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Monday, February 23, 2004
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JOURNAUX UNIVERSITAIRES Toulouse is a happy city (with chemical assistance, to be sure - the French really love their psychotropics) that retains the elements of European urbanism to which Americans are so drawn: cobbled curving streets end-on to cathedrals; restaurants whose owners shake your hand or kiss you when you come in; quiet pedestrian lanes with flower shops whose olive trees spill onto the sidewalk. Elegant squares, human-scale, with small carousels at their center, open up as you stroll. There are tearooms along the edges of the squares, in front of which sit lively people sending cigarette and bergamot smoke into the air. As you approach the umbrellas that shade the cafe tables, there’s an odor of perfume, coffee, and wine. The atmosphere is muted, with submerged human chatter, and at the same time sharp with the oddity of street life: the macho man in black leather on whose left shoulder perches a kitten; the old woman with pancake makeup dusting the breast of her jacket; six kilted Scotsmen entering a pub to watch their rugby team on tv; a clutch of girls arm in arm along the pavement, each of them wearing a bright pink scarf over her turtleneck. And even if you know that the narrower and more tempting the city street, the likelier it is to be a pissoir, these are still Amelie-streets, and you yourself are happy without chemical assistance, sipping sweet Moroccan tea from corner stalls and stopping every few moments to lift your face to the sun. Almost any French city remains this sort of other place, to which Americans go to get away from superstores, McMansions, and SUVs. Yet if you look underneath the charm, it turns out that intellectually, for instance, France is in a bad way - even, some say, under a state of siege: The Guardian’s reporter in Paris wrote recently about a petition signed by 20,000 “artists, thinkers, film-makers, scientists, lawyers, doctors, and academics” which accuses the government of, in the words of the petition writers, “waging war on intelligence [and instituting] a new state anti-intellectualism.” Much of this latest skirmish is about cuts to the arts and proposed reforms (most of them, I think, sensible) of the universities; some of it is about “regulating the status of psychotherapists” (this also would be a sign of sanity). But in a wonderful burst of Gallic rhetoric, the protesting intellectuals also accuse the government of thinking in terms of “simplistic and terrifying” alternatives - pro-veil or anti-veil? lenient judges or tough cops? etc. The government, they say, lacks a sense of life’s complexity. (The protestors have transferred to their government the language that the French traditionally use against Americans. Hubert Vedrine, not long ago France’s Foreign Minister, did a lot of sniffing about American simplisme.) And I’m sure it does lack this. I’m sure all governments do. A government isn’t the sort of thing that sits around pondering ambiguities. It legislates. No doubt the French government is tired of subsidizing to the extent that it does the forms of meditating and militating in which many of their intellectuals engage. The university where I taught last year exhibited the odd mix of frenzy and paralysis that characterizes a good deal of French intellectual life right now. It’s a place where “students strike and strike out,” as an American faculty member there recently put it. It has been closed a number of times in the last five years by student agitators who physically threaten people attempting to teach or attend classes. Some of these are “virtual strikes,” also known as warning strikes - “They aren’t striking to protest any particular policy,” the American explained to me, “but the possibility of a policy being handed down at some unspecified later time.” “Are you telling me that the students are striking against the future?” I asked him. “You could say that. The French don’t like change. Or the whiff of change.” And yet the French also think they are soixante-huitards manning the barricades - or, rather, the French retain an unexamined sympathy for people who make noise about change and continue to act like ‘68ers. As a result they feel unable to criticize acts of institution trashing that they privately deplore. French universities are “dangerously approaching collapse, if not of a material kind, at least morally,” Jean-Michel Rabate, a French professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, writes, because of the “defeatism and cynicism among staff and students.” At my defeated and cynical university in Toulouse, the latest strike was one more insult piled onto so much injury that the place has become a kind of laboratory of misconceived modernity. Its already ugly architecture, the most degenerate Corbusierianism, has been scrawled on, spat on, locked down, locked up, ripped up, and just generally befouled in a hundred ways, so that people enter campus, take or give classes, and flee. Every ten feet or so, as you walk along its outdoor corridors, long transparent plastic bags dangle in the wind (their metal containers having been removed, presumably for security reasons), looking like dancing condoms. This ugly world is at the center of the notorious Michel Houellebecq’s novels, especially The Elementary Particles, whose appearance in France sparked the rage and debate that became known as l’affaire houellebecq. An extended character study of various post-’sixties casualties, the novel is particularly interested in the rotten legacy of political radicalism. It nauseatingly literalizes Donald Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe” conceit, dwelling on the physcial degeneration of free love advocates whom no one any longer wishes to touch. Houellebecq’s pathetic soixante-huitards drag their rears through soulless lives which end in suicidal self-disgust. America is much farther along than France in maturing past its ‘68ism. “Across the country,” writes Kate Zenike is a recent New York Times article, “the war [in Iraq] is revealing role reversals - between professors shaped by Vietnam protests and a more conservative student body traumatized by the attacks of September 11 ... On campuses like Yale and Berkeley, professors say their colleagues are overwhelmingly against the war. By contrast, students polled by The Yale Daily News are 50-50.” The perplexity of one professor says it all: “’We used to like to offend people,” Martha Saxton, a professor of women’s studies at Amherst, said as she discussed the faculty protest with students this week. ‘We loved being bad, in the sense that we were making a statement. Why is there no joy now?’” The offended parties at present are Saxton’s own students, in part because they sense how much ‘68ism was about - or has turned into - a selfish effort toward “joy.” The French have not seriously begun - as has a new generation of Americans - resisting their own corrupt radical traditions. Instead, they remain a societe bloquee, stuck in sullen bad faith. The new literary movement in France labeled “deprimisme” (depression - it’s also sometimes called “dolorisme”) is one sign of this. The Elementary Particles has been called its masterwork, as J. Hoberman noted in his review in The Village Voice, because it captures more powerfully than any other novel what Mark Lilla calls “the night thoughts disturbing the slumber of the French centrist republic today.” Houellebecq has exposed the odd underside of the post-’sixties European ideal, in which an enviably subsidized life run by benign centrist governments which patronizingly view dissent as a theatrical letting off of steam turns out to inspire not joyful solidarity but corrosive anger and self-destruction. The French are stewing in their own cassoulet. |