122
PETER BROOKS
because their fight
is
for the most basic human freedoms. To a degree,
the first half of
The Year of the Young Rebels
comes to be structured
on a contrast between the Czech students' demand for real light and
the Western students' denunciation of "bourgeois freedoms" as a fraud
and a ruse. Spender is better equipped - we are all better equipped–
to understand this classical form of revolt than the rebellion of post–
affluent youth. The Czech students tend to make the Western students
look unreal, their revolt a strange gratuitous pantomime, a play event
or ludic exercise. Spender warns us that we do wrong both to our–
selves and
to
the enslaved when we despise our bourgeois freedoms.
But he is also aware that the less complicated, more immediate demand
for freedom should not be used as a cudgel against the Western stu–
dents, who face the complex of problems created by guaranteed afflu–
ence and formal freedom in a world where the individual imagination
no longer has any leverage on the center of things, on the real de–
terminants of the quality of one's life.
Yet Spender's East/West contrast does oversimplify, because there
have been infinite shadings of authenticity and fraudulence in the world
student revolt, and it is our compelling responsibility
to
determine and
judge these shadings. I feel that Spender signally fails to do so in his
chapter on Paris. He is mostly impressed by the romanticism of the
French students, their surrealist appeal to the imagination as ultimate
arbiter. What he does not see is that the French revolt was exemplary
because it combined two revolutionary protests, the "Marcusian" de–
mand for liberation and a simpler demand for freedom, the former
directed to the revolutionary reconstruction of society, the latter
to
the
immediate reform of the microsociety of the university. According to
Lucien Goldmann, the French university originally had the function of
training an elite formed by an authoritarian milieu (the French bour–
geois family of the nineteenth century, and its image in the lycees) in
the
values of independent thought and leadership. But, Goldmann's argument
continues, in an increasingly technological society where positions of true
leadership and decision-making have diminished and there is a prolifera–
tion of roles of highly-trained executants of others' decisions, this
university has come to teach students from a relatively free background
(the modern petit-bourgeois family ) the necessity to accept and to imple–
ment the ideas of others, to conform. To put it in another way: while
in postwar France the gates of higher education have been opened
to
explosively increasing numbers of students, no theory or practice of mass
education have been evolved. An outmoded bourgeois classical cultural
ideal is still offered to the consumption of a theoretical elite, which is
to be judged for its all-around cultural harmony. As a result, not only
irrelevance but failure have been built into the system: only a small
