Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

 
An interesting discussion of the controversy around the Austrian author Peter Handke's views on Serbian nationalism:

"Like Heidegger, Handke now claimed he wanted to awaken in his readers a new sense of "the mystery of being." To that end, he had his fictional creations travel to places in which new perceptions of exterior reality would enable them to surpass rational thinking and engage directly with objects themselves rather than the preconceived notions of them induced by language. His characters are finally able to achieve moments of happiness, but only in an irrational way as they sink below the threshold of mind and participate, if only for a moment, in the unfolding processes of life.

For the first two decades of his writing career, Slovenia, in Handke’s mind, symbolized everything Austria wasn’t: it, together with the rest of Yugoslavia, stood outside the Western free-market system in something of a preconsumerist idyll. Moreover, it was, in his view, a self-enclosed world of peasants and artisans who were "at one" with the land, where language counted for little and what it did count for was still "pure" and retained an exact fit to the surrounding reality.

But all this changed in 1991 when Slovenia, followed in rapid succession by Croatia and Bosnia, gained independence and sought greater ties to the European Union. Handke was outraged over the destruction of his utopian fantasy, which he wrote about in a book called, appropriately enough, The Dreamer’s Farewell (1991). Predictably, he laid the blame for his disappointment on those countries, including his native Austria, that had supported independence for the former Yugoslavian provinces.

As war intensified in the Balkans in the 1990s, Handke devoted more and more of his energies to speaking out about the conflict. He employed arguments similar to those being made on the far left that what was occurring in Yugoslavia was, in Handke’s words, "a civil war, unleashed or at least co-produced by European bad faith" and that Europe and the United States had decided to carve up Yugoslavia to fill the coffers of their bankers and industrialists."


As an argument, this runs into problems by conflating the question of the political with the aesthetics. Having already dismissed Handke's politics, the author feels that he must reinforce his case by doing the same with his aesthetics, consequently arguing that Handke's dwelling on the mechnical nature of the minutiae of existence represents a betrayal of writing. This seems a rather unjustified addition of the polemic but, nonetheless, the idea that certain apparently apolitical aesthetics so entail political commitments is an interesting one. The most famous exposition of this argument is Susan Sontag's Fascinating Fascism:

"Riefenstahl's particular slant is revealed by her choice of this tribe and not another: a people she describes as acutely artistic (everyone owns a lyre) and beautiful (Nuba men, Riefenstahl notes, "have an athletic build rare in any other African tribe") ; endowed as they are with "a much stronger sense of spiritual and religious relations than of worldly and material matters," their principal activity, she insists, is ceremonial. The Last of the Nuba is about a primitivist ideal: a portrait of a people subsisting in a pure harmony with their environment, untouched by "civilization."

All four of Riefenstahl's commissioned Nazi films—whether about Party congresses, the Wehrmacht, or athletes—celebrate the rebirth of the body and of community, mediated through the worship of an irresistible leader. They follow directly from the films of Fanck in which she starred and her own The Blue Light. The Alpine fictions are tales of longing for high places, of the challenge and ordeal of the elemental, the primitive; they are about the vertigo before power, symbolized by the majesty and beauty of mountains. The Nazi films are epics of achieved community, in which everyday reality is transcended through ecstatic self-control and submission; they are about the triumph of power. And The Last of the Nuba, an elegy for the soon-to-be extinguished beauty and mystic powers of primitives whom Riefenstahl calls "her adopted people," is the third in her triptych of fascist visuals...

Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl's portrait of them evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical. A principal accusation against the Jews within Nazi Germany was that they were urban, intellectual, bearers of a destructive corrupting "critical spirit." The book bonfire of May 1933 was launched with Goebbels's cry: "The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit." And when Goebbels officially forbade art criticism in November 1936, it was for having "typically Jewish traits of character": putting the head over the heart, the individual over the community, intellect over feeling. In the transformed thematics of latter-day fascism, the Jews no longer play the role of defiler. It is "civilization" itself."


Sontag suggests that aestheticised aspects of fascism appear in contexts where it may have been deliberate (the movels of Mishima) or inadvertent (the films of Kenneth Anger). The aesthetic carries a set of political connotations that exist beyond its own artistic conception. The most obvious example of this is how Nazism and romanticism are often considered as related concepts in their rejection of bourgeois society in favour of the heroic self and idealised visions of the past. For instance, Heidegger's ideas of authentic existence and of being was not only present in but also able to transcend its situation, are key romantic concepts but they also relate to his acceptance of the Fuhrer principle, of hero-worship ("that unyielding spiritual mission that forces the fate of the German people to bear the stamp of its history").

Also central to the joining of Nazism and romanticism was the distinction of gemeinschaft and geschellschaft. Volk was a German romantic response to French Enlightenment ideas of social contract, a characteristically romantic response to the problem of the separation, or alienation, that was seen as typical of life in modern society. Lawrence's 'savage pilgrimage' was opposed to what he saw as a dehumanised and mechanised society in which "the machine works him, instead of he the machine." In Women in Love Gerald and Loerke wish to create "an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition." In The Plumed Serpent, the cult of the machines had transformed the Americans into a "mechanical cog-wheel people," who robotically performed their functions within "that horrible machine of the world" Similarly, Celine's Voyage to the Edge of the Night partly takes place in a factory characterised by the "earsplitting continuity of the thousands and thousands of instruments that commanded the men... we ourselves became machines, our flesh trembled in the furious din, it gripped us around our heads and in our bowels and rose up to the eyes in quick continuous jolts... everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron and loses its savour in your thoughts. "

In some cases, such as Lawrence and Nietzsche, notions of volk and imperialism were largely repugnant to them, effacing some of the more authoritarian elements of their work. In others such, as Wagner, Pound and Heidegger, it is considerably more difficult to effect any rehabilitation. One such case is the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun a supporter of the Quisling government who openly wrote in support of Hitler. For instance, in Pan Hamsun contrasts the authentic self of his soldier protagonist, who lives alone in the woods with his dog as his sole companion, to the bourgeois Edvarda, who lives in society and marries a Swedish count. As with Lawrence, Hamsun's novels typically depict outcasts from an alienated bourgeois society; "I loathe your whole taxpayer's existence... I feel indignation rising within me like a rushing mighty win of the Holy Spirit." Heidegger sought from Nazism "a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety... Only a spiritual world gives the people the assurance of greatness.. and the spiritual world of a people...is the power that most deeply preserves the people's strengths, which are tied to earth and blood." Similarly, Nagel "couldn't understand what human beings would gain by having life stripped of all symbols, of all poetry," often speaking in parables, the fairy tales of a pagan christ. Influenced by Nietzsche, Hamsun's characters do not believe in god but continue to believe in a religious life, the same ambivalent relationship to religion that Nazism had.

But equally, his characters are deluded fantasists, inventors of falsehoods and contradictions. As one character says in Nagel in Mysteries; "I cannot figure out why you are turning yourself inside out for me." He himself speaks of his sudden jumps of thought, being a thinker who has never learned to think; "I admit I am a living contradiction." The vial of prussic acid he carries and his killing of a dog point to a dark aspect to his fantasies, parodying and mocking christ in the same way Nietzsche did. The element of romantic heroism is absent. Perhaps rather predictably, Hamsun's novels cannot easily be diminished to a set of unambiguous propositions. It seems flawed to analyse Hamsun's works for traces of Nazism when it was romantic culture, of which Hamsun was only one example, that acted to create Nazism. Celine's depiction of 'machine culture' is mild in comparison to that of Huxley. Lawrence's mythology of nature and eros owes a great deal to Hardy, Blake and Freud and is paralleled to a large extent in writers like Forster. Conversely, fascists like Marinetti openly embraced the machine and rejected nature. If the enlightenment is not viewed as being irredeemably tainted through its association with communism, it seems unfair not to grant romanticism the same benefit of the doubt. In practice, romanticism often acted as a necessary corrective to the extremes of other ideologies, a fact that should efface its own extremes a little.

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posted by Richard 9:16 pm