Fiction

Looking Backward and 1984

Larry Dansinger, a war tax resister, is Peacework's correspondent in the state of Maine.

With the year 2000 approaching, I reviewed two classic futuristic novels to see if their predictions were coming true. One was a socialist utopia--Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (Signet Classics, 1960; first published in 1881); the other was George Orwell's dystopia, 1984 (Signet Classics, 1964).

Is our society, as it approaches 2000, closer to a utopia or a dystopia? If I had to choose, I would sadly pick 1984. We seem to be inundated by the same messages Orwell character Winston Smith read on the Ministry of Truth building, that "war is peace," "freedom is slavery," and "ignorance is strength."

Many in the US sneer at Slobodan Milosevic and assume (probably correctly) that he is telling Serbs the same messages that were written on the Ministry of Truth building. Our government gives us these messages too. Getting a real peace message into the media is difficult and subject to distortion; we hear Clinton and NATO commanders every day telling us that war is peace. The same was true last fall and winter when the US bombed Iraq and has been in other wars as well. Is freedom really slavery? Is there no reason to seek freedom, since most of our lives are influenced and manipulated by corporations and politicians? Certainly, some parts of our lives seem out of our control, though we may choose not to participate (such as elections or television or consumerism).

Many people in the US have accepted our current economic and political systems, despite their problems, without, at least overtly, questioning them. They may not like our system but feel powerless to criticize publicly. I believe the majority of those in the US have accepted 1984 Ministry of Truth values, although there is a large minority, such as Peacework readers, who have not.

On the other hand, even if it isn't my utopia, Looking Backward gives me some hope. Bellamy imagines a socialist economy and society in the year 2000, one which provides a multitude of material comforts and opportunities for spiritual and intellectual growth for all citizens. Profits and economic competition are incomprehensible to this new generation. Bellamy's new society comes about not through any popular struggle but rather through "a rearrangement of the industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis."

Main character Julian West discovers that the state owns the means of production, but the people have little investment, financially or emotionally, in the economy. They live relatively unaffected by the economic system, which Bellamy describes as "so logical in its principles and direct and simple in its workings, that it all but runs itself." Government administrators and managers are "the agents and servants of the people."

Bellamy's brand of socialism was and still is viewed by some critics as an oligarchy and anti-democratic. It puts too much faith in centralized government and not enough in individual initiative and human solidarity. Erich Fromm, who wrote the Foreword to the 1960 Signet edition, declared, "there is no effective democracy" and "it is....a society in which the majority of the citizens are subject to the commands of industrial officers."

I find Bellamy's most important contribution is his insistance that social inequality and economic divisions are not inevitable. He believes a society is possible where everyone has their basic economic needs met and where values of equality are ingrained in people's thinking. His society has no military, no government debts, no IRS, no tax collectors, no banks or advertising agencies, few police and prisons, and few citizens who do not contribute to the prosperity of society. Impossible? Maybe not. At the time it was published, Looking Backward was very popular and controversial, spawning 165 "Bellamy Clubs" across the country, which discussed the novel and the potential for socialism in the United States. It was an ideal for many in the Populist Movement to follow and influenced the platform of the Populist Party in the 1890s. Perhaps it is time again to begin popular discussions of socialism and other utopias. As peace and justice organizers, we are often criticized (sometimes legitimately) for being clear about what we are against but fuzzy about what we want to take its place.

Looking Backward reminds us that we need to look forward: to have a vision of a more egalitarian and peaceful society and a nonviolent path to follow.

Harlot's Ghost
Fred Marchant is a poet who directs the creatie writing program of the Joiner Center at UMass Boston.

I am trapped in Norman Mailer's 1991 novel, Harlot's Ghost (Random House, 1991). I am on page 987. I have three hundred to go. I've been reading it for a month, in my normal increments of a half-hour or so before bed. When I began the novel, I was entranced by both its conception and its writing. Every page seemed to offer evidence of the powerful imagination needed to portray and delineate the secret, insidious forces which served the American state during the Cold War. Here was a novel, I thought, which could show us what it really felt like to be on the inside of the CIA in the Berlin station, or to be working with those operatives who planned the Bay of Pigs, or to be inside the mind of those operatives who worked with MK-ULTRA, the Agency's secret operation to test and use mind-control drugs, including LSD. When I began the novel, I had the grand feeling that Mailer had taken on the deepest task of the novelist, to explore those aspects of society which most of us would rather deny, or claim--erroneously--we already fully understand.

I came to this novel through a friend whose father has a small but significant role in Mailer's story. My friend's father--Dr. Frank Olson--was the germ-warfare scientist who was secretly administered LSD by MK-ULTRA operatives in 1953, and subsequently died after he was in all likelihood assassinated by the CIA, by being pushed out a window of a New York City hotel. They seemed to have suspected he was about to become a whistle-blower about the Agency's excesses and illegalities.

So it was with some sense of personal connection that I picked up this novel which tells the story of Harry Hubbard's life as an intelligence officer. Harry is the son of an OSS hero, and a protégé of a spectacularly brilliant Agency operative, Hugh Montague, whose code name is Harlot. In following young Harry's career, and Harlot's various layers of subterfuge, we are brought into the worst corners of the Cold War labyrinth. Here reside what Harlot calls the High Holies, the worst secrets of the defense of the American Faith: the failed attempts to kill Castro, the connections to J. Edgar Hoover's methods of blackmailing public figures, the CIA's connections to the Mob, the dangerous dance which JFK had with both the Mob and the CIA, and finally--I think--MK-ULTRA, that High Holy secret which my friend's father was sacrificed to protect.

I don't know if that is the Highest of High Holies. I haven't got there yet, and I suspect I am in for a few surprises as I approach the end of this novel. But what has slowed me down is Mailer's delightful and appalling fascination with the daily life and methods of CIA secret operations. It is a delightful fascination, because Mailer delights in this one terrible fact: the guardians of the American faith are in the end the ones who most savage it. This, I can already sense, is the ultimate irony of the novel. But it's an appalling fascination because once inside the labyrinth, the novelist seems to lose the thread that was to guide him. The book is over-crowded with taped conversations, coded letters, imagined scenes involving real as well as fictional characters. The book is far too long, obsessionally so. On the other hand, all this detail is all so very interesting, for everything the Agency seems to do shows us yet another facet of the perversions of American democracy in this century. Though I am sure many of you could name a few of those right now, I am certain Mailier's take on the worst of them will be worth knowing.

I'll let you know when I finish. Maybe next summer.

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
David Thoreen teaches writing and literature at Assumption College in Worcester, MA.

Tobias Wolff is a master of the short story who has had to compete with his own success as a writer of memoir. (He has written two, This Boy's Life, and In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of a Lost War.) Still, his first collection of stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1981. 175 pp.), provides an excellent introduction to the rest of his work, which includes a short novel and two subsequent story collections. While Wolff's is a world that mirrors our own, filled with recognizable people, situations, and landscapes, the occasional distortions in that mirror--coupled with his insistent moral investigation--push a Tobias Wolff story toward parable. Wolff instructs, but does not moralize. Wolff clarifies the questions, but does not provide answers. His stories help us to understand, but the responsibility of understanding rests always with the reader.

These are people caught in moral crises of their own devising. And in Wolff's stories, everyone is compromised. Those in Garden variously address the politics of friendship, marriage, family life, and what might broadly be termed "institutional life," the role schools and corporations play (or should play) in our moral choices. In "Hunters in the Snow," three men lose the deer they have been tracking and then their moral compass, contenting themselves with a realignment of loyalties that offers each an unwarranted reassurance of his own integrity. In "Passengers," we meet Glen, who has surrendered responsibility for his own choices to his boss and landlord but at last attempts to become more than a "passenger," although the manner of his rebellion is more pathetic than effectual.

But summaries such as these betray the beautiful moral complexity of Wolff's stories. Here is a more expansive reading, of "Maiden Voyage," in which a couple celebrates their Golden anniversary with a cruise on a love boat. Howard, the 75 year old husband, who still thinks from time to time of a woman he courted before marrying his wife Nora, is at last forced to ask himself whether he has wasted his life. "Marrying Nora was the smartest thing I ever did," he insists, setting up the central question of the story--whether a marriage (and the lives invested in it) should rest on a passion so intense it cannot be trusted, or a friendship so prosaic that may merely be a safe solution.

The stakes are high, as we discover when Howard and Nora are put literally on the spot after dinner one night. Bill Tweed, the ship's social director, and a rake so smarmy you can smell his breath coming off the page, calls the "Golden Couple" up to a spotlighted microphone where they are to tell their fellow passengers how they achieved "a hundred years of love." Ironically, the dinner is a costume ball, so Nora steps to the microphone dressed as Venus, with Howard, dragging his feet, done up as "a sort of gentleman pirate," in the hybrid costume of an eighteenth century squire coupled with an eyepatch and the captain's ceremonial sword. It's the texture of details like that sword that make Wolff's writing such a pleasure to read and reread.

While it recalls the marriage ceremony celebrated fifty years earlier, the sword also points to Howard's impending execution. When Nora hands him the microphone, he stares at it "as if it were something he was being asked to eat. 'Nothing to it,' he said. 'You just go from day to day and before you know it fifty years are up.' He tried to think of something else to say but he couldn't. That was all there was." Marriage, construed as a prison sentence, combines with the bleakness of Howard's final reflection to suggest a failed life, yet there may still be hope for Howard, as a page later, at the end of the story, he will renounce his memories of passionate intensity and his wife will get her "sea legs," gaining a firmer footing aboard ship, and perhaps in their marriage. In addition, a cluster of images at the story's close will reveal the illusory nature of passion. The brilliance of the story, however, lies in this question: how can Howard have made the right choice and yet feel the sting of a failed life? The human condition is a trap, and Tobias Wolff patiently traces his finger over its teeth.

Technical mastery aside, Wolff is distinguished by the empathy he feels for his characters and the conflicting emotional and intellectual responses he solicits from his readers. If his protagonists frustrate us, they remain sympathetic. And whatever they may have done, whatever questions rise out of their circumstances and decisions, Wolff leaves his characters with hope, even if it springs from the bitter recognition that the self is smaller than one would wish. At the end of "Poaching," a man failing in his roles as both husband and father sees a beaver in a pond. He is "standing in the warm rain with his family" and determines that "the creature had been sent to them, that they had been offered an olive branch and were not far from home."

Rebellion of the Hanged
Jeff Story, a member of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, is an admirer of the great American poet, Kenneth Patchen.

When asked to suggest a book for summer reading and review it for Peacework, I immediately thought of B.Traven's Rebellion of the Hanged (Ivan R. Dee, Inc.). It is the fifth in a series--referred to as the Jungle Novels--by the mysterious Traven, who used the alias and never revealed his identity. Incidentally, they need not be read in order. The last two in the series describe the conditions and the ultimate uprisings that marked the beginning of the 1910 Mexican Revolution to overthrow Porfirio Diaz. While Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were fighting in the north, the workers in the mahogany plantations were protesting abominable conditions. Traven's description reads like an eye witness account.

Traven is best known for his classic novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His storytelling is compelling, perhaps because he had lived and worked among the campesinos picking cotton in Chiapas after his anarchist writings forced him to flee Germany. He has a thorough knowledge of the day-to-day lives of the Indian workers who were pressed into a virtual death sentence in the mahogany camps--a third of those who entered soon died from the brutal conditions. Traven makes anarchist asides in his narrator's voice which are poignant if infrequent.

Rebellion of the Hanged is primarily an adventure novel whose main character, a campesino named Candido, descends into the depths of the steamy hell of the southern jungle to pay off debts--bills for his wife's doctor and her subsequent funeral. Like most Indians condemned to the camps, he is not meant to leave.

The novel's title comes from a form of torture used to punish and terrify the workers: the victim is tied by the arms and legs to trees in the jungle and "hung" overnight to be eaten by the bugs and wild animals, while suffering as well the torture to his joints and muscles. Life in the camps is horrifying, yet there is camaraderie and brotherhood which ultimately save the workers when conditions become intolerable and the uprising begins.

The final portion of Rebellion of the Hanged depicts escape from the jungle in the middle of the rainy season and the formation of a guerilla band with its various personalities, as the workers begin to battle the rurales or federal police. I came away from this novel uplifted in spite of the horror and inhumanity described in it. B. Traven is a novelist extraordinaire and I cannot recommend this classic revolutionary tale strongly enough.