Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (1938) is one of those unfortunate great books (think Spengler’s Decline of the West and any book by Henry Adams) that is often mentioned but seldom read. The book was meant as a guide to the essential philosophy, art, economics, history, and ethics from Confucius to the 20th century as uniquely interpreted by Pound.
This and the ABC of Reading (1934) constituted the core texts of the “Ezra-versity,” the informal seminars that Pound held before World War II for those acolytes who came to visit him in Rapallo, Italy.
The book is dedicated to two of these acolytes and “graduates” of the Ezra-versity: the British poet Basil Bunting (1900–1985), author of Briggflatts; and the American Jewish poet Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978) whose monumental long poem “A” is the only work comparable in scope and complexity to Pound’s own Cantos.
Guide to Kulchur is unique in both its structure and style. Written in Pound’s folksy demotic English that at times seems more akin to Mark Twain or Joel Chandler Harris, the book is arranged in a series of very short chapters that seem to unfold in a haphazard fashion. The book’s form only becomes manifest the longer one reads, and by the end of the book one is amazed at how Pound has managed to weave seamlessly the many strands of Western and ancient Chinese thought.
[2]For Pound, philosophy and ethics begin with Confucius, particularly the Confucian idea that a well-ordered and moral society is based upon the imperative to call things by their correct names. This may seem like a minor point upon which to build a civilizational edifice, but it is, in reality, nothing less than a commitment to truth telling, a commitment that is sorely at odds with our own postmodern age that has abandoned the search for truth as a sine qua non. For Pound, the commitment to truth telling extends not only to philosophy and the arts but also to economics. His unique and highly critical take on the ancient Greek philosophers (especially Aristotle) stems in no little part, as he sees it, from their inability to conceive of money as other than a means of measurement without a basis in morality. Pound viewed the ancient Greeks as “happy men with no moral fervor”[1] [3] who represented a decline from the seriousness of their Homeric era ancestors.
While Pound’s embrace of Social Credit economics and strong denunciation of usury are well known, the Guide to Kulchur reveals how closely Pound linked together economics and aesthetics. In the very remarkable Chapter 50, entitled “Chaucer Was Framed,” Pound states:
Usury is contra naturam. It is not merely opposition to nature’s
increase, it is antithetic to discrimination by the senses. Discrimination
by the senses is dangerous to avarice. It is dangerous because any
perception or any high development of the perceptive faculties may
lead to knowledge. The moneychanger only thrives on ignorance.
He thrives on all sorts of insensitivity and non-perception.
An instant sense of proportion imperils financiers.[2] [4]
[5]Pound’s insights are as remarkable as they are prescient. An imperiled aesthetic sense that is incapable of discerning differences of quality and meaning and that cannot sense subtleties of emotion is necessary for a complacent body of fungible consumers who, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Pound, who viewed the Medieval Church as the highest expression of Western Civilization, likewise saw Calvinist Protestantism as its lowest expression, one that permitted, indeed glorified, usury and the inability to make aesthetic and moral distinctions:
You can, by contrast, always get financial backing for
debauchery. Any form of “entertainment” that debases perception,
that profanes the mysteries or tends to obscure discrimination, goes
hand in hand with drives toward money profit.
It might not be too much to say that the whole of protestant
morals, intertwined with usury-tolerance, has for centuries tended
to obscure perception of degrees, to debase the word moral to a
single groove, to degrade all moral perceptions outside the relation
of the sexes, and to vulgarize the sex relation itself.[3] [6]
What is remarkable here is that Pound was able to see through the practices and goals of the leftist globalists at precisely the time that the right-wing nationalists were at the zenith of their power. These two paragraphs of Pound’s explain why the globalists use pornography as a means to normalize sexual perversions in order to subvert white family formation. They also explain the bread-and-circus nature of the global financiers to keep consumers satiated with cheap toys and gadgets. And finally, Pound was able to ascertain that Calvinist morality has led to an inability of our enemies to be able to make moral distinctions, wherein any disagreement with a leftist, however minor, becomes an example of “hate speech” in which the speaker literally becomes Adolf Hitler. It is also amazing that Pound saw the origin of leftist ideology in Calvinism, and as such, antedates by more than half a century the same conclusion brought by the Neoreactionaries, especially Curtis Yarvin a/k/a Mencius Moldbug.
Pound is a demanding author. He does not suffer fools gladly and he expects his readers to do their homework, but the rewards are many for those readers who are up to the challenge. Guide to Kulchur should be an essential book in the library of every white nationalist. Although written 80 years ago, the book is even more relevant today than it was when it was written, for in the words of its author:
Liberalism is a running sore, and its surviving proponents
are vile beyond printable descriptions. They have betrayed the “Droits
de l’homme”, they are more dastardly than Judas . . . .
In our time the liberal has asked for almost no freedom save
the freedom to commit acts contrary to the general good.[4] [7]
I rest my case.
Notes
[1] [8] Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970 [1938]), p. 330.
[2] [9] Ibid., p. 281.
[3] [10] Ibid., pp. 281–82.
[4] [11] Ibid., p. 254.
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Faszination eines Trugbildes (The Fascination of an Illusion) by Tarmo Kunnas is an unusual book in several respects. It sets out to examine what in the subtitle to the book is described as “the European intellectual and the fascist temptation, 1919-1945.” “Here,” Kunnas explains, “the tragedy of fascism is seen through the opera glasses of the person it has captivated, and my book for its part is intended to complete a picture of the fascist movements.” (p. 9) In his Foreword, Kunnas tells us that his book deals with the relationship of more than seventy European intellectuals from fifteen nations who were “tempted” by fascism.
In his Foreword, Kunnas says his objective is to examine “why fascism in the inter-war years held such attraction for the European intelligentsia and on the people of the time.” In fact, this study does not look at the attraction fascism held for people in general; it focuses exclusively on writers. The organization of the book is unusual. Instead of covering his ground with chapters devoted to specific writers or nations, Kunnas works through chapters which revolve around given themes, and then scrutinizes in each an array of writers in relation to its theme. Here are the titles of a few of the many chapters: “Exactness is not Truth,” “Mistrust of the Good in People,” “Social Darwinism,” “Puritanism,” “The Weakness of Parliamentarianism,” and “Against Faith in Progress.” For each of these, Kunnas provides the reader with an abundance of examples of how, within the perspective of the given theme, many intellectuals inclined towards fascism and a fascist solution, or towards an interpretation of the theme. This unusual approach has the advantage that it shifts focus from a biographical account to a philosophical and theoretical one so that the reader is compelled to think about the matter at hand firstly, and about the writers and thinkers drawn to it secondly; that is to say, he looks at the subject in respect of the theme itself and how fascist thinkers and fascist thought approached and evaluated each given theme. This is an original alternative to the standard presentation in critical assessments of the relation of writers to certain themes, as in potted biographies and the organization of such books into the intellectual, political, and literary career of one writer per chapter.
Kunnas is good at highlighting contradictions and paradoxes which abound in fascist theory. How does an avowed Roman Catholic like Giovanni Papini, for example, reconcile his religious faith with the evident amoralism and ruthlessness of the militaristic foreign policy enacted by the Fascist government which he so ardently supported? By way of answer, according to Kunnas (p. 358), Papini’s early work Il tragico quotidiano (The Daily Tragic) accepts the notion that evil is a necessary part of God’s creation, and that without sin, there could be no poets, artists, or philosophers; indeed, no leaders of a people and no heroes. Vice may be the necessary condition of virtue, and evil may need to exist in order for good to do so likewise. Kunnas does not go far down the thorny and well-trodden theological path of speculation which he opens here. However, he is well aware of this and other conundra and contradictions within fascist thought, including in the writings of those intellectuals who were attracted by fascism, especially the notion that the warring poles of good and evil, war and peace, and pain and pleasure constitute the very fabric of life.
Certains de ses romans sont passés à la postérité. Une chanson de Serge Gainsbourg mentionne L’amour monstre. Louis Pauwels doit aussi sa renommée à deux essais coécrits avec Jacques Bergier, Le matin des magiciens (1960), et sa suite moins connue, L’homme éternel (1970). Le succès du Matin des magiciens lui permit de lancer, dès 1961, la revue Planète versée dans le réalisme fantastique (l’Atlantide, les extra-terrestres dans l’histoire, le Tibet mystérieux, les expériences parapsychologiques, etc.).
Ce zélateur anti-écologiste du progrès technicien s’intéressait à l’Europe. Dans son maître-livre, Le droit de parler (Albin Michel, 1981), le recueil de ses premières chroniques « révolutionnaires – conservatrices » du Figaro Magazine préfacé par Jean-Édern Hallier, il revient régulièrement sur l’avenir de notre continent. « Pour que l’Europe trouve son indépendance et assure sa sécurité, elle n’a pas d’autre voie que la volonté de puissance. Nous devons avoir le dessein de devenir l’une des grandes puissances mondiales, y compris dans le domaine militaire. Nous en avons les moyens. Nous avons le nombre. […] Nous avons à nous affirmer et à nous manifester comme union des nations du vieux monde central, communauté vivante de peuples historiques concrets, forgeant concrètement leur sécurité, conscients de leur originalité, soucieux de leur rayonnement (p. 219). »
Jusqu’à ce jour, tout le monde (Céline lui-même, ses biographes, le monde judiciaire) considérait qu’en 1950 la justice française avait été bonne fille avec l’auteur des Beaux draps. Anne Simonin, directrice de recherche au CNRS, estime, elle, que le jugement fut d’une « sévérité extrême » ¹. Mais il y a mieux : on sait que l’année précédente, en novembre 1949, le commissaire du gouvernement Jean Seltensperger fut dessaisi du dossier, sa hiérarchie estimant son réquisitoire magnanime. Il se concluait, en effet, par le renvoi de Céline devant une Chambre civique (au lieu de la Cour de justice), ce qui eût entraîné une peine sensiblement moins lourde. L’historienne considère qu’il s’agit en réalité d’une « apparente complaisance », le magistrat ayant, au contraire, fait preuve d’une rare duplicité : « Imaginer renvoyer Céline en chambre civique était une façon habile de l’inciter à rentrer en France et à se produire en justice. Une fois Céline devant une chambre civique et condamné à la dégradation nationale, rien n’interdisait au commissaire du gouvernement de considérer que Céline avait aussi commis des actes de nature à nuire à la défense nationale (art. 83-4 du Code pénal). Le mandat d’arrêt, ordonné en 1945, autoriserait alors à renvoyer Céline en prison avant de le déférer en Cour de justice. Et le tour serait joué. » C’est perdre de vue que, dans son réquisitoire, Seltensperger avait requis la mainlevée du mandat d’arrêt. Et c’est surtout ne pas connaître les arcanes de cette histoire judiciaire. Coïncidence : il se trouve que le père (magistrat, lui aussi) d’un de nos célinistes les plus pointus, Éric Mazet, fut le meilleur ami de Jean Seltensperger. Au mitan des années soixante, les confidences que celui-ci fit au jeune Mazet attestent qu’il n’a jamais voulu piéger Céline, bien au contraire. Le réquisitoire modéré qu’il prononça en atteste et ce n’est pas pour rien que le dossier fut confié à un autre magistrat.
Les éditions Allia publient cette semaine un essai de Friedrich-Georg Jünger intitulé La perfection de la technique. Frère d'Ernst Jünger. Auteur de très nombreux ouvrages, Friedrich-Georg Jünger a suivi une trajectoire politique et intellectuelle parallèle à celle de son frère Ernst et a tout au long de sa vie noué un dialogue fécond avec ce dernier. Parmi ses oeuvres ont été traduits en France un texte écrit avec son frère, datant de sa période conservatrice révolutionnaire, 
Mr. Wilson begins his “inquiry into the nature of the sickness of mankind in the twentieth century” at the effective point of the writers who have most influence in the present intellectual world. They are mostly good writers; they are not among the writers catering for those intellectuals who have every qualification except an intellect. They are good, some are very good: but at the end of it all what emerges? One of the best of these writers predicted that at the end of it all comes “the Russian man” described by Mr. Wilson as “a creature of nightmare who is no longer the homo sapiens, but an existentialist monster who rejects all thought”, As Hesse, the prophet of this coming, put it: “he is primeval matter, monstrous soul stuff. He cannot live in this form; he can only pass on”. The words “he can only pass on” seem the essence of the matter; this thinking is a chaos between two orders. At some point, if we are ever to regain sanity, we must regard again the first order before we can hope to win the second. It was a long way from Hellas to “the Russian man”; it may not be so far from the turmoil of these birth pangs to fresh creation. It is indeed well worth taking a look at the intellectual situation; where Europeans were, and where we are.
This union of mind and will, of intellect and emotion in the classic Greek, this essential harmony of man and nature, this at-oneness of the human with the eternal spirit evoke the contrast of the living and the dying when set against the prevailing tendencies of modern literature. For, as Mr. Wilson puts it very acutely: when “misery will never end” is combined with “nothing is worth doing”, “the result is a kind of spiritual syphillis that can hardly stop short of death or insanity”. Yet such writers are not all “pre-occupied with sex, crime and disease”, treating of heroes who live in one room because, apparently, they dare not enter the world outside, and derive their little satisfaction of the universe from looking through a hole in the wall at a woman undressing in the next room. They are not all concerned like Dostoievsky’s “beetle man” with life “under the floor boards” (a study which should put none of us off reading him as far as the philosophy of the Grand Inquisitor and a certain very interesting conversation with the devil in the Brothers Karamazof, which Mr. Wilson rightly places very high in the world’s literature). Many of these writers of pessimism, of destruction and death have a considerable sense of beauty. Hesse’s remarkable Steppenwolf found his “life had become weariness” and he “wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to the renunciation of nothingness”; but then “for months together my heart stood still between delight and stark sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged was the soul of wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations . . . this life of mine was noble. It came of high descent, and turned, not on trifles, but on the stars.” Mr. Wilson well comments that “stripped of its overblown language,” “this experience can be called the ultimately valid core of romanticism — a type of religious affirmation”. And in such writing we can still see a reflection of the romantic movement of the northern gothic world which Goethe strove to unite with the sunlit classic movement in the great synthesis of his Helena. But it ends generally in this literature with a retreat from life, a monastic detachment or suicide rather than advance into such a wider life fulfilment. The essence is that these people feel themselves inadequate to life; they feel even that to live at all is instantly to destroy whatever flickering light of beauty they hold within them. For instance De Lisle Adam’s hero Axel had a lady friend who shot at him “with two pistols at a distance of five yards, but missed him both times.” Yet even after this dramatic and perfect illustration of the modern sex relationship, they could not face life : “we have destroyed in our strange hearts the love of life . . . to live would only be a sacrilege against ourselves . . .” “They drink the goblet of poison together and die in ecstasy.” All of which is a pity for promising people, but, in any case, is preferable to the “beetle man”, “under the floor boards”, wall-peepers, et hoc genus omne, of burrowing fugitives; “Samson you cannot be too quick”, is a natural first reaction to them. Yet Mr. Wilson teaches us well not to laugh too easily, or too lightly to dismiss them; it is a serious matter. This is serious if it is the death of a civilisation; it is still more serious if it is not death but the pangs of a new birth. And, in any case, even the worst of them possess in some way the essential sensitivity which the philistine lacks. So we will not laugh at even the extremes of this system, or rather way of thinking; something may come out of it all, because at least they feel. But Mr. Wilson in turn should not smile too easily at the last “period of intense and healthy optimism that did not mind hard work and pedestrian logic.” He seems to regard the nineteenth century as a “childish world” which presaged “endless changes in human life” so that “man would go forward indefinitely on ‘stepping stones of his dead self’ to higher things.” He thinks that before we “condemn it for short-sightedness”, ” we survivors of two world wars and the atomic bomb” (at this point surely he outdoes the Victorians in easy optimism, for it is far from over yet) “would do well to remember that we are in the position of adults condemning children”. Why? — is optimism necessarily childish and pessimism necessarily adult? Sometimes this paralysed pessimism seems more like the condition of a shell-shocked child. Health can be the state of an adult and disease the condition of a child. Of course, if serious Victorians really believed in “the establishment of Utopia before the end of the century”, they were childish; reformist thinking of that degree is always childish in comparison with organic thinking. But there are explanations of the difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth century attitude, other than this distinction between childhood and manhood. Spengler said somewhere that the nineteenth century stood in relation to the twentieth century as the Athens of Pericles stood in relation to the Rome of Caesar. In his thesis this is not a distinction between youth and age — a young society does not reach senescence in so short a period — but the difference between an epoch which is dedicated to thought and an epoch which has temporarily discarded thought in favour of action, in the almost rhythmic alternation between the two states which his method of history observes. It may be that in this most decisive of all great periods of action the intellectual is really not thinking at all; he is just despairing. When he wakes up from his bad dream he may find a world created by action in which he can live, and can even think. Mr. Wilson will not quarrel with the able summary of his researches printed on the cover of his book : “it is the will that matters.” And he would therefore scarcely dispute the view just expressed; perhaps the paradox of Mr. Wilson in this period is that he is thinking. That thought might lead him through and far beyond the healthy “cowboy rodeo” of the Victorian philosophers in their sweating sunshine, on (not back) to the glittering light and shade of the Hellenic world — das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchen — and even beyond it to the radiance of the zweite Hellas. Mr. Wilson does not seem yet to be fully seized of Hellenism, and seems still less aware of the more conscious way of European thinking that passes beyond Hellas to a clearer account of world purpose. He has evidently read a good deal of Goethe with whom such modern thinking effectively begins, and he is the first of the new generation to feel that admiration for Shaw which was bound to develop when thought returned. But he does not seem to be aware of any slowly emerging system of European thinking which has journeyed from Heraclitus to Goethe and on to Shaw, Ibsen and other modems, until with the aid of modern science and the new interpretation of history it begins to attain consciousness.
He is acute at one point in observing the contrasts between the life joy of the Greeks and the moments when their art is “full of the consciousness of death and its inevitability”. But he still apparently regards them as “healthy, once born, optimists,” not far removed from the modern bourgeois who also realises that life is precarious. He apparently thinks they did not share with the Outsider the knowledge that an “exceptional sense of life’s precariousness” can be “a hopeful means to increase his toughness”. The Greeks, of course, had not the advantage of reading Mr. Toynbee’s Study of History, which does not appear on a reasonably careful reading to be mentioned in Mr. Wilson’s book.
But Mr. Wilson moves far beyond Sartre in regarding the thinkers of an earlier period; notably Blake. At this point he recovers direction. The reader will find pages 225 to 250 among the most important of this book, but he must read the whole work for himself; this review is a commentary and an addendum, not a précis for the idle, nor a primer for those who find anything serious too difficult. The author advances a long way when he considers Blake’s “skeleton key” to a solution for those who “mistake their own stagnation for the world’s”. Here we reach realisation that the “crises of’living demand the active co-operation of intellect, emotions, body on equal terms”; contact is made here with Goethe’s Ganzheit, although it is not mentioned. “Energy is eternal delight” takes us a long way clear o the damp caverns of neo-existentialism and
No men ever had a deeper sense of the human tragedy than the Greeks; none ever faced it with such brilliant bravery or understood so well not only the art of grasping the fleeting, ecstatic moment, but of turning even despair to the enhancement of beauty. Living was yet great; they understood dennoch preisen; they did not “leave living to their servants”. Mr. Wilson in quoting Aristotle in the same sense as the above lines of Sophocles — “not to be born is the best thing, and death is better than life” — holds that “this view” lies at one extreme of religion, and that “the other extreme is vitalism”. He does not seem at this point fully to understand that the extremes in the Hellenic nature can be not contradictory but complementary, or interacting. The polarity of Greek thought was closely observed and finely interpreted by Nietzsche in diverse ways. But it was left to Goethe to express the more conscious thought beyond polarity in his Faust: the Prologue in Heaven:
May we end with a few questions based on that doctrine of higher forms which has found some expression in this Journal and in previous writings? Is it not now possible to observe with reason and as something approaching a clearly defined whole, what has hitherto only been revealed in fitful glimpses to the visionary? What are the means of observation available to those who are not blessed with the revelation of vision? Are they not the thoughts of great minds which have observed the working of the divine in nature and the researches of modern science which appear largely to confirm them?
At some point the spirit, the soul — call it what you will — is ignited by some spark of the divine and moves without necessity; yet, again it is a matter of common observation that this only occurs in very advanced types. In general it is only the “challenge” of adverse circumstance which evokes the “response” of movement to a higher state. Goethe expressed this thought very clearly in Faust by his concept of evil’s relationship to good; he also indicated the type where the conscious striving of the aspiring spirit replaces the urge of suffering in the final attainment of salvation: wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen. In the early stages of the great striving all suffering, and later all beauty must be experienced and sensed; but to no moment of ecstasy can man say, verweile doch, du bist so schön until the final passing to an infinity of beauty at present beyond man’s ken. Complacency, at any point, is certainly excluded. So must it be always in a creed which begins effectively with Heraclitus and now pervades modern vitalism. The philosophy of the “ever living fire”, of the ewig werdende could never be associated with complacency. Still less can the more conscious doctrine of higher forms co-exist with the static, or with the illusory perfections of a facile reformism. Man began very small, and has become not so small; he must end very great, or cease to be. That is the essence of the matter. Is it true? This is a question which everyone must answer for himself after studying European literature which stretches from the Greeks to the vital thought of modern times and, also, the world thinking of many different climes and ages which in many ways and at most diverse points is strangely related. He should study, too, either directly or through the agency of those most competent to judge, the evolutionary processes revealed so relatively recently by modern biology and the apparently ever increasing concept of ordered complexity in modern physics. He must then answer two questions: the first is whether it is more likely than not that a purpose exists in life? — the second is whether despite all failures and obscurities the only discernable purpose is a movement from lower to higher forms? If he comes at length to a conclusion which answers both these questions with a considered affirmative, he has reached the point of the great affirmation. The new religious impulse which so many seek is really already here. We need neither prophets nor priests to find it for ourselves, although we are not the enemies but the friends of those who do. For ourselves we can find in the thought of the world the faith and the service of the conscious and sentient man.
Après Guénon se défoule sur la classe moyenne apparue en France à la fin du Moyen Age et si visible déjà au temps de Molière (que ne le lisez-vous en ce sens celui-là !) :
La classe moyenne pense sur tout pareil, et c’est en fonction des médias. Elle a été d’abord terrifiante en Angleterre (lisez Fukuyama) puis en France et dans le monde. Balzac :
Ainsi que le montre très bien le professeur Bales, de l’Université d’Exter, les condisciples formés par les Jésuites de Gand connaissent des hauts et des bas dans l’histoire de leur amitié riche en « interférences », mais aussi en « confrontations ». Après avoir rappelé la formation de bibliothécaire de Le Roy, le poste qu’il occupe ainsi à l’Académie des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, son rôle de conseiller artistique dans une galerie de la Porte de Namur et l’apothéose de sa carrière au Musée Wiertz, dont il devient le conservateur, revenons un moment sur son œuvre de conteur pour souligner Joe Trimborn, un recueil de nouvelles datant de cette année 1913 décidément très prolifique.
Lire Bernanos aujourd’hui, c’est donc renouer avec l’idéal de la plus vieille France, celui d’une chrétienté médiévale – peut-être idéalisée – qui, dans toute sa puissance, était restée le marchepied du Royaume des Cieux. Royaume qui ne s’ouvrait qu’à ceux qui n’avaient pas tué en eux l’esprit d’enfance. Une chrétienté virile qui châtiait les usuriers et faisait miséricorde aux putains, qui couvrait la France de monastères, de vignes et de moulins. C’est à cette vieille terre de France que Bernanos songeait lorsqu’il écrivait : « Quand je serai mort, dites au doux royaume de la terre que je l’aimais plus que je n’ai jamais osé le dire ». Et cette terre est la nôtre, alors…
Bulletin célinien, n°412
Le mannequin, la poupée, l’automate sont plus parfaits que nous :
Quel est donc le génie d’un Semmelweis ? Exerçant dans une clinique où la fièvre puerpérale ravage les femmes en couche, surtout lorsque celles-ci sont tripotées par des étudiants ayant plus tôt effectué des dissections, Semmelweis comprend que cette mortalité massive est directement liée à la propagation de miasmes cadavériques dans les organes génitaux féminins. Déjà persuadé que la cause de ces décès se trouve au sein de la clinique même, son déclic survient le jour où son ami Kolletschka, souffrant d’une blessure au scalpel contractée lors d’une dissection, meurt des suites de symptômes similaires à ceux de la fièvre puerpérale. 
Se rangeant derrière l’initiateur du renouveau mitteleuropéen, le Triestin Claudio Magris, Milo Dor résume cette culture centre-européenne comme un fait rendu possible par deux facteurs : « la présence de population juive et l’emploi de la langue allemande comme moyen de communication universellement reconnu ». À l’heure du triomphe étouffant de l’anglais et de la fin de ce pénible XXème siècle — siècle qui, pour Magris, se résume dans l’affrontement entre les éléments juif et allemand —, cette culture est résolument morte. La Cacanie de Musil n’est qu’un vague souvenir et n’excite guère plus que les initiés. Stefan Zweig est adulé en raison de ses nouvelles pour femmes et son touchant exil, alors que sa nostalgie euro-habsbourgeoise est habilement passée sous silence. Berlin est sur toutes les lèvres, Vienne n’est plus rien. Anecdotique ? Non, toute la matière historique des deux derniers siècles est là : Berlin est une anomalie, elle marque le triomphe de la vulgarité belliciste des Hohenzollern sur le prestige pacificateur des Habsbourg — fait historique amorçant le début des convulsions allemandes pour Istv
Alla fine degli anni Quaranta, insomma, il futuro premio Goethe è in catene: ma Jünger, il reietto, si metamorfosa, cambia pelle, assumendosi il compito di fari aristocratico del dolore, come dirà pochissimi anni più tardi. È la carne degli sconfitti a reclamare attenzione in queste luminose pagine, che la sapienza europea non potrà a lungo ignorare. Un grido che di certo risulterà sgradito a certe anime belle, ma che fa delle sue parole uno dei canti più intensi del secolo XX.
Come già detto, il futuro Premio Goethe approda a Carloforte nel 1955, ma il suo primo contatto con la Sardegna risale all’anno precedente. Il diario del suo mese trascorso nel piccolo villaggio di Villasimius è uscito in varie edizioni, con il titolo Presso la torre saracena. Tradotto – magistralmente – da Quirino Principe, verrà inserito insieme agli altri “scritti sardi” ne Il contemplatore solitario (Guanda, 2000) e in Terra sarda (Il Maestrale, 1999).
C’est « Paris et le désert français » cent ans avant Jean-François Gravier ; mais pour être honnête Rousseau avait déjà méprisé l’usage inconvenant de l’hyper-capitale Paris pour la France.
Soixante-dix ans après sa mort, Georges Bernanos fait toujours l’objet d’interprétations intéressées. Certaines se focalisent sur le romancier et ignorent l’essayiste et le polémiste. D’autres, au contraire, valorisent le pamphlétaire et écartent son œuvre romanesque. Thomas Renaud a le mérite de montrer que ces deux facettes forment un seul ensemble de manière irrécupérable. « Complexe et torturé, dans la mesure où il n’a jamais voulu faire taire les appels de son âme, Bernanos a porté avec lui les violents paradoxes de la nature humaine, sans que ne soient jamais trahies ses plus profondes convictions. Catholique, royaliste, anti-démocrate, anti-clérical et anti-moderne, ennemi des bourgeois et partisan des petits jusqu’à la mauvaise foi, il demeura tout cela à la fois, depuis son adolescence jusqu’à son dernier souffle. D’un côté, les “ droitards ” se fourvoient en dénonçant en lui un traître passé à gauche, de l’autre, certains néo-bernanosiens se trompent également en occultant l’admiratif disciple de Drumont, le militant de rue de l’Action française, le solide soldat des tranchées et le chrétien intégral (p. 114). »
Du fait des impératifs du volume, l’auteur s’intéresse à la vie de Georges Bernanos, quitte à reléguer au second plan sa vision politique. Elle demeure cependant bien présente pour expliquer les prises de position virulentes d’un fervent chrétien inquiet de l’avenir de la foi et des fidèles. Attention au contre-sens ! Bernanos se moque du sort des États modernes. Ce catholique a compris que la modernité est en perdition, elle est la perdition et correspond à la Chute de l’Homme adamique. D’où la démarche de son biographe. « Il nous semblait préférable de présenter aux lecteurs qui le connaissaient mal un Bernanos vivant, sans l’habituelle hémiplégie intellectuelle des lecteurs “ de droite ” et “ de gauche ”. Sébastien Lapaque a fait beaucoup pour rendre ce Bernanos “ en bloc ” que trop de critiques avaient divisé. Cette petite biographie doit ouvrir largement sur l’œuvre et permettre une belle amitié avec un auteur particulièrement attachant, qui n’a jamais souhaité jouer la comédie (1). »
