For a reader of texts by people who've passed through the New School which we're assembling for the Fall's incoming class, I've been looking at Anatole Broyard's Kafka was the rage: A Greenwich Village memoir, recommended by our dean. Broyard, who went on to become a book reviewer for the New York Times, attended the New School in the immediate postwar years on the GI Bill, and had a rollicking time. It's great fun to read his description of the school:
Like the Village itself, the New School was at its best in 1946. After a war, civilization feels like a luxury, and people went to the New School the way you go to a party, almost like going abroad. Education was chic and sexy in those days. ...
The people in the lobby of the New School were excited, expectant, dressed to the teeth. They struck poses, examined one another with approval. They had a blind date with culture, and anything could happen. Young, attractive, hip, they were the best Americans. For local color, there was a sprinkling of bohemians and young men just out of the service who were still wearing their khakis and fatigues... (14-15)
The professoriate he describes was defined by the Germans, Jewish and non-Jewish, whom the University in Exile had saved from Nazism:
Because they were displaced themselves, or angry with us for failing to understand history, the professors did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country. ...
All the courses I took were about what's wrong: what's wrong with our government, with the family, with interpersonal relations and intrapersonal relations - what's wrong with our dreams, our loves, our jobs, our perceptions and conceptions, our esthetics, the human condition itself.
They were furious, the professors, at the ugly turn the world had taken ... The building resounded with gutteral cries: kunstwissenschaft, zeitgeist and weltanschauung, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, schadenfreude, schwarmerei. Their accents were so impenetrable that some of them seemed to speak in tongues and the students understood hardly a word. (15)
Broyard describes himself as the complete opposite to these exiles, internal and external.
The tragedy - and the comedy - of my story was that I took American life to heart with a kind of strenuous and ardent sincerity that young men usually bring to love affairs. While some of my contemporaries made a great show of political commitment, it seems to me that their politicizing of experience abstracted them from the ordinary, from the texture of things. They saw only a Platonic idea of American life. To use one of their favorite words, they were alienated. I was not. In fact, one of my problems was that I was alienated from alienation, an insider among outsiders. (viii)
This read well in 1989, when he wrote it (he died in 1990 and the book was published in 1993), but the words with which he ends the "Prefatory Remarks" where they appear seem to point to something else: There is a sociology concealed in the book, just as a body is concealed in its clothes. (ix)
Well, since Henry Louis Gates' 1996 New Yorker article, "The Passing of Anatole Broyard," we know about that sociology, and the "depoliticization" and the "alienation from alienation" have a monstrous and painful aftertaste. It turns out that Broyard was a light-skinned African American who passed for most of his life as white - even his children did not find out until after his death. Reading this book with that in mind is a disturbing experience. "Examined with approval"? "Blind date"? "Local color"? Without the "sociology concealed," the sentence "I was not" seems not merely to be saying "I was not [alienated]" but also just what the three words say: "I was not."
The immediate question: do we include some of Kafka was the Rage in our reader? And do we include at least a reference to Gates' discovery?
