PARTISAN REVIEW
421
onstrate your concern over a criminal trial taking place in the supe–
rior court of New Haven? We're not striking against the university;
it only looks that way. We are calling for a halt to business as usual
in order to discuss the issues posed by the trial, and Yale's relation
to it, and beyond that, our relation to racism and to the oppression
of Blacks in New Haven and America. We can't carry forward busi–
ness as usual when the fact of the existence of the Panthers, and
what is being done to them across the country, has so forcibly been
put before us and tied to the lives of Blacks in the community just
outside Yale's walls and to the existential predicament of those who
are both Blacks and Yale students. The connections are all there,
but you must constantly rearticulate them.
It was partly a problem in symbolism and metaphor. This I
could understand by the contrast to Paris in May 1968. You won–
dered about the measure of gratuitousness there, too, but only in
terms of the depth of reality that the struggle had outside the stu–
dents' universe. The movement's content was defined, or at least
delineated, by its symbolism. The barricades (useless, of course, ex–
cept in defining the students' turf and their heroic solidarity against
the "forces of order," as the French so conveniently call them), the
red and black flags, singing
L'Internationale,
marching to the sym–
bolic places -
Le Figaro's
offices, those of the state television - even
the less purely political, more liberationist side of the struggle: the
graffiti, the surrealist carnival of the Sorbonne, the "soviets" estab–
lished within the university - all these had historical referents in
past revolutionary movements, and because of this reference, all the
gestures were clearly metaphors of revolution. Which is not to call
them frivolous gestures: how, if not through metaphor, are you going
to approach any new state of being? Metaphor as a reference from
the known to the ineffable, the unseeable or the imperfectly expres–
sible, is a first move in revolution. As God to Dante is three rings
of light, so:
trGroupons et demain/ L'Internationale/ Fera le genre
humain."
It
is a metaphor oriented toward the future, which seeks
its point of literal identity of tenor and vehicle in the future. And
when the metaphors are not only linguistic, but in terms of styles of
acting, like the student soviets, they permit what Cohn-Bendit called
the "glimpse of a possibility," a momentary knowledge of the new
which vanishes, but leaves you with the conviction that it could in
fact be.
