue, and as a consequence the vice-director He Jingzhi instructed Haucheng magazine to stop selling Springtime Tale immediately. At once, official newspapers and literary magazines—such as Wenyibao (Literary Gazette), Beijing wanbao (Beijing Evening News) and Zhongguo qingnian bao (China Youth Daily)—published articles attacking the novel and criticising Haucheng magazine for having published it.30 Haucheng was nearly shut down under political and social pressure. As for the author, Yu Luojin became the target

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of official criticism as both a typical seeker of ‘bourgeois freedom’ and an example of ‘spiritual pollution’.31 She also lost the support of many readers, who seemed to have noticed for the fi rst time that Yu was not simply the sister of a national hero, but also a woman with desires of her own.

CONCLUSION Roland Barthes’ well-known essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968) has become influential for its political challenges to the institutionalised and patriarchal concept of the author, and for its liberating gesture toward the ‘feminine’ displacement of that traditional author, which in turn opens up possibilities for the resignification of texts.32 However, many feminists have argued against Barthes’ thesis at a time when female authors have just begun to emerge as objects of study. In fact, any claim of absolute authorial irrelevance ignores the different cultural, historical and social functions of the author, dismissing specific significations of the relationship between the author and his/her text in particular contexts. The author of Springtime Tale, of course, did not ‘die’, and her social fate was tightly bound to the fate of her texts, the reception of which could not be free from cultural configurations of gender, nor from the conventionalised and institutionalised relationship between the author and his/her writing. Here, I agree with many feminist scholars who take textual production first of all as social, cultural and (I would add) personal production. In Rita Felski’s words, ‘the political value of literary texts from the standpoint of feminism can be determined only by an investigation of their social functions and effects in relation to the interests of women in a particular historical context’.33 To emphasise the importance of the author in discussing Chinese women writers’ writing is not to re-advocate the patriarchal concept of authorial control over one’s own texts, but to examine how the relationship between the author and her/his writing has been historically and culturally established, how the author’s gender as conventionally perceived directly participates in producing meaning and how, in some historical moments, female authors can introduce voices that subvert established political, conventional and literary codes. Certainly, Yu Luojin’s continued pursuit of the publication of Springtime Tale marked the first attempt since 1949—the year in which Chinese women were ostensibly liberated at all levels of the social structure—to publicise a woman’s refusal to stay silent about the mistreatment of women, and to claim a woman’s right to defend herself with her own public voice. The message Zhang Jie and Yu Luojin sent through their autobiographical works has obviously been grasped by many contemporary women writers. In her essay, ‘Nü zuojia de ziwo’ (The Self of Women Writers, 1991), Wang Anyi emphasises the impact of the personal mode of writing on early post-Mao literature. ‘Before that’, she states, ‘I had been full of emotions and I had made a great effort to connect these emotions with the collective/

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dominant consciousness of a social mission. But everything had been abortive’.34 Then the work of Zhang Jie appeared: It is still vividly before my eyes, the exciting reception of ‘Love Must Not Be Forgotten.’ [ . . . ] It is already very extraordinary that a trivial private matter (xiaoshi) could become a public short story, but it goes further. What is more important is that this private matter (sishi) does not establish a connection with social and political requirements, but just relates to personal (geren) emotions and feelings. [Zhang’s story] may be regarded as the fi rst appearance of the personal and private expression/mind in literature after so many years. 35 After also acknowledging the importance of Yu’s A Chinese Winter’s Tale, Wang Anyi details how reading another short story by Zhang Jie, ‘Shi maisui’ (Gleaning, 1979), enabled her to articulate her own voice: ‘in the past I wrote my diary as fiction, but now I am writing my fiction as a diary’.36 In dominant socialist discourse, literature, even the most private writing of a diary, functioned to suppress and deny one’s life experiences. It is through the self-oriented literary practices performed by women writers like Zhang Jie, Zhang Xinxin, Yu Luojin, Dai Houying and others that literature was redefi ned and thus provided a public and narrative channel for Chinese women to express their gendered and subjective experiences.37 These early post-Mao women writers all refused in their own ways to take for granted the role of ‘woman’ as it had been politically defi ned and publicly represented in art and literature; they also fundamentally challenged the role of literature, which previously had been conditioned exclusively by patriarchal and collectivist ideologies. Their autobiographical practice not only diversified the dominant style of literary production, but also constructed an alternative literary public where different personal voices were articulated. The blossoming of Chinese women writers in the early postMao era was due to these personally oriented literary practices. NOTES 1. The full version of this essay was published as chapter four in Lingzhen Wang, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth Century China (2004). 2. The Gang of Four refers to a leftist political faction composed of Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, and her close associates, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen. These came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution and were held by Chinese people as most responsible for the Cultural Revolution. 3. See, for example, Anon, ‘Wenyi wei renmin fuwu, wei shehuizhuyi fuwu’ (Art in Service of the People and Socialism), Renmin ribao, 26 July 1980, p. 1. 4. Honig and Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 4.

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5. The problem was not new to the 1980s. In 1935, the famous actress Ruan Lingyu, besieged by public rumours and gossip, committed suicide, and in the 1940s Su Qing became the target of social gossip as a divorced woman writer. This tradition of defaming women resurfaced in the early 1980s. In addition to women writers like Zhang Jie and Yu Luojin, the famous actress Liu Xiaoqing provided an illustration of the power of gossip, especially as wielded against those women who publicly defied convention. See Lu Xun, ‘Lun “renyan kewei”’ (‘On “Gossip Being a Fearful Thing”’) in Lu, Lu Xun quanji, new edn (1981; Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1991), VI, 331–4, and Ba Jin, ‘Renyan kewei’ (‘Gossip Is a Fearful Thing’), in Ba, Zhenhua ji-Suixiang lu disan ji (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1983), pp. 131–3. 6. See ‘Wenyi wei renmin fuwu, wei shehuizhuyi fuwu’, p. 1. 7. Kinkley, After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society 1978–1981 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 12. 8. Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1929), in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, eds, Formations of Fantasy (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 35. 9. Ibid., p. 38. 10. Zhang, ‘How Did I Miss You?’, in R. A. Roberts and Angela Knox, eds, One Half of the Sky: Stories from Contemporary Women Writers of China, trans. R. A. Roberts and Angela Knox (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1987), pp. 114–15. 11. Qiu Jin’s cross-dressing at the turn of the twentieth century had already revealed the problem with both traditional moral rules and modern nationalist ideology: see Wang, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 27–60. 12. See Liu Huiying, ‘“Ziwo jingli” yu nuxing wenxue’, Yuwen daobao, Vol. 12 (1987), pp. 27–30, and Zhang Qing, ‘Nüxing wenxue de jiaoruo, xionghua he wuxinghua’, Dangdai zuojia pinglun, Vol. 5 (1986), pp. 36–41. 13. Zhang , ‘Dui Wang Chunyuan tongzhi piping wenzhang de liangdian dafu’, Wenyi Monthly, No. 6 (1983), p. 76. 14. See Edward Gunn, ‘Introduction’ to Zhang, The Dreams of Our Generation and Selections from Beijing’s People, trans. Edward Gunn, Donna Jung and Patricia Farr (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, China-Japan Program, 1986), p. 3. 15. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. Ernest Untermann, new edn (1884; Chicago: C. H. Kerr and Co., 1902), p. 99 (Engels’s italics). For Zhang’s interview, see Sun Wusa, ‘Yige putong de ren-ji nüzuojia Zhang Jie tongzhi’, Qingchun, Vol. 7 (1980), p. 29. In the early post-Mao era, there was an urgent need to solve the many marriage problems caused by political turbulence and to establish a new moral standard for marriage. The sentence by Engels was often quoted by Chinese people to argue for a new moral ideal of marriage. 16. Yu, ‘Introduction’ to Yu, A Chinese Winter’s Tale, trans. Rachel May and Zhu Zhiyu, new edn (1980; Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1990), p. ix. 17. See Liu Xinwu, ‘Aiqing de weizhi’, Shiyue, Vol. 1 (1978), pp. 117–29; Zhang Kangkang, ‘Ai de quanli’, Shouhuo, Vol. 2 (1979), pp. 100–13; and Zhang Xian, ‘Bei aiqing yiwang de jiaoluo’, Shanghai wenxue, Vol. 1 (1980), pp. 4–14. 18. Zhang, ‘Love Must Not Be Forgotten’, in Gladys Yang, ed., Seven Contemporary Chinese Women Writers, trans. Gladys Yang (San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1985), pp. 221–2. 19. Other post-Mao women writers also struggled to create a narrative space between the mother and daughter in an attempt to address the need of the

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20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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mother to form a female self in history. See Yu Luojin, Chuntian de tonghua (Springtime Tale, 1982), Xu Ran, ‘Xiaocao, bushi shengzai wotuzhong: du mama Yang Mo riji’ (Small Grass, Not Grown in Fertile Soil: Reading Mother Yang Mo’s Diary, 1994) and Wang Anyi, Jishi yu xugou (Actual Reports and Fictional Constructions, 1993). Zhang, ‘Love Must Not Be Forgotten’, p. 213. Ibid., p. 228. See Anon, ‘Yu Luojin he tade zuopin’, in Dangdai wenxue yanjiu cankao ziliao, Vol. 6 (1981), p. 20. Yu Luoke was born on 1 May 1942 into a middle-class family in Beijing. On 18 January 1967, during the high tide of ‘blood lineage,’ Yu published a long article on the topic in the tiny student newspaper, Zhongxue wenhua dagemingbao, which circulated widely through underground channels and touched off heated public discussion. Yu argued that the state’s theory of family origin was anti-communist and that class ideology produced oppression in socialist society. Arrested on 5 January 1968, he was executed on 5 March 1970 as a counter-revolutionary. He was 27 years old. Quoted in Jorg Michael Nerlich, ‘In Search of the Ideal Man: Yu Luojin’s Novel A Winter’s Tale’, in Anna Gerstlacher, et al., eds, Woman and Literature in China (Bochum: Studienverlag Brockmeyer, 1985), pp. 454–72. The theory of blood lineage (xuetong lun), one of the major causes of violence during the Cultural Revolution, defi nes and determines people exclusively through their class origin. For a detailed account of the editorial framing and expurgation of the piece, see Wang, Personal Matters, pp. 140–66. See Yu, ‘Introduction’ to Yu, A Chinese Winter’s Tale, trans. Rachel May and Zhu Zhiyu, new edn (1980; Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1990), p. xvi. Huang’s article was published in Neibu cankao (Xinhua Restricted Publication); I have not been able to read ‘A Decadent Woman’ because of its circulation being restricted to Party officials above a certain rank. See the detailed account in Emily Honig, ‘Private Issues, Public Discourse: The Life and Times of Yu Luojin’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 57, No. 2 (1984), p. 255. Yu, Chuntian de tonghua, Huacheng, Vol. 1 (1982), pp. 212, 214. See Chou Yu-sun, ‘Yu Luojin’s Winter and Spring’, Issues and Studies, Vol. 22, No. 6 (1986), pp. 9–12. The two terms came from the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign conducted in China between October 1983 and February 1984 in an attempt to curb the spread of western liberal values among the populace after the implementation of economic reform. Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, new edn (1968; New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 142–8. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 2. Wang, ‘Nüzuojia de ziwo’, in Wang, Gushi he jianggushi, new edn (1988; Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenxue yishu chubanshe, 1991), p. 155. Ibid., pp. 155–6. Ibid., pp. 155–6. In the postscript to her fi rst collection, Yu, sha, sha, sha (And the Rain Patters On, 1981), Wang Anyi talked about her feelings after reading short stories in 1979 and 1980: ‘I suddenly found that if I wrote down what had been collected in my heart and from my life, this could be short stories, too!’ (Wang, ‘Houji’ (Postscript) to Wang, Yu, sha, sha, sha (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1981), p. 236).

13 A Corneillian Cold War Mainstream French Political Drama of the 1950s Jamie Andrews

INTRODUCTION On 16 May 1952, communist sympathiser Roger Vailland’s Korean War play, Le Colonel Foster plaidera coupable (Colonel Foster Will Plead Guilty, 1952), was due to open at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu. The opening had already been delayed for several weeks after spurious safety fears about the theatre’s electrics and central heating, but the Paris authorities could no longer ignore criticism about what effectively amounted to municipal censorship. Press night on 15 May had passed off without incident, but on the fi rst public performance organised paramilitary gangs invaded the stage, attacked the actors, set off tear gas and took the fight to the streets, where French Communist Party (PCF) deputy leader Jacques Duclos was forced to flee with his bodyguards. The next day, citing fears for pubic safety, Le Colonel Foster was defi nitively banned. The play had coincided with a period of heightened tension in Cold War France, and the aborted production was followed later the same month by violent clashes during large-scale demonstrations against the arrival of the American NATO Commander General Ridgway (‘Ridgway the Plague’) and by the arrests of Jacques Duclos and the editor of the PCF newspaper L’Humanité. In this context, it is perhaps not unrealistic for René Ballet to claim that ‘few works are inscribed so thoroughly in a period of crisis as Le Colonel Foster’.1 For a play that did not even manage one full public performance, its limited production history generated an exceptional degree of debate and partisan positioning. The writing of the work had been part of Vailland’s attempt to join the PCF (his successful application was sent to Jacques Duclos in the Santé prison, along with a dedicated copy of the play-text), and this in part explains his exceptionally heavy-handed depiction of the American troops. 2 Although the eponymous Foster has some reservations about the military presence in Korea, his fellow soldiers are gross caricatures who behave with a brutish violence and casual racism towards the local population (‘fi lthy gooks’ and ‘sonsa bitches’ are common epithets). Vailland’s depiction of the American troops was most reminiscent of the socialist-realist novel par excellence of this period, André Stil’s Stalin Prize-winning Le Premier choc

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(The First Clash, 1951), but in the theatre too ‘America in the early fi fties provided the communists with an easy target’. 3 As the rigid bloc mentality intensified, efforts were made towards the establishment in France of a political third way that would bisect the two international camps. ‘Neither right nor left: the country’ was André Malraux’s call in the early post-war years; it was a call briefly taken up by Combat from 1947, by the mass-market Le Monde newspaper and subsequently by the formation of the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR), a political party whose supporters counted Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.4 French writers, meanwhile, were particularly worried about the implications of the Cold War for the power of the individual to act on history. This fear was epitomised by the publication of Roger Stéphane’s portraits of earlier adventurers (including T. E. Lawrence and André Malraux) that underlined the ‘inevitable disappearance of the individual’, and by André Chamson’s concern that France’s lack of post-war influence meant it could no longer ‘make man’s destiny more human’.5 In this essay I will argue that, in the theatre, one response to these developments was a return to a Corneillian dramatic tradition which privileged the ethical dilemma of elite individuals and the awesome decisions with which they are confronted. This tradition was reclaimed from the glory days of seventeenth-century French classical drama, but embedded in works of an exceptional political actuality that depicted the same early Cold War ‘period of crisis’ as Le Colonel Foster. In 1998, Ted Freeman’s Theatres of War made the fi rst sustained attempt to rescue and group some of the realist French plays that addressed the major controversies of this era, examining canonical works by Sartre and Camus alongside lesser-known and occasional playwrights, including Vailland.6 However, whilst some of the plays examined in detail by Freeman were too politically subversive (or too aesthetically compromised) to attract audiences, all four plays examined here enjoyed significant runs, in each case reaching the crucial centième (the hundredth performance, celebrated by a gala production) and in some cases considerably more. Despite their contemporary success, however, they are little known today, and in histories of twentieth-century French theatre, their authors will rarely merit even a footnote. Nonetheless, they were plays that were seen and debated, and that became part of a critical discourse, often drawing comparisons with the few famous works from this period that have survived as part of the canon. Their four authors represent the diversity of committed realist writing at this time—from a card-carrying communist to an equally committed monarchist—but each would appear to concur with playwright and critic Thierry Maulnier’s axiom that ‘theatre lives on conflict’.7 As Maulnier went on to state, ‘[i]t seems to me difficult for a dramatist in the middle of this century to avoid the principal confl ict of the age between the East and the West’.8 Yet despite the plays’ incorporation of highly charged Cold War scenarios, closer analysis allows the terms of Maulnier’s proposition

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to be interrogated. The stakes, I will argue, are less immediately political than they might appear, and for all the global reach of these plays’ subject matter, the aesthetic and political focus will be seen to be resolutely—and perhaps, in the circumstances, defiantly—French.

LA LIBERTÉ EST UN DIMANCHE (FREEDOM IS A SUNDAY, 1951) La Liberté est un dimanche was fi rst performed at the Hébertot theatre on 5 December 1951 and was the fi rst play by Pol Quentin, author of La Propagande politique (Political Propaganda, 1943) and a former deputy director at André Malraux’s Ministry of Information. The play was an outstanding success for its director, its producer and its star Edwige Feuillère, quickly reaching its centième before touring to Europe and North Africa; meanwhile Quentin earned sufficient royalties to be admitted immediately as a full member of the French Society of Authors (an almost unprecedented achievement). The play is set on a mysterious tropical island on which a totalitarian state has established a camp for political prisoners. As the play begins, the mistress of the incarcerated Alvar succeeds in landing on the island, and ruses to win the affections of the dilettante Governor to try and secure her lover’s release. The allusion to political camps immediately plunges the play into one of the bitterest controversies of late 1940s France: the debate over the existence of Soviet forced labour camps. The question was fi rst raised during the 1949 libel trial brought by Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko in Paris, and was renewed later the same year by former Nazi concentration camp prisoner David Rousset. The testimony of witnesses at both trials attested to the camps’ existence, confi rming a rupture between the PCF and other leftist currents and severely testing the faith of communist sympathisers (including Sartre).9 If Quentin is scrupulous in not naming the island-camp, reviewers of both sides had no doubt as to his target. Guy Verdot was reminded of the camps described by fervent anti-communist and former political prisoner Arthur Koestler, while L’Humanité’s Guy Leclerc believed that the use of standard Soviet terminology for the island’s institutions (such as ‘Central Committee’) confi rmed Quentin’s anti-communist intentions.10 However, the play soon departs from contemporary Cold War references to address less historically contingent concerns. Maulnier was certain about the play’s anti-totalitarian instincts, but emphasised the unreal nature of the camp, singularly lacking in an ‘impression of terror’ (in one scene Alvar is somewhat implausibly left alone in the library with his lover).11 This lack of care in the depiction of the camp suggests that Quentin’s focus might be elsewhere, and indeed the play soon centres on a complex psychological portrait of the island’s Governor. The Governor fi nds his lassitude is challenged by the unexpected arrival of Alvar’s

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mistress (named only as Elle (She)), who awakens dormant personal and political responses. He faces a pivotal moment of choice as to whether he shows pity and spares Alvar: ‘This is the moment of choice in a man’s life’, Elle tells him, promising that ‘a gesture of kindness can bring you back to God’s grace’.12 Yet by the curtain, the Governor will have yielded to the inevitable authority of ‘the Party’ and instituted a new reign of terror by ordering the execution of Alvar. This tight focus on an individual conscience serves to ahistoricise a supposedly contemporary work and goes some way to explain the author’s claim in the theatrical programme: ‘I had wanted timeless events, so that my heroes might just as well have lived in the 16th Century in Spain as in the 19th Century in Italy’.13 Quentin’s intimation of a timeless tragic destiny is borne out by the Governor’s elegant sententiae (‘[t]he day that you [Elle] entered our lives, you launched us on trajectories, the consequences of which you were oblivious to’) and by the frequent references to the Governor’s fatal pride.14 Similarly, the role of one character, the mysterious Doctor, who is revealed to be a spy from Party headquarters, was described by Elsa Triolet as an observer of events ‘akin to the chorus in classical drama’.15 This is not to deny that, as many critics observed, the dramatic situation derives from a specific historical climate, but to emphasise that Quentin exploits this to consider the metaphysical as much as the political implications of an individual’s explorations of the limits of his own freedom. As the Governor’s attitudes harden, Elle tells him that ‘[y]ou are ready to save humanity, and you forget man. You burn with abstract passion, and you forget to love’.16 A fear of the crushing effects of a totalitarian (that is, Soviet) regime on the individual’s liberty was a commonplace at this time in France; it underpins, for example, the tragic equation in Camus’s Les Justes (The Just, 1949) in which the hardliner Stepan is accused of ignoring individuals in his determination ‘to rescue humanity from itself’.17 The moment of choice that the Governor faces is, of course, also a central concern of Sartre’s conception of a Theatre of Situations, and this situation as formulated by Quentin will also form the climax to the next play to be examined, in which individual dilemmas equally impose themselves between apparently rigid binary oppositions.

LA MAISON DE LA NUIT (THE HOUSE IN THE NIGHT, 1953) Thierry Maulnier, whose pre-war associations with the ultra-nationalist and monarchist Action Française movement marked him as a confi rmed man of the Right, took up playwriting after 1945. His review of La Liberté had identified the play’s central preoccupation with the search for individual liberty ‘at the heart of a dictatorial police state’, and the same description applies to his own work, La Maison de la nuit, which opened almost two

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years later on 12 October 1953 at the same theatre.18 Like Quentin, Maulnier dramatises contemporary Cold War events, in this case the fl ight of refugees between ‘two Central European Republics’ (no more than Quentin’s unnamed island does Maulnier’s coyness regarding the identities of the republics convince).19 Maulnier’s previous work had suggested contemporary themes through historical distancing: for example, Le Profanateur (The Profaner, 1952) had located the trope of two polarised camps in the thirteenth-century confl ict between the Guelphs and Ghibbelines, while the retelling of the Joan of Arc story in Jeanne et les juges (Joan and the Judges, 1949) had not been without allusions to Soviet show trials. Here, however, he explicitly states that his subject is ‘the politics of today, which fi lls our newspapers, and which police and rioters confront in the streets’. 20 The contemporary relevance was acknowledged by reviewers on all sides and generated sufficient excitement to ensure that the play was one of the most successful of the 1953–1954 season, reaching 160 performances; both the right-wing Paris-Presse and the left-winger Guy Verdot praised the play’s dialogue and construction as far superior to Sartre’s Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands, 1948). 21 The setting is even more pared down than Quentin’s isolated island, taking place in the eponymous house in no man’s land between East and West (a literal and metaphysical huis clos) belonging to the refugee smuggler, Klossowski, and his daughter Lydia. It begins with a number of highly (melo-)dramatic stage effects to heighten the atmosphere of fear (gunshots, howling dogs, unknown footsteps22), but despite the acutely contemporary situation, Maulnier declines to dramatise life on either side of the barbwire border, making only indistinct references to the two regimes (again, Maulnier’s characters talk of the Party, but not of its explicit ideology). Similarly, isolated faits divers examples of abuses in the East are referenced by a fleeing countess, but the grand-guignol-esque framing (her husband was ripped apart by his own dogs on his peasants’ orders) lessens the seriousness of their impact. Maulnier is thus able to carve out a dramatic no man’s land in the middle of a work of fierce actuality. Like Quentin, his dramatic vision will narrow to a small number of socially elevated characters and to the moral decisions with which they wrestle, whilst the unity of time is explicitly observed by a clock that counts down in real-time the three hours before the play’s diegetic and extra-diegetic climax at midnight. After establishing the situation, the play quickly moves towards its moral and metaphysical crux. One of the refugees attempting to escape is Werner, a puppet Liberal Minister in the eastern republic, who is identified by two Party agents (Hagen and Krauss) disguised as dissidents in fl ight. The agents have been tasked with preventing Werner’s escape by any means, a situation complicated by the unexpected arrival of Werner’s wife, whom he had abandoned to flee in the company of his secretary/mistress. 23 While waiting for reinforcements, the agents realise that the only way to delay Werner’s departure is to shift the battle from the political to the personal.

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Hagen targets the loveless Lise Werner, feigning affection with sufficient conviction to persuade her that they should use the exit passes allocated to her husband and his mistress to cross the border in their place (thus preventing Werner’s departure until help arrives). As a backup, Hagen also appeals to Werner not to abandon his wife, although in so doing, opens himself up to the same sentiment of pity he is demanding from his adversary. Thus far, Hagen and Krauss have been portrayed with surprising sympathy by the author, a right-winger writing for the bourgeois theatre; their allegiances are justified by a clear social vision to liberate ‘the three quarters of the earth’ where people ‘come home exhausted from the factory to an evening without hope, let their children die because they’ve never been taught how to care for them’.24 However, in appealing to Werner, Hagen has tempered his political commitment with ‘the great game of pity’, and when reinforcements arrive with orders to murder the would-be exiles, and a bereft Lise understands his true identity, Hagen weakens. 25 In the face of Lise’s despair (‘[l]ook at this idiot who thought someone could love her’), Hagen assumes the expedient lies he had told her when he feigned an emotional attachment, and tells Krauss he too must be arrested, making Lise believe he will die at her side. 26 In the resulting confrontation between the two men, the drama—and perhaps Maulnier’s real focus—now reaches its peak. Maulnier is skilful in underlining the equivocal nature of Hagen’s gesture, but makes clear that two conceptions of the world are in play. Hagen charges that innocent lives cannot be sacrificed to future gains (of which he still remains convinced). Krauss’s argument warning against weakening the Party’s revolutionary purpose by arbitrary acts of pity are, however, seen to be not without validity, and if Maulnier’s stated desire for dramatic objectivity between two competing ethics is not entirely maintained, 27 the confrontation upholds a certain tragic intensity in its portrait of the clash of two rights, in the sense of grandeur invoked by Hagen’s self-abnegating gesture and, perhaps most remarkably, in Krauss’s unswerving determination to execute the innocent young girl, Lydia, who had begun to fall in love with him. In his preface, Maulnier frames Krauss’s determination to execute Lydia in the context of Biblical stories such as that of Abraham and Isaac, and this dehistoricisation of the play, along with Hagen’s references to ‘men and women thrown unwillingly into a cruel universe’, places the play’s central conflict in less immediately political structures. 28 In this light, we may feel that Maulnier’s claim that ‘La Maison de la nuit is not political’ is not merely a ritual disavowal intended to avoid criticism of wanting to ‘épater la bourgeoisie’ of Right Bank theatre houses. 29 While Maulnier’s record of journalistic attacks on Stalinism left little opportunity for the play to be received in anything but a partisan manner, some reviewers did identify the tragic element underpinning the play: that of the battle, not against ideologies, but against fate. For France-Soir, Maulnier had created ‘[f]lesh and blood characters living [ . . . ] a tragedy’, whilst in Le Parisien Libéré,

190 Jamie Andrews Georges Lerminier recognised the centrality of individual choice in ‘a tragedy [ . . . ] that evokes Corneille’.30

LES CYCLONES (THE CYCLONES, 1954) We do not need to read between the lines of an author’s preface to identify tragic impulses in Jules Roy’s Les Cyclones. The play was fi rst performed in Paris at the Michodière on 9 September 1954, a production secured by the high profi le of its director and star Pierre Fresnay, much as Quentin’s La Liberté had required the collaboration of Edwige Feuillère.31 It was a surprising success for the relatively unknown (as a theatre writer) Roy, being retained for the following 1955–1956 season and reaching 170 performances in Paris before being sent on tour. Before reviewers even had the opportunity to discern a tragic dimension rooted in the golden era of seventeenth-century French drama, publishers Gallimard proclaimed on the (pre-production) playtext cover, ‘Le Cid has become an aviator’.32 This explicit Corneillian reference should not mask a play every bit as topical as the others referenced in this essay; indeed, it is the only play treated to be located in (an unidentified region of) France. The setting is a locked-down airbase, thus maintaining a tightly sequestered unity of place, while the cast of high-ranking Air Force personnel (a Base Commander, a General) is as elevated as Maulnier’s Minister or Quentin’s Governor. The play opens with another prototype high-speed jet aircraft crashing during a test, an event whose contemporary relevance lay in the series of fatal explosions of the revolutionary British ‘Comet’ planes between 1952 and 1954. 33 As the planes appear increasingly unreliable, the Base Commander, Colonel Beaufort, has to weigh the risk to his men against the benefits that an operational plane would bring for world security: ‘If we are the strongest, there will be no War’. 34 His resolve is brought into sharp relief by the arrival of the grief-stricken widow of one of the dead pilots, and he is challenged by his Squadron Leader in terms reminiscent of the two plays previously discussed: ‘It’s having to sacrifice the life of my comrades in order to save the lives of men I don’t know’. 35 This debate amongst a very few senior officers forms the core of the play, but is handled with theatrical skill by Roy, who creates an extremely suspenseful atmosphere by two competing justifications for the planes’ failures: pilot error, as the chief engineer claims, or the airmen’s preferred explanation of mechanical failure. Jules Roy was a former Air Force Colonel who had flown a number of bombing missions over the Ruhr Valley for the RAF in 1944 and 1945, and was known for his prose account of these experiences, La Vallée heureuse (The Happy Valley, 1946) and for an essay on his friend, writer-aviator Saint-Exupéry. He had resigned his commission, however, after a mission in Indochina had disillusioned this Algerian-born pied noir about France’s

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colonial presence overseas.36 Despite his military background, and a brief sympathy for the Vichy regime, Roy was further to the Left than the two authors previously examined, but many aspects of the form and content of his work will now be familiar. If the play’s situation allows for implicit consideration of the escalating arms race, we may feel Beaufort’s assurances that an operational squadron of Cyclone planes will ensure world peace to be an abstraction, and certainly unproven within the play; once again, therefore, the Cold War appears a pretext for incorporating more personal and moral debates, focused on the conflict between Beaufort’s duty to his men and his duty to the General, who refuses to allow the Air Force to lose its one (ill-defi ned) opportunity for air superiority. As the danger of continued testing increases, Beaufort tells his group commander that the real struggle is to be found within the individual’s battle against ‘the monster that attempts to prevent us from conquering ourselves’, and the play clearly signals a privileged locus ‘far above the human condition’ in which men battle their own destiny, with the greatest risk coming not from a malfunctioning jet engine but from their own fatal pride.37 As we have seen, the inner conflict that lies at the heart of the play’s Cold War motifs was explicitly framed as Corneillian by the publishers, and the tragic atmosphere was identified by reviewers of all shades. For L’Aurore, it was ‘a noble play’; for Robert Kemp in Le Monde ‘a prose tragedy’; and L’Express described Beaufort as ‘torn by a Corneillian decision’. 38 On the far Left, Elsa Triolet’s review in Les Lettres françaises identified ‘Corneillian dilemmas’, and was placed next to an essay by Jules Roy in which he advocated fi nding ‘the great tragic themes of our era’ amongst contemporary events and characters.39 Echoing Pol Quentin’s programme note quoted earlier, and offering a calling card for the genre we are examining, Roy concluded by stating that We are not short of minotaurs, and they have names we shouldn’t be afraid to pronounce. Phaedra and Britannicus are still around, but they are living on the boulevard Saint-Germain, or at Place d’Italie, and maybe Iphigenia is a sales-girl in a department store. So why shouldn’t dramatic action take place in today’s world?40

L’ÉTRANGÈRE DANS L’ÎLE (STRANGER ON THE ISLAND, 1958) If Roy’s Corneillian reference was saved for the cover of the play-text, Georges Soria’s L’Étrangère dans l’île makes such reference directly in the dialogue. The play opened on 19 September 1958, the very day that the constitution of a provisional Algerian government-in-exile was agreed in Cairo, and less than a month before General de Gaulle, the last head of the Fourth Republic, gained popular approval for a constitution for a new French Fifth Republic. Its opening was also just a week after the EOKA

192 Jamie Andrews Greek Cypriot nationalist rebels resumed military action on the island, and it is this confl ict that forms the ostensible subject matter. Soria is an intriguing figure for our study: a Jewish, north African born journalist, he was a committed PCF member who spent the Occupation in Moscow as a war correspondent, and who only took up playwriting in 1954. However, despite his rigorously maintained Party loyalties, Soria the dramatist is easily assimilated with the previous writers. He was as convinced as any of our authors of the need to address contemporary subjects in the theatre, having by 1958 already written about the execution of the Rosenbergs in La Peur (The Fear, 1954), a surprisingly balanced work that avoided Vailland-esque caricature, and about the follies of the arms race in L’Orgueil et la nuée (Pride and the Cloud, 1956).41 Of more significance, he also shared their dramatic assumptions—far removed from PCF aesthetic orthodoxy—and had drawn on the arms race in L’Orgueil to create a dramatic world of elite scientists no less intense than Roy’s circle of highranking Air Force officers. It should therefore be no surprise that L’Étrangère dans l’île’s depiction of anti-colonial struggle should be set in a single room in the house of an impeccably connected upper-middle class family. Alicia is an English surgeon married to a Greek Cypriot lawyer, Pygmalion, while their friend Démétrios is a former comrade of Pygmalion in the British Army during the Second World War, a time—as for Jules Roy’s pilots—of moral certainties for which they both feel nostalgia.42 When the play begins, Alicia and Pygmalion have moved back to Nicosia, fi nding a previously blissful existence challenged by their different backgrounds and by the new political polarisation. Pygmalion has begun to defend captured militants, while Démétrios has secretly joined the rebels; when her father is killed by an explosive device early in the play, Alicia feels increasingly isolated, a ‘stranger on the island’. The Cypriot setting did not stop reviewers concluding that the author had merely displaced the action from Algeria, and the topicality of the work was usually seen in this context: ‘what he tells us of Cyprus [ . . . ] everyone knows that M. Soria, a committed playwright if ever there was one, thinks it of Algeria’.43 Nonetheless, the same dynamic we have observed previously holds true for this committed communist writer; despite the well-defined situation, the social reality of colonial rule is never seen, and rarely evoked, and the divided island appears more a metaphor for the personal schism between Alicia and Pygmalion than the reverse. The action moves irrevocably towards a clash of duty, when Alicia must weigh her love for Pygmalion against the concern she feels over his zealous defence of the rebels. In this heightened climate, personal relations cannot survive the political context, and near the end of the play Alicia chooses her country over her husband and plans to leave for England without him.44 It is at this moment that Pygmalion makes perhaps the most explicit Corneillian reference that we have encountered in these plays: ‘Love of a woman over love of one’s country?’

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he asks, formulating the epitome of a Corneillian dilemma.45 The reference did not pass unnoticed, L’Express declaring the play quite simply ‘a Corneillian tragedy’.46 However, the climate—both political and dramatic—had changed since the plays of the early 1950s examined above, and conventionally realistic dramaturgy built around a taut personal dilemma was, for some, no longer an appropriate way to reflect Cold War events in which France itself was the central protagonist. In fact, even Soria had added a meta-theatrical afterthought to Pygmalion’s Corneillian question: ‘Love of a woman over love of one’s country? Don’t you think that’s a bit old-hat?’47 Morvan Lebesque, noting the inability of the right-wing press to fully understand the play’s intentions, accused Soria of masking his explosive political partisanship (‘L’Étrangère dans l’île is a bomb’) in a reassuringly bourgeois form, and concluded that, ‘whilst a revolutionary political writer, M. Georges Soria is a bourgeois, artistically speaking’, a conclusion that even those more sympathetic to the PCF cause could no longer deny.48 The play’s director, Jean Négroni, told the PCF’s official newspaper that the play was ‘a tragedy that we may see as excellent boulevard theatre’, whilst the intellectuals who gathered around the revue Théâtre Populaire, such as Roland Barthes, had long been suspicious of Soria’s bourgeois aesthetics.49 This is not to suggest that Soria’s play did not make an impact: L’Étrangère ran for a very respectable 120 performances and was awarded the Ibsen Prize in January 1959. However, as Cold War tensions erupted in colonial violence, new theatrical forms were gaining ground in France. Brecht had been slow to become established, but his aesthetic had been partly adopted by Michel Vinaver’s play about the Korean War, Les Coréens (The Koreans, 1956), a play that avoided the rarefied world of the officer class and was consequently in search of an alternative form. Referencing Vinaver in relation to his own difficulties in finding a theatre to stage his play about colonial conflicts, Le Fleuve rouge (The Red River, 1966), Jules Roy reiterated that ‘if dramatic subjects exist, they are to be found amongst the Chiefs of Staff, not amongst the men’, an attitude that may have been partly responsible for the eight-year wait before the play finally reached the stage in a regional Belgian theatre.50 But for the early Cold War period we have been examining, such an elevated atmosphere had been precisely the environment in which to stage plays of searing topicality, and it was a formula that had evidently worked hitherto; as the director of L’Étrangère, Jean Negroni, asked, ‘[w]hat’s the point of causing a scandal in front of empty seats?’51

CULTURAL RESISTANCE? In Quentin’s La Liberté, the Governor tells Elle that he will offer loyalty neither to his totalitarian masters nor to the opposing regime on the neighbouring island, complaining ‘why must you destroy this difficult equilibrium?’52

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In the early Cold War period, we have seen how French intellectuals and politicians equally attempted to maintain a third way between the two dominant international blocs, but were ultimately no more successful than Quentin’s Governor; as Simone de Beauvoir concluded after the dissolution of the RDR, ‘there was no place left for those who refused to become part of either of the two blocs’.53 Alongside this increasing political polarisation, the field of art and culture saw the codification of an analogous division, as intellectuals such as Roger Garaudy and Laurent Casanova eagerly imported the theories of Zhdanovism into PCF literary and cultural activities. 54 In response to the failure of a political third way, and to the growing spectre of polarised cultural production that would deny the importance of the individual, many French intellectuals and writers leapt on the idea of a distinct European culture. Albert Camus, particularly concerned by the weight of the two-camp reality, found respite in Greek legend, and— without sacrificing historical contingency—considered ‘the myths of Ancient Greece [ . . . ] contemporary creations that illuminate the human predicament’.55 Echoing Quentin and Roy’s writings about tragic heroes inhabiting the contemporary world, Camus wrote that ‘Prometheus has returned to our century’, the dramatic implications of which he addressed in his Athens lecture on the future of tragedy, where he coined the formula ‘Antigone is right, but Creon is not wrong’ to summarise the tragic tension he was advocating.56 This Camusian aesthetic echoed Sartre’s ‘Forger des mythes’, in which he pressed for compressed dramatic situations, centred around a single event, that demonstrate how ‘right may conflict with right’; ‘in this’, Sartre argued, ‘it may well be said that we derive from the Corneillian tradition’. 57 Maulnier’s claim that ‘theatre lives on conflict’ can therefore be seen to refer as much to theatrical structure as to subject-matter, with the stakes being not simply political, but also aesthetic (tragic). It is in this context that we might better understand the four plays examined in this essay and the genre that they typify. All four writers work within situations of exceptional Cold War actuality, but ascend beyond the historically constructed debates that they appeared to be addressing. In the case of Jules Roy, this ascent is literal, as his heroes fly far above the historical contingencies of arms race debates to inhabit a (literally) ethereal space where the battle is within the individual against destiny. Back on the ground, and in the most wretched of border spaces, Thierry Maulnier admitted that he was trying to ‘deal with history as a playwright, by placing myself above the struggle’.58 For French writers absorbing the loss of international prestige at a time when individual choices seemed limited and bleak, this opportunity to infi ltrate contemporary subject matters with the tragic confl icts of elite individuals offered a reassuring connection back to the last great flowering of French drama in the golden age of Corneille, and even further to the myths of Ancient Greece. Both a welcome reassertion of national pride, and a way of navigating the abstractions of Cold War realities, the connection appealed far beyond the political loyalties of the

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individual writers. The plays could not answer the awesome challenges that the Cold War brought for French writers and audiences, but in framing the question as a matter of ethical dilemmas, they reinserted centuries of French aesthetic tradition at the heart of events that threatened to overwhelm it. NOTES 1. Ballet, ‘Préface’ to Roger Vailland, Le Colonel Foster plaidera coupable (Paris: Grasset, 1973), p. 7. 2. Vailland’s earlier reputation as a far from committed libertine had caused the PCF to hesitate over admitting him. 3. David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1914–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1964), p. 193. The period studied in this essay is book-ended by Sartre’s depiction of a racist American South in La Putain respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute, 1946) and his parody of McCarthyite hysteria in Nekrassov (1956). Reference should also be made to the huge success of Sartre’s Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands, 1948), a play about political assassination in a fictional eastern European country that was interpreted (to its author’s great discomfort) as anti-communist. Meanwhile, less nuanced, PCF sanctioned plays were created by Party intellectuals, including Roger Garaudy’s Le Printemps des hommes (Men of Spring, 1948) and Henri Bassis’s Celui de France que nous aimons le plus (The Frenchman We Love the Most, 1952). However, the concept of commitment was far from exclusively left-wing, and in addition to Maulnier’s plays the Hébertot Theatre was home to a number of reactionary, sometimes directly anti-Soviet, works, including Henry de Montherlant’s Le Maître de Santiago (The Master of Santiago, 1948), Gabriel Marcel’s Rome n’est plus dans Rome (Rome Is No Longer in Rome, 1951) and Georges Bernanos’s Dialogue des Carmélites (Dialogue of the Carmelites, 1952). Even Albert Camus’s Les Justes (The Just, 1949) and Maulnier’s adaptation of André Malraux’s iconic communist novel La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate, 1955) were received by many as anti-Soviet attacks. 4. For the Malraux quote and an outline of these third way attempts, see Herbert Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1982), pp. 260, 277–83. 5. Stéphane, Portrait de l’aventurier, 2nd edn (1950; Paris: Grasset, 1965), inside cover blurb; Chamson, ‘Rejoindre l’histoire’, in Claude Aveline, Jean Cassou, André Chamson, Georges Friedmann, Louis Martin-Chauffier and Vercors, eds, L’Heure du choix (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1947), pp. 104–5. 6. This essay acknowledges the work of Ted Freeman, an inspiring and generous teacher and mentor. 7. Maulnier, ‘Préface’ to Maulnier, La Maison de la nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 7. 8. Ibid., p. 7. 9. See Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, p. 184. 10. Verdot, ‘Récital Feuillère’, Franc-Tireur, 8 December 1951; Leclerc, ‘La Liberté est un dimanche’, L’Humanité, 10 December 1951. Both articles are found in Fonds Rondel RSupp 3161, Arts du Spectacle, Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter RSupp 3161). 11. Maulnier, ‘La Liberté est un dimanche’, Combat, 10 December 1951, in RSupp 3161.

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12. Quentin, La Liberté est un dimanche, Paris-Théâtre, Vol. 57 (1952), p. 35. 13. Quentin, ‘L’Auteur vous parle’, in Programme to La Liberté est un dimanche, in RSupp 3161. 14. Quentin, La Liberté, p. 34. 15. Triolet, ‘Folles, Bergères, et autres’, Les Lettres françaises, 13 December 1951, in RSupp 3161. 16. Quentin, La Liberté, p. 27. 17. Camus, ‘The Just’, in Camus, The Collected Plays of Albert Camus, trans. Henry Jones and Stuart Gilbert (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965), p. 140. Interestingly, Quentin’s trope of the necessity of ‘dirty hands’ in any political action links the play to what is, alongside Les Justes, arguably the only other canonical French realist play of the period, Sartre’s Les Mains sales. See, Quentin, La Liberté, p. 20. 18. Maulnier, ‘La Liberté est un dimanche’, Carrefour, 9 January 1952, in RSupp 3161. 19. Maulnier, Maison, p. 62. It is interesting to note the dialectical relationship between La Maison and La Liberté. After Maulnier praised Quentin’s portrait of individual liberty, and incorporated it into his own play, La Maison’s scenario of an isolated house straddling a divided Europe may have inspired Quentin’s follow-up, Le signe du taureau (Taurus, 1954), a comedy set in an Austrian château on the European East/West frontier. Needless to say, Maulnier embraced its subject matter (‘these gravest of problems’) but felt such matter was more suited to ‘a political tragedy’ (quoted in Geneviève Latour, Théâtre, refl et de la IVe République: Événements, politique, société, idées . . . (Paris: Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, 1995), p. 356). 20. Maulnier, Maison, p. 14. As Freeman details, 1953 saw the numbers of refugees from East Germany peak at over 400,000, and dramatic reports of their fates were a regular staple of Paris-Match and Les FAITS in the second half of 1952 (Freeman, Theatres of War: French Committed Theatre from the Second World War to the Cold War (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), p. 145). 21. Max Favalelli, ‘La Maison de la nuit’, Paris-Presse, 18 October 1953; Verdot, ‘La Maison de la nuit’, Franc-Tireur, 19 October 1953. Both articles are found in Fonds Rondel RSupp 3913, Arts du Spectacle, Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter RSupp 3913). 22. Maulnier, Maison, pp. 65–70. 23. The revelation that Werner will be stopped comes as a typically highly charged curtain line at the end of Act I: ‘Franz Werner must not get over the border, Hagen’ (ibid., p. 110). The theatre we are examining, to be as successful as it was, required not merely dramatic actuality, but also reassuring theatrical conventions taken from boulevard theatre: the dramatic curtain line, menacing noises-off, refi ned répliques, and the like. 24. Ibid., p. 183. 25. Ibid., p. 180. 26. Ibid., p. 208. 27. See Maulnier, Untitled, Arts, 15 October 1953, RSupp 3913. 28. Maulnier, Maison, p. 181. 29. Maulnier, Untitled, L’Avant-scènce théâtre, Vol. 83 (1953), p. 1. 30. Marc Blanquet, ‘La Maison de la nuit’, France-Soir, 18 October 1953, in RSupp 3913; Lerminier quoted in Anon, ‘La Maison de la nuit et la critique’, L’Avant-scènce théâtre, Vol. 83 (1953), p. 33. 31. The play had previously been seen in Brussels and had its official premiere in Baden-Baden, West Germany, earlier the same year. It was acclaimed at the Drama Festival at Enghien-Les-Bains Casino in 1953, published on the

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

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strength of that performance by Gallimard, and was turned down by seven theatres before being picked up by Pierre Fresnay. Roy, Les Cyclones (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), cover blurb. See, for example, Anon, ‘Les indiscrétions du strapontin’, L’Aurore, 3 September 1954, in Fonds Rondel RSupp 4044, Arts du Spectacle, Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter RSupp 4044). Roy, Cyclones, p. 133. Ibid., p. 118. See, Alan Riding, ‘Jules Roy, Algerian-Born French Writer, Dies at 92’, The New York Times, 21 June 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/21/ books/jules-roy-algerian-born-french-writer-dies-at-92.html (accessed 21 November 2010), and Anon, ‘Les Cyclones de Jules Roy’, Arts, 22 to 28 September 1954, in RSupp 4044. Roy, Cyclones, pp. 110, 199. The dangers of ‘l’orgueil’ occur throughout the text (for example, ibid., pp. 73, 151), as they did in La Liberté. Anon, ‘Les Cyclones de Jules Roy’, L’Aurore, 10 September 1954, in RSupp 4044; Kemp, ‘Les Cyclones’, Le Monde, 16 September 1954, in RSupp 4044; Anon, ‘Des Avions et des hommes’, L’Express, 18 September 1954, in RSupp 4044. Triolet, ‘Les Cyclones’, Les Lettres françaises, 7 October 1954, in RSupp 4044; Roy, ‘Pour des tragédies modernes’, Les Lettres françaises, 7 October 1954, in RSupp 4044. Roy, ‘Pour des tragédies modernes’, in RSupp 4044. His other two plays would be in a similar vein, writing about de-Stalinisation in Les Témoins (The Witnesses, 1962) and the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in Les Passions contraires (Confl icting Passions, 1964). In Les Cyclones, the Colonel regrets that ‘during the War, it was easier, and yet I was risking my life’ (Roy, Cyclones, p. 28). Henry Magnan, Unititled, Combat, 29 September 1958, in Fonds Rondel RSupp 6246, Arts du Spectacle, Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter RSupp 6246). In fact, at the play’s dénouement, Alicia overturns her decision and will stay in Cyprus to support her husband, who has been interned in a camp for defending Démétrios. Soria, L’Étrangère dans l’île, L’Avant-scènce théâtre, Vol. 185 (1958), p. 27. Perhaps the most explicit reference of this kind is found in Gabriel Arout’s highly successful Le Bal du Lieutenant Helt (Lieutenant Helt’s Ball, 1950), a play which, like Soria’s, masks commentary on French colonial activity by setting it elsewhere (here, the British Mandate in Palestine) and in which one of the highly educated officers is told that his dilemma is ‘what the French call a Corneillian situation’ (Arout, La Drame de Trèfl e, Pauline, ou l’écume de la mer, Le Bal du Lieutenant Helt (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), p. 198). Robert Kanters, quoted in Anon, ‘L’Étrangère dans l’île’ et la critique’, L’Avant-scènce théâtre, Vol. 185 (1958), p. 28. Soria, L’Étrangère dans l’île, p. 27. Lebesque, ‘Le fond et la forme’, Carrefour, 29 October 1958, in RSupp 6246. Quoted in Guy Leclerc, ‘En visite à L’Humanité’, L’Humanité, 17 October 1958, in RSupp 6246. For Barthes’ suspicions, see a 1954 article in which he singles out Soria and Vailland for writing ‘progressive theatre [ . . . ] which, however big-hearted it is, doesn’t usually rise above a preachy form of dialogue based drama’ (quoted in Daniel Mortier, Celui qui dit oui, celui qui dit non, ou, La réception de Brecht en France, 1945–1956 (Paris and Geneva: Champion-Slatkine, 1986), p. 128).

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50. Quoted in Robert Goffaux, Untitled, La Tribune de Genève, 4 April 1966, in Fonds Rondel 4oSW 10951, Arts du Spectacle, Bibliothèque nationale de France. 51. Quoted in Anon, ‘Georges Soria: Serez-vous d’accord avec lui?’, Libération, 25 October 1958, in RSupp 6246. 52. Quentin, La Liberté, p. 18. 53. de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard, 2nd edn (1965; London: Penguin, 1968), p. 267. 54. Andrei Zhdanov, who had overall responsibility for Soviet ideology until his death in 1948, drew a clear distinction between an approved socialist realist form and its opposite: a degenerate, reactionary, bourgeois fatalism (see Roger Garaudy, Une Littérature de fossoyeurs (1947) and Laurent Casanova, Le Parti communiste, les intellectuels, et la nation (1947)). 55. David H. Walker, ‘In and Out of History: Albert Camus’, French Cultural Studies, Vol. 8, No. 22 (1997), p. 114. 56. Camus, ‘Prométhée aux enfers’, in Camus, Essais, ed. Roger Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), p. 843; Camus, ‘Sur l’avenir de la tragédie’, in Camus, Théâtre, Récits, Nouvelles, ed. Roger Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), p. 1703. 57. Sartre, ‘Forgers of Myths’, in Sartre, Sartre on Theater, trans. Frank Jellinek, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (London: Quartet, 1976), p. 36. 58. Quoted in Jean Carlier, ‘Thierry Maulnier s’est mis à cheval sur le rideau de fer’, Combat, 26 September 1953, in RSupp 3913.

14 East-Central Europe and the Search for a Literature of the ‘Third Way’ Marcel Cornis-Pope The non-synchronous temporality of global and national cultures opens up a cultural space—a third space—where the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences. [ . . . ] Hybrid hyphenizations emphasize the incommensurable elements as the basis of cultural identities. Homi Bhabha1

Recent geocultural discussions have highlighted the need for a fresh perspective that will challenge both a naive celebration of global hybridity and a ‘nativist centrism’, articulating a ‘third space’ of negotiation between self and other, native and foreign, global and local.2 A ‘brand-new map’ is needed to take account of and further stimulate ‘the democratization of the East; the socialization of the West; the Third-Worldization of the North and the First-Worldization of the South’, until the whole planet becomes—in the words of the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña—an immense ‘border culture’, pursuing a ‘new internationalism ex centris’. 3 In what follows, I will focus on the efforts of various east-central European writers to defi ne a ‘third way/third space’ geopolitically, ideologically and culturally against the dominant confrontation between western and eastern (Soviet) paradigms during the communist era and immediately after. As a geopolitical region, east-central Europe has always had to accommodate competing notions of territorial frontiers, political organisations and ethnocultural developments. Caught between the empires of the West (especially the Habsburg) and of the East and South (Czarist/Soviet and Ottoman), the Baltic, Balkan and non-German east-central European countries have often been forced to defi ne their cultural specificity in terms that oppose ‘Occidentalism’ to ‘Orientalism’, ‘Catholicism’ to ‘Orthodoxy’, and Christianity to Judaism and Islam. This polarisation has periodically been challenged by integrative-federalist projects, political unions and cross-cultural hybrids (Greek Catholicism in eastern Europe, Latinity in Romania, ‘oriental’ influences in western music, ‘eastern’ hybridisation of western metropolitan centres, and so forth) that cut across the imaginary dividing line between eastern and western Europe. The shifting and permeable borders of the region have also allowed it to play the role of an interface and/or buffer between East and West with their competing religions and cultural ideologies. For example, during the 1848 revolutionary

200 Marcel Cornis-Pope movements, the Czechs called for a federalisation of the Habsburg monarchy rather than for its breakup, believing that a central European federation could withstand German expansionism from the West. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Endre Ady described Hungary as Europe’s ‘ferryland’ between East and West, connecting the Seine with the Danube.4 After the disintegration of the Habsburg and Tsarist Empires, the east-central European countries sought new ways to cooperate, establishing the ‘Little Entente’ (1920) against hegemonic threats from East and West. The literatures of this ‘intermediate region’ have thus often interplayed, in an uncomfortable balance, ethnocentric ambitions and regional (transnational) aspirations. 5 When the aspirations of nation-states were at its centre, literary discourse took on defensive accents, responding to the uncertainties of identity and the assumption of outside threats by reinforcing an exclusionary self-defi nition. However, literature has also had a certain degree of success in reflecting the play of differences in the multiethnic spaces of east-central Europe, offering more flexible models of intercultural exchange. The continuous flow of writers and messages across borders has further complicated the contours of this region, adding to it a revisionary diasporic dimension that, in the words of the transplanted RomanianAmerican poet Andrei Codrescu, ‘sends shoots and wedges through the surfaces of the authorized world’.6 While it is true that many exiled writers from post-1945 east-central Europe saw their main task as that of reviving their original national literatures badly compromised by Soviet/communist control, a number of literary outlets in the diaspora, most significantly the Parisian monthly Kultura launched in 1947 by Jerzy Giedroyć, opened their pages to writers from other communist countries, promoting a cross-cultural awareness of the creative potential of this ‘intermediate region’. The interest in multicultural central Europe as an alternative both to Soviet-dominated eastern Europe and to western counter-hegemony reemerged in the 1980s, as the communist bloc approached its demise and discussions of regional reconstruction began. Milan Kundera’s well-known essay, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ (1984), argued for the revival of central Europe as a buffer zone between East and West, and as an alternative to the ideological confrontation between western Europe and Russia. For Kundera, central Europe features as the most European part of the continent, made up of families of small peoples determined not by geography but by culture and destiny. But this idealised image is obtained through a double act of differentiation: central Europe is opposed both to eastern Europe—identified by Kundera with an orthodox, pan-Slavic Russia that missed the two defi ning moments of modernity (the Renaissance and the Enlightenment)—and to a post-war western Europe ‘kidnapped’ and ‘barbarized’ by American influence.7 Central Europe’s ‘tragedy’ is to be stranded between a trivialised West and a Soviet Union that cannot offer a viable counter-model of civilisational development. When a character in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) proclaims ‘[m]y enemy

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is kitsch, not Communism!’, the reference is as much to the kitsch of western liberalism as that of communist totalitarianism.8 For Kundera there is a need to reconstruct a middle ground between East and West to emphasise the common destiny and traditions of central Europeans and to highlight the role of culture/literature as a repository of democratic values. One problem with this focus on reconstructed regional traditions at the expense of eastern and western connections is illustrated in Kundera’s own essay: Even as he tries to reclaim a central Europe rendered invisible by Cold War polarisations, he creates new divisions that turn the region into a detached island rather than a connecting bridge, a utopia rather than a reality. ‘Central Europe is not a state’, he claims: ‘it is a culture or a fate. Its borders are imaginary’.9 In a spirited response, the poet Joseph [Iosif Aleksandrovich] Brodsky took Kundera to task for trying to be ‘more European than the Europeans themselves’ and for creating a false opposition between civilised anti-Slavic Slavs (the Czechs) and aggressive pan-Slavic Slavs (the imperialist Russians).10 That these divisions are not simply academic became painfully clear in the 1990s, during a new round of Balkan wars that pitted Catholic Slavs against Orthodox Slavs and Catholic/Orthodox Slavs against Muslim Slavs and non-Slavs. Another difficulty with Kundera’s argument is that the central European aesthetic traditions he idealises have themselves been contradictory, drawing upon both national differentiations and supranational multicultural features. For Kundera and a few other writers of his generation, literature was instrumental in preparing the revolts of 1956, 1968 and 1989, certainly to a larger extent than newspapers, TV or radio.11 However, dissident writers like Václav Havel, György Konrád, Adam Michnik and Paul Goma have cautioned that literature alone cannot defend civil rights and foster political changes.12 Historically, literature has also been used to reinforce parochial values, such as those associated with ethnocentric and nationalist interests. After Stalin’s death in 1953, nationalism re-emerged in a number of east-central European countries as a reaction to enforced Soviet internationalism. In the course of a decade or two, nationalist tendencies became more aggressive, submitting populations (including minority groups) to a process of political and cultural homogenisation. The suppression of the 1968 Czechoslovakian attempt to establish ‘communism with a human face’ exacerbated the confl ict between Soviet hegemony and alternative models of (national) communism. The countries which had refused to take part in the Prague invasion (Romania and Yugoslavia) developed a form of defensive (anti-Soviet) nationalism that in time became offensive xenophobia, contributing to Cold War polarisations. Similar nationalist tendencies emerged, more or less obliquely, in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic countries. Against both the Soviet levelling of cultures and the rise of nationalisms in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of east-central European writers proposed a ‘third way’ that emphasised the intermediate role played by the region’s cultures and literatures. Adam Michnik, Václav Havel, Zbigniew

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Bujak, György Konrád and Paul Goma tied their idea of an ‘open society’ to notions of cultural pluralism and human solidarity across the region. Several of them backed dissident movements outside their own cultures: for example, as a young man Goma supported the Hungarian anti-communist movement and two decades later signed the Czechoslovakian Charter 77 together with thirty-four Hungarian intellectuals and a few Romanian writers primarily from the diaspora. Goma’s own literature has reflected the political situation in his native Bessarabia (invaded by the Soviets in 1940), but also in his adoptive country, Romania, which before 1989 was torn between two forms of communism: Soviet-internationalist and nationalist. While some of his earlier novels took sides in the national and ethnic conflicts of the area, Goma’s publications after his forced exile to France, from Les Chiens de mort, ou, La passion selon Piteşti (The Dogs of Death, or The Passions in the Piteşti Version, 1981) to Chassé-croisé (Intersection, 1983), address alternatively the harsh political repression in east-central Europe and the tribulations of an exile abroad.13 Other writers across the region illustrated the notion of an alternative literature—a literature of the ‘third way’—more directly. Lajos Grendel, Péter Esterházy, Danilo Kiš, Sorin Titel, Dubravka Ugrešić and others developed new syntheses by drawing on hybrid traditions, both ‘occidental’ and ‘oriental’. Their works often focused on provincial cities which reverberate, with different intensities, the reflexes of the Centre. The favourite topoi are the Main Street, the café, the barracks, the high school, the theatre, the hotel; the dominant figures—the functionary, the officer, the merchant, the artist; ‘great’ but also ‘small’ themes reiterated continually—cosmopolitanism, multiethnicity, plurilingualism, tolerance, the Jewish presence, trust in the values of civilization and culture, even if sometimes in the style of a ‘Central-European version of bad taste’.14 Even authors who remained within the confi nes of the communist cultures cultivated the ‘vocation of the “in-between”, of the interval, of the state of geographic but also historical suspension’.15 For example, Sorin Titel’s fiction foregrounds the multicultural makeup of the Banat region (south-western Romania and northern Yugoslavia). His tetralogy, Ţara îndepărtată (Remote Country, 1989), which reveals Titel’s kinship with other multicultural writers of central Europe like Danilo Kiš, retrieves a broad repertoire of stories by moving from the memory of one individual to a layered dialogue of voices and tales. Irrespective of who the speakers are or what event is recalled, stories gradually overlap to create ‘the space of a unique memory, organized like a network whose trajectories intersect in luminous nodes’.16 The role of this recreated polysystemic space that mixes several cultural traditions (Romanian, Hungarian, German, Jewish, Serbian) is to reclaim a dialogic model of narrative and cultural exchange against the

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communicational crisis instituted by eastern European dictatorship. In similar ways, Elias Canetti’s autobiography, The Tongue Set Free (1977), foregrounds the writer’s multicultural childhood in Bulgarian Ruschuk (Ruse) among Bulgarians, Turks, Romanians, Sephardic Jews and Albanians. As he remembers, one could hear simultaneously seven or eight languages in its streets: ‘I had no real grasp of this variety’, he writes, ‘but I never stopped feeling its effect’.17 However, as Ismail Kadare’s Ura me tri harqe (Three Arched Bridge, 1978) makes clear, building bridges between ethnic groups, or between local cultures and imperial occupiers, is not always easy. This novel correlates the fourteenth-century Balkans under the fi rst Ottoman invasion with the fate of Enver Hohxa’s communist Albania six centuries later. Against the wishes of the local population, a bridge is built over the river Ujana e Keqe (‘Wicked Waters’) to facilitate the movement of the fourteenth-century occupiers (the Turks) and, by association, the twentieth-century ones (the Soviets). This bridge, however, cannot survive unless a volunteer is immured in its structure and, even after that violence is committed, the bridge continues to develop mysterious cracks that exacerbate the local community’s uncertainties and superstitions. Writers like Dubravka Ugrešić, Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz and Danilo Kiš were themselves suspended between different cultures, inhabiting hybrid or postcolonial spaces and writing non-conventional works. Born of a Montenegrin mother and a Jewish-Hungarian father, Kiš lived mostly in France after 1977, working as a professor of languages in a kind of Joycean exile. As he confessed in ‘Birth Certificate’ (1988), ‘when I wake up, I sometimes don’t know where I am’.18 This openness/disorientation translated in Kiš’s work into a questioning of the cultural map of eastcentral Europe and a promotion of a frontier-free continent against ‘all historical and geopolitical memories, political stakes, coalitions, and local antagonisms, conflicts and wars’.19 Resorting to contradictory strategies (documentary, myth, imaginary projection, metafictional allusions and references), Kiš’s major narratives, from Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, 1976) to Enciklopedija mrtvih (The Encyclopaedia of the Dead, 1983), dramatise the writer’s struggle to retrieve the hybrid identity of the Balkans. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a transcultural approach was also present in the work of the ‘Aktionsgruppe Banat’, a German-Romanian association of young poets and novelists who struggled to write German language literature in ‘the cities of the East’.20 Culturally, the group exhibited the characteristics of a marginal enclave: as Fritz König notes, the German speakers formed ‘a cultural and linguistic island inside Romania in an agricultural setting’, and as a consequence their ‘language is often slightly archaic, permeated with “Romanianisms”, and geared mainly toward their own surroundings’. 21 Aesthetically, their production was a true hybrid, bridging western and eastern European practices of poetry and fiction. As part of this, the writers pursued a

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Marcel Cornis-Pope Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt—an effect of distancing and estrangement—through all the means available to them. They want[ed] to disconnect themselves from official literature, from the literature of their predecessors, from the poetry that ‘serves’. They [were] antilyrical, antisentimental, antitraditionalist. 22

In addition to trying to defi ne their own voice, however hybrid, these writers struggled to maintain a rudimentary identity in Romania: the Aktionsgruppe Banat was banned in 1975 and its members subsequently emigrated to Germany where they faced the task of creating another problematic identity. The suicide in 1986 of Rolf Bossert, one of its major voices, eight weeks after arriving in Frankfurt, called attention to the dramatic fate of German-Romanian writers stranded between East and West. Nevertheless, this identity crisis produced some very good writing, particularly in the case of Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Müller’s fiction represents the dying world of the Banat Swabians, caught between the sordid circumstances of their lives under fascism and communism (especially in the early collection of stories, Niederungen (Nadirs, 1982), published by Müller while still in Romania) and their equally problematic life after emigration to Germany. Müller’s publications after settling in Germany, especially the novel Herztier (The Land of Green Plums, 1994) and the essay collection In der Falle (Trapped, 1996), continue to examine the difficulties both of life under totalitarianism and of the exilic condition. Yet in the process of reflecting these tensions, Müller’s writings reclaim a more inclusive notion of east-central Europe, cutting across former Cold War divisions. In a similar way, Viena, Banat (1990) by the exiled Richard Wagner, also a founding member of the Aktionsgruppe Banat and Müller’s former husband, tries to create an inclusive map as a response to the protagonist’s fractured life, part of it spent in communist Romania as a marginalised ethnic German, the other part in Germany where he is at best a ‘Swabian from the Banat’: that is, a member of a vanishing breed who speaks German ‘like a foreigner’. 23 This narrative map includes the names of eastern European localities in several languages, trying to bring back a vanished multicultural world. Similar processes were occurring in other national literatures. Piotr Szewc’s novel Zagłada (Annihilation, 1987) recreates in great detail a day in the life of the Polish-Jewish community in a town modelled on the author’s own Zamość shortly before World War Two (ironically, in 1942 Zamość was declared the ‘First Resettlement Area’ by the Germans, who unleashed a ruthless process of ‘ethnic cleansing’ indirectly captured in Szewc’s title). While the novel represents only a brief multicultural interlude in the twentieth-century history of nationalism and foreign interventionism in eastern Europe, other writers of the 1980s called into question not only national boundaries, but also cultural and literary ones. For example, a number of Latvian writers used the strategies of irony and structural

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disruption to complicate the narratives of Soviet oppression and the emerging national counter-narratives. Odu Laiks (Time of the Mosquito-Ode, 1989), co-written by Lienīte Medne, Vladis Spāre and Juris Zvirgzdiņš, is described on its title page as a true life story that includes lies, distortions and fantasies, making truth unrecognisable. 24 The novel features in the space of a few pages abrupt switches from childhood to adulthood, with leaps from the Siberian wasteland to Rīga and further to the prison workshop of a coffi n-maker who helps inmates escape by smuggling them out in caskets. 25 Milorad Pavić’s Hazarski rečnik: roman leksikon u 100.000 reči (Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words, 1984) challenges communist historiography by fusing historical periods and mixing races and cultures. Written in the form of a lexicon, with three different cultural strands or versions of history (Christian, Jewish and Muslim) that can be read in any order, the novel details the conversion of the tribe of the Khazars to a new religion in the ninth century, but is equally concerned with the interpretation of this historical event in subsequent centuries. The first interpretive layer is added in the seventeenth century when Father Teoctist Nikolsky compiles the dictionary from ‘found’ texts, some of dubious origin (a number of the Khazar poems are preserved in the versions heard from parrots), while other layers are added in the twentieth century, as new figures become involved in the textual research. One of the later entries develops into a murder mystery with ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ versions that indicate the difference that gender makes in the telling of stories. Gender and cross-cultural relations are also important in Péter Nádas’s massive novel, Emlékiratok könyve (The Book of Memories, 1986), which revolves around an unnamed Hungarian writer and his bisexual adventures during a 1970s trip to East Germany. Mixed with the fi rst-person chronicle of the narrator’s affairs with an actress, Thea, and a young man, Melchior Thoenissen, are sections of a novel he is writing about a late nineteenthcentury German novelist, Thomas Thoenissen. The character-novelist shares not only his last name with the authorial-novelist’s male character, but also similar bisexual interests. A third narrative is offered at the end by Krisztian, the homosexual lover of the character-novelist who completes Thomas Thoenissen’s work after the latter’s death, enlarging the psychological and cultural chronicle of the post-war period. In Nádas’s subsequent work, Évkönyv: Ezerkilencszáznyolcvanhét–ezerkilencszáznyolcvannyolc (Yearbook: Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Seven–Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Eight, 1989), even the genre is complicated and pluralised. Illustrated with the author’s own photographs, this essayistic novel unfolds as a month-by-month account of a year in the life of a writer who lives in the countryside but recollects events from an agitated Budapest, caught between eastern and western, communist and postmodern, influences. In similar ways, a number of Bulgarian writers have called into question ‘good’ (read ‘conventional’) writing, as defi ned by traditional literary tastes, reconnecting with everyday reality while sacrificing ‘style’. Experiments with the

206 Marcel Cornis-Pope narrative idiom (including parody and carnivalisation), which were present in the 1960s fiction of Yordan Radičkov, Vasil Popov, Yordan Valčev and Guenčo Stoev, reached their full potential in the 1990s. The interplay of genres, styles, lyrical ‘masks’ and citations is most conspicuous in poetry, such as Kiril Merdžanski’s Izbrani epitafii ot zaleza na Rimskata imperia (Selected Epitaphs from the Decline of the Roman Empire, 1992) and Ani Ilkov’s Izvorat na Groznohoubavite (The Spring of the Beautiful Ugly, 1994). Their poetry rehearsed a history of voices and styles marginalised by the discourses of communism and nationalism. Another example of anti-communist resistance combined with a predisposition for transnational work is offered by exiled theatre people. Romania, for example, lost through expatriation an entire generation of innovative stage directors. In 1969, Andrei Şerban moved to the United States with the help of Ellen Stewart, founder of the La MaMa theatre group, and quickly gained international recognition with his innovative productions. Likewise, theatre and fi lm director, actor, architect and set designer Liviu Ciulei was compelled to move to the United States in the late 1970s, where he led two innovative theatrical institutions, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and the Arena Stage in Washington, expanding their eastern European repertoire. In Poland, Tadeusz Kantor pioneered a ‘one foot’ exile by staying in Cracow and preparing his productions there, but performing with his Cricot 2 company only abroad, while Andrzej Wajda alternated between theatre work at home and fi lm directing in international co-productions. When communism collapsed, several east-central European directors returned, some only for short visits. Sławomir Mrożek, who moved to Paris and then further to Mexico, wrote one of the most lucid reflections on eastern Europeans caught between East and West in Emigranci (The Emigrants, 1974). This play, based on Mrożek’s own experiences abroad, takes a dim view of the exiles who flee from tyranny only to confront different forms of exclusion in the West, and also problematises the exilic condition by distinguishing between the idealism of the political refugee and the drab reality of the economic emigrant. The fascination with plurality also occurred in the realms of philosophy and cultural criticism. Most obviously, there was a rediscovery of the theoretical concept of heteroglossia by a new generation of exiles—mostly based in Paris—during the early years of communism. Drawing on the contributions of Mikhail Bakhtin and the early twentieth-century Russian formalists, the new expatriated theorists (the Romanian-Jewish Lucien Goldmann, the Lithuanian-born Algirdas Julien Greimas and the Bulgarian-born Tzvetan Todorov and Julia Kristeva) significantly enriched literary theory, semiotics, narratology, psychoanalysis and feminism. More broadly, theory played a role in connecting the notion of an alternative ‘third space’ with the domain of aesthetics. Historically, many east-central European writers played a double-edged game with official censorship, invoking the myth of the autonomy of the aesthetic against fascist (in the 1940s) and communist

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dictates. Under communism, the realm of aesthetics operated as a tolerated and to some extent subversive space of experimentation that challenged the dominance of state ideology without entirely displacing it. As one of the Romanian dissident writers, Ana Bandiana, wrote more recently, the aesthetic strategy of ‘surviving through culture’ had its value: while this approach ‘did not hope to defeat communism, it still tried to counteract it, diminishing its effects upon the collective spirit’.26 Other critics, particularly from the diaspora, viewed more disparagingly the annexation of political and intellectual debate under the domain of the aesthetic. Sorin Alexandrescu—who until 1990 lived in exile in the Netherlands—argues in Privind înapoi, modernitatea (Looking Back, Modernity, 1999) that, as long as the Romanian civil society was all but annihilated by ‘right and leftwing terror’, the aesthetic could be legitimately regarded as democracy’s last line of defence. 27 As Alexandrescu continues, the over-valuation of the aesthetic under communism was prompted by the belief that the victory of ‘aesthetic modernism coincided, at a symbolic level, with the victory of liberalism’, a viewpoint that now appears limiting: Though historically justified, the aesthetic canon led to a deplorable rigidity of intellectual thought and [ . . . ] cultural creation. [Today] this canon legitimizes not the renewal, but the reproduction of central values, i.e., aesthetic conservatism, the catastrophic decrease of methodological, hermeneutic, and cognitive preoccupations—why should we be looking for new methods and truths if we possess the eternal ones?—and ultimately the diminishment of cultural creation itself. 28 After the collapse of eastern European communism, several groups of scholars associated with the University of Sofia, the Slovenian Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, the Bucharest ‘New Europe Institute’, the Timişoara ‘Third Europe’ group and the Central European University in Budapest, reemphasised the idea of a multicultural ‘Third Europe’ as a buffer between countries with hegemonic ambitions and as a response to the nationalism and ethnocentrism that resurfaced in the 1990s. For these scholars, east-central Europe at its best is a ‘region of convergences’ structured around a ‘phenomenology of the middle way’ and a ‘transregionalism purged of mistrust in specificity’. 29 As argued by Cornel Ungureanu, founding member of the ‘Third Europe’ group, cities like Timişoara, Zagreb, Novi Sad, Cernăuţi, Oradea, Lugoj, Braşov and Bratislava have resisted at one time or another not only the nationalistic redefi nition of borders after World War One, but also imperialistic, pan-Germanic defi nitions of Mitteleuropa, opposing to them a polycentric concept of culture. 30 Such cities and others with multinational names (Vilnius/Wilno/Vilna, Cernăuţi/ Czernowitz/Czernitsky, Königsberg/Kaliningrad, Danzig/Gdańsk, Lviv/ Lwów/Lemberg, Sibiu/Seben/Hermanstadt) have encouraged historically a de/reconstruction of national narratives and a hybridisation of styles

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and genres. Even metropolitan centres like Riga, Bucharest, Budapest and Prague have functioned at times as ‘liminal cities’ and ‘magnetic fields’ that bring together eastern and western cultural paradigms, although not necessarily in an equal dialogue (the eastern or ‘oriental’ input functioning often as the tolerated other).31 The post-1989 literary map is not only more diverse, but also richer in cross-cultural and transitional forms. The editorial interest in previously censored manuscripts and the work of the diaspora has filled important gaps, expanding the corpus of eastern European (post)communist literatures. It has also challenged the national contours of Polish, Baltic and Romanian literatures (to mention only a few), leading to a cautious rediscovery of multicultural borderlands and multinational traditions. For example, Polish writers challenged at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s the totalising view of their national culture, reclaiming—as did Paweł Huelle in his fi rst novel, Weiser Dawidek (Who Was David Weiser?, 1987) and Stefan Chwin in his novel Hanneman (1995)—the Jewish and German legacy in Gdańsk. With many émigré writers having come back to Poland, and many debutantes living and writing abroad, the very division between ‘domestic’ and diasporic literature was redefi ned in the 1990s. Thus, Janusz Głowacki’s play Antygona w Nowym Yorku (Antigone in New York, 1992) and Edward Redliński’s play Cud na Greenpoincie (A Miracle in Greenpoint, 1995) foreground the exile-home dichotomy but complicate it by subjecting the exilic experience to a number of paradoxical reversals. The eastern European subject is marginalised twice: in the mythic metropolitan centre (New York in both cases) and in the culture back home, which has lapsed from the centrality that, for better or for worse, it had under communism into post-communist irrelevance. In the Baltic region, while critics called for a new national literature after independence in 1990, some writers offered ambiguous responses that questioned the nationalist narrative. Tooman Raudam’s Tarzani seiklused (Tarzan’s Adventures in Tallinn, 1991) involved ironically the famed movie hero in Estonia’s celebrations of independence, and Mati Unt’s Doonori meelespea (Diary of a Blood Donor, 1990), a pastiche of Stoker’s Dracula (1897), describes the return of Eduard, the husband of poetess Lydia Koidula, to Tallinn in the role of a reformed vampire who, in solidarity with the national cause, uses blood banks instead of live prey during the country’s struggle for independence. Likewise, Ints Lubējs’s Naivās Spēles (Naïve Plays, 1994) offered an irreverent reading of the twentieth-century history of the neighbouring Latvia. There is the same mixture of satire and political questioning in the work of South Slavic writers who confronted the collapse of Yugoslavia. The autobiographical narrator of Ugrešić’s novel, Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, 1997), available abroad since 1997 in Dutch and English but published in the original in an unauthorised edition only in 2002, ‘struggles to comprehend the loss of that relatively open world [Yugoslavia before the recent

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wars] and its replacement with new, claustrophobic national identities’.32 The narrator, who is forced into exile in the early 1990s, identifies with exiles and refugees, and describes herself as shipwrecked, an escapee from a sinking Atlantis (the former Yugoslavia), thus sharing the tenuous position of the writer herself who became unwelcome in Croatia because of her ‘Yugo-nostalgia’ and rejection of Croat nationalism.33 The novel focuses on the narrator’s attempts to piece together her mother’s story after arrival from Bulgaria in 1946 through family life in Zagreb to the events of the 1990s. Not surprisingly for a book that tries to reconstruct a transnational world, its structure mixes genres, retrieving the history of Tito-era Yugoslavia from old maps, personal photo albums, diaries and personal remembrances. Although the product of these contrapuntal voices is the image of a borderless, multicultural homeland, in the end it is doubtful whether the narrator’s or the exiled writer’s ‘extracognizant’ perspective (to use Michael Seidel’s terminology), which ‘inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another’, will be able to ‘transform the figure of rupture back into a “figure of connection”’. 34 The fluid, borderless female vision is countered by the belligerent male perspective embodied in the separatist wars that tore Yugoslavia apart. This is even clearer in Miljenko Jergović’s collection of short stories, Sarajevski marlboro (Sarajevo Marlboro, 1994). Jergović focuses on the effects of the war on ordinary people in multicultural Bosnia: reduced to a precarious condition after the destruction of the traditional social fabric, many people feel vulnerable but also, when forced to shed their acquired behaviours, closer to their genuine nature and more eager to cross gender and cultural boundaries. In the story ‘Muslim Doll’, for example, the Catholic male protagonist refrains from acting as an arrogant ‘protector’ to Mujesira, a Bosnian Muslim woman who struggles to survive the war atrocities, and consequently redefi nes gender roles, suggesting that intercultural relationships could follow a similar strategy by replacing domination with cooperation between ethnic groups.35 As the foregoing examples suggest, an important feature of the post-1989 scene is the ‘new internationalism’ promoted by a number of writers who have been shuttling between East and West.36 For example, the poetry of Liliana Ursu, particularly in Angel Riding a Beast (1996), draws parallels between America and Transylvania, an eastern and western perspective, without glossing over their differences. Written in Romanian and self-translated into English, Ursu’s poetry interacts with both worlds, interpreting one from the perspective of the other. According to Andrew Baruch Wachtel, a harmony is finally ‘achieved between the cultures, but it is a personal, provisional, and hence inherently unstable one which does not pretend to the level of a (modernist) universal model of cultural synthesis’.37 The same provisional, vexed synthesis is suggested in Slovenian Drago Jančar’s Posmehljivo poželenje (Mocking Desire, 1993), which has as protagonist a visiting professor of creative writing in New Orleans, who negotiates a fragile truce between his culture and the culture of his American girlfriend and who

210 Marcel Cornis-Pope upon return home experiences his own culture as strange. In the fictional travelogue of the Jewish-Serbian writer David Albahari, Cink (Tsing, revised edition 1995), everywhere the narrator goes—in the land of the Navajo, in Serbian Ćuprija, in Istrian Premantura—he encounters the ghost of his father as a mediator among his various identities. Even more intriguing are the cases of the Ukrainian Marina Sorina who has tried to find a home in an interplay of languages, translating her message, and those of others, between Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew and Italian; and of Barbara Serdakowski, who was born in Poland, grew up in Morocco, transferred to Canada, married an Italian artist who emigrated to Venezuela, and finally settled in Italy to write in a plurilinguistic/multicultural medium that translates her own existence. While the post-1989 internationalisation of east-central European literatures has hybridised identities and literary forms, these gains have been offset in part by a return to older myths of national(ist) identity. In a number of former communist countries a re-canonisation of literature has taken place, most often along nationalist lines. Questions of ethnicity and nation-building reemerged with a vengeance in the breakaway and successor states that have replaced Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. For example, the Croat literary canon has been reexamined to include previously ignored writers but also to exclude Slobodan Šnajder, Dubravka Ugrešić and Slavenka Drakulić, who have refused the nationalist orientation of the new Croatia.38 As I have argued in this essay, one response to such nationalist divisions is to retrieve the rich regional traditions of east-central Europe that have, even if not always successfully, emphasised ‘interference’ and ‘translation’ between cultures. By comparing and interfacing the literary cultures of a particular region, this type of study can help us rediscover a ‘third space’ or middle ground beyond our polarised pre-1989 worldviews. A number of literary studies of Latin America, east-central Europe, the Iberic peninsula and Scandinavia—all part of the ICLA series of histories of literatures in European languages—have moved in this direction, illustrating the mediating potential of such scholarship.39 The four-volume History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (2004–2010), in particular, highlights analogies, points of contact, mediations and hybrid and marginal phenomena that traditional literary histories have ignored, offering a more flexible approach to the literatures of the interstitial spaces that have been called the ‘Third Europe’. As my epigraph from Homi Bhabha suggests, the notion of a ‘Third Europe’ echoes the concept of ‘third space’ articulated by postcolonial/postmodern theorists. But while postcolonial criticism has tended to focus on literature from the ‘third world’, neglecting literature from eastern Europe, I am proposing to reapply this concept to the ‘second world’ where many of the same debates, concerns and styles have developed. As a version of radical liminality (‘in-betweenness’), the notion of a ‘Third Europe’ foregrounds complex negotiations between East and West, central and peripheral, global and local, native and diasporic. In one version of this concept, we are encouraged to look for a radically different ‘third way, a society that

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would escape the curse of both capitalism and communism’; but as François Furet hastens to add, this task has become as impossible as that of imagining a new Marxist revisionism.40 A more persuasive approach seems to be that attempted in the multicultural literary history of east-central Europe mentioned earlier and in Elka Agoston-Nikolova’s edited Shoreless Bridges: South East European Writing in Diaspora (2010), which subscribe to a concept of dynamic regionalism, treating the area both as a (multi)centre and as an ‘interface’ between vaster geopolitical horizons. NOTES 1. Quoted in J. Rutherford, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Rutherford, ed., Identity, Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), p. 218. 2. Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 155, 157. 3. Quoted in Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Spaces (London: Basil Blackwell, 1996), p. 132. 4. See Ady, ‘Morituri’, Figyelő, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1905), pp. 633–5. 5. Csaba G. Kiss, ‘Central European Writers about Central Europe: Introduction to a Non-Existent Book of Readings’, in George Schöpflin and Nancy Wood, eds, In Search of Central Europe (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), p. 127. 6. Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Comp., 1990), p. 91. 7. Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, trans. Edmund White, New York Review of Books (26 April 1984), p. 35. 8. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim, new edn (1984; London and New York: Harper/Collins, 1999), p. 254. 9. Kundera, ‘Tragedy of Central Europe’, p. 34. 10. Brodsky, ‘Why Milan Kundera Is Wrong about Dostoyevsky’, New York Times (17 February 1985), p. 31. Ironically, Brodsky’s own perspective enhances the divide by depicting central Europe as a part of western Asia. 11. Kundera, ‘Tragedy of Central Europe’, p. 35. 12. For example, in his more recent work, beginning with Gherla (Gherla, 1976), Goma is impatient with literary narration, replacing fiction with testimony and mapping closed spaces (prison cells, forced domiciles) in order to foreground the psychological tension between the prison space and the contestatory imagination. 13. For a detailed discussion, see Cornis-Pope, ‘Paul Goma: The Permanence of Dissidence and Exile’, in John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuszanna Török, eds, The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2010), pp. 342–67. 14. Adriana Babeţi, ‘Preface’ to Babeţi and Cornel Ungureanu, eds, Europa Centrală: Memorie, paradis, apocalipsă (Iaşi: Polirom, 1998), p. 9. 15. Ibid., p. 39. 16. Vasile Popovici, ‘Afterword’ to Sorin Titel, Ţara îndepărtată. Pasărea şi umbra (Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1989), p. 461. 17. Canetti, The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood, trans. Ioachim Neugroschel, new edn (1977; New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999), p. 6. 18. Kiš, ‘Birth Certificate’, Cross Currents, Vol. 7 (1988), p. 348.

212 Marcel Cornis-Pope 19. Kiš, ‘Variations on the Theme of Central Europe’, Cross Currents, Vol. 6 (1987), pp. 2–3. 20. Rolf Bossert, Neuntöter (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia-Verlag, 1984), p. 60. 21. König, ‘Recent Romanian-German Poetry: Bossert, Hodjak, Modoi, Britz’, in Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, ed., The German Mosaic: Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in Society (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), p. 35. 22. Cornel Ungureanu, ‘Richard Wagner şi Europa excentrică’, in Richard Wagner, Viena, Banat, trans. Wolfgang Schaller, new edn (1990; Bucharest: Univers, 1998), p. 5. 23. Wagner, Viena, Banat, pp. 19, 34. 24. Medne, Spāre and Zvirgzdiņš, Odu Laiks (Rīga: Artava, 1989), unpaginated. 25. See ibid., pp. 165–6. 26. Blandiana, ‘Statement’, România Literară, Vol. 37 (17 Septembrie 2003), p. 8. 27. Alexandrescu, Privind înapoi, modernitatea (Bucharest: Univers, 1999), p. 153. 28. Ibid., pp. 134, 153–4. 29. Monica Spiridon, ‘Response to a Questionnaire’, A treia Europă, Vol. 1 (1997), pp. 31–2. 30. Ungureanu, ‘Cutia Pandorei. Pentru o istorie alternativă a literaturilor din Europa Centrală’, A treia Europă, Vol. 1 (1997), p. 57. 31. Veronica Ambros, ‘Prague: Magnetic Fields or the Staging of the AvantGarde’, in Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, eds, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006), II, 176–81. See also the articles in this volume by Irina Novikova, John Neubauer, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Monica Spiridon and Veronica Ambros (ibid., pp. 40–56, 93–104, 162–75, 176–81). 32. Vlatka Velčić, ‘(Dis)Regarding History: Slavenka Drakulić’s and Dubravka Ugrešić’s Female Voices from Croatia’, in Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Mădălina Nicolaescu and Helen Smith, eds, Women’s Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe. Vol. 1: Rewriting Histories (Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2005), p. 55. 33. Ibid., p. 61. 34. Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. ix–x. 35. See Jergović, ‘Muslim Doll’, in Jergović, Sarajevo Marlboro, trans. Stela Tomašević, new edn (1994; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), pp. 51–6. 36. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 119–39. 37. Ibid., p. 123. 38. See Maja Brkljiačić, ‘Chewing on the Leftover End Bit of Mortadella or Intellectuals in Eastern Europe’, in Anna Wessely, ed., Intellectuals and the Politics of the Humanities (Budapest: Collegium Budapest, 2002), p. 220. 39. See Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir, eds, Literary Cultures of Latin America (2004), Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, eds, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (2004–2010), Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Anxo Abuín Gonzalez and César Domínguez, eds, A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberic Peninsula (2010) and Steven Sondrup and Svend Eric Larsen, eds, History of Nordic Literatures (in preparation). 40. Furet, ‘The Future of the Left’, trans. H.J. Kaplan, Partisan Review, Vol. 58 (Summer 1991), p. 435.

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Contributors

Wali Ahmadi is Associate Professor of Persian Literature and Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published widely on Afghan and Iranian poetry and fiction, as well as on translation theory, cultural studies and literary criticism. He is the author of Modern Literature of Afghanistan: Anomalous Visions of History and Form (Routledge, 2008) and the editor of Converging Zones: Persian Literary Tradition and the Writing of History (Mazda, 2011). Jamie Andrews is Head of English and Drama at the British Library, as well as a researcher and co-investigator on the library’s Theatre Archive Project. His specialisms include twentieth-century European drama and the history of collecting, which have led to publications on Harold Pinter, John Osborne and the responses of European dramatists to McCarthyism during the 1950s and after. After fi nding two early plays by Osborne previously thought to be lost, he went on to edit and publish these as Before Anger: The Devil Inside Him and Personal Enemy (Oberon, 2009). Marcel Cornis-Pope is Professor of English and Media Studies and cochair of the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Amongst his numerous books are Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting: Narrative Interpretation in the Wake of Poststructuralism (Macmillan Press/St. Martin’s, 1992) and Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After (Palgrave, 2001). He is the co-editor, with John Neubauer, of History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Century (John Benjamins, 2004–2010) and is currently editing a volume on multimedia literature and art in post-Cold War Europe. Joanna Elfving-Hwang is Junior Professor and Director of Korean Studies at Frankfurt University. She has been a lecturer in Korean Literature and Society at the University of Sheffield and a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

236

Contributors

at Leeds University. Her research interests lie in modern South Korean women’s fiction, trauma literature and popular culture, and her publications include Representations of Femininity in Contemporary South Korean Women’s Literature (Global Oriental/Brill, 2010). Andrew Hammond is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Brighton. In both research and teaching, he has specialised in Cold War fiction, postcolonial writing and cross-cultural representation. His books include Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Confl ict (Routledge, edited 2006), The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (University of Wales Press, 2007) and British Literature and the Balkans: Themes and Contexts (Rodopi, 2010). Neil Larsen is Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis, and has research specialisms in Latin American literature, Marxian critical theory and postcolonial studies. Amongst his numerous publications are Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (University of Minnesota Press, 1990), Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture and Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas (Verso, 2001). His most recent work includes published essays on György Lukács, Gilberto Freyre and Theodor Adorno. Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of five books on Latin American and US Latino literature and culture, the latest of which are Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (University Press of Florida, 2007) and Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety (University of Arizona Press, 2011). His edited volumes include Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the ‘Oriental’ in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). Margarita Marinova is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Christopher Newport University. Her research interests include Russian and eastern European literature, nineteenth-century cultural exchange between Russia and the United States, travel writing and world literature. Her articles have been published in such scholarly journals as Studies in Travel Literature and The Slavic and Eastern European Journal, and her book, Transnational Russian-American Travel Writing, has been published by Routledge.

Contributors

237

Derek C. Maus is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Potsdam. His primary interests are cultural narrative and the overlap between historical and literary discourse, interests which are explored in his Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (University of South Carolina Press, 2011). Along with a range of chapters and journal articles on Cold War themes, he has edited books on Walter Mosley, Russian history, postmodernism and the nuclear arms race. He is currently working on a critical survey of the works of Colson Whitehead. Brenda Murphy is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Amongst her numerous books are American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 (Cambridge UP, 1987), Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television (Cambridge UP, 1999) and The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge UP, 2005). She has also published book-length studies of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Tennessee Williams, and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights (Cambridge UP, 1999). Jane Plastow is Professor of African Theatre at the University of Leeds and Director of the Leeds University Centre for African Studies. She has worked extensively in Africa as a lecturer, community arts activist and theatre director, including periods teaching at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and setting up a national arts training programme in Eritrea at the invitation of the post-liberation government. Her major publications are African Theatre and Politics: The Evolution of Theatre in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe (Rodopi, 1996), Theatre and Empowerment: Community Drama on the World Stage (Cambridge UP, co-edited 2004) and Three Eritrean Plays (Alumnus, edited 2005). Nasrin Rahimieh is Maseeh Chair and Director of the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also Professor of Comparative Literature. Her specialisms lie in modern Persian fiction, women’s writing and diasporic literature. Amongst her many publications are Oriental Responses to the West: Comparative Essays on Select Writers from the Muslim World (Brill, 1990) and Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History (Syracuse UP, 2001). She is also the English translator of Taghi Modarressi’s The Virgin of Solitude (Syracuse UP, 2008). David Robb is a Senior Interdisciplinary Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures and Performing Arts at Queen’s University, Belfast. His main areas of research are German music and song, and the figure of the clown in literature, fi lm and drama. He is the author of Zwei

238

Contributors

Clowns im Lande des verlorenen Lachens. Das Liedertheater Wenzel & Mensching (Ch. Links-Verlag, 1998) and has edited Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s (Camden House, 2007) and Clowns, Fools and Picaros: Popular Forms in Theatre, Fiction and Film (Rodopi, 2007). Ann Sherif teaches in the East Asian Studies Program at Oberlin College, Ohio. She is a specialist in Japanese literature and language, with a current research focus on print culture and literary production in post-war Japan. Her major publications are Mirror: The Fiction and Essays of Koda Aya (University of Hawaii Press, 1999) and Japan’s Cold War: Literature, Media, and the Law (Columbia UP, 2009). Dr. Sherif has also translated modern Japanese fiction and criticism by Mizumura Minae, Yoshimoto Banana and Sato Tadao. Lingzhen Wang is Associate Professor at Brown University, having received her PhD in East Asian Literature from Cornell University in 1998. She specialises in modern Chinese literature, gender and literary theory, transnational feminism and Chinese fi lm studies. Amongst her many publications are Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford UP, 2004) and Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts (Columbia UP, 2011). She is currently working on a book project entitled Women Directing Films: History, Cinematic Authorship, and Feminisms in Modern China.

Index

A Action Française 187 Adenauer, Konrad 11, 158–9 Ady, Endre 200 Afghani, Ali Mohammad 89 Afghanistan 2, 7, 12, 58–69, 146 Africa 2, 4, 5, 9, 11, 13, 113–24, 166, 186, 192; see individual countries agitprop 4, 9, 120–1 Agoston-Nikolova, Elka 210 Aksyonov, Vasily 144, 149 Aktionsgruppe Banat 203–4 Alavi, Bozorg 8, 89–92 Albahari, David 210 Albania 203 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal 8, 92–3, 95 Alemayehu Kahsay 114–15 Alemseged Tesfai 122–4 Aleshkovsky, Yuz 147 Alexandrescu, Sorin 207 Algeria 190–2 Allende, Salvador 105 Amado, Jorge 9, 106–9 America 25 Andert, Reinhold 164 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company 88 Angola 2, 9, 113 Anisfield, Nancy 8 Anouilh, Jean 17 Arghand, Babrak 60 Asi, Qahar 66 Asia 2, 4–5, 11, 12, 80–1, 83; see individual countries Asturias, Miguel Ángel 102 Atkinson, Brooks 21–2, 25, 27 Auschwitz 162 Azhaev, Vasilii 135

B Babakohi, Zalmay 67

Bahar, Mohammad Taqi 90–1 Bakhtari, Rusta 67 Bakhtin, Mikhail 206 Ballet, René 184 Baltic region 12, 167, 199, 201, 208; see individual countries Balkan peninsula 12, 199, 201, 203 Bandiana, Ana 207 Bareq-Shafi’i 61–2 Barre, Mohamed Said 119 Barth, John 145–6, 150–1 Barthelme, Donald 141 Barthes, Roland 180, 193 Bartter, Martha A. 8 Beckert, Dieter 164–5, 167 Beijing wanbao 179 Belgium 7, 193 Bentley, Eric 17, 25 Berhe Mesgun 115–16 Berlin 91, 157, 159, 162, Berlin Wall 162, 166–7 Berlin Hootenanny-Klub 163–4 Berliner Morgenpost 159 Bhabha, Homi 199, 210 Biermann, Wolf 156, 158–9, 162–4, 166–7 Bild 159 Böning, Holger 162 Booker, M. Keith 8 Borges, Jorge Luis 102 Bossert, Rolf 204 Brassens, George 158 Brazil 9, 105, 106–10 Brecht, Bertolt 156–8, 161–2, 193, 204 Brezhnev, Leonid 146, 148 Brezhnev Doctrine 2 Broadway 18, 21, 23 Brodsky, Joseph 201 Brooks, Cleanth 101 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 2

240

Index

Bujak, Zbigniew 201–2 Bulgaria 131, 203, 205–6, 209 Burdick, Eugene 150 Burg Waldeck Festival 157, 160 Burns, Robert 165 Busch, Ernst 157 Bush, George W. 1

C Caldwell, Erskine 101 Cambaceres, Eugenio 106 Camus, Albert 110, 185, 187, 194 Canada 210 Canetti, Elias 203 Cardi, Juan Ángel 6, 32–40 Carter, Jimmy 1–2, 119 Carpentier, Alejo 102 Casanova, Laurent 194 Castro, Fidel 30–1, 39, 110 Caute, David 3 Ceauşescu, Nicolae 10 Chaikovski, Piotr Ilych 133 Chamson, André 185 Charter 77 202 Chavarría, Daniel 31 Chaviano, Daína 32 Chekhov, Anton 133 Chernobyl 144 Chile 105 China 2, 4, 10–12, 60, 72, 131, 146, 171–81 Cho Chihun 44 Cho Chin-yong 50 Cho Chŏngnae 47–9 Ch’oe Haksu 50 Ch’oe Inhun 45–6 Cho Yŏnhyŏn 45 Christianity 1, 77, 113–5, 117, 199, 205 Christie, Agatha 33 Chubak, Sadeq 89 Chun Doo-hwan 44, 52 Chwin, Stefan 208 CIA 3, 6, 31, 34, 37, 62, 88 Ciulei, Liviu 206 Clurman, Harold 25 Codrescu, Andrei 200 Cofi ño López, Manuel 31 Cold War 1–13, 17–18, 31–2, 37, 39–40, 43–7, 54–5, 58, 62, 68–9, 72–4, 79, 81–4, 87–8, 90–2, 95–7, 100–4, 106,-7, 109–10, 113, 118–19, 124, 137, 141–7, 150–1, 153, 156, 167,

184–6, 188, 191, 193–5, 201, 204 Colombia 103 communism 1, 6–8, 17–28, 34, 37, 58–69, 72, 77–8, 84, 88, 91, 107, 116–17, 119–24, 128–38, 156–68, 171–81, 184–5, 192, 199–211 Congo 2, 113 Coover, Robert 141, 144–6 Corneille, Pierre 185, 190–4 Cortázar, Julio 102, 110 Cuba 2, 6, 9, 12, 30–40, 103–4, 110, 113, 119–20 Cuban Missile Crisis 2, 73 Cyprus 192 Czechoslovakia 9–10, 128–38, 200–2

D Dai Houying 181 Daneshvar, Simin 8, 93–5 Dangdai 178 de Andrade, Mario 102 de Athayde, Tristão 109 de Beauvoir, Simone 194 de Gaulle, Charles 12, 191 Degenhardt, Franz Joseph 156, 158–61 Dehkhoda, Ali Akbar 90 DeLillo, Don 10, 144–6, 151 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea 43–55 Deng Xiaoping 171 Denmark 167 Deutscher, Isaac 4 Die Welt 159 dissent 118–19, 124, 137, 141–53, 156–68, 171–81 Djibouti 113 Dovlatov, Sergei 10, 141, 144–5 Drakulić, Slavenka 210 Druzhinin, Vladimir Nikolaevich 10, 129–38 Dubček, Alexander 9 Duclos, Jacques 184 Dutschke, Rudi 159

E Ecuador 145 Egypt 2, 7 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 150 Eisler, Hanns 156, 159, 161 Elham, Rahim 63 Engels, Frederick 175 Epstein, Mikhail 148

Index Eritrea 9, 113–24 Eritrean Liberation Front 120–1 Eritrean People’s Liberation Front 120–3 Esterházy, Péter 202 Estonia 208 Etemadzadeh, Mohammad (Behazin) 89–90 Ethiopia 2, 9, 113–24 Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party 120 Ettinger, Bracha L. 7, 44 Eulenspiegel 163 Europe 2–3, 5, 7–10, 12–13, 63, 79, 92, 102, 107, 113, 116, 128–39, 186, 199–211; see individual countries Ezhegodnik knigi SSSR 131

F factography 6, 32–3, 39–40 Fanon, Frantz 92, 95 Fardid, Ahmad 92 Farhikhta, Jalal 63 Faulkner, William 100–2, 109 FBI 4, 26, 28, 34, 37 Fekrat, Fazl-Haq 63 Felski, Rita 180 Fernández Pequeño, José 30, 39 Fernández Retamar, Roberto 104 Feuillère, Edwige 186, 190 Fleming, Ian 30 Floh de Cologne 160 Foley, Barbara 101 Fonda, Henry 25 Fore, Devin 33 Fox, Frederick 22 France 4, 7, 12, 95, 113, 116, 158, 184–95, 202 France-Soir 189 Free German Youth 157, 163–4 Freeman, Ted 185 Freiligrath, Ferdinand 156, 165 French Society of Authors 186 Fresnay, Pierre 190 Fuentes, Carlos 102, 110 Furet, François 211

G Gaddis, John Lewis 9 Garaudy, Roger 194 García Márquez, Gabriel 102, 105, 109

241

Garson, Barbara 17 Gebremeskel Gebregzibher 115 German Socialist Students Association 160 Germany 2, 4, 10–11, 26, 87–9, 91, 97, 156–68, 200, 203–5, 208 Ghanoonparvar, M.R. 87 Giedroyć, Jerzy 200 Głowacki, Janusz 208 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 164 Goethe Institute 161 Gogol, Nikolai 133, 149 Gold, Mike 101 Goldmann, Lucien 206 Goma, Paul 201–2 Gombrowicz, Witold 203 Gomez-Peña, Guillermo 199 Goncharova, Alexandra 133 González Hernández, Carmen 31–2 González Marrero, Claudia 32 Goodman, Walter 18 Gorbachev, Mikhail 2, 166 Gordani, Pozhuhan 63 Gorkii, Maxim 133–4 Gorsuch, Anne E., 128–9 Greece 2, 194 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 206 Grenada 2 Grendel, Lajos 202 Guangming ribao 179 Guatemala 2 Guevara, Che 105 Guilbaut, Serge 100–1 Guillén, Nicolás 34 Guimarães Rosa, João 102 Gundermann, Gerhard 164

H Habib, Asadollah 59–60 Habib, Qadir 60 Haile Selassie I 113–15, 119–20 Halliday, Fred 119 Halperín Donghi, Tulio 1–4-6, 110 Han Sŏrya 50–1 Hara Tamiki 73, 75, 84 Hašek, Jaroslav 134 Haucheng 179 Havel, Václav 201 Hayashi Kyoto 84 Hayes, Richard 25 Hedayat, Sadeq 90 Heine, Heinrich 156 Heller, Joseph 150 Hellman, Lillian 17

242

Index

Jamalzadih, Mohammad Ali 91 Jančar, Drago 209 Japan 4, 8, 50, 72–84 Jergović, Miljenko 209 John Birch Society 3 Johnson, Lyndon 17 Joyce, James 109, 203 Juraga, Dubravka 8

Kafka, Franz 118 Kagnew Station 115 Kanda Masu 74, 76 Kantor, Tadeusz 206 Karls Enkel 164–7 Karma, Werner 164 Kazan, Elia 18, 27 Kazan, Molly 18, 26–8 Kazemi, Mohammad Kazem 63 Kebede Mikael 115–16, 118 Kemp, Robert 191 Kennan, George 6 Kennedy, Paul 7 Kenya 7 KGB 128 Khalili, Khalilollah 63–4 Khaliq, Saleh-Mohammad 63 Khanlari, Parviz Natel 90 Kharitonov, Mark 153 Khrushchev, Nikita 2, 9–10, 108, 129–31 Kießling, Matthias 166 Kim Daejung 54 Kim Il-Sung 6, 44, 49–50, 54 Kim Jong-Il 50, 54 Kim Minsuk 49 Kim Tonhni 44 Kim Wŏn-il 46 Kingsley, Sidney 18, 21–4 Kinkley, Jeff rey 173 Kiš, Danilo 202–3 Koenker, Diane P. 128 Koestler, Arthur 3–4, 18, 21–4, 28, 186 Komsomol 130 König, Fritz 203 König, Hartmut 163–4 Kono Chizuko 74, 76 Konrád, György 201–2 Korea 6–7, 12, 43–55, 76, 84, 184 Korean War 2, 6–7, 43–6, 83, 115, 184, 193 Kravchenko, Victor 186 Kristeva, Julia 206 Kröher, Hein 157 Kröher, Oss 157 Kubitschek, Juscelino 109 Kubrick, Stanley 150 Kultura 200 Kundera, Milan 4, 200–1 Kurihara Sadako 8, 73–4, 76, 79–84

K

L

Kadare, Ismail 203

La’iq, Sulayman 61–2

Herbst, Josephine 101 Hershatter, Gail 171 Herwegh, Georg 156 hibakusha 8, 73, 76 Hiroshima 1, 8, 72–84 Hitler, Adolf 26 Hoover, J. Edgar 4 Hong Sŏk-chung 50 Hong Sŏngwŏn 46 Honig, Emily 171 Hosaini, Delju 63 House Committee on Un-American Activities 6, 17–18, 20, 23–4, 28 Howe, Irving 4 Hoxha, Enver 203 Huang Zhimin 179 Huelle, Paweł 208 Hungary 2, 200–2, 205 Huntington, Samuel 1 Hus, Jan 134 Hutcheon, Linda 142 Hwang Sunwŏn 45

I Ibsen Prize 193 Ilkov, Ani 206 Im Ch’ŏr-u 48–9 Information Research Department 3 Inglis, Fred 11 Iran 2, 8–9, 12, 63, 87–97 Iranian Hostage Crisis 2 Iraq 119 Ireland 94 Isaias Afwerki 124 Iser, Wolfgang 10, 141–2, 151 Iskander, Fazil 144, 147, 151 Islam 1, 9, 63–4, 95, 199, 205 Israel 113 Italy 113–14, 187, 210 Izvestiia 143

J

Index Lamadrid Vega, José 30 Lammel, Inge 157, 163 Laos 2 Latin America 2, 4–5, 9, 11–13, 37, 100–10, 210; see individual countries Latvia 204–5, 208 L’Aurore 191 Lawrence, T.E. 185 Lebanon 2 Lebesque, Morvan 193 Leclerc, Guy 186 Leeder, Karen 165 L’Humanité 184, 186 Leipzig Folk Festival 165 Le Monde 185, 191 Lenin, V.I. 10, 63, 105, 110, 134, 175 Le Parisien Libéré 189 L’Express 191, 193 Lerminier, Georges 190 Les Lettres Françaises 191 Levitt, Saul 17 Lewis, Bernard 1 Lewis, Theophilus 25 Liedermacher 158–61, 164, 166–8 Liedertheatre 165 Lifton, Robert Jay 153 Limited Test Ban Treaty 73 Lithuania 206 Lubējs, Ints 208 ‘Lucky Dragon’ Incident 82 Lukács, György 100

M Major, Patrick 3–4, 11 Makanin, Vladimir 153 Makonnen Endalkatchew 114 Malaysia 7 Malden, Karl 27 Malraux, André 185–6 Maltby, Paul 10, 141, 143, 147, 150–1 Maltese Falcon, The 33 Ma’mun, Razzaq 67–8 Mañach, Jorge 39 Mannix, Patrick 8 Mao Zedong 2, 10–11, 72, 171–81 Mariátegui, José Carlos 106 Marsh, Steve 88 Marshall Plan 1 Martin, Gerald 102–4 Marx, Karl 89, 166 Mason, John 6 Masuda Misako 75 Maulnier, Thierry 12, 185–90, 194

243

McCarthy, Joseph 6, 17–18, 24, 28, 34, 38 McMahon, Robert 1 Medne, Lienīte 205 Mehring, Walter 156 Mejía-Duque, Jaime 103 Mengistu Haile Mariam 113–14, 117, 119–20 Mengistu Lemma 116 Mensching, Steffen 165 Merdžanski, Kiril 206 Mexico 106, 199, 206 Michnik, Adam 201 Miller, Arthur 3, 17 Millet, Lydia 153 Minear, Richard H. 80 Mitchell, Greg 153 Mitter, Rana 3–4 Mobutu, Joseph 113 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 116 Molina Rodríguez, Alberto 31–2 Molyneux, Maxine 119 modernism 9, 67, 100–6, 110 Monaco 167 Montand, Yves 158 Moradi, Qader 67 Morocco 210 Mosadeq, Mohammad 88, 91 Moscow 10, 131, 192 Mossmann, Walter 161 Mozaffari, Abo-Taleb 63 Mozambique 113 Mozhda, Wahid 63 Mrożek, Sławomir 206 Mujahideen 7, 58–9, 63, 65–9 Müller, Herta 204 Murphy, James F., 101 Myers, Brian 51

N Nádas, Péter 205 Nagasaki 1, 73–6, 78, 81–2 Na’ibi, Abdollah 63 Najibollah, Mohammad 65 Narusawa Kaken 76 nationalism 9–10, 12, 113–24, 128–38, 204 Nazemi, Latif 65–6 Négroni, Jean 193 Neruda, Pablo 108 Netherlands 7, 207 New York Amsterdam News 27 New York Herald Tribune 38 New York Intellectuals 101

244 Index New York Theatre Critics Circle Award 23 New York Times 18, 21 Nicaragua 2 Nixon, Richard 145 Nobel Prize 3, 73, 204 Nobusuke Kishi 72 Nogueras, Luis Rogelio 31–2 Nolan, Lloyd 25 Nuclear Criticism 8 nuclear weapons 2, 8, 11, 18–19, 28, 38, 72–84, 166

Pratt, Mary Louise 132 Pravda 143 propaganda 5–6, 9–10, 27, 30, 33, 39, 120, 122–4, 128–30, 135, 143–7, 152, 179 Pushkin, Aleksandr 133 Pynchon, Thomas 141, 150 Pyŏn Hŭigŭn 50

Q Quadros, Jânio 109 Quentin, Pol 12, 186–8, 190–1, 193–4

O

R

O’Brien, Tim 151 Oda Makoto 84 Ôe Kenzaburô 72–3, 75 Offenbach, Jacques 167 Ohnesorg, Benno 159 Oktoberklub 156, 163 Ortiz, Fernando 39 Orwell, George 3–4, 7 Ôta Yôko 73, 84 O Yŏngjae 53

Radičkov, Yordan 206 Rahimi, Atiq 68 Rains, Claude 22 Rakhmaninov, Sergei 133 Rama, Angel 103 Raudam, Tooman 208 Rawnsley, Gary 7 Reagan, Ronald 2 Recio Tenorio, Bertha 31 Redliński, Edward 208 Reed, Ishmael 151 Reloba, Juan Carlos 31 Remington, Thomas F. 143, 146 Renmin ribao 178 Revueltas, José 106 Reza Shah, Mohammad 88 Reza Shah, Pahlavi 87–9, 91 Rhee Syngman 6 Richards, Lloyd 27 Ridgway, Matthew 184 Ri Taesam 53 Riviere, Joan 173 Rodríguez Rivera, Guillermo 31 Rohland, Peter 157 Roh Moo-hyon 54 Roh Taewoo 54 Romania 10, 199–204, 206–9 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel 18, 192 Roth, Philip 153 Rousset, David 186 Roy, Jules 12, 190–4 Royesh, Aziz 63 Rulfo, Juan 102 Russian Revolution 21, 23, 62, 134, 163 Ruthven, Ken 8 Ryu Chŏng-ok 51–2

P Padilla, Heberto 103 Padura Fuentes, Leonardo 30–1 Painter, David 2 Pakistan 58, 63 Pak T’aemin 50 Panjshiri, Dastgir 61–2 Pantielev, Aleksei 135 Partisan Review 101 Park Chung-hee 46 Pasternak, Boris 3 Pavić, Milorad 205 Pelevin, Viktor 153 Percy, Walter 145–6, 150 Pérez, Armando Cristóbal 30 Pérez Valero, Rodolfo 31–2 Perón, Juan Domingo 110 Peru 106 Pezeshkzad, Iraj 96 Philippines 80 Phil, Marshall R. 50 Piette, Adam 4 Poland 201, 204, 206, 208, 210 Polevoi, Boris 135 Popov, Vasil 206 Portugal 7 postcolonialism 4, 7–8, 65, 203, 210 postmodernism 10, 100, 141 Prague Spring 10, 128–9, 135, 137, 201

S Sadeq, Mostasharodollah 90

Index Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de 190 samizdat 4 Sarahat-Roshani, Laila 66 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 106 Sartre, Jean-Paul 3–4, 92, 109–10, 185–8, 194 Sato Eisaku 81–2 Saudi Arabia 58 Schmidt, Markus 160 Schöne, Gerhard 164 Schulz, Bruno 203 Schwartz, Lawrence H. 100–1 Schwenger, Peter 8 Second World War 4–5, 7, 12, 17, 19, 24, 73–4, 77, 81, 87, 100, 113, 119, 131, 150, 157, 190, 204 Seeger, Pete 162 Seidel, Michael 209 Şerban, Andrei 206 Shakespeare, William 116, 121 Shariati, Ali 8–9, 95–6 Shinkarev, Leonid 128 Shôda Shinoe 75–6 Siebers, Tobin 10 Singebewegung 163–4 Sinyavsky, Andrei 146, 149 socialist realism 4, 8–10, 49, 59, 89, 106–7, 109, 120, 172 Sŏk Yu-gyun 52–3 Solomon Dirar 122 Solomon Gebregzhier 120–1 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 3 Somalia 9, 119 Sommer, Doris 108 Soria, Georges 12, 191–3 Sorina, Marina 210 Sorokin, Vladimir 153 Soviet Estonia 144 Soviet Union 1–10, 12, 17–20, 32–3, 49, 58–69, 72–3, 75, 79, 84, 87–92, 95, 97, 113–14, 118–20, 122, 124, 128–38, 141–53, 166, 186, 188, 199–203, 210 Šnajder, Slobodan 210 Spain 7, 187 Spanish Civil War 161 Spāre, Vladis 205 Stalin, Joseph 2, 6, 9, 21, 84, 108, 129, 156, 163, 189, 201 Stalin Prize 109, 184 Stavis, Barrie 17 Steineckert, Gisela 163 Steinitz, Wolfgang 157 Stéphane, Roger 185

245

Stewart, Ellen 206 Stil, André 184 Stoev, Guenčo 206 Stoker, Bram 208 Sudan 113 Suh Ji-moon 44 Suri, Jeremi 10 Syria 119 Szewc, Piotr 204

T Tabesh, Qanbar Ali 63 Taddele Gebre-Hiwot 118 Tamana, Abdol-Karim 63 Taneev, Sergei 133 Tarshi, Abdol-Ahad 63 TASS 143 Tate, Allen 101 Tekle Hawariat 114 Terry, Megan 17 Tesfaye Gessesse 116–18 Test Bravo 82 testimonio 4, 106 Thalheim, Barbara 164 Théâtre Populaire 193 Third Reich 11, 156, 161 Third Way politics 11–12, 184–95, 199–211 Thoenissen, Thomas 205 Thompson, Ewa 129–30, 137 Titel, Sorin 202 Tito, Josip Broz 10, 209 Todorov, Tzvetan 206 Toge Sankichi 8, 73–9 Tomioka Taeko 84 Torrijos, Omar Treat, John 77–8 Triolet, Elsa 187, 191 Truman, Harry S. 2, 75–6 Truman Doctrine 2 Tsegaye Gebre Medhin 116–17, 119 Tucholsky, Kurt 156 Turgenev, Ivan 133 Turkey 2 Tynan, Kenneth 25

U Ugrešić, Dubravka 202–3, 208–10 Ukraine 210 Ungureanu, Cornel 207 United Kingdom 7–8, 30, 73, 87–8, 93–4, 96–7, 113–16, 146, 158, 190, 192 United Nations 88, 114

246 Index United States 1–4, 6–12, 17–28, 30, 33–40, 43, 49–53, 58–9, 63–4, 69, 72–5, 78–9, 81, 88, 91–2, 95, 97, 100–3, 113–17, 119, 122, 141–53, 158–60, 162, 184–5, 200, 206, 209–10 United States Information Agency 3 United States Office of Policy Coordination 3 Unt, Mati 208 Ursu, Liliana 209 US-Japan Security Treaty 8, 72, 80, 83

V Vailland, Roger 184–5, 192 Valčev, Yordan 206 Valdéz, Zoé 32 Vargas, Getulio 107 Vargas Llosa, Mario 102 Vasco, Justo E., 31 Vasilenko, Svetlana 153 Venezuela 210 Verdot, Guy 186, 188 Vietnam 2, 12, 80–2, 84, 145, 159–60 Vinaver, Michel 193 Vizenor, Gerald 153 Voinovich, Vladimir 10, 141, 147–9, 151 Vonnegut, Kurt 10, 150–3

W Wacholder 164–6 Wachtel, Andrew Baruch 209 Wagner Berno de Almeida, Alfredo 109 Wagner, Richard 204 Wajda, Andrzej 206 Walker, Jesse 27

Wang Anyi 180–1 Wang Chunyuan 175 Wegner, Bettina 164 Weimar Republic 156, 160 Weiss, Stanley 1 Wenyibao 179 Wenzel, Hans-Eckardt 164–5 Wheeler, Harvey 150 Whitehead, Colson 153 Wieser, Doris 31 Wolf, Christa 4 Wolff, Jürgen 165 World Trade Centre 1 Wouk, Herman 17–21, 23–5, 28 Wright, Richard 101

Y Yagana, Gholam Hayder 67 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny 3 Yi Hoch’ŏl 45 Yi Pŏmsŏn 44–5 Yugoslavia 10, 201–2, 208–10 Yu Luojin 175, 177–81 Yun Heunggil 46

Z Zarifi , ‘Abdol-Jamil 63 Zaryab, Rahnaward 67 Zaryab, Sepuzhmay 67 Zhang Jie 11, 175–7, 180–1 Zhang Xinxin 11, 174–5, 181 Zhdanov, Andrei 3, 6, 109, 194 Zhongguo qingnian bao 179 Zinoviev, Alexander 10, 141, 146–7, 151–2 Žižka, Jan 134 Zvirgzdiņš, Juris 205