Where the Stress Falls (31 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
The voyage to be made to new worlds used to be arduous, hazardous—so arduous that travelers often skipped it. Many authors of travel books were fireside travelers, plagiarizing earlier travel accounts. That eventually travel to exotic places became altogether common, and
more and more organized, has made the old kind of travel hoax virtually obsolete: people do take the trips they write about. In the modern period there are probably many fewer travel books that consciously intend to deceive, many more in which the author
is
deceived. The chances of being caught out, of course, have also mounted. No Natchez squaw arrived in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century to explain what Chateaubriand hadn’t seen or had misinterpreted in the course of his enthusiastic (and, in part, faked) travels to America in 1791. But someone—her name is Eleanor Lipper—who served eleven years in the Gulag and was a prisoner in that slave labor camp in Siberia that both Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore visited in the early 1940s and pronounced a model workplace (a cross between the Hudson Bay Company and the Tennessee Valley Authority) did turn up a few years later, and wrote about the rage and contempt the prisoners felt for their visitors.
more and more organized, has made the old kind of travel hoax virtually obsolete: people do take the trips they write about. In the modern period there are probably many fewer travel books that consciously intend to deceive, many more in which the author
is
deceived. The chances of being caught out, of course, have also mounted. No Natchez squaw arrived in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century to explain what Chateaubriand hadn’t seen or had misinterpreted in the course of his enthusiastic (and, in part, faked) travels to America in 1791. But someone—her name is Eleanor Lipper—who served eleven years in the Gulag and was a prisoner in that slave labor camp in Siberia that both Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore visited in the early 1940s and pronounced a model workplace (a cross between the Hudson Bay Company and the Tennessee Valley Authority) did turn up a few years later, and wrote about the rage and contempt the prisoners felt for their visitors.
THE ACCOUNTS OF TRAVEL
to exotic countries in the nineteenth century suppressed the servants, often a whole retinue, who accompanied the venturesome traveler. The modern traveler touring the revolution tended to suppress the group with which such a trip was accomplished. The sort of person who writes a book about travel to a communist country is, more often than not, the sort who gets invited. And this usually means being a member of a tour—an educational (that is, propaganda) tour sponsored and often paid for by the country being visited. As in all tours, one may not know some or even any of the other people with whom one is packaged. The group may be as small as three (as on my first trip to North Vietnam, in April 1968) or five (as when I went to Poland, in April 1980) or eight (the size of the group I joined to go to China in 1979). Groups of forty in general mean students; the eminent rarely travel in groups of more than five or six; those considered top-drawer celebrities will be invited to travel with a spouse or companion. And, if it is a first trip to a communist country, one will be surprised to learn that this group—however small, however ad hoc—is called a “delegation.” You may protest that your group represents nobody back home, that each member speaks only for herself
or himself, but your smiling hosts will keep on referring to “your delegation.”
to exotic countries in the nineteenth century suppressed the servants, often a whole retinue, who accompanied the venturesome traveler. The modern traveler touring the revolution tended to suppress the group with which such a trip was accomplished. The sort of person who writes a book about travel to a communist country is, more often than not, the sort who gets invited. And this usually means being a member of a tour—an educational (that is, propaganda) tour sponsored and often paid for by the country being visited. As in all tours, one may not know some or even any of the other people with whom one is packaged. The group may be as small as three (as on my first trip to North Vietnam, in April 1968) or five (as when I went to Poland, in April 1980) or eight (the size of the group I joined to go to China in 1979). Groups of forty in general mean students; the eminent rarely travel in groups of more than five or six; those considered top-drawer celebrities will be invited to travel with a spouse or companion. And, if it is a first trip to a communist country, one will be surprised to learn that this group—however small, however ad hoc—is called a “delegation.” You may protest that your group represents nobody back home, that each member speaks only for herself
or himself, but your smiling hosts will keep on referring to “your delegation.”
The custom is for all those taking part in the trip to rendezvous in a hotel mid-journey on the way “in,” the day before entering the country, to be instructed in the ground rules of delegation travel, and to elect a “chairman” (sometimes a vice chairman as well) for the trip, whose duty it will be to respond to official speeches and to sit at the head table at banquets and lead off the toasts. (Some delegations choose to rotate the chairmanship for different segments of the trip, to share the pompousness and the fun.) Wherever you go—at railway stations, where they meet your train; in factories; in schools; at the Writers’ Union—your delegation is meeting the representatives of their organization.
No invitation without an inviting—host—organization; no travel without a program. Led from museums to model kindergartens to the birthplace of the country’s most famous composer or poet, welcomed and given tea and phony statistics by dignitaries in factories and communes, shepherded from oversized meal to oversized meal, with time off for shopping sprees in stores reserved for foreigners, the travelers will complete the tightly scheduled trip having talked with hardly anyone except each other and the only natives they spend time with, upon whom they will base many a generalization: the inveterately amiable guides assigned to the delegation. These official companions—apart from a few head hacks, they are often young, warmhearted, eager (they have worked hard to get the coveted, thrilling job that puts them in contact with foreigners), and scared (they know the price of a misstep, an indiscretion)—hover and fuss, at the constant disposal of their charges. One is always busy, accompanied by them. They are even busier. During an after-lunch break, they have to arrange tickets and accommodations; up late at night, they will be writing reports on the day’s activities and the visitors’ reactions, planning activities to come. The tourist’s role is, characteristically, a greedy one. But a delegation tour of a communist country tenders an explicit invitation to be selfish, greedy. The visitor has only to express a wish for some unscheduled excursion or entertainment, and more phone calls are made to the people
working behind the scenes to conjure up the necessary tickets, a guide on the spot, another limousine.
working behind the scenes to conjure up the necessary tickets, a guide on the spot, another limousine.
Educational travel is by definition privileged travel—travel on a round-trip ticket. One model of travel to foreign countries for the sake of education was the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, in which a young gentleman, accompanied by his often ill-born and usually underpaid tutor, was exposed to a variety of customs, places, treasures adjacent to his own. Although these leisurely travels through the Continent were often no more than a rake’s progress, their educational point could not be altogether nullified. The graduate of the Grand Tour did return home contaminated in some sense by the foreign. At the least he had experienced that there are many models for being civilized—which is one beginning of true civilization, and civility.
In the Grand Tour offered to visitors to communist countries, travel is designed to make sure the visitor does not encounter anything contaminating. The precondition of such tours or field trips, the visitor’s intellectual and cultural distance, is reinforced by the mandatory luxuriousness of delegation travel. The Disneyland of revolution which the traveler will see has for its theme the country’s progress, the revolution’s benefits, as illustrated by an array of elementary performances, economic and cultural, to which visitors are taken in order to admire. But few visitors from very rich countries, including many who identify with the left, are able to evaluate these performances. If on their first trip to a communist country, it is probably the first time most of them will have been in a truck factory, on a breeding ranch, in a paper mill. Most visitors will know nothing about communism, about the country they are visiting (often they have not even taken the time to study a map and seem unaware of the most salient facts of its history), about peasant life and major industrial procedures.
So-called fellow travelers, whether informed or ignorant, are not the best participants in a delegation trip. Indeed, travel officials in communist countries have learned to distrust Western leftists and—this is clearest in Richard Nixon’s favorite foreign vacation spot, Ronald Reagan’s “so-called communist China”—prefer to entertain travelers untouched by radical sentiments: better a chairman of the
board than a leftist assistant professor of history. Such travelers tend to depart with a much more favorable impression of the country than they had before their trip, partly on the basis of their discovery that it contains many friendly, attractive people, that the exotic streets swarm with human beings “just like us.”
board than a leftist assistant professor of history. Such travelers tend to depart with a much more favorable impression of the country than they had before their trip, partly on the basis of their discovery that it contains many friendly, attractive people, that the exotic streets swarm with human beings “just like us.”
What had they imagined before they came?
[1984]
E
UROPE?
What Europe means to me?
UROPE?
What Europe means to me?
What it doesn’t mean: the Europe of Euro-business, Eurodollars—the so-called, would-be European “community” that is supposed to help the individual countries of capitalist Western Europe “to stand up to the bracing economic challenges of the late 20th century” (I quote from today’s
Herald Tribune
, America’s world newspaper); the Euro-kitsch acclaimed as art and literature in these countries; Euro-festivals and Euro-exhibitions and Euro-journalism and Euro-television. But
that
Europe is inexorably reshaping the Europe I love, the polyphonic culture within whose traditions, some of them, I create and feel and think and grow restless, and to whose best, humbling standards I align my own.
Herald Tribune
, America’s world newspaper); the Euro-kitsch acclaimed as art and literature in these countries; Euro-festivals and Euro-exhibitions and Euro-journalism and Euro-television. But
that
Europe is inexorably reshaping the Europe I love, the polyphonic culture within whose traditions, some of them, I create and feel and think and grow restless, and to whose best, humbling standards I align my own.
America is not, of course, totally disjunct from Europe, though it is far more unlike Europe (more “barbaric”) than many Europeans like to think. And although, like the majority of my compatriots, if a smaller majority than before, I am of European descent—specifically of European-Jewish descent (my great-grandparents immigrated to the northeastern part of the United States a century ago from what are now Poland and Lithuania)—I don’t often think of what Europe
means to me as an American. I think of what it means to me as a writer, as a citizen of literature—which is an international citizenship.
means to me as an American. I think of what it means to me as a writer, as a citizen of literature—which is an international citizenship.
If I must describe what Europe means to me as an American, I would start with liberation. Liberation from what passes in America for a culture. The diversity, seriousness, fastidiousness, density of European culture constitute an Archimedean point from which I can, mentally, move the world. I cannot do that from America, from what American culture gives me, as a collection of standards, as a legacy. Hence Europe is essential to me, more essential than America, although all my sojourns in Europe do not make me an expatriate.
To be sure, Europe means a good deal more than that ideal diversity, that stupendous nourishment … those pleasures, those standards. Both an old reality, since at least the Latin Middle Ages, and a perennial, often hypocritical, aspiration, “Europe” as a modern rallying cry for political unification has invariably promoted the suppression and erasure of cultural differences, and the concentration and augmentation of state power. It is chastening to recall that not only Napoleon but also Hitler proclaimed a pan-European ideal. Much of Nazi propaganda in France during the Occupation was devoted to portraying Hitler as Europe’s savior from Bolshevism, from the Russian or “Asiatic” hordes. The idea of Europe has often been associated with the defense of “civilization” against alien populations. Usually, to defend civilization meant to extend the military power and business interests of a single European country which was competing for power and wealth with other European countries. Besides meaning something that could indeed be called civilization (for this must not be denied, either), “Europe” meant an idea of the moral rightness of the hegemony of certain European countries over large parts of what is not Europe. Seeking to convince non-Jews of the desirability of a Jewish state in Palestine, Theodor Herzl declared that “we shall form part of Europe’s fortified wall against Asia, and fulfill the role of cultural vanguard facing the barbarians.” I cite this sentence from Herzl’s
Judenstaat
not to inveigh (along with everyone else these days) against Israel in particular but to underline the fact that virtually every act of colonization in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries by a European people was justified as an extension of the moral boundaries of “civilization”—
considered identical with European civilisation—and a rolling back of the tides of barbarism.
Judenstaat
not to inveigh (along with everyone else these days) against Israel in particular but to underline the fact that virtually every act of colonization in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries by a European people was justified as an extension of the moral boundaries of “civilization”—
considered identical with European civilisation—and a rolling back of the tides of barbarism.
For a long time the very idea of “universal” values, of world institutions, was itself Eurocentric. There is a sense in which the world
was
, once, Eurocentric. That Europe is “the world of yesterday,” which is the title that Stefan Zweig gave to his lament for Europe in the form of a memoir, his last book, written almost half a century ago after this preeminent good European was forced to flee Europe, to flee a triumphant barbarism that was (need it be said?) entirely generated from within, in the heart of Europe. One might think that the notion of Europe would have been thoroughly discredited, first by imperialism and racism, and then by the imperatives of multi-national capitalism. In fact, it has not. (Nor is the idea of civilization unusable—no matter how many colonialist atrocities are committed in its name.)
was
, once, Eurocentric. That Europe is “the world of yesterday,” which is the title that Stefan Zweig gave to his lament for Europe in the form of a memoir, his last book, written almost half a century ago after this preeminent good European was forced to flee Europe, to flee a triumphant barbarism that was (need it be said?) entirely generated from within, in the heart of Europe. One might think that the notion of Europe would have been thoroughly discredited, first by imperialism and racism, and then by the imperatives of multi-national capitalism. In fact, it has not. (Nor is the idea of civilization unusable—no matter how many colonialist atrocities are committed in its name.)
The place where the idea of Europe has the greatest cultural vivacity is in the central and eastern parts of the continent, where citizens of countries in the other empire struggle for some autonomy. I refer, of course, to the debate over Central Europe opened by Milan Kundera’s influential essay of some years ago, and continued with essays and manifestos by Adam Zagajewski, Václav Havel, Georgy Konrád, and Danilo Kiš. For a Pole, a Czech, a Hungarian, a Yugoslav (even, for other reasons, for an Austrian or a German), the idea of Europe has an obvious, subversive authority. The ultimate value of the cultural, and eventually political, counter-hypothesis of the existence of Central Europe—and, by extension, of Europe—is to urge a European peace settlement, a settlement that would erode the rivalry of the superpowers that holds all our lives hostage. To have the edges of the two empires, as they meet in Europe, be porous would be in everyone’s interest. And I mean everyone, which I shall define arbitrarily as all those who think that their great-grandchildren should be allowed to have great-grandchildren. “As long as it is impossible to go over to Vienna from Budapest for an evening at the opera without special permission,” Konrád has observed, “we cannot be said to live in a state of peace.”
Do we have anything comparable to the Central Europeans’ romantic project of a Europe of small nations, able to communicate freely with one another and pool their experience, their immense civic
maturity and cultural depth, which have been acquired at the cost of so much suffering and privation? For us, who can hop from continent to continent without securing permission from anyone for a night at the opera, could Europe mean anything of that value? Or is the ideal Europe rendered obsolete by our prosperity, our liberty, our selfishness? And the idea itself, for us, spoiled beyond repair?
maturity and cultural depth, which have been acquired at the cost of so much suffering and privation? For us, who can hop from continent to continent without securing permission from anyone for a night at the opera, could Europe mean anything of that value? Or is the ideal Europe rendered obsolete by our prosperity, our liberty, our selfishness? And the idea itself, for us, spoiled beyond repair?
In one respect, our two experiences seem comparable, perhaps due to the very real loss of European power on both sides of the divide of empire. The new idea of Europe is not of extension but of retrenchment: the Europeanization not of the rest of the world but of Europe. Among Poles and Hungarians and Czechs, “Europe” is a not-so-subtle slogan for limiting the power and cultural hegemony of the cloddish, stifling Russian occupiers. Make Europe … European. In rich Europe, where we cannot complain of being cut off from one another, there is another anguish. Not about making Europe European but about keeping it European. Clearly, a losing battle. While the highly educated populations of central Europe are suffering from preposterous isolation and rationing of cultural contacts, those of western Europe are afflicted with incessant and isolating admixtures of cultural practice. There are Sikh taxi drivers in Frankfurt and mosques in Marseille. Italian doctors in hospitals in Naples, Rome, and Turin are performing clitoridectomies on the pubescent daughters of African immigrants, at the request of their parents. The only relatively homogeneous countries in Europe are going to be the poor ones, like Portugal and Greece, plus the Central European countries that have been impoverished by forty years of Moscow-directed economic planning. The unremitting influxes of foreigners into the rich European countries have the possibility of turning the slogan “Europe” nasty once more.
Europe, an exercise in nostalgia? Loyalty to Europe like continuing to write by hand when everyone is using a typewriter? (More aptly: like continuing to write on a typewriter when everyone is using a word processor?) It seems worth noting that the countries where an idea of Europe one can take seriously does flourish are those whose inflexible, fearful, militarized systems of governance and dismal economies make them considerably less modern, less prosperous, and more ethnically homogeneous than the western part of the continent. A modern Europe—often
mistakenly called an “Americanized” Europe—is certainly a good deal less European. Some experience of Japan over the last decade has shown me that the “modern” is not equivalent to American. (Equating modernization with Americanization and vice versa may be the ultimate Eurocentric prejudice.) The modern has its own logic, liberating and immensely destructive, by which the United States, no less than Japan and the rich European countries, is being transformed. Meanwhile, the center has shifted. (But the center is always being destroyed or modified by the periphery.) Los Angeles has become the eastern capital of Asia, and a Japanese industrialist, when recently describing his plans to put up a factory in the United States in the “northeast,” meant not Massachusetts but Oregon. There is a new cultural and political geography, and it will be syncretistic, and increasingly destructive of the past. The future of mainstream Europe is Euroland, nation-sized theme parks, Europe as instant playback, which natives will consume as avidly as tourists (in Europe the distinction has long been obsolete—everyone is a tourist). What remains of the Europe of high art and ethical seriousness, of the values of privacy and inwardness and an unamplified, non-machine-made discourse: the Europe that makes possible the films of Krzysztof Zanussi and the prose of Thomas Bernhard and the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the music of Arvo Part? That Europe still exists, will continue to exist for some time. But it will occupy less territory. And increasing numbers of its citizens and adherents will understand themselves as émigrés, exiles, and foreigners.
mistakenly called an “Americanized” Europe—is certainly a good deal less European. Some experience of Japan over the last decade has shown me that the “modern” is not equivalent to American. (Equating modernization with Americanization and vice versa may be the ultimate Eurocentric prejudice.) The modern has its own logic, liberating and immensely destructive, by which the United States, no less than Japan and the rich European countries, is being transformed. Meanwhile, the center has shifted. (But the center is always being destroyed or modified by the periphery.) Los Angeles has become the eastern capital of Asia, and a Japanese industrialist, when recently describing his plans to put up a factory in the United States in the “northeast,” meant not Massachusetts but Oregon. There is a new cultural and political geography, and it will be syncretistic, and increasingly destructive of the past. The future of mainstream Europe is Euroland, nation-sized theme parks, Europe as instant playback, which natives will consume as avidly as tourists (in Europe the distinction has long been obsolete—everyone is a tourist). What remains of the Europe of high art and ethical seriousness, of the values of privacy and inwardness and an unamplified, non-machine-made discourse: the Europe that makes possible the films of Krzysztof Zanussi and the prose of Thomas Bernhard and the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the music of Arvo Part? That Europe still exists, will continue to exist for some time. But it will occupy less territory. And increasing numbers of its citizens and adherents will understand themselves as émigrés, exiles, and foreigners.
What then will happen to one’s European roots, the real ones and the spiritual ones? I can think of no more consoling response to that question than one given by an American expatriate writer who was once asked if, having spent forty years living in France, she was not worried about losing her American roots. Said Gertrude Stein, her answer perhaps even more Jewish than American: “But what good are roots if you can’t take them with you?”
[1988]
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