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mercredi, 14 novembre 2012

Georges ORWELL, Le Socialisme contre la modernité?

Georges ORWELL,

Le Socialisme contre la modernité?

samedi, 10 novembre 2012

APUNTES SOBRE “INGSOC”: EL LENGUAJE NO SEXISTA

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APUNTES SOBRE “INGSOC”: EL LENGUAJE NO SEXISTA,

por Cristina Martinez 

Teniendo en cuenta la proliferación de guías de lenguaje no sexista, no queda más remedio que realizar la siguiente reflexión:

Quienes defienden el uso inclusivo del lenguaje arguyen que el género masculino es excluyente. Sin embargo, si analizamos esta afirmación detenidamente, podremos comprobar que, como tantas otras emitidas sin conocimiento suficiente, es falsa.

En la oración los niños pequeños son preciosos, se incluye tanto a las mujeres como a los varones; en cambio, la frase las niñas pequeñas son preciosas sólo puede referirse a mujeres y, por tanto, quedan excluidos los varones. Con este sencillo ejemplo, queda demostrado que el masculino es el género inclusivo y el femenino, el exclusivo. De ahí que en gramática se hable de género marcado (femenino) y género no marcado o genérico (masculino).

Dado que en español, como en otras muchas lenguas románicas, el género no marcado representa la concordancia por defecto, si, a fin de evitar la supuesta discriminación sexista implícita en el lenguaje, según esas guías, recurrimos al desdoblamiento pueden ocurrir dos cosas: o bien, pondremos en peligro la concordancia; o bien, caeremos en imposibles circunloquios que atentan contra el principio de economía lingüística.

Veamos un ejemplo. En la oración los humanos son mamíferos, que hace referencia tanto a mujeres como a hombres, si para evitar la discriminación obedecemos los principios no sexistas que tratan de imponer y recurrimos al desdoblamiento, el resultado, respetando la concordancia, debería ser el siguiente: las humanas y los humanos son mamíferas y mamíferos. Es obvio que, esta solución es impracticable, especialmente a nivel oral, además de caer en irrelevantes repeticiones que cansan al lector o al oyente.

Si se opta por concordar únicamente los artículos definidos, se cae en una incorrección gramatical, dado que en castellano los elementos átonos (los artículos) no pueden ir coordinados. Por tanto, una solución como la que sigue, tan recurrente en los medios de comunicación, es agramatical: las y los humanos son mamíferos.

Otra de las soluciones a la que se ha recurrido es el uso de símbolos, ilegibles en el lenguaje escrito e invisibles en el oral, tales como paréntesis, arrobas, etc.

Al no haber una norma sobre el asunto, no parece ni útil, ni justificado, ni mucho menos necesario recurrir a este tipo de desdoblamientos. Es necesario un criterio unificado que homogeneice los usos lingüísticos y eso, precisamente, es lo que trata de hacer la Real Academia, tan criticada a raíz del artículo de Ignacio Bosque sobre este asunto que, paradójicamente, ha recibido el apoyo de la gran mayoría de los lingüistas.

Es tal la estulticia lingüística de los que se han aventurado a escribir esas guías que confunden género con sexo deliberadamente, porque desconocen que con el género, en español, ocurre algo parecido que con el plural y el singular. Este es el genérico y engloba a aquel. Por tanto, no se excluye al resto de madres cuando se afirma, por ejemplo: Una madre nunca abandona a su hijo.

Si los abanderados del lenguaje no sexista fueran coherentes y siguieran sus propios criterios a pies juntillas, caerían en continuas aberraciones porque cualquier afirmación podría resultarles excluyente. Así, por ejemplo, una afirmación como alimente a su hijo con leche materna puede resultar discriminatoria tanto con las niñas como con el resto de bebés del mundo. Siendo consecuentes con las normas (que, curiosamente, no existen) del lenguaje no sexista, deberíamos optar por: *padres y madres alimenten a todos sus hijas e hijos con leche materna y paterna. Huelga el comentario.

El desdoblamiento sólo está justificado cuando exista ambigüedad que no pueda resolverse mediante elementos extralingüísticos o contextuales. Será totalmente aceptable, en este caso, por ejemplo: Tengo hermanos y hermanas, si el interlocutor desconoce que son varones y hembras; o en este otro: los alumnos, varones y hembras, usarán el mismo uniforme, para aclarar que tanto unos como otras vestirán igual. Excepto en estos pocos casos, el desdoblamiento resulta innecesario e injustificado.

Se ha dicho hasta la saciedad que la lengua no entiende de sexos y, por tanto, es el hablante el que discrimina. Esta es una problemática que debería tratarse desde el punto de vista social, no lingüístico, y proponer soluciones  que sean aplicables en la realidad y no falacias que lo único que proporcionan son discusiones fútiles y gastos inútiles del dinero público. Poco podemos hacer, en cuanto a lengua se refiere, si la idea de igualdad entre hombres y mujeres no es una realidad en el imaginario social. Forzar al uso de un lenguaje artificial, en vez de concienciar activamente sobre el asunto, es un disparate que no sólo atenta contra la libertad de los hablantes sino que, además, contraviene las normas gramaticales y sintácticas del español

Cuando el cambio de mentalidad respecto a este asunto se produzca, de una manera real, en la sociedad; cuando se extienda y se consolide la igualdad de sexos, se trasladará de forma natural a la lengua, sin necesidad de forzar el sistema. La realidad hay que cambiarla de raíz y no limitarse a barnizar las palabras que la reflejan, intentando sugestionar a los hablantes para crearles una suerte de sentimiento de culpa por provocar con sus palabras la discriminación femenina. Esto no es otra cosa que un burdo ejercicio de manipulación de la conciencia y un intento evidente de crear una Neolengua que refleje una realidad que no existe.

Las palabras tienen significado pero no ideología. Yo, personalmente, no voy a eludir de toda responsabilidad al hablante porque, si existe machismo en el lenguaje, es la intención del que lo usa la que lo contiene.

jeudi, 11 octobre 2012

L’incubo orwelliano

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L’incubo orwelliano. Dalla letteratura distopica al totalitarismo contemporaneo

“Fahrenheit 451” di Bradbury, pubblicato nel 1953, pare debba il suo titolo al grado termico di combustione della carta. Nel futuro descritto dal romanzo la lettura è reato

Roberto Cozzolino

Ex: http://www.rinascita.eu/  

Nella letteratura classica dei secoli passati – ed in particolare sul versante filosofico – è stata designata come “utopia” la progettazione, puramente teorica, di una futura società ideale; una società dove sarebbe finalmente verificata l’armoniosa e pacifica convivenza degli individui, resa possibile, secondo i vari Autori, dal buon governo degli amministratori ovvero dal grado di emancipazione raggiunto dalle masse od anche dal progresso tecnologico che avrebbe definitivamente liberato l’uomo dalla schiavitù del lavoro.


L’etimologia del termine associato agli artefici delle opere riconducibili a tale filone letterario, derivante dal greco “ou” e “tópos” – letteralmente “non luogo” –, indica chiaramente per gli stessi l’ovvia consapevolezza di riferirsi a realizzazioni impensabili per la loro epoca; e che potevano semmai indicare una meta ideale verso la quale tendere, o avere valore di critica sferzante della struttura sociale dell’epoca in cui vivevano; da ciò deriva il concetto esteso di utopia come fantastica chimera, qualcosa cioè che risulta estremamente difficile, se non impossibile, realizzare nell’immediato.
 
Come è noto il termine fu adottato per la prima volta da Tommaso Moro nella sua celebre opera del 1516: “De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia”, in cui si descrive una comunità che risiede, priva di problemi, nell’isola di Utopia, dove vengono applicati metodi di governo d’ispirazione democratica e socialista; in verità il neologismo filologicamente corretto avrebbe dovuto essere “atopia” (senza luogo), con l’uso dell’alfa privativo associato al sostantivo, ma si sostiene da più parti che Moro intendesse consentire un’ambivalenza del termine, riconducibile sia ad “ou” e “tópos” (non luogo) che ad “èu” e “tópos” (luogo buono). Celeberrimo precursore di Moro fu Platone, che nella sua “Politéia” (390 a.C.) propose una forma di governo che tenterà - senza successo - di impostare presso la corte del tiranno Dionigi a Siracusa: una sorta di “comunismo” guidato da filosofi e con una società divisa in classi. Altra famosa opera utopica è “New Atlantis” di Francesco Bacone, del 1626; in essa le innovazioni tecnologiche possedute dagli abitanti dell’isola di Bensalem – fantasioso toponimo derivante dalla conflazione dei nomi di Betlemme e Gerusalemme - costituiscono un enorme supporto alla felicità degli uomini, per i quali la conoscenza diventa strumento di dominio sul mondo.

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Citiamo inoltre “La città del Sole” (1602) di Tommaso Campanella – uno stato teocratico retto secondo i principi della religione naturale e basato sulla proprietà comune, riecheggiante l’epopea degli heliopolìtai di Aristonico (131 a. C.) -; “Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse” (1696) di François Fénélon - un viaggio didattico attraverso diversi paesi e forme di governo dell’antichità -; “Voyage en Icarie” (1840) di Étienne Cabet - un sistema di stampo socialistico dove è chiara l’influenza del comunismo egualitario di Babeuf e Buonarroti -; “News from Nowhere” (1890) di William Morris – una delle più anarchiche descrizioni di una società futura -; “Erewhon” (1872) di Samuel Butler – utopia satirica della società vittoriana -; da notare che quest’ultimo titolo é un anagramma di “nowhere”, con chiaro riferimento, come quello dell’opera di Morris, al significato di “utopia”. In questa rapidissima ed incompleta elencazione dei massimi esponenti del pensiero utopico non possiamo tacere i nomi di Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Enfantin e Considérant, ovvero i massimi esponenti del cosiddetto socialismo utopistico (così definito sprezzantemente dai marxisti ortodossi, in contrapposizione al socialismo scientifico), che proposero società ideali sostenute da precise teorie sociopolitiche e che in qualche caso, forti delle loro convinzioni, finirono col rovinarsi economicamente nei tentativi falliti di realizzare i loro sogni. In concomitanza con gli utopici sistemi di società future ebbe ampio sviluppo, sin dal medioevo ma soprattutto nel Rinascimento ed oltre – ed in particolare presso i socialisti utopistici - la progettazione di complessi urbani ideali, dove erano quindi preponderanti su tutti gli altri gli aspetti urbanistici ed architettonici; dal momento che le realizzazioni antropiche sono determinate dalle varie funzioni sociali umane; e queste ultime direttamente dipendenti da orientamenti squisitamente ideologici.

Si noti peraltro che lo stesso socialismo marxista – che rimproverava agli utopisti l’assenza di un rigoroso metodo scientifico nell’analisi della società, il mancato riconoscimento della funzione storica del proletariato ed una eccessiva fiducia nelle possibilità di un riformismo basato sulla solidarietà e la filantropia - può considerarsi una grande utopia; tra l’altro densa di evidenti analogie – oltre ad altrettanto evidenti motivi di conflitto - con molti aspetti delle religioni messianiche del ceppo abramitico, come è stato efficacemente analizzato da diversi autori: ideologia intesa come ortodossia fondamentalista, aspirazioni egualitaristiche, rigida gerarchia, controllo e censura delle “eresie”, presenza di dogmi e di testi sacri, interpretazione dicotomica del mondo e fideistica certezza nella futura affermazione della giustizia universale; al punto da suggerire a Berdjaev che “il comunismo è l’insoddisfazione per il cristianesimo non realizzato”.


Verso la fine del XIX e nel corso del XX secolo prende forma un nuovo genere letterario conosciuto come anti utopia (od anche distopia, pseudoutopia, utopia negativa, cacotopia), che presenta evidenti affinità col genere utopico ma mostra, rispetto a questo, una totale inversione di segno, costituendone quasi un aspetto speculare; se infatti il romanzo utopico prospettava la futura realizzazione di una società migliore, il romanzo distopico prefigura per l’avvenire scenari da incubo, con un’umanità schiavizzata e condannata all’infelicità perpetua sotto il dominio di governi dispotici. In realtà secondo alcuni critici il primo autorevole esempio di antiutopia si ebbe già nel 1726, con la pubblicazione dei “Gulliver’s Travels” di Jonathan Swift, in cui le società immaginate possono essere considerate una grottesca satira dell’ordine sociale esistente. Tra i “moderni” precursori del genere ricordiamo H. G. Wells, che con “The time machine” (1895) ci porta in un lontano futuro per mostrarci un’umanità divisa in due fazioni antagoniste di prede e cacciatori: gli Eloi, esseri fragili e gentili ma parassitari; ed i Morlock, esseri produttivi e mostruosi che vivono nelle viscere della terra, da cui escono per dare la caccia agli Eloi e cibarsene.

“Brave New World”, scritto nel 1932 da Aldous Huxley, descrive un prossimo mondo dove tutto è sacrificabile ad un malinteso mito del progresso in cambio di un apparente benessere, e l’esasperata evoluzione scientifica, gestita da un regime totalitario, ha completamente annullato la libertà individuale. Il bellissimo e troppo poco noto “Noi” di Evgenii Ivanovich Zamjatin, scritto in pieno regime comunista ed a causa del quale l’Autore fu costretto ad espatriare – con le proprie gambe grazie all’intervento di Maxim Gorky -, ci mostra un’antiutopia, scritta in forma di diario, ambientata in un mondo dove i personaggi non hanno un nome, ma al suo posto una sigla numerica e dove tutto è ferreamente regolamentato dall’onnipresente potere. “Fahrenheit 451” di Bradbury, pubblicato nel 1953 come estensione di un racconto apparso nel 1951 (“The Fireman”), pare debba il suo titolo al grado termico di combustione della carta, in quanto nel futuro descritto dal romanzo la lettura è reato e tutti i libri devono essere bruciati, essendo sufficiente, per l’educazione delle masse, il mezzo televisivo controllato dal sistema.

Qualcuno individua chiari elementi distopici anche ne “La leggenda del grande inquisitore” di Dostoevskij, inserita nel suo ultimo lavoro: “I Fratelli Karamazov” (1879) dal sommo romanziere russo. Ma l’opera che realizza l’utopia negativa per eccellenza è, senza dubbio, “Nineteen Eighty-four” di George Orwell, scritto nel 1948 (il titolo è ottenuto scambiando tra loro le ultime due cifre che compongono tale data), dove il Grande Fratello, a capo di una enorme gerarchia costituita dal partito, controlla non solo gli individui ma anche i loro pensieri; l’Autore aveva già dato alle stampe nel 1945 l’altrettanto celebre “Animal Farm”, una feroce satira dello stalinismo scritta sotto forma di favola che, pur essendo già ultimata nel 1943, non risultava politicamente corretto pubblicare prima, dal momento che criticava la forma di governo di una nazione alleata nel recente conflitto mondiale.

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In “1984” Winston Smith, il protagonista, membro subalterno del partito che lavora alla modifica di libri ed articoli di giornale pubblicati in passato, in modo che le previsioni fatte dal partito stesso risultino veritiere, non sopporta i condizionamenti della rigida e squallida struttura sociale entro la quale è costretto a vivere e ne infrange molte regole, instaurando tra l’altro un rapporto sentimentale con una compagna, in un mondo in cui è imposta per legge la castità ed il sesso è permesso solo a fini procreativi; nel momento in cui entrambi decidono di collaborare con un’organizzazione clandestina, proprio l’individuo che avrebbe dovuto costituire il contatto col movimento di resistenza si rivela essere invece un agente della psicopolizia che, dopo averli fatti arrestare, li sottopone ad orripilanti tecniche di rieducazione sociopolitica, in modo che si trasformino in individui perfettamente mansueti ed allineati con l’ortodossia del regime.

Il cinema ha tratto massiccia e costante ispirazione dalla letteratura distopica, che per sua natura si presta ottimamente alla trasposizione filmica, spesso contaminandone il genere con altri affini - in particolare quello fantascientifico e quello di fantascienza apocalittica e post-apocalittica. Ci sembra che esistano relativamente poche pellicole che si ispirano dichiaratamente ad una delle opere letterarie citate, rimanendo molto fedeli all’impianto narrativo originario. Ricordiamo tra queste: “Fahrenheit 451” (1966) di François Truffaut, dall’omonimo racconto di Bradbury; “Nel duemila non sorge il sole” (1956) di Michael Anderson ed “Orwell 1984” (1984) di Michael Radford, entrambi ispirati al romanzo di Orwell, come il precedente “1984” (1954), adattamento televisivo di Rudolph Cartier per la BBC; “The Time Machine” (1960) di George Pal, tratto da H. G. Wells e seguito da frequenti remake. Sono invece numerosissime le pellicole liberamente ispirate al “genere” nel suo complesso ma prive di riferimenti puntuali ad una singola opera. Rinunciando ovviamente alla completezza ed all’ordine cronologico ricordiamo alcune tra le più famose: l’intramontabile “Metropolis” (1927), di Fritz Lang; “L’uomo che fuggì dal futuro” (1971), primo lungometraggio di George Lucas; “Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution” (1965), insolita incursione di Jean-Luc Godard nella fantascienza; il visionario, satirico ed al contempo agghiacciante “Brazil” (1985), di Terry Gilliam, che avrebbe dovuto chiamarsi “1984 ½” per un duplice omaggio ad Orwell e Fellini; “Soylent Green” (1973), di Richard Fleischer, ambientato in un mondo invivibile dove l’eutanasia appare come estrema risorsa; “Zardoz” (1974), di John Boorman, manifesto contro l’utopia progressista; “Rollerball” (1975) di Norman Jewison, con remake (2002) di John Campbell McTiernan, nel quale lo sport violento elargito alle masse diventa strumento di potere; “1997 Escape from New York” (1981) di John Carpenter, dove troviamo l’intera isola di Manhattan trasformata in un enorme ghetto-prigione di massima sicurezza per criminali; del medesimo regista è ”They Live” (1988), dove il potere è detenuto da insospettati alieni; “Terminator” (1984) di James Cameron, primo film di una serie che vede le macchine in guerra con gli uomini; “Twelve Monkeys” (1995), ancora di Gilliam, in cui un viaggiatore del tempo indaga sulle cause di una trascorsa epidemia della razza umana; per finire col totalitarismo virtuale di “Matrix” (1999), spettacolare trilogia dei fratelli Wachowski.


Qualunque siano, ad ogni modo, le differenze tra i vari classici distopici letterari - e tra questi e le loro più o meno fedeli rielaborazioni cinematografiche -, esistono nelle varie visioni di un futuro apocalittico alcuni elementi ricorrenti che riteniamo interessante analizzare; per cercare di capire se i loro Autori fossero solo degli intellettuali disancorati dalla realtà - e pertanto folli “profeti di sciagure” - o, al contrario, individui provvisti di una profonda capacità di analisi ed eccezionalmente lungimiranti quando ammonivano che, se si fosse continuato a percorrere certe strade, si sarebbero realizzati i terribili scenari descritti nei loro romanzi. In effetti uno dei massimi esponenti della letteratura antiutopica, il già citato Aldous Huxley, ventisette anni dopo l’uscita del suo “Brave New World” riesaminava le sue profezie alla luce di avvenimenti recenti col saggio “Brave New World Revisited” (1959), giungendo ad una conclusione inquietante: alcuni elementi dell’utopia negativa che aveva immaginato meno di tre decenni prima erano già entrati a far parte della realtà. E’ stato del resto ampiamente documentato che cambiamenti strutturali anche drastici, che la popolazione rifiuterebbe istintivamente se fossero imposti all’improvviso, vengono invece docilmente accettati se iniettati a piccole dosi nel tessuto sociale ed accompagnati da martellanti campagne massmediatiche. Altra osservazione che merita particolare attenzione è che se quasi tutti – ma non tutti – gli Autori distopici guardavano con preoccupazione, nel momento in cui scrivevano, a varie forme coeve di totalitarismo, oggi invece possiamo individuare proprio nel mondo cosiddetto “libero e democratico” molti degli aspetti più oppressivi da loro denunciati.

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Uno di questi è la presenza di una gerarchia, basata prevalentemente sul potere economico, grazie alla quale le divisioni fra classi sociali sono rigide e quasi insormontabili. Si tratta di un’esagerazione? Forse, ma il costante impoverimento della classe media, il degrado della scuola pubblica ed i costi proibitivi dell’istruzione privata, la progressiva scomparsa dello stato sociale e dell’assistenza sanitaria, l’accesso al mondo del lavoro e – di conseguenza - ad una vita dignitosa presentati non come diritto acquisito ma come conquista individuale - uniti al disinvolto uso di clientelismo, raccomandazioni e tangenti da parte della casta che detiene le leve del controllo politico - vanno esattamente in tale direzione; a questo si accompagna la proliferazione di sterminate periferie degradate in tutte le grandi metropoli, a sottolineare - oggi più che nel passato - la separazione anche fisica tra le masse proletarie ed i pochi beneficiari dei vantaggi derivanti dal contatto col potere. Una immediata conseguenza è la scomparsa dei rapporti sociali come concepiti tradizionalmente dall’uomo: le relazioni umane sono dettate esclusivamente dal dogma del vantaggio individuale e del tornaconto personale.

Altro aspetto sicuramente individuabile come comune alla letteratura anti utopistica ed alla nostra società è il reiterato tentativo di soppressione del dissenso, visto come valore negativo in opposizione al conformismo dilagante; al di là dell’apparente pluralismo e libertà di espressione, peraltro sanciti da quasi tutte le costituzioni delle moderne democrazie, risulta chiaro a tutti che, tranne rarissime eccezioni, le coalizioni che si alternano alla guida dei governi, di qualunque colore appaiano, sono sempre espressione dei medesimi gruppi di potere. La propaganda di regime e tutto l’apparato educativo favorisce nella popolazione il culto del proprio sistema di governo, cercando di convincerla che è l’unico - e probabilmente il migliore – possibile. Le voci di reale dissenso presenti vengono o infiltrate dai “servizi” e sapientemente manipolate od emarginate limitando drasticamente, con tutti i mezzi individuabili, il loro raggio d’azione. Il sistema penale inoltre comprende spesso la tortura fisica e psicologica per tutti coloro che sono semplicemente sospettati di attività eversive. Sono consentiti anche gli omicidi mirati, purché, ovviamente, finalizzati al trionfo della “democrazia”.


In molti romanzi distopici la Storia viene continuamente riscritta in modo da risultare in linea con le previsioni ed i desideri del gruppo dominante; in “1984” è previsto un “nemico” che trama costantemente ai danni del governo e contro cui la popolazione è invitata quotidianamente a sfogare tutto il proprio risentimento; nella nostra epoca siamo ormai tristemente abituati a quegli episodi noti come tattica “false flag” od alle madornali ma sempre efficaci “bugie di guerra”, finalizzate ad ottenere il consenso della popolazione per aggredire altri Stati sovrani. Tali manovre sono spesso precedute ed accompagnate dalla minuziosa creazione del nemico da odiare, l’immagine del quale viene assemblata pazientemente, giorno dopo giorno, telegiornale dopo telegiornale, ospitando sui quotidiani e nei talk show di regime l’opinione di “esperti” e le accurate analisi politiche di sedicenti “gruppi dissidenti in esilio”; si arriva a negare – contro ogni evidenza - che il personaggio oggetto della campagna di demonizzazione sia mai stato considerato amico; si presentano come veri filmati realizzati da esperti cineasti dove alcune milizie, agli ordini diretti del novello despota, si abbandonano ad ogni sorta di violenze, tanto più odiose in quanto rivolte ad esseri indifesi quali donne, vecchi, neonati; la decisione di porre fine alla criminale attività del tiranno sarà salutata con entusiasmo crescente da tutta la popolazione. Tutto ciò è naturalmente reso possibile grazie anche alla solerte complicità di una agguerrita e ben remunerata schiera di pennivendoli e gazzettieri governativi, che diffondono come vere le notizie emesse direttamente dalle centrali di disinformazione. Le eventuali e sempre più rare voci contrarie che tentino una efficace controinformazione non hanno, in genere, i mezzi idonei per contrastare in tempo utile le menzogne ufficiali.

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Altro interessante – ed eccezionalmente significativo - punto di contatto tra la realtà attuale e la letteratura distopica riguarda il divieto di revisione storica da parte dei singoli ricercatori: tale aspetto, che tra l’altro nega alla Storia il suo carattere scientifico – in quanto questa verrebbe affidata al giudizio di un tribunale piuttosto che alla libera ricerca – denuncia la scellerata volontà del pensiero unico dominante, che introducendo lo psicoreato pretende non solo il dominio sul presente ed il futuro, ma anche sul passato, secondo il motto orwelliano: “Chi controlla il passato controlla il futuro: chi controlla il presente controlla il passato”. Sempre ad Orwell è dovuta l’introduzione del concetto di “bispensiero”, ovvero la capacità di sostenere simultaneamente due opinioni palesemente contraddittorie e di accettarle entrambe come vere – sintetizzata nello slogan del partito: “la libertà è schiavitù, l’ignoranza è forza, la guerra è pace” -; grazie al bispensiero attuale assistiamo oggi a “guerre umanitarie” a seguito delle quali vengono massacrati migliaia di civili ed intere nazioni sono contaminate per molti decenni futuri con sostanze radioattive; ci indottrinano fino alla nausea con tematiche antirazziste ma dobbiamo tollerare come normale l’ingombrante e criminale presenza di una entità che fa del razzismo uno dei suoi elementi fondanti; alcune situazioni negative per la moderna sensibilità – arretratezza della condizione femminile, scarso rispetto delle minoranze, presenza della pena di morte – vengono denunciate ed aspramente contestate se riferibili al “nemico” di turno, tollerate, minimizzate e addirittura ignorate se presenti nel contesto socioculturale di un alleato.

In molti romanzi anti utopisti ed in moltissimi film riferibili a tale genere le agenzie governative paramilitari sono impegnate nella sorveglianza continua dei cittadini. In alcuni casi il controllo può essere sostituito o coadiuvato da potenti e sofisticate reti tecnologiche. Alla fine dell’Ottocento Jeremy Bentham ideò un sistema di carcere, il Panopticon, pensato come una struttura radiale che consentiva ad un unico guardiano – posizionato in una torretta centrale - di vedere, non visto, tutti i detenuti e divenne un modello nella successiva progettazione di molti istituti di pena. Analogamente i cittadini dell’incubo orwelliano sono continuamente spiati dal Grande Fratello, anche nell’intimità delle loro case (per analogia con tale attitudine è stato battezzato in Italia “Grande Fratello” un reality show dove la vita quotidiana dei protagonisti viene costantemente monitorata attraverso telecamere nascoste; risulta che la maggioranza degli adolescenti affezionati a tale demenziale spettacolo di diseducazione di massa ignori i motivi della scelta del titolo). Sembra che in quella che viene ritenuta “la più grande democrazia del mondo” sia imminente la realizzazione del progetto, spacciato come beneficio sanitario, finalizzato a dotare tutti i cittadini di un chip sottocutaneo che produrrà effetti fino ad oggi impensabili in termini di libertà personale. Sicuramente molti saranno indotti ad assecondare senza protestare questo piano criminale, perché efficacemente spaventati e resi insicuri dalla incombente crisi economica, dal terrorismo e dall’incremento della criminalità.


Ancora molto numerose ed indubbiamente interessanti sono le similitudini da individuare tra le apocalittiche visioni degli universi distopici e la moderna società sedicente democratica; lasciamo il piacere di ulteriori scoperte a chi voglia dedicarsi alla lettura di queste coinvolgenti e spesso profetiche opere letterarie, ricordando il monito che Orwell rivolgeva agli intellettuali e che deve essere fatto proprio da tutti gli uomini liberi del mondo: prendere posizione chiara contro ogni tipo di totalitarismo; soprattutto, aggiungiamo noi, quando si celi camaleonticamente sotto improbabili vesti democratiche per perseguire i propri inconfessabili fini.


A tale proposito – sebbene esuli dalle presenti note - è necessario spendere qualche parola sul concetto di stato totalitario, a nostro avviso oggi usato arbitrariamente - se per tale idealtipo si accettano le connotazioni eminentemente negative codificate da Hannah Arendt (“Le origini del totalitarismo”, 1951) -, soprattutto se riferito al periodo dell’Italia fascista, anche se l’aggettivo “totalitario” veniva disinvoltamente usato, naturalmente in una accezione positiva, da Giovanni Gentile e dallo stesso Mussolini, ad indicare che “… per il fascista … nulla … ha valore fuori dallo Stato …”; se è infatti innegabile che durante il ventennio prese forma un regime autoritario è comunque risibile la tesi secondo la quale tutti gli italiani si sarebbero trasformati all’improvviso in pavidi mentecatti ipnotizzati dal gruppo dirigente, peraltro sconfessata dalla nota e storicamente accertata presenza di diverse anime all’interno del movimento; alcune delle quali, autenticamente rivoluzionarie, emersero prepotentemente quando, con la costituzione della Repubblica Sociale Italiana, vennero definitivamente recisi i legami con le forze reazionarie che facevano capo alla Chiesa ed al troppo piccolo re fuggiasco e traditore.


Né ci convincono le smodate lodi dei glorificatori delle democrazie occidentali, dove chi (mal)governa - grazie alle sponsorizzazioni dei potentati economici che finanziano le campagne elettorali - lo fa col consenso di una percentuale infima della popolazione, vista la crescente disaffezione per le urne degli aventi diritto al voto. L’esigenza morale sentita da tutti deve essere quella di vigilare costantemente per denunciare con forza la deriva sociale verso sistemi disumanizzanti e privi di valori condivisibili e tentare di smascherare - e contrastare con ogni mezzo - le progressioni, anche se piccole ed apparentemente innocue, tendenti all’universo schiavizzante dei regimi effettivamente totalitari.


http://www.rinascita.eu/index.php?action=news&id=16899

mercredi, 25 juillet 2012

Paganism & Vitalism in Knut Hamsun & D. H. Lawrence

Paganism & Vitalism in
Knut Hamsun & D. H. Lawrence

 

By Robert Steuckers 

[1]

Knut Hamsun

Ex. http://www.counter-currents.com

Part 1 of 2

Translated by Greg Johnson

The Hungarian philologist Akos Doma, educated in Germany and the United States, has published a work of literary interpretation comparing the works of Knut Hamsun and D. H. Lawrence: Die andere Moderne: Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence und die lebensphilosophische Strömung des literarischen Modernismus [The Other Modernity: Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence, and the Life-Philosophical Current of Literary Modernism] (Bonn: Bouvier, 1995). What they share is a “critique of civilization,” a concept that one must put in context.

Civilization is a positive process in the eyes of the “progressivists” who see history as a vector, for the adherents of the philosophy ofAufklärung [Enlightenment], and for the unconditional followers of a certain modernity aiming at simplification, geometrization, and cerebralization.

But civilization appears as a negative process for all those who intend to preserve the incommensurable fruitfulness of cultural matrices, for all those who observe, without being scandalized, that time is “plurimorphic,” i.e., the time of one culture is not that of another (whereas the believers of Aufklärung affirm that one monomorphic time applies to all peoples and cultures of the Earth). Thus to each people its own time. If modernity refuses to see this plurality of forms of time, it is illusion.

To a certain extent, Akos Doma explains, Hamsun and Lawrence were heirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But which Rousseau? The one stigmatized by Maurras, Lasserre, and Muret, or the one who radically criticized the Enlightenment but without also thereby defending the Old Regime? For this Rousseau who was critical of the Aufklärung, this modern ideology is in reality that exact opposite of the ideal slogan that it intends to universalize though political activism: it is inegalitarian and hostile to freedom, even as it proclaims equality and freedom.

For Rousseau and his proto-Romantic followers, before the modernity of the 18th century, there was a “good community,” conviviality reigned among men, people were “good,” because nature was “good.” Later, in the Romantics, who were conservatives on the political plane, this concept of “goodness” was quite prominent, whereas today one attributes it only to activists or revolutionary thinkers. Thus the idea of “goodness” was present on “Right” as well as on “Left” of the political chessboard.

But for the English Romantic poet Wordsworth, nature is “the theater of all real experience” because man is really and immediately confronted by the elements, which implicitly leads us beyond good and evil. Wordsworth is certainly “perfectibilist”: man in his poetic vision reaches for excellence, perfection. But man, contrary to what was thought and imposed by the proponents of the Enlightenment, is not perfected solely by developing the faculties of his intellect. The perfection of man happens mainly through the ordeal of elemental nature.

For Novalis, nature is “the space of mystical experience, which allows us to see beyond contingencies of urban and artificial life.” For Joseph von Eichendorff, nature is freedom, and in this sense it is a transcendence, as it allows us to escape from the narrowness of conventions, of institutions.

With Wordsworth, Novalis, and Eichendorff, the themes of immediacy, of vital experience, the refusal of contingencies arising from the artificial conventions are in place. From Romanticism in Europe, especially in Northern Europe, developed a well thought out hostility to all forms of modern social life and economics. Thomas Carlyle, for example, praised heroism and disdained the “cash flow society.” This is the first critique of the rule of money. John Ruskin, with his plans for a more organic architecture and garden cities, aimed to beautify the cities and to repair the social and urban damage of the rationalism that had unfortunately arisen from Manchesterism. Tolstoy propagated an optimistic naturalism that owed nothing to Dostoevsky, the brilliant analyst and dramatist of the worst blacknesses of the human soul. Gauguin transplanted his ideal of human goodness in the islands of Polynesia, to Tahiti, among flowers and exotic beauties.

[2]

D. H. Lawrence

Hamsun and Lawrence, unlike Tolstoy or Gauguin, develop a vision of nature without teleology, without a “good end,” without marginal paradisal spaces: they have assimilated the double lesson of pessimism from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Nature, for them, is no longer an idyllic excursion, as in the English Lake District poets. It is not necessarily a space of adventure or violence, or posed a priori as such. Nature, for Hamsun and Lawrence, is above all the inwardness of man; it is his inner springs, his dispositions, his mind (brain and guts are inextricably linked together). Therefore, a priori, in Hamsun and Lawrence, the nature of man is neither demonic nor pure intellectuality. It is rather the real, as real as the Earth, as real as Gaia, the real source of life.

Before this source, modern alienation leaves us with two opposing human attitudes: (1) to put down roots, a source of vitality, (2) to fall into alienation, a source of disease and paralysis. It is between the two terms of this polarity that we can fit the two great works of Hamsun and Lawrence: Growth of the Soil for the Norwegian, The Rainbow for the Englishman.

In Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, nature is the realm of existential work, where Man works in complete independence to feed and perpetuate himself. Nature is not idyllic, as in some pastoralist utopia. Work in not abolished. It is an unavoidable condition, a destiny, an essential element of humanity, whose loss would mean de-humanization. The main hero, the farmer Isak, is ugly in face and body. He is crude, simple, rustic, but unwavering. He is completely human in his finitude but also in his determination.

The natural space, the Wildnis, this space that sooner or later will receive the stamp of man, is not the realm of human time, that of clocks, but of the rhythm of the seasons, of periodic rotations. In that space, in that time, we do not ask questions, we work to survive, to participate in a rhythm that surpasses us. This destiny is hard. Sometimes very hard. But it gives us independence, autonomy; it allows a direct relationship with our work. Hence it gives meaning. So there is meaning. In Lawrence’s The Rainbow, a family lives on the land in complete independence on the fruits of its own crops.

Hamsun and Lawrence, in these two novels, leave us with the vision of a man rooted in a homeland (ein beheimateter Mensch), a man with a limited territorial base. The beheimateter Mensch needs no book learning, needs no preaching from the media; his practical knowledge is sufficient; thanks to it, he gives meaning to his actions, while allowing imagination and feeling. This immediate knowledge gives him unity with other beings participating in life.

In this perspective, alienation, a major theme of the 19th century, takes on another dimension. Generally, the problem of alienation is addressed from three different bodies of doctrine: (1) The Marxists and historicists locate alienation in the social sphere, whereas for Hamsun and Lawrence, it lies in the inner nature of man, regardless of social position or material wealth. (2) Alienation is addressed by theology and anthropology. (3) Alienation is seen as a social anomie.

For Hegel and Marx, the alienation of the people or the masses is a necessary step in the gradual process of narrowing the gap between reality and the absolute. In Hamsun and Lawrence, alienation is more fundamental; its causes are not socio-economic or political; they lie in our distance from the roots of nature (which to that extent is not “good”). One does not overcome alienation by creating a new socioeconomic order.

According to Doma, in Hamsun and Lawrence, the problem of the cut, of the caesura is essential. Social life has become uniform, tends toward uniformity, automation, excessive functionalization, while nature and work in the cycle of life are not uniform and constantly mobilize vital energies. There is immediacy, while everything in urban, industrial, modern life is mediated, filtered. Hamsun and Lawrence rebelled against this filter.

In “nature” the forces of interiority count, particularly for Hamsun, and to a lesser extent for Lawrence. With the advent of modernity, men are determined by factors external to them, such as conventions, political agitation, public opinion that gives them the illusion of freedom while it is in fact the realm of manipulation. In this context, communities are breaking up: each individual is content with his sphere of autonomous activity in competition with others. Then we arrive at anomie, isolation, the hostility of each against all.

The symptoms of this anomie are crazes for superficial things, for sophisticated garb (Hamsun), signs of a detestable fascination for what is external, for a form of dependence, itself a sign of inner emptiness. Man is torn by the effects of external stresses. These are all indications of loss of vitality in alienated man.

In the alienation of urban life, man finds no stability because life in the metropolis resists any form of stability. Such an alienated man cannot return to his community, his family of origin. For Lawrence, whose writing is more facile but more striking: “He was the eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at the drama; in his own life he would have no drama.” “He scarcely existed except through other people.” “He had come to a stability of nullification.”

In Hamsun and Lawrence, EntwurzelungUnbehaustheit, rootlessness and homelessness, this way of being without hearth or home, is the great tragedy of humanity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To Hamsun, place is vital for humans. Every man should have his place. The location of his existence. One can not be cut off from one’s place without profound mutilation. This mutilation is primarily mental; it is hysteria, neurosis, imbalance. Hamsun is a psychologist. He tells us: self-consciousness from the start is a symptom of alienation.

Already Schiller, in his essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung [On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry], noted that agreement between thought and feeling was tangible, real, interior for natural man, but it is now ideal and exterior in cultivated humans (“the concord between his feelings and his thoughts existed at the origin, but no longer exists except at the level of the ideal. This concord is no longer in man, but hovers somewhere outside of him; it is no more than an idea that has yet to be realized; it is no longer a fact of life”).

Schiller hoped for an Überwindung (overcoming) of this caesura, for a total mobilization of the individual to fill this caesura. Romanticism, for him, aimed at the reconciliation of Being (Sein) and consciousness (Bewußtsein), fighting the reduction of consciousness solely to rational understanding. Romanticism values, and even overvalues what is “other” to reason (das Andere der Vernunft): sensual perception, instinct, intuition, mystical experience, childhood, dreams, pastoral life.

The English Romantic Wordsworth deemed this desire for reconciliation between Being and consciousness “rose,” calling for the emergence of “a heart that watches and receives.” Dostoevsky abandoned this “rose” vision, developing in response a quite “black” vision, in which the intellect is always a source of evil that led the “possessed” to kill or commit suicide. In the same vein, in philosophical terms, G. E. Lessing and Ludwig Klages emulated this “black” vision of the intellect, while considerably refining naturalist Romanticism: to Klages, the mind is the enemy of the soul; to Lessing, the mind is the counterpart of life, born of necessity (“Geist ist das notgeborene Gegenspiel des Lebens”).

Lawrence, in some sense faithful to the English Romantic tradition of Wordsworth, believes in a new adequation of Being and consciousness. Hamsun, more pessimistic, more Dostoyevskian (hence his success in Russia and its impact on such ruralists writers as Belov and Rasputin), persisted in the belief that as soon as there is consciousness there is alienation. Once man begins to reflect on himself, he detaches himself from the natural continuum, in which he should normally be rooted.

In Hamsun’s theoretical writings, there is a reflection on literary modernism. Modern life, influences, processes, refine man to rescue him from his destiny, his destined place, his instincts which lie beyond good and evil. The literary development of the 19th century betrays a feverishness, an imbalance, a nervousness, an extreme complexity of human psychology. “The general (ambient) nervousness has gripped our fundamental being and has rubbed off on our feelings.” Hence the writer now defines himself on the model of Zola, as a “social doctor” who describes social evils to eliminate disease. The writer, the intellectual, and develops a missionary spirit aiming at a “political correctness.”

Against this intellectual vision of the writer, Hamsun replies that it is impossible to objectively define the reality of man, for an “objective man” would be a monstrosity (ein Unding), constructed in a mechanical manner. We cannot reduce man to a catalog of characteristics, for man is changing, ambiguous. Lawrence had the same attitude: “Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part.” Hamsun and Lawrence illustrate in their works that it is impossible to theorize or absolutize a clear and distinct view of man. Thus man is not the vehicle of preconceived ideas.

Hamsun and Lawrence note that progress in self-awareness is not the process of spiritual emancipation, but rather a loss, a draining of vitality, of vital energy. In their novels, it is the characters who are still intact because they are unconscious (that is to say, embedded in their soil or site) who persevere, triumphing over the blows of fate and unfortunate circumstances.

There is no question, we repeat, of pastoralism or idyllism. The characters of Hamsun’s and Lawrence’s novels are traversed or solicited by modernity, hence their irreducible complexity: they may succumb, they suffer, they undergo a process of alienation but can also overcome it. This is where the Hamsun’s irony and Lawrence’s notion of the phoenix come in. Hamsun’s irony ridicules the abstract ideals of modern ideologies. In Lawrence, the recurrent theme of the phoenix indicates a certain degree of hope: there will be resurrection. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes.

Paganism & Vitalism in Knut Hamsun & D. H. Lawrence, Part 2


[1]

Ludwig Fahrenkrog, “The Holy FirePart 2 of 2

Translated by Greg Johnson

The Paganism of Hamsun and Lawrence

If Hamsun and Lawrence carry out their desire to return to a natural ontology by rejecting rationalist intellectualism, this also implies an in-depth contestation of the Christian message.

In Hamsun, we find the rejection of his family’s Puritanism (that of his uncle Hans Olsen), the rejection of the Protestant worship of the book and the text, i.e., an explicit rejection of a system of religious thought resting on the primacy of pure scripture against existential experience (in particular that of the autarkical peasant, whose model is that of Odalsbond of the Norwegian countryside).

The anti-Christianity of Hamsun is rather non-Christianity: it does not give rise to religious questioning in the mode of Kierkegaard. For him, the moralism of the Protestantism of the Victorian era (in Scandinavia, they called it the Oscarian era) is quite simply an expression of devitalisation. Hamsun does not recommend any mystical experience.

Above all, Lawrence is concerned with the caesura between man and the cosmic mystery. Christianity reinforces this wound, prevents it from clotting, prevents it from healing. However, European religiosity preserves a residue of this worship of the cosmic mystery: it is the liturgical year, the liturgical cycle (Easter, Pentecost, Midsummer, Halloween, Christmas, Epipany).

But these had been hit hard by the processes of disenchantment and desacralization, starting with the advent of the primitive Christian church, reinforced by Puritanism and Jansensim after the Reformation. The first Christians clearly wanted to tear man away from these cosmic cycles. The medieval church, however, sought adequation between man and cosmos, but the Reformation and Counter-Reformation both clearly expressed a return to the anti-cosmism of primitive Christianity. Lawrence writes:

But now, after almost three thousand years, now that we are almost abstracted entirely from the rhythmic life of the seasons, birth and death and fruition, now we realize that such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It brings null inertia.

This caesura is a property of the Christianity of urban civilizations, where there is longer an opening to the cosmos. Thus Christ is no longer a cosmic Christ, but a Christ reduced to the role of a social worker. Mircea Eliade spoke of a “cosmic Man,” open to the vastness of cosmos, the pillar of all the great religions. From Eliade’s perspective, the sacred is reality, power, the source of life and fertility. Eliade: “The desire of the religious man to live a life in the sacred is the desire to live in objective reality.”

The Ideological and Political Lessons of Hamsun and Lawrence

On the ideological and political plane, on the plane of Weltanschauungen, Hamsun and Lawrence had a rather considerable impact. Hamsun was read by everyone, beyond the polarity of Communism/Fascism. Lawrence was labeled “fascistic” on a purely posthumous basis, in particular by Bertrand Russell who spoke about his “madness” (“Lawrence was a suitable exponent of the Nazi cult of insanity”). This phrase is at the very least simple and concise.

According to Akos Doma, the works of Hamsun and Lawrence fall under four categories: the philosophy of life, the avatars of individualism, the vitalistic philosophical tradition, and anti-utopianism and irrationalism.

1. Life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) is a polemical term, opposing the “vivacity of real life” to the rigidity of conventions, the artificial games invented by urban civilization to try to give meaning to a totally disenchanted world. Life-philosophy appears under many guises in European thought and takes shape beginning with Nietzsche’s reflections on Leiblichkeit (corporeity).

2. Individualism. Hamsun’s anthropology postulates the absolute unicity of each individual, of each person, but refuses to isolate this individual or this person from any communal context, carnal or familiar: he always places the individual or the person in interaction, in a particular place. The absence of speculative introspection, consciousness, and abstract intellectualism make Hamsun’s individualism unlike the anthropology of the Enlightenment.

But, for Hamsun, one does not fight the individualism of the Enlightenment by preaching an ideologically contrived collectivism. The rebirth of the authentic man happens by a reactivation of the deepest wellsprings of his soul and body. Mechanical regimentation is a calamitous failure. Therefore, the charge of “fascism” does not hold for either Lawrence or Hamsun.

3. Vitalism takes account of all the facts of life and excludes any hierarchisation on the basis race, class, etc. The characteristic oppositions of the vitalist movement are: assertion of life/negation of life; healthy/unhealthy; mechanical/organic. Thus one cannot reduce them to social categories, parties, etc. Life is a fundamentally apolitical category, because it subsumes all men without distinction.

4. For Hamsun and Lawrence, the reproach of “irrationalism,” like their anti-utopianism, comes from their revolt against “feasibility” (Machbarkeit), against the idea of infinite perfectibility (which one finds in an “organic” form in the first generation of English Romantics). The idea of feasibility goes against the biological essence of nature. Thus the idea of feasibility is the essence of nihilism, according to the contemporary Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino.

For Severino, feasibility derives from a will to complete a world posited as being in becoming (but not an uncontrollable organic becoming). Once this process of completion is achieved, becoming inevitably ceases. Overall stability is necessary to the Earth, and this stability is described as a frozen “absolute good.”

In a literary manner, Hamsun and Lawrence have foreshadowed such contemporary philosophers as Emanuele Severino, Robert Spaemann (with his critique of functionalism), Ernst Behler (with his critique of “infinite perfectibility”), and Peter Koslowski. Outside of Germany or Italy, these philosophers are necessarily almost unknown to the public, especially when they criticize thoroughly the foundations of the dominant ideologies, which is rather frowned upon since the deployment of an underhanded inquisition against the politically incorrect. The cells of the “logocentrist conspiracy” are in place at all the publishers in order to reject translations, keep France in a state of philosophical “minority,” and prevent any effective challenge to the ideology of power.

Vitalistic or “anti-feasibilist” philosophers like Nietzsche, Hamsun, and Lawrence, insist on the ontological nature of human biology and are radically opposed to the nihilistic Western idea of the absolute feasibility of everything, which implies the ontological inexistence of all things, of all realities.

Many of them — certainly Hamsun and Lawrence — bring us back to the eternal present of our bodies, our corporeality (Leiblichkeit). But we can not fabricate a body, despite the wishes reflected in some science fiction (and certain projects from the crazy early years of the Soviet system).

Feasibilism is hubris carried to its height. It leads to restlessness, emptiness, silliness, solipsism, and isolation. From Heidegger to Severino, European philosophy has focused on the disaster of the desacralization of Being and the disenchantment of the world. If the deep and mysterious wellsprings of Earth and man are considered imperfections unworthy of the interest of the theologian or philosopher, if all that is thought abstractly or contrived beyond these (ontological) wellsprings is overvalued, then, indeed, the world loses its sacredness, all value.

Hamsun and Lawrence are writers who make us live with more intensity than those sometimes dry philosophers who deplore the wrong route taken centuries ago by Western philosophy. Heidegger and Severino in philosophy, Hamsun and Lawrence in creative writing aim to restore the sacredness of the natural world and to revalorize the forces that lurk inside man: in this sense, they are ecological thinkers in the deeper meaning of the term.

The oikos and he who works the oikos bear within them the sacred, the mysterious and uncontrollable forces, which are accepted as such, without fatalism and false humility. Hamsun and Lawrence have therefore heralded a “geophilosophical” dimension of thought, which has concerned us throughout this summer school. A succinct summary of their works, therefore, has a place in today’s curriculum.

Lecture at the Fourth Summer School of F.A.C.E., Lombardy, in July 1996.

Source: Vouloir, August 1997; online: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/paganisme-et-philosophie-de-la-vie-chez-knut-hamsun-et-david-herbert-lawrence.html [2]

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/hamsun-and-lawrence-part-2/

mardi, 19 juin 2012

Ray Bradbury. Le mille facce di un genio inafferrabile

Ray Bradbury. Le mille facce di un genio inafferrabile

Autore: Gianfranco de Turris

Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/

 

Parlare di Ray Bradbury significa far correre subito il pensiero ai suoi due capolavori, Cronache marziane (1950) e Fahrenheit 451 (1953), anche se lo scrittore, deceduto ieri a Los Angeles a quasi 92 anni (li avrebbe compiuti il 22 agosto), ha avuto una carriera più che settantennale (avendo esordito a 21 anni nel 1941, su Weird Tales) nel corso della quale ha pubblicato storie di tutti i generi, e non solo quel particolare tipo di fantascienza che a suo tempo si definì «umanistica», comunque tutte caratterizzate dal suo tocco personale, dal suo stile unico, evocativo, dalla singolare aggettivazione che avvolge il lettore senza che se ne accorga.

Con lui scompare uno degli ultimi rappresentanti (è ancora vivo Frederik Pohl, classe 1919) della grande e irripetibile «età d’oro della fantascienza». Pochi lo sapevano, ma negli ultimi anni era bloccato su una sedia a rotelle, però continuava a scrivere con regolarità pur se per interposta persona: ogni mattina per tre ore dettava telefonicamente alla figlia Alexandra, perché non poteva più usare la sua vecchia macchina da scrivere meccanica a causa di un malanno al braccio.

 

A suo tempo, negli anni Cinquanta-Settanta, ciò che colpì di Bradbury fu la visione malinconica e tragica del destino dell’uomo contemporaneo e futuro preda della massificazione totale, dello sradicamento dell’Io individuale e della sua personalità, succube di una macchinificazione della vita, intendendo con questo non solo i marchingegni meccanici e robotizzati, ma anche la virtualità che in America si stava già imponendo a metà del Novecento, mentre da noi ci si sarebbe accorti di tutto questo soltanto a partire dagli anni Ottanta con il moltiplicarsi dei canali televisivi. Non c’è dunque da meravigliarsi che lo scrittore nei suoi ultimi interventi pubblici se la sia presa con gli aggeggi elettronici che hanno invaso la nostra vita e la condizionano. «Abbiamo troppi telefonini. Troppo internet. Dobbiamo liberarci di quelle macchine», ha detto in un’intervista per il suo novantesimo compleanno al Los Angeles Times. Perché meravigliarsene, come fece a suo tempo qualcuno? È la logica conseguenza delle critiche che alle «macchine», anche se di altro genere, Bradbury ha fatto in tutte le sue opere e specialmente in Fahrenheit 451: anche cellulari, iPad, iPod, lettori elettronici, smartphone lo sono e producono conseguenze. Delle chat e di Facebook ha detto: «Perché tanta fatica per chiacchierare con un cretino col quale non vorremmo avere a che fare se fosse in casa nostra?». La sua crociata contro i deficienti e l’incultura risale ai primordi della sua carriera. Un precursore di certe critiche oggi comuni, insomma.

Tutto sta in quel capolavoro antiutopico che è appunto Fahrenheit 451. Un libro che è l’esaltazione dell’uomo e della cultura vera dell’uomo, quella trasmessa dai libri e non dalle finzioni virtuali della televisione. Già nel ’51-53 Bradbury immaginava schermi grandi come una parete e la vita falsa che trasmettevano tramite quelle che oggi si chiamano sitcom e vanno avanti per decenni quasi fosse una realtà parallela a quella del telespettatore, o reality show dove la gente comune diventa protagonista attiva (tema, questo, di molti suoi tragici racconti come il famoso La settima vittima). È contro la pandemia televisiva che lo scrittore si scaglia in difesa di un altro tipo di cultura che questa cercava di sommergere e annullare, e non aveva affatto di mira il senatore McCarthy o una specifica dittatura parafascista o paranazista, come volevano dare a intendere certi critici «impegnati» qui in Italia. Fu lo stesso scrittore, con grande delusione di certi suoi fans, a confermarlo: nel 2007, sempre in un’intervista al Los Angeles Times, affermò che il suo famoso romanzo non si doveva interpretare come una critica alla censura o specificatamente al senatore McCarthy, perché era piuttosto una critica alla televisione e al tipo di (in)cultura che essa trasmette. Insomma, Bradbury ce l’aveva e ce l’ha avuta sino all’ultimo, contro la pseudo-informazione, la pseudo-vita, gli pseudo-fatti, quelli che Gillo Dorfles ha battezzato «fattoidi», e che sono ormai la «normalità» delle tv di tutto il mondo, specie in Italia.

In un’altra intervista ha detto: «I libri e le biblioteche sono davvero una parte importante della mia vita, perciò l’idea di scrivere Fahrenheit 451 è stata naturale. Io sono una persona nata per vivere nelle biblioteche». Scoramento profondo, quindi, di tutti i suoi lettori e analizzatori progressisti: nessuna motivazione politica e/o ideologica dietro il famoso romanzo strumentalizzato in tal senso per decenni, anche se, leggendo bene quel che Bradbury scriveva, non era affatto impossibile afferrarlo. Tanto è vero che spesso, negli Stati Uniti, Bradbury si è platealmente irritato quando qualcuno gli voleva spiegare quel che aveva scritto, le sue intenzioni. Come si vede, la tanto apprezzata e semplicistica equivalenza fantascienza/progressista e fantastico/reazionario è una solenne sciocchezza, anche se purtroppo ancora qualcuno ci crede, magari forzando le tesi espresse dagli scrittori nelle loro opere. Bradbury è sempre stato sostenitore di una cultura umanistica e ci ha dato una fantascienza di questo genere con veri e propri capolavori: ma non sta scritto da nessuna parte che ciò sia sinonimo di progressismo ideologico e politico.

* * *

Tratto da Il Giornale del 7 giugno 2012.

Ray Bradbury ist tot – Chiffre 451

ray bradbury i.jpg

Götz Kubitschek:

Ray Bradbury ist tot – Chiffre 451

Ex: http://www.sezession.de/

Wer nach den berühmten Dystopien unserer Zeit gefragt wird, nennt George Orwells 1984, Aldois Huxleys Schöne Neue Welt, vielleicht Ernst Jüngers Gläserne Bienen, ganz sicher Das Heerlager der Heiligen von Jean Raspail (wenn er einer von uns ist!) und vor allem den Roman Fahrenheit 451 von Ray Bradbury. „451″ ist eine meiner Lieblingschiffren, und die Hauptfigur aus Bradburys Roman – der Feuerwehrmann Montag – ist Angehöriger der Division Antaios.

Bradbury – geboren 1920 – ist am 5. Juni verstorben. Fahrenheit 451 ist sein bekanntester Roman. In ihm werden Bücher nicht mehr gelesen, sondern verbrannt, wenn der Staat sie findet: Ihre Lektüre mache unglücklich, lenke vom Hier und Heute ab, bringe die Menschen gegeneinander auf. Vor allem berge jedes Stück Literatur etwas Unberechenbares, Freigegebenes, etwas, das plötzlich und an ganz unerwarteter Stelle zu einer Fanfare werden könne. In den Worten Bradburys: „Ein Buch im Haus nebenan ist wie ein scharfgeladenes Gewehr.“

Montag indes greift heimlich nach dem, was ihm gefährlich werden könnte. Er rettet ein paar Dutzend Bücher vor den Flammen, versteckt sie in seinem Haus und vor seiner an Konsum und Seifenopern verlorengegangenen Frau. Heimlich liest er, zweifelt, befreit sich und wird denunziert (von seiner eigenen, an den Konsum und die Indoktrination verlorengegangenen Frau); er kann fliehen und stößt in einem Waldstück auf ein Refugium der Bildung, auf eine sanfte, innerliche Widerstandsinsel, eine Traditionskompanie, eine Hundertschaft von Waldgängern: Leser wandeln auf und ab und lernen ein Werk auswendig, das ihnen besonders am Herzen liegt, um es ein Leben lang zu bewahren, selbst dann noch, wenn das letzte Exemplar verbrannt wäre.

Ich korrespondiere derzeit mit einem bald Achtzigjährigen, der insgesamt sieben Jahre im Gefängnis verbrachte und in dieser Zeit nichts für seinen Geist vorfand als das, was er darin schon mit sich trug. In Dunkelhaft war er allein mit den memorierten Gedichten, Dramenstücken, Prosafetzen, und er war dankbar für jede Zeile, die er in sich fand. Er kannte Fahrenheit 451 noch nicht und las begierig wie ein Student (wie er mir schrieb). Und er schrieb, daß er in Montags Waldstück keinen Prosatext verkörpern würde, wenn er dort wäre, sondern fünfhundert Gedichte – den Ewige Brunnen sozusagen.

Und Sie?

Ellen Kositza:

Nicht jeder kann Bradbury auswendig können

fhlg.jpgIch will direkt an Kubitscheks Bradbury-Text anknüpfen: Sein leicht verbrämter Aufruf, das Memorieren poetischer Texte einzuüben, kommt aus berufenem Munde. Kubitschek kann mehr Gedichte aufzusagen, als ich je gelesen habe, gar auf russisch, ohne daß er die Sprache beherrschte. Ein seltener Fleiß, ich werde mir keine Sorgen machen, wenn er mal ins Gefängnis muß.

In der zeitgenössischen Pädagogik ist vor lauter Selberdenkenmüssen das Auswendiglernen ja stark in den Hintertreffen geraten. Unsere Kinder tun sich nicht besonders schwer damit, es wird ihnen aber kaum – und stets nur minimal – abverlangt. Nun kam es hier im Hause kam  öfters vor, daß die müden Kinder inmitten des Abendgebets gähnen mußten; ein bekanntes Phänomen, das dem Nachlassen der Konzentration und weniger mangelnder Frömmigkeit anzulasten ist. Nun lernen wir seit einigen Monaten das Vaterunser in verschiedenen Sprachen, mühsam Zeile für Zeile zwar (so daß für jede Sprache mehrere Wochen benötigt werden), aber die abendliche Leistung zeigt Wirkung; kein Gähnen mehr.

Jetzt gibt es vermehrt Leute, die sich ihre Lieblingszeilen nicht so gut merken können. Es hat nicht jeder den Kopf dafür. Es gilt nicht mehr für gänzlich unzivilisiert, sich ein nettes Lebensmotto mit Farbe unter die Haut ritzen zu lassen. Dann kann man es stets nachlesen oder sich wenigstens vorlesen lassen. Bekanntermaßen hat sich Roman, der deutsche Kandidat des Europäisches Liederwettbewerb, ein gewichtiges Lebensmotto (samt Mikro!) auf die Brust stechen lassen: Never fearful, always hopeful. Eine hübsche, gleichsam allgemeingültige Ermunterung!

Internationale Sangesgrößen haben es ihm vorgemacht. Rihanna trägt die Weisheit never a failure, always a lesson auf der Haut, Katy Perry schürft noch tiefer und ließ sich (Sanskrit!!) Anungaccati Pravaha!, zu deutsch „Go with the flow!“ stechen, und der intellektuell unangefochtene Star des Pophimmels, Lady Gaga, uferte gar aus und verewigte ihren „Lieblingslyriker Rilke“ mit folgen Worten auf einem Körperteil:

“Prüfen Sie, ob er in der tiefsten Stelle Ihres Herzens seine Wurzeln ausstreckt, gestehen Sie sich ein, ob Sie sterben müßten, wenn es Ihnen versagt würde zu schreiben. Dieses vor allem: Fragen Sie sich in der stillsten Stunde Ihrer Nacht: Muss ich schreiben?“

Aber auch (noch) wenig prominente Zeitgenossen mögen es philosophisch-lyrisch. Jessica, Studentin und Trägerin der Playboy-Preises „Cybergirl des Monats“ läßt auf ihrer glatten Haut in wunderschön geschwungener Schrift das Cicero zugewiesene Motto Dum spiro spero blitzen, und jüngst kamen mir hier im wirklich ländlichen Landkreis zwei weitere tätowierte Kalligraphien unter´s Auge: Einmal in fetter Fraktur an strammer Männerwade unterhalb eines kahlrasierten Schädels Carpe Diem, andermal , als Schultertext: Mann muß Chaos in sich tragen, um einen tanzenden Stern zu gebären. Nietzsche hatte , glaub ich, „man“ geschrieben, aber er schrieb wohl mehr so für Männer, und der Spruchträger war tatsächlich männlichen Geschlechts, also hatte ja alles seine Richtigkeit.

Nun mag mancher Tätowierungen an sich für ein Zeichen von Asozialität halten. Wir mögen es mit Güte betrachten: Schlägt sich darin nicht eine Sehnsucht nach Dauer, nach Absolutheit, nach Schwur und Eid nieder? Nicht jeder hat Geld, Zeit, Fähigkeit und Phantasie, ein Haus zu bauen, einen Baum zu pflanzen, ein Kind zu zeugen. Wenn er schon die eigene Haut zu Markte tragen muß, dann wenigstens symbolisch aufgeladen! Nun fragt sich manche/r schlicht: womit bloß? Stellvertretend möchte ich “ Adrijanaa“ zitieren, die auf einem Forum namens gofeminin händeringend fragt:

Hallo zusammen!
Ich liebe Tattoos und möchte endlich selbst eins haben. Habe mich für ein Zitat auf dem Schulterblatt entschieden (so ähnlichw ie bei Megan Fox). Das Problem: Mir föllt keins ein. Es ist schon irgednwie blöd im Internet nach zu fragen, aber ich bin momentan einfach sowas von einfallslos. Ich lege in diesem Fall auch nicht viel Wert darauf, ob jemand diesen Spruch schon auf eienr Körperstelle besitzt oder nicht. Ein englischer Zitat wäre am besten. Es können Weisheiten, Zitate aus Songlyrics oder Filmen sein. Falls ihr ein paar Ideen habt, wäre ich sehr froh darüber, was von euch zu hören!

LG, Adi

Die Adi wurde dann von einigen „Mitusern“ nachdrücklich gefragt, ob sie denn nicht selbst auf ein paar fesche Zitate käme, die ihr aus der „Seele“ sprächen. Aber:

Ich überleg ja schon die ganze Zeit. . . Hab einige gute Lieder, die ich ganz gerne mag, aber die Texte sind manchmal zu primitiv für ein Tattoo. . . Es ist nicht so einfach

Dabei ist es eben doch ganz einfach! Es gibt bereits einige Netzseiten mit hübschen Sprüchen, die unter die Haut gehen könnten. In einem entsprechenden Ratgeberforum für tätowierbare Sprüche habe ich den hier gefunden:

Wer singt und lacht, braucht Therapie.
Alfred Adler

Das ist tiefsinnig, und mit etwas Mühe könnte man es sogar auswendig lernen – für den Fall, daß man das Zitat im Nacken oder auf dem Po unterbringen will.

jeudi, 07 juin 2012

Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

By John Morgan

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/  

Ray Bradbury, the writer best known for his novels The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, as well as a hundreds of short stories, passed away on Tuesday, June 5 at the age of 91. With him we have lost not only one of America’s greatest writers, but also one of our last genuine writers.

However, I don’t use either of these words – genuine or writer – lightly. I say writer, because I most emphatically do believe that Bradbury, while certainly not one of the most “deep” or sophisticated writers of the past century, certainly came closer to capturing the Angst of our age better than just about anyone else.

I very deliberately did not call him a “science fiction writer,” either, since, as he himself once pointed out, the only one of his major works that could be accurately defined as science fiction is Fahrenheit 451, while the bulk of his work could be more accurately be described as fantasy or horror fiction, with some mainstream works, such as Dandelion Wine, included as well.

As for “genuine,” I used that word for several reasons. One is that Bradbury was part of a vanishing set of writers who learned how to write before America became a post-literate, “information” society that looked to television and, later, the Internet rather than books for entertainment and social commentary. Another is that Bradbury, by his own account, became a writer because of an innate need to write – both because he felt he had a calling for it, and because he quite literally depended on his writing for his livelihood.

I remember reading him recount how, back in 1949 when he was staying at the YMCA in New York and desperately attempting to find a publisher for his short stories about Mars, an editor at Doubleday advised him to turn the book into a novel instead, as novels tend to be more marketable than collections of stories. Bradbury then stayed up all night at the Y, adding a superstructure to his Mars stories modeled on Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and thus The Martian Chronicles was born.

That used to be the crucible in which great writers were born. Writers were made of equal parts inspiration and determination, prepared to risk everything in the hope, often bordering on insanity, that someone else would actually like what they were doing. These days in America, if someone decides he wants to be a writer, he usually ends up taking creative writing courses at a college or university, and then, if he’s really driven, he’ll continue on to graduate school and get a Master of Fine Arts degree, attending endless “workshops” where teachers of less-than-dazzling talent of their own try to teach him how to write in a style that will appeal to the editors of the prestigious literary magazines – magazines that only a few thousand people nationwide actually read, but which count for everything in the world of academic literary writing.

If he perseveres and actually manages to publish a few things, and is a bit lucky, he can then find a cozy tenure-track position at some school, teaching writing to other writing students, and giving him the leisure time to write books that will only ever be of interest to other MFA students and professors of writing, since the incestuous world of academic writing is the only world he’s ever lived in. With a few exceptions, that is the state of the field of literary writing in America today. The only living American writers I can think of off the top of my head who I would term “genuine” writers of the same caliber as Bradbury would be Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Tito Perdue. They are a vanishing breed.

One might ask why Bradbury should matter to readers of Counter-Currents. One reason is that Bradbury was one of the few people still engaged in a process that is fast becoming a rarity – namely, the actual production of “Western culture,” rather than mere lamentation at its absence. He was very much a writer in the Western, and more specifically American, literary tradition. There is very little overt political content to his work, however, and apart from his public objections to Michael Moore stealing the name of his 2004 film, Fahrenheit 9/11, from his book without permission (a complaint which Bradbury insisted was not politically motivated), as far as I knew, he had never done anything political at all.

In looking over the coverage of Bradbury’s death in the online media, however, I came across a tribute in the National Review entitled “Ray Bradbury, a Great Conservative,” which describes how he was initially a staunch Democrat but started to become disillusioned with liberalism during Lyndon Johnson’s administration, and became more and more of a conservative after that. The article quoted Bradbury as saying in 2010, “I think our country is in need of a revolution. There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.” That’s good to know, but I still view Bradbury as essentially an apolitical man.

For me personally, the most relevant thing in Bradbury’s work is his anti-modern spirit. This is why it’s ridiculous to try to classify him as a science fiction writer. Bradbury made his bones as a writer in the 1940s and ’50s, at a time when the vast majority of science fiction was about one-dimensional characters serving as chess pieces in a game of depicting futuristic technology or some fantastic alien world. This is the tradition into which today’s “hard” science fiction falls – stories which are more about being scientifically and technologically plausible than interesting as literature.

Bradbury was never a part of this school. If a rocket appears in a Bradbury story, it’s just a rocket – he assumes you know what one is, and leaves all the technical details to your imagination. This isn’t just laziness on his part – in truth, Bradbury saw advancing technology as a threatening thing, and in his own life he was actually a technophobe who never learned to drive and who apparently refused to fly for much of his life. In the final years of his life, to his credit, he also resisted allowing his works to be turned into e-books, claiming that American life had become too mechanized – although apparently, he changed his mind about this, since Fahrenheit 451 was released as a Kindle in 2010 (ironically enough).

The most important aspect of a Bradbury tale is the depth of feeling and passion felt by the characters, and the uncompromising demand they make to remain human in the face of technology and other popular trends of modernization. Bradbury’s best stories are about solitary men who sense that their souls are being threatened by forces driven by the massive engines of progress, and who then embark on an insane battle which they know they cannot win, but which they also know is preferable to continuing to live as one of the mindless herd.

The quintessential character of this type in Bradbury’s corpus is Guy Montag in 1953’s Fahrenheit 451. In this future America (as I recall he never states exactly when it takes place), all books have been banned for decades, television has taken on the character of what is now termed “virtual reality” and dominates most citizens’ lives, presidents are elected on the basis of their looks rather than their policies, actual communication between individuals never rises above the banal, suicide and drug addiction are rife, and personalities never develop beyond childish immaturity.

Montag is a firefighter, but now that all buildings are fireproof, their only job is to show up whenever books are discovered so that they can be promptly burned. Montag grows curious, however, and eventually starts to read some of the books, and discovers the world that has been denied to him. Once exposed to it, he can’t go back to the mindless world he knew before. He ends up conspiring to destroy the firemen, leaves his television-addicted wife, kills the Fire Chief, goes on the run, and ends up joining a small, underground sect of derelict literati in the countryside who have each committed a book to memory, so that they can preserve some of them without fear of arrest. The book ends as America is destroyed in a long-anticipated nuclear war, and Montag and his fellows begin to walk back toward the ruins of the cities, determined to use their knowledge to rebuild a genuine civilization once again.

This is incredibly radical stuff. These are Evola’s “men among the ruins,” doing their part to save something of a genuine tradition even when all seems lost, in the hope that, eventually, a new world will arise. It’s amazing that Fahrenheit 451 is often required reading in public school courses, when you think about it, even though the popular wisdom is that the book is about the “dangers of censorship” – which is rather like saying that Moby Dick is a story about a man who is chasing a whale. The world Bradbury depicts says much more about the dark side of modern life, and is much more horrifying than mere “censorship.” He is a poet for the man who stands by tradition while being at war with the modern world all around. One of my favorite passages of the book has Montag attempting to read the Book of Matthew on a commuter train, while an obnoxious commercial for toothpaste blares in the background, making it impossible to think. Such moments remain strikingly relevant and symbolic.

I’ve always been struck that George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four is held up as the classic dystopian novel. While Nineteen-Eighty-Four has considerable merit in its own right, it is also quite obvious by comparing the two that Bradbury had a much greater understanding of the real dangers lurking in Western civilization in the mid-20th century, and of how they would end up playing out in our time. Orwell’s dystopia is about a crushing, all-powerful government that rules with an iron fist, something that seems quite dated today.

Bradbury’s dystopia really isn’t all that different from the America we now inhabit, where the soft touch of commercialization and materialism is used to enforce state power instead. It’s true that books haven’t actually been banned, although they have been rendered irrelevant.

Another classic Bradbury tale of a man rebelling against the spirit of his times is “Usher II,” which was included in The Martian Chronicles and is in part an homage to Edgar Allan Poe, Bradbury’s literary mentor. In this story, we learn that America has imposed moral laws on its citizens, and as a result, nothing deemed disturbing is permitted. A man named William Stendahl, frustrated with the lack of freedom on Earth, goes to the fledgling colony on Mars, where he builds a massive, automated haunted house based on Poe’s stories. Hearing of it, government officials named “Moral Climate Monitors” are dispatched to investigate its decency.

When they arrive, they immediately decide to have the house torn down, but Stendahl convinces them to go through the house once before passing judgment on it. He also reveals that he has had android doubles of all the officials made. As they walk through the house, the officials see the android versions of themselves being killed, one by one, in particularly gruesome fashion, as Stendahl condemns them for their efforts to sanitize the human experience. Finally, when he gets the Chief Inspector alone, Stendahl reveals that it is the real officials who have been getting killed, while the android doubles were looking on. Stendahl traps the Chief Inspector behind a wall in imitation of “The Cask of Amontillado,” and then whisks away by helicopter as the house collapses into the surrounding swamp.

Although perhaps the simplest version of his “man among the ruins” character is the one in his story “The Pedestrian” (1953), which is about life in 2053, when television has become so predominant that no one leaves their homes at night. Leonard Mead takes a walk through his city, enjoying the solitude he finds and wishing to differentiate himself from those who are forever huddled in front of their screens. Crime, we are told, has disappeared, since television keeps everyone constantly amused. He is finally stopped by a police car on his walk, and when he can’t offer any explanation for why he is walking, he is arrested and told that he will be taken to a psychiatric ward. The crowning dénouement comes when Mead is forced into the car and realizes that there are no police officers, and that it is completely automated.

From these examples, it should be clear that Bradbury nursed a hatred for the modern world that bordered on the violent, as evinced by the extreme reactions many of his characters have to it. The modern world for Bradbury, as it is for the traditionalists, is a place of soulless materialism, sterility, and stupidity divorced from anything authentic, as well as from the past.

My personal favorite since childhood among Bradbury’s rebellious characters, however, is Spender, in “And the Moon Be Still as Bright,” from The Martian Chronicles. In this story, following the disappearance of several earlier expeditions to Mars from Earth, a large and heavily-armed group of astronauts lands on Mars, only to discover that all of the Martians have recently died as a result of being exposed to chickenpox by the previous expeditions from Earth, and against which their immune systems had no defense.

Spender is enchanted by the remnants of the Martian civilization, but his colleagues are mostly contemptuous of it, breaking things and spending their time getting drunk. Spender disappears for several weeks, exploring the Martian ruins on his own, and then returns, lulling his colleagues into a false sense of security and then gunning down six of them. He flees into the hills, where he is pursued by the commander of the expedition, Captain Wilder, and a large force of armed men.

Wilder approaches Spender one last time before he attacks him, to try to talk him into surrendering. The conversation they have has always been among my favorite passages, and I think it’s worth quoting in full:

The captain considered his cigarette. “Why did you do it?”

Spender quietly laid his pistol at his feet. “Because I’ve seen that what these Martians had was just as good as anything we’ll ever hope to have. They stopped where we should have stopped a hundred years ago. I’ve walked in their cities and I know these people and I’d be glad to call them my ancestors.”

“They have a beautiful city there.” The captain nodded at one of several places.

“It’s not that alone. Yes, their cities are good. They knew how to blend art into their living. It’s always been a thing apart for Americans. Art was something you kept in the crazy son’s room upstairs. Art was something you took in Sunday doses, mixed with religion, perhaps. Well, these Martians have art and religion and everything.”

“You think they knew what it was all about, do you?”

“For my money.”

“And for that reason you started shooting people.”

“When I was a kid my folks took me to visit Mexico City. I’ll always remember the way my father acted – loud and big. And my mother didn’t like the people because they were dark and didn’t wash enough. And my sister wouldn’t talk to most of them. I was the only one really liked it. And I can see my mother and father coming to Mars and acting the same way here.

“Anything that’s strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn’t have Chicago plumbing, it’s nonsense. The thought of that! Oh God, the thought of that! And then – the war. You heard the congressional speeches before we left. If things work out they hope to establish three atomic research and atom bomb depots on Mars. That means Mars is finished; all this wonderful stuff gone. How would you feel if a Martian vomited stale liquor on the White House floor?”

The captain said nothing but listened.

Spender continued: “And then the other power interests coming up. The mineral men and the travel men. Do you remember what happened to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? A whole civilization destroyed by greedy, righteous bigots. History will never forgive Cortez.”

“You haven’t acted ethically yourself today,” observed the captain.

“What could I do? Argue with you? It’s simply me against the whole crooked grinding greedy setup on Earth. They’ll be flopping their filthy atoms bombs up here, fighting for bases to have wars. Isn’t it enough they’ve ruined one planet, without ruining another; do they have to foul someone else’s manger? The simple-minded windbags. When I got up here I felt I was not only free of their so-called culture, I felt I was free of their ethics and their customs. I’m out of their frame of reference, I thought. All I have to do is kill you all off and live my own life.”

The captain nodded. “Tell me about your civilization here,” he said, waving his hand at the mountain towns.

“They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn’t try too hard to be all men and no animal. That’s the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn’t mix. Or at least we didn’t think they did, We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn’t move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion.

“We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people.”

“And these Martians are a found people?” inquired the captain.

“Yes. They knew how to combine science and religion so the two worked side by side, neither denying the other, each enriching the other.”

“That sounds ideal.”

 …

Spender led him over into a little Martian village built all of cool perfect marble. There were great friezes of beautiful animals, white-limbed cat things and yellow-limbed sun symbols, and statues of bull-like creatures and statues of men and women and huge fine-featured dogs.

“There’s your answer, Captain.”

“I don’t see.”

“The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life. You see – the statuary, the animal symbols, again and again.”

“It looks pagan.”

“On the contrary, those are God symbols, symbols of life. Man had become too much man and not enough animal on Mars too. And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life is possible. The Martians realized that they asked the question ‘Why live at all?’ at the height of some period of war and despair, when there was no answer. But once the civilization calmed, quieted, and wars ceased, the question became senseless in a new way. Life was now good and needed no arguments.”

“It sounds as if the Martians were quite naïve.”

“Only when it paid to be naïve. They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It’s all simply a matter of degree. An Earth Man thinks: ‘In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore, color is not really an actual part of things I happen to see.’ A Martian, far cleverer, would say: “This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and the mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This thing is good.’”

There was a pause. Sitting in the afternoon sun, the captain looked curiously around at the little silent cool town.

“I’d like to live here,” he said.

“You may if you want.”

“You ask me that?”

“Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They’re professional cynics, and it’s too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands? There’s a little patio down here with a reel of Martian music in it at least fifty thousand years old. It still plays. Music you’ll never hear in your life. You could hear it. There are books. I’ve gotten on well in reading them already. You could sit and read.”

“It all sounds quite wonderful, Spender.”

“But you won’t stay?”

“No. Thanks, anyway.”

“And you certainly won’t let me stay without trouble. I’ll have to kill you all.”

“You’re optimistic.”

“I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I’ve got what amounts to a religion, now. It’s learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?”

This is the crux of the traditionalist argument in a nutshell. I would add, however, that while it can be beneficial for a Western traditionalist to look to the other traditional civilizations of old for instruction and inspiration, the past of our own civilization is just as alien to modern man as a Martian civilization would be. The real battle is not that of the “West” versus the intrusion of outside elements, because even the “West” of today is not really Western anymore. The battle of our time is, at essence, really about the traditional versus the modern. Everything else is just a manifestation of this basic struggle. And this is a war that is happening everywhere. And it begs the question: what, exactly, are we fighting for? For the traditionalist, at least, the fight must, and can only be for our souls.

Spender adopted the Breivik approach in his war for the traditional, sparking violence that had no chance of success (in the story, he is killed). We can understand the motives and frustrations that lead to such actions, but ultimately, they don’t get us anywhere. The more correct approach, however, is Montag’s – of going underground, and trying to preserve our traditions, until the moment arises when more is possible. As Evola put it, one must become one of “those who have kept watch during the long night [so that they] might greet those who will arrive with the new dawn.” I doubt whether Bradbury had ever heard of the traditionalists, but he was certainly one of them in spirit, if not in doctrine.

I’ll end a bit indulgently and mention the one time I met Bradbury face-to-face. It was in 1996, and he was on a book tour promoting his latest book (Quicker Than the Eye), and he made a stop at the Borders in Ann Arbor, which is where I was living at the time. He had been scheduled to give a reading followed by a book signing, but so many thousands of people came that the reading was abandoned and the poor man simply sat and signed books for seven hours. I got there early and only had to wait for three. When I finally got in front of him and plunked my stack of books down for him to sign, I could feel the air as if it were charged with electricity. I was standing in front of a man who had been as much a part of my childhood as my friends and relatives. Even though I must have been indistinguishable from the legions of other drooling fans to him, he was a perfect gentleman, and I was even able to engage him in conversation for a few moments. I admitted to him that, when I made my first attempts at writing as a teenager, many of my early stories were blatant imitations of his own themes and style. He just waved his hand and said, “That’s OK. All these years, I’ve just been ripping off H. G. Wells!” And he even wished me luck in my own writing career. That will always be how I’ll remember him – every bit as legendary as I had imagined he would be.

The thoughts and feelings which Bradbury’s work inspired in me as a youth have become part of the fabric that underlies my mental and emotional makeup to the point that I can’t even recognize it anymore. He helped to show me what is truly important in life, what is going wrong with the world and what needs to be done about it. Everything else I’ve done since then has just been a continuation of this crusade. There is a direct line between my reading of Bradbury’s works as a child and the urge that has led me to my present-day engagement with Arktos and Counter-Currents. I know that, whatever else happens, he will always be a part of my own being.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury.


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/06/ray-bradbury-r-i-p/

jeudi, 23 février 2012

William Golding et son anthropologie sceptique

Prof. Dr. Heinz-Joachim MÜLLENBROCK:
William Golding et son anthropologie sceptique

Son oeuvre majeure, “Sa majesté des Mouches” (Lord of the Flies), est une critique fort pertinente de l’optimisme progressiste

williamgolding.jpgNé le 19 septembre 1911, William Golding peut être considéré comme le grand marginal de la littérature anglaise contemporaine. Le vécu existentiel, pour lui, a été le plus intense pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, où il a servi dans la marine —Golding était présent quand le Bismarck a coulé et au moment du débarquement anglo-américain de Normandie. Il a pris conscience de ce que les hommes pouvaient mutuellement s’infliger. Les expériences de la guerre ont conduit Golding, qui, avant les hostilités, croyait encore au perfectionnement de l’homme en tant qu’être social, à penser “que l’homme produit de la méchanceté comme les abeilles produisent du miel”. Le produit littéraire de cette grande désillusion est un roman, paru en 1954, et intitulé “Lord of the Flies” (en français: “Sa Majesté des Mouches”). Ce roman a permis à Golding d’acquérir la célébrité car il est devenu un succès international.

Les contours assez simples que prend l’action dans ce roman ne nous permettent de deviner que progressivement la grande profondeur de ce récit qui a toutes les apparences de la modestie. Un groupe d’écoliers anglais, âgés entre six et douze ans, échoue sur une île inhabitée du Pacifique. Les garçons se regroupent d’abord sous la houlette de Ralph, le raisonnable, qui permet le maintien d’un ordre social quasi démocratique. Mais, rapidement, une partie d’entre eux opte pour une autre voie, sous la direction de Jack, gamin agressif, totalement dénué de scrupules. Cette partie du groupe fait sécession.

Ces garçons, regroupés autour de Jack, se dénomment les “chasseurs” et abandonnent graduellement toutes les normes de la vie civilisée; mus par leurs instincts les plus sombres, libérés par la pratique de la chasse, ils s’adonnent à l’ivresse de verser le sang, développent une fixation barbare pour les mises à mort et transforment, finalement, l’île en un enfer, après avoir allumé des brasiers qui se transformeront en incendie général. Le film, tiré du roman et réalisé par Peter Brook en 1963 met bien en exergue la mutation des garçons en une horde de sauvages. Finalement, le groupe d’écoliers est sauvé de l’auto-annihilation par l’arrivée d’un officier de marine britannique.

L’histoire est, en apparence, toute dépourvue de prétention, mais, subrepticement, elle révèle ses visées plus hautes: en effet, peu après l’arrivée des garçons sur l’île, l’un d’eux, enthousiasmé par la beauté naturelle et exotique du lieu, s’écrie: “c’est l’Ile de Corail!”. Nous avons affaire, là, à une sorte de signal intertextuel, car ce cri, inséré dans l’intrigue, rappelle indubitablement la robinsonade victorienne de Robert Michael Ballantyne, “The Coral Island” (1858), que décrit Golding par ailleurs et en détail. “Lord of the Flies” est dès lors la première “anti-robinsonade”, parfaitement charpentée. L’auteur, en effet, recourt aux techniques d’écriture que présentent toutes les robinsonades, dans le but de les inverser, d’en réviser le contenu et la portée. Ces robinsonades ont été, pour la plupart, écrites à l’époque des Lumières, comme l’atteste d’ailleurs leur nom, dérivé de l’oeuvre de Daniel Defoë, “Robinson Crusoe” (1719), qui a servi à poser l’idéal intellectuel et social de l’homme au début du 18ème siècle.

“Lord of the Flies” entend aussi dévoiler, par le biais de la littérature, une anthropologie, dans le sens où elle rejette de manière décisive les espoirs optimistes des Lumières. Chez Ballantyne, trois garçons, très conscients de leurs devoirs, prennent sur le dos le “fardeau de l’homme blanc” (pour parler comme Kipling) et se comportent entre eux comme des gentlemen; chez Golding, au contraire, les garçons, qui portent, pour une bonne partie, les mêmes prénoms, s’avèrent incapable de maîtriser la situation exceptionnelle dans laquelle ils se trouvent.

Dans “The Coral Island”, le processus civilisationnel, reproduit par les héros, est menacé de l’extérieur par des sauvages et des pirates; dans le roman de Golding, les sources de la menace du Mal ne proviennent pas de l’extérieur mais de l’intériorité même de ses jeunes compatriotes. L’anthropologie sceptique de Golding acquiert toute sa pertinence dans la mesure où, dans “Lord of the Flies”, les enfants —généralement, dans toutes les robinsonades, les héros jeunes incarnent l’innocence— recèlent en eux le Mal.

“Lord of the Flies” est donc l’antithèse radicale de la robinsonade de Ballantyne, qui, elle, enjolivait l’aventure colonialiste anglaise. Mais elle ne constitue pas pour autant un manifeste anti-impérialiste. Les visées de l’auteur sont plus profondes: elles cherchent à saisir plus généralement les déficits constitutifs de l’humanité. Le principal impact de “Lord of the Flies” est d’avoir démontré que le vernis, auquel finalement se réduit notre civilisation, est très superficiel et n’offre, en fin de compte, qu’une protection bien insuffisante contre la brutalité innée de l’être humain. A plusieurs reprises, Golding a souligné que tous les pays et toutes les cultures recèlent, au fond d’eux-mêmes, un pareil potentiel de dangerosité. L’“Oxford Dictionary of National Biography” remarque que “Lord of the Flies” n’aurait certainement jamais été écrit s’il n’y avait pas eu de Bergen-Belsen ou d’Auschwitz ou si Dresde n’avait pas été bombardée par les Alliés.

lordofthefliesbookcover_1.jpgDans “Lord of the Flies” —le titre, rappellons-le, est une traduction littérale du concept hébraïque de “Belzébuth”, le “Seigneur des Mouches”— le tête de porc fichée sur un pieu, que les “chasseurs” offrent en sacrifice pour conjurer le danger d’un “monstre” qui les menacerait, symbolise le Mal. En voyant cette tête de porc, entourée d’une dégoûtante nuée de mouches, Simon, qui finira martyr, reconnaît que l’homme lui-même est ce “monstre”, une créature déchue.

L’homme déchu est aussi le thème du récit de Golding, se déroulant dans la préhistoire, “The Inheritors” (1955). Ce récit mène l’enquête sur le Mal, depuis son émergence. “Lord of the Flies” campe l’action dans un contexte moderne (à l’arrière-plan, une guerre atomique fait rage); dans “The Inheritors”, au contraire, le Mal est décrit dans ses formes les plus originelles. Dans “Lord of the Flies”, Golding cherche à corriger un genre littéraire, véhicule traditionnel de l’idéologie progressiste. Dans “The Inheritors”, il va se poser comme l’opposant radical à l’apôtre le plus emblématique du progrès dans le monde anglo-saxon du 20ème siècle.

Si “Lord of the Flies” décrit l’île de corail (“The Coral Island”) de Ballantyne, “The Inheritors” cherche délibérément à inverser la thèse véhiculée par la nouvelle “The Grisly Folk” de H. G. Wells (1921). Dans les deux cas, le scepticisme antiprogressiste de Golding s’exprime, avec la nette intention de provoquer de manière affichée l’idéologie dominante. Dans “Lord of the Flies”, ce sont des enfants qui incarnent le Mal. Dans “The Inheritors”, les Néanderthaliens sont posés comme les victimes innocentes de l’homo sapiens, qui veut s’imposer par la violence. Le titre, qui recèle quelque ironie, cherche déjà à montrer que la Terre n’appartient pas aux doux mais, au contraire, à leurs meurtriers; l’aurore même de l’humanité est entachée de sang.

La querelle Wells/Golding n’est pas une simple dispute intellectuelle. Golding a certes tenté de réfuter la teneur idéologique de la brève nouvelle de Wells; ce dernier avait émis des remarques dénigrantes au sujet des Néanderthaliens dans “The Outline of History” (1920). Golding les cite d’ailleurs dans les prolégomènes des “Inheritors”. Ce roman acquiert dès lors sa qualité intrinsèque parce que Golding, par le biais d’une expérience littéraire audacieuse, se glisse dans la peau des Néanderthaliens, posés par Wells comme des êtres incapables de raisonner. En effet, Wells leur dénie, dans “The Grisly Folk” toute capacité de raisonnement. Golding, lui, va tenter d’interpréter le sentiment vital chtonien de ses propres Néanderthaliens, ce qu’il résussira en campant le personnage naïf de Lok, dont il interprétera les perspectives. Sur base de l’empathie conséquente qu’éprouve Golding, la domination finale des Néanderthaliens par les hommes dotés de raison et armés de quelques artifices rudimentaires de “technologie”, prend une tournure tragique. Golding démontre de la sorte que tout progrès historique englobe simultanément pertes et profits. Contrairement à l’écrivain catholique de son époque, Hilaire Belloc, Golding n’entame pas une polémique contre le principe de base énoncé par Wells, qui postule l’évolution de l’homme au départ de prémisses primitives, mais uniquement contre l’interprétation qu’en fait Wells, c’est-à-dire celle d’un développement parfaitement libre qui ne connaît ni crises ni sauts qualitatifs provisoires.

A partir de la rédaction de son amère robinsonade à héros unique, “Pincher Martin” (1956), Golding illustre sa thématique générale, celle du caractère inné du Mal en l’homme, non plus de manière collective mais de manière individuelle. Dans sa rude présentation de la situation de l’homme dans le monde, basée sur des fondements religieux, la rédemption, par la mort de Jésus Christ, ne joue aucun rôle concret et améliorant, vu tout l’arrière-plan éminemment négatif sur fond duquel se déploie l’aventure humaine.

Golding, à qui on attribua le Prix Nobel de littérature en 1983, est resté, sa vie durant, un isolé difficile à cerner sur la scène littéraire britannique. Il était populaire parmi ses contemporains et se désintéressait des problèmes réels de la société britannique. La critique que formule Golding à l’endroit de la civilisation a des fondements religieux: elle se borne à dévoiler, sans illusion aucune, la fragilité intrinsèque de l’homme et nous laisse en héritage un savoir profond qui devrait demeurer durable en nos esprits, et ce n’est pas là le moindre mérite de son oeuvre vu la superficialité de la pensée actuelle: la société humaine n’est ni améliorable ni perfectible par l’action d’une quelconque “ingénierie sociale”.

Prof. Dr. Heinz-Joachim MÜLLENBROCK.
(article paru dans “Junge Freiheit”, Berlin, n°38/2011; http://www.jungefreiheit.de ).

Le Prof. Dr; Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock est professeur ordinaire retraité de langue et littérature anglaise à l’Université “Georg-August” de Göttingen.

vendredi, 20 janvier 2012

Pourquoi relire Koestler?

Arthur-Koestler-001.jpg

Pourquoi relire Koestler?

 

Entretien avec Robert Steuckers à l’occasion de ses dernières conférences sur la vie et l’oeuvre d’Arthur Koestler

Propos recueillis par Denis Ilmas

DI: Monsieur Steuckers, vous voilà embarqué dans une tournée de conférences sur la vie et l’oeuvre d’Arthur Koestler, un auteur quasi oublié aujourd’hui, peu (re)lu et dont les livres ne sont plus tous réédités. Pourquoi insistez-vous sur cet auteur, quand commence la seconde décennie du 21ème siècle?

RS: D’abord parce que j’arrive à l’âge des rétrospectives. Non pas pour me faire plaisir, même si cela ne me déplait pas. Mais parce que de nombreuses personnes, plus jeunes que moi, me posent des questions sur mon itinéraire pour le replacer dans l’histoire générale des mouvements non conformistes de la seconde moitié du 20ème siècle et, à mon corps défendant, dans l’histoire, plus limitée dans le temps et l’espace, de la “nouvelle droite”. Commençons par l’aspect rétrospectif: j’ai toujours aimé me souvenir, un peu à la façon de Chateaubriand, de ce moment précis de ma tendre adolescence, quelques jours après que l’on m’ait exhorté à lire des livres “plus sérieux” que les ouvrages généralement destinés à la jeunesse, comme Ivanhoe de Walter Scott ou L’ile au trésor de Stevenson, Les trois mousquetaires de Dumas, Jules Vernes, ou à l’enfance, comme la Comtesse de Ségur (dont mon préféré était et reste Un bon petit diable) et la série du “Club des Cinq” d’Enid Blyton (que je dévorais à l’école primaire, fasciné que j’étais par les innombrables aventures passées derrière des portes dérobées ou des murs lambrisés à panneaux amovibles, dans de mystérieux souterrains ou autres passages secrets). Rien que cette liste de livres lus par un gamin, il y a quarante, quarante-cinq ans, évoque une époque révolue... Mais revenons à ce “moment” précis qui est un petit délice de mes reminiscences: j’avais accepté l’exhortation des adultes et, de toutes les façons, la littérature enfantine et celle de la pré-adolescence ne me satisfaisaient plus.

Koestler m’accompagne maintenant depuis plus de quarante ans

Mais que faire? Sur le chemin de l’école, tout à la fin de la Chaussée de Charleroi, à trente mètres du grand carrefour animé de “Ma Campagne”, il y avait un marchand de journaux qui avait eu la bonne idée de joindre une belle annexe à son modeste commerce et de créer une “centrale du Livre de Poche”. Il y avait, en face et à droite de son comptoir, un mur, qui me paraissait alors incroyablement haut, où s’alignaient tous les volumes de la collection. Je ne savais pas quoi choisir. J’ai demandé un catalogue et, muni de celui-ci, je suis allé trouver le Frère Marcel (Aelbrechts), vieux professeur de français toujours engoncé dans son cache-poussière brunâtre mais cravaté de noir (car un professeur devait toujours porter la cravate à l’époque...), pour qu’il me pointe une dizaine de livres dans le catalogue. Il s’est exécuté avec complaisance, avec ses habituels claquements humides de langue et de maxillaires, par lesquels il ponctuait ses conseils toujours un peu désabusés: l’homme n’avait apparemment plus grande confiance en l’humanité... Dans la liste, il y avait Un testament espagnol d’Arthur Koestler. Je l’ai lu, un peu plus tard, vers l’âge de quinze ans. Et cet ouvrage m’a laissé une très forte impression. Koestler m’accompagne donc depuis plus de quarante ans maintenant.

koestler_un testament espagnol.jpgLe Testament espagnol de Koestler est un chef-d’oeuvre: la déréliction de l’homme, qui attend une exécution promise, les joies de lire dans cette geôle, espace exigu entre deux mondes (celui de la vie, qu’on va quitter, et celui, de l’“après”, inconnu et appréhendé), la fatalité de la mort dans un environnement ibérique, acceptée par les autres détenus, dont “le Poitrinaire”... A quinze ans, une littérature aussi forte laisse des traces. Pendant deux bonnes années, Koestler, pour moi, n’a été que ce prisonnier anglo-judéo-hongrois, pris dans la tourmente de la Guerre Civile espagnole, cet homme d’une gauche apparemment militante, dont on ne discernait plus tellement les contours quand s’évanouissait les vanités face à une mort qu’il pouvait croire imminente.

En 1973, nous nous retrouvâmes en voyage scolaire, sous le plomb du soleil d’août en Grèce. Marcel nous escortait; il avait troqué son éternel cache-poussière contre un costume léger de coton clair; il suivait la troupe de sa démarche molle et avec la mine toujours sceptique, cette fois avec un galurin, type bobo, rivé sur son crâne dégarni. Un jour, alors que nous marchions de l’auberge universitaire, située sur un large boulevard athénien, vers une station de métro pour nous amener à l’Acropole ou à Egine, les “non-conformistes” de la bande —Frédéric Beerens, le futur gynécologue Leyssens, Yves Debay, futur directeur des revues militaires Raids et L’Assaut et votre serviteur— tinrent un conciliabule en dévalant allègrement une rue en pente: outre les livres, où nous trouvions en abondance notre miel, quelle lecture régulière adopter pour consolider notre vision dissidente, qui, bien sûr, n’épousait pas les formes vulgaires et permissives de dissidence en cette ère qui suivait immédiatement Mai 68? Nous connaissions tous le mensuel Europe-Magazine, alors dirigé par Emile Lecerf. La littérature belge de langue française doit quelques belles oeuvres à Lecerf: inconstestablement, son essai sur Montherlant, rédigé dans sa plus tendre jeunesse, mérite le détour et montre quelle a été la réception de l’auteur des Olympiques, surtout chez les jeunes gens, jusqu’aux années de guerre. Plus tard, quand le malheur l’a frappé et que son fils lui a été enlevé par la Camarde, il nous a laissé un témoignage poignant avec Pour un fils mort à vingt ans. Lié d’amitié à Louis Pauwels, Lecerf était devenu le premier correspondant belge de la revue Nouvelle école. Beerens avait repéré une publicité pour cette revue d’Alain de Benoist qui n’avait alors que trente ans et cherchait à promouvoir sa création. En dépit de l’oeuvre littéraire passée d’Emile Lecerf, que nous ne connaissions pas à l’époque, le style journalistique du directeur d’Europe-Magazine nous déplaisait profondément: nous lui trouvions des accents populaciers et lui reprochions trop d’allusions graveleuses. Nous avions soif d’autre chose et peut-être que cette revue Nouvelle école, aux thèmes plus allèchants, allait-elle nous satisfaire?

Koestler et la “nouvelle droite”: le lien? La critique du réductionnisme!

Le conciliabule ambulant d’Athènes a donc décidé de mon sort: depuis cette journée torride d’août 1973 à Athènes, je suis mu par un tropisme qui me tourne immanquablement vers Nouvelle école, même vingt après avoir rompu avec son fondateur. Dès notre retour à Bruxelles, nous nous sommes mis en chasse pour récupérer autant de numéros possible, nous abonner... Beerens et moi, après notre quête qui nous avait menés aux bureaux du magazine, rue Deckens à Etterbeek, nous nous sommes retrouvés un soir à une séance du NEM-Club de Lecerf, structure destinée à servir de point de ralliement pour les lecteurs du mensuel: nouvelle déception... Mais, dans Nouvelle école puis dans les premiers numéros d’Eléments, reçus en novembre 1973, un thème se profilait: celui d’une critique serrée du “réductionnisme”. C’est là que Koestler m’est réapparu. Il n’avait pas été que cet homme de gauche romantique, parti en Espagne pendant la guerre civile pour soutenir le camp anti-franquiste, il avait aussi été un précurseur de la critique des idéologies dominantes. Il leur reprochait de “réduire” les mille et un possibles de l’homme à l’économie (et à la politique) avec le marxisme ou au sexe (hyper-problématisé) avec le freudisme, après avoir été un militant communiste exemplaire et un vulgarisateur des thèses de Sigmund Freud.

A mes débuts dans ce qui allait, cinq ans plus tard, devenir la mouvance “néo-droitiste”, le thème majeur était en quelque sorte la résistance aux diverses facettes du réductionnisme. Nouvelle école et Eléments évoquaient cette déviance de la pensée qui entraînait l’humanité occidentale vers l’assèchement et l’impuissance, comme d’ailleurs —mais nous ne le saurions que plus tard— les groupes Planète de Louis Pauwels l’avaient aussi évoquée, notamment avec l’appui d’un compatriote, toujours méconnu aujourd’hui ou seulement décrié sur le ton de l’hystérie comme “politiquement incorrect”, Raymond de Becker. En entrant directement en contact avec les représentants à Bruxelles de Nouvelle école et du “Groupement de Recherches et d’Etudes sur la Civilisation Européenne” (GRECE) —soit Claude Vanderperren à Auderghem en juin 1974, qui était le nouveau correspondant de Nouvelle école, Dulière à Forest en juillet 1974 qui distribuait les brochures du GRECE, puis Georges Hupin, qui en animait l’antenne à Uccle en septembre 1974— nous nous sommes aperçus effectivement que la critique du réductionnisme était à l’ordre du jour: thème majeur de l’Université d’été du GRECE, dont revenait Georges Hupin; thème tout aussi essentiel de deux “Congrès Internationaux pour la Défense de la Culture”, tenus, le premier, à Turin en janvier 1973, le deuxième à Nice (sous les auspices de Jacques Médecin), en septembre 1974. Ces Congrès avaient été conçus et initiés, puis abandonnés, par Arthur Koestler et Ignazio Silone, dès les débuts de la Guerre Froide, pour faire pièce aux associations dites de “défense des droits de l’homme”, que Koestler, Orwell et Silone percevaient comme noyautées par les communistes. Une seconde équipe les avaient réanimés pour faire face à l’offensive freudo-marxiste de l’ère 68. C’était essentiellement le professeur Pierre Debray-Ritzen qui, au cours de ces deux congrès de 1973 et 1974, dénoncera le réductionnisme freudien. Alain de Benoist, Louis Rougier, Jean Mabire et Dominique Venner y ont participé.

Le colloque bruxellois sur le réductionnisme

Dans la foulée de ce réveil d’une pensée plurielle, dégagée des modes du temps, Georges Hupin, après avoir convaincu les étudiants libéraux de l’ULB, monte en avril 1975 un colloque sur le réductionnisme dans les locaux mêmes de l’Université de Bruxelles. Le thème du réductionnisme séduisait tout particulièrement Jean Omer Piron, biologiste et rédacteur-en-chef, à l’époque, de la revue des loges belges, La Pensée et les Hommes. Dans les colonnes de cette vénérable revue, habituée au plus plat des conformismes laïcards (auquel elle est retourné), Piron avait réussi à placer des articles rénovateurs dans l’esprit du “Congrès pour la Défense de la Culture” et du premier GRECE inspiré par les thèses anti-chrétiennes de Louis Rougier, par ailleurs adepte de l’empirisme logique, veine philosophique en vogue dans le monde anglo-saxon. Le colloque, cornaqué par Hupin, s’est tenu à l’ULB, avec la participation de Jean-Claude Valla (représentant le GRECE), de Piet Tommissen (qui avait participé au Congrès de Nice, avec ses amis Armin Mohler et Ernst Topitsch), de Jean Omer Piron et du Sénateur libéral d’origine grecque Basile Risopoulos. Des étudiants et des militants communistes ou assimilés avaient saboté le système d’alarme, déclenchant un affreux hululement de sirène, couvrant la voix des conférenciers. Alors que j’étais tout malingre à dix-neuf ans, on m’envoie, avec le regretté Alain Derriks (que je ne connaissais pas encore personnellement) et un certain de W., ancien de mon école, pour monter la garde au premier étage et empêcher toute infiltration des furieux. L’ami de W. met immédiatement en place la lance à incendie, bloquant le passage, tandis que je reçois un gros extincteur pour arroser de poudre d’éventuels contrevenants et que Derriks a la présence d’esprit de boucher les systèmes d’alarme à l’aide de papier hygiénique, réduisant le hululement de la sirène à un bourdonnement sourd, pareil à celui d’une paisible ruche au travail. Les rouges tentent alors un assaut directement à l’entrée de l’auditorium: ils sont tenus en échec par deux officiers de l’armée belge, le Commandant M., tankiste du 1er Lancier, et le Commandant M., des chasseurs ardennais, flanqués d’un grand double-mètre de Polonais, qui venait de quitter la Légion Etrangère et qui accompagnait Jean-Claude Valla. Hupin, de la réserve des commandos de l’air, vient vite à la rescousse. Le Commandant des chasseurs ardennais, rigolard et impavide, repoussait tantôt d’un coup d’épaule, tantôt d’un coup de bide, deux politrouks particulièrement excités et sanglés dans de vieilles vestes de cuir. Pire: allumant soudain un gros cigare hollandais, notre bon Ardennais en avalait la fumée et la recrachait aussitôt dans le visage du politrouk en cuir noir qui scandait “Ecrasons dans l’oeuf la peste brune qui s’est réveillée”. Ce slogan vociféré de belle voix se transformait aussitôt en une toux rauque, sous le souffle âcre et nicotiné de notre cher Chasseur. Mais ce ne sont pas ces vaillants militaires qui emportèrent la victoire! Voilà que surgit, furieuse comme un taureau ibérique excité par la muletta, la concierge de l’université, dont le sabotage du système d’alarme avait réveillé le mari malade. Saisissant sa pantoufle rouge à pompon de nylon, la brave femme, pas impressionnée pour un sou, se jette sur le politrouk à moitié étouffé par les effets fumigènes du cigare du Commandant M., et le roue de coups de savate, en hurlant, “Fous le camp, saligaud, t’as réveillé mon mari, va faire le zot ailleurs, bon à rien, smeirlap, rotzak, etc.”. Les deux meneurs, penauds, ordonnent la retraite. L’entrée de l’auditorium est dégagée: les congressistes peuvent sortir sans devoir distribuer des horions ou risquer d’être maxaudés. Essoufflée, la concierge s’effondre sur une chaise, renfile son héroïque pantoufle et Hupin vient la féliciter en la gratifiant d’un magnifique baise-main dans le plus pur style viennois. Elle était rose de confusion.

Jean Omer Piron et “Le cheval dans la locomotive”

Voilà comment j’ai participé à une initiative, inspirée des “Congrès pour la Défense de la Culture”, dont la paternité initiale revient à Arthur Koestler (et à Ignazio Silone). Elle avait aussi pour thème un souci cardinal de la pensée post-politique de Koestler: le réductionnisme. La prolixité du vivant étant l’objet d’étude des biologistes, Jean Omer Piron se posait comme un “libre-penseur”, dans la tradition de l’ULB, c’est-à-dire comme un libre-penseur hostile à tous les dogmes qui freinent l’élan de la connaissance et empêchent justement d’aborder cette prolixité luxuriante du réel et de la vie. Et, de fait, les réductionnismes sont de tels freins: il convient de les combattre même s’ils ont fait illusion, s’ils ont aveuglé les esprits et se sont emparé de l’Université bruxelloise, où l’on est supposé les affronter et les chasser de l’horizon du savoir. Piron inscrivait son combat dans les traces de Koestler: le Koestler des “Congrès” et surtout le Koestler du Cheval dans la locomotive (The Ghost in the Machine), même si, aujourd’hui, les biologistes trouveront sans doute pas mal d’insuffisances scientifiques dans ce livre qui fit beaucoup de bruit à l’époque, en appelant les sciences biologiques à la rescousse contre les nouveaux obscurantismes, soit disant “progressistes”. Koestler fustigeait le réductionnisme et le “ratomorphisme” (l’art de percevoir l’homme comme un rat de laboratoire). Ce recours à la biologie, ou aux sciences médicales, était considéré comme un scandale à l’époque: le charnel risquait de souiller les belles images d’Epinal, véhiculées par les “nuisances idéologiques” (Raymond Ruyer). Les temps ont certes changé. La donne n’est plus la même aujourd’hui. Mais l’obscurantisme est toujours là, sous d’autres oripeaux. Pour la petite histoire, une ou deux semaines après le colloque chahuté mais dûment tenu sur le réductionnisme, les étudiants de l’ULB, dont Beerens et Derriks, ainsi que leurs homologues libéraux, ont vu débouler dans les salles de cours une brochette de “vigilants”, appelant à la vindicte publique contre Piron, campé comme “fasciste notoire”. Beerens, au fond de la salle, rigolait, surtout quand la plupart des étudiants lançaient de vibrants “vos gueules!” ou des “cassez-vous!” aux copains des politrouks dûment défaits par l’arme secrète (la pantoufle à pompon de nylon) de la concierge, mercenaire à son corps défendant d’une peste brune, dont elle ignorait tout mais qui avait été brusquement réveillée, parait-il, par le “fasciste notoire”, disciple de l’ex-communiste pur jus Koestler et rédacteur-en-chef de la bien laïcarde et bien para-maçonnique La Pensée et les Hommes. L’anti-fascisme professionnel sans profession bien définie montrait déjà qu’il ne relevait pas de la politique mais de la psychiatrie.

Ma lecture du “Zéro et l’Infini”

le-zero-et-l-infini-454242-250-400.jpgCe n’est pas seulement par l’effet tonifiant du blanc-seing de Piron, dans le microcosme néo-droitiste bruxellois en gestation à l’époque, que Koestler revenait au premier plan de mes préoccupations. En première année de philologie germanique aux Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, il me fallait lire, dès le second trimestre, des romans anglais. Mon programme: Orwell, Huxley, Koestler et D. H. Lawrence. L’un des romans sélectionnés devait être présenté oralement: le sort a voulu que, pour moi, ce fut Darkness at Noon (Le zéro et l’infini), récit d’un procès politique dans le style des grandes purges staliniennes des années 30. Le roman, mettant en scène le “dissident” Roubachov face à ses inquisiteurs, est bien davantage qu’une simple dénonciation du stalinisme par un adepte de la dissidence boukharinienne, zinovievienne ou trotskiste. Toute personne qui entre en politique, entre obligatoirement au service d’un appareil, perclus de rigidités, même si ce n’est guère apparent au départ, pour le croyant, pour le militant, comme l’avoue d’ailleurs Koestler après avoir viré sa cuti. A parti d’un certain moment, le croyant se trouvera en porte-à-faux, tout à la fois face à la politique officielle du parti, face aux promesses faites aux militants de base mais non tenables, face à une réalité, sur laquelle le parti a projeté ses dogmes ou ses idées, mais qui n’en a cure. Le croyant connaîtra alors un profond malaise, il reculera et hésitera, devant les nouveaux ordres donnés, ou voudra mettre la charrue avant les boeufs en basculant dans le zèle révolutionnaire. Il sera soit exclu ou marginalisé, comme aujourd’hui dans les partis dits “démocratiques” ainsi que chez leurs challengeurs (car c’est kif-kif-bourricot!). Dans un parti révolutionnaire comme le parti bolchevique en Russie, la lenteur d’adaptation aux nouvelles directives de la centrale, la fidélité à de vieilles amitiés ou de vieilles traditions de l’époque héroïque de la révolution d’Octobre 1917 ou de la clandestinité pré-révolutionnaire, condamne le “lent” ou le nostalgique à être broyé par une machine en marche qui ne peut ni ralentir ni cesser d’aller de l’avant. La logique des procès communistes voulait que les accusés reconnaissent que leur lenteur et leur nostalgie entravaient le déploiement de la révolution dans le monde, mettait le socialisme construit dans un seul pays (l’URSS) en danger donc, ipso facto, que ces “vertus” de vieux révolutionnaires étaient forcément des “crimes” risquant de ruiner les acquis réellement existants des oeuvres du parti. En conséquence, ces “vertus” relevaient de la complicité avec les ennemis extérieurs de l’Union Soviétique (ou, lors des procès de Prague, de la nouvelle Tchécoslovaquie rouge). Lenteur et nostalgie étaient donc objectivement parlant des vices contre-révolutionnaires. Koestler a vécu de près, au sein des cellules du Komintern, ce type de situation. Pour lui, le pire a été l’entrée en dissidence, à son corps défendant, de Willi Münzenberg, communiste allemand chargé par le Komintern d’organiser depuis son exil parisien une résistance planétaire contre le fascisme et le nazisme. Pour y parvenir, Münzenberg avait reçu d’abord l’ordre de créer des “fronts populaires”, avec les socialistes et les sociaux-démocrates, comme en Espagne et en France. Mais la centrale moscovite change d’avis et pose trotskistes et socialistes comme des ennemis sournois de la révolution: Münzenberg entre en disgrâce, parce qu’il ne veut pas briser l’appareil qu’il a patiemment construit à Paris et tout recommencer à zéro; il refuse d’aller s’expliquer à Moscou, de crainte de subir le sort de son compatriote communiste allemand Neumann, épuré en Union Soviétique (sa veuve, Margarete Buber-Neumann, rejoindra Koestler dans son combat anti-communiste d’après guerre). Münzenberg a refusé d’obéir, de s’aligner sans pour autant passer au service de ses ennemis nationaux-socialistes. Dans le roman Darkness at Noon/Le zéro et l’infini, Roubachov n’est ni un désobéissant ni un traître: il proteste de sa fidélité à l’idéal révolutionnaire. Mais suite au travail de sape des inquisiteurs, il finit par admettre que ses positions, qu’il croit être de fidélité, sont une entorse à la bonne marche de la révolution mondiale en cours, qu’il est un complice objectif des ennemis de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur et que son élimination sauvera peut-être de l’échec final la révolution, à laquelle il a consacré toute sa vie et tous ses efforts. (Sur l’itinéraire de Willi Münzenberg, on se rapportera utilement aux pages que lui consacre François Furet dans Le passé d’une illusion – Essai sur l’idée communiste au XX° siècle, Laffont/Calmann-Lévy, 1995).

L’anthropologie communiste: une image incomplète de l’homme

Koestler s’insurge contre ce mécanisme qui livre la liberté de l’homme, celle de s’engager politiquement et celle de se rebeller contre des conditions d’existence inacceptables, à l’arbitraire des opportunités passagères (ou qu’il croit passagères). L’homme réel, complet et non réduit, n’est pas le pantin mutilé et muet que devient le révolutionnaire établi, qui exécute benoîtement les directives changeantes de la centrale ou qui confesse humblement ses fautes s’il est, d’une façon ou d’une autre, de manière parfaitement anodine ou bien consciente, en porte-à-faux face à de nouveaux ukases, qui, eux, sont en contradiction avec le plan premier ou le style initial de la révolution en place et en marche. Koestler finira par sortir de toutes les cangues idéologiques ou politiques. Il mettra les errements du communisme sur le compte de son anthropologie implicite, reposant sur une image incomplète de l’homme, réduit à un pion économique. Dans la première phase de son histoire, la “nouvelle droite” en gestation avait voulu, avec Louis Pauwels, porte-voix de l’anthropologie alternative des groupes Planète, restaurer une vision non réductionniste de l’homme.

Ma présentation avait déplu à ce professeur de littérature anglaise des Facultés Saint-Louis, un certain Engelborghs aujourd’hui décédé, tué au volant d’un cabriolet sans doute trop fougueux et mal protégé en ses superstructures. Je n’ai jamais su avec précision ce qui lui déplaisait chez Koestler (et chez Orwell), sauf peut-être qu’il n’aimait pas ce que l’on a nommé par la suite les “political novels” ou la veine dite “dystopique”: toutefois, il ne me semblait pas être l’un de ces hallucinés qui tiennent à leurs visions utopiques comme à toutes leurs autres illusions. Pourtant, je persiste et je signe, jusqu’à mon grand âge: Koestler doit être lu et relu, surtout son Testament espagnol et son Zéro et l’Infini. Après les remarques dénigrantes et infondées d’Engelborghs, je vais abandonner un peu Koestler, sauf peut-être pour son livre sur la peine de mort, écrit avec Albert Camus dans les années 50 en réaction à la pendaison, en Angleterre, de deux condamnés ne disposant apparemment pas de toutes leurs facultés mentales, et pour des crimes auxquels on aurait pu facilement trouver des circonstances atténuantes. Force est toutefois de constater que, dans ce livre-culte des opposants à la peine de mort, on lira que les régimes plus ou moins autocratiques, ceux de l’Obrigkeitsstaat centre-européen, ont bien moins eu recours à la potence ou à la guillotine que les “vertuistes démocraties” occidentales, la France et l’Angleterre. Le paternalisme conservateur induit moins de citoyens au crime, ou se montre plus clément en cas de faute, que le libéralisme, où chacun doit se débrouiller pour ne pas tomber dans la misère noire et se voit condamné sans pitié en cas de faux pas et d’arrestation. Le livre de Koestler et Camus sur la peine de mort réfute, en filigrane, la prétention à la vertu qu’affichent si haut et si fort les “démocraties” occidentales. Ce sont elles, comme dirait Foucault, qui surveillent et punissent le plus.

Dans les rangs du cercle de la première “nouvelle droite” bruxelloise, la critique du réductionnisme et la volonté de rétablir une anthropologie plus réaliste et dégagée des lubies idéologiques du 19ème siècle quittera l’orbite de Koestler et de son Cheval dans la locomotive, pour se plonger dans l’oeuvre du Prix Nobel Konrad Lorenz, notamment son ouvrage de vulgarisation, intitulé Les huit péchés capitaux de notre civilisation (Die acht Todsünde der zivilisierten Menschheit), où le biologiste annonce, pour l’humanité moderne, un risque réel de “mort tiède”, si les régimes politiques en place ne tiennent pas compte des véritables ressorts naturels de l’être humain. Nouvelle école ira d’ailleurs interviewer longuement Lorenz dans son magnifique repère autrichien. Plus tard, en dehors des cercles “néo-droitistes” en voie de constitution, Alexandre Soljénitsyne éclipsera Koestler, dès la seconde moitié des années 70. Avec le dissident russe, l’anti-communisme cesse d’être un tabou dans les débats politiques. Je retrouverai Koestler, en même temps qu’Orwell et Soljénitsyne, à la fin de la première décennie du 21ème siècle pour servir, à titre de conférencier, les bonnes oeuvres de mon ami genevois, Maitre Pascal Junod, féru de littérature et grand lecteur devant l’éternel.

DI: Justement, je reviens à ma question, quel regard doit-on jeter sur la trajectoire d’Arthur Koestler aujourd’hui?

RS: Arthur Koestler est effectivement une “trajectoire”, une flèche qui traverse les périodes les plus effervescentes du 20ème siècle: il le dit lui-même car le titre du premier volume de son autobiographie s’intitule, en anglais, Arrow in the Blue (en français: La corde raide). Enfant interessé aux sciences physiques, le très jeune Koestler s’imaginait suivre la trajectoire d’une flèche traversant l’azur pour le mener vers un monde idéal. Mais dans la trajectoire qu’il a effectivement suivie, si on l’examine avec toute l’attention voulue, rien n’est simple. Koestler nait à Budapest sous la double monarchie austro-hongroise, dans une ambiance impériale et bon enfant, dans un monde gai, tourbillonnant allègrement au son des valses de Strauss. Il suivra, à 9 ans, avec son père, le défilé des troupes magyars partant vers le front de Serbie en 1914, acclamant les soldats du contingent, sûrs de revenir vite après une guerre courte, fraîche et joyeuse. Mais ce monde va s’effondrer en 1918: le très jeune Koestler penche du côté de la dictature rouge de Bela Kun, parce que le gouvernement libéral lui a donné le pouvoir pour qu’il éveille le sentiment national des prolétaires bolchévisants et appelle ainsi les Hongrois du menu peuple à chasser les troupes roumaines envoyées par la France pour fragmenter définitivement la masse territoriale de l’Empire des Habsbourgs. Mais ses parents décident de déménager à Vienne, de quitter la Hongrie détachée de l’Empire. A Vienne, il adhère aux Burschenschaften (les Corporations étudiantes) sionistes car les autres n’acceptent pas les étudiants d’origine juive. Il s’y frotte à un sionisme de droite, inspiré par l’idéologue Max Nordau, théoricien d’une vision très nietzschéenne de la décadence. Koestler va vouloir jouer le jeu sioniste jusqu’au bout: il abandonne tout, brûle son livret d’étudiant et part en Palestine. Il y découvrira l’un des premiers kibboutzim, un véritable nid de misère au fin fond d’une vallée aride. Pour les colons juifs qui s’y accrochaient, c’était une sorte de nouveau phalanstérisme de gauche, regroupant des croyants d’une mouture nouvelle, attendant une parousie laïque et agrarienne sur une terre censée avoir appartenu à leurs ancêtres judéens.

Ensuite, nous avons le Koestler grand journaliste de la presse berlinoise qui appuie la République de Weimar et l’idéologie d’un Thomas Mann. Mais cette presse, aux mains de la famille Ullstein, famille israélite convertie au protestantisme prussien, basculera vers la droite et finira par soutenir les nationaux-socialistes. Entretemps, Koestler vire au communisme —parce qu’il n’y a rien d’autre à faire— et devient un militant exemplaire du Komintern, à Berlin d’abord puis à Paris en exil. Il fait le voyage en URSS et devient un bon petit soldat du Komintern, même si ce qu’il a vu entre l’Ukraine affamée par l’Holodomor et la misère pouilleuse du lointain Turkménistan soviétique induit une certaine dose de scepticisme dans son coeur.

Sionisme et communisme: de terribles simplifications

Ce scepticisme ne cessera de croître: finalement, pour Koestler, la faiblesse humaine, le besoin de certitudes claires, l’horreur de la complexité font accepter les langages totalitaires, la tutelle d’un parti tout-puissant, remplaçant la transcendance divine tuée ou évacuée depuis la “mort de Dieu”. Les colons sionistes reniaient les facultés juives —du moins de la judaïté urbanisée, germanisée ou slavisée, d’idéologie libérale ou sociale-démocrate— d’adaptation plastique et constante à des mondes différents, ressuscitaient l’hébreu sous une forme moderne et simplifiée, nouvelle langue sans littérature et donc sans ancrage temporel, et abandonnaient l’allemand et le russe, autrefois véhicules d’émancipation du ghetto. Le sionisme menait à une terrible simplification, à l’expurgation de bonnes qualités humaines. Le communisme également.

Contrairement à l’époque héroïque de ma découverte de Koestler, où nous ne bénéficions pas de bonnes biographies, nous disposons aujourd’hui d’excellents ouvrages de référence: celui du professeur américain Michael Scammell, également auteur d’un monumental ouvrage sur Soljénitsyne, et celui de l’avocat français Michel Laval (Michael Scammell, Koestler – The Indispensable Intellectual, Faber & Faber, 2009; Michel Laval, L’homme sans concessions – Arthur Koestler et son siècle, Calmann-Lévy, 2005). Tous deux resituent bien Koestler dans le contexte politique de son époque mais, où ils me laissent sur ma faim, c’est quand ils n’abordent pas les raisons intellectuelles et quand ils ne dressent pas la liste des lectures ou des influences qui poussent le quadragénaire Koestler à changer de cap et à abandonner complètement toutes ses spéculations politiques dans les années 50, immédiatement après la parenthèse maccarthiste aux Etats-Unis, pays où il a longuement séjourné, sans vraiment s’y sentir aussi à l’aise que dans son futur cottage gallois ou dans son chalet autrichien. Certes, Koestler lui-même n’a jamais donné une oeuvre ou un essai bien balancé sur son itinéraire scientifique, post-politique. Les deux volumes de son autobiographie, Arrow in the Blue (La corde raide) et Invisible Writing (Hiéroglyphes) s’arrêtent justement vers le milieu des années 50. Ces deux volumes constituent un bilan et un adieu. J’en conseille vivement la lecture pour comprendre certaines facettes du 20ème siècle, notamment relative à la guerre secrète menée par le Komintern en Europe occidentale.

Agent soviétique puis agent britannique?

Koestler se lit avec intérêt justement pour le recul qu’il prend vis-à-vis des idéologies auxquelles il a adhéré avec un enthousiasme naïf, comme des millions d’autres Européens. Mais on ne saurait évidemment adhérer à ces idéologies, sioniste ou communiste, ni partager les sentiments, parfois malsains, qui l’ont conduit à s’y conformer et à s’y complaire. Koestler a été un agent du Komintern mais, à part le long épisode dans le sillage de Münzenberg, d’autres facettes sont traîtées trop brièvement: je pense notamment à son travail au sein de l’agence de presse géopolitique, “Pressgeo”, dirigée à Zürich par le Hongrois Rados et pendant soviétique/communiste des travaux de l’école allemande d’Haushofer. Koestler lui-même et ses biographes sont très discrets sur cette initiative, dont tous louent la qualité intrinsèque, en dépit de son indéniable marquage communiste. Koestler a donc été un agent soviétique. Il sera aussi, on s’en doute, un agent britannique, surtout en Palestine, où il se rendra deux ou trois fois pour faire accepter les plans britanniques de partition du pays aux sionistes de gauche et de droite (avec qui il était lié via l’idéologue et activiste de droite Vladimir Jabotinski, père spirituel des futures droites israéliennes). Ses souvenirs sont donc intéressants pour comprendre les sentiments et les réflexes à l’oeuvre dans la question judéo-israélienne et dans les gauches d’Europe centrale. On ne peut affirmer que Koestler soit devenu un agent américain, pour la bonne raison qu’à New York il fut nettement moins “employé”’ que d’autres au début de la Guerre Froide, qu’on le laissait moisir dans sa maison américaine quasi vide et que sa carrière aux Etats-Unis n’a guère donné de fruits. Le maccarthisme se méfiait de cet ancien agent du Komintern. Et Koestler, lui, estimait que le maccarthisme était dénué de nuances et agissait exactement avec la même hystérie que les propagandistes soviétiques, quand ils tentaient de fabriquer des collusions ou d’imaginer des complots.

Koestler et la France

516E%2B8cX4wL.jpegReste à évoquer le rapport entre Koestler et la France. Ce pays est, dans l’entre-deux-guerres, le refuge idéal des antifascistes et antinazis de toutes obédiences. Koestler y pérègrine entre Paris et la Côte d’Azur. La France est la patrie de la révolution et Koestler se perçoit comme un révolutionnaire, qui poursuit l’idéal 150 ans après la prise de la Bastille, devant des ennemis tenaces, apparemment plus coriaces que les armées en dentelles de la Prusse et de l’Autriche à Valmy ou que les émigrés de Coblence. Cet engouement pour la France s’effondre en octobre 1939: considéré comme sujet hongrois et comme journaliste allemand, Koestler est arrêté et interné dans un camp de concentration en lisière des Pyrénées. Il y restera quatre mois. Cette mésaventure, ainsi que sa seconde arrestation en mai 1940, son évasion et son périple dans la France en débâcle, généreront un deuxième chef-d’oeuvre de littérature carcérale et autobiographique, Scum of the Earth (La lie de la Terre). Cet ouvrage est une dénonciation de l’inhumanité du système concentrationnaire de la Troisième République, de son absence totale d’hygiène et un témoignage poignant sur la mort et la déréliction de quelques antifascistes allemands, italiens et espagnols dans ces camps sordides. Avant 1945, la littérature carcérale/concentrationnaire dénonce, non pas le Troisième Reich, mais la Troisième République. Il y a Koestler, qui édite son livre en Angleterre et donne à l’allié français vaincu une très mauvaise presse, mais il y a, en Belgique, les souvenirs des internés du Vernet, arrêtés par la Sûreté belge en mai 1940 et livrés aux soudards français qui les accompagneront en les battant et en les humiliant jusqu’à la frontière espagnole. Eux aussi iront crever de faim, rongés par une abondante vermine, en bordure des Pyrénées. Ce scandale a été largement exploité en Belgique pendant les premiers mois de la deuxième occupation allemande, avec les témoignages de Léon Degrelle (Ma guerre en prison), du rexiste Serge Doring (L’école de la douleur – Souvenirs d’un déporté politique), des militants flamands René Lagrou (Wij Verdachten) et Ward Hermans. La description des lieux par Doring correspond bien à celle que nous livre Koestler. L’un de leurs compagnons d’infortune des trains fantômes partis de Bruxelles, le communiste saint-gillois Lucien Monami n’aura pas l’occasion de rédiger le récit de ses malheurs: il sera assassiné par des soldats français ivres à Abbeville, aux côtés des solidaristes Van Severen et Rijckoort. La lie de la terre rend Koestler impopulaire en France dans l’immédiat après-guerre. En effet, cet ouvrage prouve que le dérapage concentrationnaire n’est pas une exclusivité du Troisième Reich ou de l’URSS stalinienne, que les antifascistes et les rescapés des Brigades Internationales ou des milices anarchistes ibériques antifranquistes ont d’abord été victimes du système concentrationnaire français avant de l’être du système national-socialiste ou, éventuellement, stalinien, que la revendication d’humanisme de la “République” est donc un leurre, que la “saleté” et le manque total d’hygiène reprochés aux services policiers et pénitentiaires français sont attestés par un témoignage bien charpenté et largement lu chez les alliés d’Outre-Manche à l’époque. Les choses s’envenimeront dans les années chaudes et quasi insurrectionnelles de 1947-48, où Koestler évoque la possibilité d’une prise de pouvoir communiste en France et appelle à soutenir De Gaulle. Dans ses mémoires, il décrit Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir, avec leur entourage, en des propos peu amènes, se gaussant grassement de leurs dogmatismes, de leurs manies, de leur laideur et de leur ivrognerie. La rupture a lieu définitivement en 1949, quand Koestler participe à un recueil collectif, Le Dieu des Ténèbres, publié dans une collection dirigée par Raymond Aron. La gauche française, communistes en tête, mène campagne contre le “rénégat” Koestler et surtout contre la publication en traduction française de Darkness at Noon (Le Zéro et l’Infini). Pire: l’impression du recueil d’articles de Koestler, intitulé Le Yogi et le commissaire, est suspendue sur ordre du gouvernement français pour “inopportunisme politique”! Une vengeance pour La lie de la Terre?

En Belgique en revanche, où l’emprise communiste sur les esprits est nettement moindre (malgré la participation communiste à un gouvernement d’après-guerre, la “communisation” d’une frange de la démocatie chrétienne et les habituelles influences délétères de Paris), Koestler et Orwell, explique le chroniqueur Pierre Stéphany, sont les auteurs anglophones les plus lus (en 1946, le livre le plus vendu en Belgique est Darkness at Noon). Ils confortent les options anticommunistes d’avant-guerre du public belge et indiquent, une fois de plus, que les esprits réagissent toujours différemment à Bruxelles et à Paris. En effet, la lecture des deux volumes autobiographiques de Koestler permettent de reconstituer le contexte d’avant-guerre: Münzenberg (et son employé Koestler) avaient été en faveur de l’Axe Paris-Prague-Moscou, évoqué en 1935; cette option de la diplomatie française contraint le Roi à dénoncer les accords militaires franco-belges et à reprendre le statut de neutralité, tandis que, dans l’opinion publique, bon nombre de gens se disent: “Plutôt Berlin que Moscou!” (fin des années 70, les émissions du journaliste de la télévision flamande, Maurits De Wilde, expliquaient parfaitement ce glissement). Attitude qui reste encore et toujours incomprise en France aujourd’hui, notamment quand on lit les ouvrages d’une professeur toulousaine, Annie Lacroix-Riz (in: Le Vatican, l’Europe et le Reich de la Première Guerre mondiale à la Guerre Froide, Armand Colin, Paris, 1996 et réédité depuis). L’idéologie de cette dame, fort acariâtre dans ses propos, semble se résumer à un mixte indigeste de républicanisme laïcard complètement abscons, de sympathies communisto-résistantialistes et de germanophobie maurrasienne. Bon appétit pour ingurgiter une telle soupe! Les chapitres consacrés à la Belgique sont d’une rare confusion et ne mentionnent même pas les travaux du Prof. Jean Vanwelkenhuizen qui a démontré que l’éventualité d’un Axe Paris-Prague-Moscou a certes contribué à réinstaurer le statut de neutralité de la Belgique mais que d’autres raisons avaient poussé le Roi et son entourage à changer leur fusil d’épaule: les militaires belges estimaient que la tactique purement défensive du système Maginot, foncièrement irréaliste à l’heure du binôme char/avion et ne tenant aucun compte des visions exprimées par le stratégiste britannique Liddell-Hart (que de Gaulle avait manifestement lu); le ministère de l’intérieur jugeait problématique l’attitude de la presse francophile qui ne tenait aucun compte des intérêts spécifiques du pays; et, enfin, last but not least, la volonté royale de sauver la civilisation européenne des idéologies et des pratiques délétères véhiculées certes par les idéologies totalitaires mais aussi par le libéralisme manchestérien anglais et par le républicanisme et “révolutionnisme institutionalisé” de la France. Aucune de ces recettes ne semblait bonne pour restaurer une Europe conviviale, respectueuse des plus belles réalisations de son passé.

Dans La lie de la terre, les Belges de l’immédiat après-guerre ont dû lire avec jubilation un portrait de Paul Reynaud, décrit comme un “tatar en miniature”; “il semblait, poursuit Koestler (p. 144), que quelque part à l’intérieur de lui-même se dissimulait une dynamo de poche qui le faisait sautiller (jerk) et vibrer énergiquement”; bref, un sinistre bouffon, un gnome grimaçant, animé par des “gestes d’automate”. Braillard vulgaire et glapissant, Paul Reynaud, après ses tirades crapuleuses contre Léopold III, a été le personnage le plus honni de Belgique en 1940: son discours, fustigeant le Roi, a eu des retombées fâcheuses sur un grand nombre de réfugiés civils innocents, maltraités en tous les points de l’Hexagone par une plèbe gauloise rendue indiciblement méchante par les fulminations de Reynaud. Le ressentiment contre la France a été immense dans les premières années de guerre (et fut le motif secret de beaucoup de nouveaux germanophiles) et est resté durablement ancré chez ceux qui avaient vécu l’exode de 1940. Après les hostilités et la capitulation de l’Allemagne, la situation insurrectionnelle en France en 1947-48 inquiète une Belgique officielle, secouée par la répression des collaborations et par la question royale. Une France rouge verra-t-elle le jour et envahira-t-elle le territoire comme lors de la dernière invasion avortée de Risquons-Tout en 1848, où les grenadiers de Léopold I ont su tenir en échec les bandes révolutionnaires excitées par Lamartine? Idéologiquement, les deux pays vont diverger: en France, un pôle politique communiste se durcit, dès le lendemain de la seconde guerre mondiale, et va se perpétuer quasiment jusqu’à la chute de l’Union Soviétique, tandis qu’en Belgique, le mouvement va s’étioler pour vivoter jusqu’en 1985, année où il n’aura plus aucune représentation parlementaire. Julien Lahaut, figure de proue du parti communiste belge, qui avait été chercher tous les prisonniers politiques croupissant dans les camps de concentration français des Pyrénées (communistes, rexistes, anarchistes et nationalistes flamands sans aucune distinction), sera assassiné par un mystérieux commando, après avoir été accusé (à tort ou à raison?) d’avoir crié “Vive la république!” au moment où le jeune Roi Baudouin prêtait son serment constitutionnel en 1951. Le communisme n’a jamais fait recette en Belgique: à croire que la leçon de Koestler avait été retenue.

De Koestler au post-sionisme

253604-L.jpgAujourd’hui, il faut aussi relire Koestler quand on aborde la question judéo-israélienne. Les séjours de Koestler en Palestine, à l’époque du sionisme balbutiant, ont conduit, en gros, à une déception. Ce sionisme, idéologiquement séduisant dans les Burschenschaften juives de Vienne, où le niveau intellectuel était très élevé, s’avérait décevant et caricatural dans les kibboutzim des campagnes galiléennes ou judéennes et dans les nouvelles villes émergentes du Protectorat britannique de Palestine en voie de judaïsation. Même si Koestler fut le premier inventeur de mots croisés en hébreu pour une feuille juive locale, l’option en faveur de cette langue reconstituée lui déplaisait profondément: il estimait qu’ainsi, le futur citoyen palestinien de confession ou d’origine juive se détachait des vieilles cultures européennes, essentiellement celles de langues germaniques ou slaves, qui disposaient d’une riche littérature et d’une grande profondeur temporelle, tout en n’adoptant pas davantage l’arabe. Ce futur citoyen judéo-palestinien néo-hébraïsant adoptait une sorte d’esperanto largement incompris dans le reste du monde: selon le raisonnement de Koestler, le juif, en s’immergeant jusqu’à l’absurde dans l’idéologie sioniste, devenue caricaturale, cessait d’être un être passe-partout, un cosmopolite bon teint, à l’aise dans tous les milieux cultivés de la planète. L’hébraïsation transformait l’immigré juif, cherchant à échapper aux ghettos, aux pogroms ou aux persécutions, en un plouc baraguinant et marginalisé sur une planète dont il n’allait plus comprendre les ressorts. Plus tard, dans les années 70, Koestler rédigera La treizième tribu un ouvrage ruinant le mythe sioniste du “retour”, en affirmant que la masse des juifs russes et roumains n’avaient aucune racine en Palestine mais descendaient d’une tribu turco-tatar, les Khazars, convertie au judaïsme au haut moyen âge. Poser le mythe du “retour” comme fallacieux est l’axiome majeur de la nouvelle tradition “post-sioniste” en Israël aujourd’hui, sévèrement combattue par les droites israéliennes, dont elle ruine le mythe mobilisateur.

Beaucoup de pain sur la planche pour connaître les tenants et aboutissants des propagandes “américanosphériques”

Reste à analyser un chapitre important dans la biographie de Koestler: son attitude pendant la Guerre Froide. Il sera accusé d’être un “agent des trusts” par les communistes français, il adoptera une attitude incontestablement belliciste à la fin des années 40 au moment où les communistes tchèques, avec l’appui soviétique, commettent le fameux “coup de Prague” en 1948, presque au même moment où s’amorcent le blocus de Berlin, métropole isolée au milieu de la zone d’occupation soviétique en Allemagne. Koestler ne sera cependant pas un jusqu’au-boutiste du bellicisme: il s’alignera assez vite sur la notion de “coexistence”, dégoûté par le schématisme abrupt des démarches maccarthistes. Cependant, sa présence, incontournable, dans la mobilisation d’intellectuels “pour la liberté” révèle un continent de l’histoire des idées qui n’a été que fort peu étudié et mis en cartes jusqu’ici. Ce continent est celui, justement, d’un espace intellectuel sollicité en permanence par certains services occidentaux, surtout américains, pour mobiliser l’opinion et les médias contre les initiatives soviétiques d’abord, autres ensuite. Ces services, dont l’OSS puis la CIA, vont surtout tabler sur une gauche non communiste voire anticommuniste, avec des appuis au sein des partis sociaux démocrates, plutôt que sur une droite légitimiste ou radicale. C’est dans cet espace intellectuel-là, auquel Koestler s’identifie, qu’il faut voir les racines de la “nouvelle philosophie” en France et de la “political correctness” partout dans la sphère occidentale, ainsi que des gauches “ex-extrêmes”, dont les postures anti-impérialistes et les velléités auto-gestionnaires ont été dûment expurgées au fil du temps, pour qu’elles deviennent docilement des porte-voix bellicistes en faveur des buts de guerre des Etats-Unis. Un chercheur allemand a inauguré l’exploration inédite de cet espace: Tim B. Müller (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin) dans son ouvrage Krieger und Gelehrte – Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Kriege; ce travail est certes centré sur la personnalité et l’oeuvre du principal gourou philosophique de l’idéologie soixante-huitarde en Allemagne et en France (et aussi, partiellement, des groupes Planète de Louis Pauwels!); il relie ensuite cette oeuvre philosophique d’envergure et la vulgate qui en a découlé lors des événements de 67-68 en Europe aux machinations des services secrets américains. La personnalité de Koestler est maintes fois évoquée dans ce livre copieux de 736 pages. Par ailleurs, le Dr. Stefan Meining, de la radio bavaroise ARD, et, en même temps que lui, l’Américain Ian Johnson, Prix Pulitzer et professeur à la TU de Berlin, ont chacun publié un ouvrage documenté sur la prise de contrôle de la grande mosquée de Munich par Said Ramadan à la fin des années 50.

En s’emparant des leviers de commande de cette importante mosquée d’Europe centrale, Ramadan, affirment nos deux auteurs, éliminait de la course les premiers imams allemands, issus des bataillons turkmènes ou caucasiens de l’ancienne Wehrmacht, fidèles à une certaine amitié euro-islamique, pour la remplacer par un islamisme au service des Etats-Unis, via la personnalité d’agents de l’AMCOMLIB, comme Robert H. Dreher et Robert F. Kelley. Ceux-ci parviendront même à retourner le Grand Mufti de Jérusalem, initialement favorable à une alliance euro-islamique. Les Américains de l’AMCOMLIB, largement financés, éclipseront totalement les Allemands, dirigés par le turcologue Gerhard von Mende, actif depuis l’ère nationale-socialiste et ayant repris du service sous la Bundesrepublik. La mise hors jeu de von Mende, impliquait également le retournement d’Ibrahim Gacaoglu, de l’Ouzbek Rusi Nasar et du Nord-Caucasien Said Shamil. Seuls l’historien ouzbek Baymirza Hayit, le chef daghestanais Ali Kantemir et l’imam ouzbek Nurredin Namangani resteront fidèles aux services de von Mende mais sans pouvoir imposer leur ligne à la mosquée de Munich. L’étude simultanée des services, qui ont orchestré les agitations gauchistes et créé un islamisme pro-américain, permettrait de voir clair aujourd’hui dans les rouages de la nouvelle propagande médiatique, notamment quand elle vante un islam posé comme “modéré” ou les mérites d’une armée rebelle syrienne, encadrée par des talibans (non modérés!) revenus de Libye et financés par l’Emirat du Qatar, pour le plus grand bénéfice d’Obama, désormais surnommé “Bushbama”. Il est temps effectivement que nos contemporains voient clair dans ces jeux médiatiques où apparaissent des hommes de gauche obscurantistes et néo-staliniens (poutinistes!), auxquels on oppose une bonne gauche néo-philosophique à la Bernard-Henri Lévy ou à la Finkelkraut ou même à la Cohn-Bendit; des mauvais islamistes afghans, talibanistes et al-qaïdistes, mais de bons extrémistes musulmans libyens (néo-talibanistes) ou qataris face à de méchants dictateurs laïques, de bons islamistes modérés et de méchants baathistes, une bonne extrême-droite russe qui manifeste contre le méchant Poutine et une très méchante extrême-droite partout ailleurs dans le monde occidental, etc. Les médias, “chiens de garde du système”, comme le dit Serge Halimi, jettent en permanence la confusion dans les esprits. On le voit: nos cercles non-conformistes ont encore beaucoup de pain sur la planche pour éclairer nos contemporains, manipulés et hallucinés par la propagande de l’américanosphère, du soft power made in USA.

Il ne s’agit donc pas de lire Koestler comme un bigot lirait la vie d’un saint (ou d’un mécréant qui arrive au repentir) mais de saisir le passé qu’il évoque en long et en large pour comprendre le présent, tout en sachant que la donne est quelque peu différente.

(propos recueillis à Bruxelles, décembre 2011/janvier 2012).

dimanche, 08 janvier 2012

Rudyard Kipling: The White Man’s Poet

Rudyard-Kipling-large.jpg

Rudyard Kipling:
The White Man’s Poet

By National Vanguard

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

 

Editor’s Note:

Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865 and died on January 18, 1936. In commemoration of his birth, we are reprinting the following article from National Vanguard, March 1984. Share your favorite Kipling quotes and poems in the comments section. This version is from Irminsul’s Racial Nationalist Library [2] site. The poems quoted below are available in the Wordsworth Poetry Library edition of Rudyard Kipling, Collected Poems [3].

One hundred years ago, in Lahore—today the second city in independent Pakistan but then an administrative center in British India—a 17-year-old subeditor, fresh out of school in England, worked very hard to get out each day’s edition of the Civil and Military Gazette. His name was Rudyard Kipling.

Jungle_Book_Rudyard_Kipling_poster.jpegEvery now and then the young subeditor, with his editor’s assent, would fill up a little left-over space in the newspaper with a poem of his own composition, much to the annoyance of the Indian typesetters, who did not like to use the special typefaces which Kipling deemed appropriate to distinguish his poems from the prose around them. In 1886 he gathered up all of these poems from the previous three years and republished them in a book, under the title Departmental Ditties. The book was an immediate hit with other British colonials, and the first printing sold out very quickly.

Then it was one book after another, for from 1883 until his death in 1936 Kipling’s pen was seldom idle; hardly a week went by that he did not write one or more poems. Because his poetry expressed so well the common sentiment of the race—the deep soul-sense of men conscious of their breeding and of their responsibility to live up to a standard set by their forebears—it became very popular with his fellows. He was by far the most widely read—and the best-loved—poet writing in English at the beginning of this century; every cultured person in the English-speaking world was familiar with at least some of his poems. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Kipling's  Novel, KimKipling chose as his symbol—his personal rune—the swastika, the ancient Aryan sign of the sun and of health and of good fortune. Most editions of his works published in the first decades of this century are adorned with this symbol. Beginning in 1933, however, Jewish pressure was brought to bear against the publishers, and the swastikas were dropped from subsequent printings.

Unfortunately, the censorship did not end there. Kipling’s poetry was obnoxious to the new men who began tightening their grip on the cultural and informational media of the English-speaking world in the 1930s—obnoxious and dangerous. Actually, the whole spirit of Kipling’s writing was dangerous to them, totally at odds with the new spirit they were promoting so assiduously, but they could not simply ban all further publication of his works.

What they did instead was take measures to have dropped from new editions of his collected writings those of his poems and stories which expressed most explicitly the spirit and the ideas they feared: the spirit and the ideas of proud, free White men. Today every school child still reads a bit of Kipling’s poetry: such things as “Mandalay” and “FuzzyWuzzy” and “Gunga Din,” which superficially seem safely in tune with an age of multiracialism and “affirmative action” and White guilt.

But what American schoolchild has ever been given an opportunity to read Kipling’s “The Children’s Song”? The first two stanzas of that poem are:

Land of our Birth, we pledge to thee
Our love and toil in the years to be;
When we are grown and take our place,
As men and women with our race.

Father in Heaven who lovest all,
Oh help Thy children when they call;
That they may build from age to age,
An undefiled heritage.

There are many other Kipling poems, equally dangerous, which have been deleted from every edition of his works published since the Second World War. Here are three of them:

A Song of the White Men

Now, this is the cup the White Men drink
When they go to right a wrong,
And that is the cup of the old world’s hate–
Cruel and strained and strong.
We have drunk that cup—and a bitter, bitter cup
And tossed the dregs away.
But well for the world when the White Men drink
To the dawn of the White Man’s day!

Now, this is the road that the White Men tread
When they go to clean a land–
Iron underfoot and levin overhead
And the deep on either hand.

We have trod that road—and a wet and windy road
Our chosen star for guide.
Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread
Their highway side by side!

Now, this is the faith that the White Men hold
When they build their homes afar–
“Freedom for ourselves and freedom for our sons
And, failing freedom, War. ”
We have proved our faith—bear witness to our faith,
Dear souls of freemen slain!
Oh, well for the world when the White Men join
To prove their faith again!

The Stranger

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk–
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to.
They are used to the lies I tell,
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf–
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

Song of the Fifth River

When first by Eden Tree,
The Four Great Rivers ran,
To each was appointed a Man
Her Prince and Ruler to be.

But after this was ordained,
(The ancient legends tell),
There came dark Israel,
For whom no River remained.

Then He Whom the Rivers obey
Said to him: “Fling on the ground
A handful of yellow clay,
And a Fifth Great River shall run,
Mightier than these Four,
In secret the Earth around;
And Her secret evermore,
Shall be shown to thee and thy Race.”

So it was said and done.
And, deep in the veins of Earth,
And, fed by a thousand springs
That comfort the market-place,
Or sap the power of Kings,
The Fifth Great River had birth,
Even as it was foretold
The Secret River of Gold!

And Israel laid down
His sceptre and his crown,
To brood on that River bank,
Where the waters flashed and sank,
And burrowed in earth and fell,
And bided a season below,
For reason that none might know,
Save only Israel.

He is Lord of the Last–
The Fifth, most wonderful, Flood.
He hears Her thunder past
And Her Song is in his blood.
He can foresay: “She will fall,”
For he knows which fountain dries
Behind which desert-belt
A thousand leagues to the South.

He can foresay: “She will rise.”
He knows what far snows melt
Along what mountain-wall
A thousand leagues to the North.
He snuffs the coming drouth
As he snuffs the coming rain.
He knows what each will bring forth,
And turns it to his gain.

A ruler without a Throne,
A Prince without a Sword,
Israel follows his quest.
In every land a guest,
Of many lands a lord,
In no land King is he.
But the Fifth Great River keeps
The secret of Her deeps
For Israel alone,
As it was ordered to be.


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/12/rudyard-kipling-the-white-mans-poet-2/

samedi, 07 janvier 2012

Dystopia is Now!

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Dystopia is Now!

By Jef Costello

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Whatever happened to the Age of Anxiety? In the post-war years, intellectuals left and right were constantly telling us — left and right — that we were living in an age of breakdown and decay. The pre-war gee-whiz futurists (who’d taken a few too many trips to the World’s Fair) had told us that in just a few years we’d be commuting to work in flying cars. The Cassandras didn’t really doubt that, but they foresaw that the people flying those cars would have no souls. We’d be men at the End of History, they told us; Last Men devoted only to the pursuit of pleasure — and quite possibly under the thumb of some totalitarian Nanny State that wanted to keep us that way. Where the futurists had seen utopia, the anti-futurists saw only dystopia. And they wrote novels, lots of them, and made films — and even one television show (The Prisoner).

But those days are over now. The market for dystopias has diminished considerably. The sense that something is very, very wrong, and getting worse – (something felt forty, fifty years ago even by ordinary people) has been replaced with a kind of bland, flat affect complacency. Why? Is it because the anxiety went away? Is it because things got better? Of course not. It’s because all those dire predictions came true. (Well, most of them anyway).

Dystopia is now, my friends! The future is where we are going to spend the rest of our lives. The Cassandras were right, after all. I am aware that you probably already think this. Why else would you be reading this website? But I’ll bet there’s a tiny part of you that resists what I’m saying — a tiny part that wants to say “Well, it’s not quite as bad as what they predicated. Not yet, anyway. We’ve got a few years to go before . . . uh . . . Maybe not in my lifetime . . .”

Here is the reason you think this: you believe that if it all really had come true and we really were living in dystopia, voices would be raised proclaiming this. The “intellectuals” who saw it coming decades ago would be shouting about it. If the worlds of Brave New World [2], Nineteen Eighty-Four [3], Fahrenheit 451 [4], and Atlas Shrugged [5] really had converged and been made flesh, everyone would know it and the horror and indignation would bring it all tumbling down!

Well, I hate to disappoint you. Unfortunately, there’s this little thing called “human nature” that makes your expectations a tad unrealistic. When I was very young I discovered that there are two kinds of people. You see, I used to (and still do) spend a lot of time decrying “the way people are,” or “how people are today.” If I was talking to someone simpatico they would grin and nod in recognition of the truth I was uttering. Those are the people who (like me) didn’t think that “people” referred to them. But to my utterly naïve horror I discovered that plenty of people took umbrage at my disparaging remarks about “people.” They thought that “people” meant them. And, as it turns out, they were right. They were self-selecting sheep. In fact, this turned out to be my way of telling whether or not I was dealing with somebody “in the Matrix.”

Shockingly, people in the Matrix take a lot of pride in being in the Matrix. They don’t like negative remarks about “how things are today,” “today’s society,” or “America.” They are fully invested in “how things are”; fully identified with it. And they actually do (trust me on this) believe that how things are now is better than they’ve ever been. (Who do you think writes Mad Men?)

And that’s why nobody cares that they’re living in the Village. That’s why nobody cares that dystopia is now. Most of those old guys warning about the “age of anxiety” are dead. Their children and grandchildren were born and raised in dystopia, and it’s all that they know.

In the following remarks I will revisit some classic dystopian novels, and invite you to consider that we are now living in them.

1. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

This is, hands down, the best dystopian novel of all. It is set in a future age, after a great cataclysmic war between East and West, when Communism and assembly-line capitalism have fused into one holistic system. Characters are named “Marx” and “Lenina,” but they all revere “Our Ford.” Here we have Huxley anticipating Heidegger’s famous thesis of the “metaphysical identity” of capitalism and communism: both, in fact, are utterly materialistic; both have a “leveling effect.”

When people discuss Brave New World, they tend to emphasize the “technological” aspects to the story: human beings hatched in test tubes, pre-sorted into “castes”; soma, Huxley’s answer to Zoloft and ecstasy all rolled into one; brainwashing people in their sleep through “hypnopedia”; visits to “the feelies” instead of the movies, where you “feel” everything happening on the screen, etc.

These things get emphasized for two reasons. First, some of them enable us to distance ourselves from the novel. I mean, after all, we can’t hatch people in test tubes (yet). We are not biologically designed to fit caste roles (yet). We don’t have “feelies” (virtual reality isn’t quite there – yet). So, we’re not living in Brave New World. Right? On the other hand, since we really have almost developed these things (and since we really do have soma), these facets of the novel can also allow us to admire Huxley’s prescience, and marvel a tad at how far we’ve come. The fantasies of yesteryear made reality! (Some sick souls feel rather proud of themselves when they read Brave New World.) But these responses are both defense mechanisms; strategies to evade the ways in which the novel really comes close to home. Without further ado, here they are:

The suppression of thumos: Thumos is “spiritedness.” According to Plato (in The Republic) it’s that aspect of us that responds to a challenge against our values. Thumos is what makes us want to beat up those TSA screeners who pat us down and put us through that machine that allows them to view our naughty bits. It’s an affront to our dignity, and makes us want to fight. Anyone who does not feel affronted in this situation is not really a human being. This is because it is really thumos that makes us human; that separates us from the beasts. (It’s not just that we’re smarter than them; our possession of thumos makes us different in kind from other animals.) Thumos is the thing in us that responds to ideals: it motivates us to fight for principles, and to strive to be more than we are. In Brave New World, all expressions of thumos have been ruthlessly suppressed. The world has been completely pacified. Healthy male expressions of spiritedness are considered pathological (boy, was Huxley a prophet!). (For more information on thumos read Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man – a much-misunderstood book, chiefly because most readers never get to its fifth and final part.)

Denigration of “transcendence.” “Transcendence” is my convenient term for what many would call the “religious impulse” in us. This part of the soul is a close cousin to thumos, as my readers will no doubt realize. In Brave New World, the desire for transcendence is considered pathological and addressed through the application of heavy doses of soma. Anyone feeling a bit religious simply pops a few pills and goes on a “trip.” (Sort of like the “trips” Huxley himself took – only without the Vedanta that allowed him to contextualize and interpret them.) In the novel, a white boy named John is rescued from one of the “Savage Reservations,” where the primitives are kept, and brought to “civilization.” His values and virtues are Traditional and he is horrified by the modern world. In one particularly memorable scene, he is placed in a classroom with other young people where they watch a film about penitents crawling on their knees to church and flagellating themselves. To John’s horror, the other kids all begin laughing hysterically. Religion is for losers, you see. How could anyone’s concerns rise above shopping? Which brings me to . . .

Consumerism. The citizens of Brave New World are inundated with consumer goods and encouraged to acquire as many as possible. Hypnopedia teaches them various slogans that are supposed to guide them through life, amongst which is “ending is better than mending.” In other words, if something breaks or tears, don’t fix it – just go out and buy a new one! (Sound familiar?) Happiness and contentment are linked to acquisition, and to . . .

Distractions: Drugs, Sex, Sports, Media. These people’s lives are so empty they have to be constantly distracted lest they actually reflect on this fact and become blue. Soma comes in very handy here. So does sex. Brave New World was a controversial book in its time, and was actually banned in some countries, because of its treatment of sex. In Huxley’s world of the future, promiscuity is encouraged. And it begins very early in life — very early (this was probably what shocked readers the most). Between orgasms, citizens are also encouraged to avail themselves of any number of popular sports, whether as participants or as spectators. (Huxley tantalizes us with references to such mysterious activities as “obstacle golf,” which he never really describes.) Evenings (prior to copulation) can be spent going to the aforementioned “feelies.”

The desacralization of sex and the denigration of the family. As implied by the above, in Brave New World sex is stripped of any sense of sacredness (and transcendence) and treated as meaningless recreation. Feelings of love and the desire for monogamy are considered perversions. Families have been abolished and words such as “mother” are considered obscene. Now, before you optimists point out that we haven’t “abolished” the family, consider what the vector is of all the left-wing attacks on it (it takes a village, comrades). And consider the fact that in the West the family has all but abolished itself. Marriage is now consciously seen by many as a temporary arrangement (even as a convenient merging of bank accounts), and so few couples are having children that, as Pat Buchanan will tell you, we are ceasing to exist. Why? Because children require too much sacrifice; too much time spent away from careering, boinking, tripping, and playing obstacle golf.

The cult of youth. Apparently, much of the inspiration for Brave New World came from a trip Huxley took to the United States, where aging is essentially regarded as a disease. In Brave New World, everyone is kept artificially young – pumped full of hormones and nipped and tucked periodically. When they reach about 60 their systems just can’t take it anymore and they collapse and die. Whereas John is treated as a celebrity, his mother is hidden from public view simply because she has grown old on the savage reservation, without the benefit of the artificial interventions the “moderns” undergo. Having never seen a naturally old person before, the citizens of Brave New World regard her with horror. But I’m guessing she probably didn’t look any worse than Brigitte Bardot does today. (Miss Bardot has never had plastic surgery).

The novel’s climax is a marvelous dialogue between John and the “World Controller.” The latter defends the world he has helped create, by arguing that it is free of war, competition, and disease. John argues that as bad as these things often are, they also bring out the best in people. Virtue and greatness are only produced through struggle.

As a piece of writing, Brave New World is not that impressive. But as a prophecy of things to come, it is utterly uncanny – and disturbingly on target. So much so that it had to be, in effect, suppressed by over-praising our next novel . . .

2. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1948)

This is the most famous of all dystopian novels, and also the one that is least prescient. Like Brave New World, its literary qualities are not very impressive. It is chiefly remembered for its horrifying and bizarrely over-the-top portrayal of a future totalitarian society.

As just about everyone knows, in Nineteen Eighty-Four every aspect of society is controlled by “Big Brother” and his minions. All homes feature “telescreens” which cannot be shut off, and which contain cameras that observe one’s every move. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Love with terror, etc. Orwell includes slogans meant to parody Hegelian-Marxist dialectics: “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” ignorance is strength.” The language has been deliberately debased by “Newspeak,” dumbed-down and made politically correct. Those who commit “thoughtcrime” are taken to Room 101, where, in the end, they wind up loving Big Brother. And whatever you do, don’t do it to Julia, because the Women’s Anti-Sex League may get you. In short, things are double-plus bad. And downright Orwellian.

Let’s start with what Orwell got right. Yes, Newspeak reminds me of political correctness. (And Orwell’s analysis of how controlling language is a means to control thought is wonderfully insightful.) Then there is “doublethink,” which Orwell describes in the following way:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.

This, of course, reminds me of the state of mind most people are in today when it comes to such matters as race, “diversity,” and sex differences.

The Women’s Anti-Sex League reminds me – you guessed it – of feminism. Then there is “thoughtcrime,” which is now a reality in Europe and Canada, and will soon be coming to America. (Speaking of Brigitte Bardot, did you know that she has been convicted five times of “inciting racial hatred,” simply for objecting to the Islamic invasion of France?) And yes, when I get searched at the airport, when I see all those security cameras on the streets, when I think of the Patriot Act and of “indefinite detention,” I do think of Orwell.

But, for my money, Orwell was more wrong than right. Oceania was more or less a parody of Stalin’s U.S.S.R. (Come to think of it, North Korea is sort of a parody of Stalin’s U.S.S.R., isn’t it? It’s as if Kim Il-Sung read Nineteen Eight-Four and thought “You know, this could work . . .”) But Orwell would never have believed it if you’d told him that the U.S.S.R. would be history a mere four decades or so after his book was published. Soft totalitarianism, not hard, was the wave of the future. Rapacious, unbridled capitalism was the future, not central planning. Mindless self-indulgence and phony “individualism” were our destiny, not party discipline and self-sacrifice. The future, it turned out, was dressed in Prada, not Carhartt. And this is really why Brave New World is so superior to Nineteen Eighty-Four. We are controlled primarily through our vices, not through terror.

The best description I have encountered of the differences between the two novels comes from Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

And here is Christopher Hitchens (in his essay “Why Americans are not Taught History”) on the differences between the two novels:

We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression “You’re history” as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell’s was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley . . . rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.

I believe this just about says it all.

3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

This one is much simpler. A future society in which books have been banned. Now that all the houses are fireproof, firemen go around ferreting out contraband books from backward “book people” and burning them. So, what do the majority of the people do with themselves if they aren’t allowed to read? Why, exactly what they do today. They watch television. A lot of television.

I read Fahrenheit 451 after seeing the film version by Francois Truffaut. I have to admit that after seeing the film I was a bit disappointed by the book. (This would be regarded as heresy by Bradbury fans, who all see the film as far inferior.) I only dimly recall the book, as the film manages to be more immediately relevant to current pathologies than the book does (perhaps because the film was made fourteen years later, in 1967).

I vividly remember the scene in the film in which Linda, Montag the fireman’s wife, asks for a second “wallscreen” (obviously an Orwell influence). “They say that when you get your second wallscreen it’s like having your family grow out around you,” she gushes. Then there’s the scene where a neighbor explains to Montag why his new friend Clarisse (actually, one of the “book people”) is so different. “Look there,” the neighbor says, pointing to the television antenna on top of one of the houses. “And there . . . and there,” she says, pointing out other antennae. Then she indicates Clarisse’s house, where there is no antenna (she and her uncle don’t watch TV). “But look there . . . there’s . . . nothing,” says the neighbor, with a blank, bovine quality.

Equally memorable was a scene on board a monorail (accompanied by haunting music from Bernard Herrmann). Montag watches as the passengers touch themselves gently, as if exploring their own sensations for the very first time, while staring off into space with a kind of melancholy absence in their eyes. Truffaut goes Bradbury one better, by portraying this future as one in which people are numb; insensitive not just to emotions but even to physical sensations. In an even more striking scene, Montag reduces one of Linda’s friends to tears, simply by reading aloud an emotionally powerful passage from David Copperfield. The response from her concerned friends? “Novels are sick. All those idiotic words. Evil words that hurt people. Why disturb people with that sort of filth? Poor Doris.”

What Bradbury didn’t forsee was a future where there would be no need for the government to ban books, because people would just voluntarily stop reading them. Again, Huxley was more prescient. Lightly paraphrasing Neil Postman (from the earlier quotation), “What Bradbury feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” Still, you’ve got to hand it to Bradbury. Although books still exist and nobody (at least not in America) is banning them, otherwise the world of today is pretty much the world of Fahrenheit 451.

No one reads books anymore. Many of our college graduates can barely read, even if they wanted to. Everywhere bookstores are closing up. Explore the few that still exist and you’ll see that the garbage they sell hardly passes as literature. (Today’s bestsellers are so badly written it’s astonishing.) It’s always been the case in America that most people didn’t read a lot, and only read good books when forced to. But it used to be that people felt just a little bit ashamed of that. Things are very different today. A kind of militant proletarian philistinism reigns. The booboisie now openly flaunt their ignorance and vulgarity as if these were virtues. It used to be that average Americans paid lip service to the importance of high culture, but secretly thought it a waste of time. Now they openly proclaim this, and regard those with cultivated tastes as a rather curious species of useless loser.

Nobody needs to ban books. We’ve made ourselves too stupid to deserve them.

4. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957)

Atlas Shrugged changed my life.

You’ve heard that before, right? But it’s true. I read this novel when I was twenty years old, and it was a revelation to me. I’ve since moved far away from Rand’s philosophy, but there’s a part of me that still loves and admires this book, and its author. And now I’ll commit an even worse heresy than saying I liked the film of Fahrenheit 451 more than the book: I think that, purely as a piece of prose fiction, Atlas Shrugged is the best of the four novels I’m considering here. I don’t mean that it’s more prescient or philosophically richer. I just mean that it’s a better piece of writing. True, it’s not as good a book as The Fountainhead, and it’s deformed by excesses of all kinds (including a speech by one character that lasts for . . . gulp . . . sixty pages). Nevertheless, Rand could be a truly great writer, when she wasn’t surrounded by sycophants who burbled affirmatively over every phrase she jotted (even when it was something like “hamburger sandwich” or “Brothers, you asked for it!”).

Atlas Shrugged depicts an America in the not-so-distant future. Collectivism has run rampant, and government regulation is driving the economy into the ground. The recent godawful film version of the first third of the novel (do yourself a big favor and don’t see it) emphasizes this issue of government regulation at the expense of Rand’s other, more important messages. (Rand was not simply a female Milton Friedman.) Rand’s analysis of the roots of socialism is fundamentally Nietzschean, though she would not admit this. It is “hatred of the good for being the good” that drives people in the world of Atlas Shrugged to redistribute wealth, nationalize industries, and subsidize lavish homes for subnormal children. And at the root of this slave morality (which Rand somewhat superficially dubs “altruism”) is a kind of primal, life-denying irrationalism. Rand’s solution? A morality of reason, where recognition that A is A, that facts are facts, is the primary commandment. This morality is preached by Rand’s prophet, John Galt, who is the leader of a secret band of producers and innovators who have “gone on strike,” refusing to let the world’s parasites feed off of them.

Despite all her errors (too many to mention here) there’s actually a great deal of truth in Rand’s analysis of what’s wrong with the world. Simply put, Rand was right because Nietzsche was right. And yes, we are living in the world of Atlas Shrugged. But the real key to seeing why this novel is relevant to today lies in a single concept that is never explored in Atlas Shrugged or in any of the other novels discussed here: race.

 [12]Virtually everything Rand warned about in Atlas Shrugged has come to pass, but it’s even worse than she thought it was going to be. For our purveyors of slave morality are not just out to pillage the productive people, they’re out to destroy the entire white race and western culture as such. Rand was an opponent of “racism,” which she attacked in an essay as “barnyard collectivism.” Like the leftists, she apparently saw human beings as interchangeable units, each with infinite potential. Yes, she was a great elitist – but she believed that people became moochers and looters and parasites because they had “bad premises,” and had made bad choices. Whatever character flaws they might have were changeable, she thought. Rand was adamantly opposed to any form of biological determinism.

Miss Rand (born Alyssa Rosenbaum) failed to see that all the qualities she admired in the productive “men of the mind” – their Apollonian reason, their spirit of adventure, their benevolent sense of life, their chiseled Gary Cooperish features – were all qualities chiefly of white Europeans. There simply are no black or Chinese or Hispanic John Galts. The real way to “stop the motor of the world” is to dispossess all the white people, and this is exactly what the real-life Ellsworth Tooheys and Bertram Scudders are up to today.

Atlas Shrugged, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Fahrenheit 451 all depict white, racially homogeneous societies. Non-whites simply do not figure at all. Okay, yes, there might be a reference somewhere in Atlas Shrugged to a “Negro porter,” and perhaps something similar in the other books. But none of the characters in these novels is non-white, and non-whites are so far in the background they may as well not exist for these authors. Huxley thought that if we wanted epsilon semi-morons to do our dirty work the government would have to hatch them in test tubes. Obviously, he had just never visited Detroit or Atlanta. Epsilon semi-morons are reproducing themselves every day, and at a rate that far outstrips that of the alphas.

These authors foresaw much of today’s dystopian world: its spiritual and moral emptiness, its culture of consumerism, its flat-souled Last Manishness, its debasement of language, its doublethink, its illiteracy, and its bovine tolerance of authoritarian indignities. But they did not foresee the most serious and catastrophic of today’s problems: the eminent destruction of whites, and western culture.

None of them thought to deal with race at all. Why is this? Probably for the simple reason that it never occurred to any of them that whites might take slave morality so far as to actually will their own destruction. As always, the truth is stranger than fiction.

The dystopian novel most relevant to our situation is also – surprise! – the one that practically no one has heard of: Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints [13]. But that is a subject (perhaps) for another essay . . .

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/01/dystopia-is-now/

vendredi, 16 décembre 2011

Le mystère des Anneaux


Le mystère des Anneaux

dimanche, 16 octobre 2011

Identità umana e pregiudizio etnico ne «I viaggi di Gulliver» di Jonathan Swift

 

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Identità umana e pregiudizio etnico ne «I viaggi di Gulliver» di Jonathan Swift

 

di Francesco Lamendola

Fonte: Arianna Editrice [scheda fonte]

 

Da quando è apparso nelle librerie di Londra, nel 1726, il capolavoro di quella mente satirica e paradossale che fu Jonathan Swift (in una sua opera minore, la «Modesta proposta», del 1729, aveva suggerito, con la impassibile seriosità dell’economista, che i bambini poveri venissero utilizzati come cibo per i ricchi), ossia «Gulliver’s travels», esso non ha finito di dar luogo ad equivoci e fraintendimenti.
Basti dire che, per anni ed anni, di esso, o piuttosto di una sua edizione ridotta e “normalizzata”, si è voluto fare un classico per la gioventù; cosa ancora più amaramente paradossale di quel che avrebbe potuto immaginare il suo stesso autore, dato che tutto si può pensare de «I viaggi di Gulliver», tranne che sia un romanzo adatto ai bambini.
Se bastasse il fatto che il protagonista, a un certo punto, capita nel paese di Lilliput, dove tutto, a cominciare dagli abitanti, è quindici volte più piccolo che nel nostro mondo; oppure che, nella sua successiva avventura, egli finisce nel paese di Brobdingnag, ove il rapporto delle grandezze è rovesciato a sfavore dell’uomo, e lo stesso protagonista finisce rinchiuso in gabbia come un canarino, per il trastullo della gigantesca figlia del re; se bastassero tali aspetti puramente esteriori, allora vorrebbe dire che noi attribuiamo ben poca importanza a ciò che diamo da leggere ai bambini, oppure che non abbiamo capito nulla della terribile serietà di questo libro.
Che cos’è che non passa attraverso la macina della satira impietosa di Swift, misantropo inguaribile e scatenato pessimista? Non si salva nessuno: i suoi strali colpiscono con infallibile cattiveria i filosofi, gli storici, gli inventori (e questo in piena ideologia del progresso, in pieno secolo dei Lumi!); l’avidità e la brutalità degli Europei, protesi alla conquista degli altri continenti (e ciò nel Paese europeo che più di tutti si stava impegnando in questa sedicente “missione di civiltà”, la Gran Bretagna, dopo aver ridotto alla disperazione i vicini Irlandesi); la sete degli uomini di vivere eternamente; il primordiale istinto di sopraffazione proprio della natura umana, che viene significativamente contrapposto alla olimpica saggezza e all’esplicito disprezzo ad essa riservato dai nobili cavalli parlanti.
Dal punto di vista filosofico, «I viaggi di Gulliver» sono una vera e propria miniera di spunti per la riflessione, almeno quanto lo sono altri classici ammirati sotto il profilo letterario, ma, di solito, poco considerati in questa prospettiva, quali la «Divina Commedia» di Dante, il «Don Chisciotte della Mancia» di Cervantes e i «Promessi Sposi» di Manzoni.
Una miniera addirittura inesauribile: al punto che, se volessimo non già trattare, ma anche solo sfiorare, le principali tematiche filosofiche sottese al romanzo di Swift, avremmo la necessità di riempire parecchi volumi; qui, pertanto, vogliamo limitarci a toccare uno solo di tali aspetti, vale a dire quello riguardante il problema dell’identità e del pregiudizio etnico.
Formidabile accusatore dell’etnocentrismo, Swift insiste continuamente, lungo tutta la sua opera, sulla estrema difficoltà, anzi, sulla radicale impossibilità di superare i pregiudizi culturali della propria civiltà, nel momento in cui ci si trova alle prese con una civiltà diversa, i cui presupposti materiali e spirituali siano totalmente differenti dai nostri e anche da quelli che potremmo teoricamente concepire.
È ovvio che, così impostata la questione, la soluzione non può consistere nel generico e velleitario cosmopolitismo illuminista, benché tanto decantato da Voltaire e dagli altri “philosophes” francesi, a cominciare da Montesquieu: come si fa ad essere cittadini del mondo, infatti, se risulta per noi insormontabile la barriera culturale entro la quale siamo nati e cresciuti e dall’interno della quale tendiamo a giudicare, con arbitraria sicumera, altri modi di essere, di sentire e di pensare, del tutto diversi ai nostri?
Più sensato, semmai, appare un atteggiamento di scettica tolleranza, simile a quello già mostrato da Montaigne e del quale abbiamo già avuto, a suo tempo, occasione di occuparci (cfr. il nostro articolo «Michel de Montaigne e il cannibale felice», apparso sul sito di Arianna Editrice in data 13/12/2007).
Ha scritto Gianni Celati nel suo saggio introduttivo a «I viaggi di Gulliver» di Jonathan Swift (Feltrinelli, Milano, 2004, pp.  XV-XVI):

«Che si tratti di meschini lillipuziani o di magnanimi giganti o di cavalli virtuosi, le abitudini dei vari paesi  dipendono sempre da una fissazione su certi assiomi, definizioni nominali, dogmi o giudizi a priori; e sono una cecità che impedisce di vere oltre i limiti di una cultura, anche dove si tratta di cose osservabili a occhio nudo. Non solo nei comportamenti, ma anche nelle percezioni e nei pensieri intimi, la natura umana sembra ineluttabilmente dipendente da condizionamenti ambientali. Per cui il passaggio da un regime di abitudini all’altro corrisponde sempre a un lavaggio del cervello; e Gulliver non fa che subire lavaggi del cervello passando da un paese all’atro e adeguandosi a sempre nuove situazioni.
Se tutti i comportamenti e i pensieri dipendono così strettamente  da condizionamenti esterni, viene da chiedersi  dove ci porti questa lezione di relativismo radicale. Come si chiede Patrick Reilly:  “che ne è della vantata libertà della mente, l’inviolabile santuario dell’io”? Spesso è stato detto che Swift  porge un orecchio all’uomo perché si riconosca. Ma guardiamo Gulliver, che sembra un automa in balia della relatività , alieno in tutti i paesi dove capita e anche nella sua amata Inghilterra: se lui è l’uomo in cui specchiarsi, l’uomo è l’alieno del mondo, che appena fuori casa diventa  come Gulliver una specie di “freak” da baraccone, alla maniera dei selvaggi che erano esibiti per lo svago delle folle o dei potenti. Dal libro risulta che l’identità umana viene riconosciuta attraverso “leggi di Natura”; le quali però sono giudizi a priori, abitudini di pensiero per discriminare  l’indigeno dall’estraneo. Ad esempio, nella prima parte Gulliver si trova subito a essere classificato dai dotti lillipuziani come un uomo caduto dalla luna, in base a supposte “leggi di Natura”; e per gli stessi motivi i dotti di Brobdingnag lo classificano come un embrione abortivo, poi uno scherzo di natura; e i matematici lapuziani lo disprezzano perché non ha le loro stesse attitudini demenziali; infine i cavali lo espellono dalla Houyhnhnmland perché lo considerano una bestia irrazionale. Sempre le “leggi di natura” servono a definire la differenza  tra l’indigeno e l’estraneo, e hanno il risultato di esporre Gulliver a sanzioni, a condanne al rischio della vita, all’espulsione.
Inoltre va notato che la consistenza di questi giudizi a priori si fonda  soprattutto sulla boria dei sapienti, sui luoghi comuni della cultura, e in nessun altro libro  la scienza dei dotti viene così collegata alle forme universali dell’etnocentrismo. È questo che impedisce di riconoscere  nell’alieno Gulliver un’identità umana;, facendone appunto un “freak”, uno scherzo di natura: perché, nella scienza dei dotti, i valori differenziali diventano  modi del pregiudizio etnico che decide  l’identità dell’individuo; sicché i luoghi comuni  d’ogni cultura rappresentano i criteri ultimi  per distinguere gli individui umani al resto delle creature sensitive.
Questa  una lezione che Swift ha imparato da Montaigne, uno dei suoi grandi ispiratori;  e il «Gulliver»» sviluppa la visione di Montaigne sulla relatività delle opinioni e abitudini e di tutti i popoli. Una battuta nella quarta parte riassume il pensiero che attraversa il nostro libro: “dov’è mai un essere vivente non trascinato da preconcetti e parzialità per la sua terra natia?”: Bisognerebbe citare i tratti del pregiudizio etnico negli omiciattoli di Lilliput come nei cavali della Houyhnhnmland : pensare alle idee dei capi lillipuziani di macellare  o accecare il povero Gulliver, ricordare le proposte nell’assemblea dei cavalli  di castrare gli Yahoo. Che si tratti dell’untuosa crudeltà  dei lillipuziani, della crudeltà orientale  del re di Luggnagg, di quella olimpica dei cavalli, o di quella  degli europei impegnati in guerre e massacri coloniali, la cultura delle nazionalità sembra che debba sempre confermare  le proprie abitudini ricorrendo a sistemi di crudeltà.
Ogni cultura risulta un modo violento di marchiare gli altri, di segnare i limiti tra noi e l’estraneo.  Perché chi è fuori dai limiti d’una cultura, l’alieno, sembra appartenere alla natura brada come le bestie,  dunque dovrà essere domato, marchiato o castrato come le bestie. Questo mi sembra il succo delle disavventure di Gulliver, e fa venire un mente un celebre passo di Montaigne: “Noi non abbiamo altro punto  di riferimento per la verità e la ragione che l’esempio e l’idea degli usi e opinioni del nostro paese. […] Perciò gli altri diversi da noi sembrano selvaggi, allo stesso modo in cui chiamiamo selvatici i frutti  che la natura ha prodotto nel suo naturale sviluppo” (“Essais”, libro I, cap. XXXI).»

Abbiamo detto che la constatazione della irrimediabile limitatezza e dell’insuperabile condizionamento degli individui da parte della società fa sì che Swift propenda per una visione relativistica e scettica della condizione umana.
La sua satira, che assume talora i toni di un feroce sarcasmo, non sa o non vuole individuare una”pars costruens”  sulla quale far leva, in tanto pessimismo antropologico; egli è un formidabile distruttore, ma non si pone nemmeno il problema di come l’uomo possa tentare di uscire dal condizionamento cui sempre viene sottoposto, senza neppure rendersene conto.
Non si può dire che ne abbia l’obbligo: Swift non è un filosofo, ma uno scrittore; il fatto che abbia saputo vedere e criticare, dietro la vuota retorica del cosmopolitismo illuminista e del progresso illimitato, il vuoto presuntuoso di una cultura incapace anche solo di comprendere i limiti della sua stessa ideologia, sta a significare che il grande demistificatore era di parecchie lunghezze più avanti dei suoi contemporanei, senza però spingersi innanzi fino a raggiungere, o almeno a intravedere, un terreno solido su cui poggiare i piedi.
Proviamo, dunque, a riprendere il discorso là dove l’autore de «I viaggi di Gulliver» lo lascia in sospeso, e vediamo a quali conclusioni si possa arrivare.
Oggi che la globalizzazione sta rimescolando le culture, le riflessioni di Swift appaiono di particolare urgenza, perché è ovvio che una mescolanza culturale, realizzata in tempi brevissimi e con l’unico denominatore comune del profitto economico di pochi, non può che portare a incomprensioni, tensioni, conflitti.
Non ci sembra, però, che l’appartenenza a una determinata cultura debba connotarsi prevalentemente in senso negativo, come Swift sembra pensare: al contrario, l’identità culturale è un elemento essenziale al buon vivere, perché consente all’individuo di interagire positivamente con l’ambiente, di comprendere gli altri ed esserne compreso, di condividere con essi valori, strumenti di pensiero e sensibilità. Un individuo senza identità è come una pianta secca e senza radici; una cultura senza identità è, a sua volta, come un deserto pietrificato, dove ogni cosa diviene anonima e intercambiabile.
È chiaro che l’identità culturale, se si chiude su se stessa e degenera in esclusivismo intollerante, finisce per rendere un pessimo servizio all’individuo, espropriandolo della sua unicità e precludendogli la via di ogni possibile arricchimento spirituale; ma, fino a che questo non avviene e la società si limita ad offrire all’individuo dei saldi punti di riferimento e una rete di relazioni armoniose con l’altro, non solo non ne limita la creatività, ma gli offre un insostituibile punto d’appoggio, sul quale far leva e con il quale orientarsi.
Il problema è che, oggi, da un lato le culture tendono ad abdicare alla propria autonomia e a lasciarsi omologare in un generale appiattimento, ciò che produce un gravissimo impoverimento anche per il singolo individuo; dall’altro, tendono a svuotarsi dall’interno e a dimenticare le proprie radici, trasformandosi in quelle “società liquide” di cui parla Zygmunt Bauman, dominate dalla smania del cambiamento e caratterizzate dalla riduzione del cittadino a consumatore compulsivo di beni sempre più inutili, senza i quali, però, egli si sentirebbe povero ed escluso.
Il grande pericolo, perciò, al giorno d’oggi, non è tanto l’etnocentrismo, quanto l’anonimità e la degradazione delle culture, in nome di un “progresso” incontrollabile e di un tecnicismo esasperato che relegano sempre più l’individuo nel ruolo di semplice accessorio di un sistema efficiente, ma impersonale, dominato dalla sola dimensione economica.
E non ci sembra si possa dire che i pregiudizi dell’economia siano più accettabili di quelli di origine culturale: al fanatismo identitario si sostituisce il non meno temibile ricatto dello status economico-sociale.
Nel romanzo di Gulliver, “freak” è lo straniero in quanto diverso, ridotto a fenomeno da baraccone; nella società globalizzata contemporanea, ove imperano la tecnoscienza e le leggi del profitto, “freak” è colui che non può o non vuole consumare secondo le modalità totalitarie del consumismo imperante: chi, per esempio, si accontenta di essere fruitore di beni e servizi e non più di marchi, di firme, di simboli legati all’industria.
“Freak”, abnorme, è, oggi, colui che voglia essere se stesso e rifiutare le maschere dell’avere e dell’apparire: egli viene guardato con sospetto e disprezzo, proprio come i lillipuziani guardano Gulliver, così ingombrante nella sua diversità.
Ma tale diversità è un bene, non un male, sia per il singolo individuo, sia per la società intera.
Potrebbe una società permettersi di fare a meno di quel cinque per cento creativo, di quella piccola minoranza di persone che non si adeguano passivamente a tutte le mode e a tutti i pregiudizi, ma che coltivano in se stesse la preziosa, inestimabile pianticella dell’originalità, della consapevolezza, dell’apertura esistenziale?


Tante altre notizie su www.ariannaeditrice.it

lundi, 10 octobre 2011

Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell: A Commemoration

Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell:

A Commemoration

By Kensall Green

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

So much fine writing already exists here concerning Roy Campbell (October 2, 1901–April 22, 1957) that it would be hardly fair to Counter-Currents’ previous Campbell biographers to repeat—my own rephrasing notwithstanding—this  poet’s life story once again. Let it simply stand that October 2, 2011 is Roy Campbell’s 110th birthday, and we remember him as poet, as a man of action, and as a heroic defender of the faith.

It is a mighty testament to his talent that his work and life are commemorated still, considering how much suppression his poetry — and therefore his very existence as a poet and hero — were subject to by the intellectual cabal of his day, and all the days since. He died, neck broken in an auto accident in Portugal, April 1957.

The following poems of Campbell both appeared in Sir Oswald Mosley’s BUF Quarterly magazine, published sometime between 1936 and 1940.

The Alcazar*

By Roy Campbell

The Rock of Faith, the thunder-blasted—
Eternity will hear it rise
With those who (Hell itself outlasted)
Will lift it with them to the skies!
‘Till whispered through the depths of Hell
The censored Miracle be known,
And flabbergasted fiends re-tell
How fiercer tortures than their own
By living faith were overthrown;
How mortals, thinned to ghastly pallor,
Gangrened and rotting to the bone,
With winged souls of Christian valour
Beyond Olympus or Valhalla
Can heave ten million tons of stone!

*In the summer of 1936, during the early part of the Spanish Civil War [2], Colonel José Moscardó Ituarte [3], and Spanish Nationalist Forces in support of General Franco, held a massive stone fortress, The Alcazar, against overwhelming Spanish Republican [4] forces. Despite being under continual bombardment, day and night, Col Moscardo and the Nationalists (reportedly nearly 1000 people—more than half of which were women) held out for two months.

The Fight

By Roy Campbell

One silver-white and one of scarlet hue,
Storm-hornets humming in the wind of death,
Two aeroplanes were fighting in the blue
Above our town; and if I held my breath,
It was because my youth was in the Red
While in the White an unknown pilot flew—
And that the White had risen overhead.

From time to time the crackle of a gun
Far into flawless ether faintly railed,
And now, mosquito-thin, into the Sun,
And now like mating dragonflies they sailed:
And, when like eagles near the earth they drove,
The Red, still losing what the White had won,
The harder for each lost advantage strove.

So lovely lay the land—the towers and trees
Taking the seaward counsel of the stream:
The city seemed, above the far-off seas,
The crest and turret of a Jacob’s dream,
And those two gun-birds in their frantic spire
At death-grips for its ultimate regime—
Less to be whirled by anger than desire.

‘Till (Glory!) from his chrysalis of steel
The Red flung wide the fatal fans of fire:
I saw the long flames, ribboning, unreel,
And slow bitumen trawling from his pyre,
I knew the ecstasy, the fearful throes,
And the white phoenix from his scarlet sire,
As silver the Solitude he rose.

The towers and trees were lifted hymns of praise,
The city was a prayer, the land a nun:
The noonday azure strumming all his rays
Sang that a famous battle had been won,
As signing his white Cross, the very Sun,
The Solar Christ and captain of my days
Zoomed to the zenith; and his will was done.

Roy Campbell. Poet, hero, comrade. You are commended and celebrated. Your talent shall not fade, nor shall your works grow old, age shall not bury you, nor every future time condemn.[1] Happy birthday.

Note

1. Paraphrase of Laurence Binyon’s “For The Fallen,” as quoted by Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 56.

 

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

jeudi, 08 septembre 2011

Le Yogi et le commissaire

Ex : http://zentropa.splinder.com/post/25473109/le-yogi-et-le-commissaire

Le yogi et le commissaire

yogi.jpgFutur auteur de Le zéro et l’infini, Arthur Koestler avait joué un rôle important dans la guerre d’Espagne comme agent du Komintern. Par ses écrits, il avait donné le ton d’une propagande antifranquiste qui a perduré. Plus tard, ses déceptions firent de lui un critique acéré du stalinisme. À l’été 1942, il publia un texte qui marquait sa rupture : Le yogi et le commissaire. Deux théories, écrivait-il, prétendent libérer le monde des maux qui l’accablent. La première, celle du commissaire (communiste) prône la transformation par l’extérieur. Elle professe que tous les maux de l’humanité, y compris la constipation, peuvent et doivent être guéris par la révolution, c’est-à-dire par la réorganisation du système de production. À l’opposé, la théorie du yogi pense qu’il n’y a de salut qu’intérieur et que seul l’effort spirituel de l’individu, les yeux sur les étoiles, peut sauver le monde. Mais l’histoire, concluait Koestler, avait consacré la faillite des deux théories. La première avait débouché sur les pires massacres de masse et la seconde conduisait à tout supporter passivement. C’était assez bien vu et totalement désespérant.

C’était bien vu à une réserve près. Pourquoi fallait-il donc « sauver » le monde ? Et le sauver de quoi au juste ? La réponse était dans la vieille idée de la Chute et dans celle, plus récente, du Progrès. L’une et l’autre impliquaient l’idée de salvation. Si les théories opposées du yogi et du commissaire avaient fait tant d’adeptes au XXe siècle en Occident, c’est qu’on avait pris l’habitude depuis longtemps de penser la vie en termes de rédemption ou d’émancipation.

Il n’en avait pas toujours été ainsi. La Grèce antique, par exemple, avait une approche toute différente, assez voisine de celle du Japon traditionnel. Nulle intention de changer le monde, mais la volonté de construire et de conduire sa vie en visant l’excellence. C’était une forme de spiritualité vécue dans l’immanence, mais on ne le savait pas. Elle avait sa source dans l’œuvre d’Homère que Platon appelait « l’éducateur de la Grèce ». Homère avait exprimé un idéal éthique, celui du kalos kagathos, l’homme beau et noble. Idéal aristocratique qui devint celui de tous les Grecs à l’époque classique. Seulement, cet idéal n’a jamais été regardé comme une spiritualité. Au contraire, les philosophes l’ont souvent dénigré en laissant entendre que seules leurs spéculations conduisaient à la sagesse.

En dépit de tout, pourtant, cet idéal n’a pas cessé d’irriguer une part essentielle du comportement européen le plus noble, mais jamais de façon explicite. Lacune due notamment à un parfait contresens sur l’idée de spiritualité.

Il faut comprendre que la spiritualité ne se confond pas avec les mystiques du vide. Elle est indépendante du surnaturel. Elle est ce qui élève au-dessus de la matérialité brute et de l’utilitaire, donnant un sens supérieur à ce qu’elle touche. Les pulsions sexuelles appartiennent à la matérialité, tandis que l’amour est spiritualité. Le travail, au-delà du désir légitime de rémunération, s’il a le gain pour seule finalité, patauge dans le matérialisme, alors que, vécu comme accomplissement, il relève de la spiritualité. Autrement dit, ce qui importe n’est pas ce que l’on fait, mais comment on le fait. Viser l’excellence de façon gratuite, pour la beauté qu’elle apporte et qu’elle fonde, est la forme européenne de la spiritualité, qu’il s’agisse de l’embellissement de la demeure par la maîtresse de maison, de l’abnégation du soldat ou du dressage équestre.

Ces réflexions peuvent sembler futiles face aux grands enjeux historiques de notre temps. En réalité, la spiritualité et son contraire commandent largement ces derniers. À la différence des animaux, les hommes ne sont pas programmés par l’instinct. Leur comportement dépend de leurs représentations morales, religieuses ou idéologiques, donc spirituelles.

Faute d’avoir été formulée, reconnue et revendiquée, l’authentique spiritualité européenne est ignorée. Et plus on avance dans l’ère de la technique triomphante, plus elle est masquée par un matérialisme étouffant. D’où l’attrait illusoire pour les spiritualités orientales, le « yogi » comme disait Koestler. Pour renaître, ce n’est pourtant ni sur les bord du Gange ni au Tibet que les Européens se laveront des souillures de l’époque, mais à leurs propres sources.

► Dominique Venner.

 

mercredi, 10 août 2011

Jonathan Bowden on Thomas Carlyle

 

Jonathan Bowden on Thomas Carlyle

vendredi, 05 août 2011

T. S. Eliot: Ultra-Conservative Dandy

T. S. Eliot:
Ultra-Conservative Dandy

 

 

By Jonathan Bowden

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/ 

 

eliot1.jpgFor a brief period in the late 1990s there was an attempt to demonize T. S. Eliot as an anti-Semite. This opinion was most ably canvassed by Anthony Julius’ T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form [2], but the attempt failed, and Eliot’s reputation as a poet now stands even higher than ever.

Thomas Stearns Eliot’s most controversial book was the collection of essays drawn from a series of lectures he gave in 1934 called After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy [3]. In this book, Eliot argued for an organic society — primarily from a Christian perspective — and he took a decidedly non-philo-Semitic position, considering that the more organic the society, was the better its prospects.

It seems an utter travesty, at this date, that the most famous English language poet of the twentieth century should be treated in this way.

For the interesting things to say about this fey, classical, and austere man have little to do with this (or his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915) but, rather, revolve around his contribution to literary criticism. In this regard, his development of the idea of a tradition within a writer’s oeuvre proves crucial — witness his own distancing over time from the thesis of “The Wasteland” and “The Hollow Men” as he turned to Christianity, metaphysically speaking. The idea of not seeing works in isolation but from a whole perspective is very interesting in a deeply conservative way.

This further ramifies with Eliot’s coolness and classicism in the arts — if compared and contrasted to his hostility to the Romantics, particularly a left-wing revolutionary like Shelley. (Eliot would have had no time for the literary prognosis of the Trotskyist Paul Foot in his Red Shelley [4].) Nonetheless, for him, poetry was a codification but never a standardization. It was an escape from emotion through distancing — rather than an achievement of emotional excess through revelation. All of this led to his espousal of the metaphysical poets — Donne, Vaughan, Marvell, and Thomas — as he praised their use of metaphysics in poetry to provide a unified sensibility.

Possibly Eliot’s most famous literary idea was the objective correlative — whereby he sought a general, and culturally relevant, explanation of works which transcended personal responses to them. This involved a semi-objective as well as a subjective reading of the text. A piece attempts to mean what it says, but it also indicates states of mind and experiences which are factual and that can be essayed without being unduly personal about literature.

This hunt for a more general meaning indicates a social vision for art in a man whose own work is very abstruse and ‘difficult’ to understand. This is particularly true of the early poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) and “The Wasteland” (1922), but changes somewhat after “Ash Wednesday” in 1927.

If we might turn to the poetry now: “Prufrock” begins with a stream of consciousness which is typical of early modernism — although much of Eliot’s early poetic vision owes something to his discovery of Arthur Symonds’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature [5] in 1908. Prufrock begins with comparing the evening to an etherized patient upon a table which was considered scandalous at the time when Georgian poetry was all the rage. There is even a hint of the right-wing nihilism of Gottfried Benn in early Eliot. In “Prufrock” he deals with a disappointed life, states of physical and intellectual inertia, and the absence of both carnal love and spiritual progress.

In October 1922 “The Wasteland,” edited extensively by Ezra Pound, made its appearance and extended the analysis, amid many other concerns, to his failing marriage to Vivienne, both of whom were suffering from nervous and mental disorders at the time. The poem definitely chimes with the post-First World War disillusionment of an entire generation.

“The Hollow Men” in 1925 confirms and extends this triad of despair until his conversion to Anglicanism from Unitarianism in 1927. This event was definitely the key metaphysical moment in this very fastidious man’s life. The hunger for meaning and a dormant metaphysical purpose came out. For, in his conversion or re-conversion, Eliot illuminated the idea that life is spiritually barren and meaningless without an over-arching quest, sensibility or teleology.

Certainly once his conversion is definite, the pitch of Eliot’s life and his poetry (above all) takes a decisive turn. “Ash Wednesday,” the “Ariel” poems, and the “Four Quartets” (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948) are much more certain in their direction, as well as being more casual, melodic, and contemplative in their creative method. Although secular literati remain discomfited by these poems’ transparent religiosity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the “Four Quartets” which is immersed in Christian thought, traditions, and imagery.

Much of his creative energy after “Ash Wednesday” went into writing plays in an attempt to broaden the poet’s social role — all of these pieces were verse dramas. The whole point of Sweeney Agonistes (1932), The Rock (1934), and Murder in the Cathedral dealing with Thomas a Beckett’s assassination was to bring a larger or wider audience to a conservative purpose for Christian poetry.

For Eliot is that rare thing in twentieth century literary art — an ex-nihilist, someone who reverses the positions of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (without the enervation) and wanders back towards C. S. Lewis, Belloc, and Chesterton. I think the key point about these partial dandies and Right-wing conservative intellectuals is their belief in belief. . . . For, without the prospect (even in its absence) of metaphysics, life had no ultimate meaning for them, or for us. Almost everything else about them is incidental to this truth.


 

 

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samedi, 30 juillet 2011

Wyndham Lewis' The Apes of God

Wyndham Lewis’ The Apes of God

by Jonathan Bowden

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Wyndham Lewis
The Apes of God [2]

apes-of-god.jpgThe Apes of God happens to be one of the most devastating satires to be published in the English language since the days of Dryden and Pope. It appeared in a Private Press edition [3] (prior to general release), and at over 600 pages it was the size of your average London telephone directory.

The Apes deals, in ultra-modernist vein, with a catalog or slide-show of dilettantes from the London of the inter-war period. It is, in reality, a gargantuan satire against the Bloomsbury Group and all of its works. The historical importance of the Bloomsbury Group is that they were the incubator for all the left-liberal ideas which have now hardened to a totalitarian permafrost in Western life. This is the real and crucial point of this gargantuan effort — an otherwise neglected work.

To recapitulate some of the detail: the novel concerns the sentimental education of a young idiot (Dan Boleyn) in the ways of Bloomsbury (apedom). During this prologue he meets a great galaxy of the millionaire bohemia so excoriated by Lewis. The chapters and sub-headings basically deal with his education in ideological matters (not that the simpleton Dan would see it in that way), and he is assisted in his insights by Pierpoint (a Lewis substitute), the Pierpointian ventriloquist and contriver of ‘broadcasts’, Horace Zagreus, as well as Starr-Smith. The latter is Pierpoint’s political secretary, a Welsh firebrand, who dresses as a Blackshirt for Lord Osmund’s fancy-dress or Lenten party which makes up a quarter to a third of the book.

[4]

Wyndam Lewis' portrait of Edith Sitwell

The liberals who are dissected are James Julius Rattner (a Semitic version of James Joyce), Lionel Kien and family, Proustians extraordinaire, various poseurs and Bullish lesbians, as well as the Sitwell family group who are depicted as the Finnian Shaws. The Sitwells are all but forgotten today, but they were highly influential in the world between the Wars — as is witnessed in John Pearson’s masterly biography Facades: Osbert, Edith and Sachaverell Sitwell. It is no accident to say that this satire has kept the Sitwells in contemporary culture, despite the fact that they are the butt of Lewis’ ferocious wit.

Throughout this odyssey through Apedom various themes are disentangled. The first is a penchant for the class war — in a parlor Bolshevik manner — from those who superficially have the most to lose from it. This leads to an active collaboration between masters and servants ahead of time. The next “war” to which these pacifists hook their star is the age-war between the generations which is best illustrated by the Sitwells’ attitude to their aged Patriarch, Cockeye in the novel.

Other cults or pseudo-cults of the lower thirties (i.e., the twenties) were the cult of the child, feminism of various kinds, the glorification of the negro (witness the work of Firbank, for instance), and the ever-present cult of homosexuality. As Horace Zagreus — one of Lewis’ voices in the novel — acidly points out: as far as Bloomsbury was concerned, heterosexuality was the love that dare not speak its name.

All of these putative forms of political correctness were held together by a rising generation whose most ‘advanced’ adherents were determined to let their hair down during the roaring ’20s. Indeed, the cloying, ormolu tainted facade of the super-rich — anatomized in this novel — only came to an end with the Great Crash, which burst at about the time of the novel’s appearance in 1930.

The semantics of the radical bourgeoisie have largely taken over the world — and what was anathema to mass or philistine opinion is now the normal chit-chat of the semi-educated to educated. Revolutionary bohemia — according to Lewis — proceeds in three stages. First you have the aristocratic version of it during the 1890s — the “naughty nineties,” the breaking of Oscar Wilde, etc., only for this stage to be followed by a mass bourgeois version of la Decadence in the 1920s. This makes way for the mass proletarianized version of bohemia which hits the world in the 1960s, after a few beatnik preliminaries the decade before. Lewis never lived to see this period, having died in 1957.

Another very interesting feature about Lewis’ prescience is his understanding of revolutionary ideology and its after-effects. For, as early as The Art of Being Ruled in 1926, Lewis was positing the notion that the emancipation of women to work would kill off the family far more effectively than all the feminist route-marches put together.

One of Lewis’ most extraordinary judgments is that many Marxian values, floating freely and slip-streaming their historical source, could make use of market capitalism to achieve their ends. This was an insight of such penetration and Chestertonian paradox in 1926 that it must have appeared half-insane.

Other ancillary positions which were part of this Super-structuralist ramp (sic) were the cult of the exotic and the Primitive in art, Child art and children’s rights, Psycho-analysis, and hostility to all prior forms.

The revolutionary thinker Bill Hopkins once said to me that one of the reasons for the obsession with primitivism in early modernism was a reaction to Western thought’s compartmentalization in the late nineteenth century. This led to a desire to kick against the pricks and develop contrary strategies of pure energy in the Arts. Whatever the truth about this, a hostility towards the martial past, nationalism, imperialism, race and empire — the entire rejection of Kipling’s Britain — was part-and-parcel of the Bloomsbury sensibility.

Nonetheless, it goes without saying that Lewis, the founder of the Vorticist movement inside modernism, saw modern art as a weapon in his battle against The Apes of God. In this regard Lewis was that very rare animal — a thoroughgoing modernist and a right-wing transvaluator of all values.

Interestingly, the idea of The Apes comes from the dilettantist perquisite of thousands of amateur painters, poets, sculptors, writers and the rest, themselves all part of a monied bohemia, who crowd out the available space for genuine creatives like himself. The cult of the amateur, however, would soon be replaced by the general melange of entertainment and the cultural industry which has probably stymied a great deal of post-war creation that Lewis never lived to see.


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samedi, 16 juillet 2011

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Jonathan Bowden

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/ 

george-orwell.jpgGeorge Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [2] is probably the most important political novel of the twentieth century, but the Trotskyite influence on it is under-appreciated. The entire thesis about the Party’s totalitarianism is a subtle mixture of libertarian and Marxist contra Marxism ideas. One of the points which is rarely made is how the party machine doubles for fascism in Orwell’s mind – a classic Trotskyist ploy whereby Stalinism is considered to be the recrudescence of the class enemy. This is of a piece with the view that the Soviet Union was a deformed workers’ state or happened to be Bonapartist or Thermidorean in aspect.

Not only is Goldstein the dreaded object of hatred — witness the Two-Minute hate — but this Trotsky stand-in also wrote the evil book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which the party defines its existence against. The inner logic or dialectic, however, means that the Inner Party actually wrote the book so that it would control the mainsprings of its own criticism.

One of the strongest features of Nineteen Eighty-Four is its use of what the novelist Anthony Burgess called “sense data.” These are all the unmentionable things — usually realities in the physical world — which make a novel physically pungent or real to the reader. This is the very texture of life under “real, existing socialism”: scraping oneself in the morning with a bar of old soap, the absence of razor blades, human hair blocking a sink full of dirty water; the unsanitary details of conformism, socialist commerce, and queuing which made the novel feel so morally conservative to its first readers. This and the depiction of the working class (or Proles), who are everywhere treated as socially degraded  beasts of burden. Some of the most fruity illustrations come from Winston Smith’s home flat in Victory mansions — the smell of cabbage, the horrid nature of the Parsons’ children, the threadbare and decrepit nature of everything, the continuous droning of the telescreen.

Most of these “sense data” are based on Britain in 1948. It is the reality of Wyndham Lewis’ Rotting Hill — a country of ration cards, depleted resources, spivdom, dilapidated buildings after war-time bombing, rancid food, restrictions, blunt razor blades, and almost continuous talk about Victory over the Axis powers. Britain’s post-war decline dates from this period when the national debt exceeded outcome by seven times — and this was before the joys of Third World immigration which were only just beginning. The fact that Nineteen Eighty-Four is just the conditions in Britain in 1948 — at the level of the senses — is a fact not widely commented on.

The uncanny parallels between Newspeak and political correctness are widely mentioned but not really analyzed — save possibly in Anthony Burgess’ skit 1985, a satire which majors quite strongly on proletarian or workers’ English — whereby every conceivable mistake, solecism, mispronunciation, or scatology is marked up; correct usage is everywhere frowned upon.

Another aspect of the novel which receives scant attention is its sexological implications. In most coverage of Nineteen Eighty-Four the party organization known as the Anti-Sex league is given scant attention. Yet Orwell had considerable theoretical overlaps with both Fromm and Wilhelm Reich — never mind Herbert Marcuse. Orwell’s thesis is that totalitarianism fosters a sexless hysteria in order to cement its power. The inescapable corollary is that more liberal systems promote pornography and promiscuity in order to enervate their populations.

Orwell certainly pin-pointed the arrant puritanism of Stalinist censorship — something which became even more blatant after the Second World War. One also has to factor in the fact that Orwell was living and writing in an era where importing James Joyce’s Ulysses and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were criminal offenses. Nonetheless, Orwell’s anti-puritanism and libertarianism, sexually speaking, is very rarely commented on. Perhaps this leads to the nakedly sexual rebellion of Winston’s and Julia’s affair against the Party. A series of actions for which the mock-Eucharist, the imbibing of bread and wine in O’Brien’s inner party office, will not give them absolution!

It might also prove instructive to examine the sequences of torment which Winston Smith has to undergo in the novel’s last third. This phase of the book is quite clearly Hell in a Dantesque triad (the introductory section in Victory Mansions and at the Ministry is Purgatory, and Heaven is the brief physical affair with Julia). In actual fact, well over a third of the novel is expended in Hell, primarily located in the fluorescent-lit cells of the Ministry of Love.

This is the period where O’Brien comes into his own as the party inquisitor or tormentor, an authorial voice in The Book, and a man who quite clearly believes in the system known as Ingsoc, English Socialism. He is a fanatic or true believer who readily concedes to the Party’s inner nihilism and restlessness: “you want an image of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping down on a human face forever.”

orwell1984.jpg

Moreover, the extended torture scene proceeds over a third of the novel’s expanse and was quite clearly too much for many readers — in north Wales, one viewer of the BBC drama in the mid-fifties dropped dead during the rat scene. I suppose one could call it the ultimate review! Questions were even asked in parliament about what a state broadcaster was spending its money on.

Nonetheless, O’Brien is quite clearly configured as a party priest who is there to enforce obedience to the secular theology of Ingsoc. (Incidentally, Richard Burton is superb as O’Brien in the cinematic version of the novel made in the year itself, 1984 [5].)

The point of the society is to leave the Proles to their own devices and concentrate entirely on the theoretical orthodoxy of both the inner and outer party members. In this respect, it resembles very much a continuation of the underground and Bohemia when in power. You get a whiff of this at the novel’s finale, with Winston ensconced in the Chestnut Tree cafe waiting for the bullet and convinced of his love for Big Brother.

This is the inscrutable face of the Stalin lookalike which stares meaningfully from a hundred thousand posters in every available public place. Might he be smiling under the mustache?


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samedi, 29 janvier 2011

D. H. Lawrence on America

D. H. Lawrence on America

Derek HAWTHORNE

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

LAW1.jpgI have contributed several essays to Counter-Currents dealing with D. H. Lawrence’s critique of modernity. Those essays might lead the reader to believe that Lawrence treats modernity as a universal ideology or worldview that could be found anywhere.

However, in many of his writings Lawrence treats modernity as, in effect, a spiritual disease that specifically afflicts white, northern Europeans. Everything I have said in other essays about the modern overemphasis on the “spiritual sympathetic centres” and how we starve the “lower centres” in favor of the upper, or how love and benevolence are our undoing, Lawrence usually frames in explicitly racial terms. Modernity, in other words, is the condition of white, Northern European peoples, the peoples who initiated modernity in the first place.

In a letter from October 8, 1924, when he was living in New Mexico, Lawrence writes: “I loathe winter. They gas about the Nordic races, over here, but I believe they’re dead, dead, dead. I hate all that comes from the north.” Like Nietzsche, Lawrence does not lament the “death” (or decline) of the Nordic races. He merely observes it. Nor, generally speaking, does he fall into the common error of romanticizing other races. (However, he does on occasion contrast “northern” to “southern” culture, usually to the detriment of the former.)

In Women in Love, Gerald Crich represents the white race in general; his life is an allegory of what Lawrence believes is wrong with the “northern people,” and his death symbolizes what Lawrence regarded as their degeneration. Early in the novel, Gudrun Brangwen reacts to him:

There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing. . . . “His totem is the wolf,” she repeated to herself.

Later in the novel, Birkin reflects on Gerald: “He was one of these strange white wonderful demons of the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold?”

Like Gerald’s, the end of the white race shall be an ice death: a death brought about by cold ideals and abstractions; a cutting off from the source, from the life mystery. “The white races, having the Arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfill a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation.” It is a self-destruction, just as Gerald’s death is self-destruction.

The Great Death Continent

Though the process of snow-abstract annihilation began in Northern Europe, for Lawrence the “epicenter” of the process has shifted to North America. Lawrence’s most dramatic statement of this occurs in one of his last books, The Plumed Serpent, in a passage so important that I shall quote it at length:

Was that the clue to America, she sometimes wondered. Was it the great death-continent, the continent that destroyed again what the other continents had built up? The continent whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of God? Was that America? . . .

And did this account for the great drift to the New World, the drift of spent souls passing over to the side of godless democracy, energetic negation? The negation which is the life-breath of materialism.—And would the great negative pull of the Americas at last break the heart of the world? . . .

White men had had a soul, and lost it. The pivot of fire had been quenched in them, and their lives had started to spin in the reversed direction, widdershins [counterclockwise]. That reversed look which is in the eyes of so many white people, the look of nullity, and life wheeling in the reversed direction. Widdershins. . . .

And all the efforts of white men to bring the soul of the dark men of Mexico into final clenched being has resulted in nothing but the collapse of the white men. Against the soft, dark flow of the Indian the white man at last collapses, with his god and his energy he collapses. In attempting to convert the dark man to the white man’s way of life, the white man has fallen helplessly down the hole he wanted to fill up. Seeking to save another man’s soul, the white man lost his own, and collapsed upon himself.

There is much to digest in this passage. Lawrence is suggesting that America (by which he means North America, including Mexico and Canada) acts as a vast engine of negation, wiping away or adulterating all human characteristics and all human distinctions that are “natural,” and doing so in the name of the Ideals of democracy and materialism (i.e., commerce).

Second, Lawrence is suggesting that the soul of the “dark man” is fundamentally different from that of the white man (a point he makes again and again in the Mexican writings) and that the white man’s soul has not been shifted to the “upper centres,” or knocked widdershins and out of touch with the life mystery. Therefore, all the efforts by the white man to “civilize” the dark man are in vain and it is the latter that will in fact win the day, because in some primal sense he is “stronger.” America, in short, is the continent of nihilism; the lead actor in the final drama of white, western civilization, the Ragnarok.

One of Lawrence’s heresies is to believe in essential national and racial characters. Culture, for Lawrence, flows from natural differences between human beings—and this means that humans are not fundamentally malleable and interchangeable; certain cultures simply cannot be fitted to certain people. Nevertheless, Lawrence does not believe in any doctrine of racial superiority. (The references that Lawrence makes from time to time to an “Aryan race” and, more narrowly, to the “Nordic” type may raise eyebrows today, but such terminology was common for the time.)

The Studies in Classical American Literature

Much of Studies in Classical American Literature (1923) is devoted to developing these points. This book—one of Lawrence’s most entertaining—is misleadingly titled for it is really not so much about American literature as it is about America itself. Note that in the quote above from The Plumed Serpent Lawrence refers to America as the continent “whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of God.”

The first essay in Studies is entitled “The Spirit of Place,” Lawrence explains this term as follows:

Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars; call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality.

America’s spirit of place, Lawrence tell us, is one which draws men who want to “get away” and to be masterless. It is the land of those drawn to a kind of negative freedom: not the freedom actually to be something, but, in essence, the freedom to not have to be anything at all, and especially not to be subject to another’s will. But as Hegel recognized this negative freedom—freedom to say no—does not translate into any positive sort of freedom at all. True freedom, Lawrence states, only comes about through finding something you “positively want to be.” Americans, on the other hand, “have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless, of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.”

The spirit of America, for Lawrence, thus begins to resemble very much the spirit of Gudrun Brangwen in Women in Love: negation; a fierce desire really to be nothing at all. This is American “freedom.” America is the land where the white race has gone to die, and to literally kill all its old forms: its traditions, customs, blood-ties, myths and folktales, morality, religion, high culture, even its memory of its past.

America is the land where men have come to free themselves of everything in life that is unchosen, especially when the unchosen is the natural. Again, there is a break from the primal self or true unconscious and a shift to life lived entirely from the Ideal “upper centres.” Lawrence writes, “The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny. It is his destiny to destroy the whole corpus of the white psyche, the white consciousness. And he’s got to do it secretly. As the growing of a dragon-fly inside a chrysalis or cocoon destroys the larva grub, secretly.”

The self-destruction of the white man takes place secretly, marching under the banner of the Ideal. America is the land where all the old forms are destroyed in the name of “Freedom,” “Democracy,” and, above all else, “Progress”:

Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! Hums the under-consciousness [of Americans]. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper-consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time as it will have to hear.

The cause of Liberty in Europe, Lawrence tells us, was something vital and life-giving. But he detects in American icons like Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson something strident, cold, and life-killing in their appeals to Democracy. American democracy, Lawrence claims, is at root a kind of “self-murder”; that is, when it is not “murdering somebody else.”

Lawrence’s analyses of American literature basically consist in showing how these American tendencies play themselves out in authors like Franklin, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman, and others. Whitman—an author with whom Lawrence had a love-hate relationship—gets by far the roughest treatment:

ONE DIRECTION! toots Walt in the car, whizzing along [in] it. . . .

ONE DIRECTION! whoops America, and sets off also in an automobile.

ALLNESS! shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whizz over an unwary Red Indian.

ONE IDENTITY! chants democratic En Masse, pelting behind in motor-cars, oblivious of the corpses under the wheels.

law2.jpgIt is Lawrence’s analysis of Melville’s Moby Dick, however, that is perhaps his most incisive. He sees in this simple story an encapsulation of the American spirit, the American thanatos itself. Here is Lawrence summing up his interpretation:

What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.

And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fire-worshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.

The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of the upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.

When a people loses a sense of blood-relatedness, what basis is there for community? American community is not based on blood ties, shared history, shared religion, or shared culture: it is based on ideology. He who professes the American creed is an American—he who does not is an outcast.

The American creed is based principally on a belief in freedom, equality, and Progress. For Lawrence, the first of these is (in its American form) empty, and the other two are a lie. American equality is a lie because in fact people are not equal, and virtually everyone realizes this in their heart of hearts.

American ethics requires, however, that everyone pay lip service to the idea that no one is, or can be, fundamentally better than anyone else. This is one of the country’s core beliefs. In fact, Lawrence points out that this is so fundamental to being an American that Americans are terrified lest they somehow let on to their fellow countryman that they really don’t believe that everyone is equal, or that all opinions are equally valid and valuable. They are afraid of seeming “judgmental,” and they parrot an absurd relativism in order to be seen by others as “tolerant.” Lawrence writes of America, “I have never been in a country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch the moment he shows he is not one of them.”

Essentially the same point was made by Alexis de Tocqueville. In his Democracy in America, Tocqueville includes a section titled “The Power Exercised by the Majority in America over Thought,” and writes as follows:

I know no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America. . . . In America the majority has enclosed thought within a formidable fence. A writer is free inside that area, but woe to the man who goes beyond it. . . . Before he goes into print, he believes he has supporters; but he feels that he has them no more once he stands revealed to all, for those who condemn him express their views loudly, while those who think as he does, but without his courage, retreat into silence as if ashamed of having told the truth. . . . Hence the majority lives in a state of perpetual self-adoration; only strangers or experience may be able to bring certain truths to the Americans’ attention. (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence [New York: Doubleday, 1969], 254–55)

A creedal state such as America is as intolerant as a creedal religion. A Jew who does not believe in the Exodus story does not cease thereby to be a Jew, since being Jewish is an ethnic as well as a religious identification. Similarly, Hinduism (another ethnic religion) tolerates and subsumes a vast number of doctrines and differences of emphasis. (It is even possible, in a certain sense, to be an atheist Hindu.) Christianity and Islam, however, are creedal religions and therefore much less tolerant of doctrinal deviations. One can stop being a Christian or a Muslim—immediately—by believing or not believing certain things.

America early on divided itself into ethnic communities—the English, the Germans, the Irish, etc. A genuine spirit of community existed within these groups, in virtue of their blood ties and shared history, culture, and religion. But gradually these communities mixed and lost their unique identities. The creed of “Americanism” was the only thing that then arose as something that was supposed to bind people together. But since Americanism consists mostly of the recognition of negative liberties, how effective could it be at creating community? The result is that Americans became increasingly alienated from each other.

In his Preface to Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs (1929) Lawrence speaks of the breakdown in America of “blood-sympathy” and argues that it is responsible for a seldom-discussed facet of the American character, one which Europeans find particularly strange and amusing: the American pre-occupation with hygiene and super-cleanliness:

Once the blood-sympathy breaks . . . human beings become secretly intensely repulsive to one another, physically, and sympathetic only mentally and spiritually. The secret physical repulsion between people is responsible for the perfection of American “plumbing,” American sanitation, and American kitchens, utterly white-enamelled and antiseptic. It is revealed in the awful advertisements such as those about “halitosis,” or bad breath. It is responsible for the American nausea at coughing, spitting, or any of those things. The American townships don’t mind hideous litter of tin cans and broken rubbish. But they go crazy at the sight of human excrement.

With the blood-sympathy broken, Americans seek as much as possible to isolate themselves from their fellow citizens, who they fear and find repulsive. In his essay “Men Must Work and Women as Well,” Lawrence writes presciently of how technology serves to abstract us from human relationships: “The film, the radio, the gramophone were all invented because physical effort and physical contact have become repulsive to us.”

The radio and the gramophone brought individuals and families indoors and isolated them in their individual dwellings. No longer did they sit on their front porches and converse with their neighbors. The rise of the automobile contributed to this as well. Front porches were built for the cleaner, slower paced horse-and-buggy days. Sitting on the front porch was no longer so attractive when it meant being subjected to the noise and exhaust of automobiles whizzing by. Architecture began to reflect this change in the early part of the twentieth century, with designs for new houses sometimes eliminating the front porch altogether, and often with entrances concealed from view.

In the early days of the radio and the gramophone, only some families owned them, and they would often invite the neighbors in to listen to the gramophone or to the radio. This was also the case in the early days of television. But as these technologies became cheaper, just about every family acquired them and instead of facilitating social interaction they came to positively inhibit it. One can see this same phenomenon playing itself out in an even more radical way in the age of personal computers. It is now quite common for many Americans to live almost completely isolated lives, interacting with others via the Internet and carrying on “virtual relationships.”

Progressively, the lives of Americans became denuded of most of the features that have made life worth living throughout human history: community, extended family relations, participation in rituals, customs, traditions, remembrance of the past through shared stories, and the transmission of folk wisdom through myths, fables, and songs. The lives of most Americans became entirely dominated by the concerns of what Hegel called bürgerliche Gesellschaft, or “bourgeois society”: the realm of commerce.

“Getting ahead” becomes the primary concern in life, and all else—all the products of High Culture and most of the simple pleasures of life—become distractions, impracticalities. In his essay “Europe v. America,” Lawrence writes that “the American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas the European hasn’t got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.”

This is the secret to much of the inadequacy that Americans still feel when in Europe or in European company. Partly it is the (usually correct) sense that Europeans are better educated. But it is also the sense that these people have mastered the art of life. Life for most Americans is a problem to be solved, something we will eventually be able to do better than the Old World, thanks to the marriage of commerce and science.

Hence the tendency of Americans to believe anything that is asserted by scientists and medical men, no matter how ridiculous and ill-founded, and to distrust all that comes from tradition and “the past.” As witness the bizarre American reliance on “self-help books” and “how-to” manuals, even on such subjects as making friends or raising children. Americans are aware that these things were done in the past, without manuals, but believe that “experts” can teach us how to do them better than they have ever been done before.

While we wait for science to tell us how to live, life slips by. As Lawrence writes in a letter, “They can’t trust life until they can control it. So much for them—cowards! You can have the Land of the Free, as much as I know of it.”

Perhaps Lawrence’s most eloquent and succinct summation of the difference between the New World and the Old comes is the following line from “Europe v. America”: “The Europeans still have a vague idea that the universe is greater than they are, and isn’t going to change very radically, not for all the telling of all men put together.”

With life narrowed to the concerns of “getting ahead,” and natural human sympathies submerged or obliterated, Americans began to see each other more and more merely as objects: as consumers, or competitors, or employees, or bosses, but seldom as flesh and blood human beings. Thus we find the terrible American record of exploitation of the workers; frauds committed against the consumers, often at the expense of their health or even their lives; the devastation of communities wrought by the dumping of industrial waste; and the dumping of armies of workers in massive “layoffs.”

Heidegger was right: in its disregard for human life, American capitalism reveals itself as metaphysically identical to communism. And like communism, it tramples human life in the name of Progress. In its paper-thin idealism, its inhumanity, its self-destructiveness, and in its uncertainty of exactly what it is or should be, America is Women in Love’s Gerald Crich made real on a vast scale. Or, rather, Gerald Crich—coupled with the nihilism of Gudrun Brangwen—is the spirit of America. (Remember, those two are a couple: they complement one another. See my essay on Women in Love.)

The spirit of America—at once nihilism and “benevolent” idealism—can be seen very clearly in how it has treated other peoples both on its own soil and abroad. Earlier we saw in The Plumed Serpent Lawrence commenting on the white man’s attempt to “civilize” the “dark men.” Why do Americans feel that they must bend others to their way of life? American universalism leads to the belief that inside every foreigner is an American just screaming to get out.

Americans are like fresh converts to a religion, who feel that they have to convert all their friends—subconsciously in order to reassure themselves that they have made a sound choice. Americans have given up so much that was once thought to be essential to life and to community—so they simply must be right; others must find their way the most desirable way. If they do not, then they are ignorant and don’t know what’s good for them; or their governments have prevented them from seeing the truth.

Americans have been converting foreigners into Americans for a long time now, through exporting their consumer culture (irresistibly appealing to the baser elements in all peoples), and through less peaceable means.

On their own soil, white Americans have also tried to convert the “dark man” to Americanism. In his essay “Certain Americans and an Englishman,”  Lawrence speaks of Americans trying to turn the Red Man into a “wage earner.” This can be done, up to a point, but at the price of the Red Man sacrificing his soul. But ultimately Lawrence believes there can be no true harmony between different races, because they are so different, and that the attempts of white men to create “multicultural societies” will end in the destruction of the whites (an outcome he does not particularly lament).

Writing of Hector St. John de Crèvecouer in Studies, Lawrence states that he only wanted to know the Red Man in his head, abstractly because “he must have suspected that the moment he saw as the savages saw, all his fraternity and equality would go up in smoke, and his ideal world of pure sweet goodness along with it.” Later on in Studies, Lawrence writes that “The Red Man and the White Man are not blood-brothers: even when they are most friendly. When they are most friendly, it is as a rule the one betraying his race-spirit to the other.”

Lawrence’s views on America are apocalyptic. He sees no hope for the country, and seems to believe that it will drag the rest of the white world down with it. What, then, are we to make of these extreme views? Much of what Lawrence has to say about the emptiness of American ideals, and the emptiness of American lives, presages arguments that would be made by numerous social critics years later, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. I am thinking of such writers as Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Christopher Lasch, and Daniel Bell. Much of what he has to say would strike any Leftist as uncontroversial.

But once again Lawrence shows himself to be a kind of political hybrid, for his remarks on race, his opposition to the ideal of equality, and his opposition to multiculturalism seem to put him, by today’s standards, on the extreme right. Of course, contrary to what many Leftists might think, simply to point this out does not serve to refute Lawrence. Nor is it entirely convincing to accuse him of inconsistency: perhaps it is today’s Leftists and Rightists who are confused. And there is some plausibility to this suggestion.

For example, leftists today advocate both multiculturalism and “diversity,” which they tend to equate. But it is hard to see how the latter can be preserved if the former is achieved. In other words, inevitably a multicultural society would lead to the blending of peoples and the blending and watering-down of cultures, thus potentially destroying diversity rather than maintaining it. Lawrence challenges us to critique our own views, and to question their consistency—and their sanity.

There is no easy, ready-to-hand answer to Lawrence’s charges—about America in particular, or modernity in general. They strike at the heart of what is believed by most people in the West today. Whatever else one may say about his views, it is striking how their capacity to shock and to challenge us has only increased over the years.

vendredi, 28 janvier 2011

D. H. Lawrence's "Women in Love": Anti-Modernism in Literature

D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love :
Anti-Modernism in Literature

Derek Hawthorne

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

L2.jpgD. H. Lawrence’s greatest novel is also his most anti-modern. Written between April and October of 1916 in Cornwall, during some of the darkest days of the First World War, Women in Love was conceived as a sequel to The Rainbow. (Both novels were brilliantly filmed by Ken Russell.) Women in Love continues the story of Ursula Brangwen’s life, and the fulfillment she finds in a love affair with Rupert Birkin (who does not figure in The Rainbow at all). This relationship is, in fact, paired with another: that of Gudrun, Ursula’s sister (a very minor character in The Rainbow), and Gerald Crich, Birkin’s best friend. The novel follows the course of both relationships.

The connection between the two novels seems a tenuous one at best, however, and one can read and appreciate Women in Love without any knowledge at all of The Rainbow. This has a great deal to do with the dramatic difference in tone between the two. In a letter, Lawrence described the relationship between the two novels as follows: “There is another novel, sequel to The Rainbow, called Women in Love . . . this actually does contain the results in one’s soul of the war; it is purely destructive, not like The Rainbow, destructive-consummating.”

Women in Love is indeed “purely destructive”: it is grimly apocalyptic and misanthropic. There is little sense of the presence of nature this time: the novel moves almost entirely within the conscious and (more importantly) subconscious minds of its four main characters. And the backdrop is the ugly, human–built mechanicalness of the industrialized Midlands. It is easy to attribute the change in tone between the two novels as due to Lawrence’s horror at the war (“The war finished me,” he later said).

But one must not lose sight of the fact that the two novels do, in fact, tell one continuous story, and that the switch in tone is appropriate to what the second half of the story depicts: the fragmentary lives of individuals struggling to find fulfillment in the modern world. In his “Foreword” to the novel Lawrence wrote that it “took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself. I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.” For Lawrence, as for Heidegger, the war was ultimately just an inevitable extension of the industrial age itself.

At the beginning of the story, Birkin is involved in an unhappy love affair with Hermione Roddice, the daughter of an aristocrat and a thinly-disguised portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Birkin is already acquainted with Ursula professionally, as he is the local school inspector and she the school mistress. After they are brought closer together and love begins to grow between them, Birkin abandons Hermione. The memorable episode that precipitates the final break between them involves Hermione trying to bludgeon him to death with a lapis lazuli paperweight.

However, Birkin’s relationship with Ursula is, from the first, difficult in its own way. Much of the reason has to do with Birkin’s misanthropy and Schopenhauerian pessimism. At some level, Ursula sympathizes with Birkin’s views, but she is put off by his extraordinary vehemence, and, more importantly, seems to feel that if he would admit his love for her and fully surrender himself to their relationship he would be freed from his all-consuming hatred of the world. She is carrying on with life, in spite of everything, and eventually she succeeds in drawing him back into life.

The character of Rupert Birkin is universally acknowledged to be a self-portrait of Lawrence, though it would be dangerous to assume that Lawrence has no critical distance from the character (or from himself, for that matter). Nevertheless, Birkin often speaks for Lawrence. Early in the novel Birkin declares that it would be much better if humanity “were just wiped out. Essentially they don’t exist, they aren’t there.” Later, in conversation with Ursula, Birkin declares:

“Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest thing: they persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do! . . . It’s a lie to say that love is the greatest. . . . What people want is hate—hate and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love they get it. . . . If we want hate, let us have it—death, murder, torture, violent destruction—let us have it: but not in the name of love. But I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. . . .”

“So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?” said Ursula. . . .

“Yes truly. You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”

The pleasant sincerity of his voice made Ursula pause to consider her own proposition. And it really was attractive: a clean, lovely, humanless world. It was the really desirable. Her heart hesitated and exulted. But still, she was dissatisfied with him.

If anything, in his own correspondence Lawrence goes further than Birkin. In a letter to his friend S. S. Koteliansky, dated September 4, 1916, while Lawrence was working on Women in Love, he declares:

I must say I hate mankind—talking of hatred, I have got a perfect androphobia. When I see people in the distance, walking along the path through the fields to Zennor, I want to crouch in the bushes and shoot them silently with invisible arrows of death. I think truly the only righteousness is the destruction of mankind, as in Sodom. . . . Oh, if one could but have a great box of insect powder, and shake it over them, in the heavens, and exterminate them. Only to clear and cleanse and purify the beautiful earth, and give room for some truth and pure living.

Where Women in Love is most interesting, however, is not in such outpourings of venom, but in Lawrence’s attempts to pinpoint why things have gone so disastrously wrong in the modern world. As have many other authors, Lawrence places a great deal of weight on the materialism and mechanism of industrialized modernity. Another, later, exchange between Birkin and Ursula is particularly revealing in this regard. The pair have just bought a chair at a flea market and Birkin states:

“When I see that clear, beautiful chair, and I think of England, even Jane Austen’s England—it had living thoughts to unfold even then, and pure happiness in unfolding them. And now, we can only fish among the rubbish-heaps for the remnants of their old expression. There is no production in us now, only sordid and foul mechanicalness.”

“It isn’t true,” cried Ursula, “Why must you always praise the past at the expense of the present? Really, I don’t think so much of Jane Austen’s England. It was materialistic enough, if you like—”

“It could afford to be materialistic,” said Birkin, “because it had the power to be something other—which we haven’t. We are materialistic because we haven’t the power to be anything else—try as we may, we can’t bring off anything but materialism: mechanism, the very soul of materialism.”

L1.jpgBut why did Jane Austen’s England have the power to be something else? And what else did it have the power to be? For the answers to these questions we must, in essence, look back to The Rainbow. Jane Austen’s England still preserved some connection to the land—a sense of belonging to nature. What England then had the “power to be” was nothing grand and idealistic: it had the power simply to be its natural self. The people of Jane Austen’s England made and enjoyed beautiful objects—but these objects were an ornament to a life lived in relative closeness to the earth.

In the industrialized world of 1916, however, objects are all that human beings have. The object of life itself becomes the production and acquisition of objects. This by itself cannot, of course, provide any sense of “meaning in life,” and to fill this void we have introduced idealism and given to our materialism a moral veneer: we are making Progress, alleviating hunger and disease and want, promoting equality, and in general perfecting ourselves and the world through the marriage of science and commerce.

Gerald Crich and the Mastery of Nature

In Women in Love the coupling of industrial materialism with idealism is personified by Birkin’s friend Gerald Crich, son of the local colliery owner. On the train together, the two men speak of the modern world: “So you really think things are very bad?” Gerald asks. “Completely bad,” Birkin responds. Throughout the novel, Gerald is drawn to Birkin, fascinated by the man and his notions—yet he is repelled by him at the same time, and frightened. He encourages Birkin to explain what he means, and Birkin obliges him:

“We are such dreary liars. Our idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers. It is very dreary.”

But Gerald responds that he thinks the pianoforte represents “a real desire for something higher” in the collier’s life.

“Higher!” cried Birkin. “Yes. Amazing heights of upright grandeur. It makes him so much higher in his neighboring collier’s eyes. He sees himself reflected in the neighboring opinion, like in a Brocken mist, several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied. He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the human opinion.”

Material things and the zeal for material things do not lift up the average man. They merely produce what Christopher Lasch aptly called “the culture of narcissism,” and what Wendell Berry has called a “consumptive culture.” One of the absurdities of modern life is the pretence that human beings who have been reduced to the level of mere consumers are somehow more “advanced” than their ancestors.

But aside from man the consumer, what of man the producer? After all, someone has to produce all those pianofortes. This is where men like Gerald come in. Birkin asks Gerald what he lives for. Gerald answers: “I suppose I live to work, to produce something, in so far as I am a purposive being. Apart from that, I live because I am living.” Ursula remarks to Gudrun that Gerald has “got go, anyhow” and Gudrun replies, “The unfortunate thing is, where does his go go to, what becomes of it?” Ursula suggests, jokingly, that it “goes in applying the latest appliances!” This remark, however, is truer than she supposes.

The most brilliantly-written chapter of Women in Love is “The Industrial Magnate,” in which Lawrence depicts Gerald’s mastery of the mine. Gerald spends the first few years of his adult life wandering aimlessly, but always in hearty, masculine fashion: living the wild life of a student, becoming a soldier, then an adventurer. Always with Gerald there was an overweening curiosity and a desire truly to master something—a desire which masks a real, inner feeling of helplessness and lostness. He finds his true calling in running the mine, for there he believes he has found the meaning of life:

Immediately he saw the firm, he realized what he could do. He had to fight with Matter, with the earth and the coal it enclosed. This was the sole idea, to turn upon the inanimate matter of the underground, and reduce it to his will. . . . There were two opposites, his will and the resistant Matter of the earth. . . . He had his life-work now, to extend over the earth a great and perfect system in which the will of man ran smooth and unthwarted timeless, a Godhead in process.

By writing “Matter” with a capital M, Lawrence underscores the fact that for Gerald the mine is important not in itself but for what it represents. Gerald sees himself not merely as a colliery owner, but as a titanic being: a participant in the long, historical process of man’s divinization through the conquest of nature, now coming to full consummation in the industrial age.

But where has he gotten such ideas? Lawrence tells us that Gerald “refused to go to Oxford, choosing a German university,” and that he “took hold of all kinds of sociological ideas, and ideas of reform.” It is plain that Gerald has been exposed to a great deal of German philosophy. In depicting Gerald’s outlook on life, Lawrence seems to be blending ideas and terminology from three German philosophers: Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche.

Fichte and the Mastery of Nature

Lawrence writes that through Gerald’s domination of his will (or his ideals) over Matter “there was perfection attained, the will of mankind was perfectly enacted; for was not mankind mystically contradistinguished against inanimate Matter, was not the history of mankind just the history of the conquest of the one by the other?” The philosophy this is closest to is that of Fichte, though Lawrence is probably thinking of Hegel.

Fichte believed, essentially, that an objective world—an other standing opposed to ego—existed merely as an instrument for the expression of human will. Nature, or what Lawrence here calls “Matter,” exists as something that must be overcome and transformed by human beings according to human ideals. In doing so, human beings realize themselves. All of human history for Fichte, indeed all of reality, is the unending imposition of the ideal on the real, or the transformation of material otherness into an image of human will.

Even though Fichte’s philosophy, at first glance, appears to be something novel, in fact in a sense it is (and was) nothing new at all: it is the underlying metaphysics of modernity laid bare. In the modern world, again, human beings essentially relate to nature as raw material that must be forced to fit human designs or interests—or at best as a mere background for human action. Further, time is conceived in linear fashion and history as a movement from darkness to light, from primitivism to progressivism.

The humanism of the Renaissance becomes, in the modern period, anthropocentrism. Man is a titanic being without any natural superior, whose vocation is to better the world and other men. It is pointless to ask when, exactly, these modern attitudes took hold. In part, they are an outgrowth of Christian monotheism, which taught the idea that the earth and all its contents has been given to man by God for his exclusive use.

Renaissance humanism, which was in many ways a kind of neo-pagan revolt against Christianity, celebrated the ideal of man as Magus, and as a kind of mini-God here on earth. In part, though these Renaissance ideas were bound up with the revival of Hermetic occultism, they paved the way for the scientific revolution represented by men such as Francis Bacon.

By that point in history, belief—real belief—in the God of monotheism was dying, at least among the intelligentsia, who veered more and more toward abstract conceptions of divinity which had little to do with human life. God, in other words, had become irrelevant and human beings found themselves alone in this world that had been given to them for their mastery, with nothing watching from above. It was only a matter of time before man would declare himself God, as Fichte virtually does.

Hegel’s Idealism

Hegel took over Fichte’s ideas and, among other things, amplified them with a theological interpretation. God, for Hegel, is pure self-related Idea which becomes real and concrete in the world through human self-awareness—a self-awareness achieved primarily through the analysis and mastery of nature, as well as through art, religion, and philosophy.

Although Hegel insisted that he had not meant to make man God, a great many of his followers and detractors saw that this is precisely what his philosophy had done. The “young Hegelian” Ludwig Feuerbach saw this and in his influential work The Essence of Christianity (1841) declared that God was, in fact, nothing but an ideal projection of human consciousness, a stand-in, in fact, for humanity itself.

The Hegelian (or, perhaps, young Hegelian) element in Gerald’s metaphysics comes in when Lawrence tells us that Gerald found his “eternal and his infinite” in the endless cycle of machine production. God, as Hegel learned from Aristotle, is an eternal act. The never-ending cycles of modern, industrial production—the apex of man’s mastery of nature—becomes, for Gerald, God incarnate: “the whole productive will of man was the Godhead.”

Nietzsche, Hegel, and the End of History

What seems Nietzschean here is simply the insistence on Will. In allowing himself to be used as an instrument of the “productive will of man” Gerald believes that he is aggrandizing his own personal power. However, as I noted earlier, in believing so Gerald is deceiving himself, and in the end “the God-motion, this productive repetition ad infinitum” simply burns him away in a cold fire. However, there is more to Gerald’s Nietzscheanism than this.

The relation of Nietzsche to Hegel is a complex one, but it can be boiled down in the following way. Hegel believed that in the modern period history had, in effect, ended. This assertion seems nonsensical if we make the mistake of confusing history with time. Of course, Hegel did not think time had stopped. He merely believed that the story of mankind had come to an end in the modern age, because it was in the modern, post-Christian age that mankind came to realize its true nature as radically self-determining (and other-determining, as well). With this realization of radical human freedom, and the realization that man actualizes God in the world, Hegel believed that essentially all the important questions and controversies of human history had been answered. The destiny of man was to live in more or less liberal societies, under more or less democratic states, and to practice more or less humanistic versions of Christianity. And in this condition mankind would continue to exist and prosper.

013019.jpgFor Nietzsche, on the other hand, the end of history meant the death of everything that ennobles the human race. Without anything to struggle over or to believe in so strongly that one would be willing to fight and die for it, humanity would sink to the level of what Nietzsche called the Last Man, Homo economicus: the man whose aspirations do not rise above material comfort, safety, and security. The only hope was the arrival of the Overman, who would create new values, new systems of belief, and initiate new conflicts among human beings. In short, the Overman would re-start history. Nietzsche’s writings, in their trenchant critique of all Western beliefs and values, can be seen as an attempt to actually hasten the collapse of the modern world and usher in the Overman.

Nietzsche’s Will to Power

Essentially, Gerald Crich represents the Nietzschean Overman—or at least someone who believes himself to be a Nietzschean Overman. Gerald, himself a “great blonde beast,” is riding the tiger by riding his employees, expressing his “will to power” through mastering the mines.  What Gerald doesn’t realize is that, in Nietzschean terms, he is merely, the instrument of will to power, expressing itself in the modern age as industrialism and mechanization. As Colin Milton has discussed at some length, this may actually indicate a confusion, or at least an inconsistency, in Lawrence’s understanding of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is explicitly invoked in the novel when Ursula identifies Gerald with “Wille zur Macht.” The episode which prompts this comment from her is one of the most famous in the novel. In the chapter “Coal Dust,” Ursula and Gudrun go for a walk, but when they come to the railway crossing have to stop to wait for the colliery train to pass. As they stand there, Gerald Crich trots up riding a “red Arab mare.” The mare is frightened by the locomotive and moves away from it, but Gerald forces her back again and again, cutting into her flesh with his spurs. Ursula is horrified and cries “No—! No—! Let her go! Let her go, you fool, you fool—!” Gudrun, on the other hand, is fascinated by Gerald’s show of brute force over the mare and cries out only as he rides away, “I should think you’re proud.” As we shall see, Gudrun is Gerald’s counterpart, a portrait of the other, purely destructive side of modern will.

The episode with the mare is a good example of Lawrence’s sometimes obvious, but very effective symbolism. The mare represents nature—any and all natural beings—forced into submission before the designs and mechanisms of modernity. There is no other way to bring nature into accord with modern unnaturalism, other than by force and sheer bullying. And so later on Ursula refers to “Gerald Crich with his horse—a lust for bullying—a real Wille zur Macht—so base, so petty.”

In his essay “Blessed are the Powerful” Lawrence remarks, “A will-to-power seems to work out as bullying. And bullying is something despicable and detestable.” In short, in Women in Love Lawrence seems to understand Wille zur Macht as a kind a kind of egoistic self-aggrandizement. In fact, however, what Nietzsche teaches is the surrender to Wille zur Macht, as an impersonal force that expresses itself through us.

Interestingly, perhaps the clearest parallels to Gerald Crich’s philosophy of life, and Lawrence’s treatment of it, are two thinkers Lawrence knew nothing about when he wrote Women in Love: Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger, both of whom were strongly influenced by Nietzsche.

Spengler: Faustian Man and Technology

2235978055390419269357Pic.jpgSpengler’s major work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) was published in 1918, two years after Lawrence first began working on Women in Love. According to Spengler, “Faustian man” creates a human world of artifacts and schemes not out of any economic motivation but rather out of a sheer desire for mastery.

However, Spengler believed that in the modern world, at the very height of his technological prowess, Faustian man has begun to decline. In Mensche und Technik (Man and Technics, 1932) Spengler argued that technology had, in effect, taken on a life of its own. In building a technological world, humanity has been caught in the logic and the inevitable course of technology itself.

Technology rapidly becomes indispensable and human beings find themselves unable to do without it. Technological problems inevitably require technological solutions, and the sheer amount of gadgetry that the average human has to be conversant with grows exponentially. Technology comes to dominate the economy, so that most people find themselves not just being served by technology but working most of their lives for its advancement. In short, Faustian man, who had originally created the machines, now comes to be ruled by them.

Gerald certainly presents us with a vivid portrait of Spengler’s Faustian man. Lawrence does not explicitly make anything like Spengler’s argument concerning technology, but something like it lies beneath the surface of Women in Love and some of his other writings. Certainly Lawrence conveys the idea that Gerald foolishly believes himself to be master of the machines. Lawrence writes, “It was this inhuman principle in the mechanism he wanted to construct that inspired Gerald with an almost religious exaltation. He, the man, could interpose a perfect, changeless, godlike medium between himself and the Matter he had to subjugate.”

The medium Lawrence refers to is technology. “And Gerald was the God of the machine, Deus ex Machina.” In Man and Technics, Spengler writes: “To construct a world for himself, himself to be God—that was the Faustian inventor’s dream, from which henceforth arose all projects of the machines, which approached as closely as possible to the unachievable goal of perpetual motion.” Of course, what Gerald doesn’t realize is that he is Spengler’s Faustian man caught in the trap: servant of that which he had created.

Ernst Jünger and the Gestalt of the Worker

Ernst Jünger’s promethean, Nietzschean philosophy of technology comes uncannily close to Gerald’s own ideas. Jünger’s views were forged on the battlefields of World War I, at the very same time Lawrence was writing Women in Love. The war affected both men profoundly, but in profoundly different ways. As I have already mentioned, much of the misanthropy and apocalyptic quality of Women in Love is to be attributed to Lawrence’s horror of the war and what it had reduced men to. Jünger himself regarded the war as horrifying, and his memoir of his days as a soldier, In Stahlgewittern (The Storm of Steel, 1920), is as frightening and chastening an account of war as has ever been written. For Jünger, as for Lawrence (and, later, Heidegger) the war was essentially a technological phenomenon.

However, Jünger came to believe that technology—including the technology of war—was, in effect, a natural phenomenon: the product of some kind of primal, expressive force not unlike Schopenhauer’s Will or Nietzsche’s Will to Power. The very title In Stahlgewittern suggests this understanding of things. Michael E. Zimmerman writes in Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity:

On the field of battle, [Jünger] experienced himself at times as a cog in a gigantic technological movement. Yet, unexpectedly, by surrendering himself to this enormous process, he experienced an unparalleled personal elevation and intensity which he regarded as authentic individuation. Generalizing from this experience, he concluded that the best way for humanity to cope with the onslaught of technology was to embrace it wholeheartedly. (Zimmerman, 49)

In Der Arbeiter (The Worker, 1932) Jünger heralded the coming of what Zimmerman calls his “technological Overman.” The productive power underlying all of reality shall body itself forth in the “Gestalt of the worker,” who is essentially a steely-jawed soldier on perpetual march to the technological transformation and mastery of nature. Zimmerman writes how

Jünger asserted that in the nihilistic technological era, the ordinary worker either would learn to participate willingly as a mere cog in the technological order—or would perish. Only the higher types, the heroic worker-soldiers, would be capable of appreciating fully the world-creating, world-destroying technological-industrial firestorm. (Zimmerman, 54–55)

This passage rather uncannily brings to mind Lawrence’s description of the effect that Gerald’s managerial style has on his workers. This is a crucially important passage and I shall quote it at length:

But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanized. And yet they accepted the new conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out of them. At first they hated Gerald Crich, they swore to do something to him, to murder him. But as time went on, they accepted everything with some fatal satisfaction. Gerald was their high priest, he represented the religion they really felt. His father was forgotten already. There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted. It was the highest that man had produced, the most wonderful and superhuman. They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system which was beyond feeling or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within them, but their souls were satisfied.

One can see here that Lawrence seems to accept the Spengler-Jünger thesis that there is an inexorable logic to the modern, technological society and that a fundamental change has come over humanity which makes it possible for men to become servants of the machine. The passage above continues, “It was what they wanted, Otherwise Gerald could never have done what he did.” Lawrence clearly believes that there is something inevitable about what human beings are becoming—but unlike Jünger he cannot embrace it. The Nietzschean-Jüngerian answer to modernity—to ride the tiger—is perhaps the best that one can do to harmonize oneself with the technological world and its apparent dehumanization. But Lawrence absolutely rejects it, and paints Gerald as a tragic, deluded figure. Why?  In answering this question, we confront Lawrence’s central objection to modernity.

History: Progressive of Cyclical?

women_in_love.jpgIn the deleted “Prologue” to Women In Love (which is interesting for a good many other reasons), Lawrence describes Birkin in the early days of his affair with Hermione as “a youth of twenty-one, holding forth against Nietzsche.” Yet when Lawrence introduces us to Birkin’s own views they seem strikingly Nietzschean. First, however, Lawrence describes how Birkin had studied education (and become a school inspector) under the influence of what seems unmistakably like a warmed-over Hegelianism:

He had made a passionate study of education, only to come, gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of consciousness. And each unit of consciousness is the living unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards which mankind, like an organism seeking its final form, is laboriously growing.

But Birkin quickly becomes disillusioned with this vision, and responds to it in true Nietzschean fashion:

But if there be no great philosophic idea, if, for the time being, mankind, instead of going through a period of growth, is going through a corresponding process of decay and decomposition from some old, fulfilled, obsolete idea, then what is the good of educating? Decay and decomposition will take their own way. It is impossible to educate for this end, impossible to teach the world how to die away from its achieved, nullified form. The autumn must take place in every individual soul, as well as in all the people, all must die, individually and socially. But education is a process of striving to a new, unanimous being, a whole organic form. But when winter has set in, when the frosts are strangling the leaves off the trees and the birds are silent knots of darkness, how can there be a unanimous movement towards a whole summer of fluorescence? There can be none of this, only submission to the death of this nature, in the winter that has come upon mankind, and a cherishing of the unknown that is unknown for many a day yet, buds that may not open till a far off season comes, when the season of death has passed away.

What is Nietzschean here is Birkin’s conviction that he is living at the end of history—but, contra Hegel, it is a time of disintegration and decay. However, unlike Nietzsche and his followers (including Gerald), Lawrence and Birkin do not see any way to transmute this situation into something that becomes life-advancing. What Gerald cannot see, but Birkin and Lawrence clearly can, is that the submission of the miners to “the Gestalt of the worker” represents the first stage in the complete breakdown of the Western world. The same passage quoted earlier from “The Industrial Magnate” chapter continues:

[Gerald] was just ahead of [his workers] in giving them what they wanted, this participation in a great and perfect system that subjected life to pure mathematical principles. This was a sort of freedom, the sort they really wanted. It was the first great step in undoing, the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the mechanical principle for the organic, the destruction of the organic purpose, the organic unity, and the subordination of every organic unit to the great mechanical purpose. It was pure organic disintegration and pure mechanical organisation. This is the first and finest state of chaos.

Submission to or mastery of the modern, technological world—whether that world represents an advance or a degeneration—is not the answer for Lawrence because he believes that true human fulfillment lies in submission to something higher, or perhaps deeper: the true unconscious. Gerald offers his miners a kind of “freedom,” but it is the illusory freedom of the mind and ego from the call of the natural self.

Essentially, for Lawrence, the modern world is characterized by the subordination of the organic to the mechanical; of the natural to the planned, automated, and “rational.” But in severing the tie to the organic and placing themselves in the service of the machine and the idea, human beings lose their fundamental being, and their sense of having a place in the cosmos.

The real problem with Nietzsche is that although he talks a great deal about the body and about “instincts,” everything for him is still, to borrow Lawrence’s language, “in the head.” In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche presents us with an attractive discussion of the healthy, “natural” morality of the master type, which values such things as health, strength, and beauty.

But Nietzsche’s own approach to morals amounts to a conscious and willful desire to relativize all values—to declare that there is no natural source, and no natural values. The Overman, in fact, gets to simply posit new values. This appears to be a purely intellectual, and largely arbitrary affair. The idea of “creating” values is psychologically implausible: how can anyone believe in, let alone fight for, values and ideals that they have consciously dreamed up?

The Impotent Übermensch

In his characterization of Gerald Crich, Lawrence gives us a realistic portrait of what would become of an “Overman” in real life. Keep in mind that it is Lawrence’s belief that when we abstract ourselves from the natural world, and from the promptings of the nature within us, we suffer and even, in a way, go mad. This is, in effect, what becomes of Gerald. In the concluding passages of the “Industrial Magnate” chapter Lawrence describes the psychological toll that mastery of Matter has taken on Gerald:

And once or twice lately, when he was alone in the evening and had nothing to do, he had suddenly stood up in terror, not knowing what he was. And he went to the mirror and looked long and closely at his own face, at his own eyes, seeking for something. He was afraid, in mortal dry fear, but he knew not what of. He looked at his own face. . . . He dared not touch it, for fear it should prove to be only a composition mask.

Inevitably, Gerald’s sense of dissociation displays itself in a sexual manner:

He had found his most satisfactory relief in women. . . . The devil of it was, it was so hard to keep up his interest in women nowadays. He didn’t care about them anymore. . . . No, women, in that sense, were useless to him any more. He felt that his mind needed acute stimulation, before he could be physically roused.

The clear suggestion is that Gerald is practically impotent. Like Clifford in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whose impotence has a purely physical cause, Gerald is physically numb; he lives from the mind alone. Disconnected from his natural being, he no longer feels spontaneous, animal arousal for the opposite sex. He has become “re-wired,” so to speak, so that the route to the sexual center, in his case, is by way of the intellect; he can only become sexually aroused through his mind.

The irony here is that Gerald is portrayed throughout the novel as handsome, strong, and virile in both a physical and spiritual sense: he is a master of matter, and of women. In fact, however, both his physical and spiritual virility is mere appearance. He is master neither of himself nor of his world. Nor is he even master of his erection. On the other hand, Birkin, who is portrayed as physically weaker, is at least truly virile in a spiritual sense. This is the reason he manages to avoid becoming “absorbed” by Ursula.

lady_chatterley,1.jpgLawrence is famous for characterizing relations between the sexes as a battle, or, more accurately, a struggle unto death. In Women in Love, the two couples battle each other continuously, but most of the fighting is done by the women against the men. (The famous nude wrestling match between Gerald and Birkin is a purely honest, physical contest, whose only psychological undertones are homoerotic.)

Birkin compromises with Ursula in settling for love rather than something “higher.” But despite this he maintains his integrity and individuality. It is a difficult feat, and even at the novel’s end we see Ursula working to try and undermine his desire for another kind of love in his life: “Aren’t I enough for you?” she asks him.

Gerald, however, cannot pull it off. He lacks Birkin’s spiritual virility: his ability to maintain himself, inviolate, even in giving himself to a woman. Gurdrun’s onslaughts are much more destructive and insidious than Ursula’s, and in the end the “manly” Gerald is broken by them.

Gudrun Brangwen, the Modern Woman

Gerald Crich is only one half of Lawrence’s portrait of the “modern individual.” The other half is Gudrun Brangwen. Of course, Birkin and Ursula are modern individuals, though in a different sense. The latter couple are both seeking some fulfilling way to live in, or in spite of, the modern world. They (especially Birkin) have achieved some critical distance from it.

Gerald and Gudrun, however, are both creatures of modernity. Gerald has consciously embraced the modern rootless prometheanism; Gudrun unconsciously. Further, Gudrun is not simply a female version of Gerald. Her “modernity” consists in certain traits which complement those of Gerald. What complicates matters is that Ursula and Gudrun also represent, for Lawrence, the two halves of femininity, and not just modern femininity.

In the first chapter of the novel, Gudrun reacts with revulsion to one of the locals as she and Ursula walk through Beldover: “A sudden fierce anger swept over the girl, violent and murderous. She would have liked them all annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear for her.” It is interesting to compare this with Birkin’s (and Lawrence’s) fantasies of annihilation. Birkin, the complete misanthrope, wants to wipe the earth clean of humanity, including himself, so that there is only “uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up.” In Gudrun’s fantasy, she is left sitting up and everyone else is wiped away.

This small detail gives us an important clue to Gudrun’s character, which is fundamentally egoistic. A thoroughgoing egoism is always nihilistic, for it wills that all limitation or opposition to the ego be cancelled. But even the mere existence of other human beings (or anything else, for that matter) constitutes a limitation on the ego.

Just as Lawrence does with Gerald, this “self-assertion” on Gudrun’s part is connected, by allusion, with Nietzsche. This time, however, the allusion is put into the mouth of the character herself in what seems on the surface like a purely innocent remark. Enjoying the snowy Tyrol, Gudrun exclaims, “Isn’t the snow wonderful! Do you notice how it exalts everything? It is simply marvellous. One really does feel übermenschlich—more than human.”

Like Gerald, Gudrun lives in a state of abstraction from the body and from nature. In sex she remains perfectly detached. Writing of the aftermath of Gudrun’s first sexual encounter with Gerald, Lawrence emphasizes again and again her full consciousness, while Gerald lays on top of her, asleep and satiated. He tells us “she lay fully conscious.” And: “Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness.” And: “She was suspended in perfect consciousness—and of what was she conscious?” (He does not truly answer the question.)

Gudrun is revolted by the rhythms of nature and by natural objects—even though, ironically, it is small animals that she depicts in her sculpture (perhaps this is the only way she can encounter them, as things she molds and creates herself). Holding Winifred Crich’s pet rabbit Bismarck, who puts up quite a struggle, “Gudrun stood for a moment astounded by the thunderstorm that had sprung into being in her grip. Then her colour came up, a heavy rage came over her like a cloud. . . . Her heart was arrested with fury at the mindlessness and bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly scored by the claws of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her.”

The mechanical succession of day after day revolts her. Very early in the novel she confesses to Ursula, “I get no feeling whatever from the thought of bearing children.” She looks at Ursula, who is clearly flustered by this, with a “mask-like expressionless face.” When Ursula, intimidated by her sister, stammers out a reply, “A hardness came over Gudrun’s face. She did not want to be too definite.” This desire to remain indefinite is essential to Gudrun’s character.

In fact, the essence of Gudrun is nothingness. In the first chapter, Lawrence tells us “there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her.” In conversation with Gerald, Birkin describes her as a “restless bird,” and says that “She drops her art if anything else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her from taking it seriously—she must never be too serious, she feels she might give herself away. And she won’t give herself away—she’s always on the defensive. That’s what I can’t stand about her type.” Gudrun’s “type” is the modern individual who cannot stand to be tied to anything, who is in constant flux, wary of anything that would compel her to make a commitment, whether to a relationship or a career, or whatever. Plato in the Republic essentially winds up describing this modern type when he attempts to characterize the sort of character produced by a democracy:

“Then,” [said Socrates], “he also lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing; now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy. Often he engages in politics and, jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come to him; and if he ever admires any soldiers, he turns in that direction; and if it’s money-makers, in that one. And there is neither order nor necessity in his life, but calling this life sweet, free, and blessed, he follows it throughout.”

“You have,” [said Adeimantus], “described exactly the life of a man attached to the law of equality.”

Near the end of the novel, Lawrence tells us of Gudrun:

Her tomorrow was perfectly vague before her. This was what gave her pleasure. . . . Anything might come to pass on the morrow. And to-day was the white, snowy iridescent threshold of all possibility. All possibility—that was the charm to her, the lovely, iridescent, indefinite charm—pure illusion. All possibility—because death was inevitable, and nothing was possible but death.

She did not want things to materialize, to take any definite shape. She wanted, suddenly, at one moment of the journey tomorrow, to be wafted into an utterly new course, by some utterly unforeseen event, or motion.

amant-de-lady-chatterley-1981-aff-01-g.jpgWhen Gudrun is asked the question wohin? (where to?) Lawrence tells us that “She never wanted it answered.”

The quintessential modern individual does not, in fact, want to be anything at all, for to be something definite would close off other possibilities. And so the modern individual is always oriented toward the future, which contains all possibilities, rather than toward the present. In this respect, Gudrun’s character perfectly complements Gerald’s. Gerald has completely abstracted himself from the present by regarding everything else as “Matter” to be transformed according to his will.

This is, again, what Heidegger tells us is the modern perspective on nature. Because everything is merely raw material to be made over into something else, nothing is ever regarded as possessing a fixed identity. The essence of everything, really, is to become something else, something better. The being of things is thus something projected into the future; something that will be revealed at a later date, through human ingenuity. The result of this treatment of things as raw material is that it produces individuals who live for the future: for what will be, and for what they will be. This is how “abstraction” from the present occurs. A key ingredient in this, of course, is a kind of radical subjectivism and anthropocentrism: the being of things is something that will be created by human beings.

The modern world is therefore a world of individuals who are, mentally, quite literally elsewhere. On the one hand they are disconnected from the nature world (which to them is essentially “stuff”) and from their own nature, which they erroneously believe is something they can decide on or even re-make. They are disconnected, in fact, from presentness in general.

At one point Lawrence reveals to us that Gudrun suffers from the nagging feeling that she is merely an “onlooker” in life whereas her sister is a “partaker.” Indeed she is an onlooker and this is the key to her weird “consciousness” in the sex act. Gerald is an onlooker too, hence the sense of unreality he experiences when looking at himself in the mirror. They are both creatures of the mind, of idealism, and of futurity.

And this is truly the heart of Lawrence’s critique of modernity: that we have lost touch with the sense of being a part of nature, and of being in our bodies, in present time. The ultimate result of such abstraction from nature, the body, and the present is the destruction of nature, of any possibility of inner peace and fulfillment, and of community.

Both Gerald and Gudrun are fundamentally destructive, nihilating individuals, but of the two Gudrun represents destruction in its purest form. Gerald destroys in order to transform and, as we saw earlier, he believes himself to be an agent of history and of social reform. (Or, at least, this is the moral veneer he paints over his activities.) With Gudrun, there is not such self-justification. Of course, ultimately Gerald’s transformation of Matter is perfectly destructive, and so one can plausibly claim that in a sense Gudrun is the more honest of the two, though she is not self-aware in her destructiveness.

Gudrun represents the inner truth of Gerald’s prometheanism laid bare. This point is conveyed through the structure of Lawrence’s novel itself. Gudrun is a presence throughout the entire book, but by the last few chapters the story becomes focused very much on her. And it is in the last few chapters that the pure nihilism of her character is brought to the fore. At the same time, Gerald, who had earlier been a relatively strong figure, is reduced to inefficacy and becomes almost a shadowy presence. His physical death comes, in way, as merely an outward expression of an internal death that had already taken place in his soul.

Gudrun and Loerke

What seems to immediately precipitate Gerald’s suicide is that Gudrun gives every indication of leaving him for an artist named Loerke who she has met in the Tyrol. Loerke, better than Gerald, personifies Jünger’s promethean modernism. Loerke is a sculptor who shares with Gudrun and Ursula his plans for a granite frieze for a huge factory in Cologne. Churches, he tells the two sisters are “museum stuff,” and since the world is now dominated by industry, not religion, art should come together with industry to make the modern factory into a new Parthenon:

“And do you think then,” said Gudrun, “that art should serve industry?”

“Art should interpret industry as art once interpreted religion,” he said. . . .

“But is there nothing but work—mechanical work?” said Gudrun.

“Nothing but work!” he repeated, leaning forward, his eyes two darknesses, with needle-points of light. “No, it is nothing but this, serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine—motion, that is all. . . .”

Loerke exhibits the same destructive, modern will we find in Gerald and Gudrun, but come to full consciousness of itself. This is what attracts Gudrun to Loerke. She has realized that Gerald is weak—he possesses the destructive will, but cannot own up to it; he must hide it under his idealism. Loerke has embraced the Will to Power without illusion:

To Gudrun, there was in Loerke the rock bottom of all life. Everybody else had their illusion, must have their illusion, their before and after. But he, with a perfect stoicism, did without any before and after, dispensed with all illusion. He did not deceive himself in the last issue. In the last issue he cared about nothing, he was troubled about nothing, he made not the slightest attempt to be at one with anything. He existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical and momentaneous. There was only his work.

Birkin describes him a bit later as “a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.” Loerke is completely detached from nature and from the body. His sexuality is indeterminate. Though he has a male lover, he is drawn to Ursula. But he tells her that it wouldn’t matter to him if she were one hundred years old: all that matters is her mind.

The Gudrun-Gerald relationship plays itself out, and reaches its tragic end, in the Alps. The choice of locations is significant. Attentive readers of Lawrence’s fiction will note that he tends to depict his characters as either “watery” or “fiery.” In Women in Love Birkin and Ursula are the fiery pair, contrasted to Gudrun and Gerald, who are watery. Gerald meets his end in the novel when he commits suicide by wandering off into the snow and freezing to death. For Lawrence, this act represents Gerald quite literally “returning to his element.” Though Gudrun and Ursula are bound together by blood, the deeper bond is between Gudrun and Gerald, and it is metaphysical. They are the two aspects of the modern soul: one productive without a purpose; the other destructive, nihilating.

Ursula’s Primacy

In a sense it is strange to argue as I did earlier that Women in Love represents the continuation of Ursula’s story. For one thing, the novel seems to focus more directly on the Birkin-Gerald relationship. Further, Gudrun is actually a more vivid character than Ursula. Nevertheless, I would still argue that Ursula is the central character. She is the most “natural” of any major character in the novel; the least in conflict with herself.

We are made to feel closer to Birkin, as he is transparently Lawrence’s self-portrait. But Birkin is “abstracted” from life in his own way. He berates Hermione for having everything in her head and lacking real sensuosity. Yet so much of Birkin is theory and talk. He wants some kind of total, transformative experience that would give him a real sense of being alive—yet he wants to hold onto his ego boundaries. He wants love, but then again he doesn’t. He wants to give himself to Ursula, but not totally. Admirers of Lawrence the man often miss the rather obvious flaws in Birkin’s character, and are thus oblivious to how Lawrence may have achieved a critical distance from Birkin (and from himself).

In the end, Birkin’s “problems” are in large measure solved by the oldest means in the world: the force of natural love, and the institution of marriage. Up to a point (but only up to a point) Birkin simply surrenders his abstract ideas about relationships—about finding something “more” than love—and surrenders to Ursula. Ursula knows from deep within herself, the falsity of Birkin’s ideals. Through her he comes to know what Lawrence would call “the sweetness of accomplished marriage.” There is only one part of him that remains unfulfilled. But that is a subject for another essay . . .

dimanche, 16 janvier 2011

D. H. Lawrence's Critique of Modernity

D. H. Lawrence’s Critique of Modernity,
Part 1

Derek HAWTHORNE

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

d-h-lawrence.jpg1. The Genealogy of Modernity

 

The entire corpus of D. H. Lawrence’s writing is devoted to addressing the problem of life in the modern world, and his view of modernity was extraordinarily negative. Consider the following striking image Lawrence provides us with in his essay “The Novel and the Feelings”:

Supposing all horses were suddenly rendered masterless, what would they do? They would run wild. But supposing they were left still shut in their fields, paddocks, corrals, stables, what would they do? They would go insane. And that is precisely man’s predicament. He is tamed. There are no untamed to give the commands and the direction. Yet he is shut up within all his barbed wire fences. He can only go insane, degenerate.

According to Lawrence, we have created a human world for ourselves: a world of concrete and ideals, and have excluded nature. What does it mean to say that we have become “tamed”? It means that we have lost our wildness; our connection to the natural self, or the true unconscious. We have “corralled” ourselves; imprisoned ourselves in this tame, human, “ideal” world voluntarily. When Lawrence remarks that there are no “untamed to give the commands and the direction” he means that we have lost touch with the true unconscious, the untamed source within us, from which “natural man” draws his guidance. We can only go insane – in the sense that we lose our grip on reality, our orientation to the greater universe. We become degenerate through losing everything great in life, all aspiration, all spirit, and become instead Nietzsche’s “Last Man”: a creature whose concerns never rise above the level of comfort and security, and who lives from distraction to distraction, trying never to reflect upon the emptiness within him.

Though it all we reassure ourselves with the thought that “Progress” is being made. Lawrence offers the following amusing description of Modern Progress in Fantasia of the Unconscious:

“Onward, Christian soldiers, towards the great terminus where bottles of sterilized milk for the babies are delivered at the bedroom windows by noiseless aeroplanes each morn, where the science of dentistry is so perfect that teeth are implanted in a man’s mouth without his knowing it, where twilight sleep is so delicious that every woman longs for her next confinement, and where nobody ever has to do anything except turn a handle now and then in a spirit of universal love–” That is the forward direction of the English-speaking race.

Much of Lawrence’s critique of modernity is simply devoted to pointing out the folly of our devotion to abstract ideals. But Lawrence was not merely a gadfly – he was a (literary) revolutionary. He believed that the existing social order was not salvageable and that it would have to be utterly and completely destroyed:

It is no use trying merely to modify present forms. The whole great form of our era will have to go. And nothing will really send it down but the new shoots of life springing up and slowly bursting the foundations. And one can do nothing but fight tooth and nail to defend the new shoots of life from being crushed out, and let them grow. We can’t make life. We can but fight for the life that grows in us.

In order to fully understand Lawrence’s critique of modernity one must understand how he believes that modernity has come about. In a number of his works, Lawrence tries to work out a philosophy of history that would shed light on the mechanisms of historical change. In Movements in European History (1919) and elsewhere Lawrence develops a theory of history founded on a metaphysics derived from Empedocles. The twin principles that govern all of human life, and all human history are, according to Empedocles and Lawrence, Love and Strife. The forces are, respectively, attractive and repulsive. The first tends toward unity, the second toward disintegration or apartness. In the language Lawrence employs, the lives of human beings are governed by “sympathetic” and “voluntary” impulses, on both individual and global levels. In the modern West, due primarily to the influence of Christianity, there has been an overemphasis on the sympathetic, unitive, and “feminine” element. When an imbalance in the two forces occurs, whether in an individual psyche or in history, a swing to the other pole will occur. Thus, modern individuals have swung to the voluntary pole. Ironically, however, they have vented their aggressive willfulness through fanatical devotion to a secularized version of the ideals implicit in “sympathetic” Christianity: liberty, equality, fraternity, and, most pernicious of all, universal love.

In Apocalypse, much of which is devoted to a critique of Christian values, Lawrence refers to Lenin, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson as “evil saints.” These are men who aimed to advance the “noble” ideals of modernity regardless of the cost in human lives. He tells us elsewhere that “What has ruined Europe, but especially northern Europe, is this very ‘pure idea.’ Would to God the ‘Ideal’ had never been invented. But now it’s got its claws in us, and we must struggle free. The beast we have to fight and to kill is the Ideal. It is the worm, the foul serpent of our epoch, in whose coils we are strangled.”

The secularization of Christian ideals, and their transformation into “isms” such as socialism, communism, liberalism, and multiculturalism is a manifestation of a deeper process, however. It is the process by which the intellect comes to usurp all else in the soul. The complex and often beautiful mythology of Judaism and Christianity, which operates on a visceral level, is replaced by the abstract ideologies of men like Hegel and Marx. This simply reflects the modern shift away from “mythopoetic thought” to a form of rationalism which seeks to do away with myth and to make everything explicit and transparent by means of “the concept.” Lawrence understands this cultural shift in actual physiological terms, as a shift from a life lived in contact with the “lower centers” of the body to one which operates exclusively from the “upper centers.” (He also understands the aforementioned “sympathetic” and “voluntary” forces as grounded in human physiology.)

Lawrence states in Fantasia, “We have almost poisoned the mass of humanity to death with understanding. The period of actual death and race-extermination is not far off.” Yet, underneath our intellectualism and devotion to ideals, in the deeper recesses of the body, nothing has changed. Lawrence writes, “What really torments civilized people is that they are full of feelings they know nothing about; they can’t realize them, they can’t fulfill them, they can’t live them.” These feelings may be sexual. They may be moral sentiments, such as archaic stirrings of the sense of honor. Or they may be religious: an inchoate yearning for the lost gods. Modern society gives us no one way to make sense out of many of these feelings, especially the religious ones. And others it positively condemns. Yet the feelings remain, and the feelings are very often—indeed, almost always—against the ideals. In our society, these feelings stir most strongly in children. But children are soon “put right” by an educational system that forces them, as Lawrence puts it, into “mental consciousness.” They are forced to suppress their heretical feelings, and are fed full of the Ideal.

We imagine that we live in a golden age of Progress, but Lawrence dismisses it as wholly false:

Everything is counterfeit: counterfeit complexion, counterfeit jewels, counterfeit elegance, counterfeit charm, counterfeit endearment, counterfeit passion, counterfeit culture, counterfeit love of Blake, or of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or Picasso, or the latest film-star. Counterfeit sorrows and counterfeit delights, counterfeit woes and moans, counterfeit ecstasies, and, under all, a hard, hard realization that we live by money, and money alone: and a terrible luring fear of nervous collapse, collapse.

In the eyes of modern people, however, it is very often nature itself that seems counterfeit or, at least unreal. Lawrence believes that in modernity nature is essentially seen as raw material to be made over into the products of human design. This point was famously made by Heidegger in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” Heidegger argues that in the modern period, as a result of the advancement and proliferation of technology, the being of the natural world has revealed itself to humankind in a manner that is vastly different from how it revealed itself to our ancestors. It has become for us the “standing reserve” (Bestand). Heidegger writes:

The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile [in the modern period] even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use. (Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt [New York: Harper and Row], 14–15.)

In a similar vein Lawrence writes, “To the vast public, the autumn morning is only a sort of stage background against which they can display their own mechanical importance.” In his essay “Aristocracy,” Lawrence speaks in general of how modern man has lost the connection to nature, and of how we have lost the connection to “Amon, the great ram” in particular. “To you, he is mutton. Your wonderful perspicacity relates you to him just that far. But any farther, he is—well, wool.” (This promethean perspective on nature—the perspective that sees nature as “standing reserve”—is perfectly exemplified in the character of Gerald Crich in Lawrence’s greatest novel, Women in Love.)

Nature seems unreal to moderns because to them it is unfinished: it waits upon us to put our stamp upon it; to “make it into something.” Natural objects always therefore have the status of mere potentials: potentials for being made over, improved upon, or re-used or re-arranged in some fashion. At root, this is because the modern consciousness is radically future oriented. The past, for moderns, is something that has been gotten beyond, and is well lost. Only the future matters, and the future promises to carry on the march of progress; to be cleaner, faster, and smarter. Everything has its true being, therefore in the future. Everything—including ourselves—is always what it is going to be. The being of things is always promissory.

Modern people live in reaction against the past, and in anticipation of the future. What drops out is the present. Hence, the notorious inability of modern people to appreciate what is present at hand, or to recognize when enough is enough. Lawrence writes in an essay, “Why do modern people almost invariably ignore the things that are actually present to them?” He goes on to speak of an elderly tourist he encountered who left England “to find mountains, lakes, scythe-mowers, and cherry trees,” and asks “Why isn’t she content to be where she is?”

Lawrence’s answer to all of this will be unsurprising at this point. He wants us to somehow re-connect with those primal feelings and impulses that modernity requires us to suppress. The Fall of Man had nothing to do with sex; on the contrary God was on the side of sex. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit they became creatures of the “upper centres”; self-aware and self-conscious. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked” (Genesis 3:6). In Lawrence’s words, the Fall did not arise “till man felt himself apart, as an apart, fragmentary, unfinished thing.” Somewhere along the way, we reached a point where we came to see ourselves as on the earth, but not of it. At one point, Lawrence refers to modern people as “parasites on the body of earth.”

He writes in “A propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,”

Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. . . . This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.

But how exactly are we to go about connecting with our primal instincts, and to the earth? This is the central problem for Lawrence, and his writings explore different ideas about how to accomplish it. Of course, one approach might be purely negative or critical. It might consist in a ruthless critique of everything that is, and everything that we are, until we get to that within us which is “natural.” This is indeed one of Lawrence’s approaches, and I am exploring it in this essay. It consists, in essence, of a kind of emptying or burning away. It is the alchemical nigredo, in which some lowly stuff (in this case, us) is burned and purified; made ready for transformation into something of a higher or better sort. Lawrence’s approach to modernity is certainly destructive, but it is not purely destructive.

Lawrence reminds us of Nietzsche, going around philosophizing with a hammer. His attitude in Women in Love seems, at least on the surface, particularly Nietzschean (a point to which I shall return later). But Lawrence’s position seems to evolve over time into a version of the nostalgia Nietzsche rejected. It is a nostalgia for something like the consciousness of the “Master” type Nietzsche discussed in On The Genealogy of Morals. At times Lawrence seems clearly to yearn for a return to something like a pre-modern pagan mentality. This element in his makeup becomes more pronounced over time, culminating in his “Mexican” works, The Plumed Serpent (1926) and Mornings in Mexico (1927).

There is a major problem with such a position, however. Doesn’t our ability to understand and to critique our own history mean that we have advanced beyond the position of our ancestors? We might yearn to return to paganism, but we have lost pagan innocence. And the more we believe we have understood paganism, the further we are removed from the life of an actual pagan. In other words, Nietzsche was right. Yet the Nietzschean alternative, the literal creation of “new values” by an Overman is unnatural: it is yet another manifestation of the modern dislocation from the earth and from the body. The current values are dead all right, but Lawrence believes they were laid over top of our suppressed natural values, which must now be unearthed. But how? And how can we “go back” while preserving what we have gained in going forward, even if the going forward was into degeneration? I believe these questions get to the heart of Lawrence’s concerns about modernity, and finding an answer to it.

D. H. Lawrence’s Critique of Modernity,
Part 2

5041.jpgLawrence encountered the effects of modernity—especially the Industrial Revolution—directly in his native Midlands. He saw how if affected people, generally for the worse. Again and again he sets his stories against the backdrop of the collieries. He saw the miners become increasingly dehumanized. Working in the earth, they become cut off from it and from themselves. They lived, but they did not flourish. Lawrence’s remarks about the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, and the condition of the miners put him quite close to the thought of Marx and other socialist writers. In fact, it would not be at all unreasonable to claim Lawrence as a kind of socialist. However, as we shall see, few socialists would wish to do so!

Though The Rainbow can hardly be thought of as a novel about the Industrial Revolution, nevertheless that is its backdrop. The novel is the saga of several generations of an English family, the Brangwens, following them from the pre-industrial to the industrial age. A pastoral mood dominates throughout most of the work, and one feels a vivid sense of connection to nature and to place. Little of great significance really happens to the Brangwen family until one gets to the present day, and the story of Ursula Brangwen. Up to that point their lives are as cyclical and as repetitive as the seasons, but what we feel in reading about them is great peace, not boredom. As the narrative moves into the thick of the industrial age, it becomes populated with characters— Ursula among them—who have lost the sense of connection to the soil and to traditional culture that was the mainstay of their forebears’ existence. Ursula and her lover, Skrebensky, are lost souls, in search of some connection somewhere. Skrebensky betrays the search, and flees from Ursula. (Ursula continues it, though we must read the novel’s sequel, Women in Love, to see where it takes her.)

In his essay “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside,” Lawrence writes,

In my father’s generation, with the old wild England behind them, and the lack of education, the man was not beaten down. But in my generation, the boys I went to school with, colliers now, have all been beaten down, what with the din-din-dinning of Board Schools, books, cinemas, clergymen, the whole national and human consciousness hammering on the fact of material prosperity above all things.

How were these mean beaten down? Lawrence answers in the same essay that “the industrial problem arises from the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.” Human concerns, in other words, are narrowed to economics.

It is unsurprising to see people concerned solely with making a living if they face starvation. But, for Lawrence, what is queer about modern Europeans—including the working classes—is that actual starvation is seldom a danger for any man, yet they behave as if it is. Indeed, he begins his lengthy philosophical essay “The Education of the People” with exactly this issue: “Curious that when the toothless old sphinx croaks ‘How are you going to get your living?’ our knees give way beneath us. . . . The fear of penury is very curious, in our age. In really poor ages men did not fear penury. They didn’t care. But we are abjectly terrified of it. Why?” Whoever has wits (and guts), Lawrence points out, doesn’t starve, nor does he care about starving. But today the only thing that seems to really move people is a threat to their safety and security. We are all, it seems, Nietzsche’s Last Man.

Lawrence’s analysis of what has “beaten down” modern working men places him close to Karl Marx. Clearly, Lawrence believes that modern workers exist in the condition Marx referred to as “wage slavery.” Under capitalism, it becomes less and less feasible to be self-sustaining or self-employed and workers must sell their labor to bosses, who pay the workers only a fraction of the profit produced by their hard work. Although workers are de jure free to leave their jobs, they are de facto enslaved because the same conditions of economic exploitation will be found on the next job, and the next. In his essay “Is England Still a Man’s Country?” Lawrence writes “The insuperable difficulty to modern man is economic bondage. Slavery!” Lawrence would probably also have found Marx’s theory of “alienation” under capitalism quite congenial. (That theory is to be found in the so-called “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” of 1844, which were not published until 1932.)  Lawrence would probably have agreed with Marx’s idea that capitalist relations of production alienate us from our “species being” by making it nearly impossible for us to realize ourselves and find fulfillment through work.

We know that Lawrence went through a period in his youth when he certainly thought of his himself as a socialist. In 1905, Lawrence met Alice Dax, a socialist and early feminist. Dax introduced him to a circle of socialist thinkers active in the Midlands, and also to her book collection, which included works by authors like John Ruskin, William Morris, and Edward Carpenter. Later, of course, Lawrence would make the acquaintance of an even more eminent group of “progressive” thinkers, including Bertrand Russell. On February 12, 1915 Lawrence wrote to Russell:

We must provide another standard than the pecuniary standard, to measure all daily life by. We must be free of the economic question. Economic life must be the means to actual life. . . . There must be a revolution in the state. . . . The land, the industries, the means of communication and the public amusements shall all be nationalized. Every man shall have his wage till the day of his death, whether he work or not, so long as he works when he is fit. Every woman shall have her wage till the day of her death, whether she works or not, so long as she works when she is fit—keeps her house or rears her children.

Then, and only then, shall we be able to begin living.

Throughout his career, Lawrence would again and again toy with the sort of thing he proposes here: a political solution to the problem of modernity. Ultimately, as we shall see, he came to completely reject the final assertion quoted above: that only when the right political action has been taken can we “begin living.” Ultimately, Lawrence realized that politics is not the answer; that the hope lies in the very personal quest of private individuals. (But more on this later.)

Lawrence’s “socialism” was always of the utopian variety, never the “scientific” sort advanced by Marxists. In so far as there are affinities with Marx’s thought, they are affinities—as I have already pointed out—with the early, “humanistic” Marx, not the Marx of Das Kapital. In addition, Lawrence eventually came to combine socialist ideas with a form of elitism, and an emphasis on ties to blood and soil. This, as many others have pointed out, puts him closer to fascism and national socialism than to Marx or to the left-wing progressives of Alice Dax’s circle. (However, Lawrence’s occasional flashes of Luddism and his vigorous critique of modern science distance him from both the Communists and the Nazis.)

Lawrence agrees with the Marxists in deploring the perniciousness of class warfare under capitalism. However, he rejects the Marxist (and, for that matter, national socialist) ideal of the “classless society.” For Lawrence, the problem with modern, industrial civilization is not that it has classes, but that the classes have lost the ability to relate to each other in a healthy way. In “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover” he writes, “Class-hate and class-consciousness are only a sign that the old togetherness, the old blood-warmth has collapsed, and every man is really aware of himself in apartness. Then we have these hostile groupings of men for the sake of opposition, strife. Civil strife becomes a necessary condition of self-assertion.” For Lawrence, true community depends upon shared blood ties, shared history, and closeness to the soil. In traditional, aristocratic societies relations between the classes were never so bad as they are under capitalism, for all individuals felt a kinship for one another based on an intuition of ethnic and cultural ties. But in the modern period, our awareness of these ties has been destroyed by what Lawrence calls in the same essay “individualism,” by which he means something like “atomization.” People have lost the common tie to the earth; they have forgotten their history and their folk culture. They exist in a state of apartness and mutual distrust. Industrialization and wage slavery have exacerbated this condition, pitting the new classes of bosses and workers, bourgeoisie and proletariat, against each other. The irresponsible exploitation of the earth, and of human beings, by business is only possible because these ties have been broken. This breakdown was furthered by industrialization and capitalism, but the deeper cause is what we have seen Lawrence denouncing as “idealism”: the tendency to live according to mental conceptions, ideals, and grand designs, rather than according to our “natural” and intuitive blood-consciousness, and blood-warmth.

In a late essay, “Men Must Work and Women as Well,” Lawrence writes,

Now we see the trend of our civilization, in terms of human feeing and human relation. It is, and there is no denying it, towards a greater and greater abstraction from the physical, towards a further and further physical separateness between men and women, and between individual and individual. . . . Recoil, recoil, recoil. Revulsion, revulsion, revulsion. Repulsion, repulsion, repulsion. This is the rhythm that underlies our social activity, everywhere, with regard to physical existence.

Lawrence rejects the ideal of the classless society, but he also rejects class division as it has been hitherto established in history. And he rejects traditional, hereditary aristocracy in favor of a quasi-Nietzschean “aristocracy of the spirit.” However, like much else in his social thought, Lawrence leaves it completely vague how such an aristocracy could be established and maintained. He certainly objects to the plight of the proletarians, but unlike the Marxists he does not romanticize them. In fact, Lawrence argues that in modern society virtually everyone has become “proletarian,” or proletarianized. In John Thomas and Lady Jane (the second of three versions of the novel that would become Lady Chatterley’s Lover) Connie Chatterley hears the following from the musician Archie Blood:

The proletariat is a state of mind, it’s not really a class at all. You’re proletarian when you are cold like a crab, greedy like a crab, lustful with the rickety egoism of a crab, and shambling like a crab. The people in this house are all proletarian. The Duchess of Toadstool is an arch proletarian. . . . The proletarian haves against the proletarian have-nots will destroy the human world entirely.

In other words, capitalism has turned us all into people whose lives revolve around work and money, through which we hope to gain greater security and greater buying power. When not working, we engage in various forms of mindless indulgence. It is the sort of life which (via the character of “Walter Morel”) he depicts his father living in Sons and Lovers: a day spent in the pit, followed by an evening getting drunk and stumbling home.

Essentially, the aim of communism is to do precisely what capitalism has already accomplished in a much more sinister way: to make everyone proletarian. The communists just sought to erase the distinction between the proletarian haves and have-nots. And this brings us back to Heidegger. One of Heidegger’s more notorious claims was that capitalist and communist societies were “metaphysically identical.” In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger states, “Europe lies in the pincers between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same, namely in regard to their world-character and their relation to the spirit.” Both are fundamentally materialist in their orientation: in both social systems human concerns do not rise, and are not supposed to rise, above the level of material comfort and security. Both deny the higher needs of the human spirit: communism explicitly, capitalism implicitly (and far more insidiously). In his essay “Democracy” Lawrence speaks of how in modern, democratic societies the “Average Man” is exalted above all: “Please keep out all Spiritual and Mystical needs. They have nothing to do with the average.”

Early in life, Lawrence had half-idealized the “working men” (or the miners, at least) as more in touch with their chthonic, primal feelings. Lawrence came to realize that this was an illusion. In “Democracy” he asserts that the working men are “even more grossly abstracted” from the physical. But why? Here we encounter an aspect of Lawrence’s socialism that situates him far away from Marx, but close to William Morris and the socialists of the “arts and crafts movement.” The working man is abstracted from the physical because he has been beaten down by ugliness.

Now though perhaps nobody knew it, it was ugliness which really betrayed the spirit of man, in the nineteenth century. The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

How does one square this thesis about the debilitating effects of ugliness with Lawrence’s claim that it is “idealism” that is the culprit here, “beating down” the working man and everyone else? The two claims are not mutually exclusive. Ugliness is a consequence of idealism: where the Ideal is all important, “aesthetic concerns” will be denigrated. This was very obviously a feature of communist societies such as the Soviet Union, where Lenin explicitly declared such concerns “momentary interests.” Westerners living in capitalist societies were always quick to point out the ugly, utilitarian quality of Soviet life—while being generally blind to it in their own countries. The typical American capitalist attitude is that unless something makes a profit it is valueless. What good is beauty, poetry, or good food—unless they can be sold on a mass scale? Since human life cannot be entirely free of these things, capitalism finds an indirect way of justifying them. The sight of beauty “relaxes” us. Reading poetry “lowers the heart rate.” Good food is a “reward for a hard day’s work.” In short, the fine and noble is not beautiful and useless at all—because it can make better, healthier, longer-lived workers of us! But the claim that the fine and noble could have any intrinsic value apart from its relation to work simply doesn’t get a hearing.

American education reflects this prejudice and students follow along like good proletarians in training, objecting to “useless” classes on literature, history, and art. All of this may make it seem like the capitalist attitude is not idealistic at all but cynically “practical.” This is not the case, however, for the ugliness and barrenness of life under capitalism is seen as part of the march of Progress. Like a disciple of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Lawrence suggests that beauty is the key to solving the “industrial problem”:

If they had made big, substantial houses, in apartments of five or six rooms, and with handsome entrances. If above all, they had encouraged song and dancing—for the miners still sang and danced—and provided handsome space for these. If only they had encouraged some form of beauty in dress, some form of beauty in interior life—furniture, decoration. If they had given prizes for the handsomest chair or table, the loveliest scarf, the most charming room that men or women could make! If only they had done this, there would never have been an industrial problem. The industrial problem arises from the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.

In the essay “Red Trousers” he playfully suggests that “If a dozen men would stroll down the Strand and Piccadilly tomorrow, wearing tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats, then the revolution against dullness which we need so much would have begun.”

Of course, such suggestions may seem highly romantic, and unrealistic, but there is nevertheless a great deal that is right about them. The essays from which the above two quotes were taken were written in the period 1928–1930. They reflect the fact that Lawrence never entirely gave up on his early “utopian socialist” sentiments. He simply became a good deal wiser about the prospects for translating them into reality. His early naïveté is perfectly reflected in the finale of The Rainbow, in which Ursula Brangwen looks down upon the ugliness of the mining countryside, only to see a rainbow rising above it: “She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.” The First World War destroyed Lawrence’s naïve hopes that the modern world might be cleansed and redeemed, at least through some kind of social reform. His next novel, Women in Love, would be a complete repudiation of the optimism with which The Rainbow ends. My next essay will be devoted to an analysis of Women in Love as anti-modern novel.

samedi, 15 janvier 2011

George Steiner's "The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H."

George Steiner’s
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.

Jonathan BOWDEN

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

George Steiner
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999

steiner.jpgGeorge Steiner’s novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., was published about three decades back and encodes a large number of the author’s non-fiction books which were released beforehand. This is especially pertinent to the analysis published in In Bluebeard’s Castle, for instance.

For our purposes in this review, the dramatic or theatrical presentation of Steiner’s brief work is almost as important as the text itself. It was dramatized (the only one of the Professor’s works to be treated in this way) by the socialist playwright Christopher Hampton and, on a personal note, I actually saw it in 1981–82.

The drama starred Alec McCowen as Adolf Hitler in a production which lasted around an hour and a half. He was later awarded the Evening Standard theater award for his riveting performance — particularly his oracular testimony or speech at the play’s close. The critical record suggests that it was performed at the Mermaid Theatre, but I seem to recall seeing it at the Riverside studios in west London. I went with a girl that I was rather keen on at the time, but she was nauseated by the whole thing and fell asleep.

To cut to the chase: I believe that this is largely a work by and about George Steiner rather than the personalities or historical personages with whom he deals. Steiner is an “ultra-civilized” liberal, a polyglot, and an Encyclopaedist who has made a personal or subjective religion out of Western high culture. His play — and the short novel which gave it birth — are his attempts to deal with the fact that no matter how knowledgeable or assimilated he becomes he always remains an outsider . . . an Ashkenazic amongst Gentiles.

What differentiates Steiner from most of his group is that he has not chosen to identify himself with the major pathways that various vanguards usually choose. Not for him, in other words, the ways of commerce, gross materialist accumulation or gain; militant leftism or anti-system revolt; or active and intentional Zionism.

The elements in the play which appear shocking, “transgressive,” non-humanitarian, anti-Zionist, and even “self-hating” in Jewish terms, are quite understandable when you reckon on Steiner’s own sensibility. A pure intellectual who incarnates the mind-body split, Steiner actively dislikes Israel, Ashkenazic enthusiasm, and the normalcy, almost semi-Gentile qualities, of nationalism and group adherence. Like an ultra-liberal in the West, an active vision of Hell would be national service in the armed forces — that is, having to endure the relative crudity, non-sophistication, and “political incorrectness” of all and sundry. Steiner, in other words, wishes to assimilate on his own terms — most of which are basically specific to himself.

His culture is actually quite a small sliver of land that articulates the integrative energies of mid-European Jews from around 1880 to 1940. For him, authors like Karl Kraus, Kafka, and Paul Celan are European culture tout court. Likewise, a special endorsement will always be given to those superior Gentiles and cultural creators (Goethe, Tolstoy, Beethoven, and so forth) who make ready the path of assimilation through humane artistry.

In a manner which is typical of the radical liberals who dominate the cultural space in the West today, Steiner is truly horrified by Man’s brutality, ferocity, hatred, and capacity for endless sadism. A keen dualist, many of Steiner’s books contain long, anguished discourses about the Marquis de Sade, for example. De Sade, in gigantic works of megalomania like The 120 Days of Sodom, is rarely pithy or gnomic. But one of his remarks bears recording: when he declares that civilisation is an exercise in cruelty which has been tempered by disquiet. Steiner’s whole career is a protest against this assertion; yet, as a liberal pessimist, he doubtless secretly agrees with it.

To return to the play proper, however . . . the whole point of the narrative is to prepare for the enormous speech by the McCowan figure at the piece’s end. It is relatively typical for a creator like Steiner that he loves to hate Hitler and, in all honesty, his view of the German dictator is very similar to that of Norman Mailer in his last published novel shortly before his death. Both of them see Hitler as not a man at all but a force, a hypostatization, a recognition of the absence of the real — even an incarnation of terror, implacability, and death.

In this regard, but in no other, they actually engage in transgression and cross over to the other side . . . if only momentarily. Neither of these mild apostates can really be accused of shoah revisionism or its historical counterpart — by dint of identifying with the discourse of Harry Elmer Barnes. Not one bit of it . . . but they do, luridly, hesitantly, mesmerically (even lambently) become cultural revisionists just for a moment before snapping back into their a priori positions. This would amount to a post-existential and “left” conservative in Mailer’s case; a pained, enervated, diaphanous and painfully raw (or thin-skinned) “rootless cosmopolitan” in Steiner’s.

The piece itself, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., is essentially front-end loaded. It only really exists as a prop or attainment for Hitler’s great speech at the end. Some of the work’s Zionist or Ashkenazic critics who said that it was poorly constructed or slightly slung together actually have a point — yet what they miss is the deux ex machina moment. This amounts to the aporia in language — the moment of apocalypse at the finale — when a demi-god of inversion (literally an Anti-Christ) is permitted to orate. Steiner was classically educated by his father to a very high level . . . it has to be admitted. But one of his mental conceits is that Greek tragedy, even genuine tragedy without the Grecian overlay, is impossible at this time. He wrote an entire early book called The Death of Tragedy which is essentially on this theme. Nonetheless, I believe in delving a little bit deeper here.

The book itself is a bit of a rag-bag, primarily due to the fact that everything is fed towards (rather impatiently) getting to the end. This is the moment of high Greek drama, the play within the play which signifies the instant when the trial of Hitler begins, and that essentially resembles a playlet within a play. The main purpose of a narrative which runs for a hundred pages or so is to get all of the important characters on stage. Some of this is uneasily handled, and a good deal of it reads like some middle-brow thriller writers from the ’sixties and ’seventies, such as Hammond Innes or Aleister MacClean.

The dramatis personae are Emmanuel Lieber, the Nazi hunter and instigator of events, Simeon (the presiding judge at Hitler’s mock-trial) and search-party leader, as well as a young Israelite Isaac Ansell (who represents the post-war generation); and Elie Barach, an Orthodox Jew whose faith is disturbed by Benasseraf’s dream. He is the holy fool of the group — the Fool or Tom o’ Bedlam figure, if you like. For Benasseraf is mildly mentally ill, suffers flash-backs, and casts an alternative light on things. He even serves the dissentient role of an esoteric Hitlerist — albeit in reverse order.

There are two Gentile characters (other than Hitler). These are John Asher (who is half-Jewish); and who Steiner basically considers to be Gentile. Like all radical liberals, Steiner is overly-drawn to the other. He evinces quite a lot of sympathy for this character and possibly identifies with him. Asher is fascinated by the whole affair, but not pruriently. He suffers from no metaphysical lusts. The other Gentile is Teku, a Latino Indian or an indigenous South American . . . he is probably conceived as a largely silent witness to the trial, an incarnation of Mankind looking on.

As I say, the real purpose of the narration is to get these characters together so that the trial can occur. The elderly figure of Hitler (played by McCowan) has no real role until the trial sequence commences. When this happens he brushes aside any rudimentary defence apparatus provided by the “court” and represents himself. The whole point of the novella is really this trial.

The Hitler figure defends himself with vigor and urgency, irrespective of the fact that it’s obviously not a real court case. The point here is philosophical, semi-religious, and higher in tone or intent. The whole event is primarily metaphysical in aspect — and Hitler defends himself metaphysically. Once Hitler emerges in Steiner’s sequence, and despite his great age, he effortlessly dominates the scenario and virtually all the other characters lose their reality.

Hitler is really conceived of as being intimately connected to the Jewish destiny, so much so that he appears to be a part of their very development. To Steiner, he is no longer a man but an anti-god; a personal Satan not for mankind at large like the devil in Christianity or Islam. No. He is an Israelite devil; a Loki, a sprite of destruction — almost the pagan anti-god for one particular people, namely his own.

Throughout all of this we have to remember that Steiner is an uneasy co-optee; he doesn’t really identify with his people that much . . . like most liberals. He admires the “hard” jews and Israelis in his plot device — the men who have hunted down the Great Beast (666) — but he doesn’t really share their passions. Unlike all of them (to varying degrees) he is not a nationalist; he strives not to allow himself group emotions.

Nonetheless, a peculiar thing occurs during Hitler’s great speech (performed by McCowan) and which is quite reminiscent of the Bailiff’s endless oratory in The Childermass (a novel by Wyndham Lewis which I have reviewed elsewhere on this site). The leftist and Zionist critics who loathed this short book (as well as the play that came out of it via Hampton’s redaction) do have a point. Hitler is the genius; they are underlings. Like the malevolent Anglo-Irish landowner, Pozzo, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, he has the power. Steiner knows this, wills it. and lets it happen. At the deepest possible level, so to say, Steiner is a masochist who worships and adores Hitler as a negative god, albeit filtered and sublimated through aesthetic inversions (the catalog of which is multiple). In this moment of post-Christianity, he is truly a Satanist.

The arguments which Steiner/Hitler uses are less important than the way it is delivered. Hitler is not a man but a force; a diabolical instantiation; the encomium of the Word turned around. He is an avatar; an Odin in a rival religion to the one which Steiner was brought up in (Judaism) and has rejected subsequently. Like most academics with tenure, he’s an Enlightenment man now.

It has to be said that in McCowan’s dark threnody one comes close to a species of black metal or cacophonic white power music — of a sort that Professor Goodrick-Clarke tabulated, with little overt criticism, in Black Sun. Steiner agrees — in a fragmentary moment or a semiotic register — with everything that Savitri Devi has ever said about the Führer, but he does so as an instant of nausea and ontological victimhood. Albeit raised to a high artistic level, it is a cosmicism whereby the liberal-minded victim of a street mugging forgives his attacker, even thinks it was justified.

None of the arguments the Hitler character uses are original; moral and historical relativism; together with the fact that many Orthodox Rabbis believe Hitler to have been part of God’s plan — i.e., to whip the chosen people for transgressing from the divine path of allegedly being Man’s beacon. A role which involves waiting for the coming of Jehovah and his messiah . . . Might Hitler have been him — in the way that a sect like Jews for Jesus believe that Christians have a point?

Steiner leaves these questions unanswered, but to my mind this secularist sees Hitler as a savage god — much like Stasinopolous’ view of Picasso, but more importantly. The only way out of Steiner’s dilemma is to attempt a caveat — and Nietzsche comes to his aid here. For in a pagan (Gentile) world Steiner believes that Jews are being punished for inventing conscience. This, although complicated, and passim. Nietzsche’s Geneaology of Morals, is Nietzsche’s understanding of anti-semitism as a metaphysical postulate. Didn’t he partly reject Christianity as the judaicisation of European gentility?

In any event, Steiner achieves an artistic madness here — in his own terms — that reminds one of Hans Prinzhorn’s Art of the Insane. Where, following on from the manner of Kafka in Metamorphosis, the mild-mannered insurance salesman, Gregor, transforms into a gigantic cockroach overnight. It is the ultimate Hieronymous Bosch morphology or curdling, and at the end of the rival novella the roach-man just dies. He lowers his head plus mandibles (so to speak) for the last time and gradually his epidermis or shell gets closer and closer to the carpet. Finally, he expires — all passion spent. It is the post-facticity of degeneration; the world-weariness, sadness in the face of Man’s nature, and masochism which lurks at Humanism’s heart. It, to switch one’s foray into entomology, involves the endless circling of a moth around the candle-flame which will devour it.

Professor Steiner seeks cessation; a Heideggerian full-stop: he wishes to flop down and worship the Black Sun.

vendredi, 17 décembre 2010

D. H. Lawrence on Men & Women

D. H. Lawrence on Men & Women

Derek HAWTHORNE

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

1. Love and Strife

Lawrence.jpgIn a 1913 letter D. H. Lawrence writes that “it is the problem of to-day, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women.” Lawrence’s views about relations between the sexes, and about sex differences are perhaps his most controversial – and they have frequently been misrepresented. But before we delve into those views, let us ask why it should be the case that establishing a new relation between men and women is “the problem of to-day.” The reason is fairly obvious. The species divides itself into male and female, reproduces itself thereby, and the overwhelming majority of human beings seek their fulfillment in a relationship to the opposite sex. If relations between the sexes have somehow been crippled—as Lawrence believes they have been—then this is a catastrophe. It is hard to imagine a greater, more pressing problem.

Lawrence came to relations with women bearing serious doubts about his own manhood, and with the conviction that his nature was fundamentally androgynous. Throughout his life, but especially as a boy, it was easier for him to relate to women and to form close bonds with them. Thus, when Lawrence discusses the nature of woman he draws not only upon his experiences with women, but also upon his understanding of his own nature. One of the questions we must examine is whether, in doing so, Lawrence was led astray. After all, Lawrence eventually came to repudiate the idea of any sort of fundamental androgyny and to claim that men and women are radically different. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he writes, “We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the sexes.” Lawrence wrote this in 1921 intending it to be provocative, but it is surely much more controversial in today’s world, where it has become a dogma in some circles to insist that sex differences (now called “gender differences”) are “socially constructed.” Lawrence continues: “There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the reverse, men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do.”

Lawrence saw relations between the sexes as essentially a war. He tells us in his essay “Love” that all love between men and women is “dual, a love which is the motion of melting, fusing together into oneness, and a love which is the intense, frictional, and sensual gratification of being burnt down, burnt into separate clarity of being, unthinkable otherness and separateness.” The love between men and women is a fusing—or a will to fusing—but one that never fully takes place because the relation is also fundamentally frictional. Again and again Lawrence emphasizes the idea that men and women are metaphysically different. In other words, they have different, and even opposed ways of being in the world. They are not just anatomically different; they have different ways of thinking and feeling, and achieve satisfaction and fulfillment in life through different means.

Lawrence’s view of the difference between the sexes can be fruitfully compared to the Chinese theory of yin and yang.  These concepts are of great antiquity, but the way in which they are generally understood today is the product of an ambitious intellectual synthesis that took place under the early Han dynasty (207 B.C.–9 A.D.). According to this philosophy, the universe is shot through with an ultimate principle or power known as the Tao. However, the Tao divides itself into two opposing principles, yin and yang. These oppose yet complement each other. Yang manifests itself in maleness, hardness, harshness, dominance, heat, light, and the sun, amongst other things. Yin manifests itself in femaleness, softness, gentleness, yielding, cold, darkness, the moon, etc.

Contrary to the impression these lists might give, however, yang is not regarded as “superior” to yin; hardness is not superior to softness, nor is dominance superior to yielding. Each requires the other and cannot exist without the other. In certain situations a yang approach or condition is to be preferred, in others a yin approach. On occasion, yang may predominate to the point where it becomes harmful, and it must be counterbalanced by yin, or vice versa. (These principles are of central importance, for example, in traditional Chinese medicine.) The Tao Te Ching, a work written by a man chiefly for men extols the virtues of yin, and continually advises one to choose yin ways over yang. Lao-Tzu tells us over and over that it is “best to be like water,” that “those who control, fail. Those who grasp, lose,” and that “soft and weak overcome stiff and strong.”

Like the Taoists, Lawrence regards maleness and femaleness as opposed, yet complementary. It is not the case that the male, or the male way of being, is superior to the female, or vice versa. In a sense the sexes are equal, yet equality does not mean sameness. The error of male chauvinism is in thinking that one way, the male way, is superior; that dominance and hardness are just “obviously” superior to their opposites.

Yet the same error is committed by some who call themselves feminists. Tacitly, they assume that the male or yang characteristics are superior, and enjoin women to seek fulfillment in life through cultivating those traits in themselves. To those who might wonder whether such a program is possible, to say nothing of desirable, the theory of the “social construction of gender” is today being offered as support. According to this view, the only inherent differences between men and women are anatomical, and all of the intellectual, emotional, and behavioral characteristics attributed to the sexes throughout history have actually been the product of culture and environment. (And so “yin and yang,” according to this view, is really a rather naïve philosophy which confuses nurture with nature.) Clearly, Lawrence would reject this theory. In doing so, he is on very solid ground.

It would, of course, be foolish not to recognize that some “masculine” and “feminine” traits are culturally conditioned. An obvious example would be the prevailing view in American culture that a truly “masculine” man is unable, without the help of women or gay men, to color-coordinate his wardrobe. However, when one sees certain traits in men and women displaying themselves consistently in all cultures and throughout all of human history it makes sense to speak of masculine and feminine natures. It is plausible to argue that a trait is culturally conditioned only if it shows up in some cultures but not in others. Unfortunately, the “social construction of gender” thesis has achieved the status of a dogma in academic circles. And, in truth, ultimately it has to be asserted as dogma since believing in it requires that we ignore the evidence of human history, profound philosophies such as Taoism, and most of the scientific research into sex differences that has taken place over the last one hundred years.

I said earlier that Lawrence believes men and women to be “metaphysically different,” and in his essay “A Study of Thomas Hardy” he does indeed write as if he believes they actually see the world with a different metaphysics in mind:

It were a male conception to see God with a manifold Being, even though He be One God. For man is ever keenly aware of the multiplicity of things, and their diversity. But woman, issuing from the other end of infinity, coming forth as the flesh, manifest in sensation, is obsessed by the oneness of things, the One Being, undifferentiated. Man, on the other hand, coming forth as the desire to single out one thing from another, to reduce each thing to its intrinsic self by process of elimination, cannot but be possessed by the infinite diversity and contrariety in life, by a passionate sense of isolation, and a poignant yearning to be at one.

So, men seek or are preoccupied with multiplicity, and women with unity. What are we to make of such a bizarre claim? First of all, it seems to run counter to the Greek tradition, especially that of the Pythagoreans, which tended to identify the One with the masculine, and the Many with the feminine. However, if one looks to Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher Lawrence was particularly keen on, one finds a different story. Empedocles posits two fundamental forces which are responsible for all change in the universe: Love and Strife. Love, at the purely physical level, is a force of attraction. It draws things together, and without the intervention of Strife it would result in a monistic universe in which only one being existed. Strife breaks up and divides. It is a force of repulsion and separation. Now, Empedocles seems to identify Love with Aphrodite, and we may infer, though he does not say so, that Strife is Ares. In other words, he identifies his two forces with the archetypal female and male. This can offer us a clue as to what Lawrence is up to.

In Lawrence’s view, it is the female who wants to draw things, especially people, together. It is the female who yearns to heal divisions, to break down barriers. “Coming forth as the flesh, manifest in sensation” she seeks to overcome separateness through feeling, primarily through love. In the family situation, it is the female who tries to unite and overcome discord through love, whereas it is the male, typically, who frustrates this through the insistence on rules and distinctions. The ideal of universal love and an end to strife and division is fundamentally feminine—one which men, throughout history, have continually frustrated. It is characteristic of men to make war, and characteristic of women, no matter what cause or principle is involved, to object and to call for peace and unity.

Now the male, as Lawrence puts it, suffers from a sense of isolation, and a “yearning to be one.” He yearns for oneness, in fact, as the male yearns for the female. Yet his entire being disposes him to see the world in terms of its distinctness, and, indeed, to make a world rife with distinctions. Lawrence implies that polytheism is a “male” religion, and monotheism a “female” one. It is easy to see the logic involved in this. Polytheism sees the divine being that permeates the world as many because the world is itself many. Further, societies with polytheistic religions have always been keenly aware of ethnic and social differences, differences within the society (as in the Indian caste system), and between societies. Monotheism, on the other hand, tends toward universalism. Christianity especially, however it has actually been practiced, declares all men equal in the sight of God and calls for peace and unity in the world. (Lawrence, as we shall see later on, does indeed regard Christianity as a “feminine” religion, and blames it, in part, for feminizing Western men.)

This fundamental, metaphysical difference has the consequence that men and women do, in a real sense, live in different worlds. But perhaps such a formulation reflects a male bias towards differentiation. It is equally correct to say, in a more “feminine” formulation, that it is the same world seen in two, complementary ways. Indeed, it may be the case that it is difficult to see, from a male perspective, how the two sexes and their different ways of thinking and perceiving can achieve a rapprochement. Lawrence believes, of course, that they can live together, and that their opposite tendencies can be harmonized. In this way he is like Heraclitus, Lawrence’s favorite pre-Socratic, when he says “what is opposed brings together; the finest harmony is composed of things at variance, and everything comes to be in accordance with strife.” Heraclitus also tells us that “They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it [the Logos] agrees with itself. It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of the bow and lyre.” In order to make a lyre or a bow, the two opposite ends of a piece of wood must be bent towards each other, never meeting, but held in tension. Their tension and opposition makes possible beautiful music, in the case of the lyre, and the propulsion of an arrow, in the case of the bow. Both involve a harmony through opposition.

In a 1923 newspaper interview Lawrence is quoted as saying “If men were left to themselves, they would rush off . . . into destruction. But women keep life back at its own center. They pull the men back. Women have enormous passive strength, the strength of inertia.” Here Lawrence uses an image he was very fond of: women are at the center, the hub. This is because they are closer to “the source” than men are.

womeninlove.jpgIn Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence tells us “The blood-consciousness and the blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can stay at the source. Nor even make a goal of the source, as Freud does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.” Lawrence believes that men yearn for purposive, creative activity, which involves moving away from the source. However, the energy and inspiration for purposive activity is drawn from the source, and so there is a complementary movement back towards it.

In The Rainbow, Lawrence describes how Tom Brangwen, besotted with his wife, seems to lose himself in a sensual obsession with her, and with knowing her sexually. But gradually,

Brangwen began to find himself free to attend to the outside life as well. His intimate life was so violently active, that it set another man in him free. And this new man turned with interest to public life, to see what part he could take in it. This would give him scope for new activity, activity of a kind for which he was now created and released. He wanted to be unanimous with the whole of purposive mankind.

Sex is one means of contacting the source. Men contact the source through women. This does not mean, of course, that blood-consciousness is in women but not in men. Rather, it means that in most men the blood-consciousness in them is “activated” primarily through their relationship to women. Second, in women blood-consciousness is more dominant than it is in men. Women are more intuitive than men; they operate more on the basis of feeling than intellect. It should not be necessary to point out that whereas such an observation might, in another author, be taken as a denigration of women, in Lawrence it is actually high praise. Women are also much more in tune with their bodies and bodily cycles than men are. Men tend to see their bodies as adversaries that must be whipped into shape.

When Lawrence continually tells us that we must find a way to reawaken the blood-consciousness in us, he is writing primarily for men. Women are already there—or, at least, they can get there with less effort. There is an old adage: “Women are, but men must become.” To be feminine is a constant state that a woman has as her birthright. Masculinity, on the other hand, is something men must achieve and prove. Rousseau in Emile states “The male is male only at certain moments, the female is female all of her life, or at least all her youth.” We exhort boys to “be a man,” but never does one hear girls told to “be a woman.” One can compliment a man simply by saying “he’s a man,” whereas “she’s a woman” seems mere statement of fact. The psychological difference between masculinity and femininity mirrors the biological fact that all fetuses begin as female; something must happen to them in order to make them male. It also articulates what is behind the strange conviction many men have had, including many great poets and artists, that woman is somehow the keeper of life’s mysteries; the one closest to the well-spring of nature.

In “A Study of Thomas Hardy,” Lawrence states that “in a man’s life, the female is the swivel and centre on which he turns closely, producing his movement.” Goethe tells us “Das ewig Weiblich zieht uns hinan” (“The Eternal Feminine draws us onwards”). The female, the male’s source of the source, stands at the center of his life. The woman as personification of the life mystery entices him to come together with her, and through their coupling the life mystery perpetuates itself. But he is not, ultimately, satisfied by this coupling. He goes forth into the world, his body renewed by his contact with the woman, but full of desire to know this mystery more adequately, and to be its vehicle through creative expression.

Without a woman, a man feels unmoored and ungrounded, for without a woman he has no center in his life. A man—a heterosexual man—can never feel fulfilled and can never reach his full potential without a woman to whom he can turn. As to homosexual men, it is a well-known fact that many cultivate in themselves characteristics that have been traditionally usually associated with woman: refined taste in clothing and decoration, cooking, gardening, etc. What these characteristics have in common is connectedness to the pleasures of the moment, and to the rhythms and necessities of life. Men are normally purpose-driven and future-oriented. They tend to overlook those aspects of life that please, but lack any greater purpose other than pleasing. They tend, therefore, to be somewhat insensitive to their surroundings, to color, to texture, to odor, to taste. They tend, in short, to be so focused upon doing, that they miss out on being. Heterosexual men look to women to ground them, and to provide these ingredients to life—ingredients which, in truth, make life livable. Homosexual men must make a woman within themselves, in order to be grounded. (This does not mean, however, that they must become effeminate – see my review essay of Jack Donovan’s Androphilia for more details.)

Homosexual men are, of course, the exception not the rule. Lawrence writes, of the typical man, “Let a man walk alone on the face of the earth, and he feels himself like a loose speck blown at random. Let him have a woman to whom he belongs, and he will feel as though he had a wall to back up against; even though the woman be mentally a fool.” And what of the woman? What does she desire? Lawrence tells us that “the vital desire of every woman is that she shall be clasped as axle to the hub of the man, that his motion shall portray her motionlessness, convey her static being into movement, complete and radiating out into infinity, starting from her stable eternality, and reaching eternity again, after having covered the whole of time.” Man is the “doer,” the actor, whereas woman need do nothing. Just by being woman she becomes the center of a man’s universe.

The dark side of this, in Lawrence’s view, is a tendency in women towards possessiveness, and towards wanting to make themselves not just the center of a man’s life but his sole concern. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s describes at length Rupert Birkin’s process of wrestling with this aspect of femininity:

But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up.

Birkin sees these qualities in Ursula, with whom he is in love. “She too was the awful, arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest depended.” He feels she wants, in a way, to worship him, but “to worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession.”

Woman’s possessiveness is understandable given that the man is necessary to her well-being: she is only happy if she is center to the orbit and activity of some man. Again, for Lawrence, such a claim does not denigrate women, for he has already as much as said that a man is nothing without a woman. Nevertheless, some will see in this view of men and woman a sexism that places the man above the woman. From Lawrence’s perspective, this is illusory. It is true that the man is “doer,” but his perpetual need to act and to do stands in stark contrast to the woman, who need do nothing in order be who she is. It is true, further, that men’s ambition has given them power in the world, but it is a power that is nothing compared to that of the woman, who exercises her power without having to do anything. She reigns, without ruling. The man does what he does, but must return to the woman, and is “like a loose speck blown at random without her” – and he knows this. Much of misogyny may have to do with this. From the man’s perspective, the woman is all-powerful, and the source of her power a mystery.

Many modern feminists, however, conceive of power in an entirely male way, as the active power of doing. Lawrence recognized that in trying to cultivate this male power within themselves, women do not rise in the estimation of most men. Instead they are diminished, for men’s respect for and fascination with women springs entirely from the fact that unlike themselves women do not have to chase after an ideal of who they ought to be; they do not have to get caught up in the rat race in order to respect themselves. They can simply be; they can live, and take joy just in living.

One can make a rough distinction between two types of feminism. The most familiar type is what one might call the “woman on the street feminism,” which one encounters from average, working women, and which they imbibe from television, films, and magazines. This feminism essentially has as its aim claiming for women all that which formerly had been the province of men—including not only traditionally male jobs, but even male ways of speaking, moving, dressing, bonding, exercising, and displaying sexual interest. Ironically, this form of feminism is at root a form of masculinism, which makes traditionally masculine traits the hallmarks of the “liberated” or self-actualized human being.

The other type of feminism is usually to be found only in academia, though not all academic feminists subscribe to it. It insists that women have their own ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others. Feminist philosophers have written of woman’s “ways of knowing” as distinct from men’s, and have even put forward the idea that women approach ethical decision-making in a markedly different way. It is this form of feminism to which Lawrence is closest. Lawrence’s writings are concerned with liberating both men and women from the tyranny of a modern civilization which cuts them off from their true natures. Liberation for modern women cannot mean becoming like modern men, for modern men are living in a condition of spiritual (as well as wage) slavery. In an essay on feminism, Wendell Berry writes

It is easy enough to see why women came to object to the role of [the comic strip character] Blondie, a mostly decorative custodian of a degraded, consumptive modern household, preoccupied with clothes, shopping, gossip, and outwitting her husband. But are we to assume that one may fittingly cease to be Blondie by becoming Dagwood? Is the life of a corporate underling—even acknowledging that corporate underlings are well paid—an acceptable end to our quest for human dignity and worth? . . . How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? [Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), 69–70.]

I will return to this issue later.

Having now characterized, in broad strokes, Lawrence’s views on the differences between men and woman, I now turn to a more detailed discussion of each.

2. The Nature of Man

As we have seen, Lawrence believes that men (most men) need to have a woman in their lives. Their relationship to a woman serves to ground their lives, and to provide the man not only with a respite from the woes of the world, but with energy and inspiration. However, this is not the same thing as saying that the man makes the woman, or his relationship to her, the purpose of his life. In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child, the great centre of life and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair.” This is because Lawrence believes that true satisfaction for men can come only from some form of creative, purposive activity outside the family.

women1.jpgHaving a woman is therefore a necessary but not a sufficient condition for male happiness. In addition to a woman, he must have a purpose. Women, on the other hand, do not require a purpose beyond the home and the family in order to be happy. This is another of those claims that will rankle some, so let us consider two important points about what Lawrence has said. First, he is speaking of what he believes the typical woman is like, just as he is speaking of the typical man. There are at least a few exceptions to just about every generalization. Second, we must ask an absolutely crucial question of those who regard such claims as demeaning women: why is being occupied with home and family lesser than having a purpose (e.g., a career) outside the home? The argument could be made—and I think Lawrence would be sympathetic to this—that the traditional female role of making a home and raising children is just as important and possibly more important than the male activities pursued outside the home. Again, much of contemporary feminism sees things from a typically male point of view, and denigrates women who choose motherhood rather than one of the many meaningless, ulcer-producing careers that have long been the province of men.

Lawrence writes, “Primarily and supremely man is always the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown, alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening and the night are hers.” Lawrence’s male bias creeps in here a bit, as he romanticizes the “dauntless” male soul. Men and women always believe, in their heart of hearts, that their ways are superior. Nevertheless, Lawrence is not here relegating women to an inferior position. Half of life is spent in the evening and night. Day belongs to the man, night to the woman. It is a division of labor. Lawrence is drawing here, as he frequently does, on traditional mythological themes: the man is solar, the woman lunar.

Lawrence characterizes the man’s pioneering activity as follows: “It is the desire of the human male to build a world: not ‘to build a world for you, dear’; but to build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful.” In other words, the man’s primary purpose is not having or doing any of the “practical” things that a wife and a family require. And when he acts on a larger scale—Lawrence gives building the Panama Canal as an example—it is not with the end in mind of making a world in which wives and babes can be more comfortable and secure (“a world for you, dear”). He seeks to make his mark on the world; to bring something glorious into existence. And so men create culture: games, religions, rituals, dances, artworks, poetry, music, and philosophy. Wars are fought, ultimately, for the same reason. It is probably true, as is often asserted, that every war has some kind of economic motivation. However, it is probably also true to assert that in the case of just about every actual war there was another, more cost-effective alternative. Men make war for the same reason they climb mountains, jump out of airplanes, race cars, and run with the bulls: for the challenge, and the fame and glory and exhilaration that goes with meeting the challenge. It is an aspect of male psychology that most women find baffling, and even contemptible.

Now, curiously, Lawrence refers to this “impractical,” purposive motive of the male as an “essentially religious or creative motive.” What can he mean by this? Specifically, why does he characterize it as a religious motive?

It is religious because it involves the pursuit of something that is beyond the ordinary and the familiar. It is a leap into the unknown. The man has to follow what Lawrence frequently calls the “Holy Ghost” within himself and to try to make something within the world. He yearns always for the yet-to-be, the yet-to-be-realized, and always has his eye on the future, on what is in process of coming to be. Yet there seems to be, at least on the surface, a strange inconsistency in Lawrence’s characterization of the man’s motive as religious. After all, for Lawrence the life mystery, the source of being is religious object—and women are closer to this source. Man is entranced by woman, and with her he helps to propagate this power in the world through sex, but his sense of “purpose” causes him to move away from the source. So why isn’t it the woman whose “motives” are religious, and the man who is, in effect, irreligious?

The answer is that religion is not being at the source: it is directedness toward the source. Religion is possible only because of a lack or an absence in the human soul. Religion is ultimately a desire to put oneself at-one with the source. But this is possible only if one is not, originally or most of the time, at one with it. In a way, the woman is not fundamentally religious because she is the goddess, the source herself. The sexual longing of the man for the woman, and his utter inability ever to fully satisfy his desire and to resolve the mystery that is woman, are a kind of small-scale allegory for man’s large-scale, religious relationship to the source of being itself. He is, as I have said, renewed by his relations with women and, for a time, satisfied. But then he goes forth into the world with a desire for something, something. He creates, and when he does he is acting to exalt the life mystery (religion and art), to understand it (philosophy and science), or to further it (invention and production).

Lawrence speaks of how a man must put his wife “under the spell of his fulfilled decision.” Woman, who rules over the night, draws man to her and they become one through sex. Man, who rules the day, draws woman into his purpose, his aim in life, and through this they become one in another fashion. The man’s purpose does not become the woman’s purpose. He pursues this alone. But if the woman simply believes in him and what he aims to do, she becomes a tremendous source of support for the man, and she gives herself a reason for being. The man needs the woman as center, as hub of his life, and the woman needs to play this role for some man. Without a mate, though a man may set all sorts of purposes before him, ultimately they seem meaningless. He feels a sense of hollow emptiness, and drifts into despair. He lets his appearance go, and lives in squalor. He may become an alcoholic and a misogynist. He dies much sooner than his married friends, often by his own hand. As to the woman, without a man who has set himself some purpose that she can believe in, she assumes the male role and tries to find fulfillment through some kind of busy activity in the world. But as she pursues this, she feels increasingly bitter and hard, and a terrific rage begins to seethe beneath her placid surface. She becomes a troublemaker and a prude. Increasingly angry at men, she makes a virtue of necessity and declares herself emancipated from them. She collects pets.

In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence writes:

As a matter of fact, unless a woman is held, by man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force. She can’t help herself. A woman is almost always vulnerable to pity. She can’t bear to see anything physically hurt. But let a woman loose from the bounds and restraints of man’s fierce belief, in his gods and in himself, and she becomes a gentle devil.

If a woman is to be the hub in the life a man, and derive satisfaction from that, everything depends on the spirit of the man. A few lines later in the same text Lawrence states, “Unless a man believes in himself and his gods, genuinely: unless he fiercely obeys his own Holy Ghost; his woman will destroy him. Woman is the nemesis of doubting man.” In order for the woman to believe in a man, the man must believe in himself and his purpose. If he is filled with self-doubt, the woman will doubt him. If he lacks the strength to command himself, he cannot command her respect and devotion. And the trouble with modern men is that they are filled with self-doubt and lack the courage of their convictions.

Lawrence, following Nietzsche, in part blames Christianity for weakening modern, Western men. Men are potent—sexually and otherwise—to the extent they are in tune with the life force. But Christianity has “spiritualized” men. It has filled their heads with hatred of the body, and of strength, instinct, and vitality. It has infected them with what Lawrence calls the “love ideal,” which demands, counter to every natural impulse, that men love everyone and regard everyone as their equal.

Frequently in his fiction Lawrence depicts relationships in which the woman has turned against the man because he is, in effect, spiritually emasculated. The most dramatic and symbolically obvious example of this is the relationship of Clifford and Connie  in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Clifford returns from the First World War paralyzed from the waist down. But like the malady of the Grail King in Wolfram’s Parzival, this is only (literarily speaking) an outward, physical expression of an inward, psychic emasculation. Clifford is far too sensible a man to allow himself to be overcome by any great passion, so the loss of his sexual powers is not so dear. He has a keen, cynical wit and believes that he has seen through passion and found it not as great a thing as poets say that it is. It is his spiritual condition that drives Connie away from him, not so much his physical one. And so she wanders into the game preserve on their estate (representing the small space of “wildness” that still can rise up within civilization) and into the arms of Mellors, the gamekeeper. Their subsequent relationship becomes a hot, corporeal refutation of Clifford’s philosophy.

In Women in Love, Gerald Crich, the industrial magnate, is destroyed by Gudrun essentially because he does not believe in himself. Outwardly, he is “the God of the machine.” But his mastery of the material world is meaningless busywork, and he knows it. Gudrun is drawn to him because of this outward appearance of power, but when she finds that it is an illusion she hates him, and ultimately drives him to his death. For Lawrence, this is an allegory of the modern relationship between the sexes. Men today are masters of the material universe as they have never been before, but inside they are anxious and empty. The reason is that these “materialists” are profoundly afraid of and hostile to matter and nature, especially their own. Their intellect and “will to power” has cut them off from the life force and they are, in their deepest selves, impotent. The women know this, and scorn them.

In The Rainbow, Winifred Inger is Ursula’s teacher (with whom she has a brief affair), and an early feminist. She tells Ursula at one point,

The men will do no more,–they have lost the capacity for doing. . . .  They fuss and talk, but they are really inane. They make everything fit into an old, inert idea. Love is a dead idea to them. They don’t come to one and love one, they come to an idea, and they say “You are my idea,” so they embrace themselves. As if I were any man’s idea! As if I exist because a man has an idea of me! As if I will be betrayed by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his idea, to be a mere apparatus of his dead theory. But they are too fussy to be able to act; they are all impotent, they can’t take a woman. They come to their own idea every time, and take that. They are like serpents trying to swallow themselves because they are hungry.”

In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his final aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expect woman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled.”

It is important to understand here that the issue is not one of power. Lawrence’s point not that men must dominate or control their wives. In fact, in a late essay entitled “Matriarchy” (originally published as “If Women Were Supreme”) Lawrence actually advocates rule by women, at least in the home, because he believes it would liberate men. He assumes the truth of the claim—now in disrepute—that early man had lived in matriarchal societies and writes, “the men seem to have been lively sorts, hunting and dancing and fighting, while the woman did the drudgery and minded the brats. . . . A woman deserves to possess her own children and have them called by her name. As to the household furniture and the bit of money in the bank, it seems naturally hers.” The man, in such a situation, is not the slave of the woman because the man is “first and foremost an active, religious member of the tribe.” The man’s real life is not in the household, but in creative activity, and religious activity:

The real life of the man is not spent in his own little home, daddy in the bosom of the family, wheeling the perambulator on Sundays. His life is passed mainly in the khiva, the great underground religious meeting-house where only the males assemble, where the sacred practices of the tribe are carried on; then also he is away hunting, or performing the sacred rites on the mountains, or he works in the fields.

Men, Lawrence tells us, have social and religious needs which can only be satisfied apart from women. The disaster of modern marriage is that men not only think they have to rule the roost, but they accept the woman’s insistence that he have no needs or desires that cannot be satisfied through his relationship to her. He becomes master of his household, and slave to it at the same time:

Now [man’s] activity is all of the domestic order and all his thought goes to proving that nothing matters except that birth shall continue and woman shall rock in the nest of this globe like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. Man is the fetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, and the reborn of woman. . . . Instead of being assertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering and sensitive. He begins to have as many feelings—nay, more than a woman. His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity and tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very largely the original role of woman.

Ironically, in accepting such a situation without a fight, he only earns the woman’s contempt: “Almost invariably a [modern] married woman, as she passes the age of thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt, of her husband, or a pity which is near to contempt. Particularly if he is a good husband, a true modern.”

3. The Nature of Woman

In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “Women will never understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other’s game, but they will remain apart.” But what is meant by “feeling” here? Lawrence is referring again to his belief that women live, to a greater extent than men, from the primal self. In the case of most men today, “mind-consciousness” and reason are dominant—to the point where they are frequently detached from “blood-consciousness” and feeling.

In describing the nature of woman Lawrence once again draws on perennial symbols: “Woman is really polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth. Her deep positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull.” The sun represents man, and the moon woman. Day belongs to him, and night to her. However, another set of mythic images associates the earth with woman and the sky with man. The “pull” in women is towards the earth, and this means several things. First, the earth is the source of chthonic powers, and so, as poetic metaphor, it represents the primal, pre-mental, animal aspect in human beings. In a literal sense, however, Lawrence believes that women are more in tune than men with chthonic powers: with the rhythms of nature and the cycle of seasons. Further, the “downward flow” refers to Lawrence’s belief that the lower “centres” of the body are, in a sense, more primitive, more instinctual than the upper, and that women tend to live and act from these centers more than men do. Lawrence writes, “Her deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. . . . The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down to the weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet.”

Finally, to be “polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth” means to have one’s life, one’s vital being fixed in reference to a central point. If Lawrence intends us to assume that man is polarized upwards then we may ask, toward what? If woman is oriented towards the center of the earth, then–following the logic of the mythic categories–is man oriented toward the center of the sky? But the sky has no center. Man is less fixed than woman; he is a wanderer. He is a hunter, a seeker, a pioneer, an adventurer. Woman, on the other hand, lives from the axis of the world. Mircea Eliade writes that “the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World.” Woman is at the center. Man begins there, then goes off. He returns again and again, the phallic power in him rising in response to the chthonic power of the woman. And his religious response is an ongoing effort to bring his daytime self into line with the life force he experiences when in the arms of the woman.

Woman, Lawrence tells us, “is a flow, a river of life,” and this flow is fundamentally different from the man’s river. However, “The woman is like an idol, or a marionette, always forced to play one role or another: sweetheart, mistress, wife, mother.” The mind of the male is built to analyze and categorize. But the nature of woman, like the nature of nature itself, defies categorization. Even before Bacon, man’s response to nature was to force it to yield up its secrets, to bend it to the human will, or to see it only within the narrow parameters of whatever theory was fashionable at the moment. The male mind attempts to do this to woman as well–and the woman, to a great extent, cooperates. She fits herself into the roles expected of her by authority figures, whether it is dutiful daughter-sister-wife-mother, or dutiful feminist and career-woman.

Lawrence writes, “The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done.” Two opposing wills exist in women, Lawrence believes: a will to conform or to submit, and a will to reject all boundaries and be free. In Women in Love, Birkin compares women to horses:

“And of course,” he said to Gerald, “horses haven’t got a complete will, like human beings. A horse has no one will. Every horse, strictly, has two wills. With one will, it wants to put itself in the human power completely—and with the other, it wants to be free, wild. The two wills sometimes lock—you know that, if ever you’ve felt a horse bolt, while you’ve been driving it. . . . And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will, she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”

Ursula, who is present at this exchange, laughs and responds “Then I’m a bolter.” The trouble is that she is not.

Lawrence’s fiction is filled with vivid portrayals of women (arguably much more vivid and well-drawn than his portrayals of men). The central characters in several of his novels are women (The Rainbow, The Lost Girl, The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover). All of Lawrence’s major female characters exhibit these two wills, but frequently he presents pairs of women each of whom represents one of the wills. This is the case in Women in Love. Ultimately, in Ursula’s character the will to surrender emerges as dominant. In her sister Gudrun the will to be free and wild dominates, with tragic results. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie Chatterley exhibits the will to surrender, and her sister Hilda the will to be free. The two lesbians in Lawrence’s novella The Fox are cut from the same cloth. Similar pairs of women also crop up in Lawrence’s short stories. In each case, one woman learns the joys of submitting, not to a man but to the earth, to nature, to the life mystery within her. The man is a means to this, however. The best example of this in Lawrence’s fiction is probably Connie Chatterley’s journey to awakening. In John Thomas and Lady Jane, an earlier version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence has Connie speak of the significance of her lover and of his penis: “I know it was the penis which really put the evening stars into my inside self. I used to look at the evening star, and think how lovely and wonderful it was. But now it’s in me as well as outside me, and I need hardly look at it. I am it. I don’t care what you say, it was penis gave it me.” As to the other woman in Lawrence’s fiction, she tends to be horrified by the primal self in her, and its call to surrender. She lives from the ego. She rages against anything in her nature that is unchosen, and against anything else that would hem her in, especially any man. She views herself as “realistic” and hardheaded, but the general impression she gives is of being hardhearted and sterile.

In his portrayals of the latter type of woman, Lawrence is partly depicting what he believes to be a perennial aspect of the female character, and partly depicting what he regards as the quintessential “modern” woman. It is in the nature of woman to counterbalance the will to submit with an opposing will that “bolts,” and kicks against all that which limits her, including her own nature. Lawrence believes that modern womanhood and all the problems of women today arise from the over-development of that will to freedom.

A “will to freedom” sounds like a good thing, so it is important to realize that essentially what Lawrence means by this is a negative will which tries either to control, or to destroy all that which it cannot control. Lawrence’s critique of modernity is a major topic in itself, but suffice it say that he believes that in the modern period a disavowal of the primal self takes place on a mass, cultural scale. The seeds of this disavowal were sown by Christianity, and reaped by modern scientism, which becomes the avowed enemy of the religion that helped foster it. Individuals live their lives from the standpoint of ego and mental-consciousness, and distrust the blood-consciousness. The negative will in women seizes upon reason and ego-dominance as a means to free herself from the influence of her dark, chthonic self, and from the influence of the men that this dark, chthonic self draws her to. The will to negate, using the mind as its tool, thus becomes the path to “liberation.”

Lawrence writes in Apocalypse:

Today, the best part of womanhood is wrapped tight and tense in the folds of the Logos, she is bodiless, abstract, and driven by a self-determination terrible to behold. A strange ‘spiritual’ creature is woman today, driven on and on by the evil demon of the old Logos, never for a moment allowed to escape and be herself.

And in an essay he writes, “Woman is truly less free today than ever she has been since time began, in the womanly sense of freedom.” This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what is asserted by most pundits today, when they speak of the progress made by woman in the modern era. Why does Lawrence believe that woman is now so unfree? The answer is implied in the quotation from Apocalypse: she is not allowed to be herself.

In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence tells us

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.

aaron'srod.jpgWhat Lawrence says here is applicable to both men and women. “To be oneself” in the true sense means to answer to the call of the deepest self. We can only achieve our “fullness of being” if we do so. The mind invents all manner of goals and projects and ideals to be pursued, but ultimately all that we do produces only frustration and emptiness if we act in a way that does not fundamentally satisfy the needs of our deepest, pre-mental, bodily nature.

Lawrence writes further in Apocalypse: “The evil Logos says she must be ‘significant,’ she must ‘make something worth while’ of her life. So on and on she goes, making something worth while, piling up the evil forms of our civilization higher and higher, and never for a second escaping to be wrapped in the brilliant fluid folds of the new green dragon.” Earlier in the same text, Lawrence tells us that “The long green dragon with which we are so familiar on Chinese things is the dragon in his good aspect of life-bringer, life-giver, life-maker, vivifier.” In short, the “green dragon” represents the life force, the source of all, the Pan power. Lawrence is saying that modern woman, in search of something “significant” to do with her life, falls in with all the corrupt (largely, money-driven) pursuits that have brought men nothing but ulcers, emptiness, and early death. “All our present life-forms are evil,” he writes. “But with a persistence that would be angelic if it were not devilish woman insists on the best in life, by which she means the best of our evil life-forms, unable to realize that the best of evil life-forms are the most evil.” Like men, she loses touch with the natural both within herself and in the world surrounding her. Lawrence’s dragon symbolizes both of these: primal nature as such, and the primal nature within me. It is this dragon which Lawrence seeks to awake in himself, and in his readers. The tragedy of modern woman is that she has renounced the dragon, whereas she would be better off being devoured by it.

In John Thomas and Lady Jane Lawrence also links the ideal of fulfilled womanhood to the dragon. Following Connie Chatterley’s musings on the meaning of the phallus (which I quoted earlier), Lawrence writes:

The only thing which had taken her quite away from fear, if only for a night, was the strange gallant phallus looking round in its odd bright godhead, and now the arm of flesh around her, the socket of the hand against her breast, the slow, sleeping thud of the man’s heart against her body. It was all one thing—the mysterious phallic godhead. Now she knew that the worst had happened. This dragon had enfolded her, and its folds were pure gentleness and safety.

Make no mistake, Lawrence believes that women can adopt the ways of men; he believes that they can succeed at traditionally male work. But he believes that they do this at great cost to themselves. “Of all things, the most fatal to a woman is to have an aim,” Lawrence tells us. In general, he believes that the ultimate aim of life is simply living, and that we set a trap for ourselves when we declare that some goal or some ideal shall be the end of life, and believe that this will make life “meaningful.” This applies to men, but even more so to women. Why? Because, again, women are so much closer to the source that men tend to regard women as the life force embodied (“Mother Nature”). For a woman to live for something other than living is to pervert her nature, and her gift. Again, Lawrence’s position is not that a woman is incapable of doing the work of a man, but ultimately she will find it deadening: “The moment woman has got man’s ideals and tricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manly world—there’s an end of it. She’s had enough. She’s had more than enough. She hates the thing she has embraced.”

In our age, many women who have forgone marriage and children in order to pursue a career are discovering this. The body has its own needs and ends, and the organism as a whole cannot flourish and achieve satisfaction unless these needs and ends are satisfied. With some exceptions, women who have chosen not to have children regret it, and suffer in other ways as well (for example, they are at higher risk for developing ovarian cancer than women who have given birth). The same goes for men, many of whom spend a great many “productive” years without feeling a need to reproduce–then are suddenly hit by that need and launch themselves on a frantic, sometimes worldwide search for a suitable mate able to father them a child. Lawrence wrote the following, prophetic words in one of his final essays:

It is all an attitude, and one day the attitude will become a weird cramp, a pain, and then it will collapse. And when it has collapsed, and she looks at the eggs she has laid, votes, or miles of typewriting, years of business efficiency—suddenly, because she is a hen and not a cock, all she has done will turn into pure nothingness to her. Suddenly it all falls out of relation to her basic henny self, and she realizes she has lost her life. The lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the real bliss of every female, has been denied her: she had never had it. Having lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!

This quote suggests that Lawrence believes that the woman, the hen, ruins herself by taking up the ways appropriate and natural for the cock – but this is not exactly what he means. In Lawrence’s view, the modern ways of the cock are destroying the cock as well, but they are doubly bad for the hen. What’s bad for the gander is worse for the goose. Lawrence believes that in order to achieve satisfaction in life, we must get in touch with that primal self that the woman is fortunate enough always to be closer to.

4. A New Relation Between Man and Woman

So what is to be done? How are we to repair the damage that has been done in the modern world to the relation between the sexes? How are we to make men into men again, and women into women?

Lawrence has a great deal to say on this subject, but one of his oft-repeated recommendations essentially amounts to saying that relations between the sexes should be severed. By this he means that in order for men and women to come to each other as authentic men and women, they must stop trying to be “pals” with each other. In a 1925 letter he writes, “Friendship between a man and a woman, as a thing of first importance to either, is impossible: and I know it. We are creatures of two halves, spiritual and sensual—and each half is as important as the other. Any relation based on the one half—say the delicate spiritual half alone—inevitably brings revulsion and betrayal.”

In order for men and women to be friends, they must deliberately put aside or suppress their sexual identities and their very different natures. They must actively ignore the fact that they are men and women. They relate to each other, in effect, as neutered, sexless beings. They can never truly relax around each other, for they must continually monitor the way that they look at each other or (more problematic) touch each other. Sitting in too close proximity could awaken feelings that neither wants awakened. If, with respect to their “daytime selves,” men and women are forced to relate to each other in this way regularly, it has the potential of wrecking the ability of the “nighttime self” to relate to the opposite sex in a natural, sensual manner. Once accustomed to the daily routine of suppressing thoughts and feelings, and taking great care never to show a sexual side to their nature, these habits carry over into the realm of the romantic and sexual. Dating and courtship become fraught with tension, each party unsure of the “appropriateness” of this or that display of sexual interest or simple affection. The man, in short, becomes afraid to be a man, and the woman to be a woman. “On mixing with one another, in becoming familiar, in being ‘pals,’ they lose their own male and female integrity.” Writing of the modern marriage, Wendell Berry states

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

If we must suppress our masculine and feminine natures in order to be friends with the opposite sex, in what way then do we actually relate to each other? We relate almost entirely through the intellect. Lawrence writes, “Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, with sex in the head. We find a woman who is the same. We marry because we are ‘pals.’” And: “We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer.” Modern men and women begin their relationships as sexless things who relate through ideas and speech. The man looks for a woman, or the woman for a man who thinks and talks as they do; who “knows where they are coming from,” and has “similar values.” They might as well not have bodies at all, or conduct the initial stages of their relationships by telephone or email. Indeed, that is exactly the way many modern relationships are now beginning. But the primary way men and women are built to relate to each other is through the body and the signals of the body; through the subtle, sexual “vibrations” that each gives off, through the sexual gaze (different in the male and in the female), and through touch. No real, romantic relationship can be forged without these, and without feeling through these non-mental means that the two are “right” for each other. We cannot start with “mental agreement” and then construct a sexual relationship around it.

Lawrence, like Rousseau, had a good deal to say about education, and in fact much of what he says is Rousseauian. His ideas on the subject are expressed chiefly in Fantasia of the Unconscious and in a long essay, “The Education of the People.”

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, in a chapter entitled “First Steps in Education,” Lawrence lays out a new program for educating girls and boys: “All girls over ten years of age must attend at one domestic workshop. All girls over ten years of age may, in addition, attend at one workshop of skilled labour or of technical industry, or of art. . . . All boys over ten years of age must attend at one workshop of domestic crafts, and at one workshop of skilled labour, or of technical industry, or of art.” The difference between how boys and girls are to be educated (at least initially) is that whereas both are required to attend a “domestic workshop,” only boys are required to attend a “workshop of skilled labour or of technical industry, or of art.” Keep in mind that Lawrence is laying down the rules for education in his ideal society. He anticipates that whereas all males will work outside the home (in some fashion or other), not all females will. His system is not designed to force women into the role of homemakers, for he leaves it open that girls may, if they choose, learn the same skills as boys. As to higher education, Lawrence leaves this open: “Schools of mental culture are free to all individuals over fourteen years of age. Universities are free to all who obtain the first culture degree.” The system is designed in such a way that individuals are drawn to pursue certain avenues based on their personalities and natural temperaments. Unlike our present society, in Lawrence’s world there would be no universal pressure to attend university: only individuals with certain natural gifts and inclinations would go in that direction. Similarly, the system leaves open the possibility that some women will pursue the same path as men, but only if that is their natural inclination. The intent of Lawrence’s program is not to force individuals into certain roles, but to cultivate their natural, innate characteristics. And as we have seen, Lawrence believes that males and females are innately different.

Lawrence makes it clear elsewhere that in the early years education will be sex-segregated. This is intended to facilitate the development of each student’s character and talents. Males, especially early in life, relate more easily to other males and are better able to devote themselves to their studies in the absence of females. The same thing applies to females. Sex-segregated education in the early years also has the advantage, Lawrence believes, of promoting a healthier interaction between males and females later on. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he states, “boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible, that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that lies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which each has to offer the other, finally.” After all, “You don’t find the sun and moon playing at pals in the sky.”

But this is, of course, all in the realm of fantasy. Lawrence’s system would be practical, if modern society could be entirely restructured, and he is aware that this is not likely to occur anytime soon. So what are we to do in the meantime? Here we encounter some of Lawrence’s most controversial ideas, and most inflammatory prose. He writes, “men, drive your wives, beat them out of their self-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea of themselves. Absolutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves to tatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous sight in their own eyes.” It is this sort of thing that has made Lawrence a bête noire of feminists. Yet, in the next sentence, he adds “Wives, do the same to your husbands.” Lawrence’s intention, as always, is to destroy the ego-centredness in both husband and wife; to destroy the modern tendency for men and women to relate to each other, and to themselves, through ideas and ideals.

As a man and a husband, however, he writes primarily from that standpoint: “Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till she’s stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her, Reduce her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying.” Does he mean any of this literally? Is he advocating that husbands beat their wives? Perhaps. Lawrence and Frieda were famous for their quarrels, which often came to blows, though the blows were struck by both. Lawrence states the purpose of such “beatings” (whether literal or figurative) as follows: “Make her yield to her own real unconscious self, and absolutely stamp on the self that she’s got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back into her own true unconscious.”

As we have already seen, Lawrence believes that healthy relations between a man and a woman depend largely on the man’s ability to make the woman believe in him, and the purpose he has set for himself in life. Sex unites the “nighttime self” of men and women, but the daytime self can only be united, for Lawrence, through the man’s devotion to something outside the marriage, and the woman’s belief in the man. This is just the same thing as saying that what unites the lives of men and women (as opposed to their sexual natures) is the woman’s belief in the man and his purpose. And so Lawrence writes:

You’ve got to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. You’ll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours: her night goal to your day goal. . . . She’ll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least of all to her. She’ll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut off and gone ahead, into the dark. . . . Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she believes in you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. . . . And you feel an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in your purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratification of her embrace. That’s what it is to have a wife.

Friends of Lawrence must have smiled when they read these words, for he was hardly giving an accurate description of his own marriage. As I have mentioned, Lawrence and Frieda frequently fell into violent quarrels, and she would often demean and humiliate him, and he her. Yet, ultimately, Frieda believed in Lawrence’s abilities and his mission in life; he knew it and derived strength from it. Those who may think that Lawrence’s prescriptions for marriage require an extraordinarily submissive and even unintelligent wife should take note of the sort of woman Lawrence himself chose.

Now, some might respond to Lawrence’s description of marriage by asking, understandably, “Where is love in all of this? What has become of love between man and wife?” Yet Lawrence speaks again and again, especially in Women in Love, of love between man and wife as a means to wholeness, as a way to transcend the false, ego-centered self. In a 1914 letter he tells a male correspondent:

You mustn’t think that your desire or your fundamental need is to make a good career, or to fill your life with activity, or even to provide for your family materially. It isn’t. Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in entire nakedness of body and spirit. Then you will have peace and inner security, no matter how many things go wrong. And this peace and security will leave you free to act and to produce your own work, a real independent workman.

Initially in these remarks Lawrence seems to be taking a position different from the one he expressed in the later Fantasia of the Unconscious, where he asserts that the man derives his chief fulfillment from purpose, not from the home and family. But Lawrence’s position is complex. He believes that the man requires a relationship to a woman in order to be strengthened in the pursuit of his purpose. Recall the lines I quoted earlier, “Let a man walk alone on the face of the earth, and he feels himself like a loose speck blown at random. Let him have a woman to whom he belongs, and he will feel as though he had a wall to back up against; even though the woman be mentally a fool.” Man fulfills himself through having a purpose beyond the home, but he must have a home and a wife to support him. Through romantic love (which always involves a strong sexual component) the man comes to his primal self, and emerges from the encounter with the strength to carry on in the world. Lawrence is telling his correspondent—and this becomes clear in the last lines of the passage quoted—that in order to accomplish anything meaningful he must first submerge himself, body and soul, into love for his wife.

Of course, this makes it sound as if Lawrence regards married love merely as a means to an end: merely as a means to pursuing a male “purpose.” Elsewhere, however, he speaks of it as if it were an end in itself. This is particularly the case in Women in Love. Early in the novel Birkin tells Gerald, “I find . . . that one needs some one really pure single activity—I should call love a single pure activity. . . . The old ideals are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman—sort of ultimate marriage—and there isn’t anything else.” Again, Lawrence is seeking a way to get beyond idealism, and all the corrupt apparatus of modern, ego-driven life. To get beyond this, to what? To the true self, and to relationships based upon blood-consciousness and honest, uncorrupted sentiment. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s plan for achieving this involves a “perfect union” with a woman (and, as he states in the same novel, “the additional perfect relationship between man and man—additional to marriage”).

Birkin wants to achieve this with Ursula, but he keeps insisting over and over (much to her bewilderment and anger) that he means something more than mere “love.” The reason for this is that Birkin and Lawrence associate “love” with an ideal that is drummed into the heads of people in the modern, post-Christian world. We are issued with the baffling injunction to “love thy neighbor,” where thy neighbor means all of humanity. Any intelligent person can see that to love everyone means to love no one in particular. And any psychologically healthy person would find valueless the “love” of someone who claimed also to love all the rest of humanity. Lawrence is reacting also against the lovey-dovey, white lace, sanitized, billing and cooing sort of “love” that society encourages in married couples. Lawrence’s disgust for this sort of thing is expressed in his short story “In Love.” The main character, Hester, is repulsed by the “love” her fiancé, Joe, shows for her. They had been friends prior to their engagement and got on well

But now, alas, since she had promised to marry him, he had made the wretched mistake of falling “in love” with her. He had never been that way before. And if she had known he would get this way now, she would have said decidedly: Let us remain friends, Joe, for this sort of thing is a come-down. Once he started cuddling and petting, she couldn’t stand him. Yet she felt she ought to. She imagined she even ought to like it. Though where the ought came from, she could not see.

Birkin (like Lawrence) wants to avoid at all costs falling into this sort of scripted, stereotyped love relationship, but Ursula has a great deal of difficulty understanding what it is that he does want. He tries his best to explain it to her:

“There is,” he said, in a voice of pure abstraction, “a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman—so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.”

The “final me and you” refers to the primal self. “The old ideals are dead as nails” and so is modern civilization. Birkin does not want his relationship to Ursula to “fit” into the modern social scheme, to become conventional or “safe.” He also fears and abhors the impress of society on his conscious, mental self. He does not want to come together with Ursula “though the ego,” as it were. He wants them to come together through their primal selves and to forge a relationship that is based on something deeper and far stronger than what the overly socialized creatures around him call “love.” Yet, at the same time, one could simply say that what he wants is a truer, deeper love, and that what passes for love with other people is usually not the genuine article. They are doing what one “ought” to do, even when in bed together.

In The Rainbow (to which Women in Love forms the “sequel”), Tom Brangwen offers his views on love and marriage in a famous passage:

“There’s very little else, on earth, but marriage. You can talk about making money, or saving souls. You can save your own soul seven times over, and you may have a mint of money, but your soul goes gnawin’, gnawin’, gnawin’, and it says there’s something it must have. In heaven there is no marriage. But on earth there is marriage, else heaven drops out, and there’s no bottom to it. . . . If we’ve got to be Angels . . . and if there is no such thing as a man or a woman among them, then it seems to me as a married couple makes one Angel. . . . [An] Angel can’t be less than a human being. And if it was only the soul of a man minus the man, then it would be less than a human being. . . . An Angel’s got to be more than a human being. . . . So I say, an Angel is the soul of a man and a woman in one: they rise united at the Judgment Day, as one angel. . . . If I am to become an Angel, it’ll be my married soul, and not my single soul.”

À la Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, men and women form two halves of a complete human being. Human nature divides itself into two, complementary aspects: masculinity and femininity. A complete human being is made when a man and a woman are joined together. But they cannot be joined—not really—through the mental, social self, but only through the unconscious, primal self.

In Women in Love, this view returns but in a modified form. Now Birkin tells us, “One must commit oneself to a conjunction with the other—for ever. But it is not selfless—it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and integrity—like a star balanced with another star.” And Lawrence tells us of Birkin, “he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.” Tom Brangwen’s view implies that men and women, considered separately, do not have complete souls, and that a complete soul is made only when they join together in marriage. There is a suggestion in what he says that the “individuality” of single men and women is false, and that only a married couple constitutes a true individual. Birkin’s ideal, on the other hand, involves the man and the woman each preserving their selfhood and individuality and “balancing” each other.

Despite the fact that Birkin frequently, and transparently, speaks for Lawrence we cannot take him as speaking for Lawrence here. I believe that it is Brangwen’s position that is closest to Lawrence’s own. When Women in Love opens, Birkin is in a relationship with Hermione, who Lawrence portrays as a woman living entirely from out of her head, without any naturalness or spontaneity. Yet there is a bit of this in Birkin as well, which is perhaps why he reacts against it so violently when he sees it in Hermione. After the passage just quoted from Women in Love, Lawrence writes of Birkin, “He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. . . . And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him.” Lawrence then goes on to describe Birkin’s fear and loathing of women’s “clutching.” Birkin is a conflicted character. He wants to lose himself in a relationship with a woman, but fears it at the same time. He wants Ursula, and talks on and on about spontaneity and the evil of ideals, yet he is continually preaching to Ursula about his ideal relationship which, conveniently, is one in which he can unite with her yet preserve his ego intact. This at first bewilders then infuriates Ursula, who never understands what it is that he wants. In the end, the problem resolves itself, probably just as it would in real life. Drawn to Ursula by a power stronger than his conscious ego, Birkin eventually drops all of his talk, surrenders his will, and settles into a married bliss that is marred only by his continued desire for the love of a man.

Ultimately, Lawrence believes that the “establishment of a new relation” between men and women depends upon a return to the oldest of relationships, and that this is possible only through a recovery of the oldest part of the self. We must, he believes, drop our ideal of the unisex society and be alive again to the fundamental, natural differences between men and women. Men and woman do not naturally desire to enjoy each other’s society at all times. We must not only educate men and women apart, but re-establish “spaces” within civilized society where men can be with men, and women with women. We must not force men and women together and command them to forget that they are men and women. Education and, indeed, much else in society must work to cultivate and to affirm the natural, masculine qualities and virtues in men, and the feminine qualities and virtues in women. Having become true men and women and having awakened, through their apartness, to the mystery and the allure that is the opposite sex, they will then come together and forge romantic alliances that are not based upon talk and “common values” but upon the “pull” between man and woman. Lawrence is not referring here simply to lust. A sexual element is, of course, involved, but what he means is the mysterious, ineffable attraction between an individual man and a woman, what we often call “chemistry,” which has nothing to do with the words they utter or the ideals they pay lip service to. And once this attraction is established, if the two desire to become bound to each other, then they must surrender themselves to the relationship. They must overcome their fear of the loss of ego boundaries. They must drop all talk of “rights” and not fall into the trap of treating the marriage as if it were a business partnership. For both, it is a leap into the unknown but in this case the unknown is the natural. When we plant a seed we must close the earth over it and go off and wait in anticipation. But we know that nature, being what it is, will produce as it has before. If all goes well, in that spot will grow the plant we were expecting. Similarly, marriage is not a human invention but something that grows naturally between a man and woman if its seed is planted in the fertile soil of the primal selves of each.

dimanche, 28 novembre 2010

Nobelprijswinnaar niet welkom in Turkije

Ex: http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/

Nobelprijswinnaar niet welkom in Turkije
Van onze correspondent
ISTANBOEL -  De Britse schrijver V.S. Naipaul, die in 2001 de Nobelprijs
voor de Literatuur won, kan vanwege zijn kritiek op de islam niet deelnemen
aan een internationale literaire bijeenkomst in Istanboel.

naipaul_wife_prize_photo.jpgAanvankelijk was de in Trinidad geboren Naipaul als eregast uitgenodigd voorhet European Writers Parliament, een groot internationaal literair evenement dat vandaag in Istanboel van start gaat. Toen dat bekend werd, protesteerde een groep Turkse schrijvers fel en dreigde met een boycot.

De komst van Naipaul zou "een belediging zijn voor moslims", vanwege eerdere uitlatingen van de schrijver over de islam.

Zo heeft de Nobelprijswinnaar eens gezegd dat islamisering een vorm van
kolonisatie is die rampzalige gevolgen met zich meebrengt. Dat zou volgens
Naipaul vooral gelden voor mensen die zich tot de islam bekeren, omdat ze
hun afkomst en eigen verleden moeten verloochenen.

Volgens de Turkse dichter en filosoof Hilmi Yavuz beledigt de schrijver met
zulke opmerkingen de islam en moslims. Daarom is zijn komst naar het
literaire evenement niet gewenst, aldus Yavuz. Vele andere Turkse schrijvers
zijn dezelfde mening toegedaan. "De uitnodiging aan Naipaul moet worden
ingetrokken en men moet de schrijver vertellen wat daarvan de reden is",
aldus Özdenören. "De aanwezigheid van Naipaul is een belediging voor
moslims", aldus de linkse Turkse schrijver Cezmi Ersöz.

De organisator van het evenement, Ahmet Kot, probeerde nog de protesterende
Turkse schrijvers tegemoet te komen door Naipaul niet meer als eregast te
verwelkomen. Naipaul zou alleen de openingsspeech houden. Het
compromisvoorstel mocht niet baten. De protesterende Turkse schrijvers
hielden voet bij stuk. Daarna hebben het organisatiecomité en Naipaul
gezamenlijk besloten dat het beter is dat hij thuisblijft.