Reviews
Carpenter, Luther & Jacobson, Barbara & Kovály, Heda Margolius
POWER SHIFT: THE RISE OF THE SOUTHERN RIM AND ITS CHALLENGE TO THE EASTERN ESTABLISHMENT, by Kirkpatrick Sale. New York: Random House. 310 pp. $12.95 Kirk Sale's hypothesis is that rapid economic...
...the abandonment of social capital in built-up areas...
...Sale's book shows us that the sources of capitalist strength are still the same: control of food and energy, the manipulation of government, and technological innovation...
...Sale's Northeast includes Wisconsin, Illinois, and all points east-the Southern Rim everything south of a line stretching from San Francisco to North Carolina's border with Virginia...
...Yates collects a good bit of widely scattered information into a series of compact summaries...
...The sources or causes of the corruption get lost—and organized crime comes to look as important as oil or defense in the life of the Southern Rim...
...Its "editors" refuse to call it samizdat...
...He has launched his new series, Writers from the Other Europe, with two Czech works of fiction that have won international acclaim in English, German, and French translations but are virtually unknown in America...
...from his deeds to his words...
...Last April, the Secret Police raided the homes of many writers and intellectuals and seized their notes and manuscripts—in the case of philosopher Karel Kosik, the sole copy of several hundred manuscript pages...
...Since the government controls all duplicating equipment, including mimeograph and copy machines, the only way of copying manuscripts is by typing, and so only a few copies can be made...
...Kundera finds nothing mysterious in the workings of the obtuse and vicious machinery that destroys human potential and turns life into an absurd, cynical spectacle...
...the distribution of the fruits of growth...
...242 pp...
...Most readers find it impossible to read modern Czech fiction without thinking of Kafka...
...Flexner adroitly manipulates a scalpel...
...The relationship is dialectical: political power creates new opportunities for growth and profit, and wealth provides access to political favors...
...Sale contends that the Watergate break-in was done in "cowboy" style—paranoid, amoral, aiming at "total victory...
...There also are important differences in perspective...
...But all these people, playing ephemeral, laughable sexual games, try to find in each other the genuine feeling and the reality of a life that their alienated existence cannot provide...
...However, this unfortunate lack of catholicity is also a consequence of her attempt to explain through categorizing, of the concomitant problem of converting cases that do not fit into deviant categories, and of some surprisingly naive comments such as "in the final To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...Translated by Kaca Polackova...
...He attacks them head-on, with scornful irony: when we laugh at a tragedy, it becomes a farce...
...She divides movement ideologies into three types, each differing in terms of focus and strategy for change: (1) the feminist perspective of women-equal-to-men (exemplified in the early years of the women's movement, e.g., Friedan, Bird, NOW, and Cosmopolitan...
...Ludvik Vaculik is one of about a hundred blacklisted writers living in occupied Czechoslovakia...
...They are forbidden to publish, their books have been removed from the public libraries, and their names are never mentioned in literary textbooks or catalogs...
...In Kundera's Laughable Loves the political situation merely provides the backdrop for a series of erotic encounters—sometimes grotesque, sometimes nostalgic and tender...
...This growth makes matters much more difficult for us...
...But despite the excesses of defensespending, it is not clear that this produces disproportionate growth in the Southern Rim as a whole...
...As a result, we can only assume she wishes to argue that, in this new phase of adrogyny, no serious conflicts of social privilege exist...
...The book has not been published in the author's homeland...
...For example, Yates's categories take no notice of either racial or class differences...
...But then Sale sees Gerald Ford as the tool of the Northeastern elite in general and of Rockefeller in particular, and here again Sale overestimates the role of geography and underestimates the role of class and ideology...
...15.00...
...Neal Ascherson has aptly called it "one of the major works of literature produced in postwar Eastern Europe...
...They are seeking to maintain a tenuous legality—insisting that these are not privately published [sam-izdannye] books but simply manuscripts circulating among friends...
...even the dreadful ending has an overtone of tired resignation...
...Much of the recent growth in the Southern Rim simply resulted from the creation of industries and services that had long been established in the rest of the country...
...Their author, Milan Kundera, another eminent Czech writer, is best known in the West for his two political novels, The Joke and Life is Elsewhere...
...and Tadeusz Konwicki's novel, A Dreambook of Our Time...
...In a moment of supreme anguish man and animals meet at the same level, and the animals emerge as more human than the man...
...One good paragraph at the end of the book reminds us that, in the past, earlier waves of capitalists rose, merged with older business strata, and learned to tame their rapaciousness in order to stabilize the system...
...It needs healthy growth...
...Nixon is the symbol of all Sale doesn't like in the Southern Rim...
...The framework is a naively optimistic unilinear theory of change, lacking even the sophistication of Rostow's three stages of economic growth...
...He tries to develop other descriptions: a "cowboy" style in business and politics...
...This theme of substituting sham beliefs for truth and of illusion for reality runs through most of the stories...
...was the style of the Franklin National Bank so different when it tried to break into the inner circle of the New York banks...
...The aggressiveness of the new southern wealth may reinforce the demands of older northern business groups trying to overcome the damage done to them by inflation and the underemployment of their capital...
...The economic side of this growth is more difficult to assess...
...These two books share the theme of the struggle for women's rights but little else...
...The manuscripts are carefully selected to avoid accusations of disseminating "subversive" ideas: they are literary rather than political works, not polemics against the regime...
...Flexner follows the silent and the articulate, the literate and the illiterate...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Yates's limited vision reflects, in part, the movement she wishes to analyze...
...Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press...
...q 220 BOOKS...
...167 pp...
...Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap / Harvard University Press...
...He implies that farm income as a whole is exorbitant, but he does not go into the divisions between corporate farms, family farms, processors and middlemen...
...This form of publication is called Edice Petlice—in English, The Lock and Key Editions might convey the meaning...
...women and men can shift beliefs and behavior when they recognize injustice and intolerance...
...He lists some big processors and distributors with headquarters in the area—Del Monte, Carnation, Sunkist, Tropicana, Safeway—but leaves it to the reader to remember those processors and distributors based elsewhere—such as General Mills, General Foods, Pillsbury, Ralston-Purina, and Kraft...
...But before he can get a glimpse of the truth, he meets his death—as senseless and perplexing as his life...
...Moreover, she is careful with her sources and scholarly in her treatment of them...
...It withdraws resources that could be used to face such problems as the decay of industrial cities and makes it harder for us to get at those resources through the federal government...
...He drowns out his confusion and fears by his absorption in a new hobby—the guinea pigs he has brought home for his children...
...Sale bases his case on six industries: defense, oil, agribusiness, advanced technology, real estate and construction, and leisure...
...yet, it is just as possible that it will not...
...the focus for change of the androgynous perspective is "cultural," the strategy is conversion (by means of cooperation and rationality...
...The shadow of the inexplicable, mysterious menace becomes so unbearable that the clerk, out of curiosity and "sheer helplessness," decides he must get to the bottom of the mysterious circumstances that surround him...
...The elites of the Northeast and of the Southern Rim are not as distinct as he implies...
...And so, while the Prague bookstores display worthless political pamphlets and selected works of long dead and therefore harmless classic authors, contemporary Czech literature is surviving on typed, dog-eared pages, soiled by scores of nervously perspiring palms...
...Century of Struggle (a minimally revised edition of the 1959 classic) surveys the first wave of the movement from 1820-1920...
...An interesting example of the latter is Flexner's treatment of the founding of the first black women's school in 1833 by Prudence Crandall in Canterbury, Connecticut...
...The present typed "catalog" of the Lock and Key Editions includes about 50 volumes of fiction, poetry, and historical, philosophical, and literary essays by 34 authors...
...LUDVIK VACULIK'S NOVEL The Guinea Pigs—now the first book in Philip Roth's series— was also the first work circulated in Czechoslovakia's Lock and Key Editions...
...2) the women's liberationist perspective of women-over-against-men (Millet, Mitchell, Firestone, and Atkinson...
...Should you take a mad world seriously, you yourself would go mad...
...Yet he ends up spending his afternoons in a church, longing for God...
...Yates studies feminist writings and features movement literati...
...In order to endure his ultimate alienation, the protagonist switches his narrative from first to third person, to "detract the attention of the readers...
...Sale means to portray the workers and farmers of the region as victims...
...Up to this point, the geopolitical interpretation seems plausible...
...As a whole, the Southern Rim still lags in income and public services...
...but I feel that it is not a distinct policy issue...
...In the first story, two lovers on a vacation trip decide to play "The Hitchhiking Game": they pretend they are strangers just a driver who casually picks up a hitchhiking girl on the road...
...q 218 BOOKS Heda Margolius Kovaly THE GUINEA PIGS, by Ludvik Vaculik...
...In 1973, a group of authors decided to circulate their manuscripts among each other, their friends, and some blacklisted literary critics—thus lending out their manuscripts to interested persons at their own risk...
...Revised Edition...
...The book doesn't ask how coherent that elite is, whether local elites are bound into a regional elite, whether they have a sense of class interest or try to ruin each other in their rush to the trough...
...She argues that American society is now entering the last stage of androgyny in which significant social changes occur primarily through rationality and cooperation...
...This, however, does not stop the police from seizing the manuscripts whenever they find them or from interrogating and harassing their owners...
...WHAT WOMEN WANT, by Dorothy Graham Yates...
...Many work as night watchmen, garbage collectors, and in similar jobs...
...THE MEANING of what Sale describes is that the capitalist class is being renovated, once again, by new blood and sources of money...
...Yet, an implicit answer to these crucial questions does emerge, and that answer is Richard Nixon...
...Sinister, inexplicable BOOKS 219 happenings threaten to undermine his own life and also the whole structure of the society...
...The taming of that renovated capitalist elite will depend on the growth of popular forces—unions, and truly democratic parties...
...Yates focuses on movement ideologies, Flexner on events, people, and the way these coalesce into issues...
...He uses figures on farm profits and farm size to show the growth of corporate farming nationally, and to demonstrate that the Southern Rim is in the forefront of this process...
...Perhaps we can see both sides best in Sale's treatment of Nixon's resignation...
...His first literary success was the novel The Axe, published in 1966—an insightful, brilliant variation on a familiar theme of the late '60s in Czechoslovakia, the destruction of an ideal, the inevitable clash between integrity and corrupt political power...
...405 pp...
...The Joke appeared in 1967, and the party readily confirmed the author's insight by submitting him to a treatment similar to that meted out to the novel's protagonist...
...If there had been no Kafka, today's Czech writers surely would create his world out of their own everyday experiences...
...One last question remains, which seems to have been in Sale's mind but was never made explicit in the book: is the growth of the Southern Rim a problem for the democratic forces in America...
...Sale's one-sidedness gives his readers a picture that is at odds with the author's underlying populism...
...The Southern Rim's "cowboy" style is not new or unique, and not limited geographically...
...Despite this grim suppression, new works are being written—and read...
...the plentiful favors poured out from him...
...The protagonist, a bank clerk, lives in a world whose familiar outlines dissolve around him...
...THE EDITORS analysis what is true is what we believe...
...This kind of incomplete comparison, occurring throughout the book, builds a serious overstatement and distortion into Sale's hypothesis...
...The game with its playful pretense of make-believe feelings creates a confusion of identities and a destructive eruption of emotions...
...Sale has much of the story, but others will have to study the business class more systematically, make the geographical comparison more explicit, and bring the farmers and workers into the picture...
...The evidence is certainly there, in the familiar stories of C. Arnholt Smith, Howard Hughes, Bebe Rebozo, Roy Ash, Bobby Baker, the Milk Producers' Fund, John Connally, etc...
...It more than deserves the accolades bestowed upon it over the years...
...The focus for change of the feminist perspective is "political," the strategy is pressure...
...The protagonist of the last story, an atheist who is "almost certain that God does not exist," feigns religion only in order to seduce a pious girl...
...the focus for change of the liberationist perspective is "social," the strategy is conflict...
...LAUGHABLE LOVES, by Milan Kundera Translated by Suzanne Rappaport...
...the allocation of capital...
...The serious question in a geopolitical approach is, how much of the fruits of growth stay in the region...
...It strengthens capitalism...
...they are merely different tendencies within the capitalist class...
...3.50...
...Sale doesn't ignore the question, but he doesn't answer it...
...230 pp...
...The South is growing rapidly—but from a low starting point...
...The Joke tells the story of a young man who finds out the hard way that the Party will not condone even the most innocent joke—for the Party bureaucrats are devoid of humor...
...Both Kafka's and Vaculik's tortured visions indeed rise up from the battered flagstones of Prague...
...At the beginning of their trip they are a happy couple, only dimly aware of the insecurities and doubts inherent in their relationship...
...Instead, he approaches the problem geopolitically...
...The revisions here are, however, minimal—a brief preface, a new conclusion, and some few additions to the text...
...Century of Struggle, by contrast, tells the story of the activities of upper-, middle-, and lower-class blacks, whites, affiliated, unaffiliated, men and women as they struggle for women's suffrage and the entrance of women into higher education and labor unions...
...There is a lot of truth in this contention, yet also much simplification...
...But it is not merely Kafka's influence that made the present Czech literature what it is...
...But because he never asks explicitly how little the common people benefit from the growth, he allows southern nonpopulist readers to identify with the people he describes: they may be 216 pirates, but they're our pirates, ripping off the Yankees...
...The Southern Rim's growth, in fact, has been uneven and vulnerable to depression...
...The book lends itself to interminable wrangling about geopolitical chauvinism, and is diverted from the hard questions of the effects of growth...
...Still, they stubbornly refuse to heed the friendly encouragement by the Secret Police to leave the country or else write odes to those who set them free of the freedom to express their views...
...Sale hopes that this renovated capitalist elite will mellow...
...In telling these stories, Sale brings together much of the best investigative journalism of the last 10 years, but there are also some problems in this classic muckraking approach...
...All the ties of self-interest led to him...
...The singular impact of this disturbing tale is enhanced by the narration's gentle, easy, and often cheerful tone...
...Vaculik completed The Guinea Pigs in 1970, a dark time in Czechoslovakia when all ideals were dead and buried and the human condition was an ever deeper descent into degradation...
...Power Shift is not a systematic investigation of the "Rimian" elite...
...It would indeed be unfortunate if it were to become a policy issue, for this would allow the new "Rimian" elite to paint reform as opposed to the whole Southern Rim...
...At night, when his wife and children are asleep, he plays with the guinea pigs—fascinated by these little animals who are even more helpless than he is himself—examines them, experiments with them, and eventually tortures them...
...He argues that even if the profits are creamed off by outside ownership, much income remains in property values, banking, and wages...
...The editor of the Writers from the Other Europe series, Philip Roth, cannot be praised enough for his aim to "bring together outstanding and influential works of fiction by East European writers" and publish them in paperback, making them available to a wide range of readers...
...Yates offers a meat-axe approach to explanation...
...Nor does it go far enough toward the more difficult task of including and interpreting diversities within the women's movement...
...There is no doubt about the southern growth-65 percent of America's population growth between 1970 and 1975...
...Yates examines the ideas of declared feminists, Flexner the significant contributions of the declared and the undeclared...
...One of them is the shotgun effect in which congressmen's connections with mobsters, the Teamsters, banking, oil, and agribusiness all appear in the same paragraph...
...Fortunately, the book comes to more than its shortcomings...
...In the West, Vaculik is probably best known as the author of the 2,000 Word Manifesto signed by the progressive intellectuals during the Czech Spring of 1968...
...3.50...
...And Sale suggests that Nixon drew together the "Rimian" elite...
...Century of Struggle survives both as first-rate historical research and inspirational primer...
...Yates then considers each of these types as progressive stages "along life's way" as well as of the historical development of the movement—they characterize steps in the life of every feminist and three periods in the history of feminism...
...The typescripts are bound between covers, sold to trustworthy readers—and everyone, even the author, has to pay for his copy...
...For Sale, piracy is the essence of the "Rimian" elite...
...As she phrases it...
...Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and most other southern states remain at the bottom in terms of per capita income...
...He does an impressive job on defense, piling up lists of involved contractors and states, citing the technological spin-offs, and showing how the peculiar rules of defense-contracting enable this industry to build up undeveloped areas...
...For the American reader, all these books open up unexplored territory of strange lives and alien beings— among whom he may encounter the most mysterious of strangers—himself...
...suburban sprawl...
...They are the result of unplanned growth: the control of defense and energy policy...
...the Three R's: rightism, racism, and repression...
...when it is all over, the two lovers are left with nothing except disgust and a "sad emptiness...
...What Women Want emphasizes the second wave from 1959-73...
...Kundera's Life is Elsewhere—a novel about a poet who accepts the immorality of the Party as the supreme ethical imperative—won the Prix Medicis of 1973 for the best foreign novel published that year in France...
...In a short time this activity became thoroughly organized, and word from Prague has it that one such copy may reach as many as a hundred readers...
...but these descriptions lead back to his real subject, the connection between political power and economic gain...
...LAUGHABLE LOVES, the second volume in Roth's Writers from the Other Europe series, is a collection of seven stories...
...12.95 Kirk Sale's hypothesis is that rapid economic and population growth has buoyed up the "Southern Rim" of the United States to a point where it competes with the "Northeast...
...10.00...
...This population growth results in new representatives in the Congress and new votes in the Electoral College...
...Philip Roth is adding a new dimension to the American literary scene...
...Set beside almost any book other than Flexner's What Women Want would not look quite so pale...
...And it was perhaps this grim humorlessness that alienated them most from the Czech people...
...Nixon based his strategy on holding the South—and the "Yankee" establishment used the report of that strategy to attack Nixon and his followers...
...The issues posed by the Southern Rim are not regional but national...
...For "God alone is relieved of the distracting obligation of appearing and can merely be.' THE NEXT two books in Philip Roth's series are the works of two Polish authors: the late Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen...
...Both New York: Penguin Books (paperback), Writers from the Other Europe series, Philip Roth, editor...
...Sale's refusal to admit this very low starting point does create the illusion of untold wealth...
...Not only there: the first vohime of the series, Ludvik Vaculik's The Guinea Pigs, despite its author's great popularity, has never been published in his homeland...
...Sale's sketchier treatment of agribusiness shows basic flaws...
...But there is no law forbidding an author from making a copy of his manuscript and giving it to a friend and, so far, there have been no arrests...
...q BOOKS 217 CENTURY OF STRUGGLE, by Eleanor Flexner...
...3) the androgynous perspective of women-and-men-equal-eachother (Rossi, Heilbrun, Ozick, Greer, Janeway...
...What Women Want is, in fact, a compact summary of what upper-middle-class white women in the movement who write about the movement want...
Vol. 23 • April 1976 • No. 2
