Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski
In this gentle novel, our narrator Ludwik recalls the summer he met Janusz. The heat of their love was almost strong enough to eclipse the complications of their lives during the final years of Polish communism. The men share a few oneiric days on a lakeside somewhere in eastern Poland. Janusz imagines ghosting the wealthy young woman who has been his meal ticket; Ludwik dreams about freedom. When they return to Warsaw to begin their lives post-graduation, things ultimately fall apart.
While I read Swimming In The Dark, Losing at the Starting Line – Wang Xiuying on Chinese education kept coming to mind, especially the following passage:
The problem as Xi sees it is that the universities produced too many liberals and humanists. Egypt is the worst case scenario: an inflated higher education system with too many humanities graduates leading to endless protests and revolutions. Plenty of talkers, no doers. In April, a report by the People’s Bank of China stated that East Asian countries were falling into the ‘middle-income trap’ because of the preponderance of liberal arts students[…] My humanist friends take solace in the fact that we are not at war: the Japanese Kamikaze Death Squad sent ‘useless’ arts students on suicide missions in the Second World War.
If we pare back this novel’s lakeside moments where love comes close to conquering all and the political backdrop of communism’s terminal years, a disgruntled Arts graduate lies at the heart of the story. The events in Swimming In The Dark take place shortly after the main character, Ludwik, graduates with a Humanities degree, without any real plan and no desire to teach. The existential malaise of an Arts graduate without a strong vocational inclination is not unique to communist societies: having grown up on the opposite end of Europe, in a heavily capitalist society two decades after Ludwig, I faced similar prospects.
On a sentence, paragraph, and scene level, I enjoyed this book. Jedrowski is a skilled writer. However well Jedrowski renders aspects of Polish life and culture, I felt a strong sense that in reading this book, I was eating from the garbage can of ideology.
From early in the story, out on the oneiric lakeside, Ludwik speaks of freedom. The freedom that Ludwik alludes to escaped me as a reader. While the book trots out the scenes of people queuing all day for basic amenities that we all know to associate with the collapse of communism, when Ludwik speaks of freedom, he seems to be speaking about something else. He rejects the idea of becoming a teacher because of the low pay and need to swallow the Party line, but teaching is notoriously underpaid and undervalued in capitalist societies too. He wants to live out and proud as a gay man in the 1980s and seems to allude to communism as the obstacle. In the USA, outside of a few enclaves in a few of the larger cities, homosexuality was just as frowned upon. In many Western liberal democracies, AIDS affected large percentages of the gay communities and their governments left them to die during these years. In Ireland, homosexuality remained illegal up until 1993. The desire of an Arts graduate without any familial connections to live a middle-class and openly queer life in his country’s capital is not unique, easily solved, and certainly not one I would associate with communism. If this book were set in modern day Poland, in which the totalitarianism of communist rule has now been replaced with the totalitarianism of free-market capitalism, a conservative government and the Catholic church, I would find the struggles of Ludwik more real. When Poland joined the European Union, it did so on the promise of capitalist wealth and liberal values, which do not look like they’ve been delivered in equal measures.
We see key characters try to install themselves in the working world. Our narrator makes half-hearted attempts to enroll in a postgraduate programme he has no real interest in. His friend Karolina ends up in some menial position. Ludwik’s lover Janusz is the most successful, getting a job in the office of press control and having no qualms about it. Those who are from wealthier families have better prospects. I have no doubt that this is a relatively accurate portrayal of postgraduate life in communist Poland, but is this different under any other regime? In the US, where Ludwik eventually flees to, would a working class southern youth like Janusz ever manage to enter into a large university in the country’s capital?
The book begins and ends in Ludwik’s self-imposed exile in Chicago, where people ask how are you but don’t care about the answer and the bread is suspiciously soft. Ludwik lives alone, works in an office, and watches Poland collapse from afar. If the character of Ludwik would still live today, he would still be watching Poland fall apart, but without the salacious US media coverage. In the closing pages of the book, we get the sense that life in the US fails to deliver the freedom Ludwik sought. Delusion is the closest thing to freedom Americans can find.
As well as changes in its physical location, Poland has experienced unprecedented shifts in its demographic and political ideology in the last century. Its problems grow more acute with every passing day. While I enjoyed this novel’s tour of Warsaw and quiet acknowledgements of those hidden queers who carried the cultural torch throughout turbulent times, pointing the finger towards communism as the source of all ills strikes a bum note. 32 years after the fall of communism, Poland is not the bastion of LGBT rights you’d imagine.
The question that lingers within me in the days after I finished this book is: if this were a queer love story with a positive framing of the social fabric they enjoyed under communism, could it have been published? Was it so necessary to denounce a failed system for another failed system to feel good about itself?