kaczvinsky - durrell and the political unrest

8/13/2019 Kaczvinsky - Durrell and the Political Unrest

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,Durrell and the Political Unrest:Paris, May 1968

DONALD p KACZVINSKYLouisiana Tech University

Thirty-five years ago this May, Paris enjoyed one of he most beautifulsprings of the century. Just before Easter, the chestnut blossomsalong the Seine burst into bloom. A photograph printed in the NewYork Times on May 4, shows the generations in peace and harmony, theadults watching children floating toy boats in a manmade pond in theTuileries garden. With peace talks between the US and North Vietnamscheduled to take place in their city, Parisians were proud, as the headlinesreported, to become the center of the world again' (Tanner, 3). The optimism was, as we know, ll founded, The very day the photograph was taken,a student protest began in the Latin Quarter over the injustices and inadequacies of the education, system, a protest that would explode into violenceand bloodshed, affecting not only every student France :iut every businessand industry, eventually paralysing the country and symbolically markingFrance's entry into t h ~ p o s t i n d u s t r i a l world, ' '

Like France politically, Lawrence DUrrell literarily was c e n t ~ stage inthe world, H'is p o p u l a ~ i t y , with the publication o,f he f/ex.andria Quartethad made him a c e l ~ b r i t y especially in 'France and AMerica'; and mostfervently among students. During the early months of 9 8 1and with greatfanfare, Durrell was busy launching his noverTunc E n g l ~ d i m d America:He retu'rned to France, however, -n ,early'May (just before tile student v o l tto write N U7quam Durrell's hope f?r'sustained or increaSed success with his

In-between: Essays & Studies in Literary CriticismVolume September 2002 Number 2


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IN BETWEEN 172two novels would be unfulfilled. Indeed, Durrell would lose much of hisreputation with the publication of the double decker novel and its scathingattack on the simulacra of culture as represented by the firm.My paper will try to answer two questions: 1 How much was Durrellinvolved with the political unrest that took over his adopted home? 2) Dothe events of May 1968 have any appreciable influence on Durrell s ownwriting at the time, particularly his story of revolt?First, let us summarise the events that made up the May Movement.On Friday night May 3, students of he New Left clashed with police in theLatin Quarter. Five hundred students were arrested and numerous peopleinjured, including 21 police officers. The protests were a spill over fromstudent protests at the University of Nanterre, in the suburbs of Paris. Thestudents had interrupted a lecture and, though a minority, finally succeededin having the university closed. They then moved to the Sorbonne to continue their protests against Qvercrowding in the university, archaic andarbitrary teaching methods and exams, inadequate training for technologicalpositions, and a lack of student and faculty participation in universitydecision making. They also felt these educational changes would comeabout only through the violent overthrow of the capitalist system. TheEducation Minister, Alain Peyrefitte, fearing a clash between the left andright fascist students closed the Sorbonne for the first time since its openingin 1253. He also sent in the police as a buffer, but the p o l i ~ reaction to thestudents was violent and did more than anything to unite the various groupsagainst the repressive authorities and win popular support. After a series ofdaily skirmishes with police, the student protest would culminate a weeklater on May l in the Night of the Barricades, followed by the studentoccupation of he Sorbonne and the Odeon.The second halfof the uprising is marked by the inclusion of the unions into the fray . This traditional outlet for radical activism actually cameas a relief to many. Hearing that militant Communists had taken over themovement, one solidly bourgeois restaurant owner responded, Thank God,we re over the hump (Tanner, France at a Boil 17.) The first strike wascalled for May J3 as a show of sympathy for the students. However, oncebegun, the spontaneous strikes of the workers took on a more politicalradical view. Neither the workers strikes nor the workers actions werecompletely under the control of union leaders. The strikes and o_cupationof the factories started with the Sud-Aviation factory in Nantes and spreadto the Renault factories and virtually all the industrial sector. The papersreported the workers were striking not only in sympathy with the studentsfor the brutal police reaction -but for higher wages and fewer work hours.On May 24, de Gaulle, who had ~ e e n in Romania, gave a speech on television calling for a referendum and recognising the necessity for a change inour society, and everything indicates that this change should include a


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Durrell and tbe Political Unrest: Paris, May 1968 173broader participation by every one in the conduct and results o he activityin which each is directly concerned ( Text o President 14). The speechwas a disaster, satisfying no one. The executive o the General Federationo Labour, Georges Seguy, negotiated with the government under thedirectorship ofPompidou. But the Renault workers rejected the agreementand the strike widened.The politicians then stepped in. Mitterand announced that he wouldpreside over a provisional government. The Communist Party planned ademonstration for the 29d. and Pompidou called in tanks not knowing whatwas to happen. De Gaulle had in the meantime disappeared, supposedlygoing to his retreat in Colombey, but actually visiting General Massu,commander o French forces in Germany (Jackson, 127). When de Gaullereturned on the 30 th , he met with his government, made another speech, thistime on the radio alone, postponed the referendum, dissolved parliament,and called for an election. With that the events of May ended. De Gaullewon a landslide victory in June, but the events had taken a toll on him andless than a year later he had resigned.At first glance, the answer to the first question, How much was Dur-rell involved in the protests is easily answered: very little. Indeed thegeneral absence o French intellectuals distinguishes the May Movement.Jean Paul Sartre was the major intellectual figure in France, and he tookonly a marginal role, not leading the charge but only interviewing DanielCohn-Bendit or Danny the Red : the anarchist leader who, ironically,organised the student protests. Michel Foucault, who would emerge as theleadi ng French philosopher in the two decades following, was in Tunis(Macey 204-5) and did not participate. While Durrell had returned to Francein time for the protests, he remains remarkably silent about the politicalupheavals in his letters to Henry Miller. Durrell says little to Miller at all.This is not surprising, for as Gordon Bowker tells us, while in California thatyear Durrell had begun an affair with Hoki, Miller s new wife (335). Hokifollowed Durrell in May to Sbmmieres where she wanted to continue theliaison. I Durrell supposedly rebuffed any further advances. One can imagine1 There is some question as to what exactly Durrell was doing during this period.Ian MacNiven, in Lawrence Durrell: A Biography. is more cautious about Durrell s cuckolding of Miller and does not mention Hoki s trip to Sommieres; butsuggests Durrell spent the time alone. Durrell seems to eonlirm this when hestates in an interview with Claudine Brelet While the events of May 1968 wereunfolding in Paris I stayed alone here in Sommieres for three wceks. TherewllSabsolutely nothing to do. All activities were paralyzed in France ( A Little Ori-ented , (29). But Durrell may have conveniently ~ o r g o t t e n In either case he didnot participate in the Paris riots.


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that, feeling guilty for cuckolding Miller and now stuck in France with thenation paralysed because of worker strikes and the student unrest, Durrellwould be unable and unwilling to communicate. And Durrell was an Englishman, thankful for the hospitality shown him by the French. It woul beunlikely he would repay that kindness by agitating the young into politicalrevolt against the government.

Despite this, Durrell did have n indirect influence on the protests. TheQuartet was a favourite among students. Bowker points out, in assessingDurreH s achievement, that the Quartet had caught the mood of the timesand that, for the 1960 s Flower Children, Durrell had become a guru towhom to turn for enlightenment and justification for a new, sensually awarelifestyle (430). Later in the Revolt o Aphrodite, Durrell will expand uponthe debilitating effect on sexual freedom and sensual pleasure in a restrictivecapitalist world.

The effect of Durrell s work on the students of May is underscored inJulian Barnes s novel Metroland. In this book, an English student, namedChristopher Lloyd, goes to Paris in May 1968, trying to act the insouciantmodernist. He meets a girl with whom he will have a torrid affair at exactlythe same time of the May Movement. Like a parody of Darley seeingMelissa and Clea in the coffee shop, Lloyd meets his future lover in amirror-lined bar in the Rue de Richelieu over n espresso. He strikes up aconversation over the pocket edition of Mountolive, which she has left ona plastic wicker chair next to her:

You re reading Mountolive? I managed to croak in the local patois, andthe strain of his modest celebration persuaded my eyes back into line. ShewasAs you see .(Quick, quick, think of something.)Have you read the others? She had sort of dark hair andI have read the tirst two. Naturally, I haven t read Clea yet. Of course

not, pretty dumb question, her skin was rather sallow, but unblemished,of course that s often the case, it s only fair skins which getOh naturally. Are you enjoying it? Why did I keep asking these fuckingobvious questions? Of course she was, or she wouldn t have read two anda half books. Why didn t I show I d read it, tell her that I adored theQuartet, that I d read everything Durrell wrote which I could get myhands on, that I even knew someone who wrote Pursewarden poems .

(Barnes 88)Importantly, Lloyd interrupts Annick s reading just as the political plotwhich underlies the four-part story will begin, and though he has read thebook, Lloyd misses its point: Annick, who looks very much like Justine, willkeep Lloyd occupied with love and ignorant about the poJitical events thatare occurring all around him while in a foreign country. The point is - he


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Durrell and the PoliticalUnrest: Paris, May 1968 175

states,weill was there, all through May. through the burning of the Bourse, the occupation of the Odeon, the Bilhincourt lock-in. the rumours of tanks roaring backthrough the night from Germany. But I didn t actually see anything . . . I camehome and wrote for weeks on end. Annick (76).Lloyd is embarrassed, like Darley, to have been so out oftouch. Later, whenasked about his time in Paris, he states: I never actually lie, though for atime I used to try and discourage the obvious follow-ups. I would nevermention May for a start, Early sununer was the nearest I d admit to . (75)But Annick who is far different from any English girl Lloyd has met, wouldhave been the type of person in the riots: young, a university student,daughter ofa bourgeois family. With the links between sexual freedom andpolitical suppression in the air, the Quartet as Barnes suggests, was aspiritual force in the student unrest. The English, with their usual dismissalof anything French, saw the uprising as insignificant. Lloyd s own explanation of the riots is that the students were too stupid to understand theircourses, became mentally frustrated, and because of a.lack of sports faci -ties, got exercise by fighting the police.

Durrell shows far more sympathy and a far keener understanding of heimplications and underlying causes of the May Movement. The issues whichbrought the students and workers together were not the traditional left-wingissues over wages and working hours. Despite high unemployment, Francewas experiencing a growing affluence throughout all classes. While theCommunist leadership took over, in part, the direction of the May Movement after May 13, they did not have and could not have control of therebe.lion. The students themselves are not so much a class characterised bytheir economic situation, like a proletariat, but surely a group which isprimarily aligned by its age and education, a group which receives knowledge. Unlike the proletariat, the students were working at becoming mainstreamed into the bourgeois society. They also are not exploited by thosewho own the means of production but a group who receives knowledgethat is then cultivated and applied by the businesses and industries. EVen theworkers who joined the movement were not from the rank and file, buttechnocrats, engineers, and teachers. As Alain Touraine suggests, There isa profound .difference between the revolutionary action of the workermovement, which fought against capitalist property, and the May Movement, which was concentrated in certain university faculties a ld industriesand marked the beginning of social struggles against a new type ofeconomicorganisation and power: technocracy . (194) The primary configul1ltion thenof he May Movement would have been not a proletariat a professionalor pre-professional class, working within the bourgeois sysJem.}

What the students and workers rebelled against Yas the; collusion of


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knowledge and power or the use of knowledge as a means of power. Thestudents and workers of France felt not so much exploited as alienated,forced to accept decisions from a centralised bureaucracy. They called formore local control in the use and application of knowledge: they wantedstudent and worker power. The students wanted a say in the administrationof he university, the content ofexams .and the design of meaningful curricula; the workers wanted their knowledge and ideas to be used responsibJyand locally.

In Tunc, published three months before the uprising, Felix Charlock,while not a student, is an inventor and later technocrat for the firm, the kindof worker who would have been at the forefront of he worker movement inthe second stage of the protest. Felix creates modern devices like theOrient pearl or dolly , a kind of hearing aid, until one day while messingabout with the structure of the human ear as a sound bank [he] collided withthe firm. Bang Tunc 27). Because of his marriage to Benedicta and thequality of his ideas, his knowledge, Felix rises up through the ranks of thefirm, eventually becoming its leader. He is clearly not exploited but treatedquite well and paid handsomely for his work: Felix has two homes and allthe resources and lab equipment necessary to work. What he feels, however,is alienated from decision-making and from the useful application of hisknowledge. Felix s OWI invention ofa sodium-tipped filament is taken byMarchant, another of he firm s scientists, and used, without Felix s permission or knowledge, to build a gunsight. Felix, in Tunc, constantly questionsJulian and criticises the firm s policies. When Felix threatens to give awayone of his inventions for free without any contracts, he is severely reprimanded by Julian and the plan is quashed. And the application of Felix sgreatest invention, the memory computer Abel which can predict the futurebased on a few utterances, is out of Felix s hands. When Felix sets thecomputer to kiII Julian. the computer ends up kiIling Felix s own son, Mark.The other characters who figure prominently in Tunc are also part of theprofessional or pre-professional class: Caradoc is an architect; Vibart, apublisher; Sacrapant a recruiter; Koepgen, a theology student. None of thesecharacters is exploited in a Marxist understanding of class confl ict.

t;:ven Iolanthe, while a working girl who is clearly exploited by men,nonetheless ends up owning a movie studio and is ruined not by beingforced to work for subsistence wages, but by having to compete with a firmwhose resources far exceed her meagre means. Iolanthe, for her part, rejectsJulian not because she feels the firm will inadequately compensate for herlabour; but because she wants the freedom to control her l ife and her work.As she talks with Felix, she tells Felix her reason for remaining outside thefirm. With my first money 1 set up my own firm, chose my own parts. Julianhas tried to break us because again perversely - his only way of gettingme would be by owning. me, having shares in me Tunc 305). Within this


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Durrell and the Political Unr,est: Paris , May 1968 177power struggle, then, Julian and the firm do not want to repress knowledgeand beauty, but control its distribution for profit. If the students at theSorbonne would have to take sudden death exams, that is, perform intel- lectually on topics that had little relation to their own lives, so IolantheW 6uld perform in certain roles, though the character or script had littlerneaningful relation to her. In each case, the production of knowledge orbeauty would be rewarded, but the student or actresses felt alienated fromits meaning to their own lives. Like the students, Iolanthe demands freedomfrom authority, all authority.

IfDurrell s Tunc shows his engagement, if indirectly, with the issuessurrounding the student/worker uprising, the May Movement can give ussome insight into how we understand Durrell s second volume, Nunquam.I have stated elsewhere that Durrell s Revolt is a search for wholeness thatfails (88). I still agree with this, but I felt at that time that the failure was dueto Durrell s lack of imaginative power. Durrell was writing about a periodand a theme that was not close to hi . artistic vision. I would like to suggestthat The Revolt fails because of Durrell s political insight The Revolt likethe May Movement, failed because it had to fail. Given the new configuration ofpower, both revolts pointed out the contradictions of post-industrialsociety but had lost any real target or means for rebirth. Touraine states:The real importance of the May Movement rests in the unity that was establishedbetween the questioning ofthe fundamental social and cultural institutions in ourtype of society and a truly political struggle. The May Movement was both impressive and a dead end . (77)The same thing could be said for Durrell s Revolt.At the conclusion ofNunquam Felix, who has now become head ofthe firm, has planned a fire where all the contracts of the firm will beburned. By burning the contracts all forms of human relationship will betransformed in the conflagration. The model of such a renovation of societyis probably taken from the student revolts, characterised by the fires thatwere lit through the Latin Quarter and the subsequent dancing in the streets.On Christmas eve, in the dead,ofwinter, the rebirth is to begin. Felix states:

have been working all day and am enormously weary. Benedicta has had fires litin the big ballroom where once she shattered all the mirrors. t has been transformed now into rather an elegant room. t is full of flowers. There is some tineblack jazz playing and we have been dancing, dancing in complete happiness andaccord. And we wiII keep on this way, dancing and dancing, even though Romebum Nunquam 318).

Rather than a celebration of liberty, these fires should be understoodas the cremation ofthe corpse of Western curture - the postmodern is, forDurrell, as it was for the students (though perhaps neither one knew it) a


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IN-BETWEEN 178postmortem. As Jean Baudrillard makes quite clear in his comments on theMay Movement, The barricades of 10 May seemed defensive and to bedefending a territory: the Latin Quarter, the old boutique. But this is not true. . .They [the students] were not there to save.the Sorbonne, but to brandishits cadaver in the face of the others, just as black people in Watts and Detroitbrandished the ruins o heir neighbourhoods to which they had themselvesset fire (151). In Nunquam Cyrus P. Goytz, the best embalmer in theuniverse , who trains his students withghoulish pleasure, represents thepostmodern professor, lecturing on how to retain the simulacra of life in abody of culture that is already dead and now rotting all too quickly.

The problem with the conclusion of the novel is exactly the problemthat plagued the conclusion of the student revolt. First, while the studentswere able to reform the university and the workers were able to gain concessions in wages and work time, they were unable to destroy the source oftheir alienation. The enemy was no particular person, monarch, politician orcapitalist, but technology (communications and computers) itself. Widespread and penetrating into every aspect ofhuman existence, there was noone to fight and nowhere to go. The post-industrial has gained power since1968, so that now even third-world nations are tapped into the Internet andshow the wonders of heir country on a flat, 17-inch screen. In the sameway,while the characters of Tunc can rebel and escape for a time, the firm willtrack them down. And after Jul ian s death the firm goes merrily along.Secondly, there were no individual leaders left to control or direct the rebirthofcivilisation. After the violent days ofMay, the movement in the studentsphere, led all along by a loose collection ofanarchists, socialists, communists and others ofvarious political stripes, had no clear leaders or direction.Revolt turned into chaos and then dissipated. While university reforms didtake place, France still remains part of a capitalist global economy - amember ofG7. In Nunquam Felix has been operated on and has lost thepiece of his brain where memory is stored; Benedicta, having been brokensexually, is too weak and fragmented to take over any leadership role. AndBaum expresses his reservations, Either everything will disintegrate, thetirm will begin to dissolve; or else nothing, Mr . Felix, absolutely nothing(318).Given this, let us return to the beautiful spring day of Friday, May 3,1968. Durrell will come to understand, in part through the events that werehappening in his own adopted country, that the renovation of civilisationwas by that day impossible. He realised the postmodem world was a postmortem world, that despite all the resources ofthe firm, Cyrus Goytz couldnot make the dead come back to life. In his next series, Durrell thus movedthe pivotal moment in our centlJry from the contemporary world to the daysjust after WorldWar II. Finally he saw that any kind of rebirth required anindividual open response to the forces of Nature rather than a collective


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Dum:1I and the Political Unrest: Paris, May 1968 179

defensive response to the violence in the s t r e e ~ In Quinx, t h ~ caves will beopened in spring, on Friday 13 , (possibly April 1945) not in the dead ofwinter as in Nunquam.: man is in accord with the natural world around him;and the private love of Blanford and Constance, who is pregnant, offersmore hope for the generations than the sloganeering of students and the firesofMay.Works CitedBarnes, Julian. Metroland. New York: Vintage, 1992.Baudrillard, Jean. The Spiraling Cadaver'. Simulacra nd Simulation. Trans.Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan p, 1994.Bowker, Gordon. Through the lJark Labyrinth: A Biography ofLawrence Durrell.New York: St. Mar tin 's Press, 1997.Durrell, Lawrence. A Little Oriented Toward the Romantics'. Interview by

Claudine Brelet. Lawrence Durrell. Conversations. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. Teaneck and Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, London: Associated UP, 1998.125-31.Nunquam. New York: Penguin, 1979.Tunc. New York: Pengtiin, 1979.

Jackson, Julian. 'De Gaulle and May 1968'. In De Gaulle nd Twentieth CenturyFrance. Ed. Hugh Gough and John Horne. New York: Edward Arnold, 1994.Kaczvinsky, Donald P. Lawrence Durrell s Major Novels, or The Kingdom of heImagination. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, London: Associated UP, 1997.Macey, David. The Lives ofMichel Foucault. New York: Vintage, 1995.Tanner, Henry. 'Paris, Chosen for Talks, Is Proud to Become the Center of theWorld Again '. New York Times, (4 May 1968): 3.'France at a Doil'. New York Times, 21 May 1968): 17.

'Text ofPresident De Gaulle's Address to the United Nation', New York Times, 25May 1968): 14. -Touraine, Alain. The May Movement: Revolt and Reform. Trans. Leonard F. X.Mayhew. New York: Random House, 1971.

kaczvinsky - durrell and the political unrest

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