E.P. Thompson's The Sykaos Papers

...Among other things, it is a serious exploration of the deep structures in human culture and a critique of the abuse of structural analysis by historians and anthropologists...

...The Oitarians are literally a programmed people, directed by computer, ritually acting out their roles according to fixed and predictable rules, "a structuralist's [or a totalitarian's] paradise...

...And his own society, as Sage discovers, is not without its good points, nor without stresses and contradictions...

...The Sykotics (humans) are helplessly locked in their East-West opposition, racing toward destruction...

...In retrospect, then, The Sykaos Papers will read as somewhat dated, even a little cranky in its depiction of the cold war antagonism...

...Here he becomes a pawn in a cold war power struggle, typical of an irrational race whose belief in "free will" permits such pointless conflicts...

...In the peculiar historical circumstances of the post–Second World War period, bonding by exclusion has developed a runaway inertia, and the cold war became "the central human fracture, the absolute pole of power" in the postwar world...

...Thompson writes of the Sykaos-Oitar confrontation, unlike some of his other oppositions, with subtlety and sympathy and, in charting the process by which Sage and Oi Paz grow toward each other, with powerful emotion as well...

...One wonders why Thompson has made the attempt...

...But the book can be read differently...

...For what common fund of culture is now being drawn upon to dismantle the Iron Curtain...

...the military men, especially the Americans, are appalling philistines...

...Oitarian nature cannot be totally programmed any more than humans can completely escape the programs of their cultures and power structures...

...Nor is Oi Paz a hopeless case...

...It may be that by posing this question Thompson is tackling a criticism of his writings on exterminism, one explicitly raised by Mike Davis of New Left Review...

...Sage is, as an anthropologist, virtually a boundary-crosser by profession, and she is a woman in a man's world, a civilian drafted by the military, an Englishwoman poised between America and Russia...

...But Thompson is too subtle a 410 • DISSENT Books thinker—and too sophisticated a student of binary oppositions—to leave it at that...

...But the Oitarians are coming to rescue Oi Paz...

...Men misunderstand women...

...The fear or threat of the Other," he wrote in Beyond the Cold War, "is grounded upon a profound and universal human need...

...How could this boundary possibly be crossed...

...The forces playing the most obvious role in the revolution in the East—internal contradictions of communism, reform from above—don't fit well in Thompson's intellectual schema...

...B]onding by exclusion is intrinsic to human socialization...

...Almost all of the working-class characters are thoroughly decent and humane...

...Reading The Sykaos Papers for its anthropological content makes one take the parable too seriously and judge it harshly...

...And in the confrontation between Sykaos and Oitar the situation appears doubly grim...

...The apparent one-sided implosion of the cold war now also casts doubt on the utility of Thompson's thought-experiment, the positing of an extreme opposition to be bridged by a kind of SUMMER • 1990 • 411 Books superhumanism...

...On the superficial level, The Sykaos Papers is an imaginative playing out of that scenario...

...She is also a bit of a dreamer and a rebel, who strains against "the binary trap which seems to block and limit human thought...

...These writings have been filled with a despondency, a fatalism that sits uneasily with the work of the social historian committed to human agency as a motor of history...

...He proves a penetrating observer and critic of human rituals...

...The book is stuffed full of these oppositions, each one a study in the difficulties of communication, but crisscrossing the human terrain so that no single dualism tyrannizes over the complexity of real-world experience...

...Where are the pan-European movements Thompson thought necessary to break down the East-West divide...

...a mysterious thread, for instance, links Sykotic and Oitarian poetry, myth and legend—a necessary symbolic solution to the symbolic problem of the binary opposition...

...We cannot expect to have the good fortune of having our planet invaded . . . by some monsters from outer space, who would at last bond all humanity against an outer Other," warned Thompson in Beyond the Cold War...

...But these are sideshows, and the main event more than compensates...

...In methodological writings, he has urged historians to take more seriously the dense and complex meanings of the symbolic world, without embracing too heartily the deterministic and static qualities of anthropologists' structural analyses...

...How much credit can we extend even to the international youth culture to which Thompson has pointed as carrying enough symbolic weight to fracture the cold war deadlock...

...As a seminal figure in the early New Left, he polemicized for a Marxist humanism against the superstructuralist Althusserians who came to predominate in the theoretical discussions of the later sixties...

...if you read it as parable you will have no patience for the lectures...

...Here is the binary opposition in its most extreme form: human vs...

...His politics have been about crossing class boundaries—in early career, as a middle-class Communist and as a Workers Educational Association tutor—and about striving for the classless society...

...This crude plot summary of The Sykaos Papers— the first novel by Edward Thompson, social historian and eloquent voice for nuclear disarmament— is not very promising, either as parable or as science fiction, and on these grounds it has been dismissed by some critics on this side of the Atlantic...

...The encounter between Sage and Oi Paz is good ethnography and good fiction, and it carries the reader to the book's several climaxes, to its unclichdd resolution of the question whether humanity will unite against the alien, and to an arresting coda in which the book's underlying themes clearly shine through the parable...

...Dickens, who addressed similar themes in Hard Times, dispensed with analysis...

...Having thus engaged our feelings as well as our intellect, the book succeeds in its later stages far better than in earlier sections...

...Though here Thompson is stressing that a structural analysis must not blind the analyst to power imbalances and moral values—must not render us incapable of taking sides—nevertheless, by so blatantly disregarding his own injunction to consider the intricate ways in which both sides of an opposition define themselves against the Other, he sacrifices most of the intellectual justification for these cardboard characterizations...

...The Oitarian word for Earth is "Sykaos," and the meanings of this coinage are not difficult to decode...

...The bulk of the book is occupied with a detailed narrative, viewed fully and ingeniously from both sides, of the encounter between the alien, Oi Paz, and the anthropologist, Helena Sage, recruited by NATO to study him in a secured compound in rural England...

...But it is difficult, mixing these two discourses, Swiftian parable and intellectual exercise...

...race and nationality divide even comrades...

...The issues of how such oppositions arise, how the delicate boundary areas between them are treated, how the boundaries are crossed and the oppositions broken down or reformulated—these issues weave through all of Thompson's writings of the last twenty years...

...Thompson has responded to the charge of determinism by showing how even the most extreme opposition can be bridged...

...the military cuts itself off from civilians, and even within the army Officers can't communicate with Other Ranks...

...His remedy is to cross the boundary: to re-create, through internationalism, a common culture of humanity...

...Thompson undermines the complexity of this scheme by depicting some of these struggles in an embarrassingly one-sided or schematic fashion...

...More recently, in his writings on the cold war and the culture of East-West deadlock he calls "exterminism," he has propounded a quite orthodox structural analysis of his own...

...the upper classes snicker uncomprehendingly at working-class rituals...

...That theme does not date...

...There is a clever twist, too, in the hints dropped that the two peoples do after all have some common fund of culture...

...Thompson takes from social anthropology the central idea of the book, that the mental world of humans is structured by certain fundamental "binary oppositions," pairings that begin with physically determined traits (left/right, male/female) and develop into complicated cultural constructions (raw/ cooked, sacred/profane...

...When he has a man actually chase a woman around a table, he cannot retrieve the scene by observing that "the situation was stripped down to its primitive mythic fundaments, old goatish satyr pursuing nymph...

...But this depiction is not, after all, its central feature...

...As his own work has best illustrated, history provides us with far more credible stories of human agents struggling against oppressive structures...

...Will the threat from without bring humanity together and usher in a new era of planetary harmony...

...He is a poet and thus rather more imaginative than the average Oitarian...

...In his social history, he has been preoccupied with the question of how the estranged "plebeian" and "patrician" worlds of eighteenth-century England could develop within a supposedly common culture and then harden into the quite distinct cultures of class society in the nineteenth century...

...what the book will be read and enjoyed for is, rather, a creative restatement of that consistent theme in Thompson's lifework, the power of human imagination to create new worlds within and against the limiting and oppressive structures of authority and conformity...

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