The Unknown Citizen by W H Auden

What if your entire life was summed up as a bunch of numbers and statistics?

Chillingly cold and ruthlessly impersonal- your life in numbers. Your social security number, your bank account, your insurance card, your credit score, your Internet browsing history and purchase history. How would you like it if I choose to interpret your life solely on those terms alone?

Worse still, what if the powers that be decide that you are the sum of your numbers? Where would you be? How would you summon your sense of self? What story will you tell about yourself that would capture the essence of you?

The Unknown Citizen is a poem by W H Auden which explores this concept where nameless entities define your life on paper. An unknown citizen had died and the government tries to describe his life but all it has to go on are reports and statistics on him. What the government finds is information indicating a fairly average life: colorless and bland and therefore according to the bureaucratic opinion, satisfactory.

The citizen in question had never had any complaints flied against him. He was an average worker in a auto factory run by Fudge Motors Inc, who was a loyal member of the the right kind of union. Social workers report that he was popular among his friends and he read the paper regularly. He was insured and had made purchases of modern gadgets based on installment. He held the right kind of opinions- adhering to social consensus- a man disposed to peace who went to war when society demanded he should. He had five children by marriage which was the acceptable number by government standards and he left the education of his children to the safe hands of the school system. He did have to go to the hospital once but he was cured of his ailment

As far as the state of his mind was concerned, the government report concludes that such speculation is fruitless. If anything was wrong with him or if he had felt differently, they would have certainly known about it.

The last two lines have a creepy 1984 tinge to it- which in fact can be said about the entire poem. Written in 1939 Auden carefully and deliberately captures the dehumanization process of paper work that reduces humans to mere abstract constructs based on numbers and robs them entirely of their individuality. A pre-war piece, this poem captures the coming horror show that a rigidly bureaucratic state would be capable of unleashing. When humans are reduced to numbers, it is easier to subtract them from the collective society.

One could make the argument that our lives have turned worse than Auden could ever imagine. Based on market research done on the population, private companies target the average Joe. There is a lot of paperwork and information generated in the world of business, a world based on profit rather than legal power, where our existence is based on paper or computer data base. We have reached a point in our collective existence where the existence of a person without paper work would render them illegal. Can you believe that? Existence can be defined as illegal.

The first time I ever heard of Auden was when I was barely fourteen, watching the funeral scene from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. I was so moved by the Funeral Blues (“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”) that I went to look for more poems by him. Just by his subtle and yet powerful economy of expression he had made it in to my mind as one the greatest poets I had ever come across.

What really got to me was the sheer political nature of his poetry. He was a man of time and he was politically conscious and active. He was one of the good guys and it shows in the sentiments that he expressed in his poems. He was never afraid of speaking his mind and being a poet did a much better job than the most.

But he did not entertain his politics at the expense of his conscience or the art f his poems. His prosody if made devoid of political context, would still be considered as great literary pieces. If you couple them with his political views, they pack a punch that has had more effects on the mind than a thousand manifestos.

I can only express regret about the fact that, I don't read Auden often enough.