Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s

Chapter 5: The Trouble with Dualism: Sites and Issues

Name /V1921/V1921_CH05 09/11/01 06:11AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 103 # 3 5 T H E T R O U B L E W I T H D U A L I S M Sites and Issues T H E I N H E R E N T LY dualistic construction of national and international politics in the 1930s comes to the fore in the survey ‘‘Authors Take Sides’’ (1937), which was published, with writers’ responses, in the Left Review. The questionnaire, which was addressed ‘‘To the Writers and Poets of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales,’’ stated emphatically that ‘‘the equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical , the ironic, detachment, will no longer do,’’ and it proceeded to pose the following questions: ‘‘Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the people of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?’’ Such dualisms not only undergirded the period ’s political discourse but also put their stamp on influential psychocultural reflections. Most prominently, Sigmund Freud stipulated in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) that paired opposites such as Eros and Thanatos or individual and society were the two dominant aspects of human civilization: The two urges, the one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human beings, must struggle with each other in every individual; and so, also, the two processes of individual and of cultural development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground. But this struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the contradiction—probably an irreconcilable one—between the primal instinct of Eros and death. It is a dispute within the eco- Name /V1921/V1921_CH05 09/11/01 06:11AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 104 # 4 nomic of the libido, comparable to the contest concerning the distribution of libido between ego and objects. (141) The sheer number of antithetical terms in this essay is astonishing. Words such as rift, conflict, contest, dispute, struggle, and opposition are strewn thickly throughout the tract. Like many of his contemporaries, Freud was steeped in the rhetoric of sociopolitical antagonism, and he recognized that the political conflict that was at the basis of this model could cause a catastrophe: ‘‘In this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety’’ (vol. 14, 145). It was this unrest and anxiety that constituted a major motivating force for English intellectuals of the 1930s to leave their country, both in search of better socioeconomic conditions and, paradoxically , in pursuit of the worst that can be imagined—the zero point of culture and society. Although English travelers heeded Freud’s universal pronouncements about the conflicted nature of the human condition, they were also interested in the specifics of social and political processes, both at home and abroad. In particular, they were obsessed by the rift between the upper and the lower classes, the conflict between right-wing and left-wing politics, and the opposition between the older and the younger generations. But in spite of these clear lines of demarcation and antithetical patterns, dualisms in the 1930s had a way of becoming either undermined by the mutual contamination of their oppositional terms or to be subsumed under the monistic tendency of political totalitarianism . In this chapter, I will outline the ways in which 1930s travel writing was predicated upon the dualistic principles that dominated the decade, while showing simultaneously how the travelers’ experience of cultural and geographical displacement tended to unsettle their antithetical conceptions. One of the central arguments of this study—that 1930s travel books explore cultural differences abroad from various positions that reflect contemporary, English concerns—is but one aspect of the trouble with dualism. For instance, Graham Greene’s account of Mexico ends 104 R A D I C A L S O N T H E R O A D Name /V1921/V1921_CH05 09/11/01 06:11AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 105 # 5 with a description of air-raid precautions being taken in London. Evelyn Waugh delivered his famous ‘‘conservative manifesto’’ in his Mexican travel book, where he focused on the expropriation of the...