8. W. H. Auden

Passivity and Bureaucracy in "The Unknown Citizen"

1. Introduction

The poem I chose for my eighth paper is my favourite from the lot. It can still be applied to modern society as bureaucracy has grown greatly since the year Auden wrote this poem. "The Unknown Citizen" feels like anti-poetry, it’s not personal and diminishes people to a bunch of numbers and letters, to faceless beings that make the big machine work. It feels lazy, like a shallow and depthless attempt to leave a footprint, just like the society of that time.

2. About the Poet

Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February 21, 1907, in York, England. His father was a doctor and his mother a nurse, so that made young Auden become interested in science. He discovered his vocation as a poet in 1922, when the artist and friend Robert Medley encouraged him to write poetry. He entered Christ Church College in Oxford in 1925, where he discovered modernist poetry and meet other writers like C. D. Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, who would later be called the "Oxford Group" or the "Auden Generation".

The novelist Christopher Isherwood was since 1925 his literary mentor. Under his guidance his writing improved and his first book, "Poems", was accepted by T.S. Eliot’s editorial, Faber and Faber, and published in 1930. After a brief trip to Germany, which was still a liberal democracy, Auden worked as a lecturer, essayist and reviewer. He married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, a lesbian actress and writer, so that she could get a British passport and leave Germany. In 1937 he travelled to Spain to take part in the Civil War as an ambulance driver, but he was appointed as a propagandist instead. He wrote several poems of his experience such as "Spain 1937".

Auden and Isherwood moved to America right before World War II broke out, but he continued to write about war. His poetry collection of 1940, called "Another Time", includes his most famous works: "Musée des Beaux Arts", "The Unknown Citizen" and "September 1, 1939". It also contains poems influenced by psychoanalysis such as "In Memory of Sigmund Freud".

He became a U.S. citizen in 1946 and remained there for several years working as a teacher. He often travelled to Germany and Austria once the war had ended. In 1948 his poem "The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue" earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Before returning to England he met the poet and translator Chester Kallman, with whom he fell in love and with whom he lived until his death in 1973. Together, they translated opera libretti like "The Magic Flute" or "Don Giovanni", and Auden also helped him write original libretti like "The Rake’s Progress". From 1956 to 1961 he worked as a lecturer at Oxford and other places, and also as a journalist for The New Yorker and other magazines. He died in 1973 in Vienna, Austria.

3. Modern Passivity and Bureaucracy

There were many important events in the late 30s and early 40s that influenced Auden’s political poetry and political views: the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the growth of bureaucracy in America.

The first half of the 20th century was marked by political conflicts between communist, liberal democratic and fascist regimes. The Spanish Civil War, in which Auden had participated even if briefly, resulted in the victory of fascism over democracy — the victory of collectivism over individualism.

Germany too saw Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Blaming the Socialists, Bolsheviks and Jews for the country’s declining situation after World War I, the Nazi Party obtained enough votes for Hitler to become the Chancellor of Germany. After series of political maneuvers that involved persuasive propaganda and the assassination of most political opponents, Hitler appointed himself as the Führer. Afterwards, he violated all of the pacts signed after World War I and began to invade surrounding countries with his recently restored army. Knowing that Hitler wouldn’t stop, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, and soon most European countries joined the war. The main Axis powers were Germany, Japan and Italy, while the Allies included Great Britain, France, China and other minor powers. Russia was on Germany’s side at the beginning but joined the Allies when she was attacked by Hitler. The United States supplied the allies with countless war materials via the Lend-Lease program in exchange for opening military bases in their land. As in World War I, they remained neutral but sided with the allies later on.

Auden arrived in the United States in 1939 and wrote "The Unknown Citizen" the following year, when the country was still neutral. The United States had refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which established the League of Nations, and they grew isolated from Europe. Four years after the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent Great Depression, president Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, a series of economic programs by which the government was able to intervene to restore economy. This program made necessary the creation of governmental institutions that regulated society such as the Social Security Act (SSA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA) or the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The country became a bureaucracy and one of the first modern welfare states. Due to this economic interventionism that would favor the greater community, individual traits were suppressed and citizens became a series of statistics that guaranteed the system’s progression. Those citizens were homogenized by authorities so that they transformed into a malleable, consumer mass that ensured economic growth.

4. Style

This poem is dedicated to the memory of a dead person so it falls into the category of an eulogy; however, the text doesn’t talk about the virtues of the deceased person as it should be expected from an eulogic work. Instead, it praises the person’s submission to authority, and that authority is the one writing the poem. In this way, the poem could be considered a satirical eulogy.

The poem has twenty-nine lines without a regular meter; but the one that appears the most is anapest followed by iambic feet:

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: 28

When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. 24

The rhymes match the simplicity of the life of this normal man ("complaint" and "saint", "population" and "generation") but their scheme grows intertwined by the end of the poem (ababaccdeeffdgghhijjikmknnnoo).

The language is ordinary as well and centers around the semantic field of everyday acts ("worked", "heard", "bought") and general objects ("drink", "paper", "car"). Bureaucratic words appear quite often: "Social Psychology", "Producers Research", "High-Grade Living". Those are certainly not the type of words normally found on eulogies, but because this is a satire, words of admiration and praise have been substituted by cold, shallow concepts.

5. Summary

A U.S. anonymous citizen has died and the State erects him a monument and writes a poem about his virtues, which are in summary accepting the government’s authority and leading a very normal and compliant life. The government doesn’t know him as an individual and needs to consult his statistical data to write the poem.

6. Analysis

The poem’s epigraph is a parody of the tombs erected in memory of the unknown soldiers that died in World War I and whose remains couldn’t be identified. The inscription on these tombs shows words of praise towards the brave soldiers who died in the battlefield and whose identities remain unknown. In the same way that the State erects a monument to commemorate someone they don’t know, this poem commemorates someone they did know, but only as a sequence of letters and numbers — "JS/07 M 378". As with the unknown soldiers, the State knew about his existence but not about the individual.

Now the government’s opinion of this citizen begins. An anonymous government employee looks up the data collected by several administrative institutes and praises his lack of wrongdoing. Never referring to him by his name, a governmental institution called "Bureau of Statistics" found "no official complaint" against him (1-2). Moreover, the reports on the conduct of this citizen agree that "in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint" (4). Being a saint in the old-fashioned sense of the word meant leading an upright life based on one’s moral beliefs in spite of the adversities that came from the ruling side. However, being a "saint" in the modern sense of the word meant to lead a life based on the rules imposed by the ruling side to the detriment of your own moral criteria. Everything this citizen did, it was to "serve the Greater Community" (5), like old-fashioned saints did, but this time to serve what authorities considered the controlled and submissive mass.

This citizen worked in a car factory for a company called "Fudge Motors Inc.", probably a parody of Ford Motors. "Inc." is short for "Incorporation" or "Incorporated" and its presence on a company’s name is a sign of power. This company has reports on the citizen as well: "he never got fired" and "satisfied his employers" (7-8). He wasn’t a member of any subversive labor union and his beliefs weren’t revolutionary, he wasn’t a "scab or odd" (9) and didn’t threaten the company’s stability. His Union was one that respected the government’s authority, and the citizen "paid his dues" (10) accordingly.

Now it’s the turn for "Social Psychology workers" (12): this anonymous citizen "was popular with his mates and liked a drink" (13). His social life was good and he consumed alcohol in small quantities. He also contributed to the State’s economy by purchasing a paper every day, the "Press" say, and his reactions to advertisements met the expectations of the current consumer society (14-15).

Another institution says that "he was fully insured" and that he only went to the hospital once. His policies and his Health-card tell that his balance was positive — he gave more than he took (16-17). He was also "fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan", according to "both Producers Research and High-Grade Living" (18-19); he had taken the bait and purchased things he couldn’t afford at the moment. He probably used it to buy a "phonograph", a "radio", a "car" and a "frigidaire", everything "necessary to the Modern Man" as reported by the State (20-21). Besides dictating which products were "necessary", the State also regulated "proper opinions", which this citizen shared and that made "researchers into Public Opinion" "content" (23-24).

Even his intimate life has been reported: "he was married and added five children to the population", which was the normal number according to their "Eugenist" (25-26). Once again, his children aren’t treated as persons, he didn’t have children, he "added them to the population", that is, he contributed with five new submissive citizens because "he never interfered with their education", which he left in hands of the government’s "teachers" (27).

The citizen is at least treated as an individual and not as a collection of data in the last two lines. The worker asks, "Was he free? Was he happy?" but those questions don’t refer to the old-fashioned concepts of "free" and "happy" because the worker answers that "the question is absurd: / had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard" (28-29). Being happy and free in the modern sense of the word meant being a model citizen.

7. Conclusion

"The Unknown Citizen" follows the line of other dystopian works such as George Orwell’s "1984" and Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World". Their criticism of social passivity reminds us of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s criticism of the superficiality of the Industrial society discussed in the second paper. U.S. citizens were so oblivious to their surroundings that most of them became aware of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis only after the war had ended.