In recounting how books about death and darkness inoculated me against depression in the plague year, I forgot to mention Victor Serge’s Mexican journals from the last decade of his life. It would be difficult to equal his grounds for depression: a man of boundless energy and deep human sensibility, Serge had experienced the demise of the revolutionary movement to which he had dedicated his life. Now he found himself exiled, penniless, unable to publish, his marriage disintegrating, many of his comrades and friends dead or disappeared, all against the cataclysmic background of world war and fierce Stalinist and fascist repression. What does the reader of his journals perceive as the antidote to his Job-like afflictions? Lucidity! He registers the events of exile and the distant world from which he has been expelled insatiably. He gulps down his impressions of the psychedelically foreign Mexican milieu like a powerful intoxicant. Processing them gives off light. Serge is what I would call a reality junky, a compulsory witness of unfolding history and ambient culture.
In the evenings last year, I watched Netflix or Amazon series from France or Russia for my aural comprehension. The Russian series were mostly drivel glorifying the Great Patriotic War. One exception was a skillful adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, the “War and Peace” of Stalingrad. The rest were formulaic and chauvinistic. Very different the French series that became my favorite, a World War II dramatization entitled Un village français. Its creators must have absorbed much of the literature of the post-war era as well as such documentaries as Le chagrin et la pitié about resistance and collaboration in wartime France. In watching its intro, I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in Sartre’s La mort dans l’âme, where the German tanks roll into Paris and a German soldier tosses a crumpled pack of cigarettes to a hypnotized Frenchman.
One episode in particular captured my attention. I must have watched it a half dozen times, always with tears: episode ten of season four, “Alsace et Lorraine.” It shouldn’t require a psychoanalytic study to guess my reasons. A bunch of young French guys have fled to the mountains in order to avoid forced labor in Germany. Although they are immature and undisciplined, they decide at a certain point that they might as well be maquisards serving the Resistance. So they make contact with the hardened underground and are told that there are no weapons for them, but that if they are serious, they should begin by drilling, exercising, and acquiring cohesion and discipline. One of their number had been a theater student at university before fleeing. He is driven by the idea that they should practice a theater piece that he’s writing. For want of a better way to spend their time, they are persuaded to follow his direction. Their play looks totally stupid.
When they eventually decide that they must undertake serious action, they opt for diverting the German garrison and marching in formation into Villeneuve on the national holiday of November 11, to honor the French World War I dead and commemorate the erstwhile victory over Germany. The episode involves many nail-biting complications, but all these are resolved just in time so that their rag-tag formation with tricolore and wooden guns can march to the main square to commemorate the fallen French heroes and lead the stunned crowd of townspeople in singing the Marseillaise, an anthem not heard for years. Its stirring strains elicit intense emotion in the assembled women and old people. And in me.
The point of this touching scene is that the quixotic theater student was right after all: resistance is theater. Theater is authority. The authority of their performance resurrects the idea of the nation in the oppressed crowd. The immature young people become men by enacting theater. They become real by pretending to be real with courage and conviction. What could be deeper than this, or more existentialist, or more clearly aimed at my circumstances with my young friends?
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 