Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
I n 1965 the United States Congress established the National Endowment for
the Arts as an independent agency of the federal government whose mission
was declared:
To foster the excellence, diversity and vitality of the arts in the United
States and to broaden public access to the arts.
The initiative was part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society enterprise, the effort
to remake America in the areas of health, education, and science as well as to
eliminate poverty. Behind it, however, were two other impulses. One was the
fabled memory of the depression-era W.P.A. (Works Projects Administration)
program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The W.P.A. supported many
artists, who later became famous in the emergence of abstract expressionism, in
creating murals and frescoes on schools and public buildings—similar to those
In This Issue painted by the Mexican muralists such as Orozco and Rivera—and supported
many writers in composing the great historical guides to American cities, many
Arts Policy of which remain standard to this day. The second impulse was the idea that the
Arts Policy in a Democracy 1 United States as a shining new power in the world—there was still the glow of
The Kulturstaat 2 “the American century”—would support the arts as had every great historical
Japan’s Rising Support of the Arts 3 power in the past. Thus, populism and cultural greatness joined to undergird
this historic step in national policy.
Being Creative 4
Thirty-two years later Jane Alexander, the departing chairman of the
Electronic Connections National Endowment of the Arts, spoke wearily of recurring Congressional
Online with Books and the Media 5 attempts “to drive a stake into the heart of federal funding for the arts.” And
she called these exorcistic rites—the hearings in the Congress on the appropri-
Demography ations—“a nearly debilitating annual Sturm und Drang that threatens to suck
Population Implosion 7 the life out of all arts advocates.”
Can One “Predict” Population Size? 7 At its peak, in 1992, the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts was
$175.9 million; in FY’98 it is $98 million, of which sixty percent goes for direct
India at Fifty
grants to institutions and individuals and forty percent for grants to state arts
Snakes and Ladders 9 councils—surely a small sum compared to the $678 million allotted by the
The Vision of Nehru 10 German federal government, as reported in the following pages.
Tagore and Chaudhuri 10 The story of this extraordinary change is a complex one—and will be a con-
Post-modern Hinduization 11 tinuing theme of the Newsletter in subsequent issues. At the heart of the mat-
Indo Chic: The Rating Game 12 ter is the question that Tocqueville raised (but then, everybody quotes
Tocqueville, see page 36) of the tension between egalitarianism and elitism in a
Reports from France and Italy democracy that prided itself on departing from older aristocratic cultures, and
Communism & Fascism Equivalent? 13 the contemporary question whether arts in a democracy, where each arts group,
Foucault Undone 14 particularly minorities, claiming a share of the public purse in the name of
Nolte and Furet 15 diversity, may not simply make a national arts endowment agency a multicul-
Disputing the United States 16
tural clearing house.
We intend to make this debate a continuing one in our pages. But to provide
“Those Were the Days…” 17 some comparative perspective, we have asked our colleagues Wolf Lepenies and
Reports from England Masakazu Yamazaki to write reports on cultural policy and its problems in
Power to the People, i.e. Women 18 Germany and Japan. These follow below. We hope to continue this in our next
issue with reports on France and the United Kingdom. ◆
(continued on next page)
—Daniel Bell
Arts Policy
The Kulturstaat
Fay Weldon: Gender Switch 18
Reports from Germany/E. Europe
and the Cultural Wars Within
Arguments on Language Policy
Robert Gernhardt
On Ernst Jünger’s Century
Stjob: New Public Media Language
19
20
21
21
T he prominent role that cultural policy plays in Germany can only be
understood in historical perspective. The philosophy of German ideal-
ism and the classic literature of Goethe’s Weimar established the idea of
a subjective inward Reich [a spiritual realm], which preceded the founding of
the German State by more than a hundred years. For a long time it was misun-
The Fall and Rise of Bertolt Brecht 23 derstood as being itself a political act—that of renouncing politics alto-
Song of the Sirens 24 gether—and as legitimating a withdrawal from society into the sphere of pri-
Romania: Hard Road to Normalcy 25 vate life. Germany always took pride in regarding itself as a Kulturstaat, keeping
the mere civilization of Western nations at a distance.
Mismanaged Cultural Transmission 26
Even the profound political change of democratization after the end of the
Reports from Japan Nazi regime did not alter the view that the State bears the major responsibility
Paradoxical Sense of Transience 27 for all matters of culture. However, there are problems with this view, and they
are becoming more and more prickly.
Fresh Wind in Japanese Film 28
First, in the German constitution, the German states (Länder) have been given
Furusato: Sociology of Remembrance 29 a prerogative for which probably no word exists in any other language,
The New Japanese Literature 29 Kulturhoheit, i.e., a supremacy in cultural matters. The Länder want to preserve
Su Tong and New Writing in China 30 their constitutional rights, but in order to finance huge cultural projects, they
need help from the federal government. Therefore, a complex relationship
Poetry between the federal government and the Länder has developed that is becoming
Adam Zagajewski 32 unmanageable. Especially in Berlin, the federal government and the local admin-
Robert Pinsky 32 istration find themselves in an impasse over their relative obligations to finance
cultural institutions in the new capital.
Criticism and a Pot of Paint
Second, in the East, the unification of Germany is still seen, to a large extent,
The Soaking of Clement Greenberg 34 as a “victory” of the West. Culture has become a refuge for political nostalgia:
Whistler’s Mother 35 theaters such as the Volksbühne in the former East Berlin try to preserve in their
The American Scene productions and their outlook, which they regard as a distinct Eastern (“Ossi”)
mentality. Culture wars rage: ironically, while the President of the Republic,
Everybody’s Tocqueville 36
Roman Herzog, pays tribute to Bertolt Brecht on his hundredth anniversary in
The End of the American Epic? 37 the company of his comrades from the old Berliner Ensemble, the conservative
Periodicals Prime Minister of Bavaria claims Brecht, who was born in Augsburg, to be the
greatest Bavarian poet of the twentieth century.
On a Single Theme… 38
Third, though all this illustrates the political importance given to culture, the
Susan Sontag on the End of Cinema 40 allocation of money is of equal importance. German culture is state-subsidized
News from the Republic of Letters 41 to an extent that is hardly understandable to visitors from abroad: a good seat in
Necrology one of the three Berlin operas that may cost $50 is subsidized by the State at no
less than $200 per evening. (Production costs are incredibly high, due largely to
When a Sage Dies 43
contracts which the unions refuse to alter). The city of Berlin alone has a yearly
Cornelius Castoriadis 43 cultural budget of almost one billion dollars. At the national level the German
David Rousset 44 taxpayers spend about 10 billion dollars a year on culture: the federal govern-
Eric de Dampierre 44 ment contributes approximately 5%, the German states about 46%, and the local
Khone Shmeruk 45 communities about 49%.
George Solti 45 About 40% of the cultural budget is spent on theater and music. Revenue from
approximately 20 million visitors accounts for only about 13% of the cultural
To Read an Obituary 46
budget for the more than 150 state theaters. The approximately 200 private the-
Miscellany aters, with around 10 million visitors a year, as well as many free theater groups
British Reading Room 8 receive high public subsidies, too.
The limits of this Subventionspolitik, however, have been reached by now. In
Out of a Time Warp 26
order to find more private sponsorship, attempts are under way to change German
Big, Big Brother 31 tax laws that give little incentive for spending private money for public purposes.
Barbies and Ancient Rome 42 In order to achieve this, Chancellor Kohl has formed a surprising coalition with
A Report to Our Readers 48 the Green Party which has advocated such a change most strongly. In the long
run, this may imply that the institutions of civil society and individuals will
become a second pillar of support for culture although, at present, they still buy
2
Arts Policy
the influence they have by contributing less than 0.2% to the this area; they have been funding artistic productions for
cultural budget. some time. In music, for example, Kanazawa, Kyoto,
Fourth, equally in matters of culture it has become increas- Takasaki, and other cities have public orchestras. For ten
ingly difficult in Germany to reach decisions. The heated years forward-looking mayors and prefectural governors—
debate over whether, where, and how to build a Holocaust for example, in the city of Mito and in the Hyogo and
memorial provides a good example: Some time ago Chancellor Saitama Prefectures—have led the way in building new the-
Kohl took a casual look at the four models under considera- aters and allocating funds for performances. The budgeting
tion for the memorial, lingered briefly in front of the model for the New National Theater has taken a page from their
by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra, and even asked a ques- book—a rare example of local governments initiating a
tion. Next day, all German newspapers wrote: Eisenman and change in central-government policy thinking.
Serra win competition for Holocaust memorial. Only those Of course, Japan has only taken the first small steps on this
who don’t know that Germany has been a monarchy for quite new path. National theaters are still grossly underfunded. The
a while now would be surprised. But, as yet, no final decision situation is especially pathetic when Japan is compared with
has been reached. Europe, which has a long tradition of public support for the
This may change in September with the next elections. If arts. For example, in Sweden with a population of nine mil-
the Social Democrats and the Greens are able to form a coali- lion, the government disburses ¥19 billion for three national
tion government, cultural policy may be affected. Members theaters. The Japanese government is providing less than a
from both parties have indicated their willingness to create a third that amount for production expenses at the New
federal ministry of culture. But since the German states cer- National Theater. Japan, with a population of over 125 mil-
tainly will not renounce their constitutional rights in all mat- lion, should be able to invest ¥200 billion in its national the-
ters of culture, we might see culture wars of a new kind. ◆ aters. Berlin has three opera houses, and the state government
—Wolf Lepenies provided a subsidy of ¥20,000 per seat for every production,
a fact that Japanese taxpayers might consider nightmarish
Japan’s Rising Support rather than enviable.
There are a number of reasons for the weakness of modern
for the Arts Japan’s arts administration and for the relative lack of pub-
lic criticism of this state of affairs. First, rapid industrializa-
3
Arts Policy
4
Electronic Connections
T he Internet and its World Wide Web-sites have, in the last five years, grown at a rate that
has been unprecedented in the history of communications. No previous telecommunications
advance—not the telephone, the television set, cable television, VCRs, the facsimile
machine, not the cellular telephone—has penetrated the public consciousness and secured wide-
spread public adoption so quickly.
Until the 1990s, computers were not linked to each other in York Times now have Web-sites on which they post their lead-
any way comparable to the Internet. Today the Internet prob- ing stories the night before their print appearance. Weeklies,
ably connects 30 million computers and tens of millions of such as U.S. News and World Report, will post their major sto-
users in more than a hundred countries. Given the exponen- ries on the Internet several days before publication so as not
tial growth, connections between 100 million computers is in to have their stories “stolen” before their appearance in print.
sight within a few years. New “affinity groups” spring up con- Beyond that the online Web-sites have become an alto-
stantly. On America Online (AOL), one of the largest access gether new form of journalism. The Wall Street Journal offers
services, during a typical evening more than a quarter of a an “Interactive Edition” at $49 a year (or $29 for print sub-
million users log on to one or more of the 8000 “chat rooms” scribers) which provides focused news sections from which a
on the service, exchanging 80 million “instant messages” a reader can select business news in Spanish and Portuguese,
day. Such phenomena, on a much smaller scale, were typical search listings for technical and professional positions, as well
of “ham radios” and “citizen band” communication in the as material from other financial magazines such as Barrons
early days of their founding. And how transient or permanent and Smart Money.
these phenomena will be remains to be seen. Business Week Online offers daily briefings (it is a weekly
But what is clear are the extraordinary ramifications of the magazine), topical collections of stories of interest to special-
Internet and instant communication on newspapers and ized audiences, six years of its archives available through a
weekly news magazines, especially in the competition to be key work index, and online conferences through its chat
“first” with the latest scandal; of the transformation of peri- rooms. In March the demand was so heavy that Business Week
odicals not just as daily or weekly journals but as extensive was forced to suspend new subscriptions until it could han-
resource services through Web-sites; the creation of close con- dle the volume of requests.
nections and exchanges between magazines into new elec- The Times Literary Supplement has issued a CD-ROM (from
tronic networks; and the beginning of scholarly publishing, October 1994 to December 1996, which will be updated annu-
particularly journals and encyclopedias on CD-ROMs and ally.) You can search for a word or phrase in the complete text
through electronic media rather than paper. of the TLS and retrieve complete articles and line drawings
The most striking illustration of the rip-tide effects of the (price: $470 a year). Subscribers to the TLS now can have
Internet on news is the story of the “Drudge Report.” On a access on-line to any issue since October 1994 and even
late Saturday night at the end of January, a gossip-monger receive their copy of the review “directly to your door.”
named Matt Drudge, who has a Web-site on the Internet, pub- The Economist’s Web edition is free to its subscribers. More
lished a breathless report that Newsweek magazine had “killed than just a Web-site, it sends free weekly summaries to read-
a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its ers every Thursday by E-mail, a day before the weekly edi-
foundations.” It was the first hint of the Monica Lewinsky tion is available on the Web and by mail. The Economist’s
affair. By 2:23 A.M. Sunday morning, the Drudge item was re- “screensaver” has a world clock and provides information on
posted on a half-dozen anti-Clinton talk groups and contin- upcoming world events tied to a reader’s computer clock,
ued to surface among the excited conversations of Internet while also bringing detailed statistical analysis of more than
news groups, to be picked up by an ABC (one of the major net- sixty countries. And it provides immediate access to more
work systems) news program, then by a CBS talk-radio show, than 6,000 articles.
and then onto the round-the-clock coverage on CNN and In all these different ways, the Web editions of these maga-
MSNBC (an all-news 24-hour cable network established by zines go beyond the weekly print sections and are becoming a
NBC), and finally, Newsweek magazine—which had held up new and different format from the traditional kind. Whether
the story because at that point it lacked sufficient readers will pay for these extra services remains to be seen.
credibility—posted it on its Web-site before publishing a The multiplication of all the Web-sites as well as the widen-
story it had not been prepared to print. ing of resources—not only of the established Nexis (a citation
The increasing competition between the media and the bank for news stories) or Lexis (on legal decisions) but also
macho need to have “the news beat and be first” has intensi- the back issues of hundreds of newspapers and journals, as
fied the velocity and volatility of news reporting. All the well as the volumes in libraries—threaten to create a new
major newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New Borgesian Tower of Babel. A classics professor recently began
5
Electronic Connections
searching the Internet for references to Plato and found 40,000 fields. Users can search the full text of articles or search by
situations, including numerous references to a “suburb of topic, by authors, or by key words. The world of scholarship,
Chicago” and the Spanish word for plate. His solution was to thus, is available at one’s own desk by clicking a mouse.
create a site called “The Fourth Tetraology,” to explore Plato’s In similar fashion, more detailed materials such as survey
middle dialogues and three other groups. But then one had to data—polls, opinions, voting analysis, and the like—are avail-
know the key word “Tetraology” to know where to go. able on the Survey Data Documentation and Analysis Web-
Inevitably, “search engines” have arisen as services for sub- page developed by the Survey Methods Program at the
scribers to help classify the different topics available. But then University of California, Berkeley. The Web-site not only calls
you need to know how search engines work. Using automated up the collection of survey questions from, say, ten separate
software, search engines follow links across the Web and call studies, but also can run cross-tabulations on these data to
up pages wherever they can find them. Once a page fits a user’s allow a researcher to test some of his or her own hypotheses.
need, the search engine automatically indexes some or all of The age of print—is it over? For encyclopedias, surely. The
the words on the page. Then, when a Web surfer punches in Encyclopedia Britannica (EB), the oldest (230 years) and nomi-
search words, the engine looks up the word on its index and nally the most prestigious encyclopedia in English, occupied
calls up the appropriate Web address. three feet of shelf space with thirty-two
The largest search engine, HotBot, how- volumes, 44 million words, and 72,000
ever, indexes only about 34% of the esti- The age of print— articles and sold for $1500. Now it is on
mated 320 million pages on the Web. two CD-ROMs which sell for £125 in the
One unique effort to facilitate ex- is it over, again? U.K. and $125 in the U.S. And a subscrip-
changes between like-minded periodicals tion also brings an Internet search ser-
and research organizations and founda- vice to link up the EB with other sites.
tions is the Electronic Policy Network organized by the liberal The electronic mode has now become the certified route for
bi-monthly, The American Prospect. Each of the forty-six mem- organizations publishing abstracts of their own research
bers and affiliates, such as the Brookings Institution, the Russell reports. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER),
Sage Foundation, and the Twentieth Century Fund, have their the largest in the field, publishes annually about 400 working
own Web-sites, presenting their own publications and research papers, and in the past would publish the quarterly Reporter
reports. But the network also has a “search engine” that allows with several hundred-word abstracts of these papers for those
researchers to search for material on specific subjects and, more who would wish to order the full paper. The Winter 1997/8
ingeniously, has a “virtual magazine” called Idea Central that issue is the last to include working paper abstracts. Future
organizes the outputs of all the members by topic. So Idea issues will only list working paper numbers, titles and authors,
Central has ongoing “magazines” on health policy, welfare and but the abstracts will be published only on the NBER Web-
families, education, economics and politics, civic participation, site. That site also will now have a searchable index of over
media old and new, as well as briefing books such as campaign 5,000 working papers issued since 1978, in addition to a macro-
finanace reform (which include reports broken down by sub- economic history database of over 35,000 time series, as well
topic from seven of its affiliates), and all of these are available as the Penn World Tables containing international economic
on-line through the Internet. and demographic data.
The major developments in the scholarly fields are the growth And a book? To paraphrase Getrude Stein, a book, is a book,
of comprehensive search and retrieval systems and the increas- is a book. No longer. Once published, a book sat for eternity
ing possibility of publication of journals by electronic means. until it crumbled into dust. But James Kugel of Harvard, who
The most striking illustration of the vast expansion of schol- has written a book, The Bible as it Was (Harvard University
arly search is JSTOR (short for “Journal Storage”), which Press, 1997), concludes his preface with a note to readers:
began in 1996 with a grant from the Mellon Foundation. Despite all the time spent assembling and checking the
JSTOR is a database now comprising sixty-four journals in material…no doubt errors of commission and omission
twelve fields, half of which are already accessible. By the year remain; moreover, texts now being published for the
2000, more than one hundred journals in the fifteen fields will first time or yet to be discovered will likely provide fur-
be available on JSTOR database, in cooperation with 200 aca- ther insights that might have enriched this study. And
demic libraries. Thus, there are eleven journals in economics, so I cannot but make a request of my learned readers: I
with the American Economic Review leading off; seven in phi- will be most grateful for any corrections or additions
losophy, starting with the Journal of Philosophy; eleven in that you might be kind enough to pass along, either via
mathematics, with the Annals of Mathematics and the Journal the publisher or to me by means of my Web-page,
of the American Mathematical Society, etc., including journals http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~jlkugel/, where I intend
in the widely dispersed fields of finance, ecology, Asian stud- to maintain a regularly updated information sheet about
ies, and higher education. this book and related matters….It is my hope that the
JSTOR’s search engine allows users to browse and search age of electronic publishing may yet provide a release
individual journals, in some instances such as the American from the dire sentence of Eccles. 1:15. [A crooked thing
Political Science Review going back to 1906, or to perform cannot be made straight.] ◆
cross-disciplinary searches of multiple journals in multiple —DB
6
Demography
7
Demography
divided into, and this number is taken as the maximum num- Miscellany
ber of people the earth could support.
Yet this is quite simplistic. The maximum possible food pro-
British Reading Room
duction depends not only on environmental constraints such
as soil, rainfall, terrain, and the length of the growing sea-
son, but also on human choices, individual and collective,
W hen in 1978 Shirley Williams, the Labour secretary
of state for education , announced the decision to
construct a new British Library—at a site in Euston adja-
which cultivars are chosen; the technology of cultivation; cent to the St. Pancras Station—replacing the fabled old
credit available to farmers; farmer education; infrastructure reading room in the British Museum, a cry arose against
to produce and transport farm inputs (including irrigation the cultural vandalism of this move. The sublimely beau-
capacity and hybrid seed development); infrastructure to tiful old domed room, the heart of the library, was dear to
transport, store, and process farm outputs; economic demand those who cherished the images of Karl Marx or Bernard
for food from other sect ors of the economy; and international Shaw dozing over their books. But there was also the prob-
politics and markets that affect trade inputs and outputs. lem of utility—how such an archaic jewel could be main-
Moreover, culture defines what is food. Where a Hindu may tained for “modern” purposes.
see a sacred cow, an American may see a hamburger on When the utility question first arose, Patrick Gordon
hooves. If edibility alone determined what is food, cock- Walker, the former Labour education secretary, proposed
roaches would be in great demand. an extension of the library in adjacent Bloomsbury .He had
The minimum food requirement depends not only on phys- not figured on the wrath of other Labour M.P.s such as the
iological requirements (about 2,000 kilocalories per person per wily left-wing Barbara Castle and the brawling right-wing
day), but also cultural and economic standards of what is Bessie Braddock, who claimed that extension would mean
acceptable and desirable. Not everyone who has a choice will tearing down a few blocks occupied by the poor. What was
accept a vegetarian diet with no more than the minimum calo- more important: books or people? And in this they were
ries and nutrients required for normal growth. supported privately by Richard Crossman, the Labour min-
Many authors of maximum population estimates recognized ister of housing. So, Shirley Williams had to carry the load.
the difficulty of finding a single answer by giving a low esti- Move forward to the present. The new British Library
mate and a high estimate. This range of low to high medians, has opened, at least the Humanities Reading Room, the
from 7.7 to 12 billion, is close to the low and high U.N. pro- first of nine. There will be the Rare Books Reading Room,
jections for 2050: from 7.8 billion to 12.5 billion. the Oriental and Indian Collections, the Manuscript
Recent population history has rapidly approached the Reading Room, and finally the Science Reading Room in
level of many estimated limits, and the U.N. projections of mid-1999. So far the project has cost five times its original
future population lie at similar levels. Of course, a historical budget. There is space for only one-third of its 3,500 regu-
survey of estimated limits is no proof that limits really are in lar readers, and the new British Library can store only 12
this range. It is merely a warning signal that the human pop- million of the 25 million books originally planned for.
ulation has now entered a zone where limits on how many And the verdict (one over-awed reader commented to the
people the earth can support have been anticipated and may London Review of Books): “The building is splendid. The
be encountered. ◆ entrance hall reaches up through floors of reading rooms;
it is crossed over by high walkways and is penetrated from
Source: Joel E. Cohen, “How Many People Can the Earth top to bottom by a glazed shaft.” This will contain the
Support?” Bulletin (of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), King’s Library in a display of leather bindings.
March/April 1998. Copyright © 1997 by Joel E. Cohen. Reprinted by permission. The lavishly leather-topped reading desks will be fed
books by a computerized retrieval system and equipped for
modem and Internet use—assets which may baffle the older
nostalgic pen-pushing scholars. The look is smart, comfort-
able, and conducive to earnest endeavor: marble columns,
soft-colored stone on the floor of the entrance hall, blue car-
pets in the reading rooms, pale oak, leather and brass, soar-
ing walls and curving ceilings awash with light.
As with the original reading room, there is a problem of
space. A plot had been set aside behind the new library for
expansion. But the Treasury wants to sell it, possibly to the
Sainsbury supermarket firm. As The Economist comments,
“Eventually the Treasury will have to choose between
catering for scholars of obscure Asian languages and con-
sumers of even more obscure Asian vegetables.”
8
India at Fifty
O n August 15, 1997, India celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its independence. It is a stun-
ning feat in the history of democracy. India is the second most populous country in the world
with a population almost reaching a billion persons by the millenium. There are twenty-five
states, some of which are larger individually than the populations of Japan, Mexico, or France. Kashmir
and Kerala, at opposite ends of the Indian subcontinent, are as different as Sweden and Italy.
There are eighteen official languages, the largest of which, writes, almost as many Muslims in India as in Pakistan, and
Hindi, the official language, is spoken by about 30% of the many more than in Bangladesh.
population, plus thousands of distinct dialects whose speak- But secularism, as Nehru knew, was a sophisticated way of
ers often cannot communicate with one another. There are life that might never be appreciated by the masses of Indians.
3,500 sub-castes with either distinct or subtle differences that And since people live by myths (when not by religions), in his
often keep the people apart from marriage, jobs, or social Discovery of India (Oxford, 1990) Nehru created a fable, as
intercourse. In the last election, there were 600 million regis- Edward W. Desmond writes, that celebrated the achievements
tered voters for the seven national political parties. of Mughal emperors and Rajput maharajhas alike, playing
Yet, except for the short period from 1973 to 1975, when the down the ceaseless conflict of fratricide. He gave a special
then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the constitu- place to the visions of ancient emperors like the Buddhist con-
tion, it has survived as a democracy. In fact, half of the peo- vert Ashoka of the third century B.C. and the Mughal Akhbar
ple in the world who live in a democracy live in India. There of the sixteenth who could be portrayed as having a proto-
is also another singular fact noted only by those who recall secular outlook in their efforts to harmonize contending reli-
Sherlock Holmes’s story of the dog that did not bark in the gious forces within their empires.
night: namely that of almost all of the one hundred post-colo- But then there are the snakes. The Hindu nationalists see
nial regimes in the world in the last fifty years, India has been India’s history as as one of a unified culture, the Hindu peo-
one of the few that has not experienced a military dictator- ple the “chosen people of the subcontinent” overcome by
ship. Its Asian neighbors, from Pakistan to Burma, and almost alien forces, beginning in the eleventh century, who destroyed
all post-colonial African nations have had military regimes. temples, forced conversion by sword and imposed an alien cul-
India has not. ture. For them the glory of the past Hindu civilization based
There is also the history. Though Indian nationalists might on the Vedas and manly virtues, must be restored as the basis
passionately disagree, English rule in India, going back two- of an Indian political identity, and all other religions and cul-
hundred years, was a benign force. There was the emphasis on tures take a secondary place in this scheme of things.
education, initiated by the English utilitarians; the Indian Civil Thus the stage is set for the coming years. With its institu-
Service as a bedrock of administration; the English judicial sys- tional underpinnings, India was cemented politically by
tem, and the ethos of Sandhurst, the military training school Nehru’s Congress Party, which, by the end of the half-century,
that produced among others Winston Churchill, and created a remained the only national secular party. After the death of
professional Indian army that stayed out of politics. Today, Nehru it was held together by a dynasty living on the origi-
many of the institutions are eroding and English itself, the lan- nal charismatic capital, including Nehru’s daughter Indira
guage of the educated elite and the national newspapers of Gandhi and her two children Sanjay and Rajiv—one died in a
India, is under sharp attack politically and culturally, though it plane accident, the other, like his mother, assassinated by ter-
continues to gain in the business and technological worlds. rorists. Sonia Ghandi, Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, and her two
In a book with the intriguing title Snakes and Ladders: children are now moving to take control of a shattered
Glimpses of Modern India, the writer Gita Mehta uses the Congress party against the rising tide of Hindu nationalism
board game, for which that is the title, as a metaphor for exemplified by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been
India. The roll of the dice determines “how many squares a invited for the second time to form a national administration.
player may move. Starting at the foot of the ladder lets you Since 1947, there have been twelve national elections for the
climb it, sometimes moving thirty squares in a single throw.” national parliament, but four within the last decade. In the last
Landing on a snake means you have to slide back down elections, as various correspondents have reported, the level
“swallowed by past nightmares,” back to square one. of violence has been rising. The fateful question is whether the
The faith ladder that India climbed was created by political fragmentation and polarization which now exists in
Jawaharlal Nehru. It was a secular state, one that, as Amartya India may finally result in the end of secular society. ◆
Sen has written, made it possible to think a nation could inte- —DB
grate Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and Parsees, and a mas- Sources: Amartya Sen, Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 8, 1997.
sive Muslim population which chose to stay on in India rather Lloyd & Susanne H. Rudolph, The New Republic, March 16, 1998.
than be “exchanged’ into Pakistan. There are in fact, he Edward W. Desmond, The New York Review of Books, May 14, 1992.
9
India at Fifty
The Vision of Nehru nomic vision. And he pointed out that too much of an emphasis
on Nehru’s improvisations led Khilnani to slight the social and
10
India at Fifty
moving openly from classical Western thought to the culture of modern science appears with high frequency in the dis-
of China or Japan “in sharp contrast with the cultural conser- course of Hindu fundamentalist parties. The Hindu right has
vatism and separatism that has tended to grip India from time proclaimed the twenty-first century a “Hindu century” on the
to time.” And, as Sen writes sweetly, the filmmaker Satyajit theoretical grounds made respectable by left critics of science.
Ray was also an alumnus of Santinketan and made several films In this context, the Hindu nationalists have been able to
based on Tagore stories. As Ray wrote in 1991: “Santinketan position themselves as the true defenders of non-Western ways
made me the combined product of East and West that I am.” of knowing. Themselves leading the charge for “decolonizing
If Rabindranath Tagore was the complete Bengali who knowledge,” the Hindu fundamentalist parties began to
became the citizen of the world, Nirad C. Chaudhuri was the replace modern mathematics with so-called “Vedic mathemat-
acerbic Bengali who became the last Englishman of the empire. ics” in public schools. One of the first acts of the Bharatiya
In 1951, at age fifty-four, Chaudhuri published his first book, Janata Party (BJP) after coming to power in the state of Uttar
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. It was dedicated to
the memory of the British empire, “because all that was good
and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the
same British rule.” It was reviled and denounced in India, yet,
with its cadences of classical British prose and the picture it
drew of the displaced colonial Indian incapable of living in his
forefather’s way but unable to find a place in the new Indian
landscape, it has been acclaimed as one of the great books of
the twentieth century. This was followed by a second install-
ment of his autobiography, Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, a volume
uncompromising in its intellectual elitism, including an
unwillingness to translate quotations from Latin and Greek.
In 1970, Nirad Chaudhuri migrated to England.
Now, at age one hundred, he has published a volume, Three Pradesh in 1992 (one of the poorest states in India, but the
Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, the three being individual- largest with 120 million people) was to make the study of Vedic
ism, nationalism, and democracy. As Amit Chaudhuri writes, mathematics compulsory for high school students. Explicitly
“it is a record of his growing disillusionment with the unvis- stating an interest in “awakening national pride” among stu-
ited Yarrow, the country of his imagination, after it became dents, the government-approved textbooks replaced standard
the country of his domicile.” But the book is not a rant but a algebra and calculus with sixteen Sanskrit verses proclaimed
set of epigrammatic observations on mass culture and the by their author, Jagadguru Swami Shri Bharati Krishna Tirathji
decline of English life. Maharaj, the high priest of Puri, to be of Vedic origin.
Since this is an anniversary and “cultural amnesty” has be- Prominent Indian mathematicians and historians who have
come the order of the day, Chaudhuri has now received official examined these verses believe that there is nothing Vedic about
recognition from the department of culture—apparently will- them, and that the Jagadguru has tried to pass off a set of clever
ing to overlook his reference to India as “a land of barbarians.”◆ formulas for quick computation as a piece of ancient wisdom.
—DB But that has not stopped BJP and other revivalist cultural
Source: Amartya Sen, The New York Review of Books, June 26, 1997. movements in India from equating Jagadguru with
Ziauddin Sardar,, The New Statesman, August 29, 1997. Ramanujan—the great Indian mathematician, the subject of
Pankaj Mishra, Prospect, November 1997. the recent book by Robert Kanigal The Man Who Knew
Amit Chaudhuri, The Spectator, January 17, 1998. Infinity—in their hagiographies of Indian knowledge systems.
Hinduization is not limited to mathematics alone. History
Post-modern Hinduization curricula have always been favorite targets of religious
nationalists. Under the growing influence of religious nation-
11
India at Fifty
12
Reports from France and Italy
T he publishing event of the year in continental Europe was without a doubt The Black Book of
Communism, a three-inch thick, 800-page reference work on the “tragedy of planetary dimen-
sions” that began with the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The book has sold 170,000 copies
in France alone and is now apearing in translation in virtually every other major European language.
The book is divided into five sections documenting the rise which was forced to defend in parliament the patriotism of its
of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, Comintern activities in the doctrinaire coalition partners. Still, these parties have come
inter-war period (including Spain), the East European experi- under criticism in both countries for failing to confront their
ence, Asia, and the “Third World,” including Latin America, past. For example, Salidro Viola, editorialist at the left-wing
Africa, and Afghanistan. The title echoes The Brown Book of La Repubblica, has called on the new “democratic socialists”
Nazi Terror which was published in the mid-1930s by Willi to end their “deafening silence” before the “infamous, bestial
Muenzenberg and written largely by Arthur Koestler and Otto carnage perpetrated by the Communists after 1917.”
Katz, who ironically, was hanged by the Communist regime A similar but more refined debate has also just been pub-
after the Slansky trial in 1952 where Katz “confessed” to being lished by the French journal Commentaire, a periodical
a Gestapo agent. inspired by Raymond Aron. It involves the late historian
The book has been controversial both for what it says and François Furet, author of a recent history of the twentieth cen-
because of the European political context in which it has tury (Le Passé d’une illusion, 1995), and Ernst Nolte, the con-
appeared. The book was originally conceived as a compendium troversial German historian of fascism (see “Furet vs.
of recent research into the global Communist experience writ- Hobsbawn”, CIC Newsletter, Issue No. 1). Nolte was asked by
ten by respected regional specialists. However, the book’s edi- the Italian journal Critica Liberale to respond to Furet’s book
tor, historian Stéphane Courtois, a former Communist and cur- and out of this grew a correspondence that lasted until Furet’s
rently editor of the review Communisme, added a preface untimely death last summer. The nine letters published there
without consulting his collaborators, and it is this text that has constitute an extraordinary exchange about the historical and
attracted the most attention. In it, Courtois asserts that not moral relation between communism and fascism.
only was there no essential difference between Leninism and In his last book Furet considered several of the theses that
Stalinism, but also that the criminal essence of Communism have been associated with Nolte’s work: that the period 1917-
renders it indistinguishable from Nazism. He points out that 1945 was a time of ideological “civil war” between commu-
the systematic elimination of certain social classes and ethnic nism and fascism in Europe; that Lenin’s policies prepared the
groups began in the Soviet Union well before the Nazis took way for Mussolini, then Hitler; and that therefore Nazism was
power, and asserts that while the latter claimed roughly 25 mil- not a unique product of German culture, but an indirect result
lion victims, those of global Communism reach “nearly 100 of a social revolution that began with Bolshevism. This
million.” This figure has been judged to be inflated even by “genetic” approach by Nolte to postwar history is seen by
his own research team which also objected to many of his for- Furet in a generally favorable light, and they agree on the role
mulations, including the phrase “class genocide” and the fol- of “antifascism” in clouding the real challenge of communism
lowing sentence: “the starvation of a kulak child in the since the ‘30s. But Furet also criticizes Nolte’s attempt to
Ukraine, deliberately brought about by the Stalinist regime, develop a “rationale” (which Nolte says is not an excuse) for
has the same ‘value’ as the starvation of a Jewish child in the Nazi anti-Semitism in a perceived Jewish affinity for commu-
Warsaw ghetto by the Nazi regime.” Several of the book’s nism and other universal, anti-German ideologies. Furet called
authors have publicly distanced themselves from this preface, these charges “shocking and false.”
though not from the rest of the volume. In Nolte’s response and the letters that follow, two central
The book has also been controversial in France and Italy issues emerge, that of the “exceptional” and the “rational”
because Communist and ex-Communist parties currently share in history. Nolte argues that politics in our century grew in
power in coalitions there. Leaders of opposition parties, like reaction to the nineteenth century capitalist experience and
Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, has been dominated ever since by messianic, universalistic
have taken to carrying the book around and discussing it with ideas, beginning with the “grandest illusion,” communism,
reporters whenever possible. This strategy has had little reso- to which fascism was a pale response and imitation. Furet
nance in Italy, where the main ex-Communist Party changed points to the existence of an anti-modern literature in
its name to “democratic socialist” several years ago and has Europe long before 1914, running back to the Counter
become a rather centrist left party. In France, however, the Revolution, a point Nolte accepts (even suggesting that the
situation has embarrassed the Jospin socialist government, French activist of the 1930s, Charles Maurras, not a German,
13
Reports from France and Italy
may have been the first fascist). He also charges Nolte with
underplaying the economic and political factors—economic Foucault Undone
depression, military defeat—that shaped different fascisms
in Italy and Germany, to which Nolte responds that greater
weight should be given to the fact that Mussolini was a close
reader of Lenin, and Hitler a close reader of Mussolini. And
in any case, Nolte argues, the important point is that fascism
A lmost forty years ago, Michel Foucault pub-
lished his Madness and Civilization: A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason (Plon, 1961). For
Foucault, madness was a disease “invented” by bourgeois
civilization to label and put away in asylums those who
like communism was an essentially new response to a crisis elected to live out the chaos that “we” refused to confront
of modern bourgeois life and not the mature fruit of a dis- in ourselves. Madness, he said, became “silenced.”
tinctly German tradition. Instead of a debate about our natures, it became a ther-
This brings them to the issue of German anti-Semitism and apy. The “ship of fools” became a hospital, an instrument
whether it can be accounted for “rationally” in a genetic his- of social control in the name of the Enlightenment. It was
tory of twentieth-century political history. Nolte insists on a view that found an immediate and large echo in the
the point, arguing that it was Hitler’s reading of anti-semitic writings of the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, the classicist
literature linking Judaism and Bolshevism, coupled with an Norman O. Brown, and Frankfurt School theorists, such
objectively large Jewish participation in left-wing move- as Herbert Marcuse, who denounced the “freedom” of
ments, that decisively turned his war against the latter into a bourgeois society as “repressive sublimation.” It was a
war against the former. He speaks here of a “causal nexus” view that became the leitmotif of the sixties, and estab-
and writes: “I think the ‘final solution’ cannot be intelligible lished itself as an orthodoxy in counter-culture psychol-
without reference to ‘Jewish messianism’ as such, and as ogy and academic sociology.
Hitler and his adepts conceived it.” Yet, it was a tumescent view that never sat well with
Furet retorts that it is precisely such language that gives sober-minded historians, even those with radical sympa-
Nolte’s readers the impression that he is exculpating Nazism thies such as Lawrence Stone, who wrote an early attack
or, worse, blaming its victims. To argue that the Gulag pre- on Foucault’s views in The New York Review of Books.
ceded Auschwitz is true but meaningless; furthermore, the Now, a massive work by five British historians, The
Jews were attacked in Germany as a “bourgeois” class long History of Bethlem (Routledge, 1997) may prick the
before 1917. The real issue, Furet concludes, is why Germany Foucault balloon. Bethlem—the infamous London men-
made Jews into the scapegoats for every aspect of the modern tal asylum, which celebrated its 750th anniversary last
world it wished to reject, producing utterly irreconcilable fall—might just seem the place that exemplified Fou-
images of “Jewish influence.” cault’s thesis, remarks Leo Carey. (Bethlem gave us the
The correspondence concludes on this theme of anti-mod- word “bedlam,” the colorful catchall for pandemonium,
ernism, a subject on which Nolte has clear and strong feelings. chaos, and insanity.) Yet according to the book’s co-
He applauds the workers movements leading up to the authors—Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter,
Communist revolutions for resisting the march of the compet- Penny Tucker, and Keir Waddington—Bethlem Hospital
itive capitalist economy and states that without such resis- was a place of considerable humanity.
tance “we would have to despair for humanity.” And even What they found was that inmates were treated with
today he sees “a concrete menace: that unfettered capitalism, decency and respect throughout most of its history, but
dominating the whole world, will create a vacuum that will more importantly in respect to Foucault’s argument, as
be filled by an ‘anti-fascism’ that simplifies and mutilates his- against the lock-em-up and throw-away-the-keys picture
tory, just as the economic system is standardizing the world.” chronicled by Foucault, Bethlem remained open to the
At this point it becomes clear that Nolte uses the equation of public through most of the eighteenth century. “Unlike
communism and fascism to advantage, since the “rationale” the silent mad in the Foucault model, the mad in Bethlem
behind both movements was the resistance to the forces of were talking politics and they were talking religion,” says
modernity. Readers will here be reminded of Martin Roy Porter, professor of the social history of medicine at
Heidegger’s statements before the war about the threats of London’s Wellcome Institute.
modernity and technology, and after the war about the equiv- Paradoxically, professionals today are increasingly
alence of East and West. And in fact Nolte devoted an entire wary of throwing open asylum doors. Too often, de-insti-
book to the Heidegger case (Martin Heidegger, Politik und tutionalization becomes a way for governments to cut
Geschichte im Leben und Denken, 1992), explaining and justi- funding, disgorging onto the streets a stream of helpless
fying the philosopher’s early enthusiasm for Nazism and his individuals too confused even to beg. As Porter observes
later disappointment. ◆ acidly, “There’s no community and no care.”
—ML
Sources: Stéphane Courtois, et al., Le Livre noir du communisme Sources: Leo Carey, “Bedlam Bound,” Lingua Franca, Feb.1998.
[The Black Book of Communism], Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997. An exchange between Lawrence Stone and Michel Foucault,
François Furet and Ernst Nolte, “Sur le fascisme, le communisme The New York Review of Books, March 31, 1983.
et I’histoire du XXe siècle” [On fascism, communism, and the his-
tory of the twentieth century], Commentaire, Fall-Winter 1997-98.
14
Reports from France and Italy
15
Reports from France and Italy
16
Reports France and Italy
17
England and Feminism
18
Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
19
Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
20
Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
21
Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
22
Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
23
Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
expressions which he transforms into something surprising from various critics or present day writers. Once a year these
and markedly expressive. poems and interpretations have been collected in successive
This way of creating the largest possible effect out of a min- volumes of the Frankfurter Anthologie together with an index
imal cause is hard to translate into other languages. That is, as to the poems in the latest and all preceding volumes in print.
Biermann says, the reason why some foreigners, having read Altogether this collection has grown under the general guid-
Brecht in translation, find it incomprehensible that Germans ance of the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki to more than
are so impressed by some poems which seem trite. ◆ one thousand poems. Going by the number of poems of indi-
—MB vidual writers in this collection, Goethe, Heine, Rilke, Brecht,
Sources: György Konrad, “Geleitwort” [Preface] in 1898/Bertholt and Benn far outdistance all the others.
Brecht/1998: ‘... und mein Werk ist der Abgesang des Jahrhunderts’, Both Benn and Brecht belonged to a generation which dur-
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1998 ing their lifetime changed everything, rethought everything,
Wolf Biermann, “Nichtige Wichtigkeiten über Brecht” rewrote everything, and had a strong belief in the totality of
[Small matters of great importance about Brecht], Berliner art and in the changebility of life. Both died in the summer of
Zeitung, February 7/8, 1998. 1956, bringing the self-experiment of the European con-
Gustav Seibt, “Brecht und die Kälte des Jahrhunderts” sciousness after 1900 to an end. The epoch had begun with
[Brecht and the coldness of the century], Berliner Zeitung, self-experiments not only in science and technology, but also
February 7/8, 1998. in literature where ideologies, thought systems, and social
Kurt Drawert, “Gute Zeit für Lyrik” [Good times for poetry], change became experimental arrangements as means for self-
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 7, 1998. knowledge, for writing exact protocols of self-experience.
We have become used to reading artistic and literary forms
The Song of the Sirens of the first half of the twentieth century as experiments of pic-
tures, expression, and content. Literature—poetry in the first
Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht are the presumed polar polit- place—moved through all forms filling in all white spots in the
ical opposities in twentieth-century German writing. Brecht, of map of the aesthetic imagination. But this experiment was also,
course, was pro-communist, albeit in a complex cynical manner. as Schirrmacher argues, an experiment with consciousness
Benn, today largely neglected outside Germany, occupied a posi- formed by literary language. Even the two major ideologies of
tion comparable to Ezra Pound’s. He was a the century were, Schirrmacher says,
modernist whose experiments with lan- nothing else but a literal translations of
guage and forms of verse did for poetry text into reality. The core motivation of
what the Expressionists did for painting. this desire was that what is being written
Yet in his espousal of a kind of atavistic and read should become reality.
tribalism, he declared, when the Nazis Both Brecht and Benn seem to be
came in, for the “new State” and for a while extreme variations of an experiment
occupied a leading position in the official that failed politically and succeeded
Union of National Writers until, in 1936, aesthetically. Both were prophets who
the Nazis declared his early work to be lived long enough to see the terrible ful-
immoral and “a stench.” Benn withdrew fillment of their dreams. Both suffered
into a mood of negation, rejecting all ideals in the end under a self-justification
and politics, a mood summed up in an auto- complex which made them point to the
biography, The Double Life, published in laws of history. Both believed them-
1950, defending his—and the German people’s—errors. The dis- selves to be utterly different from the other and did not rec-
cussion in Germany today of the century of Ernst Jünger has ognize the status of the other until their end. Both carried
prompted renewed questions about the ideological impact of liter- literature to an unsurpassed height and exposed the subject
ary works and the relation of politics to aesthetics. These themes in in their poems to experiences and experiments which have
an influential essay by Frank Schirrmacher, an editor of the become the inner voice of an uninterrupted debate within
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, come to a surprising conclusion. the self of their readers.
Trust the inner voice—this message once gave modernity
24
Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
25
Reports from Germany and Eastern Europe
Miscellany
A Mismanaged
Out of a Time Warp
Cultural Transmission
Through its English edition the Budapest Review of Books, “a
critical quarterly of the social sciences” edited by Gábor Klanizay
E ngland, the Blair government has decided, has an image
problem: it is seen as a frump, as rooted in the past, and
too bound to tradition. Besides, the U.S. is claiming the
and Zsófia Zachár, wants “to make the debates within the twenty-first century as the American century because of
Budapest intellectual milieu accessible outside it.” It is a product its information industries and telecommunications. The
of the Hungarian book market where, because of cut-throat com- New Britain cannot allow all these to go unchallenged.
petition, one third of over 3,000 newly founded private book pub- Thus, says the Blair government—in considering a Panel
lishing firms have collapsed; the rest publish over 8,000 titles a 2000—England needs to be “rebranded” and sold in a
year, although some have a print run of only 500 copies. high-gloss campaign to display its new vigorous and
vibrant energy. The effort is described by John Lloyd in
26
Reports from Japan
27
Reports from Japan
28
Reports from Japan
memory of the time they spent together. In Federico Fellini’s tions of the songs, one can also find them as expressing some-
last film, La Voce della Luna (1990), there is a line that goes “to thing of society’s unconscious impulses, and at the same time
live is to remember.” This describes perfectly the thoughts of feels that the societal factors underpinning these impulses
a husband as he watches his wife vanish. Reality is trans- must also be understood.
formed into something evanescent, and memory becomes the A good example is the old and universally known Japanese
true reality. Taking this construct even further, this memory song “Furusato” [“My Old Home”], an archetypal Education
may not even be true, but may instead be a recollection of a Ministry’s approved song. In this song, which appears to ring
past that should have been. with emotion, no particular “home” is specified; the words
The question is how to perceive this reversal of reality and refer only to “this mountain” or “that river,” so that a general,
memory. Is it to be labeled a sort of fin-de-siècle illness? Or is abstract symbol of furusato is created that can be applied any-
memory itself a new community for the people of the modern where. The effect is to erase the differences between and indi-
age—to be affirmed as a means to recreate the individual? ◆ viduality of villages in a process of generalization. By propos-
—MT ing a sense of lost furusato that is everywhere and nowhere,
Source: Saburo Kawamoto, “Nippon Eiga no Atarashii Kaze” this song generates a reproducible image that can fill the
(A Fresh Wind in Japanese Film), Asteion, Spring 1998. abstract void that has formed within society. This empty,
abstract space defies all perspective and is thus capable of rel-
“Furusato”—Sociology of ativizing even the “space” of the nation; it cannot be confined
to the tiny framework of the nation-state.
Remembrance The formation of a new kind of perception was made possi-
ble by technological innovation. Even if the song “Furusato”
Born in 1949 in Osaka, Ryuzo Uchida studied at Kyoto Univer- served as a means of social mobilization of the masses, it was
sity and the University of Tokyo, spent some time at Yale Univer- not simply mobilization at the ideological level geared to par-
sity, and currently teaches at the Tokyo University. A sociologist ticular political goals and the ancient community mentality. It
specializing in modern societal theory and media issues, he notes was a renascent expression of social sensitivity among people
in this essay that the concept of furusato, the nostalgic rural who, in relating not so much to the state as to capitalism, had
“home” which repeatedly appeared in songs sung at schools, from lost a basis for their existence. ◆
the 1868 Meiji Restoration onward, does not so much refer to a par- —KW
ticular place as to an abstract notion that can be at once everywhere Source: Ryuzo Uchida, “Furusato no Kioku [Memories of Home]”,
and nowhere. This, he says, has subtly colored the outlook of those Daikokai, No. 20, 1998.
who live in cities, where human relations tend to anonymity.
The New Japanese Literature
T he recently fashionable philosophical debate on “the
politics of memory” seems to have arrived at a dead
end. The “politics of memory” movement is concerned
with exposing the various hidden political aspects of the
process whereby collective memories and traditions have been
Born in 1954, Mitsuyoshi Numano graduated from Tokyo
University and studied at Harvard University. He currently com-
bines teaching activities at his alma mater with his role as a
translator of contemporary Russian and Polish literature. He
built up historically to construct, strengthen, and maintain analyzes the significance of writing literary works in Japanese,
the identity of a modern state and society. It is certainly true which is a minor language from the international perspective.
that “memory” as a form of collective mentality has served as
a concealed emotional wellspring in the construct of the
nation-state, and even as a force behind an exclusive and mali-
cious racism. But within this kind of construct, the role of
memory has in fact tended to be minimized. The domain of
memory must be subjectified not on the level of the kind of
T he environment for Japanese literature is changing dra-
matically. A significant number of non-Japanese have
a deeper knowledge of Japanese culture than most
Japanese, and there are even foreign authors who write novels
in Japanese. Conversely, there are also Japanese authors who
political symbolism and imagery involved in the creation of have crossed Japan’s linguistic and cultural borders to write in
the nation-state, but as something created from within, other languages. This is reflected in the emergence of a new
grounded in human perception and perspectives, and given tendency to view Japanese literature not as a unique phenom-
concrete depth by various mechanistic relationships. enon isolated from world literature, but rather as part of world
To exemplify this “mass memory” in Japan, Uchida analyzes literature. This transition in Japanese literature is symbolized
the songs of the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras (the three peri- by the Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of Yasunari Kawabata
ods named for emperors from the late nineteenth-century to and Kenzaburo Oe, which were separated by an interval of
the postwar periods), in particular those known as “Education twenty-six years.
Ministry Songs,” which were supposedly those most steeped Kawabata’s 1968 Nobel Prize was awarded for his Japanese
in political rhetoric. The songs prescribed by the Education aesthetics, so different from those of the West. This is clearly
Ministry have often been the subject of controversy, since expressed in the title of his acceptance speech: “Japan, the
they are a characteristic medium for imparting state ideology Beautiful, and Myself.” The title of Oe’s 1994 speech was
to students. This is true but looking beyond the surface func- “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself.” By this he meant that the
29
Reports from Japan
essential task of Japanese writers was not to discover a “beauti- multiple languages. Examples include Samuel Beckett, Joseph
ful Japan” with which they could identify, but rather to create Brodsky, Elias Canetti, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, and
a literature that would be open to the rest of world by recog- Salman Rushdie. In the manner of these cross-border authors,
nizing the ambiguity of their own standpoints. As has been Levy, Zappetti, Mizumura, and Tawada are releasing the peo-
suggested by Oe in his sympathetic comments on the works of ple of Japan from the Japanese framework, or releasing for-
Milan Kundera, a Czech writer who defected to France, a work eign readers from the preconceived notion of the exotic
written in a minor regional language can have greater universal beauty of the orient. In this way, they are exploring paths to
power than works written for distribution in more widely spo- link Japanese literature with world literature. ◆
ken languages. Oe has certainly demonstrated this fundamen- —KW
tal paradox of language and literature in his works. Source: Mitsuyoshi Numano, “Sekai no Naka no Nippon Bungaku:
Another writer who deserves recognition in relation to the Arata na Aidentiti o Motomete” (Japanese Literature in a Global
international characteristics of Japanese literature is Kobo Context: Seeking a New Identity), Asteion, Summer 1998.
Abe, whose works seem to have no nationality. Abe’s dislike
of tradition and his foresight—including his early interest in
Creole—should be fully recognized today, now that we have Su Tong and the
gone beyond criticism of Orientalism and deconstruction.
Interestingly, the global scope of Abe’s work has been inher- New Writing in China
ited in the context of Japanese literature by foreign writers The young pace-setters of the contemporary Chinese literary
who are skilled in Japanese, such as Hideo Levy and David scene have broken new ground with their nonideological ethnic-
Zappetti. The emergence of writers who were not born ity and their boldly experimental use of language. Zhang Jing, a
Japanese but write in Japanese has, according to Levy, scholar of comparative literature and culture, singles out Su
destroyed the modern myth that Japan has maintained a Tong’s work 1934 nian di taowang [1934 Escapes] for special
monolithic identity of race, culture, and language. It has also praise. Born in China in 1953, Zhang came to Japan in 1985,
released Japan from the bonds of the ethnic homogeneity ide- earning his doctorate at the University of Tokyo. He currently
ology. Levy is constantly aware of the distance between clas- teaches at Kokugakuin University.
sical and modern, America and Japan, and he has honed his
Japanese through the practical use of language across these
distances. In this way, he has also provided the Japanese with
a dramatic new power. Swiss-born Zappetti has created a lit-
erary world in which he recasts the literature of Junichiro
Tanizaki in a modern context in the style of Haruki
I n the mid-1980s a group of highly talented young writers
jolted the Chinese literary scene with works marked by
startlingly original story lines and language. Written in a
florid style that breaks violently with the past, these novels
captivate readers with their half-realistic, half-fantastic sto-
Murakami. Instead of simply lapsing into Japanese lyricism, ries born of the authors’ fertile imagination. The works of
he is seeking to transcend one border after another. He has these young writers opened up a new realm of language,
demonstrated the potential to create new a literary style not utterly different from the tradition that had prevailed since
despite being a foreigner, but because of it. Lu Xun, and launched what amounted to a rebellion against
At the other extreme from Levy and Zappetti are Minae modern literature.
Mizumura, who writes bilingual novels in Japanese and Members of the generation that lived through the Cultural
English, and Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and Revolution found it extremely difficult to throw off the shack-
German. Mizumura’s unique novels have Japanese mingled les of ideology, but these younger writers easily crossed that
with English in lines that run from left to right. (Japanese is hurdle and were able to approach literature as an isolated lin-
normally written in vertical lines.) Mizumura lived in American guistic phenomenon. Free from ideological fetters, they were
society for about 20 years from her teens onwards. During that able to pour all their energies into constructing highly origi-
time she expanded her imaginings about Japan until she became nal linguistic worlds.
more fascinated with things Japanese than Japanese living in Another factor in the development of their literature was the
Japan. By writing about the gulf between her imagined Japan pronounced influence of modern Latin American literature.
and the real thing, she has created a remarkable mechanism for These writers found that they had much more in common with
commenting indirectly on contemporary Japan. Tawada has Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges than with
written fantasy novels that are deeply imbued with elements of Marcel Proust or James Joyce. Their spiritual dialogue and
Japanese folklore, as well as numerous stories about searching communion of sensibilities with these Latin American contem-
for one’s self when in danger of falling headlong into a foreign poraries helped them to discover the rich literary possibilities
culture. Her Kakato o Nakushite (Losing My Heels) won the of matters close to home and thus to open up new territory in
1991 Gunzo Literary Prize for New Writers. Her elegant style, subject matter and develop a more deeply expressive style.
rich with unique physiological perceptions, perfectly matches One of the most brilliant of these young writers is Su Tong.
her uncertain identity. His 1934 Escapes is a masterpiece that has secured a perma-
When we look back over world literature in the twentieth nent place in the history of contemporary literature. The story
century, it becomes apparent that a significant number of concerns an ordinary peasant household and relates their
writers have worked across multiple ethnic groups and used births and partings, their joys and sorrows. The protagonist
30
Reports from Japan
Shen Baonian, the narrator’s grandfather, marries a woman accept the existence of only one reality and working in a lit-
named Jiang, but then flees the village, claiming that his new erary dimension utterly different from that of their predeces-
wife is destined to bring ill luck to those around her. In town, sors, Su Tong and his contemporaries have used the native
he builds a profitable business making bamboo utensils. ethnic mentality of a people to probe and portray the sources
Hearing of his success, the other men of the village follow suit of contemporary humanity’s spiritual drift at the deepest lev-
and leave their homes, and Shen Baonian’s eldest son begins els of the psyche. That is why their works connect with the
an apprenticeship under his father. When the protagonist’s raw passions of contemporary readers and leave a deep and
mistress Huanzi becomes pregnant, however, he sends her to lasting impression. ◆
live with his wife. Huanzi has a miscarriage, whereupon she —MT
disappears with Jiang’s one remaining child, the father of the Source: Zhang Jing, “Toki Hanatareta Minzoku no Sozoryoku,
narrator. Shen Baonian is eventually caught in a trap laid by [The Ethnic Imagination Set Free]”, Asteion, Spring 1998.
his employees, falls ill, and dies. Throughout this narrative
the author interweaves scenes with hidden import—a myste- Miscellany
rious death in the home of a wealthy man, the spread of an
epidemic, the divinations of a sorcerer, stolen glimpses of sex- Big, Big Brother
ual liaisons—and the story gradually falls into place like the
pieces of a puzzle.
One superb feature of the book is the shifting time frame of
the narrator, who speaks both as a contemporary of the reader
Y ou probably have never heard of the Axicom Corp., a
giant information service tucked near the rolling
Ozark foothills in Arkansas. But chances are that Axicom
and from the standpoint of one who directly witnessed events knows quite a lot about you. Twenty-four hours a day,
that occurred in the past. When he “witnesses” his own Axicom electronically gathers and sorts information about
father’s birth and his grandfather’s liaisons, his vantage point 196 million Americans. Credit card transactions and mag-
is on a plane with the characters involved; his is by no means azine subscriptions. Telephone numbers and real estate
the omniscient, omnipotent God’s-eye view narrators so often records. Car registrations and fishing licenses. Customer
adopt. The unique world of the novel springs from the inter- surveys and demographic details.
twining of these two space-time frameworks. Axicom can determine whether you own a dog or a cat,
Sustaining this world is a highly refined literary style that enjoy camping, read the Bible or lots of other books. It
leaves a powerful impression on the reader. Su Tong restruc- can pinpoint your occupation, the car you drive, your
tures and transmutes accepted modes of expression in a per- favorite vacations. And by analyzing the equivalent of
ilous and pathfinding experiment that instantly expands the billions of pages of data, it projects for its customers who
expressive possibilities of contemporary Chinese. should be offered a credit card and who is unlikely to buy
In addition to its richly poetic style, the novel is notable for a personal computer.
its subject matter. Chinese fiction was long burdened by the What Axicom does is perfectly legal—bringing
obligation, imposed by the political circumstances in which it together an array of facts from scattered sources. The
arose, to treat subject matter appropriate to the ideology it practice is known as “data warehousing” or “data min-
espoused. Until recently, modern Chinese novels tended to ing.” In a flash, data warehouses can assemble electronic
adhere to a simple formula of justice fighting villainy, pros- dossiers that give marketers, insurers, and, in some cases,
perity against poverty, oppression versus resistance, and so law enforcement officers a comprehensive look into the
forth. Even when they focused on an earlier historical era, as needs, life-style, and spending habits of individuals.
1934 Escapes does, they tended to be consciously retrogres- The number of data warehouses, large and small, using
sive or nostalgic. Su Tong’s writing, however, never lapses into faster computers and the Internet, now exceeds 1,000—
ideological didacticism. a ten-fold increase in five years. These include retailers
1934 Escapes is set in a peasant village sixty years ago for such as Sears, Roebuck, gift shop firms such as Hallmark
this reason: In order to grasp the present in its raw, naked Cards, and insurance companies such as All State. And
form, we need to focus our attention on our primitive cus- there are the information service companies such as
toms—our forgotten experiences and culture—in all their var- Metromail and R.L. Polk, but few are as large as or as
ied manifestations. Centering on a mysterious curse, the story powerful as Axicom.
drifts among folk customs, superstitions, and accidental Firms like Axicom are under few obligations to divulge
occurances, and in the process highlights the raw conflict and their files to consumers. So this explosion of data ware-
struggle of human life. The indomitable spirit of people liv- housing has sharpened the ethical, legal, and political
ing amid the squalor and ugliness of the pre-modern era, the questions about an individual’s right to privacy in an
futility of human works when in the end we find ourselves increasingly “open” society
powerless despite all our efforts to live heroically—to shed
light on such themes, the author reveals to the reader, through Source: Washington Post Weekly Edition, March 23, 1998.
vivid use of language, the mystery of folk beliefs and the
ethnic essence of a people.
Rejecting the kind of “absolute truth” or ideology that can
31
Transatlantic Poetry
32
Transatlantic Poetry
to the world of epiphanous experience. He acknowledges the Mysticism for Beginners by Adam Zagajewski
force of that “piercing sense of community..that half leg- The day was mild, the light was generous.
endary country of Poland..all that is social, common and col- The German on the cafe terrace
lective.” Yet, “not everything belonged to everybody…we held a small book on his lap.
also experience things which social groups will never know.” I caught sight of the title:
His writing, again, is an attempt to diagnose the deformities Mysticism for Beginners.
of a poetry under too much public pressure, a poetry that feels Suddenly I understood that the swallows
a duty to participate in politics. Poetry, then, becomes a call- patrolling the streets of Montepulciano
ing in a zone of solitude, of “immobility which is necessary with their shrill whistles,
for writing perfectly achieved poetry.” and the hushed talk of timid travelers
This is the background, then, for the turn to mysticism. But from Eastern, so-called Central Europe,
it is not a mysticism of a doctrine or a system of a single truth. and the white herons standing-yesterday? the day before?-
He is, as Adam Kirsch writes, paradoxically “a mystic poet of like nuns in a field of rice,
the liberal imagination,” seeking to catch the elusive moments and the dusk, slow and systematic,
between an ecstasy that is more intellectual than emotional or erasing the outlines of medieval houses,
spiritual, and an irony that is more emotional than detached. and olive trees on little hills,
It is the “sensuous apprehension of thought,” which T.S. Eliot abandoned to the wind and heat,
once praised as the true measure of poetic achievement. As and the head of the Unknown Princess
Jaroslaw Anders concludes: that I saw and admired in the Louvre,
Zagajewski is…a very modern mystic, one who realizes and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings
that the mystical pursuit is essentially a contradictory one: sprinkled with pollen,
Endless postponing of the ‘test’ as the title poem suggests, and the little nightingale practicing
is often a part of the course. It is his mixture of skepticism its speech beside the highway,
and passion that makes him one of the most interesting and any journey, any kind of a trip,
poets of his generation writing in any language. is only mysticism for beginners,
Sources: Jaroslaw Anders, L. A. Times Book Review, Feb. 1, 1998. the elementary course, prelude
Adam Kirsch, The New Republic, March 23, 1998. to a test that’s been
Edward Hirsch, essay introducing six poems by Zagajewski, postponed.
Doubletake, Fall 1997.
appreciation of Pinsky’s poetry in Salmagundi. We print here In his work from The Want Bone on, Pinsky is often where
extracts from Bedient’s essay leaving out some of the detailed the heart of Western literature itself most monsters up its rich-
examination of particular poems but providing an apprecia- ness. He has gone to the “riven hub.” His hands are on the pot-
tion of Pinsky’s style: ter’s wheel of “passions” and “misfortunes,” which, in their
A typical new Pinsky poem has no address—it floats, emi- rapid whirl, come to have much the same feel. “Voyage to the
grates, circles back, is unable to rest in a single interiority of Moon” is the sweetest of monsterings, the most entrancing
substance or subject. The title of the show-stopper among the expression of his Freudian realism about the realism of the
new poems, “Impossible to Tell,” underscores the near-impos- heart. Climaxing its fluid interminglings of weight and flota-
sibility Pinsky now finds himself in (and this is his distinc- tion, rage and love, war and peace, the poem allows us at the
tion) when he writes a poem. It is the purest achievement to end the simultaneous recognition of the heart’s destructive-
have come so far from all provinciality, to know the genuine ness and its dream of happiness….
complexity of the relations between the particular and the Maker and Breaker with his crown of glass
general, to know it along the tangled nerves. In spikes like icicles, his violent paws
An extreme fluidity of form—loose or complex, meander- Of metal, his many arms, his orbs and swords
ing or braided—is peculiarly, if not solely, American. “Song
of Myself” and Moby Dick remain the greatest instances. Doubled like his reflection in the moat
Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore, Frank O’Hara and John Around the palace of the Moon—where now
Ashbery—the examples are numerous. But each new inven- The pair have landed with their little dog.
tion within the form has, of course, its own character and That spiked heaviness should have risen to the Moon is, of
meaning. Pinsky’s is most like Melville’s and Whitman’s in course, reason to expect the worst. But we knew to expect
motive, most like Melville’s in anguish—yet new. It is haunted that, we “in the pack” who, when “The black captain stran-
by the limit at which the universal is deaf to everything. gles his wife,” “applaud and applaud, the sound of our hands/
The poem “Voyage to the Moon” knows both the heart’s In a fluttering mass around that heavy act.” Meanwhile, to
penchant for catastrophe—the richest stories have heaviness have allowed the pair of lovers to reach the Moon, “with their
in them, grief, ruin—and that it wants, even so, for the world little dog,” is an almost heart-breaking gift.
to “go on ending endlessly….” Source: Carl Bedient. Salmagundi, Fall/Winter 1997.
33
Criticism and a Pot of Paint
34
Criticism and a Pot of Paint
of a genre, as in the sonata form in music or perspective in Mother, as she calls it. Everything about the Mother, Walden
painting. What he championed was materiality and texture, observes, “seems shrouded in uncertainty”—what the artist
the centrality of the paint, not an image on the canvas, or later, intended to convey and, most important, how he went about
as in the innovations of his protégé Helen Frankenthaler, the the actual transfer of vision to canvas.
staining and soaking of unprimed canvas with paint. To begin with an obvious part of the mystery, Walden asks
Greenberg did seek to trace an historical lineage for this why this nominally all-American portrait hangs not in New
mode of abstraction by linking this style to Monet and espe- York or Washington but in Paris (it was recently moved from
cially to Monet’s water lily paintings which encircled the walls the Louvre to the Musée d’Orsay). When the Mother was first
of the Jeu de Paumes in Paris. As with Monet, what abstract exhibited in the United States in 1881, ten years after Whistler
expressionism signaled was the end of the easel painting most had painted it, it caused no stir. No one wanted to look at it,
sought after by the nineteenth-century bourgeois collectors. much less buy it for the $1500 Whistler hoped to get.
Greenberg became known for his brawling style of life, a fea- Eventually it was acquired by the French government for
ture of celebrity often more appealing for its notoriety than for $1000. Yet by 1932, when the Mother came back to America,
any detailed confrontation with his judgments. In his “theory,” on loan from the Louvre to an exhibition at the New York
as I have indicated, Greenberg was not original and was popu- Museum of Modern Art, it had a triumphal tour and was
larizing some of the ideas of Meyer Schapiro. Yet he did have viewed by adoring millions during the year and a half it trav-
an “eye” for particular painters. In the “first generation,” he elled to cities all over the country. It even inspired a three-
championed Pollock, Rothko, and Newman. Their banner, he cent postage stamp in honor of Mother’s Day, though the
insisted, was carried on by the color-field painters such as imposition of flowers on an empty corner of the original image
Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Morris Louis. And, as a infuriated many American artists at the time.
final round, he promoted Jules Olitski and Larry Poons. To the ordinary American museum-goer, the painting was
Thereafter, for almost twenty years, he was silent. seen as a celebratory portrait of themselves, though in its early
Abstract expressionism was overtaken by the minimalists years it had been embraced by French aesthetes, astonish-
such as Judd, Morris, and Flavin, with their spare geometric ingly, as a prime example of dandyism and decadent sophisti-
forms that come to final singularity with Sol LeWitt. The geo- cation. For Americans, much later, it was converted into “a
metric forms were given roman-candle color by Frank Stella. symbol of plain, puritanical homeliness.” What Walden finds
Johns restored images, such as his flags and beer cans, but intriguing about the attitude toward the painting, among
placed the stamp of materiality and impasto on his canvasses. other things, is the neglect of its stylistic qualities in favor of
And Andy Warhol trumped them all by combining avant- its corny symbolism.
garde, kitsch, and camp in his phosphorescent silk-screen What Walden points out is that Whistler’s painterly train-
portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, ing had all along been erratic and inadequate. His most
and the epicene likeness of Mao Zedong. impressive technical effects were achieved in etching, where
In the end, avant-garde art, so-called, has become the most he could work at the tonal atmospheric variations of light and
(financially) rewarding speculation of them all. Modern harsh, dark, black and white, that interested him the most. Because
atonal, or mathematical serial music finds no listeners because of his limited experience with oils, however, the Mother was
of its difficulty. Modern art, however, has no such problem. painted on almost raw canvas, which Whistler scoured and
Avant-garde art can be sold before and after. “That’s my latest blotted and scraped as though he were preparing the ground
painting on the wall,” said the Duchess. And she need not of an etching. On to the raw canvas he brushed highly diluted
even know that it was a poem. ◆ paint, which had beautiful effects initially but deteriorated
—Daniel Bell in rapid order.
Sources: Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life, Scribner, For the restorer the problems were all but insurmountable:
1997. Yet the effects of time and air and dust have not, in Walden’s
Adam Gopnik, “The Power Critic,” The New Yorker, March 16, view, seriously diminished the mysterious beauty of the por-
1998. trait and its style. Though most Americans insist on behold-
ing in this familiar work only sentimental homage to the
Whistler’s Mother great institution of motherhood, it has for Walden a far more
evocative strangeness and power and even foreshadows
I n News From the Republic of Letters (see page 41) the art
restorer Sarah Walden has persuasively subverted the
conventional view of Whistler’s portrait of his mother as
a Norman Rockwellish act of filial piety. In a literally eye-
opening analysis of Whistler’s most famous painting (formally
many aspects of twentieth-century American painting. At
one point when she was doing the most limited restoration
possible, the Mother, Walden tells us, found itself in her stu-
dio next to Ingres’ great portrait of Napoleon and “the
pinched little widow from South Carolina held up remark-
titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black: A Portrait of the ably well in this company, somehow retaining her own com-
Artist’s Mother”), Walden, who spent many months in her manding presence.” ◆
London studio restoring the work for the Louvre, found mys- —PKB
tery and ambivalence in the painting rather than the filial Source: Sarah Walden, “Secrets of an American Masterpiece,”
devotion which has long been the accepted view of the News from the Republic of Letters, No. 3, 1998.
35
The American Scene
Everybody’s Tocqueville
Many, many Europeans have visited the United States, from Mrs. Trollope to Charles Dickens to Lord Bryce, and written acidly or
solidly about this country, but no one has been cited, quoted, featured, mentioned, affirmed, applauded, or claimed more widely,
deeply, or broadly than Alexis de Tocqueville. Over historical time he has been hailed by the left and right and center, and all parties
in between. How could this be? Professor James Kloppenberg tells us why. We abridge here his article.
36
The American Scene
College), Tocqueville was a sober prophet who saw through find in it arguments in favor of their own convictions. But I
the promise of material prosperity and egalitarian ideals to the have faith in the future, and I hope that the day will come
hollowness at the core of modern democratic cultures that had when all will see clearly what only now a few suspect.
lost touch with the values of tradition and authority. For mem- The life of Tocqueville in America, already reflecting the cir-
bers of the New Left, Tocqueville was the scourge of con- cuitous path of democratic theory and practice over a century
formism, a sober prophet who saw through the promise of and a half, seems destined to continue indefinitely. That inter-
material prosperity and egalitarian ideals to the invisible est persists, however, for reasons that owe more to Americans’
oppression that Herbert Marcuse was laying bare in books like irresistible urge to simplify Tocqueville’s ideas than a willing-
One Dimensional Man and Essay on Liberation. ness to acknowledge his ambivalence or to keep in focus the
In the last decade and a half the “Tocqueville” that has multiple dimensions of his complex analysis of American
emerged is both the one associated with the decline of com- democracy. In that sense, most Americans are equal. ◆
munity and the rich “associational” life of voluntary organi-
zations in the U.S. This cuts across the older definitions, at Sources: James T. Kloppenberg, The Tocqueville Review, 1996,
least intellectually, of “left” and “right” in the scholarly world vol. XVII, no. 2.
and has become a staple of political rhetoric. (The Tocqueville Review is the journal of The Tocqueville Society,
In the intellectual world, this includes the group associated a bilingual French-American scholarly society based in Paris and
with Robert Bellah in the project that became Habits of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, and not to be confused with the Alexis
Heart; Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who has de Tocqueville society, a Republican-oriented organization based
savaged the absurdities of Rights Talk, to use the title of her in Virginia.)
unclassifiable book; historians such as Thomas Bender, whose
studies of community and public life have helped keep alive
Tocqueville’s own insights into American democracy; those
political activists allied with Senator Bill Bradley who share The End of the American Epic?
the reasons for his dissatisfaction with both the Democratic
and the Republican parties; political theorists such as William
Galston, who served for several years as a domestic advisor in
the Clinton White House; Jane Mansbridge, who has shown
the breadth of social scientists’ dissatisfaction with the reduc-
tionist attribution of all human behavior to self-interest; and
A merica is awash in new epics: long poems about
the Battle of the Alamo, historical novels about
the Civil War, movies about the experience of
slavery. But in what sense can it be said that American
experience today has an epic character? This is the ques-
Jean Bethke Elshtain, who argues in her recent book tion posed by Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer in a
Democracy on Trial that Americans’ growing cynicism about recent issue of the quarterly The Public Interest.
politics, the absence of civic mindedness, and a destructive Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the closest America
obsession with right have sapped the mutual respect, empa- comes to possessing an epic poem, is an attempt to see
thy, and understanding that are necessary for the survival of the whole of our democratic experience through the eye
a democratic community. of a single human being, who sings the “Song of Myself.”
The first President of the United States to quote Tocqueville But in Glazer’s view the myths that dominated the tradi-
was Dwight D. Eisenhower (whose speech writer was tional American epic have become eroded. The old myths
Malcolm Moos of Johns Hopkins.) Since then his words have took up the American idea or creed or experiences that
appeared in the speeches of every President and any politi- defined the nation as a whole: the winning of the West,
cian aspiring to portentous greatness. Thus, Newt Gingrich, manifest destiny, the Civil War, imperialism, the World
addressing the Republican Party National Convention in Wars. Its epic characters were pioneers and warriors.
San Diego on August 13, 1996, praised the contributions of In more recent times this kind of optimistic epic has
churches and neighborhood organizations and concluded faded in the face of more pessimistic myths concerning
that nothing less than “the moral case for lower taxes” is to group diversity—racial, ethnic, sexual—and their claims
be found in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. And the for recognition. Some maintain that the challenge of this
President who quoted Tocqueville most frequently was diversity is itself a fit subject for epic treatment, but
Ronald Reagan, whose speechwriters, like Gingrich, detached Glazer doubts “whether the improving of group relations
Tocqueville’s emphasis on civil society from his emphasis on can replace the conquest of a continent as the subject of
the ideal of reciprocity. In fact, probably the only things Pat epic.” Americans may be able to live without an epic
Buchanan and Hilary Rodham Clinton, individualists and sense of their experience, but can they escape the
communitarians, have in common is their willingness to place demands of the epic form?
Tocqueville on their banner. —ML
Tocqueville himself foresaw his fate. In a contemporary let- Source: Nathan Glazer, “American Epic: Then and Now.” The
ter to his friend Eugene Stoffels (printed in the 1899 Bigelow Public Interest, Winter 1998.
edition), Tocqueville wrote: “I please many persons of oppo-
site opinions, not because they penetrate my meaning, but
because, looking only to one side of my work, they think they
37
Periodicals
On a Single Theme…
In this section we select a number of periodicals which have that raises the question: what is living, and what is dead, in
published single issues on some unifying theme, thus providing a the idea of culture? What is it, and how can we know it? The
summing up or reference point for readers. contributors here do not focus on epistemological issues
Daedalus exclusively. Instead, several raise the provocative question of
whether the phenomenon of place-rooted cultures is simply
Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and disappearing in the jumble of globalization and so-called
Sciences, devotes its Winter 1998 issue, its fortieth anniver- “popular culture.”
sary, in homage to its founder Gerald Holton. Among the notable articles is one by Greenblatt, the
The issue leads off with a paper by Holton on a theme that “father” of new historicism, who holds Geertz up as an exam-
he has made his own in recent years, “Einstein and the ple of how prizing interpretation — whether of literature or
Cultural Roots of Modern Science.” Holton recounts his efforts entire cultures – need not lead to abandonment of the empiri-
to understand a paradox: the “rebellious” role of Einstein in cal world or to the belief that there is “nothing outside the
science and his other persona as a cultural traditionalist. It is text.” A more critical view of Geertz’s concept of culture is
the first aspect that has received most of the biographical given by anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod in her article on
attention, while the second has been largely ignored. popular television in Egypt, where she argues that television
A paper by Peter Galison, historian of science at Harvard, is just one technology rendering obsolete the notion of cul-
deals with “The Americanization of the Unity of Science.” The tures as localized communities in a shared web of meaning.
unity of science is a theme associated with the Vienna Circle, “The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond.” Representations,
the fabled founders of logical positivism, which included (Berkeley), Summer 1997.
Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Carnap. Galison’s
paper traces the effort to recreate the movement on American Parnassus Poetry in Review
soil, after the war, largely through the efforts of Philip Frank, The issue, edited by Herbert Leibowitz, is a garland of essays,
the philosopher of science at Harvard. poetry, movie stills, and interviews, threaded loosely on the
Lorraine Daston, director of the Max Planck Institute for the theme of “cinematic poetry.” Stuart Klawans points out that this
History of Science in Berlin, provides a fascinating account of emphasis on imagery was used by the French to assert artistic
the time when the rift opened between art and science and distinction. David Yezzi employs the concept in a review of the
when science began to distrust the imagination. It was “the book Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema by Andrei
newly erected divide between the objective and the subjec- Tarkovsky, the great Russian filmmaker, whose religious films
tive—the very words first enter dictionaries as a pair in were often disfigured by authorities. Mindy Aloff writes a fas-
German, French, and English in the 1820s and the 1830s….” cinating account of the relation of the film about Pablo Neruda,
Where in the eighteenth century artists and scientists had seen Il Postino, to its original source, the novel Ardiente Paciencia
no conflict in embracing both standards simultaneously, a cen- [Burning Patience]. There is a conversation with the German
tury later the chasm had forced an either/or choice in the way filmmaker Werner Herzog, and a lament for the cinema by
perceptions were judged. Susan Sontag, extracts of which appear on page 40.
“Science in Culture,” Daedalus, (Cambridge, Massachusetts), “The Movie Issue,” Parnassus Poetry in Review, (New York), Vol. 22,
Winter 1998. Nos. 1 and 2.
Representations Intertexts
Representations is a cross-disciplinary journal started a Spring 1997 inaugurates Intertexts as a journal of compara-
dozen years ago at the University of California at Berkeley by tive literature to be published twice a year. The “statement of
the literary theorist Stephen Greenblatt and the art historian purpose” indicates that it will probe the spaces between liter-
Svetlana Alpers to deal with the questions of “reality” and its ature and society as well as stray beyond nationally defined
representations. Greenblatt has moved to Harvard but remains boundaries (“subvert” and “deconstruct” are the predictable
its editorial chair. The journal is now edited actively by Carla code words). The first issue focuses on Latin American and
Hess, the French historian. Often the journal runs special the- Latina women writers. Women, says the journal, write notori-
matic issues, and the latest one is devoted largely to the work ously out of bounds; otherwise they tend not to write at all.
of one person, Clifford Geertz. And intellectually adventurous Latin American women are
Clifford Geertz of the Institute for Advanced Study at often (in)famously aligned with supra-national, or Pan-
Princeton is without question the most important living American causes. Patriotism and patriarchy sound more than
anthropologist in the English-speaking world. Over the years etymologically connected in a Romance language.
his writings on the nature of culture have encouraged an Rosemary Feal claims to Latin-Americanize “queer theory”
“interpretive turn” in anthropology that still distinguishes it by appropriating the North American reading practice for
from the other social sciences. As Geertz nears retirement, the texts that feature lesbian subjects elsewhere, for example in
editor’s representations have offered up a Festschrift of sorts, the Barcelona of Cristina Peri Rossi’s Uruguayan heroine. And
38
Periodicals
Debra Castillo explores the mutual cruelties of a heterosexual 3000 in Russian, and is now required reading in many East
affair between a Salvadoran refugee and his Sanctuary worker European law faculties. (Subscriptions: EECR, Nador u. 11,
in Mother Tongue by Demetria Martinez. Other essays feature 1051 Budapest, Hungary. E-mail: rosea@osi.hu)
the fate of traditional women in a changing world, the inter-
rupted identifications between reader and addressee, and a Transitions
fresh reading of the founding text for Latin American femi- Another important English-language journal on East Europe,
nists: the nun Sor Juana’s seventeenth-century refusal to heed the glossy monthly Transitions, is currently edited by former
her confessor and stop writing. New York Times bureau chief Michael Kaufman and edited in
“Claiming Voices, Seizing Spaces: Latin American and Latina London and Prague by the Institute for Journalism in Tran-
Women Writers,” Intertexts (Texas Tech University), Spring 1997. sition. It has an enormous range, as can be seen in the recent
Foundation Saint-Simon
Special Book Issue (February 1998), and contains reports on
crime novels and science fiction in Russia, self-censorship in
The Foundation Saint-Simon is a new and unique French Slovakia, Czech best-sellers, Czeslaw Milosz’s recent poetry, and
institution. Currently directed by Pierre Rosanvallon, it is an Ukranian post-modern fiction.
assembly of leaders in business, the civil service, the univer- (Subscriptions: IJT, Washingtonova 25, 110 00 Prague 1,
sity, and the press, which meets frequently for non-partisan Czech Republic. E-mail: transitions@ijt.cz)
discussions of public policy issues. This report on the condi-
tion of the French welfare state arises from the Foundation’s Modern Language Notes
discussions and occasional papers. It examines how France – The rehabilitation of Raymond Aron in France in the 1980s
and indeed all European nations – might find a way to reform has been followed by that of Albert Camus. Several critical
its welfare state in a manner consistent with its social-democ- works have appeared in recent years, most notably Olivier Todd’s
ratic traditions. The report focuses mainly on the sclerotic, monumental biography, now in (truncated) English translation:
bureaucratized education system, unemployment assistance, Albert Camus: A Life (Knopf, 1997). This special number
health, and retirement benefits. Its main argument is that devoted to Camus reflects the new interest in his work and
equity and not equality should govern the reform of social includes worthwhile articles on the Algerian background to
programs, which would imply greater flexibility in education his work, his politics, and humanism, and his relation to Sartre.
and fewer middle-class breaks in other programs. “Camus 2000,” Modern Language Notes, (Baltimore),Sept. 1997.
(Paris), 1997.
Granta One of the least studied aspects of liberal democratic poli-
The sea invites endless fascination from Homer’s Odyssey to tics is the role of political opposition. Yet this question has
James Agee’s Permit Me Voyages, the restless accounts of wan- become increasingly important as liberal-democratic regimes
derings marked by changes of fortune. It is a recurrent theme have spread and been transformed throughout the globe: from
of weary editors often in need of a topic to fill their pages. Yet Africa, where they are new; to the East Bloc, where they are a
the special issue of Granta is the exception. It is full of stories distant memory; to Western nations such as Italy and Spain,
and travel accounts, ruminations and fantasies by the likes of which had no postwar alternation of government; and to
James Hamilton-Patterson, Orhan Pamuk, the tireless Paul Japan and Mexico, which are still dominated by single par-
Theroux, Haruki Murakami, and Neal Ascherson, the British ties. This issue of Government and Opposition is a survey of the
journalist whose book Black Sea is a superb account of the area, state of political opposition in all these regions and also con-
with the deadest and the most fertile locales in the world, tains a theoretical article on the function of opposition by Jean
which divides Europe and “the other.” It is best read on a voy- Blondel of the European University in Florence.
age or on “the shore of a sounding sea.” “The Repositioning of Opposition,” Government and Opposition,
“The Sea,” Granta, (Cambridge, England), Spring 1998. (London), Autumn 1997.
39
Periodicals
40
Periodicals
41
Periodicals
42
Necrology
We make no excuses. We mourn. fields of French life was utterly unique.
Born to Greek parents in Constantinople
in 1922, he grew up in Athens, where he
witnessed the Second World War and
Two Geniuses of the Word, Isaiah Berlin and Meyer Schapiro the Greek civil war. He joined the Greek
“When a sage dies,” says the Talmud, “all are his kin,” Leon Wieseltier reminds Communist Party in 1944 but soon fell
us. The rabbis were speaking practically, not metaphysically. When a sage dies, afoul of the Stalinist elements, and with
everyone must observe some of the practices of mourning. In the past year and a number of other intellectuals soon to
a half, two of our Jewish sages, two geniuses of the word, Isaiah Berlin and make their mark on the Paris scene—
Meyer Schapiro, are gone. Kostas Papaioannou, Kostas Axelos—he
We mourn, expressing the tears of sorrow at the passing of our kin.At the set sail for Paris. There he also joined the
memorial service for Isaiah Berlin at the Hampstead Synagogue, on 14 January Communist Party, only to find the
1998, Noel Annan remarked: Stalinist atmosphere even more oppres-
No one else was remotely like him. Of course he had charm, but he had sive than in Greece. Along with Claude
more than that. He was a Magus, a magician when he spoke, and it was for Lefort, philosopher and contributor to
his character and personality as much as for his published works that so Les Temps Modernes, he left the party
many honours fell upon him. The Evening Standard spoke truth when it and formed a new left-wing group with
said “the respectful sadness that met his death and the enormous regard syndicalist leanings called “Socialisme
in which he was held shows that intellectuals can still be prized as civiliz- ou barbarie” (SB), a phrase from Marx
ing influences in Britain”. He was loved by people with whom he had on the polar outcomes of the future.
nothing in common—millionaires, obscure writers, world-famous musi- Socialisme ou barbarie was also the
cians, public figures and young unknown scholars to whom he listened. name of the group’s tiny review, which
Whatever the circle, he civilized it; and the world is a little less civilized began in 1959 as a poorly produced
now that he has left it. political rag like so many others, but by
Both Isaiah Berlin and Meyer Schapiro were cosmopolitan figures who its last number in 1965 had become of
emerged from the ferment of the secularized Jewish intelligentsia between the great relevance on what would later be
wars—Berlin in his passage from Eastern Europe to Oxford, Schapiro within the called the “New Left.” If Castoriadis and
European-oriented world of the New York Intellectuals. In that quarrelsome SB had a theme, it was the omnipresent
world, Schapiro was universally admired as “our genius.” and destructive presence of bureau-
As Morris Dickstein wrote in Dissent, (Fall 1997), a charismatic teacher whose pas- cracy in modern life. But they also
sion and erudition were astonishing, Schapiro trained generations of art histori- maintained against orthodox French
ans and opened the eyes of others to the visual field around them. His range was leftists that communism was totalitarian
enormous, from the discussion of frontal and profile images in painting to and would remain so, so long as it was
Romanesque art, the subject of his 1929 dissertation at Columbia University, to wedded to the “leading role” of the
impressionism—in particular a lifetime identification with Cezanne—to the party. Castoriadis believed in the syndi-
abstract expressionism of his time. calist notion that every society and each
Always alert to contradictions, Schapiro insisted that there are truths about group within it was capable of govern-
art that can be established in “a collective criticism extending over generations.” ing itself if it was not distorted by the
He showed how Freud misread da Vinci, how Heidegger mistook van Gogh, each powers of state, party, or organized
reading into the subject their own predelictions. When Heidegger saw in van monopoly. It was this liberationist doc-
Gogh’s shoes the sturdy pair of a peasant, he found there, Schapiro pointed out, trine of autogestion that found an echo
what he wanted to find in his search for soil (and soul). among the Situationists and other
Though his interests turned in many directions, Schapiro was perhaps our groups behind the events of ‘68.
greatest expositor of modernism. He noted that the modernity embraced by the Castoriadis’s articles for SB were writ-
early avant-garde had grown problematic and pondered how much may have ten by night under pseudonyms, usually
been lost in turning away from figurative representation. But he also opened “Paul Cardan.” By day he was an econo-
our eyes to the spiritual adventure of modern art, the depth of feeling, the unex- mist for the OECD (Office of Economic
pected beauty, and the personal power of what remained when freedom of the Cooperation Development) in Paris.
artist was genuine. Only in the mid-’70s did he begin to
publish under his given name and first
43
Necrology
came to the attention of a wider French tique Revolutionaire as a new Third Frederick Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Karl
public with his book L’institution imagi- Way. But the movement broke up a year Popper. And together with Claude
naire de la société (1975) and his short- later when Rousset, then a left-wing Tardits, Gilbert Rouget, and Michel
lived review Libre. When French intel- socialist, called for an investigation of Leiris, he founded l’association
lectuals finally came to grips with the Soviet concentration camps and was Classique africains which has brought
reality of communism in the late 1970s, subsequently denounced by Sartre and out twenty-six volumes in bilingual edi-
they also tardily discovered Castoriadis. Simon de Beauvoir for making “an anti- tions and provided the foundation of
But by then he had moved on, retiring Communist diatribe.” Rousset was also traditional African literature.
from his OECD job to take up psycho- accused by Pierre Daix, the editor of the Dampierre’s desire to create an interna-
analysis, which he began to practice, leading Communist weekly of falsifying tional milieu for the social sciences led
and to write more ambitious (and some- documents, and in 1951 sued for libel, a him in 1960, together with Raymond
times impenetrable) books about the case which, for the first time brought a Aron, to create the tri-lingual Archives
imaginative “labyrinth” of social and number of survivors of the Soviet camps européenes de sociologie, which published
psychological life. He died on December to testify in France. Rousset won the in German, English, and French. The first
26, 1997 in Paris. case. But given the domination of editorial committee included, as well,
[We note the recent publication of French intellectual life at that time by Ralf Dahrendorf and Michel Crozier. The
two anthologies of Castoriadis’s writ- the Communists, Rousset was isolated journal continues to this day.
ings in English translation: World in and vilified as “an American agent.” But it was as an ethnographer that
Fragments (Stanford University Press) In 1968, he was elected to Parliament Dampierre made his mark. He spent
and David Ames Curtis, ed., The on the Gaullist ticket but resigned some time each year until 1991 in the
Castoriadis Reader (Blackwell). There three years later, describing himself, Central African Republic at Bangassou.
also is a website devoted to his work: still, as a “madman who wants to His thesis, Un ancien royaume Bandia du
http://aleph.lib.ohio- change the world.” Haut-Oubangui (Plon, 1967) written in
state.edu/~bcase/Castoriadis.] Rousset was born in January 1912 in a beautifully classical French, explored
—ML Roanne, in the Loire valley, the son of a the history and aesthetics of its culture.
Protestant minister. He received a degree And in 1965, he created the first “labo-
in literature at the Sorbonne, but spent ratoire d’ethnologie de sociologie com-
David Rousset most of his life as a journalist. He was parative” at Nanterre (University of
eighty-five at the time of his death.
D avid Rousset was arrested by the
Gestapo in 1943, accused of writ-
ing anti-Nazi propoganda, and deported
Paris) which became the model for other
French social science centers.
But it was aesthetics which was his
to Buchenwald. When the American Eric de Dampierre lasting love. In 1995 he published a
troops liberated the camp in 1945, Mr.
Rousset was, in the words of his friend,
the writer Mauruce Nadeau, “an old,
E ric de Dampierre, described in Le
Monde as “Un ethnologue d’une
grand culture,” died in March 1998 at
masterpiece, Une aesthetique perdue:
Harpes et harpistes du Haut-Oubangui.
The book explored the lost art of the
wrinkled child, a little pile of bones.” age sixty-nine. Zandé harpists of the Upper Oubangi.
He was one of the first to return from Dampierre was probably the most As in his earlier work, Poètes nzakara
hell, and to write about it. widely admired of the first generation (Paris, 1963), Dempierre explained how
But his spirit was unbroken, and in of French social scientists after World formal beauty, derision, tragedy, and an
1947 Rousset published Univers Concen- War II. Quiet, handsome, of aristocratic obsession with death combine in the
trationnaire [The Concentration Camp mien (“un seigneur dans l’Universite,” unique aesthetics of this African soci-
Universe]. Rousset defined the Nazi wrote Jacques Lautmann), he won im- ety. Here he focused on the harpists,
extermination program less as a mon- mediate attention for his charm, cul- who are masters of poetry, music, and
strous aberration of war than as an inte- ture, and learning. He was, said his close sculpture. The harps of the bards are
gral part of German society, a product friend Henri Mendras, a man of the not modeled on a common style, as is
of its ideology and a factor in the eighteenthth century for whom conver- typical elsewhere in Africa. Instead,
German economy. Both the concentra- sation was one of the great pleasures of each is produced by the poet as a singu-
tion camps and the death camps were life. He was the second of the generation lar object that he uses throughout his
driven by the belief that certain groups to go, following the death a few years active years. This uniqueness confirms
of people were not human beings. The ago of the modest yet great social theo- what Dempierre considered to be the
book won the Prix Renaudot, the pres- rist Francois Bourricaud. fundamental principle of Zandé thought,
tigous French literary award, in 1947. Dampierre placed his stamp on a focus on singularity which recognizes
Like many French intellectuals of the French intellectual life in three ways. As few class concepts. This, he believed, dis-
day, Rousset thought that the “old a director of the publishing house Plon, proved Lévi-Strauss’s portrayal of the
Europe” was broken and finished. And, he initiated the first translations, in the “primitive mind” as fundamentally “a
with Jean-Paul Sartre, in 1948 they 1950s and 1960s, of the works of Max classifying machine.”
formed the Rassemblement Democra- Weber, Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, —DB
44
Necrology
45
Necrology
of the world’s most celebrated—were Review, December 8, 1997.
banned from their own podiums. How
else could a young, inexperienced We are saddened by the death in April
Hungarian expatriate assume the direc- 1998 of our friend Octavio Paz. An appre-
torship of the Bavarian State Opera, ciation will appear in our next issue.
“one of the most important conducting
46
A Report to Our Readers
(continued from page 48)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
odicals, other than Commentaire—a journal edited by Jean-Claude Casanova, in the BYLINES IN THIS ISSUE: Michael Becker is
heritage of Raymon Aron—reprint articles from other countries. a sociologist of science and an associate at
In England a new magazine, Prospect, is attentive to other countries (unlike such the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Daniel
weeklies as the Labourite New Statesman and the Tory Spectator, which remain bril- Bell, emeritus professor of sociology at
liantly insular.) The Economist has a monthly section called “Review of Books and Harvard University, is scholar-in residence
Multimedia,” which carries reportage (such as the phenomenon in Poland where at the American Academy of Arts and
the media today appreciates imported culture but not its own) and a rotating Sciences. Pearl K. Bell is a literary critic
monthly article on fiction in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and even China. The who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
London Review of Books remains quite solid in its devotion to intellectual issues. James T. Kloppenberg is professor of
And the Times Literary Supplement is nonpareil. Without compromise, it will run a American Studies at Brandeis University.
dozen concentrated sections during the year on the classics, linguistics, feminism, Wolf Lepenies is director of Wissenschaft-
scholarly journals, and the like, calling attention to significant books in a field and skolleg zu Berlin and the author of Saint-
providing lucid (if controversial) judgments. And its “Letters” section provides end- Beuve: Auf der Schwelle zu Moderne [On the
less delights on such outre controversies as whether Ludwig Wittgenstein threat- Threshold of Modernity]. Pratap Mehta is
ened Karl Popper with a hot poker on the occasion of a talk by Popper at the Moral associate professor of government and
Sciences Club in Cambridge, an exchange between philosophers that has run over social Studies at Harvard University. Mark
many weeks and even attracted the “Arts and Ideas” section of the New York Times. Lilla teaches political theory at New York
But, given all that, we think there is still a place for the Newsletter of the Committee University and has been a member of the
on Intellectual Correspondence. The reaction to the first issue was overwhelmingly, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton,
and spontaneously, positive. We printed 1500 copies: 300 went to our colleagues in New Jersey. Masayuki Tadakoro is profes-
Japan for distribution to periodicals and individuals there (as well as the translation sor of International Relations at the
of the articles by Japanese journals), 200 went to Germany, again for similar distribu- National Defense Academy in Yokosuka.
tion. The remainder went to periodicals and writers in the U.S., England, and some Kiyokazu Washida is a professor at Osaka
of the countries in Western Europe. The print run was exhausted, and we printed an University. Masakazu Yamasaki is artistic
additional 500, fortunately so when an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, perhaps director of the Hyogo Prefecture Theatre in
the most prestgious paper in Europe, prompted requests for fifty more copies. Kobe. His new play, The Twentieth Century,
There was uniform praise for our format, simple yet distinctive and elegant. There will open at the National Theatre in Tokyo
was some disagreement, less on the contents of the issue than the length of the arti- in November.
cles. Our friend Robert Solow complained that the articles were too short, for being CITATIONS FROM SOURCES: Former vice-
a busy man, if he was going to read about cultural developments abroad, he wanted chancelor of the University of London
a fuller exposition. Our friend Bernard Bailyn exclaimed, “Excellent. Keep the pieces Noel, the Lord Annan, is the author of
short, they give me all I need to know.” One is reminded of the story attributed to Our Age: Portrait of a Generation. Morris
Franklin D. Roosevelt who purportedly said, “Some of my friends are for high tar- Dickstein is professor of humanities and
iffs, some of my friends are for low tariffs; I am for my friends.” We shall try to vary director of its graduate center at the City
the lengths, and friends can choose accordingly. University of New York. Ruth R.Wisse is
We seek to cover the significant but neglected cultural developments, issues, and Professor of Yiddish and comparative liter-
debates in the countries where we have friends to report them. Japan today is, unfortu- ature at Harvard University.
ately, terra incognita, especially since the brilliant wartime cadre of interpreters such as DESIGNER: Glenna Lang also illustrates for
Donald Keene, Edward Seidensticker, and Herbert Passin, have now retired. Our col- the Atlantic Monthly and has published four
leagues, Masakazu Yamazaki and Masayuki Tadakoro, write and coordinate the reports children’s picture books with David Godine.
on Japan. At the Wissenscaftskolleg zu Berlin, Wolf Lepenies and Michael Becker write THANKS: We are grateful to Sulochana
reports from Germany. Mark Lilla reads the French and Italian press and writes those Raghavan Glazer for help with material on
reports. Daniel Bell is the editorial coordinator of the issue. India, and to Doris Sommer for suggestions
Our initial focus, stated in our first issue, is the cultural periodicals in a half-dozen about Latin America. Clare Cavanagh trans-
countries, that want to reach out beyond their borders. We now have seventy coop- lated the poem by Adam Zagajewski which
erating periodicals from which we draw material, and it is our hope that these peri- appeared in Doubletake, Fall 1997.
odicals, in turn, will use the reports in the Newsletter and more will want to obtain LETTERS: ■ Todd Gitlin writes that the Com-
and reprint in full the articles that we have cited in our reports. With such reprints, mittee on Correspondence mentioned in
we seek to widen the ripples in the waters into which these stones have been cast. our first issue came into being in 1959
We are not a “closed endeavor.” We are seeking to widen our group of active col- because of the nuclear arms race, and was
laborators, and some of these are acknowledged gratefully in the follow-up column initiated by Erich Fromm with David Ries-
on this page. But we welcome the cooperation of all our readers, in particular with man. ■ Paula Dietz says that the abridge-
suggestions of articles in different journals that are worthy of wider attention. We ment of “Letter from Greece” in the last
have begun in this issue a discussion of cultural patronage of the arts to provide a issue inadequately represented its scope.
comparative view. We welcome suggestions about other questions that are impor- Readers can consult The Hudson Review,
tant to the life of our milieu. ■ Summer 1997 for the full account.
47
A Report to Our Readers
THE COMMITTE ON
INTELLECTUAL CORRESPONDENCE
is an International Project spon- A Report to Our Readers
sored by the Suntory Foundation
This is the second Newsletter of the Committee on Intellectual Correspondence.
(Japan), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu In our first issue, we noted that “…in this post-ideological age, there has been a
Berlin and the American Academy thinning of intellectual debate. Passions are fueled by ethnic and religious attach-
of Arts and Sciences. ments which further divide the discourse between intellectuals.” And we said, as
our intentions, that we hope to “re-take the common terrain…to contribute to the
DIRECTORS renaissance of a cultural milieu where intellectuals as well as scientists and public
Daniel Bell figures can learn about the cultural and intellectual issues in other countries.”
Associate We began our efforts over a year ago. Since then there have been a few heartening
Mark Lilla developments. The New York Times now devotes on Saturdays two or more pages to
“Arts and Ideas.” Such a move may have been part of the effort to thicken the paper,
Wolf Lepenies such as devoting a Monday section to the information industries and a Thursday
Associate section, “Circuits,” to new developments in computers and the Internet. The choice of
Michael Becker “Arts and Ideas” may be a sign of the times, if the swallows follow. (And we are pleased
Masakazu Yamazaki that the Times devoted an early story to the Committee on Intellectual Correspondence.)
Associate The Wall Street Journal has begun a weekly section called “Weekend,” which is
Masayuki Tadokoro designed for the urbane leisure pursuits of the wealthy, such as wines, travel, books,
music, film, art, and a page called, oddly, “Taste” which covers cultural issues. There
Graphic Designer is an occasional hint of sometimes strident interventions in the “cultural wars,” but
Glenna Lang there have also been efforts at cultural reportage such as a story on the conference
at the University of Virginia organized by Richard Rorty and Paul Berman to “re-
Administrative Assistant affirm” American patriotism for the Left.
Patrick T. J. Browne These are new bright spots. The back-of-the-book of the New Republic, edited by
Leon Wieseltier, runs some of the best (and longest) review essays on serious books
U.S. Address: in the U.S. The Los Angeles Times has one of the liveliest book-review sections in
American Academy of Arts and Sciences the country. In one issue it ran a set of essays—one of the few periodicals in the
136 Irving Street country to do so!—on the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto, with arti-
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 cles by Eric Hobsbawm, Daniel Bell, Martin Malia, William Pfaff, and Russell Jacoby.
Telephone: (617) 576-5000 And the bi-weekly New York Review of Books remains the premier intellectual jour-
FAX: (617) 576-5050 nal, after thirty-five years, a singular accomplishment. Yet it is largely an Anglo-
American journal in its writers and reviews. It has devoted considerable space to
E-mail: CIC@amacad.org
the wars in the Balkans and to infringements of human rights, yet other than an
occasional essay, say, on Carl Schmitt or Jacques Derrida (the one a new, the other a
The Committee on Intellectual worn-out subject), it has not been involved with the intellectual issues, or the nov-
Correspondence acknowledges with els and theatre, of countries in Europe and Asia.
gratitude the financial support of the The German press, the weeklies and dailies, are remarkable in their reportage of
Sasakawa Peace Foundation of Japan, cultural developments in other countries, and little escapes the curiosity of the feuil-
in underwriting the project and the leton sections of Die Zeit and F.A.Z. In France Le Débat, edited by Pierre Nora and
Newsletter. Marcel Gauchet, is a model of serious intellectual controversy, but few French peri-
(continued on previous page)
48