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Review of The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin, Princeton University Press, 391 pages, $35

In the memorable words of those other ‘60s hangovers, the Grateful Dead, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” There have been few stranger trips than the intellectual odyssey undertaken by some of the Dead’s contemporaries, as chronicled by Richard Wolin in The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s.

You can’t make this stuff up. It would be difficult to invent Pierre Victor, but then there is no need to, since he reinvented himself so often—as Benny Lévy, and then Jean Tse-toung, in his bizarre metamorphosis from Egyptian-born Maoist leader of the Gauche prolétarienne (Proletarian Left) to Jean-Paul Sartre’s secretary and ultimately Talmudic scholar and Zionist. Victor/Lévy seems to have joined other amanuenses of aging philosophers, such as Ralph Schoenman with Bertrand Russell, in nudging their mentors in ill-advised directions that they might not otherwise have taken. (Although a coauthor rather than a scribe, and close in age, one is tempted to mention Edward Herman’s unfortunate influence on Noam Chomsky in this regard.) But more positively, without endorsing Victor’s intellectual journey, Wolin credits him with reintroducing Sartre to a sense of ethics.

Such ambiguities figure centrally in The Wind from the East, making the book appealingly nuanced and filled with surprises.

In this context, Wolin points out, “Belatedly, the GP militants realized that political murder in the name of left-wing cause was no better than political murder in the name of a right-wing cause. . . . This was one of the points that the [1972] Munich Olympic massacre had driven home. Suddenly, the fashionable Maoist slogan ’Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ assumed an entirely new and sinister meaning.” Among the erstwhile Maoists, Wolin writes that by the midseventies, “Nearly everyone had become a Camusian, championing the priority of ethics over politics.”

And this is what lends substance to the otherwise risible, if illisible (unreadable), episode in French intellectual history that Wolin puts in perspective. While the fever raged, however, just how did these impenetrable writers, who in the case of the journal Tel Quel actually gloried in being illisible, relate to the simplicities of Mao Zedong’s (Mao Tse Tung’s) “Little Red Book”? Why, for several years, did they fall in love with Mao, the Gang of Four and the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution?

A fly on the wall might have found the 1974 visit of the Tel Quel team to Beijing somewhat unreadable in its own right. Their conversations must have been mystifying in their mutual miscomprehension. One of the group’s leading lights, Julia Kristeva, coming from Bulgaria, the most rigidly orthodox Warsaw Pact state, had fewer excuses than her comrades-in-pilgrimage, since her experience should have taught her that the elliptical formulations of their Chinese interlocutors were not just some literary trope but a product of the tangible fear of cadres caught up in a power struggle in which the rapidly changing line and mysteriously inventive slogans had more to do with settling scores than establishing the finer points of semiotics.

With admirable self-restraint, Wolin does not guffaw as he recounts Kristeva’s equation, in About Chinese Women, of ancient Chinese foot binding with male circumcision, in secretly conferring “superior political and symbolic knowledge.”

Perhaps some confession is in order: I was a teenage Maoist, and several years before the “Long March” of Tel Quel, I voyaged to Beijing, where I met Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai) and the Gang of Four. During a New Year’s Eve dinner, I had the temerity to argue with Jiang Qing (Chiang Ch’ing), Mao’s third wife and the intellectual fountainhead of the Cultural Revolution. She declared that the only two proletarian English novels were Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Even in my callow youth, I was aware that with her marriage to Mao, there was more than a hint of identification with Jane Eyre and decided it was best not to go there, but I could not resist pointing out that the hero of Hard Times was a scab, a strikebreaker. Her response was, “Your hair is too long.”

This was the woman who ran the cultural aspects of the Cultural Revolution so admired by the philosophes back in Paris. She ruthlessly directed China’s cultural life and authorized the half dozen or so Beijing operas, which were the only stage or screen works allowed—not to mention the aria from the opera The Red Lantern allowed on the one “proletarian piano.” I must confess that I had my doubts about the project at the time. One can only hope that the Tel Quel team did too, or that Jean-Luc Godard noted some cultural dissonance between the The Red Lantern and his own oeuvre, notably his 1967 film La Chinoise, which Wolin characterizes as “an alternately whimsical and propagandistic attempt to fathom the wave of Sinophilia cresting in Paris that year.”

Yet it was not all as self-evidently absurd as it might appear in retrospect. The transient Western Maoists of the time shared a dissatisfaction with the capitalist system and growing evidence that the Communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact were not the answer. China was presented as a model of popular mobilization, of antibureaucratic socialism. This was the sixties: “Bombard the headquarters!” was a seductive slogan for young people, not least the ossified French social system that Wolin describes in the book’s second chapter, “France During the 1960s.”