Sanctimony and Resistance

Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll is based on the arguments between Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera concerning the way Czech intellectuals should pursue resistance to Soviet domination. One exchange in the play draws on a letter that Havel circulated asking Gustav Huzak to release Milan Hubl and others who were jailed for disseminating “provocative printed matter.” Kundera objected to the letter on the grounds that it was “moral exhibitionism” and “playacting.” Havel later admitted as much.

Writing about Stoppard’s playin the Weekly Standard , Michael Weiss gives a different angle:

“what Kundera [and Stoppard’s Kundera character Jan] neglected to address was how buoyed political prisoners were by mere ‘playacting.’ It ‘helped renew the broke solidarity’ and ‘marked the beginning of a process in which people’s civic backbone began to straighten again.’ Sanctimony and amour propre are permissible vices if they inspire confidence in the luckless victims of ideology.”

Stoppard’s play also depicts the crucial role of adolescent indifference and apathy in undermining tyranny. In one speech, Jan notes that Ivan Jirous had been jailed for having long hair, and attributes the police respond to fear: “He’s frightened by indifference. Jirous doesn’t care . He doesn’t care enough even to cut his hair. The policeman isn’t frightened by dissidents ! Why should he be? Police love dissidents, like the inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith . . . . But [the rock group] the Plastics don’t care at all. They’re unbribable. They’re coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics. They’re pagans.”

Stoppard himself says that his story is about how “in the logic of Communism, what the band wasn’t interest in and what the band wanted could not in the end be separated.”