,Durrell and the Political Unrest:

Paris, May 1968

DONALD p, KACZVINSKY
Louisiana Tech University
T
hirty-five years ago this May, Paris enjoyed one of the most beautiful
springs of the century. Just before Easter, the chestnut blossoms
along the Seine burst into bloom. A photograph printed in the New
York Times on May 4, shows the generations in peace and harmony, the
adults watching children floating toy boats in a manmade pond in the
Tuileries garden. With peace talks between the US and North Vietnam
scheduled to take place in their city, Parisians were proud, as the 'headlines
reported, 'to become the center of the world again' (Tanner, 3). The opti-
mism was, as we know, ill founded, The very day the photograph was taken,
a student protest began in the Latin Quarter over the injustices and inade-
quacies of the education, system, a protest that would explode into violence
and bloodshed, affecting not only every student iii France !:iut every business
and industry, eventually paralysing the country and symbolically marking
France's entry into world, ' " '
Like France politically, Lawrence DUrrell literarily was stage in
the world, H'is with the "publication o,fThe )f/ex.andria Quartet
had made him a especially in 'France and AMerica'; and most
fervently among students. During the early months of 1968
1
and"with great
fanfare, Durrell was busy launching his noverTunc iii America:
He retu'rned to France, however, -in,early'May (just before tile student
to write N,U7quam, Durrell's hope f?r'sustained or increaSed success with his
In-between: Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism
Volume II September 2002 Number 2
IN-BETWEEN 172
two novels would be unfulfilled. Indeed, Durrell would lose much of his
reputation with the publication of the 'double decker' novel and its scathing
attack on the simulacra of culture as represented by the firm.
My paper will try to answer two questions: 1) How much was Durrell
involved with the political unrest that took over his adopted home? 2) Do
the events of May 1968 have any appreciable influence on Durrell's own
writing at the time, particularly his story of revolt?
First, let us summarise the events that made up the May Movement.
On Friday night May 3, students of the New Left clashed with police in the
Latin Quarter. Five hundred students were arrested and numerous people
injured, including 21 police officers. The protests were a spill over from
student protests at the University of Nanterre, in the suburbs of Paris. The
students had interrupted a lecture and, though a minority, finally succeeded
in having the university closed. They then moved to the Sorbonne to con-
tinue their protests against Qvercrowding in the university, archaic and
arbitrary teaching methods and exams, inadequate training for technological
positions, and a lack of student and faculty participation in university
decision making. They also felt these educational changes would come
about only through the violent overthrow of the capitalist system. The
Education Minister, Alain Peyrefitte, fearing a clash between the left and
right fascist students closed the Sorbonne for the first time since its opening
in 1253. He also sent in the police as a buffer, but the reaction to the
students was violent and did more than anything to unite the various groups
against the repressive authorities and win popular support. After a series of
daily skirmishes with police, the student protest would culminate a week
later on May lOin the Night of the Barricades, followed by the student
occupation of t he Sorbonne and the Odeon.
The second half of the uprising is marked by the inclusion of the un-
ions into the fray. This traditional outlet for radical activism actually came
as a relief to many. Hearing that 'militant' Communists had taken over the
movement, one solidly bourgeois restaurant owner responded, 'Thank God,
we're over the hump' (Tanner, 'France at a Boil' 17.) The first strike was
called for May J 3 as a show of sympathy for the students. However, once
begun, the spontaneous strikes of the workers took on a more political
radical view. Neither the workers' strikes nor the workers' actions were
completely under the control of union leaders. The strikes and o_ccupation
of the factories started with the Sud-Aviation factory in Nantes and spread
to the Renault factories and virtually all the industrial sector. The papers
reported the workers were striking not only in sympathy with the students
for the brutal police reaction -but for higher wages and fewer work hours.
On May 24, de Gaulle, who had in Romania, gave a speech on televi-
sion calling for a referendum and recognising 'the necessity for a change in
our society, and everything indicates that this change should include a
Durrell and tbe Political Unrest: Paris, May 1968 173
broader participation by every one in the conduct and results of the activity
in which each is directly concerned' ('Text of President' 14). The speech
was a disaster, satisfying no one. The executive of the General Federation
of Labour, Georges Seguy, negotiated with the government under the
directorship ofPompidou. But the Renault workers rejected the agreement
and the strike widened.
The politicians then stepped in. Mitterand announced that he would
preside over a provisional government. The Communist Party planned a
demonstration for the 29
d
., and Pompidou called in tanks not knowing what
was to happen. De Gaulle had in the meantime disappeared, supposedly
going to his retreat in Colombey, but actually visiting General Massu,
commander of French forces in Germany (Jackson, 127). When de Gaulle
returned on the 30
th
, he met with his government, made another speech, this
time on the radio alone, postponed the referendum, dissolved parliament,
and called for an election. With that the events of May ended. De Gaulle
won a landslide victory in June, but the events had taken a toll on him and
less than a year later he had resigned.
At first glance, the answer to the first question, 'How much was Dur-
rell involved in the protests' is easily answered: very little. Indeed the
general absence of French intellectuals distinguishes the May Movement.
Jean Paul Sartre was the major intellectual figure in France, and he took
only a marginal role, not leading the charge but only interviewing Daniel
Cohn-Bendit or Danny the 'Red': the anarchist leader who, ironically,
organised the student protests. Michel Foucault, who would emerge as the
leadi'ng French philosopher in the two decades following, was in Tunis
(Macey 204-5) and did not participate. While Durrell had returned to France
in time for the protests, he remains remarkably silent about the political
upheavals in his letters to Henry Miller. Durrell says little to Miller at all.
This is not surprising, for as Gordon Bowker tells us, while in California that
year Durrell had begun an affair with Hoki, Miller's new wife (335). Hoki
followed Durrell in May to Sbmmieres where she wanted to continue the
liaison. I Durrell supposedly rebuffed any further advances. One can imagine
1 There is some question as to what exactly Durrell was doing during this period.
Ian MacNiven, in Lawrence Durrell: A Biography. is more cautious about Dur-
rell's cuckolding of Miller and does not mention Hoki's trip to Sommieres; but
suggests Durrell spent the time alone. Durrell seems to eonlirm this when he
states in an interview with Claudine Brelet 'While the events of May 1968 were
unfolding in Paris I stayed alone here in Sommieres for three wceks. TherewllS
absolutely nothing to do. All activities were paralyzed in France' ('A Little Ori-
ented', (29). But Durrell may have conveniently In either case he did
not participate in the Paris riots.
IN-BETWEEN 174
that, feeling guilty for cuckolding Miller and now stuck in France with the
nation paralysed because of worker strikes and the student unrest, Durrell
would be unable and unwilling to communicate. And Durrell was an Eng-
lishman, thankful for the hospitality shown him by the French. It would be
unlikely he would repay that kindness by agitating the young into political
revolt against the government.
Despite this, Durrell did have an indirect influence on the protests. The
Quartet was a favourite among students. Bowker points out, in assessing
DurreH's achievement, that the Quartet had caught the mood of the times
and that, for the 1960's Flower Children, Durrell had become 'a guru to
whom to turn for enlightenment and justification for a new, sensually aware
lifestyle' (430). Later in the Revolt of Aphrodite, Durrell will expand upon
the debilitating effect on sexual freedom and sensual pleasure in a restrictive
capitalist world.
The effect of Durrell's work on the students of May is underscored in
Julian Barnes's novel Metroland. In this book, an'English student, named
Christopher Lloyd, goes to Paris in May 1968, trying to act the insouciant
modernist. He meets a girl with whom he will have a torrid affair at exactly
the same time of the May Movement. Like a parody of Darley seeing
Melissa and Clea in the coffee shop, Lloyd meets his future lover in a
mirror-lined bar in the Rue de Richelieu over an espresso. He strikes up a
conversation over the pocket edition of Mountolive, which she has left on
a plastic wicker chair next to her:
'You're reading Mountolive?' I managed to croak in the local patois, and
the strain of this modest celebration persuaded my eyes back into line. She
was ...
'As you see'.
(Quick, quick, think of something.)
'Have you read the others?' She had sort of dark hair and ...
'I have read the tirst two. Naturally, I haven't read Clea yet.' Of course
not, pretty dumb question, her skin was rather sallow, but unblemished,
of course that's often the case, it's only fair skins which get ...
'Oh naturally. Are you enjoying it?' Why did I keep asking these fucking
obvious questions? Of course she was, or she wouldn't have read two and
a half books. Why didn't I show I'd read it, tell her that I adored the
Quartet, that I'd read everything Durrell wrote which I could get my
hands on, that I even knew someone who wrote Pursewarden poems.
(Barnes 88)
Importantly, Lloyd interrupts Annick's reading just as the political plot
which underlies the four-part story will begin, and though he has read the
book, Lloyd misses its point: Annick, who looks very much like Justine, will
keep Lloyd occupied with love and ignorant about the poJitical events that
are occurring all around him while in a foreign country. The point is - he
Durrell and the PoliticalUnrest: Paris, May 1968
175
states,
weill was there, all through May. through the burning of the Bourse, the occu-
pation of the Odeon, the Bilhincourt lock-in. the rumours of tanks roaring back
through the night from Germany. But I didn't actually see anything . . . . I came
home and wrote for weeks on end. 'Annick' (76).
Lloyd is embarrassed, like Darley, to have been so out oftouch. Later, when
asked about his time in Paris, he states: ' I never actually lie, though for a
time I used to try and discourage the obvious follow-ups. I would never
mention May for a start, Early sununer was the nearest I'd admit to' . (75)
But Annick who is far different from any English girl Lloyd has met, would
have been the type of person in the riots: young, a university student,
daughter ofa bourgeois family. With the links between sexual freedom and
political suppression in the air, the Quartet, as Barnes suggests, was a
spiritual force in the student unrest. The English, with their usual dismissal
of anything French, saw the uprising as insignificant. Lloyd's own explana-
tion of the riots is that the students were too stupid to understand their
courses, became mentally frustrated, and because of a.lack of sports faci Ii-
ties, got exercise by fighting the police.
Durrell shows far more sympathy and a far keener understanding of the
implications and underlying causes of the May Movement. The issues which
brought the students and workers together were not the traditional left-wing
issues over wages and working hours. Despite high unemployment, France
was experiencing a growing affluence throughout all classes. While the
Communist leadership took over, in part, the direction of the May Move-
ment after May 13, they did not have and could not have control of the
rebe.llion. The students themselves are not so much a class characterised by
their economic situation, like a proletariat, but surely a group which is
primarily aligned by its age and education, a group which receives knowl-
edge. Unlike the proletariat, the students were working at becoming main-
streamed into the bourgeois society. They also are not exploited by those
who own the means of production but a group who receives 'knowledge'
that is then cultivated and applied by the businesses and industries. EVen the
workers who joined the movement were not from the rank and file, but
technocrats, engineers, and teachers. As Alain Touraine suggests, 'There is
a profound . difference between the revolutionary action of the worker
movement, which fought against capitalist property, and the May Move-
ment, which was concentrated in certain university faculties a'ld industries
and marked the beginning of social struggles against a new type of economic
organisation and power: technocracy' . (194) The primary configul1ltion then
of the May Movement would have been not a proletariat u ~ a professional
or pre-professional class, working within the bourgeois sysJem.}
What the students and workers rebelled against )Yas-,the; collusion of
IN-BETWEEN 176
knowledge and power or the use of knowledge as a means of power. The
students and workers of France felt not so much exploited as alienated,
forced to accept decisions from a centralised bureaucracy. They called for
more local control in the use and application of knowledge: they wanted
student and worker power. The students wanted a say in the administration
of the university, the content ofexams . and the design of meaningful curric-
ula; the workers wanted their knowledge and ideas to be used responsibJy
and locally.
In Tunc, published three months before the uprising, Felix Charlock,
while not a student, is an inventor and later technocrat for the firm, the kind
of worker who would have been at the forefront of the worker movement in
the second stage of the protest. Felix creates 'modern' devices like the
Orient pearl or 'dolly', a kind of hearing aid, until one day 'while messing
about with the structure of the human ear as a sound bank [he] collided with
the firm. Bang' (Tunc 27). Because of his marriage to Benedicta and the
quality of his ideas, his knowledge, Felix rises up through the ranks of the
firm, eventually becoming its leader. He is clearly not exploited but treated
quite well and paid handsomely for his work: Felix has two homes and all
the resources and lab equipment necessary to work. What he feels, however,
is alienated from decision-making and from the useful application of his
knowledge. Felix's OWI1 invention ofa sodium-tipped filament is taken by
Marchant, another of the firm's scientists, and used, without Felix's permis-
sion or knowledge, to build a gunsight. Felix, in Tunc, constantly questions
Julian and criticises the firm's policies. When Felix threatens to 'give' away
one of his inventions for 'free' without any contracts, he is severely repri-
manded by Julian and the plan is quashed. And the application of Felix's
greatest invention, the memory computer Abel which can predict the future
based on a few utterances, is out of Felix's hands. When Felix sets the
computer to kiII Julian. the computer ends up kiIling Felix's own son, Mark.
The other characters who figure prominently in Tunc are also part of the
professional or pre-professional class: Caradoc is an architect; Vibart, a
publisher; Sacrapant a recruiter; Koepgen, a theology student. None of these
characters is exploited in a Marxist understanding of class confl ict.
t;:ven Iolanthe, while a working girl who is clearly exploited by men,
nonetheless ends up owning a movie studio and is ruined not by being
forced to work for subsistence wages, but by having to compete with a firm
whose resources far exceed her meagre means. Iolanthe, for her part, rejects
Julian not because she feels the firm will inadequately compensate for her
labour; but because she wants the freedom to control her l.ife and her work.
As she talks with Felix, she tells Felix her reason for remaining outside the
firm. 'With my first money 1 set up my own firm, chose my own parts. Julian
has tried to break us because -- again perversely - his only way of getting
me would be by owning. me, having shares in me' (Tunc 305). Within this
Durrell and the Political Unr,est: Paris, May 1968 177
power struggle, then, Julian and the firm do not want to repress knowledge
and beauty, but control its distribution for profit. If the students at the
Sorbonne would have to take 'sudden death' exams, that is, perform intel- '
lectually on topics that had little relation to their own lives, so Iolanthe
W'6uld perform in certain roles, though the character or script had little
rneaningful relation to her. In each case, the production of knowledge or
beauty would be rewarded, but the student or actresses felt alienated from
its meaning to their own lives. Like the students, Iolanthe demands freedom
from authority, all authority.
If Durrell's Tunc shows his engagement, if indirectly, with the issues
surrounding the student/worker uprising, the May Movement can give us
some insight into how we understand Durrell's second volume, Nunquam.
I have stated elsewhere that Durrell's Revolt is a search for wholeness that
fails (88). I still agree with this, but I felt at that time that the failure was due
to Durrell's lack of imaginative power. Durrell was writing about a period
and a theme that was not close to hi .. artistic vision. I would like to suggest
that The Revolt fails because of Durrell's political ' insight The Revolt, like
the May Movement, failed because it had to fail. Given the new configura-
tion of power, both revolts pointed out the contradictions of post-industrial
society but had lost any real target or means for rebirth. Touraine states:
The real importance of the May Movement rests in the unity that was established
between the questioning ofthe fundamental social and cultural institutions in our
type of society and a truly political struggle. The May Movement was both im-
pressive and a dead end'. (77)
The same thing could be said for Durrell's Revolt.
At the conclusion of Nunquam, Felix, who has now become head of
the firm, has planned a fire where all the contracts of the firm will be
burned. By burning the contracts all forms of human relationship will be
transformed in the conflagration. The model of such a renovation of society
is probably taken from the student revolts, characterised by the fires that
were lit through the Latin Quarter and the subsequent dancing in the streets.
On Christmas eve, in the dead,ofwinter, the rebirth is to begin. Felix states:
I have been working all day and am enormously weary. Benedicta has had fires lit
in the big ballroom where once she shattered all the mirrors. It has been trans-
formed now into rather an elegant room. It is full of flowers. There is some tine
black jazz playing and we have been dancing, dancing in complete happiness and
accord. And we wiII keep on this way, dancing and dancing, even though Rome
bum' (Nunquam 318).
Rather than a celebration of liberty, these fires should be understood
as the cremation ofthe corpse of Western curture - the postmodern is, for
Durrell, as it was for the students (though perhaps neither one knew it) a
IN-BETWEEN 178
postmortem. As Jean Baudrillard makes quite clear in his comments on the
May Movement, 'The barricades of 10 May seemed defensive and to be
defending a territory: the Latin Quarter, the old boutique. But this is not true .
. . . They [the students] were not there to save. the Sorbonne, but to brandish
its cadaver in the face of the others, just as black people in Watts and Detroit
brandished the ruins of their neighbourhoods to which they had themselves
set fire' (151). In Nunquam, Cyrus P. Goytz, 'the best embalmer in the
universe', who trains his students with ghoulish pleasure, represents the
postmodern professor, lecturing on how to retain the simulacra of life in a
body of culture that is already dead and now rotting all too quickly.
The problem with the conclusion of the novel is exactly the problem
that plagued the conclusion of the student revolt. First, while the students
were able to reform the university and the workers were able to gain conces-
sions in wages and work time, they" were unable to destroy the source of
their alienation. The enemy was no particular person, monarch, politician or
capitalist, but technology (communications and computers) itself. Wide-
spread and penetrating into every aspect of human existence, there was no
one to fight and nowhere to go. The post-industrial has gained power since
1968, so that now even third-world nations are tapped into the Internet and
show the wonders of their country on a flat, 17-inch screen. In the same' way,
while the characters of Tunc can rebel and escape for a time, the firm will
track them down. And after Julian's death the firm goes merrily along.
Secondly, there were no individual leaders left to control or direct the rebirth
of civilisation. After the violent days of May, the movement in the student
sphere, led all along by a loose collection of anarchists, socialists, commu-
nists and others of various political stripes, had no clear leaders or direction.
Revolt turned into chaos and then dissipated. While university reforms did
take place, France still remains part of a capitalist global economy - a
member ofG7. In Nunquam, Felix has been operated on and has lost the
piece of his brain where memory is stored; Benedicta, having been broken
sexually, is too weak and fragmented to take over any leadership role. And
Baum expresses his reservations, 'Either everything will disintegrate, the
tirm will begin to dissolve; or else nothing, Mr. Felix, absolutely nothing'
(318).
Given this, let us return to the beautiful spring day of Friday, May 3,
1968. Durrell will come to understand, in part through the events that were
happening in his own adopted country, that the renovation of civilisation
was by that day impossible. He realised the postmodem world was a post-
mortem world, that despite all the resources ofthe firm, Cyrus Goytz could
not make the dead come back to life. In his next series, Durrell thus moved
the pivotal moment in our centlJry from the contemporary world to the days
just after World' War II. Finally he saw that any kind of rebirth required an
individual open response to the forces of Nature rather than a collective
Dum:1I and the Political Unrest: Paris, May 1968 179
defensive response to the violence in the s t r e e ~ In Quinx, t h ~ caves will be
opened in spring, on Friday 13
111
, (possibly April 1945) not in the dead of
winter as in Nunquam.: man is in accord with the natural world around him;
and the private love of Blanford and Constance, who is pregnant, offers
more hope for the generations than the sloganeering of students and the fires
of May. ###
Works Cited
Barnes, Julian. Metroland. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Spiraling Cadaver'. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans.
Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan p, 1994.
Bowker, Gordon. Through the lJark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.
Durrell, Lawrence. 'A Little Oriented Toward the Romantics'. Interview by
Claudine Brelet. Lawrence Durrell.' Conversations. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. Te-
aneck and Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, London: Associated UP, 1998.
125-31.
__ . Nunquam. New York: Penguin, 1979.
__ . Tunc. New York: Pengtiin, 1979.
Jackson, Julian. 'De Gaulle and May 1968'. In De Gaulle and Twentieth Century
France. Ed. Hugh Gough and John Horne. New York: Edward Arnold, 1994.
Kaczvinsky, Donald P. Lawrence Durrell's Major Novels, or The Kingdom of the
Imagination. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, London: Associated UP, 1997.
Macey, David. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Tanner, Henry. 'Paris, Chosen for Talks, Is Proud to Become the Center of the
World Again'. New York Times, (4 May 1968): 3.
__ . 'France at a Doil'. New York Times, (21 May 1968): 17.
'Text of President De Gaulle's Address to the United Nation', New York Times, (25
May 1968): 14. -
Touraine, Alain. The May Movement: Revolt and Reform. Trans. Leonard F. X.
Mayhew. New York: Random House, 1971. ###