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vendredi, 02 septembre 2016

Ezra Pound: décadence des lettres, décadence de la Nation

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Ezra Pound: décadence des lettres, décadence de la Nation

Ezra Pound est la figure majeure de la poésie du XXe siècle. Qu’il s’agisse de ses fameux Cantos, comme de ses abécédaires (et de son  Comment Lire), l’œuvre poundienne constitue une incontournable source d’appréhension et de compréhension de la littérature, comme de la poésie. Cela étant, au travers de ses essais et de ses poèmes, Ezra Pound établit à plusieurs reprises une corrélation entre la décadence littéraire d’une nation et la décadence de cette nation elle-même. Si le langage et la littérature entretiennent des liens évidents, Pound remarquait que la régression littéraire engendrait forcément une régression du langage, et fatalement celle de la culture nationale : « si la littérature d’une nation décline, cette nation s’atrophie et périclite ». S’il évoquait déjà subrepticement la question dans Comment lire, c’est dans son ABC de la lecture qu’il aborda au fil des chapitres le drame du déclin littéraire comme déclin national, dans l’indifférence la plus totale, sinon dans la joie de la masse de consommateurs acculturés.

Si Comment Lire était un pamphlet auquel on reprocha cependant de ne pas aller suffisamment au fond des choses, Ezra Pound se rattrapa dans ABC de la lecture qui doit être lu comme un complément au premier livre où il  y développa sa propre doctrine  littéraire, mais surtout sa propre doctrine du langage. Or, comme la littérature est « du langage chargé de sens », la « grande littérature est tout simplement du langage chargé de sens au plus haut degré possible ». Ainsi, pour Ezra Pound, « le Langage a été manifestement créé pour – et sert manifestement à – la communication » (communication ne s’entendant pas dans son acception moderne qu’est celle du marketing, bien évidemment). De la sorte, lorsque la littérature connaît une phase de déliquescence, cela influe fatalement sur le langage, et donc sur la communication entre les hommes. Pire même, c’est la culture de la nation qui subit cet avilissement ; en s’accoutumant au médiocre, l’homme finit par le considérer comme une normalité des plus banales, avant de le confondre avec l’excellence, puisqu’« un peuple qui croît dans l’habitude d’une mauvaise littérature est un peuple sur le point de lâcher prise sur son empire et sur lui-même ».

« L’Homme sensé ne peut rester assis tranquillement à ne rien faire quand son pays laisse mourir sa littérature, quand la bonne littérature ne rencontre que le mépris, de même qu’un bon docteur ne peut avoir la conscience tranquille quand un enfant ignorant est en train de s’inoculer la tuberculose comme s’il s’agissait simplement de manger des tartes à la confiture. »

-Ezra Pound-

ABC-de-la-lecture_8103.jpgLes causes de l’avilissement du langage selon Ezra Pound convergent avec les observations que fit Pasolini quelques années plus tard dans Empirisme Hérétique ; il pointe les dégâts que cause l’Usure, mais aussi le catholicisme qu’il percevait comme une religion castratrice, en prenant comme point d’appui la décadence de Rome qui transforma « de bons citoyens romains en esclaves ». De fait, si Dieu est aussi mort aux yeux de Pound, l’hégémonie culturelle des sociétés modernes est aux mains de la Technique. Si le degré hégémonique de cette dernière indique le niveau de décadence d’une civilisation, Ezra Pound estime que c’est d’abord la littérature, et donc le langage, qui en pâtit la première, car si « Rome s’éleva avec la langue de César, d’Ovide et de Tacite. Elle déclina dans un ramassis de rhétorique, ce langage des diplomates « faits pour cacher la pensée », et ainsi de suite », dit-il dans ABC de la Lecture. La critique d’Ezra Pound ne diffère guère de celle de Bernanos ou de Pasolini sur ce point, outre le fait qu’il aille plus loin dans la critique, n’hésitant pas à fustiger les universités, au moins étasuniennes, comme agents culturels de la Technique, mais aussi l’indifférence navrante de ses contemporains. Le triomphe des Musso, Levy et autre Meyer ne trouve aucune explication logique, tout du moins sous le prisme littéraire. Seules les volontés capitalistes des éditeurs – se cachant sous les jupes du « marché » qu’ils ont pourtant façonné – expliquent leur invasion dans les librairies. Comme il l’affirme dans Comment Lire, « Quand leur travail [des littérateurs, ndlr] se corrompt, et je ne veux pas dire quand ils expriment des pensées malséantes, mais quand leur matière même, l’essence même de leur travail, l’application du mot à la chose, se corrompt, à savoir devient fadasse et inexacte, ou excessive, ou boursouflée, toute la mécanique de la pensée et de l’ordre, socialement et individuellement, s’en va à vau-l’eau. C’est là une leçon de l’Histoire que l’on n’a même pas encore à demi apprise ».

En lançant pareille provocation, Ezra Pound se refusait cependant à tout élitisme. Au contraire, puisqu’il jugeait l’état littéraire d’une nation comme représentative de sa santé culturelle et politique. Il anticipa néanmoins les critiques de ses détracteurs en déplorant qu’« il [soit] très difficile de faire comprendre aux gens cette indignation impersonnelle qui vous prend à l’idée du déclin de la littérature, de ce que cela implique et de ce que cela produit en fin de compte. Il est à peu près impossible d’exprimer, à quelque degré que ce soir, cette indignation, sans qu’aussitôt l’on vous traite « d’aigri » ou de quelque autre chose, du même genre. »

C’est justement cette incapacité à réagir, et même cette propension incompréhensible à applaudir l’avilissement que provoque la culture de masse, qui hérissait Ezra Pound. Le poète s’accorde plusieurs apartés dans Comment Lire où il raille cette hégémonie de la Technique sur la création. Alors que la poésie, et la littérature, sont chargés de sens, il voyait dans l’avènement des pseudo-manuels du bon écrivain non pas une réelle méthodologie comme celles qu’il aborda dans ABC de la Lecture, mais une recette qui fonctionnerait à tous les coups pour fainéants qui souhaiteraient avoir du succès en matière littéraire, au détriment de la connaissance et du savoir. « Le mépris général voué au « savoir », le mouvement de recul du grand public devant tout livre réputé « bon » et, d’autre part, les publicités flamboyantes sur le mode « Comment avoir l’air de savoir quand on ne sait rien », auraient pu indiquer depuis beau temps aux âmes sensibles que quelque chose cloche dans les méthodes contemporaines de diffusion des belles-lettres »

« Un premier larron invente quelque chose, un deuxième met en valeur, ou plusieurs douzaines généralisent un enthousiasme ou une surabondance mousseuse ou onctueuse, après quoi un dernier tente de remettre de l’ordre. Par exemple, l’estimable Pléiade émascule la langue française, et les classiques anglais, etc., toutes choses bonnes à reléguer en zone subsidiaire : intérêt pour une époque, intérêt historique, bric-à-brac pour musées. »

-Ezra Pound-

Littessays.jpgCette glorification de la médiocrité, Ezra Pound la voyait d’autant plus dans la reproduction hédoniste à laquelle s’adonnent certains scribouillards dans le but de connaître un succès commercial. Aujourd’hui, plus que jamais, la réussite d’un genre littéraire entraîne une surproduction incestueuse de ce même genre, comme c’est notamment le cas en littérature de fantaisie, où l’on vampirise encore Tolkien avec autant de vergogne qu’un charognard. Si la « technicisation » de la littérature comme moyen créatif, ou plutôt en lieu et place de toute création, devient la norme, alors, comme le remarquait plus tard Pasolini, cela débouche sur une extrême uniformisation du langage, dans une forme déracinée, qui efface petit à petit les formes sophistiquées ou argotiques d’une langue au profit d’un galimatias bon pour les robots qui présentent le journal télé comme on lirait un manuel technique. Les vestiges d’une ancienne époque littéraire ne sont plus que le fait de compilations hors de prix et d’hommages ataviques afin de les présenter au public comme d’antiques œuvres dignes d’un musée : belles à regarder, mais réactionnaires si elles venaient à redevenir un modèle. Ezra Pound disait que « le classique est le nouveau qui reste nouveau », non pas la recherche stérile d’originalité qui agite la modernité comme une sorte de tautologie maladive.

mercredi, 31 août 2016

Jack London et notre oligarchie mondiale

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Jack London et notre oligarchie mondiale

La force motrice des oligarques est leur conviction de bien faire

par Nicolas Bonnal

Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org

L'occident est dirigé par des oligarques humanitaires et dangereux. Voyons voir.

La Fed a été créée il y a un peu plus de cent ans ; les élites hostiles déclenchent un an après la première guerre mondiale ; elles ont voulu un créer un nouvel ordre mondial dès la fin de cette guerre, via les propositions de Wilson et Mandel House. A cette époque aussi Rathenau parlait des 300 qui dirigent le monde ; et de cette oligarchie anonyme et vagabonde des esprits aussi brillants et différents que Chesterton (Un nommé jeudi) ou Jack London furent les dénonciateurs. On va parler de Jack London ; nous le redécouvrons avec joie.

C'est dans le Talon de fer que London décrit cette terrible oligarchie qui malmène le peuple prolétaire américain, régulièrement remplacé alors, au moment des grèves, par des arrivages d'immigrants est et sud-européens. Marx avait déjà dénoncé l'immigration comme piège social, entre la Belgique et la France. A l'époque de Jack London, Madison Grant pronostique dans son passing of a great race la fin du peuple américain (il rappelle que l'immigration fait baisser la natalité du natif). Edward Allsworth Ross, plus grand sociologue de l'époque, fait de même dans son Changing world jamais traduit ici. Peu à peu il sera interdit - jusqu'à Trump ou presque (Lisez Peter Brimelow, lisez aussi le... cousin de Paul Auster) d'évoquer le sujet de l'immigration, sous peine d'imputation fasciste, nazie, xénophobe, etc.

Et voyons l'oligarchie de Jack London, si proche de la nôtre. Dans le Talon de fer donc, il parle comme un libertarien du corporate state confisqué et noyauté par les grosses boîtes et les élites :

« Les Oligarques avaient réussi à inventer une machine gouvernementale aussi compliquée que vaste, mais qui fonctionnait, en dépit de tous nos efforts pour l’entraver et la saboter. »

Puis London ajoute que nous sommes achetés ou abrutis par ces mêmes élites. Il y a celui qu'on achète pour trois lentilles (le bobo) et celui qu'on laisse crever (le prolo).

« Ils avaient une meilleure nourriture, moins d’heures de travail quotidien, plus de vacances, un choix plus varié de plaisirs et de distractions intellectuelles. Quant à leurs frères et sœurs moins fortunés, les travailleurs non favorisés, le peuple surmené de l’Abîme, ils ne s’en souciaient pas le moins du monde. Une ère d’égoïsme s’annonçait dans l’humanité. »

L'égoïsme est important et c'est une notion selon moi plus forte que l'individualisme dont se repaissent les théoriciens actuels de l'anti-mondialisation. A notre époque damnée je me considère par exemple comme un individualiste, pas comme un égoïste.

London souligne ensuite les progrès de l'oligarchie (comme disait Baudrillard le capitalisme bouge plus vite que ses opposants !).

« L’Oligarchie elle-même se développa d’une façon remarquable et, il faut l’avouer, inattendue. En tant que classe, elle se disciplina. Chacun de ses membres eut sa tâche assignée dans le monde et fut obligé de l’accomplir. Il n’y eut plus de jeunes gens riches et oisifs. Leur force était employée pour consolider celle de l’Oligarchie. »

Et que je t'envoie faire tes études à Sydney, ton MBA à Berkeley... tes devoirs humanitaires à Haïti ou au Rwanda...

Et là, le coup de génie de Jack London. Il comprend que nos élites sont dangereuses car gentilles et humanitaires, missionnées et messianiques. Elles sont dans le même état moral que le Führer qui voulait interdire le tabac aux femmes, limiter les vitesses de voiture, libérer les sudètes ou créer l'homme nouveau. Dans son Ozymandia, le libertarien Shaffer Butler indique que ses étudiants sont des gentils nazis sans le savoir (végétariens, écolos, zoophiles, anti-tabac, contrôleurs de tout, etc.)

Et Jack London d'écrire :

« Ils se croyaient les sauveurs du genre humain, et se considéraient comme des travailleurs héroïques se sacrifiant pour son plus grand bien. »

Irremplaçables, ces élites en viennent à ne plus imaginer leur propre grand remplacement. La montée fabriquée des bourses et des bureaucraties mondiales les favorise.

« Ils étaient convaincus que leur classe était l’unique soutien de la civilisation, et persuadés que s’ils faiblissaient une minute, le monstre les engloutirait dans sa panse caverneuse et gluante avec tout ce qu’il y a de beauté et de bonté, de joies et de merveilles au monde. Sans eux, l’anarchie régnerait et l’humanité retomberait dans la nuit primordiale d’où elle eut tant de peine à émerger. »

jack london, littérature, littérature américaine, oligarchie, oligarchisme, lettres, lettres américaines, Le peuple est donc détesté car il ne comprend rien. Merkel, Juncker ou Sutherland n'arrêtent pas de nous insulter au sujet de l'immigration. On nous accuse d'inventer ce que nous redoutons. Vite, la camisole.

Et cela donne sous la plume géniale de Jack London (dont le livre inspira le Metropolis de Fritz Lang) :

« Telle était la bête qu’il fallait fouler aux pieds, et son écrasement constituait le suprême devoir de l’aristocrate. En résumé, eux seuls, par leurs efforts et sacrifices incessants, se tenaient entre la faible humanité et le monstre dévorant ; ils le croyaient fermement, ils en étaient sûrs. »

Ces lignes font penser à celles de Nietzsche dans le Crépuscule des idoles : notre penseur rebelle y décrit l'Eglise comme une ménagerie destinée à dresser le barbare. Nous sommes revenus à ces excès. Les fondations et les programmes financés par les fondations des Clinton-Soros-Bill Gates doivent nous rééduquer et nous mettre au pas de leur loi.

London revient sur la philosophie périlleuse de ces élites auto-proclamées :

« L’amour du bien, le désir du bien, le mécontentement de ce qui n’est pas tout à fait bien, en un mot, la bonne conduite, voilà le facteur primordial de la religion. Et l’on peut en dire autant de l’Oligarchie.»

Et il ponctue par cette phrase superbe :

« La grande force motrice des oligarques est leur conviction de bien faire. »

C'est comme cela que l'on a les sanctions antirusses, les millions de réfugiés, les terroristes, les guerres, les retraites à 70 ans, le salafisme partout, la dette immonde, sans oublier la négation des élections ou de la liberté quotidienne.

London se fait a priori peu d'illusions sur le populo :

« D’autre part, la grande masse désespérée du peuple de l’Abîme s’enfonçait dans un abrutissement apathique et satisfait de sa misère. »

Et il annonce que les révoltes peuvent être provoquées, noyées dans le sang ou récupérées. Avis à Zerohedge.

Dans un autre très bon livre, Le peuple de l'abîme, Jack London décrit – on est en 1902 - la catastrophique situation des classes pauvres ou « indigentes » en Angleterre, donnée toujours en exemple par nos grands libéraux (même Tocqueville était horrifié par le modèle british et le « labyrinthe infect » de Manchester, je citerai en bas les pages). Il se livre ensuite à un éloge original de la féodalité :

« Dans les anciens temps, les grands cavaliers blonds, qui fonçaient à l’avant-garde des batailles, montraient au moins leur mesure en pourfendant les hommes de la tête à l’échine. Tous comptes faits, il avait bien plus de noblesse à tuer un ennemi solide d’un coup d’épée proprement assené, que de le réduire à l’état de bête, lui et ses descendants, par une manipulation adroite et implacable des rouages de l’industrie et de la politique. »

jack london, littérature, littérature américaine, oligarchie, oligarchisme, lettres, lettres américaines, London cite d'ailleurs la machine politique, comme le grand Ostrogorski à l'époque (un savant russe qui fut envoyé par le tzar pour étudier la corruption du système politique US, la « machine », les « boss » et tout le reste). Ensuite il appelle le nécessaire alcoolisme, qui effarera aussi Louis-Ferdinand Céline dans ses Bagatelles (il y consacre bien trente pages à l'alcool notre phénomène) :

« La classe ouvrière anglaise est littéralement noyée dans les demis de bière. Celle-ci la rend stupide, l’abrutit, et diminue considérablement son efficacité – l’ouvrier anglais n’a plus cet esprit de répartie, cette imagination et ces réflexes rapides qui faisaient l’apanage de sa race. »

Enfin London rappelle que l'oligarchie doit gouverner par la peur ; la nôtre utilise le terrorisme, la dette, le chômage, le réchauffement, le « ouacisme », car tout est bon à prendre. Il écrit :

« Et puis il y a aussi cette insécurité de bonheur, cette précarité de l’existence et cette peur devant l’avenir – les voilà, les facteurs bien puissants qui entraînent les gens à boire. »

Je conclurai encore et toujours avec Tocqueville parce que c'est un des grands génies de l'humanité et qu'il a tout vu. Il écrit au tome II de sa Démocratie à propos des oligarques :

« Je pense qu’à tout prendre, l’aristocratie manufacturière que nous voyons s’élever sous nos yeux est une des plus dures qui aient paru sur la terre ; mais elle est en même temps une des plus restreintes et des moins dangereuses. Toutefois, c’est de ce côté que les amis de la démocratie doivent sans cesse tourner avec inquiétude leurs regards ; car, si jamais l’inégalité permanente des conditions et l’aristocratie pénètre de nouveau dans le monde, on peut prédire qu’elles y entreront par cette porte. »

Enfin Tocqueville explique pourquoi cette classe « industrielle » (le chat botté de Perrault en est une préfiguration) n'hésitera pas à nous remplacer ou à nous éliminer, à nous liquéfier :

« L’aristocratie que fonde le négoce ne se fixe presque jamais au milieu de la population industrielle qu’elle dirige ; son but n’est point de gouverner celle-ci, mais de s’en servir. »

On se doute que l'on apprend à jeter les peuples après usage. Ne vous étonnez pas de la fracture entre le peuple et les élites, inquiétez-vous de votre sort. Mais il semble que jamais depuis longtemps opinion publique n'a été plus motivée que la nôtre contre ses guides.

Nicolas Bonnal

Bibliographie

Jack London – Le talon de fer ; le peuple de l'abîme (ebooksgratuits.com).

Tocqueville – Œuvres complètes, Paris, 1866, tome VII, pp.366-370 (archive.org) ; De la démocratie, II, Deuxième partie, chapitre vingt.

Chesterton – Un nommé jeudi (sur wikisource).

Ross – A changing America.

mercredi, 21 octobre 2015

"Canto XIII - Canto 13" by Ezra Pound (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

"Canto XIII - Canto 13" by Ezra Pound (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

Kung is Confucius who presents an ideal social order based on ethical principles "good is right" rather than on political realism "might is right". You notice that present day society - particularly in dealings between nations - works on the basis of political realism with only the pretence of ethical principles. The rich and the powerful have the best weapons. the best lawyers and can withstand deprivation the longest, so they manage to win. There's a good exposition of the kung-fu philiosophy of government here:
http://www.friesian.com/confuci.htm

One of the sayings I like best - although it's really Taoism, but Kung could easily have said it too - "The wise man does everything while appearing to do nothing" We all take too much action. Often the best thing to do is nothing.

You can read more about Ezra Pound's cantos and radical ideas here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos

jeudi, 20 août 2015

Vladimir Nabokov, les femmes et la Russie

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Vladimir Nabokov, les femmes et la Russie

Amoureux fou de la même femme jusqu’à sa mort, Vladimir Nabokov peupla pourtant ses romans de nombreuses figures féminines obsédantes, inquiétantes et parfois sulfureuses. Les créatures qui hantent les lignes de ses œuvres les plus remarquables revêtent tour à tour l’apparence de la tentatrice venimeuse, de l’âme-soeur éternelle ou de l’idéal inaccessible. En réalité, bien davantage que la simple dimension amoureuse, ce sont les racines et le terreau culturel de l’âme qu’elles révèlent, renvoyant le narrateur masculin à l’arrière-plan, désemparé et dépossédé de son histoire, comme Nabokov le fut de la sienne lorsqu’il dut fuir sa Russie natale.

Sans être laid, le jeune Vladimir Nabokov ne plaît pas vraiment aux femmes, et témoigne d’ailleurs à leur égard d’une indifférence d’autant plus remarquable que ses camarades de diaspora, qui fréquentent les mêmes cercles et cafés berlinois au début des années 1920, se consacrent tout autant au rayonnement de la littérature russe dans la capitale qu’à l’initiation des jeunes allemandes aux charmes slaves. Déjà absorbé par ses travaux au sein de la revue Roul, il constate avec un soupçon de malhonnêteté dans sa biographie Autres Rivages « n’avoir jamais ressenti ce souffle brûlant qu’on nomme l’âme slave et qui vous pousse, entre autres choses, vers les femmes avec une certaine ardeur emplie de noblesse ».

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Une enfance dans l’immense demeure familiale, à grandir entouré de nurses fraîches et rayonnantes venues d’Angleterre, lui a certes procuré des émois précoces – elle a surtout assoupi son intérêt pour la culture russe et l’a très tôt conduit à préférer la langue de James Joyce à celle de Dostoïevski, indépassable fierté de la littérature nationale au sujet duquel il écrit ces quelques mots lapidaires : « a cheap sensationalist ».

En dépit d’une aversion affichée de manière quelque peu provocatrice pour la culture russe, c’est bel et bien dans sa langue maternelle que Nabokov rédige son premier roman Machenka. Un jeune locataire d’une pension d’immigrés russes, follement amoureux de la femme du couple qui loge dans la chambre voisine, passe de longues semaines à attendre le retour de celle-ci, qu’un voyage retient au loin. Tantôt transporté par la passion qui l’habite, tantôt dévoré par elle, l’image de cette fille « lugubre et pure comme un frisson dans la nuit » le pousse jusqu’à la folie. Toujours absente, la jeune femme inonde le roman de sa douloureuse présence, comme la jeune et mystérieuse Sonia de L’Exploit, cinquième roman publié six ans plus tard, toujours en russe, et se déroulant aussi dans ces communautés d’émigrés russes, trop instruits pour être révolutionnaires et trop slaves pour s’accommoder de la mentalité occidentale. Les deux filles sont ardemment désirées, mais avec une maladresse juvénile et d’un mouvement de l’âme contenant en soi son propre échec, trop instinctif pour devoir jamais aboutir. Ce désir se superpose dans les deux cas à celui qu’éprouve le jeune narrateur de définitivement et parfaitement se fondre dans la culture nouvelle qui l’entoure. Mais là encore, comme l’emportement sentimental, l’élan ne contient pas l’intensité suffisante. « En fait, tout ce fatras anglais, assez disparate finalement, avait été filtré par la singularité de sa mère patrie et imprégné de teintes typiquement russes ». L’amour adolescent s’avère bien trop pur et exigeant pour se réaliser sans se compromettre, comme celui du jeune étudiant slave pour une langue apprise dans les livres est trop naïf pour se satisfaire de la médiocre réalité des public schools londoniennes.

De l’écrivain russe au romancier américain

Vladimir Nabokov et sa femme Vera

Vladimir Nabokov et sa femme Vera

Après la seconde guerre mondiale, Nabokov n’écrit plus qu’en anglais, et entreprend de diriger la traduction de ses premières œuvres. Avant sa conversion définitive, il publie néanmoins un dernier roman en russe, Le Don, dans lequel il rend hommage à la langue qu’il est sur le point d’abandonner, en rédigeant chaque chapitre à la manière d’un grand auteur de son pays natal. Dès lors, Nabokov écrit en anglais, dirige les traductions de ses œuvres en allemand et en français, et se met à apprendre le suédois avec un espoir quelque peu vaniteux qu’une traduction de qualité de ses romans dans cette langue retienne l’attention du comité Nobel. La femme n’est plus au centre de ses écrits. « Je me rends compte à présent que la langue russe, par sa syntaxe, par ses sonorités, était éminemment féminine », écrit-il dans un commentaire de son premier roman. L’âme slave, c’est la féminité à l’état brut qui coulait sur le papier, et dont la chaleur mélancolique a déserté ses deux premiers romans publiés en anglais, pour le meilleur comme pour le pire.

Dans La Vraie Vie de Sebastian Knight, œuvre estimée par la critique mais qui ne constitue finalement qu’un manifeste littéraire romancé, la femme ne sert que de prétexte au déroulement d’une histoire sur laquelle pèse très lourdement l’ego d’un auteur peu sûr de maîtriser son anglais et s’en justifiant par avance au lecteur. En revanche, Brisure à Senestre, dystopie glaciale décrivant la dérive autodestructrice d’une régime totalitaire ayant déclaré la guerre à la philosophie, brille par la noirceur de son univers où l’unique présence féminine est celle d’une fonctionnaire du régime, dénaturée et virilisée à l’extrême par l’exercice de la violence. Plus de Russie, plus d’expatriés : désormais, les personnages sont fictifs jusque dans leur nationalité et leur langue, et l’artificialité parfois volontairement humoristique à laquelle travaille Nabokov le pousse à explorer des thèmes nouveau où l’identité n’a plus sa place – et la femme non plus.

lol1981-fr-gallimard-folio-paris.jpgDans Lolita, ni femme ni culture. Seule une gamine de douze ans et l’Amérique des motels qui défile le long des routes. L’histoire en elle-même et le scandale qu’elle suscita n’apparaissent finalement que comme secondaires si l’on songe que le roman existait déjà en substance quinze ans plus tôt, sous le titre de L’Enchanteur, que Nabokov n’avait pas publié mais dont il reprend de très près la trame. Dans les deux œuvres, l’auteur insiste sur le caractère déterminant de la mère de la fillette, tantôt gravement malade et inspirant la pitié, tantôt vulgaire et ignare, suscitant le dégoût du narrateur autant que celui du lecteur. Lorsqu’il paraît, le roman reçoit de manière immédiate et étonnamment évidente le qualificatif de « littérature américaine ». En réalité, il s’agit là de bien davantage qu’un simple symbole, puisque c’est l’achèvement du détachement absolu des personnages de leurs origines culturelles, la rupture définitive avec la Russie amoureusement méprisée ou douloureusement regrettée et paradoxalement, dans l’évolution du style de Nabokov, du point culminant où les personnages, pourtant sans réelles profondeur et texture historiques, se donnent à voir dans leur plus complexe richesse. « Je suis le chien fidèle de la nature. Pourquoi alors ce sentiment d’horreur dont je ne puis me défaire ? », s’interroge Humbert Humbert, incapable d’aimer les femmes, mais torturé par l’amour d’une fillette.

Nabokov avait parfaitement senti qu’il lui fallait se séparer de ce qui demeurait de russe dans son écriture afin d’atteindre un langage universel qui ne se contente pas d’exalter le souvenir d’une expérience intime, mais qui se déleste de ses caractéristiques pour devenir absolu. Il avait commencé par évoquer des amourettes du passé : il finira par rechercher l’Amour atemporel. Il voulait être un grand écrivain russe : il sera devenu un génie européen. D’amours incarnées où la féminité slave s’exaltait dans des songes adolescents, le voilà passé aux passions monstrueuses et sublimes qui croissent tant bien que mal dans des univers indignes de les contenir. Tel est le cas de l’amour de Van pour sa cousine Ada dans son chef-d’oeuvre absolu, Ada ou l’Ardeur. Comme pour signifier l’aboutissement du long mûrissement de sa pensée, de son style et de son génie, Nabokov situe l’histoire dans un univers parallèle, dans une Amérique du Nord découverte par les Vikings et colonisée par les Russes. Et pour la première fois dans un de ses romans, la femme tant aimée est finalement conquise, le dénouement heureux et l’amour triomphal.

lundi, 25 mai 2015

Ezra Pound and the Corporate State

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Ezra Pound and the Corporate State

In a modern world subject to the numerical vagaries of bad credit and unbalanced algorithms, the Fibonacci number offers a pattern of sanity and intrigue. Know also as the Golden Spiral, this pattern appears as a perfect and dynamic model of order visible in creation, yet also demonstrates the intriguing attribute of having no beginning and no end. The spiral implies that from the micro to the macrocosm exist a fundamental and unbroken connection, implying a correlation between the health of one’s cellular structure and the socio-political forms of global order. Whereas Aristotle spoke of the Golden Mean, the Golden Spiral describes arrangements of natural phenomena ranging from the seed pod arrangement of a pinecone to spiral galaxies such as the milky way.

Somewhere along this ‘divine proportion’ has emerged what the great American poet Ezra Pound called a “canker corrupting all things”, leaving both cell and state compromised. CONTRA NATURAM! Lincoln called it “a black spot on the soul of a nation”. What Pound refers to is a subject and condition that has been poisoning the worlds cellular structure since homo sapien emerged, but has been successfully resisted until the past millennium brought forth an overpowering method of human economic interaction that is guaranteeing the eventual ecological collapse of the earth, with social collapse already a global visible phenomenon. It is an age which Pound says is characterized by the need “to sell, and sell quickly”. The acceleration of industry by usury which the modern world is built upon has led to the securitization of vast swathes of the earth’s surface, bringing forth untold trillions of apparent wealth, while leaving behind poisonous rivers and species extinction; an age in which even the air is tainted with industrial excess. Debt, the delayed contact with reality, allows men to profit off the future, Pound says to “rake in the profits resulting from changes in the values in the monetary units”. A 2006 US senate report noted that as much as 60% of the oil price rise since the early 2000’s were due to the activities of investment banks speculating on the oil futures market.

The poet offers us a Malapartian blend of fact and fiction, a tapestry weaving together historic truths with intelligent composition, creating the epic of the Cantos written over 50 years. His writings offer insights into economics, history, culture and the meaning of language. His enemy is usury, the enemy of freedom, his allies – none save his mind, which was declared lost in 1945, “when the raft broke and the waters went over me”, a charge which inspired the poet towards greater heights. Pound begins Cantos XLV “With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting that design* might cover their face”. If the absence of design is the mark of finance-capitalism then one understands that there is no end goal in sight, no purpose to be fulfilled, just rampant profiteering.”With usura is no clear demarcation” declares the poet; the lines between low and high, between ugly and beauty, between extinction and survival have been severed.

Discrimination, as Ian Dallas writes, forms the basis of sanity. R.D. Laing defined madness as the sane response to an insane situation. The madness of contemporary leadership is evident in their fundamentalist belief held in the magical brilliance of paper-money and democracy, while increasingly vast slums of the urban poor lead to new warfighting doctrines being developed by the state. Civil unrest, poverty and the imposition of draconian laws by a self serving state mean that the masses find themselves in a situation where citizen and terrorist are both addressed via uniform methods owing to budget-deficit enforced standardization protocols. In America, SWAT teams were once present only in the largest cities, now every mid sized city has one, routinely employing them in day to day activities such as the serving of warrants, with deadly consequences. Matt Apuzzo writes that “police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” with the result that the hardened American soldier returning home finds airport security using the same M4 assault rifles as he used in Afghanistan.

Pound writes that “with usura hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall”. With empty churches being converted to banks across Europe, and banks built like cathedrals, a paradise aspired to has become a laughed at chapter in history. Marx wrote that money has itself been endowed “with the properties of a quasi-religious nature”. Sheldon Wolin writes that under the corporate state “a giant corporation includes prayer sessions for its executives while evangelicals meet in franchised congregations while millionaire preachers extol the virtues of capitalism”

Paraphrasing Karl Polanyi, the American activist Chris Hedges writes that capitalism “turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities. This ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The ecosystem and human beings become objects whose worth is determined solely by the market. They are exploited until exhaustion or collapse occurs. A society that no longer recognizes that the natural world and life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves.” The internal cannibalism of the united states, as evident in such dreadful carcass of Detroit testify to the reality of great lands under siege by usura.

If we may take a democratic approach to world history we may find interest in the fact that the majority have for the majority of the time found value in the belief that behind the perceived order or disorder of existence lay something beyond themselves, a sacred ‘design’ around which were built temples and civilizations. The loss of the divine has not been without consequence. James Mossman’s suicide note famously read “I can’t bear it any more, though I don’t know what ‘it’ is.”

The towering figure of Sheldon Wolin, a retired political science professor from Yale, has called the phenomena of our free society an “inverted totalitarianism” which stands in direct comparison with the classic totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. His extraordinary book of the same name explores layer by layer the social outcomes of advanced finance-capitalism as reflected in the world greatest inverted totalitarian regime, the land of his birth. What he documents is a phase in social organization that every capitalist state will eventually pass through, en route to harsher forms of control and financial insecurity. The correlation of debt to totalitarianism seems to be in the 21st century a valid theorem when evaluating the social costs of capitalism.

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The defend the present with reference to socialisms failure is to divert attention from the de facto extension of state control over life towards the utopian belief in social and political freedom enshrined in a humanist doctrine espousing liberty, de jure. Inverted totalitarianism is the outcome of “investing de facto power with authority”. When money is power, government becomes the formal face of governance, but is itself beholden to real power originating elsewhere. In the inverted totalitarianism created by finance-capitalism, “economics trumps politics” as opposed to classical totalitarianisms where the economy is an instrument in the service of the political leader. Wolin writes that in this system “the leader is not the architect of the system but its product”.

The question of debt is not some sentimental affair dramatised by the stage antics of Bono and Blair, nor private in the case of ones personal debt or the national debt as a technical problem concerning the citizen of “his” nation. Patriotism quickly vanishes when the reality of the corporate state is understood. The question of debt reaches into the very DNA of the modern state and can be seen as the cause and effect of much social ill as well as the inevitable driver of every capitalist state towards harsher forms of control. Debt has been likened to a delayed contact with reality. This places today’s much vaunted ‘personal freedoms’ into a saner context: one day it will catch up with us because the imbalance that promotes unconstrained sexual freedom is the same that allows the unconstrained rape of the ecosystem.

As the corporate state oversees the wholesale sale of the nation and its prosperity, the resulting disintegration will necessitate the fusion of corporate monopoly with the security apparatus of the state, leading to the inverted totalitarianism of capitalist society. The media will explain that certain restrictions and draconian laws will be implemented in order to save our free societies. To prepare us for our the protection of our freedoms the state will offer us democratic accountability: the narrative states that our debt is the reason that we are collapsing as a society, a truth experienced personally by billions of the worlds poor. Cutbacks to pay off debt means that social welfare becomes a distant memory and decent jobs a privilege reserved for the faithful few. We will all pay the price as a collective, and we will maintain the respect for the law as is befitting a nation, and that those who do not endure patiently the remedy, will be processed by an efficient legal system which makes outlaws of those flaws in the system.

The privatized prison industry is one of the most worrying indicators of social malfunction. The constraint effects of debt and the jail cell were both issues experienced by the poet. “No man who has passed a month in the death cells believes in cages for beasts”, Pound said of his time in the open air holding cells of the American military. The death-cell was the experience given to Pound by the incipient American corporate state. His freedom denied, Pound found in his shackles the reality of the corporate state; those who trespass beyond the narrow confines of the economic motif fall outside the definitional framework of a money-civilization and are incarcerated; the dangerous masses through debt and exceptional individuals within concrete walls.

 

Whereas Carl Schmitt spoke of the ‘total state’ penetrating every aspect of society, Wolin speaks to us of a corporate state where every aspect of human life, from religion to culture, to people, become commodified, becomes exploitable, to turn a profit. When every aspect of life becomes subject to an economic determinism, when our impulses and physical movements are all in tune with market forces, then the corporate state has imposed a brilliant coup de etat, in effect rewriting society according to the dictates of one aspect of the human existence; making money, and exalted it above all else, creating the one dimensional man who’s dependence upon credit fosters the necessity of the credit industry. Matt Tabibi writes of America showing a “culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence.”

If the illogical drive towards ecological collapse is not the intention of the financial elite, then we may find uncomfortable comfort in Wolin’s explanation that this system is perpetuated by “power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inaction”. This economic determinism underpinning the subconscious of modern man is visible at the political level where any social challenge is addressed via recourse to a ‘budget’ allocation. Where the destruction of Amazonian rainforests are measured in the billions of dollars and where climate change proposals are ignored as too expensive.

Survival is an instinct which has been lost by economic man. This was not lost on Carl Schmitt who witnessed the political extinction of a German republic which could not protect itself against an adversary using constitutional means to destroy the constitution. His nation’s fascist destiny was not beyond the powerful undercurrents of a European civilization succumbing to ‘market forces’. Karl Polanyi wrote that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.”

Whereas Carl Schmitt sought to protect the “political” from the corroding affects of a financial philosophy of history, Wolin writes that in the corporate state “It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political”, low voter turnout but a simple indicator that the uneducated masses even know that what they are given as politics” is a media spectacle necessary for the holographic flame of democracy to stay lit. With the death of politics traditionally understood, anacyclosis as defined by Polybius has been supplanted by market forces, with its own cyclical logic visible on the stock market.

The corporate state may be defined as a mixed constitution of plutocracy, oligarchy and democracy with a state security apparatus which serves the front of the most powerful interests within that state. While a mixed constitution might appear as the recommended means of fostering stability by delaying the painful stages of political cycles, the peculiar nature of financial capitalism fosters a regime which Polybius would have rejected outright as tyrannical in the extreme; one of his negative regimes favoring the few over the many; the corporate state is by design anti-democratic.

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Pound wrote that “The Scientists are in terror and the European mind stops”. It is significant that the monied narrative struck at the popular heart of western civilization by examining in minute details the debt problems in modern Greece. Our prized rationality itself seems to be undergoing restructuring as the home of the Acropolis sees right wing thugs carrying clubs and knives to “cleanse” the streets of this once great city. That citizens might employ vigilante violence against non-Greeks to cure a problem caused by the diseased logic of fiat money means that modern education has successfully forced us to equate squares with triangles, allowing easy reception to that other equation of freedom equals democracy and free markets. According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism is the inevitable political form of capitalism.

In the maelstrom of these unfolding events, society should remember that even the Ancients Greeks had divine recourse; inscribed above the entrance of the Temple of Apollo was the exhortation “know thyself”, and as millions of activists worldwide strive to correct these wrongs, we would do well to remember the exhortation of Odysseus; “hold fast, my heart, you have endured worst suffering”.

*design/delight according to different versions of the text

Spanish version below

See also this old interview with Sheldon Wolin, and then buy his book

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wlHB6jSe7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6HMQM7Lo58

Featured image from https://shapersofthe80s.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/roberts-vorticistseiffel1915.jpg

mardi, 12 mai 2015

H. P. Lovecraft’s The Conservative

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The First Steampunk:
H. P. Lovecraft’s The Conservative

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

H. P. Lovecraft
The Conservative: The Complete Issues 1915–1923 [2]
Foreword by Alex Kurtagić
London: Arktos, 2013

Prior to the internet, or even the telephone, how fast could a written message travel from one end of Manhattan to another? You might think a day or two, or even hours, but you’d be wrong. In the early part of the last century, a system of pneumatic tubes enabled a piece of paper, sealed in a capsule, to travel from Wall Street to Harlem in a matter of seconds.[1]

James Howard Kunstler, proponent of livable cities and enemy of our fossil-fueled “happy motoring” lifestyle, has observed that if the power grid went out (as he devotedly wishes), and our everyday technology was rolled back to before even the automobile, we’d be effectively in the 1900s, a period surviving records show was not experienced as a Dark Age whose inhabitants wandered around lifelessly, wishing they could fly to Bangkok in a couple hours.[2]

The point is — and so-called “conservatives” used to know this, before they became obsessed with “creative destruction” and “the rapture” — our ancestors knew a thing or two,[3] and lived quite well without all our “mod cons.”[4]

American popular culture has always been infused with a DIY ethic: “Yankee ingenuity,” Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and his “American Scholar” creating his own tradition, seeking an “original relation to the universe,” all the way to Robert Johnson’s Coke bottleneck guitar which Muddy Waters made loud nightclub-friendly with electricity. It lies behind America’s plethora of home-made religions, from uptight Mormonism and Fundamentalism to acid experimentation and cults of the space brothers;[5] the Old Weird America where the Amish farmer and the laid-back hippie become indistinguishable;[6] where people made their own damn culture and didn’t buy it from a global — or even a New York[7] — corporation.

The whole “steampunk” genre, and lifestyle, appears to address this loss, although it also seems to do so more as hipster nostalgia and “irony” rather than a genuine rebirth,[8] although the related interests in home brewing and beekeeping (both recently legalized in . . . New York City!) shows promise, especially for those prepping for the collapse.[9]

Anyhow, so back in the 1860s, folks became wild about printing and mailing around their own homemade newspapers or journals, and H. P. Lovecraft, who had entered a period of seclusion following his failure to matriculate and a nervous breakdown, jumped in as enthusiastically as any basement-dwelling World of Warcraft addict.[10]

In fact, you could say he pursued the gamer’s dream of becoming a game designer himself, moving from contributing to others’ periodicals to producing his own, The Conservative, whose issues are collected here.[11]

Lovecraft seems to have come out swinging, maintaining a quarterly schedule for two years, then backing off to a yearly issue, finally skipping several years and putting out two more issues, numbered as if the missing volumes had somehow appeared (virtually?). Although he didn’t write all of it, he wrote most of it; and it wasn’t just pseudo-Augustan poetry and essays about cats. Lovecraft had a mission: world dominance, at least of the amateur press universe:

Promoting his own vision of amatuerdom as a haven for literary excellence and a tool for humanistic education.[12]

In this capacity, he contrived to become the head of the Department of Public Criticism (lovely title!) for the whole ’zine — I mean, amateur journalism scene.

Otherwise, the Conservative promoted Lovecraft’s favorite crochets, being described by him as:

[. . . ] an enthusiastic champion of total abstinence and prohibition; of moderation, healthy militarianism as contrasted with dangerous an unpatriotic peace-preaching; [. . .] of constitutional or representative government, as opposed to the pernicious and contemptible false schemes of anarchy and socialism.

Indeed, the choice of name is significant, and it’s hard to tell at many points whether Lovecraft, addressing the reader in the name of The Conservative, is speaking as Editor of the journal of that name, as the archetypal “conservative,” or as himself.

Joshi is right to notify us that these are Lovecraft’s notoriously “conservative” opinions in their original form, before later modifications and nuance.[13]

We [sic] will find that some of Lovecraft’s early opinions are quite repugnant, and many of them are uttered in a cocksure, dogmatic manner greatly in contrast to his later views.[14] Nevertheless, it was evident to all amateurs that the editor of the Conservative was an intellectual force to be dealt with.[15]

lovecraft__dedo9__by_artlessilliterate-d5he7mq.jpgBut therein lies their charm. Consider this collection, to continue the pop culture metaphor, a kind of Lovecraft Unplugged.

Some quotes, which most of our reader may find bracing rather than “repugnant”:

It appears that the CONSERVATIVE’S review of Charles D. Isaacson’s recent paper was not accepted in the honestly critical spirit intended, and that Mr. Isaacson is preparing to wreak summary verbal vengeance upon the crude barbarian who cannot appreciate the loathsome Walt Whitman, cannot lose his self-respect as a white man, and cannot endorse a treasonable propaganda designed to deliver these United States as easy victims to the first hostile power who cares to conquer them.[16]

The strongest tie in the domain of mankind, and the only potential source of social unity, is that mystic essence compounded of race, language, and culture; a heritage descended from the remote past.

Why any sane human being can believe in the possibility of universal peace is more than the CONSERVATIVE can fathom. The essential pugnacity and treachery of mankind is only too evident; and that very nation, even though pledged, would actually abolish means of warfare is absolutely unthinkable.

On those damn’d immigrants:

Leaving their own countries in dissatisfaction, they assume the cloak of American citizenship; organise any finance conspiracies with American money; and finally, with an audacity almost ironical, call upon the United States for help when overtaken by justice! Half the detestable violence of the Irish “Fenians” and “Sinn Fein” ruffians was hatched in America by those who dare drivel about such a thing as “neutrality”!

Traditional hierarchy, but a nobility of achievement, not birth:

In Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy, every son of a noble is a noble. The titled class is very large, as a rule very worthless, and possess numerous privileges subversive to the rights of so-called inferior men.

Indeed, the honest yeoman is the true friend — and beneficiary — of a traditional society:

It has been more than once remarked, that there is an intangible bond of kinship betwixt the highest and the humblest elements of the community. Whilst the bourgeois complacently busy themselves with their commonplace, respectable, and unimaginative careers of money-grabbing, the artist and the aristocrat join forces with the ploughman and the peasant in an involuntary mental wave of reaction against the monotony of materialism.

Although many on the alt-Right may find issue with some of Lovecraft’s ideas, such as the value of teetotalism:

He who strives against the Hydra-monster Rum, strives most to conserve his fellow-men.

Or his sadly jingoistic enthusiasm for WWI, despite taking a broader view in evolutionary terms:

Englishmen and Germans are blood brothers, descended from the same stern Woden-worshipping ancestors, blessed with the same rugged virtues, and fired with the same noble ambitions.

Amateur journalism got Lovecraft back in contact with human kind, or at least the more acceptable specimens in this sadly non-18th century world, and for this we later readers can be thankful. Although he eventually shifted his attention to the pulp magazine world, the bulk of his time and writing would continue to be devoted to maintaining a sort of virtual existence via mail, this time with a far-flung network of correspondents, editors, and “revision” clients;[17] although Lovecraft traveled far more than many might think (Florida, Montreal), there were a number of lifelong friends that Lovecraft never met. [18]

Editor Kurtagić proudly notes that this is the first “professional” reprinting of The Conservative in 25 years (since the stapled pamphlet with only Lovecraft’s contributions, edited by Joshi) and the first complete edition in 35. Perhaps more importantly, we can add that the introduction is more than merely scholarly; unlike Joshi, Kurtagić is sympathetic to Lovecraft’s “conservative” agenda, striving to show how Lovecraft’s various opinions are, though not “systematic,” nevertheless consistent and well-founded; in this he succeeds, since, after all, they are.

For example, Lovecraft, though so thoroughly steeped in the Augustan poets that he could almost be said to write only pastiches himself, and opposed both to Whitman’s free verse and the contemporary Imagists like Pound or Eliot, also thoroughly approved of the Victorian-bashing favored by same.

It is time . . . definitely to challenge the sterile and exhausted Victorian ideal which blighted Anglo-Saxon culture for three quarters of a century and produced a milky “poetry” of shopworn sentimentalities and puffy platitudes . . .

But these two attitudes are no more “inconsistent” or paradoxical than the demand voiced by the proponents of “historically informed performance practice” such as Nikolas Harnoncourt, that we need to strip away a century or two of calcified notions of how to perform, say, Bach or Monteverdi, not so that we can achieve some mythical “authentic” sound but so that we can craft our own response to the music; again, “an original relation to the universe.”[19]

On one other matter, though, Kurtagić would draw Lovecraft’s ire. Speaking of The Conservative being “a haven for literary excellence,” Lovecraft begins the very first issue, right under the masthead, thusly:

The Conservative desires to apologize for any errors in proofreading which may be found in this issue. Circumstances . . . rendered haste a prime essential.

Constant Readers will recall that I’ve found a lot to criticize in the publications Kurtagić has put out under the Wermod or Palingenesis Project labels. Here, Arktos seems to have done a much better job of copyediting, for which they are to be lauded. Except . . .

In my experience, introductions, prefaces, forewords and the like are not infrequently presented without footnotes, [20] at least to material quoted from the main text to follow. I like my prefaces to give me some hint of what’s to come, a kind of “coming attractions,” and it’s nice to be able to turn to the quotations in context. So I was happy to see footnotes here, but then disappointed to find that they are wildly inaccurate, presumably due to changes in pagination during the editorial process. Now really, if you are going to provide footnotes at all, how hard is it to make sure a dozen or so in the prefatory matter are accurate? [21]

That said, this is really a must have for the Lovecraftian, as well as any Counter-Currents reader who would like to sample the pleasures of real olde skool alt-Right blogging.

Notes

[1] Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska was not far off in his reference to Al Gore’s invention as “the intertubes [3].” According to Wikipedia [4], “Eventually the network stretched up both sides of Manhattan Island all the way to Manhattanville on the West side and “Triborough” in East Harlem, forming a loop running a few feet below street level. Travel time from the General Post Office to Harlem was 20 minutes. A crosstown line connected the two parallel lines between the new General Post office on the West Side and Grand Central Terminal on the east, and took four minutes for mail to traverse. Using the Brooklyn Bridge, a spur line also ran from Church Street, in lower Manhattan, to the general post office in Brooklyn (now Cadman Plaza), taking four minutes. Operators of the system were called “Rocketeers””

[2] As late as the ’60s and on TV no less, such a time could symbolize not the zombie apocalypse but the Good Olde Days, worth jumping off a train for; see “Next Stop Willoughby” — only the most iconic example of Twilight Zone’s somewhat disingenuous (where’s the ham-fisted “liberalism”?) nostalgia for the time when life was slower – or, equally disingenuous, com-symp Orson Welles’ lugubrious opening and closing eulogies of 19th century Midwest life in The Magnificent Ambersons. All this is related to the phenomenon I’ve called “liberal psychogeography;” see “The Gilmore Girls Occupy Wall St.” in The Homo and the Negro (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012); the liberal attempts to eat his cake and have it too, by gentrifying small towns or neighborhoods (Martha’s Vineyard, the Hamptons, Ann Arbor, Greenwich Village) after the awful rednecks and other White ethnics who built them are purged.

[3] Pompous private scholar and anti-modern curmudgeon Harry Haller, the titular Steppenwolf of Hesse’s novel, strikes a rather Evola-esque note as he mocks his landlady’s son’s interest in radios among other modern contraptions, noting that communication through the air over long distances was a phenomenon well-known to the ancient Hindus. By the end of the book the humbled and drug-addled Haller will be forced by Mozart himself to listen to a broadcast of a Handel Concerto Grosso.

[4] Fr. Rolfe (“Baron Corvo”) observed that the magnificence of life in the Italian Renaissance lay not in a vulgar obsession with ever more “new” knowledge, but rather in the belief that everything was already discovered and known; a man could acquire a complete set of knowledge and then concentrate his energies in ever more elaborate and beautiful presentation thereof. See A History of the Borgias, Preface.

[5] See Donna Kossy’s Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief [5] (Portland: Feral House, 1994); also see my reviews of The Magical Universe of William Burroughs (here [6]) and Erik Davis’s Nomad Codes (here [7]).

[6] Greil Marcus, The Old Weird America (Picador, 2011; published in 1997 as Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes).

[7] “New York City!” exclaim the cowboys on learning of the origins of their store-bought alsa.

[8] The season of Portlandia announced that “The Dream of the 1890s Is Alive in Portland.” The origins of the genre arguably lie on TV as well: The Wild Wild West (CBS, 1965-69), specifically the iconic character of Dr. Miguelito Loveless (played, I’m glad to point out, by my fellow Detroiter Michael Dunn), introduced in an episode with the rather Lovecraftian title “The Night the Wizard Shook the Earth.” The character, played by Kenneth Branagh, was still the only point of interest in the insultingly stupid 1999 movie, which attempted to cash-in on the fad, while simultaneously bowing to the contrary mania for making older works “relevant” by replacing White characters with negroes; a typically Judaic attempt to play all the angles by director Barry Sonnenfeld.

[9] See Claus Brinker’s review of Survive the Economic Collapse, here [8].

[10] The current job market for Brown University grads offers little hope of anything but the same poverty Lovecraft endured, although apparently what he really missed was access to Brown’s telescope.

[11] The move from consumer to producer prompts Kurtagić’s comparison to the ’zine and cassette scenes of the ’90s.

[12] I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft by S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus, 2010); Chapter 6: “A Renewed Will to Live.”

[13] This was not, however, the liberal’s usual disingenuous “evolution” of opinion. For example, his Social Darwinist defense of capitalism would eventually, under the pressure of personal penury and the Great Depression generally, mutate into a qualified, then enthusiastic, support of the New Deal; but with typical Lovecraftian perversity, this was not in spite of, but because, it seemed like the closest thing to Fascism. Ralph Adams Cram came to the same conclusion; see my “Ralph Adams Cram: Wild Boy of American Architecture” in The Eldritch Evola … & Others (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014).

[14] Not unlike the Simpsons’ “Comic Book Guy.”

[15] Ibid.

[16] Isaacson, a fellow amateur journalist, was a “good” Jew of the Germanic, assimilating sort, but Lovecraft, although willing to praise his talents, always had a sharp eye — and pen — for the traces of the “Jewish mentality” that prevented him from appreciating Aryan literature and society.

[17] The astounding bulk of his letters dwarfs his fiction, and Joshi may be correct in suggesting that eventually, like weird pioneer Horace Walpole, his literary reputation may rest on these rather than the famous Cthulhu mythos. See I Am Providence, op. cit., Chapter 26: “Thou Art Not Gone.”

[18] Lovecraft’s remarks on friendship are often as odd as his comments about love and marriage. Robert E. Howard (Conan) died a few months before Lovecraft himself; hearing the news, Lovecraft remarked about how odd it would be to know that there was no longer anyone to collect mail at Howard’s PO Box. (Which is not to say that HPL did not otherwise express a normal sort of grief over the loss of his close friend (“Mitra, what a man!”); see Joshi, op. cit., Chapter 23: “The End of One’s Life.”

[19] Of course, Emerson was a big, early fan of Whitman, who, in turn, was another proponent of self-publication in both senses. Harnoncourt’s remarks occur in the liner notes to a one-disc sampler of the Teldec 153 disc box set, Bach 2000 (1999). It’s of note that the Traditionalist author and violist Marco Pallis was an associate of Arnold Dolmetsch, the distinguished reviver of early English music and one of the pioneers of the so-called “authenticity” movement, whom in turn directed Pallis to the writings of René Guénon; see “Biography of Marco Palllis,” here [9].

[20] Like book reviews, hah!

[21] Answer: not hard at all.

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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/05/the-first-steampunk/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: https://secure.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/theconservative-frontcover.jpg

[2] The Conservative: The Complete Issues 1915–1923: https://secure.counter-currents.com/the-conservative/

[3] the intertubes: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=intertubes

[4] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_York_City

[5] Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Kossy#Kooks_.281994.29

[6] here: http://www.counter-currents.com/tag/the-magical-universe-of-william-s-burroughs/

[7] here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/11/ever-sacred-ever-vexed/

[8] here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/04/survive-the-economic-collapse/

[9] here: http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/authors/Marco-Pallis.aspx#_ednref1

samedi, 09 mai 2015

Fight club : de la destruction de l’anonymat à l’âge des héros

fightclub-1800-1406035542.jpg

Fight club : de la destruction de l’anonymat à l’âge des héros

Avant-propos :

Que cela soit volontaire ou non, l’histoire de Palahniuk, habilement adaptée sur écran par David Fincher, affiche clairement les ambitions d’une révolte radicale, de cette génération broyée entre les mâchoires de la modernité et de l’individualisme triomphant. Décrié à sa sortie comme un film d’inspiration fasciste, « Fight club » est devenu l’icône d’une certaine jeunesse, dévoyée, malheureuse, mais alerte, laquelle, peu à peu, a posé des mots sur ses maux.

S’il entre dans le registre de ces ouvrages d’« anticipation sociale », il est pourtant plus dans la description d’une réalité omniprésente que dans l’appréhension d’un futur incertain et c’est à ce titre qu’il inspira quelques travaux psychosociologiques, qui bien qu’insuffisants, n’en demeurèrent pas moins un appui potentiel à une étude sérieuse du sujet. De sorte que pour la réalisation de cet article, nous avons cru bon d’en étayer l’idée générale, bien que ces vulgaires précédents, tâcherons parodiques d’une véritable analyse, ne présentent au fond que les résidus d’un monde universitaire loin, très loin des préoccupations soulevées par Fincher et Palahniuk.

Partant de cette disjonction, deux professeurs, Jocelyn Lachance et Sébastien Dupont présentèrent dans « La temporalité dans les conduites à risque : l’exemple du film “Fight club” » une vision typiquement conventionnelle de l’œuvre – tout en se faisant gloire d’en faire une relecture originale. En effet, au-delà de la prétention à l’objectivité qui voile d’ordinaire les rendus universitaires, nous percevons sans mal l’avis des auteurs et la critique qu’ils opposent aux personnages, vus comme des adolescents en période de trouble intérieur.

Fight club serait ainsi, pour nos auteurs, la définition évidente du cheminement de l’adolescent en perte de repère, livré à lui même, à la recherche de sens et en marge de la temporalité. Tout se résumerait à un déséquilibre intérieur induisant une remise en question de la société de consommation.

Or pourquoi un déséquilibre est-il source d’une remise en question du mode de vie moderne ? Simplement, car ce mode de vie est par essence déséquilibré, aussi est-il naturel qu’il entretienne une action déstabilisante sur tout ce qu’il touche. Nous pourrions également nous questionner sur cette tendance à estimer que la négation de la civilisation occidentale moderne doive forcément tenir d’une triviale « révolte » adolescente et puérile, et non pas d’un simple constat d’échec qui aurait pu être conduit par n’importe quel intellectuel véritable. La réponse nous apparaîtrait clairement que le constat est trop amer, de sorte qu’il en devient gênant, et comme il est fort difficile à atténuer, le système s’attaque directement aux troubles fête, réduits à n’être que des « ados » déséquilibrés.

Que le personnage principal ait perdu son rapport à la temporalité ne nous paraît pas contestable,. Schizophrène, il ne sait plus s’il dort ou rêve. Cependant, pour notre part, loin de critiquer cette allégorie d’une totale libération du temps profane, nous la mettrons en avant comme relevant – en filigrane – d’une sorte de révélation.

Les deux universitaires nous disent ainsi que « Fight Club est également allégorique d’une autre dimension des comportements humains, celle des conduites à risque. […] Le personnage principal, qui est présenté au début du film comme un homme déprimé, en quête de sens, et que nous interprétons comme un adolescent tourmenté par la perte des repères de l’enfance, va ainsi bouleverser son existence en se livrant à plusieurs types de conduites à risque : les combats du Fight Club, la vitesse en voiture, les activités délictueuses (vols, menaces à main armée, vandalisme), une tentative de suicide, etc. »

Alors, si toute la critique présente dans l’ouvrage n’est réduite qu’à une simple « conduite à risque », interrogeons-nous sur ce risque ; celui de s’opposer par la violence, à la violence d’un mode de vie absurde et totalitaire, à une société s’étant saisie de la plus grande violence possible en tant qu’elle pourfend la civilisation. Ce que ces auteurs interprètent comme une somme de « conduite à risque » nous apparaît plutôt comme autant d’étapes rituelles d’une initiation balbutiante.

Or, si ce point de vue pourrait paraître badin chez certains, notre partialité ne nous fait souffrir d’aucun complexe face aux castrés de la demi-mesure et autre échanson, servant benoîtement le vin empoisonné de la modernité à toute une jeunesse ivre de diplômes. Si Fight Club, de même qu’American Psycho, ont su se présenter comme des anomalies inhérentes à la propagande hollywoodienne, peinant le vrai visage de la civilisation occidentale, celui du matérialisme aigu, nous doutons fort que quelques travaux universitaires puissent annihiler le dérangeant souvenir que laisse ce genre d’œuvre cinématographique. Car il perdure telle une fine graine déposée dans les esprits fertiles de toute une génération, qu’il s’agira ici de faire germer.

1) Évincement de la variable temporelle et rédemption

Le temps de l’homme moderne est, qu’il le veuille ou non, réglé comme une montre. Jamais celle-ci n’arrête sa course, attachant irrémédiablement l’espèce au temps profane ; dénué de toute transcendance et de toute reproduction d’actes primordiaux.

« Avec l’insomnie, plus rien n’est réel ! Tout devient lointain. Tout est une copie, d’une copie, d’une copie… » Tyler Durden

chuck1.jpgLa première étape traversée par le personnage principal revient donc à s’en affranchir. On apprend doucement à prendre du recul, à concevoir l’apparente réalité comme une extrême relativité, une illusion dont Sigismond en traduirait ainsi les contours en tant que « […] nous sommes dans un monde si étrange que vivre ce n’est que rêver, et que l’expérience m’enseigne que l’homme qui vit rêve ce qu’il est, jusqu’au moment où il s’éveille. […] Dans ce monde, en conclusion, chacun rêve ce qu’il est, sans que personne s’en rende compte ». Pedro Caldéron, « La vie est un songe ».

« Et alors il s’est passé quelques choses, je me suis laissé aller, dans un total oubli de moi même envahi par la nuit, le silence et la plénitude. J’avais trouvé la liberté. Perdre tout espoir, c’était cela la liberté », (Tyler Durden). Comment ne pas y voir une référence à l’inscription qui orne les portes des enfers que Dante expose dans la divine comédie ; perdre l’espoir est la première étape d’une élévation, ainsi que Dante plonge dans les enfers tout comme le prophète de l’Islam.

« Dans une adaptation de la légende musulmane, un loup et un lion barrent la route au pèlerin comme la panthère, le lion et la louve font reculer Dante… Virgile est envoyé à Dante et Gabriel à Mohammed par le Ciel ; tous deux, durant le voyage, satisfont à la curiosité du pèlerin. L’Enfer est annoncé dans les deux légendes par des signes identiques : tumulte violent et confus, rafale de feu… L’architecture de l’Enfer dantesque est calquée sur celle de l’Enfer musulman : tous deux sont un gigantesque entonnoir formé par une série d’étages, de degrés ou de marches circulaires qui descendent graduellement jusqu’au fond de la terre ; chacun d’eux recèle une catégorie de pécheurs, dont la culpabilité et la peine s’aggravent à mesure qu’ils habitent un cercle plus enfoncé. Chaque étage se subdivise en différents autres, affectés à des catégories variées de pécheurs enfin, ces deux Enfers sont situés tous les deux sous la ville de Jérusalem… Afin de se purifier au sortir de l’Enfer et de pouvoir s’élever vers le Paradis, Dante se soumet à une triple ablution. Une même triple ablution purifie les âmes dans la légende musulmane : avant de pénétrer dans le Ciel, elles sont plongées successivement dans les eaux des trois rivières qui fertilisent le jardin d’Abraham… »

Miguel Asîn Palacios, « La Escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia », Madrid, 1919.

La perte de l’espoir n’est d’ailleurs pas le seul signe de la descente aux enfers qu’entreprennent les membres du Fight Club, qui chaque soir glissent dans la noirceur des caves d’un infréquentable troquet. Il peut néanmoins apparaître troublant que pour s’élever, il faille ainsi tomber dans les arcanes des enfers, toutefois, si c’est là un moyen de s’épargner le vestibule des lâches dont nous rappelions dans un précédent billet qu’il est « cet état misérable […]celui des méchantes âmes des humains qui vivent sans infamie et sans louange et qui ne furent que pour eux mêmes […] Les cieux les chassent, pour n’être moins beaux et le profond enfer ne veut pas d’eux, car les damnés en auraient plus de gloire » (Dante, la descente aux enfers).

Ce « pèlerinage » se présente ainsi comme indispensable à la libération de son orgueil, de même qu’à l’observation de son enfer intérieur, il est telle une croisade contre les plus bas instincts de l’homme, caractérisés dans Fight club par la lutte interne qu’oppose le narrateur contre Tyler Durden, n’étant rien d’autre qu’une lutte pour l’existence. Le Fight club apparaît alors comme la mise en abîme de cette lutte interne du « soi » contre le « moi ».

« Qu’est-ce qui est pire, l’enfer ou rien du tout ? Ce n’est qu’après avoir été capturés et punis que nous pouvons être sauvés. » Tyler Durden.

Ainsi la première étape de l’élévation est donc la descente, dont le but est de gagner le grand Djihad ou la croisade intérieure ; de même que la rédemption nous apparaît comme la pierre angulaire de l’œuvre. De même, ne dirait-on pas que l’auteur ait voulu opter pour la souffrance virile, celle des hommes qui finissent par se haïr à mesure qu’ils aiment et acceptent leur mal ?

« S’améliorer soi-même c’est de la masturbation. C’est se détruire soi-même. » Avec cette phrase, Tyler Durden lance alors une vérité apparaissant telle une critique acerbe du culte individuel, physique, prôné par les médias. On entrevoit ainsi cette volonté d’autoflagellation détruisant le masque de l’indifférenciation.

chuck-palahniuk-sarah-lee-1.jpg

 

Sur cette question, nous retrouvons également dans American Psycho de Bret Easton Ellis, un passage révélateur de la tendance actuelle au culte du moi et au résultat qu’il induit :

« J’habite au 11ème étage de la tour American Gardens, sur la 81ème rue ouest. Je m’appelle Patrick Bateman et j’ai 27 ans. Je prends grand soin de moi, en mangeant léger, et en faisant de l’exercice chaque jour. Au réveil si je suis légèrement bouffi, je m’applique des sachets de glace sur mon visage pendant mes abdos du matin. Je peux en faire 1000. Après avoir ôté le sachet de glace, j’applique une lotion désincrustante. Puis, sous la douche, j’utilise tout d’abord un gel moussant, puis un gommage corps au miel et aux amandes et un gommage pour le visage. Ensuite j’applique un masque à la menthe sauvage que je laisse pénétrer 10mn. Pendant ce temps là, je prépare la suite des hostilités. J’utilise toujours un after-shave sans alcool ou avec très peu d’alcool parce que ça irrite et dessèche la peau, alors vous vieillissez plus vite. Une crème reconstituante, suivie d’une crème contour des yeux, et pour finir, une crème protectrice hydratante. Il existe une image de Patrick Bateman, une sorte d’abstraction, mais je n’existe pas vraiment, ce n’est qu’une entité, quelque chose d’illusoire. Et bien que je puisse cacher mon regard froid, que vous puissiez me serrer la main et sentir ma chaire s’agripper à la votre, vous pourriez vous dire que nos vies sont comparables, mais je ne suis tout simplement… pas là ! »

2) De la destruction de l’anonymat dans l’« infra humain » vers l’anonymat du « supra humain »

L’anonyme dans nos sociétés contemporaines est en voie de dissolution, il n’est rien de plus qu’une statistique évoluant dans un rapport d’activité, noyé par un travail pétri de procédures.

« Nous voyons que l’ouvrier y est bien aussi anonyme, mais parce que ce qu’il produit n’exprime rien de lui-même et n’est pas même véritablement son œuvre, le rôle qu’il joue dans cette production étant purement “mécanique”. En somme, l’ouvrier comme tel n’a réellement pas de “nom” parce qu’il n’est, dans son travail, qu’une simple “unité” numérique sans qualités propres, qui pourrait être remplacée par toute autre “unité” équivalente, c’est-à-dire par un autre ouvrier quelconque, sans qu’il y ait rien de changé dans le produit de ce travail ; et ainsi ,[…] son activité n’a plus rien de proprement humain mais, bien loin de traduire ou tout au moins de refléter quelque chose de “supra-humain”, elle est au contraire réduite à l’“infra-humain” et elle tend même vers le plus bas degré de celui-ci, c’est-à-dire vers une modalité aussi complètement quantitative qu’il est possible de la réaliser dans le monde manifesté. Cette activité “mécanique” de l’ouvrier ne représente d’ailleurs qu’un cas particulier (le plus typique qu’on puisse constater en fait dans l’état actuel parce que l’industrie est le domaine où les conceptions modernes ont réussi à s’exprimer le plus complètement) de ce que le singulier “idéal” que nos contemporains voudraient arriver à faire de tous les individus humains et dans toutes les circonstances de leur existence ; c’est là une conséquence immédiate de la tendance dite “égalitaire”, ou en d’autres termes, de la tendance à l’uniformité, qui exige que ces individus ne soient traités que comme de simples “unités” numériques, réalisant ainsi l’“égalité” par en bas puisque c’est là le seul sens où elle puisse être réalisée “à la limite”, c’est-à-dire où il soit possible, sinon de l’atteindre tout à fait (car elle est contraire, comme nous l’avons vu, aux conditions mêmes de toute existence manifestée), du moins de s’en approcher de plus en plus et indéfiniment jusqu’à ce qu’on soit parvenu au « point d’arrêt » qui marquera la fin du monde actuel. »

René Guénon, «Le règne de la quantité », le double sens de l’anonymat

Le travail, passé du métier à la profession, nous transforme en ce qu’il y a de plus inférieur et l’avènement du néotaylorisme qui perdure dans le secteur tertiaire prouve, s’il en était besoin, qu’aucune évolution n’est apparue dans ce domaine. Or « vous n’êtes pas votre travail, vous n’êtes pas votre compte en banque, vous n’êtes pas votre voiture, vous n’êtes pas votre portefeuille, ni votre putain de treillis, vous êtes la merde de ce monde prête à servir à tout. »

Constat que nos universitaires appréhendent comme un comportement à risque, parcequ’il dérange leur propre confort intellectuel, en tant qu’il est le bilan de leurs illusions, ou de ce Paradis qui est en réalité notre enfer ; mais également parce qu’il fait trembler leur petit monde bourgeois et borné, renversant à lui seul leurs structures cognitives dévoyées par des siècles de limitation « infra-humaine ». En réalité ces individus ne présentent de risque que pour une certaine catégorie de notables, profitant alors d’une médiocrité qu’ils imposent arbitrairement à l’ensemble de leurs contemporains.

Nous voyons là un rejet du matérialisme et de cette équation qui transforme les hommes en les objets qui les environnent, car « les choses qu’on possède finissent par nous posséder ». Ainsi, disons-le avec Tyler Durden : « Je rejette tous les présupposés de la civilisation (modernes, NDA) et spécialement l’importance des possessions matérielles » et Chateaubriand lui répondra glorieusement qu’« un homme bien persuadé qu’il n’y a rien de nouveau en histoire perd le goût des innovations, goût que je regarde comme un des plus grands fléaux qui affligent l’Europe dans ce moment. L’enthousiasme vient de l’ignorance ; guérissez celle-ci, l’autre s’éteindra ; la connaissance des choses est un opium qui ne calme que trop l’exaltation. »

C’est un fait, que la négation de l’idéologie matérialiste, qui se retrouve aussi bien dans la propension à user du sentimentalisme que dans le scientisme ou le rationalisme, est un préalable à toute modification structurelle de nos êtres.

« L’individu se perd dans la “masse”, ou du moins il tend de plus en plus à s’y perdre ; […] dans la quantité pure, […], la séparation est à son maximum, puisque c’est là que réside le principe même de la “séparativité”, et l’être est d’ailleurs évidemment d’autant plus “séparé” et plus enfermé en lui-même que ses possibilités sont plus étroitement limitées, c’est-à-dire que son aspect essentiel comporte moins de qualités ; mais, en même temps, puisqu’il est d’autant moins distingué qualitativement au sein de la “masse”, il tend bien véritablement à s’y confondre. Ce mot de “confusion” est ici d’autant mieux approprié qu’il évoque l’indistinction toute potentielle du “chaos”, et c’est bien de cela qu’il s’agit en effet puisque l’individu tend à se réduire à son seul aspect substantiel, c’est-à-dire à ce que les scolastiques appelleraient une “matière sans forme” où tout est en puissance et où rien n’est en acte, si bien que le terme ultime, s’il pouvait être atteint, serait une véritable “dissolution” de tout ce qu’il y a de réalité positive dans l’individualité ; et en raison même de l’extrême opposition qui existe entre l’une et l’autre, cette confusion des êtres dans l’uniformité apparaît comme une sinistre et “satanique” parodie de leur fusion dans l’unité. »

[…]

Si nous nous demandons ce que devient l’individu dans de telles conditions, nous voyons que, en raison de la prédominance toujours plus accentuée en lui de la quantité sur la qualité, il est pour ainsi dire réduit à son seul aspect substantiel, à celui que la doctrine hindoue appelle rûpa (et en fait, il ne peut jamais perdre la forme, qui est ce qui définit l’individualité comme telle, sans perdre par là même toute existence), ce qui revient à dire qu’il n’est plus guère que ce que le langage courant appellerait un «corps sans âme», et cela au sens le plus littéral de cette expression. Dans un tel individu, en effet, l’aspect qualitatif ou essentiel a presque entièrement disparu (nous disons presque, parce que la limite ne peut jamais être atteinte en réalité) ; et comme cet aspect est précisément celui qui est désigné comme nâma, cet individu n’a véritablement plus de «nom» qui lui soit propre, parce qu’il est comme vidé des qualités que ce nom doit exprimer ; il est donc réellement «anonyme», mais au sens inférieur de ce mot. C’est là l’anonymat de la «masse» dont l’individu fait partie et dans laquelle il se perd, «masse» qui n’est qu’une collection de semblables individus, tous considérés comme autant d’«unités» arithmétiques pures et simples ; on peut bien compter de telles «unités», évaluant ainsi numériquement la collectivité qu’elles composent et qui, par définition, n’est elle-même qu’une quantité ; mais on ne peut aucunement donner à chacune d’elles une dénomination impliquant qu’elle se distingue des autres par quelque différence qualitative. »

René Guénon, «Le règne de la quantité », le double sens de l’anonymat

Aussi, le retour à l’acte dans les premiers pas de l’initiation présente dans l’œuvre, était donc de détruire l’anonymat « infra-humaine » , ceci par le refus d’une désintégration dans la masse. L’individu sans lien et déraciné se devait de renouer avec ses frères, et ce fut dans le fracas des os contre la chair, comme dans la douleur teintée des cris diffus d’une catharsis soulevant des lambeaux de poussière entremêlés du sang des siens.
Le Fight club s’est présenté comme le retour au « soi », que Socrate appréhende dans la formule du « connaît toi toi-même », or « comment tu peux te connaître si tu t’es jamais battu ? » répond Tyler Durden.

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L’objectif est donc de déconnecter l’homme des limites qu’impose la société moderne, d’où la volonté du « lâché prise » qu’on perçoit durant l’épisode de la voiture ; s’il est vrai, comme disait Cicéron que « philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir », l’on ne peut s’élever qu’en abandonnant toute peur de la mort. De même qu’il faut cesser d’être un enfant s’imaginant que tout n’arrive qu’aux autres, chantre d’un optimisme béat, de même dans un raisonnement absolu on pourrait dire que rien n’a d’importance, comme « l’être qui a atteint un état supra-individuel est, par là même, dégagé de toutes les conditions limitatives de l’individualité, c’est-à-dire qu’il est au-delà des déterminations de “nom et forme” (nâma-rûpa) qui constituent l’essence et la substance de cette individualité comme telle ; il est donc véritablement “anonyme” parce que en lui le “moi” s’est effacé et a complètement disparu devant le “Soi”. » (René Guénon, « Le règne de la quantité », le double sens de l’anonymat)

Néanmoins, loin de soutenir que les protagonistes réalisent une quelconque élévation spirituelle, il n’empêche que la chute dont ils étaient alors victime s’est stoppée net, de sorte qu’une récupération de la voie droite peut alors être possible. Car en s’extirpant de tous les préjugés modernes, par un solipsisme frisant parfois avec le nihilisme, l’homme du Fight club vint à chevaucher le tigre en se gardant de l’emprise d’un système mortifère. L’avènement de la marginalité, le contre-pied de la normalité et les concepts de bien et de mal, ont définitivement fait place à celui de justice.

3) Un retour à l’âge des héros ?

Nous disions que l’œuvre fraye avec le nihilisme, mais il ne va pas forcément jusqu’à la remise en question de toute signification et de tout but de l’existence humaine, il ne rend pas le monde comme fruit d’un hasard, tel que peuvent l’expliquer les dégénérés comme Stephen Hawking, mais s’arrête à l’expression rageuse d’un abandon de Dieu.

Pourtant, jamais son existence n’est niée, mais c’est finalement la volonté d’une vie simple qui l’emporte sur les spéculations métaphysiques :

« Dans le monde tel que je le vois, on chassera des élans dans des forets humides et rocailleuses du Rockfeller center. On portera des vêtements en cuir qui dureront la vie entière. On escaladera d’immenses lianes qui entoureront la tour sear. Et quand on baissera les yeux, on verra de minuscules silhouettes en train de piller du maïs ou de faire sécher de fines tranches de gibier sur l’aire de repos déserte d’une super-autoroute abandonnée. »

La mise en place d’un temps sacré apparaît comme une nécessité et renvoie à la réalisation des actes primordiaux ; les héros, ce sont les Grecs qui fabriquèrent les premiers savons avec les cendres des leurs soldats. Ce même savon, cette foi sortant des bourrelets d’une myriade de femmes obèses, gavées aux fast foods et découpées jusqu’à en faire sortir les précieuses graisses, va finalement faire exploser la société de consommation et avec elle le mode de vie moderne. Société dissoute dans le souffle d’une monnaie scripturale avalée par des lignes de codes n’ayant de réalité que parce qu’ils nichent dans des serveurs aux sous-sols de ces grandes machines à travailler.

Le résidu de la folie humaine va ironiquement faire s’envoler les piliers du système de domination et nous ramener à l’inconfort d’une société normale. Mais les idées modernes s’en iront-elles pour autant ? La mentalité cadavérique de l’anti-sacré fuira-t-elle le cœur des hommes ? Pour le savoir, il n’y a bien qu’une chose à faire… du savon.

Jérôme Carbriand

Étudiant en économie, j'ai outrepassé les limites de l'enseignement universitaire en m'intéressant aux post-keynesiens, j'ai en cela une solide maîtrise des réalités économiques. D'autre part, j'ai parallèlement voué un intérêt particulier à la lecture d'une grande partie de la philosophie occidentale dont l'incohérence générale m'a incité à étudier la "métaphysique". Dans cette voie, certains auteurs m'ont véritablement touché, c'est le cas de René Guénon, Julius Evola et Mircea Eliade. Que suis-je donc, sinon une Cassandre sans génie, dont le seul mérite aura été de tomber avant les autres, écrasé par une foule arrogante et aliénée. Je suis le mouton noir d'un troupeau aveugle, dont les yeux s'entrouvrent pour percevoir l'abîme dans lequel nous nous jetons. Je suis le cauchemar de la modernité et la honte de la Tradition pour avoir enduré la boue d'une époque aussi souillée.

jeudi, 26 mars 2015

Bill Hopkins: Ways Without a Precedent

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Bill Hopkins (1957)

Ways Without a Precedent

By Bill Hopkins 

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

Editor’s Note:

One of the aims of the North American New Right is to promote a revival of the Right-wing artistic and literary subculture that gave us such 20th-century giants as D. H. Lawrence, Gabriele D’Annunzio, F. T. Marinetti, Knut Hamsun, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Williamson, Roy Campbell, and H. P. Lovecraft (all profiled in Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right [2]). 

A group that showed some promise in this direction was the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, although the movement fizzled. Or perhaps it just came too soon. With that possibility in mind, I am reprinting Bill Hopkins’ 1957 Angry Young Men manifesto “Ways Without a Precedent” as an aid to reflection on the role of the artist in the current interregnum. For more on Hopkins and the Angry Young Men, see our articles by Jonathan Bowden [3] and Margot Metroland (part 1 [4], part 2 [5]) and our tags for Bill Hopkins [6] and Colin Wilson [7]

The literature of the past ten years has been conspicuous for its total lack of direction, purpose and power. It has opened no new roads of imagination, created no monumental characters, and contributed nothing whatever to the vitality of the written word. The fact that the decade in question has shown the highest ratio of adult literacy in British history makes this inertia an astounding feat. So astounding, indeed, that the great majority of readers have turned their attention to the cinema, television and radio instead. Their reading talent has been commandeered by the more robust newspapers.

The truants can hardly be blamed for seeking livelier entertainment, since most writers have reduced themselves to the rank of ordinary entertainers, and for the most part, have failed to be even this. Writers see the shadow of the mass mortuary too clearly to provide good, knock-about entertainment. The same shadow prevents them from producing more enduring work by making nonsense of posterity.

All writers must accept this shadow across their consciousness as an occupational hazard, and its surmounting divides them cleanly into the camps of optimism or pessimism, allowing no shades of neutrality between. The negative acceptance has the strongest following just now, and for this reason the bulk of serious novels today almost inevitably offer victims as their cast and senseless brutality as their business. These works do not educate us a scrap, nor do they offer any great insights into the tumult of our time. The writers dwell instead on the horror of anything changing—man, mood or scene—and reveal that the precise value of all and everything is that it is here at present. The understanding is that Man is too frail and imperfect for violent change. It is a poor argument for literature, progress and health.

Unless there is a radical change in this outlook literature will continue its drift into negativism.

Many people have their own ideas of what a creative writer’s job should be. The popular conception is that he should provide stories that are an escape from life. The slightest whiff of reality is regarded as an intrusion of the diabolical and an act of treachery. The ideal path amounts to improbable love yarns closing upon chaste kisses. If there is invariably an impoverished odour about these fabrications, the accolades of best-seller returns do not hint at it.

This view is not taken by the more intelligent, who demand a measure of truth with their entertainment. This again is asking for too little. The measure of truth dealt out is generally confined to obscene language in kitchen squalor and the dreary divesting of the heroine’s virginity. Now unalloyed sex is a tedious business when it is repeated too often. But this is not borne out by the positive glut of literary prurience that has come our way over the past few years. As it shows no sign of stopping we must conclude either that the percentage of perverts is much higher than is imagined, or that there is nothing more pornographic than a half-truth. But, whichever it is, the fact remains that when it is only a small measure of truth that is requested, the result merely mirrors appearance. It never delves to the cause behind appearance. It is better to offer no truth at all than make this kind of compromise.

There are only a few who demand all the truth a writer possesses. Over the past twenty years, this demand was sufficient to encourage the development of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, but few others of major creative stature. If the demand were extended to a larger and more perceptive audience it would doubtless encourage the emergence of even greater writers. Certainly it would produce a literature capable of vigorously advancing our present half-hearted ideas of living to an unprecedented level.

There is no likelihood of such an ideal audience coming into existence for the philanthropic purpose of encouraging a vigorous literature. This would be asking for a healthiness that does not exist among most intelligent people today. The same malady that prevents a vital literature from developing and becoming a regenerative force to our society, disposes of the idea of a sick audience transcending its condition and calling for chest expanders. Contemporary literature, whether on the printed page or declaimed from the boards of the theatre, shows its bankruptcy by confining itself to merely reporting on social conditions. It makes no attempt at judging them. Literature that faithfully reflects a mindless society is a mindless literature. If it is to be anything larger, it must systematically contradict the great bulk of prevalent ideas, offer saner alternatives, and take on a more speculative character than it has today. I am optimistic enough to think that immediately the results prove positive and exciting, the more conformist brands of literature will lose most of their following.

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But the failure of literature is only a small part of a much wider catastrophe. When I refer to a lack of health among the intelligent, I touch upon what threatens the whole of our civilization with imminent collapse. The truth is that Man, for all his scientific virtuosity, cannot defeat his own exhaustion. To do so means drawing upon unused strengths that once would have been described as religious. Unfortunately, Man has become a rational animal; he rejects any suggestion of religiosity as scrupulously as an honest beggar denounces respectability. I say unfortunately, because it is mental and physical exhaustion that is the principal malady of our civilization. The very people who should be the leaders of our society are the most affected, so the disillusionment, despair and social revolt of our age has been allowed to grow unchecked.

All the problems and struggles that confront the growth of our civilization depend entirely on whether we can get an exhausted man back upon his feet and keep him there. If the answer is a negative one, our past counts for nothing: it has proved insufficient to preserve our future.

The reasons for this exhaustion are all documented and detailed in the archives of the past fifty years. Rationalism, Communism, Socialism, Labourism, Fascism, Nazism, Anarchism; the honest penny-ha’penny thinking that human happiness was an adequate goal, the quest for social equality; two world wars and a couple of dozen local blood-lettings; poison gas, tanks, aircraft, flame-throwers, atomic, hydrogen and cobalt bombs, bacteriological warfare; depressions, inflations, strikes . . . the documents are quite explicit and well known.

Altogether they amount to the exhaustion of a man with asthma having run a marathon race and found there were no trophies or glory at the end of it. That is exactly our own position. With every decade since the turn of the century we have intensified our endeavours while our condition has deteriorated. Now it seems that despite all our efforts, knowledge and hopes, besides the lives jettisoned in their millions, we have achieved nothing. The dry taste of futility lingers in the mouth of all. The energy of any flying spark is in itself enough to arouse popular amazement. The supineness of the intelligent is the tragic paradox of the Atomic Age. Only the insulated specialists, bafflingly capable of drawing the blinds against all other realities, remain enthusiastic about tomorrow.

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James Dean

The evidence of exhaustion stares out from the columns of the daily newspapers. The references to ‘Angry Young Men’ for ex-ample, record a general astonishment at the vigour of simply being angry. Another instance is the hero-worship of the late James Dean, who posthumously remains as the embodiment of Youth’s violent rebuttal of a society grown pointless. That the rejection is equally pointless does not appear to matter; the sincerity redeems it. There is the idolization of such simple men as Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, the respective champions of wistful sentimentality and the stark voluptuousness of knowing one thing that’s good, anyway. Which, after all, is one advantage of being a farmer’s boy.

Significantly, the more thoughtful go only a few steps further to admire such writers as Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. All of these playwrights have distinguished them-selves for creating small men and women whose unlikely poetry is in their bewilderment in an inexplicable and often tyrannical world. The heroism of the Twentieth Century Man, as currently postulated, is: (a) in winning a compassionate pair of lips that will lull him to peace after an endless gauntlet of victimizations (thus mysteriously negating the lot), (b) kicking a bullying foreman (an enemy of the people) in a conclusive place, or (c) just inhabiting a dustbin with all the pretences down and stoically waiting for the end.

This is the landscape a new writer looks upon this year. Every-thing has deteriorated from the point in the mid-1940s we optimistically imagined to be already rock-bottom. What is left is a mockery of attempt, accomplishment and greatness.

It would be too easy to be angry and join the lynching parties. But this is not a writer’s job. Nor is it for a writer to subscribe to the general bankruptcy, despair and apathy around him, whatever popularity might be obtained from it. If there is a task for the writer, it is to stand up higher than anyone else and discover the escape route to progress. His function is to find a way towards greater spiritual and mental health for his civilization in particular and his species in general. This is my own intention, and unless other writers adopt the same attitude our civilization will remain leaderless, lost and exhausted, and the chaos will continue until its eclipse under radio-active clouds.

Literature has been an accelerating factor to this state of affairs over the last decade. Instead of acting as a brake it has been intent upon glorifying the lostness, the smallness and the absolute impotence of Man under adverse conditions. This is the reverse of what its role must be in the future. It must begin to emphasize in every way possible that Man need not be the victim of circumstances unless he is too old, shattered or sick to be anything else. It is the conquest of external conditions that determines the extent of Mankind’s difference from all other forms of life; and, in turn, decides the superiority of its leaders. If this is denied, then we are indeed due for elimination. Perhaps overdue. But contemporary writing will not bring itself to this assertion until it has been wrenched clear of its embrace with a falling society. The dismaying fact is, most writers seem quite satisfied to act out their present hysterical offices to the length of disaster itself. Their conversion is enough to set any salvationist with work to last several lifetimes.

It is customary for young writers to condemn those who have authority and influence. For my own part, I am unable to do this because I find their exhaustion only too understandable. The leaders of our civilization have strained at hopelessly impossible tasks for too long, and instead of creating a new structure for living, they have succeeded only in producing a succession of failures. Today they have reached a standstill, and the prospect of marshalling together one more attempt has become an outrage against all reason and experience.

They are reasonable men and their conclusion is, in the light of what they have done, entirely rational. If reason or rationalism can accept exhaustion, by the same terms ruin and death are equally acceptable. But survival is our inflexible rule of health; and since survival has become a completely irrational instinct, the time has arrived when we should look to the irrational for the means to reject this reasonable but (humanly speaking) unacceptable end of our civilization.

Firm upon this premise, I predict that within the next two or three decades we will see the end of pure rationalism as the foundation of our thinking. If we are to break out of our present encirclement, we must envisage Man from now on as super-rational; that is, possessing an inner compass of certainty beyond all logic and reason, and ultimately far more valid.

The times we are entering require a far more flexible and powerful way of thinking than rationalism ever provided. Three sovereign states have been loosing hydrogen tests in the world’s atmosphere in preparation for deterrent wars. Each new explosion shadow-boxes with genetical mutations in the coming generations. Populations everywhere are multiplying daily to that frightening point in the future when the earth’s food resources will not be sufficient to supply all with one decent meal a day. The fish harvests from the oceans are diminishing. The problems of soil erosion and the reclamation of land swallowed up by water remain unattended. These are only a few of the more obvious questions that call for solutions on a new level. A level of universal planning that can only be encompassed by a supranational body like world government. Meanwhile, science advances every year a trifle further beyond the comprehension of most of the human race.

The path of a civilization in our disorders leads directly to its extermination. And, while we take it, Proustians talk about their sensitivity in dark rooms and stylists continue to manufacture their glittering sentences. This is the marrying of an illness to a deformity; a grotesque mésalliance to make even a lunatic marvel. But it will go on, as I say, until writers turn away and look objectively to another part of the horizon.

I have stated that Man is more than rational, and that if he is not, he is finished. Now I take the argument forward another step and assert that his current exhaustion is the vacuum created by an absence of belief. At the beginning of this credo I declared that only a religious strength could conquer exhaustion, and by religious strength I meant, specifically, belief: exhaustion exists only to a degree commensurate to its wane. A complete dearth of belief mathematically equates to utter exhaustion. It is no coincidence that it has struck the most responsible members of our society; they are the ones who have had the responsibility of scraping the barrel of reason and materialism. The same exhaustion will strike at the leaders of the East just as surely within a span of time roughly corresponding, no doubt, to our own venture into pure rationalism.

Through history, the men and women who have towered over their contemporaries through their achievements and struggles have had extraordinary levels of belief. They have ranged from visionaries, saints and mystics to fanatics and plain, self-professed, men-of-destiny. Whether their beliefs were in an external thing—let us say the Church—or simply in themselves, was a matter of little importance. The result in every case was sufficiently positive to make them memorable. Each of them was primarily separated from those around him by a greater capacity for belief. It took all of them high above the eternally small, grumbling, self-pitying parts that constitute personality. Belief is, and I speak historically, the instrument for projecting oneself beyond one’s innate limitations. Reason, on the other hand, will have us acknowledge them, even when the recognition is disastrous, as now.

The admission of a permanent state of incompleteness has been made by a great many people and much of the damage I have referred to is the direct result of it. But their places have to be filled. It has become imperative that, just as a new way of thinking and a new literature are needed, a new leadership must also be evolved with the aim of combating this exhaustion by the restoration of belief.

When I speak of belief in the present context, I do not mean any belief in particular, of course, but rather belief divorced from all form whatsoever. The form is an arbitrary matter, and its choice in the sense of literature is essentially a matter for the writer’s temperament. Whatever the choice, the reservoir of power within belief offers any writer the certainty of major work.

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It is obvious that this concern with belief leads inevitably to the heroic. The two are joined as essentially as flight to birds. The hero is the primary condition of all moral education, and his reality is synonymous with any great idea. He is literally the personification of the dramatic concept. But the heroic poses the possibility of people who can think and act with a magnitude close to the superhuman. The introduction of such characters and events will require a great deal of care and skill, for the ridiculous is only one step away.

The greatest difficulty overhanging this work, however, will be in the motive force itself. There has been a nonsensical confusion between belief and religion that has lasted for centuries. Instead of belief finding its separate identity, it has always been inextricably tied to religion. Churches of every denomination deliberately fostered this misconception from their beginnings, for the belief latent in men responded to hot appeal and willingly testified to the truth of any proffered set of doctrines. The nature of belief appears to be conducive to appeals. Its generosity is evident in this respect when we examine many of the childish and absurd inventions the various religions have offered worshippers at one time or another.

It is quite true that the Church has been the only vehicle for belief on any sizeable scale up to the present, and deserves credit for it, although self-interest provided its own reward. But it is absurd to regard belief on the basis of tradition as the monopoly of any organization. The Church was the first to understand the potentialities of its power and was also the first to direct it to an end; but sole proprietary rights were assumed too rigidly for the Church to pass us now as a public benefactor. Those who tried to break the monopoly were decried as heretics. Where it could, the Church had them burnt. This confiscation of belief and its isolation under the steeple brought about the Reformation and eventually the George Foxes and other champions of the right to independent belief.

Over the past fifty years there has been a general rejection of all churches with the sole exception of the strongest, Catholicism. The rejection parcelled belief with the Church and disposed of both. It was the result of a considerable amount of ignorance and a distinct lack of subtlety. Today, the same excuses do not hold, and if the mistake is repeated, it can never be done with the same blind vehemence of the first rejection.

If this social exhaustion of ours is due to the rejection of belief, how can writers reclaim it? There are three choices open, at least. The first is the establishment of a new religion. The second, to revitalize and reconstruct Christianity. The third, to trace belief to its source and turn it to a new account.

The argument against the first is that a new religion, whatever advantages it would have (supposing for a moment that it should find an ample crop of visionaries, priests, theologians and militant doctrines), would suffer from its lack of tradition more than it would profit by its modernity. Although many people talk somewhat loosely about the need for a new religion, the very impossibility of it as an overnight phenomenon rules it out for today.

However, should this particular miracle come to pass, its contribution to our civilization would be a substantial one while it was sustained by its visionaries. But as soon as the visionaries died, its hierarchy would become rigid as precedents in the history of every church show us without exception. There would be no more room for succeeding visionaries with their tradition-breaking habits in this church than in any other.

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A priest is a poor substitute for a visionary. So poor, in fact, that the plenitude of them against the paucity of visionaries has largely dissuaded many who with the right inspiration would be religious. A visionary has the prerogative of freely contradicting himself while still retaining his influence. Less flexible, because he happens to lack a visionary’s imagination and vitality, the priest conscientiously commits to paper everything enunciated by the other in case he should forget the passport of his office. Subsequent generations of priests accept the dogmas laid out for them without demur or question on the same grounds. This is orthodoxy; its strength is in its ossification. The more rigid the observance, the more virtuous the believer . . .

There can be no prospect more terrible for any prophet coming after, and this is when a church really dies. When it is attacked from without, what is sent crashing is cardboard: the Church died after the passing of its first visionaries and the hardening of its arteries to fresh truths.

As this argues against the possibility of a new religion arising, it argues equally against the impossibility of a revitalized Christianity. Any great idea, if it is perpetuated without continual reappraisals, is eventually rendered into ritualistic twaddle and shibboleths that justify the cheapest sneers (although not the spirit) of its detractors. And finally, the sad truth is that the only men courageous enough to approach great ideas and test their truth are men of equal stature to their formulators. No church that I am aware of has produced an apostolic succession of this order, so we must put aside both possibilities as impractical for anyone who hopes to work within his own times.

The last alternative is the one that, under the circumstances, is the most realistic. If we can trace belief to its origins and examine it in terms of plain, unadorned power, we have a potential weapon that will play an immeasurable part in our salvaging. I am convinced that it is an internal power comparable, when fully released, to the external explosions of atomic energy. With a complete understanding of its nature, its functions and its strength at zenith, I believe that we can not only cure Man’s many illnesses, but determine by its use a level of health never before attained. If we can learn the answers to these questions, Man may be transformed within a few years from the hardening corpse he has become into a completely alive being. The change can only be for the better.

One of the most tiring assumptions that has gained universality is that Man is completely plotted, explored and known. Dancing to the cafe orchestra of Darwin and Freud, there has been a tendency over the last fifty years to regard humanity as a fully arrived and established quantity that has little variation and no mystery to the scientist. Nothing could be more untrue. Man is so embryonic that attempting to define him today is preparing a fallacy for tomorrow. He is inchoate, only just beginning. Given unlimited belief and vitality, he is capable of all the impossibilities one cares to catalogue, including the most preposterous. Equally, without belief and vitality, he is simply decaying meat like any other fatally wounded animal. The difference will be largely decided by writers.

This is not a disproportionate claim. Writers have always influenced and led the thinking of their own times, immediately after the heads of State and Church. Sometimes, as with the Voltaires, a long way in front of either of them. The present heads of State are clearly unable to see a way through the difficulties of today, and there is no reason for us to suppose they can do any better with tomorrow. The non-existence of any influential Church leaders in Britain prohibits any criticism of their recalcitrance. The only remaining candidates qualified as leaders are writers.

eschyle-01.jpgThe Greeks, unlike ourselves, expected their literary men to be thinkers and teachers as a matter of course. This expectation was justified by figures of the stature of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Dramatists like these preached, taught, entertained and prophesied with such vitality and authority that their judgements were taken away by their audiences and applied to all levels of civic life. That both playwrights and audiences prospered upon this didactic relationship is best shown by the intellectual versatility of the Hellenic world, which has yet to be repeated.

When Bernard Shaw demanded that the theatre should be a church, he also meant that the ideal church should be a serious theatre. So it was in the Greek world. Nobody could afford to miss a sermon of this sort, because there was nothing more intellectually and spiritually exciting to be found from Kephallenia to far Samoso. Each new drama-sermon made the Kingdom of Man a titanic affair that could not be taken casually, and if this is not a religious understanding, there is no such thing!

In addition to this laudable state of sanity, they had none of the blank one-sidedness about them that stamps the orthodox priest, because their real religion was Man, and no other. Because Man is only human when he is in movement, they were able to throw him into catastrophic dilemmas that modern religion would regard as blasphemous. But they threw him only to retrieve him, and by this method they were able to add new understandings of his darker territories and enlarge his consciousness. With the aid of such dramatists the citizens of the Greek city-states developed into creditable human beings. But the high level of the theatre was to fall, and the whole of the Greek world was not long in following it.

Seneque.jpgWhen the Roman Empire rose to take its place, Terence and Seneca, the bright lights of Latin, reflected a frightening deterioration in what was expected of a writer. Julius Caesar found it an easy matter to be both a swashbuckler and a scribe in a world that, culturally, could not even conquer sculpture. But Rome’s poverty was magnificence compared to the bankruptcy prevailing in Britain and everywhere else in the civilized world today.

However, when I call in history to augment my contentions I am beating upon a broken drum. The role I predict for writers is one entirely without precedent, and it is the better because of it. Aeschylus and his colleagues refined the Greeks, and that was quite enough for their day. But today writers must become the pathfinders to a new kind of civilization. That new civilization remains an impossibility until we extricate our own civilization from the destruction that threatens it.

The problem is that of the individual. What kind of man or woman survives cataclysmic events better than any others? What kind of people are the first to fall? What are the first disciplines necessary for a new, positive way of thinking? These questions, together with ten thousand others, fall into the kind of prophetic writing that will be needed to solve the problems that lie immediately ahead. The duty then of all writers who are concerned with tomorrow is to concentrate on defining human characters at differing stages of ideal health. From this gallery it will be possible for us to aim at men and women dynamically capable of laying the foundations of our new world. We may not be able to describe precisely the men and women we want, but at least we can provide a reasonable indication. We can narrow the perimeter of choice.

I realize that there is as great a difference between facts and speculations in the minds of writers as in the minds of ordinary people. The great difference is that writers are particularly suited to the correlation of apparently hostile facts, often blatant contradictions, and their craft teaches them to deepen and extend thoughts to final understandings that seem almost mystical to the average person. This talent to reach down into the depths of men and find appalling corruption, and far from being ruined by the revelation proceed to conceive supreme peaks of human perfection, is common to both writer and visionary. There is no reason why they should be different in other ways, if the dedication is strong enough.

Until now most writers have concerned themselves with recording the anomalies and cruelties perpetrated by a skinflint world upon a good small man. Modern literature, for lack of a great aim, has become a Valhalla for those who shriek, beat their brows and weep more energetically than anyone else. As a device, hysteria is very useful for a writer, but as an end it becomes patently ludicrous. Any writer who resorts to such tricks without offering a ticket of destination is wasting his own time and the time of his readers, flouting the Zeitgeist in the most imbecilic fashion, and finally (I hope) cutting his own throat.

The truth of today is too plain for clear-thinking people to ignore, however uncomfortable it may be to the inherently lazy. We must grow larger . . . see further and deeper . . . think with more skill, concentration and originality—or become extinct. If we are not capable of meeting these seemingly unattainable requirements, writers such as myself will persist obstinately in trying to have things as we want them even if the words are finally addressed to the abyss rather than human faces. If the crusade is a hopeless one, it will be so only because there is nothing more impregnable than human weakness. This is an important conclusion, and its recognition offers three salient truths.

First, that a writer’s duty is to urge forward his society towards fuller responsibility, however incapable it may appear.

Second, a writer must take upon himself the duties of the visionary, the evangelist, the social leader and the teacher in the absence of other candidates.

Third, that he understands the impossible up-hill nature of a crusade and counters it by infusing in everything he creates a spirit of desperation.

This spirit of desperation is the closest approximation we can get to the religious fervour that brought about a large number of miraculous feats of previous, less reasonable, epochs. In desperation, as with religious exaltation, miracles, revelations and extraordinary personalities can be brought to everyday acceptance. The great advantage of it is that one can develop it to the point of being able to evoke it whenever there is cause for it.

I used the atmosphere of desperation in my first novel, The Divine and the Decay, very much in the way that a wind comes through an open door, throws a room into a sudden disarray, then leaves as abruptly. The wind in this case is a fanatic, and the room with an open door a small island community. As always in such cases, one is left perplexed and filled with a sense of indefinable outrage that has little to do with the disarray that must be restored to order. There is something maniacal about a really desperate man that welds him into a total unity and he becomes an embodiment of a single idea. Almost, dramatically speaking, flesh wrapped around an idea. Working for so long with desperation as my tool, I also learned about the merits of the lull, when the air vibrated with the foreboding of the next entrance. I relearned also a Greek lesson: how to turn presence into absence and absence into presence. But these details are worth mentioning only in relation to the use of desperation in contradistinction to the monotonous normality that most writers regard as the acme of reality.

Desperation is the only attitude that can galvanize us from this lethargic non-living of ours. But without a calculated direction desperation is useless. Misadventures in its application can leave us dangerously drained of further effort. This is where the dramatization of aims is expressly the writer’s function. Consider the case of Sisyphus, whom the Gods had forever rolling that gigantic boulder of his up a hill and forever having it roll down again when he neared the top. The punishment was inflicted upon only too human strength. But with enough desperation the penalized king would not have attempted to roll it up after the first couple of attempts. He would have picked it up and flung it over the impossible crest, straight into the faces of his Olympian tormentors. I can think of many contemporary equivalents of the Sisyphean plight that are incessant defeats only because each of the sufferers refuses to rear up and wreck his opposition with the fury of desperation. To me, desperation is our immediate instrument, in the absence of belief, for collapsing this damnable, subhuman recognition of one’s surface limitations. Refuse to acknowledge them and the horizon spreads wide.

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This cannot be done without examples, as I have said. The examples themselves can only be set by fanatics advancing be-yond the arena of human experience and knowledge. In a religious sense, the fanatic or writer goes into the wilderness, the first act of any visionary’s apprenticeship. Simultaneously, he becomes a social leader also, for humanity having to travel beyond the point where it now rests will only use paths already trodden.

New paths can only be created by writers with a desperate sense of responsibility. The only others capable of such a task are religious and philosophic minds, but unfortunately orthodoxy has ruined the first, and a desiccation debars the second. In resting the responsibility of human deliverance upon writers I am not calling for miraculous transitions antipathetic to their nature. Fundamentally, the writer has always been a prophet and a diviner in embryo. Centuries of ‘telling a jolly tale’ have simply caused him to let these other parts fall into disuse. I want their return, and I want them cultivated to full growth.

At the moment, the position of the writer in society is a difficult one. The good ones feel, quite rightly, that they should be antagonistic to authority; but the feeling is only a feeling and remains nothing more because few have got around to the point where they must begin wrestling with it. Because of this apprehension which is not turned into positive action, these writers find themselves nullified and abortive. They try to offset this predicament by an over-haughty pride in their isolation. More specifically they emphasize their artistic position to offset shortened powers, and offer a defensive facade of being icy intellectual pinnacles which, in actuality, spells death to their work if this attitude is carried to their desks.

To be exact, a writer is rather a ludicrous figure at work. He must be, to put himself in an arena with berserk bulls to gauge how much damage the horns can do. The gorings constitute literally the blood and tissue of his work; they are part of his empirical research into life. Perhaps research is too dignified a term for the tattered and bloody creature he becomes if he persists until he reaches the level of a good writer.

By such voluntary acts, he becomes an authority on the most fundamental subjects. Pain, for instance. It is not the politician, theologian or doctor who catalogues the depth, the range and the gamut of it, but the writer. He can state from personal knowledge that it has a hundred different pages, all written in different inks. Similarly, he is an expert in regions like agony, happiness, terror, exultation and whirling hope. These are his working neighbour-hoods.

He also knows from personal experiment the fine shades of violence; its velocity, trajectory and impact; its sources, and its quivering conclusions. When an accident is about to happen, let us say an aeroplane is plunging in a death dive, or a child is about to go under the wheels of a motor car, most eyes will be averted until it is over. But this is a luxury a writer simply cannot afford, and he will watch even if the object of study is someone he loves intensely. He has conditioned himself to observe everything that happens within his orbit with a steady and remembering eye. As his craft is produced at first-hand, constantly in positions of physical and mental hardship, for him the step towards vision and leadership is not a large one.

On the face of it, it seems ironical that a writer who goes to such lengths to learn this abnormal craft should use it only for the purpose of entertaining. But most are given little choice to be anything else with the shadow of destruction hanging over them. The few writers who would like to create heroic work are discouraged in advance, for they cannot be sure of even polite credulity on the part of readers. All ambitious contemporary writers are haunted by the thin, peaky face of the rational reader who peruses his literature with the pursed lips of a confirmed sceptic. Anything larger than his own life is anathema to this gentleman. Authors know it well and go in dread of him. This is why only a foolhardy few dare create anything but the slightest, most prosaic structures. The heroic, the bizarre, the moral and religious fabrics, have been torn down in the interests of reality. If the realities were large there would be little ground for complaint, but what is considered to be real by the normal canons of judgement is, of course, as confined as candlelight. It is not surprising that creative thinking today operates upon candle-power.

The situation is so bad that many leading writers have fallen to mocking their own ability to serve ‘fodder to pygmies’. They are proud of the ingeniousness they have developed over the course of time in feeding sly pieces of originality with every hundredth spoonful, done so skilfully it passes almost unnoticed. It is the bare remnants of creative pride. In another age a man could be a master; today he must be a midget, breathing a sigh of relief every time he gets away with his creative crime unpunished. This attitude of contemptuous hostility between writers and readers is another symptom of the need for a rupture between life and literature. The writer cannot create as largely as he wants; the reader is incapable of belief. Unless this stalemate is broken and another game started, the chess pieces will be swept to the floor . . .

Let me take you into the theatre and make an illustration of tragedy. An infinite number of creators have visited this terrain for the purpose of laying their masterpieces. It is as studded with great monuments as a war cemetery. On one you will read Prometheus Bound, next to it, Agamemnon. Close by perhaps Oedipus Rex, and, among the newer additions, Hamlet, Macbeth and Faust. Death . . . broken dreams . . . disillusion . . . There are a thousand threads in the pattern of it, and no doubt there are persons who walk the streets of London, Berlin and New York with threads still unwound and unwritten in their minds. But tragedy, with all the multiplicity of permutations before its in-evitable curtain, has one basic demand. The downfall.

My difficulty is in imagining how an object can fall in any direction other than down. However, most thinking people today appear to find more difficulty in imagining any height superior to themselves. That brings us to the dilemma. If a tragic figure is to fall he obviously cannot fall a few inches and hope to capture our awe or our pity; his fall must be a considerable one. It never is, under the present conditions. As soon as the figure of prospective tragedy begins to climb over the heads of his audience, they insist he climb down again to a height where they can believe in him. The only exception to this is Jack and the Beanstalk. And Jack only gets away with it, I surmise, because his pantomime appears in the Christian season of drunkenness and makes a swift departure before sober judgements are restored.

If a hero cannot rise, he cannot fall; on this point of order such good rationalists as Galileo, Newton and Einstein will bear me out. Such a fall would be unnatural, ungravitational and illogical; in fact, there is no fall. And yet Tragedy must have it.

Very well, what is it that sets the proper height for a tragic descent? Put in this way, it is like discussing a ballerina’s artistry in terms of ballistics! Let us assert, however, that tragedy has always demanded the greatest height conceivable as an essential condition of the downfall. A lot of levels contribute to make up this total height. The height is created by an outraged spiritual understanding, a shattered moral code and the complete social abasement of the protagonist. The downfall is darker than death; and often death is willingly chosen in preference to it, indeed as the very palliative of it when the intensity of anguish produced becomes fully manifest.

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But these platforms of consciousness are ridiculously archaic to the modern world. The religious, moral and social heights have become melodramatic and unintelligent, beside the more modern concentration on the significance of a man’s facial twitches under psychoanalysis. For that, we have banged our windows shut on Heaven and locked the cellar door on Hell. We have foreshortened our intelligence accordingly. The result is that Oedipus Rex, Prometheus Bound, Hamlet, Macbeth and Faust would not only be laughed out of our London theatres if they were written today but, in truth, would be impossible to write today unless my thesis for creating fresh belief finds more general acceptance. Until it has, our own contribution to tragedy’s magnificent cemetery is a headstone inscribed: No More Tragedies. By it, we have created a tragedy infinitely more tragic than anything by Aeschylus, Shakespeare or Goethe.

The only indulgence to tragedy on the London stage is accorded to Shakespeare, whose vintage has removed him beyond the critical appraisals of the cognoscenti. The Shakespearian seasons that continue ad nauseam in the Waterloo Road serve as final evidence that the only good writer is a dead one. While the Old Vic flourishes as a salve to the national conscience, the absence of new tragedy is concealed from all but those who love and care for the theatre. The phenomenon of the Old Vic is the story of the Orthodox Church hardening its arteries against fresh truths all over again. Just as the Church is content with past visionaries and anachronistic dogmas, the theatre brandishes dead playwrights as its testament of greatness. In either case the result is bad. The sad and obvious truth about the titans of the past is that Aeschylus did not know the meaning of world over-population; Goethe was in the dark about guided missiles; Shakespeare was a complete idiot on the question of nuclear fission. The only writers competent to deal with these present-day problems are writers who are alive!

I believe that this civilization of ours requires cement to stop its crash until a new civilization is developed. Its great need, ultimately, is for a new religion to give it strength. In the meantime we urgently need a philosophy to span the gaps in our society that grow wider every day. But a philosophy and a religion can be evolved only by a new leadership. The possibility of such leaders depends solely on whether we can produce men capable of thinking without rule or precedent. Apart from writers with phenomenal powers of dedication, I cannot see the likelihood of such men emerging in time to meet the oncoming crises.

For these reasons, I believe that literature must be the cradle of our future religion, philosophy and leadership. In this belief I see the writer filling the paramount role if our civilization is to survive.

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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/03/ways-without-a-precedent/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/SculptureParts.jpg

[2] Artists of the Right: https://secure.counter-currents.com/artists-of-the-right/

[3] Jonathan Bowden: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/07/bill-hopkins-and-he-angry-young-men/

[4] part 1: http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/03/the-prophet-of-exhaustion-part-1/

[5] part 2: http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/03/the-prophet-of-exhaustion-part-2/

[6] Bill Hopkins: http://www.counter-currents.com/tag/bill-hopkins/

[7] Colin Wilson: http://www.counter-currents.com/tag/colin-wilson/

[8] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/billhopkins-ida-kar1.jpg

[9] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/hopkins2.jpg

[10] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Bill-Hopkins-4-1.jpg

[11] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/declaration.jpg

 

lundi, 16 février 2015

Horreur et endettement chez Lovecraft

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Horreur et endettement chez Lovecraft

Ex: http://www.philitt.fr

La littérature d’horreur dit-elle quelque chose du monde ? Un auteur qui ne s’intéresse ni à l’argent ni au sexe peut-il avoir un message radical sur ce qui lie l’économie à la reproduction ? En somme, Le Cauchemar d’Innsmouth de Howard Phillips Lovecraft a-t-il pour sujet la crise de 29 ?

Le Cauchemar d’Innsmouth est l’une des nouvelles les plus connues de Lovecraft. Elle figure parmi les titres réputés « canoniques » du « Mythe de Cthulhu » pour user d’un vocable qui appartient sans doute, désormais, à un état passé de la critique. En tout cas, nul, parmi les amateurs de Lovecraft, ne nie que ce texte soit l’un des plus importants d’une œuvre qui a marqué l’histoire de la littérature d’horreur. De même, la fécondité des images évoquées par ce récit est évidente aujourd’hui, que ce soit dans les romans, les bandes dessinées, les films.

Le schéma narratif est tout simple : un jeune homme est obligé de passer la nuit dans un village côtier de Nouvelle-Angleterre. L’activité halieutique, si prospère auparavant, semble désormais marginale. Les quais sont abandonnés, les maisons dans un état de décrépitude avancée, la population semble dégénérée. Après avoir rencontré un vieil homme qui lui dévoile les secrets d’Innsmouth, le narrateur réussit, non sans mal, à s’enfuir d’une ville dont la population lui est désormais hostile.

Ce récit a inspiré bien des réflexions et des analyses. La moins incontestable repose sur la plus choquante des révélations faites par Zadok Allen : Innsmouth a été le lieu de l’accouplement infâme de ses habitants avec des créatures venues des profondeurs des océans. Depuis, ces hybrides, déterminés par leur hérédité et leurs intérêts, conspirent à l’éradication de l’humanité. La logique de l’horreur dans ce récit tient donc au métissage. Or, comme la critique l’a justement fait remarquer, l’auteur lui-même, dans sa vision du monde et ses opinions politiques, était tout sauf indifférent à cette question. C’est parce que Lovecraft rejetait le métissage dans la vie réelle qu’il en a fait un objet d’horreur dans la fiction, voilà toute la thèse.

Lovecraft et l’argent

Il n’est nullement dans notre intention, ici, de nous écarter de cette interprétation dominante que nous croyons avoir par ailleurs renforcée, en faisant le parallèle avec les événements de Malaga Island que Lovecraft ne pouvait ignorer. Le métissage était pour Lovecraft un objet d’horreur sociale et littéraire. Il reste cependant à interroger les mécanismes qui rendent le métissage inéluctable et malheureux ; à révéler les ruses de l’abâtardissement et à démontrer en quoi le métissage est non seulement un ressort de l’horreur lovecraftienne mais ce qui en fait la spécificité et qui lui donne sa dimension cosmique.

En effet, s’arrêter à l’argument classique qui résume et explique tout par le racisme nous semble très insatisfaisant. Le racisme est une idée et les idées ne sont jamais premières dans l’ordre de la causalité. Le racisme est la conceptualisation, parfois pathologique, de la prise de conscience de la fragilité des liens biologiques et culturels qui lient l’homme à ses ancêtres, rien de plus. Rien de plus, mais rien de moins et la question de l’hérédité et de l’héritage, en somme, celle de Lovecraft comme héritier doit être posée.

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Il est commun de noter que Lovecraft n’avait d’intérêt ni pour l’argent, ni pour le sexe. Or, son œuvre, de par la question de la filiation, partout présente, met le sexe en avant. Non pas le sexe comme idée théorisant le plaisir — sous les formes jumelles de l’amour ou de la perversion — mais le sexe comme réalité biologique dont le plaisir n’est qu’une ruse, c’est-à-dire le mécanisme de transmission des caractères héréditaires. Qu’en est-il, alors, de l’argent ? N’est-il pas, lui aussi, chose qui s’hérite ?

Le mépris notoire de Lovecraft pour tout ce qui est vénal ne fait pas de lui un homme qui méprise l’argent. C’est un luxe que la gêne lui refuse. Cet homme incapable (délibérément incapable) d’exiger ce qui lui est dû, n’est en rien un inconscient. L’éthique n’est pas chez lui l’alibi de la faiblesse. Ce gentleman généreux et magnanime sait vivre chichement, voilà tout. Il sait épargner aux autres ses propres fragilités, fussent-elles innocentes. Tout au long de sa vie, il s’est montré économe. Il mangeait peu et mal ; il n’achetait pas tous les livres qu’il désirait ; il ne voyageait que quand il le pouvait et toujours par les moyens les plus modestes.

Robert Olmstead, le héros du Cauchemar d’Innsmouth, parcourt la Nouvelle-Angleterre en « amateur d’antiquité et de généalogie » en « choisissant toujours le trajet le plus économique ». Le personnage et son auteur ont en commun de voyager pour les mêmes raisons et avec les mêmes contraintes. C’est l’obligation de ne pas trop dépenser qui amène le protagoniste de ce théâtre de l’horreur à prendre le misérable bus d’Innsmouth et c’est sa curiosité pour les antiquités et la généalogie qui le pousse à quitter son « île de placide ignorance. » En effet, les personnages de Lovecraft, comme Lovecraft lui-même, ne sont animés ni par la libido sentiendi (le sexe), ni par la libido dominandi (le pouvoir que seul donne l’argent dans les sociétés modernes), mais par la libido sciendi, (la volonté de savoir). Robert Olmstead ne déroge pas à la règle : il veut tout savoir sur le monde et il finira par tout savoir de lui-même, y compris le pire.

Le cauchemar de 1929

Cependant, l’argent et, plus largement, la question économique ne sont pas un simple ressort de l’intrigue. Ils en sont le cœur. Le tableau qui est fait d’Innsmouth est tout de contraste. Aux couleurs chatoyantes de l’opulence passée s’opposent celles, délavées, de la décrépitude présente. « Il reste plus de maisons vides que de gens », mais ce sont les belles et dignes maisons de l’aristocratie commerçante qui sont, aujourd’hui, délabrées. De même, les vastes entrepôts de briques rouges le long des quais sont à l’abandon. Quant à l’église et à la salle de réunion maçonnique, on y rend un autre culte désormais. Lovecraft, lecteur de Spengler, décrit là une parfaite pseudomorphose : les structures minérales sont toujours là, mais ceux qui les peuplent et, de ce fait, leur nature elle-même, sont radicalement altérés.

Jadis le commerce, la pêche et les conserveries de poisson avaient enrichi Innsmouth. Aujourd’hui, sans que rien ne le justifie, la ville n’est plus que l’ombre d’elle-même. L’angoisse première naît de cette ruine inexplicable. Cependant, l’affinerie Marsh, elle, semble encore en activité. N’est-ce point paradoxal alors qu’il n’y a plus ni commerce ni navires au long cours pour ramener des métaux précieux ? En tout cas, ce noyau d’activité au sein d’une ville rongée et ruinée ne paraît en rien freiner le déclin général. À croire que les bénéfices, s’il y en a, ne profitent à personne…

Quand Lovecraft écrit Le Cauchemar d’Innsmouth, l’Amérique est au début de la Grande Dépression. Pour beaucoup d’Américains, le Krach de 1929 a été une surprise totale et les événements qui ont suivi sont apparus comme dépourvus de toute logique. Les rares esprits assez lucides pour en comprendre la rationalité y ont vu la conséquence nécessaire de l’excès de crédit. Il y a eu un pacte trompeur entre l’espoir et le prêt. L’espoir a déçu, le prêt s’est réduit à la dette et les hommes ne furent plus rien qu’esclaves de la dette. Voilà ce que disaient certains contemporains. Mais, n’est-ce point de cela qu’il s’agit dans la nouvelle de Lovecraft ?

Que dit le vieux Zadok Allen à Robert Olmstead ? Que les plus riches et les plus aventureux des voyageurs et des commerçants d’Innsmouth ont conclu, dans les îles des mers du Sud, un marché avec une race amphibie très ancienne. La situation économique n’était pas bonne au lendemain de la guerre de 1812. Que demandaient-ils, au fond, ces hommes aux visages de poisson, en échange de leur or ? Qu’on expédie quelques Canaques à la mer pour qu’ils les offrent à leurs dieux ? La belle affaire ! Ce n’est pas cher payé ! Et pour le reliquat, il serait toujours temps de voir.

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Per usura n’ont les hommes de lignées pures

Mais les créatures venues de la mer avaient bien plus à vendre que leur or. Elles voulaient autre chose et étaient prêtes à donner bien plus en contrepartie. Que vos fils et nos filles s’accouplent et leur progéniture sera immortelle, dirent-elles ! Passant leurs réticences premières, non sans déchirement, non sans violence, les habitants d’Innsmouth l’acceptèrent. C’est une façon trop tentante de régler ses dettes que de les reporter sur la génération suivante et puis doit-elle se plaindre ? Elle ne sera plus humaine, certes, elle sera, par ses épousailles, éternellement liée à Dagon et à jamais tributaire de forces par nature hostiles à l’Homme puisqu’en concurrence avec lui dans le struggle for life cosmique, mais elle sera, aussi, à tout jamais libérée de la finitude humaine.

Alors, « les gens ont commencé a pus rien faire », à quoi bon ? L’or venait de la mer et achetait les complaisances ; le poisson abondait et permettait de nourrir des hommes désormais à demi-poisson ; le temps n’était plus à craindre ; l’attente n’aboutissait plus à la mort ; la vie n’était qu’un lent glissement vers le fond des océans et vers une autre façon de vivre, de rire, de tuer. Tout au plus fallait-il prêter l’oreille à la musique des abysses dans l’impatience du retour de Celui qui n’est pas mort. Car, le païen Lovecraft fait d’Innsmouth le lieu d’une attente messianique, celle d’un grand nettoyage, suivi du remplacement de la race humaine par une autre à la fois plus ancienne et plus radicalement tournée vers ce futur qui verra le retour des Grands Anciens.

Cependant, le lecteur sait depuis le début que cette échéance eschatologique sera reculée. Le narrateur échappe à la ville et dénonce ce qui s’y passe à un gouvernement qui n’hésite pas à renoncer un instant à être un État de droit en recourant à l’état d’exception.

Ce que Lovecraft décrit dans sa nouvelle, il le voit sous ses yeux. L’Italie et l’Allemagne en Europe, les États-Unis du New Deal sous ses yeux lui montrent que la crise de 1929 et, au-delà du symptôme, que la modernité ne sont pas inéluctables. Comme chez beaucoup de conservateurs, l’espérance dans l’État (dans sa violence) se substitue au pessimisme politique. Le socialisme comme organisation de l’économie apparaît, aux yeux de ces hommes, comme un moyen de préservation de l’ordre ancien — non dans sa lettre, mais dans son esprit.

Le cauchemar d’Innsmouth est celui de la dette et de son corollaire, l’abâtardissement. Seul le réveil de l’État peut nous en sauver (provisoirement), y est-il suggéré. Comment ? Par l’état d’exception, par la déportation, par l’extermination. Le massacre final n’est rien d’autre que la vision fantasmagorique d’un New Deal musclé, d’un fascisme à l’américaine. L’horreur romanesque ou politique n’a d’autre issue, pour Lovecraft, que dans cette ultime violence retardatrice et seulement retardatrice. Car le gentleman de Providence sait aussi cette profonde vérité : tout passe.

 

samedi, 22 novembre 2014

Un poète rebelle, immortel et toujours debout

EZRA POUND
 
Un poète rebelle, immortel et toujours debout

Auran Derien
Ex: http://metamag.fr

pound35.jpgAu mois de novembre 1972, disparaissait le génial Ezra Pound dont la lutte contre l’usure fut une direction fondamentale de la vie et de l’œuvre. Les Cantos prohibidos (Chants interdits) sont une création poétique admirable qu’aucun usurier ne pourra faire oublier malgré les efforts pour salir tout ce qui est beau, noble et généreux. La haine des banksters s’est traduite par la proclamation que Pound était un “malade mental” qui fut enfermé dans un établissement pour psychopathes. 

Le poète fuit le grand asile d’aliénés


Ezra Loomis Pound naquit aux Etats-Unis dans l’Etat d’Idaho en 1885 et mourut à Venise en novembre 1972. S’il a été la plus grande gloire littéraire jamais née dans ce pays, il fut le plus européen de tous ses écrivains. Peu après la fin de ses études (Université de Pennsyvania), il édita la revue “Poetry” dans laquelle il fit connaître entre autres William Butler Yeats et Thomas Stearns Eliot. Il quitta les Etats-Unis en 1911, quasi définitivement. Il y retourna contraint et forcé après la seconde guerre mondiale.


Il s’installa en Angleterre où il fonda le mouvement “imagisme” et en rédigea, en 1914, la première anthologie Hommage à Properce où il parle de la décadence de l’Empire Romain. Il prophétisa ensuite la chute de l’Empire britannique dans “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”. Il évolua lentement vers une perception “vorticiste”, mouvement qu’il opposa aux esthétiques antérieures ainsi qu’au conservatisme anglais. Tout naturellement, le vorticisme voulait être une esthétique appropriée au monde de son temps. L’œuvre principale, la plus connue, les Cantos, contient 117 poèmes dont la rédaction s’étale de 1917 à 1968. On y découvre l’envergure prodigieuse de son talent et l’immensité de sa culture. Il y utilise les principales langues européennes ainsi que le mandarin, qu’il maîtrisait au même titre que l’arabe. Quoique l’anglais prédomine, il se sert abondamment d’expressions provençales, grecques, latines, françaises, espagnoles et surtout italiennes, affirmant que certaines idées doivent être exprimées dans leur langue initiale pour ne pas les altérer. On est loin ici des camarillas contemporaines pour lesquelles la traduction mensongère est la base du commerce de niaiseries pieuses. Les mafias s’abattront sur lui, authentique génie - hors du commun - de la littérature du XXème siècle. Le motif de la haine fut que, depuis l’Italie qu’il aimait tant, il parla à Radio Rome durant la seconde guerre mondiale, incitant les USA à ne pas entrer dans le conflit puis se faisant l’avocat d’une paix honorable. Lorsque l’Italie fut envahie par l’armée US avec l’aide de la mafia italienne, Pound fut arrêté, enfermé dans une cage exposée aux intempéries. On n’oubliera pas qu’aux Etats-Unis il fut condamné à la prison pour trahison. Parce que le monde de la culture devait beaucoup au poète, quelques personnalités dont Hemingway, qu’on saluera donc au passage, obtinrent son transfert dans un hôpital psychiatrique. Lorsqu’il put enfin sortir, il abandonna les USA au profit de l’Italie qui avait été une Patrie adoptive. En arrivant il promit de ne plus faire de déclarations, après avoir affirmé que finalement il avait pu sortir d’un asile d’aliénés peuplé de 180 millions d’habitants. On se souviendra aussi qu’en descendant du bateau Christophe Colomb qui le déposa à Naples le 9 juillet 1958, il salua à la Romaine sa patrie d’adoption. 


Un écrivain maudit


Cantos_Ezra_Pound.jpgSi Pound n’est pas apprécié dans les médias, la raison en est son immense lucidité. Il a accepté la responsabilité historique d’écrire à contre courant, d’être un rebelle à temps complet. Son talent secouait la médiocrité et le mensonge. Son œuvre fonctionne comme un miroir dans lequel les trafiquants voient leur infâmie. Tout cela a été délégitimé par l’industrie du spectacle et les prédicateurs médiatiques. L’écrivain contemporain, celui pour qui les lobbys obtiendront un prix “ en souvenir de Nobel”, n’est plus qu’un propagandiste du meilleur des mondes. Pound reste l’ultime manifestation de l’esprit, incarne l’aède antique même si en ce moment les shopping center ont remplacé le forum.


Mais l’œuvre est là, les “Cantos prohibidos” contre l’usure ont été formulés, le poète est toujours debout, immortel. Il en sera ainsi jusqu’à ce que ces chants fassent tomber les murs des marchés spéculatifs, envoient les usuriers dans des marmites remplies d’eau où ils finiront en bouillie comme l’ont mérité, au cours du temps nombre, de faux-monnayeurs.

jeudi, 20 novembre 2014

The Lovecraftian Fiction of Don Webb

tumblr_lvhyw65gp41qg8i80o1_1280.jpg

Knowing All the Angles:
The Lovecraftian Fiction of Don Webb

By James J. O'Meara 

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

Don Webb
Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft [2]
New York: Hippocampus Press, 2014

“A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.” — John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

I don’t know if I am delivering cows to the slaughterhouse door or helping beautiful butterflies out of their cocoon. . . . I made simple diagrams showing all the angles. Humans picked up where they had stopped four thousand years ago.” — Don Webb, “The Megalith Plague”

4b584464f21f6a74d8dac928cde3a6ea.image.390x600.jpgDon Webb has been writing short stories, and the occasional novel, since, as a rather indifferent undergraduate at Texas Tech, he took a supposedly easy-A class in “The Science Fiction Short Story” and discovered that unlike his fellow slackers, he’d rather take the write a story option than the term paper. The story itself was equally indifferent, but by then the hook was in, a writer born.

Earlier still, as a mere sprout growing up in Texas, Webb had discovered the chilly pleasures of weird fiction, and H. P. Lovecraft in particular. So, like so many others, it was natural that he should turn his hand to tales inspired by Lovecraft and his mythos. He’s now a professor of writing at the University of Texas, and this collection brings together about thirty years’ worth of his homages to the eldritch Master, each one also dedicated to another weird writer.

Now, before you saddle up and hit the trail, heading out the other direction, expecting the literary equivalent of a Star Trek convention,[1] well, just hold your horses, pardner[2] — you should know right away that these are no ordinary, all too ordinary, works of Lovecraft pastiche.

Apart from literary polish, what sets these tales apart from others and links them all together — or manifests itself within them — is Webb’s particular take on Lovecraft and the occult in general.

Reflecting perhaps his day job as an English professor, Webb distinguishes the tragic approach to Lovecraft — epitomized by such “miserablists” as Thomas Ligotti — and the comedic (as in the Divine Comedy) — well represented by August Derleth. For the one, knowledge brings disaster and, well, misery; for the other, the officially sanctioned dogmas of revealed religion assure us that all will be set right eventually.

Webb then announces a third approach, his own — the Epic. Lovecraft characters such as Randolph Carter or Joseph Curwen “rebel[s] against cosmic injustice,” and

Brave souls [who] seek to gain entrance into a heightened realm of perception and will do so by embracing the darkness — not the darkness of Sunday school “evil” but the darkness of the unknown.

For every hundred readers thinking how dreadful it would be to have one’s brains removed by the Fungi or one’s psyche trans-temporally transposed by the Great Race, there is one who secretly wishes for it to happen.

With these bold words Webb aligns himself with those Lovecraftians who affirm that whatever the old boy thought, Wisdom is Good.[3]

For example, in “Calling Cthulhu [3],”[4] esoteric journalist Erik Davis described the then-nascent cult of pop-Cthulhu, and noted that Lovecraft’s “dread” and “horror” seemed to belong to a 19th-century materialist confronting vast new vistas opened up by science, not unlike those opened by the ’60s drug culture, as he describes it in a later article on Cthulhu porn:

In this tangy bon-bon of nihilistic materialism, Lovecraft anticipates a peculiarly modern experience of dread, one conjured not by irrational fears of the dark but rather by the speculative realism of reason itself, staring into the cosmic void. . . . This terror before the empty and ultimately unknowable universe of scientific materialism is what gives the cosmic edge to the cosmic horror that Lovecraft, more than any other writer, injected into the modern imagination (though props must be given up as well to Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, and, in the closing chapters of The Time Machine at least, H. G. Wells). While many secular people proclaim an almost childlike wonder at the mind-melting prospect of the incomprehensibly vast universe sketched out by astrophysics and bodied forth by doctored Hubble shots, Lovecraft would say that we have not really swallowed the implication of this inhuman immensity—that we have not, in other words, correlated our contents.[5]

As Webb says,

I write to create wonder, which can be ecstasy and fear or simple alienation. I write thus to heal my Gnostic soul, the alien man trapped in this world. Fortunately some others share my needs and have bought this little book. I hope I can abduct them from the workaday world into a place of weird realism.[6] I hope you won’t be quite the same when you return to your “real” life. Hail to the Ancient Dreams!

As words like ‘Gnostic’ and ‘epic’ clue us in, this is the Heroic or Dry Path of the Hermetic, or Magical, Tradition, as discussed by Baron Evola.[7] In these traditions, the pursuit of Knowledge is not a sinful urge subject to dreadful punishment, as in the Abrahamic religions Lovecraft, atheist that he is, is still influenced by,[8] but rather the essence of the Path itself.[9]

And so Webb himself is not only a teacher of writing but also a high priest of the Temple of Set, and a student of the great theorist of the Left Hand Path, Dr. Stephen A. Flowers (another Texan!).[10] His weird tales are kinda like “The Dunwich Horror” written from Wilbur’s point of view.[11]

The nature of that wisdom is also of interest. An adolescent reading of Derleth’s anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (my own first exposure to Lovecraftiana) acquainted him with

[T]he Bloch-Lovecraft sequence [of tales; i.e., Bloch‘s “The Shambler from the Stars” and Lovecraft’s response] that forever caught my mind with the Shining Trapezohedron. A gateway to “other spaces” — possibly one of the most effective symbols of cosmicism for itself. This image haunts both my fiction and my esoteric pursuits [my emphasis].

And so Webb eventually became a Knight of the Order of the Trapezoid, initiated by Dr. Stephen Flowers.

Now, the notion of the Secret being mathematics is certainly a notion Lovecraft uses as a prop in stories like “The Shambler from the Stars” and eminently in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (which features the bizarre notion of “non-Euclidean calculus”[12]. However, serious use of mathematics as a symbol, and even a method of enlightenment, goes back at least to Plato, up through Leibniz,[13] and most recently has been promoted by the endless stream of pseudepigraphical kindles from the so-called “Illuminati Conspiracy.”[14]

And it maps easily, I think, onto the Traditional metaphysics, the path of jnana, as outlined by René Guénon.[15]

So the picture that emerges is that both Webb’s take on Lovecraft, and his view of reality, are one, neither cosmic despair (Lovecraft, Ligotti, or Dawkins[16] nor blind Abrahamic “faith” (Derleth and millions of others) but optimistic enlightenment through mathematics (Guénon, The Illuminati Conspiracy, Webb).[17]

But make no mistake; these are well-written tales, not agitprop for the Illuminati; and they are delicious horror tales, with the protagonists usually meeting unfortunate ends:

Detective Sergeant Blick materialized almost a thousand feet above L.A. — “Looking Glass”

Or at the very least, they emerge with a new and uncomfortable awareness of once pleasant, ordinary things:

But I can’t quite believe in home any more. I wonder what Their thoughts are like, and some nights I wonder so long and hard that I think I might start to know.” — “Doc Corman’s Haunted Palace One Fourth of July”

I won‘t go through all 25 or so tales here, but rather suggest that you go out and buy the book and enjoy yourself; besides, there’s always the tricky thing about not revealing too much about stories that often depend on a gruesome surprise if not an outright “trick“ ending. But I will note some of my favorite tales here.

“Lovecraft’s Pillow” is perhaps intended as a bit of self-mockery, lest the author become too big for his britches. A hack horror writer (“What do you do when you have ideas for four novels and are writing your ninth?”) buys what purports to be Lovecraft’s pillow, half expecting to tap into the old boy’s dreams, but the actual transformation is very different and more substantial.

“From Mars to Providence” starts off as a Wells/Lovecraft mashup, but slowly become perhaps the best Lovecraft pastiche I’ve read — almost every line is a Lovecraft phrase, title or allusion, yet the narrative proceeds quite naturally to a twist ending that, in retrospect, is only what the title plainly promised.[18]

“The Codices” is a story I should have written at some point, taking off from the interesting fact that R. H. Barlow, one of Lovecraft’s youthful correspondents, is likely to have met William S. Burroughs when Barlow was teaching anthropology at Mexico City College while Burroughs was there studying the Mayan Codices.
Barlow couldn’t help but think about Burroughs’s ideas [“you orient yourself toward the future . . . by looking backward to . . . a time before death“] as reflecting the sort of thing that Lovecraft had written about.[19]

Alas, a private seminar with Burroughs and two of his “young, beautiful wild boys” does not end as pleasantly as they had anticipated.

Inevitably, not everything quite works. “Powers of Air and Darkness” is a sort of steam punk version of Lovecraft (itself a popular genre of Lovecraftianism these days) that despite some interesting ideas — using elements of Charles Fort (“It‘s all stockyards”), ancient astronauts and Operation Paperclip to re-vision Lovecraft’s horror of “progress” as the great parade of fin de siècle technology (“the difference engine, the X-ray, pneumatic limbs, dirigibles” etc.) being a plot by the “fungal fliers” of Pluto (see “The Whisperer in Darkness”) to exterminate mankind for their masters, the Elder Gods — is just too long and rather dull, somewhat like the Edwardian spooky tales it emulates.

But the repeated line about stockyards does tie up nicely with the next and final tale, “Casting Call” (“waiting with the other cattle,” itself an allusion to Hitchcock’s “treat them like cattle”), as well as the second tale, “The Megalith Plague,” as already quoted at the top.

In fact, there’s a nice bit linking up all the tales, as well as linking up Webb’s fiction and philosophy: just about every tale mentions angles; for while there are

. . . right angles that turn thinking into sleeping.

there are also:

Certain shapes — trapezoids in particular — obtuse angles that have a deleterious effect on mankind.

Indeed, like the narrator of zombie apocalypse “Sanctuary,”

“I guess I should have paid more attention in Mrs. Gamble’s geometry class.”

Back in “The Eldritch Evola,” I suggested that if Evola’s metaphysics sometimes sounds like Lovecraft, then rather than disparage Evola’s metaphysics we should take Lovecraft’s “fictions” more seriously. Don Webb is that rare bird, equally adept in hermetics and weird fiction, and this collection is recommended to anyone who isn’t afraid of either one.

Notes

1. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; see “Klingon Like Me” in Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica by Erik Davis (Verse Chorus Press, 2011).

2. You see, many stories take place in Texas, and, well . . . actually, no one talks that way, thank Yog Sothog. Webb’s Texas Arkham, Doublesign (as in “a town so small the “Welcome” and “Leaving” signs are on the same pole“) is full of colorful detail but none of the painful dialect attempts writers of Lovecraft’s generation indulged in. Texas is actually a pretty appropriate place for weird fiction, being, after all, the home of Lovecraft’s friend and fellow Weird Tales titan. Conan creator Robert E. Howard. Webb points out elsewhere that Texans love eccentrics and storytellers; I suspect that if Lovecraft had ever visited Howard, they would have taken to the oddball New Englander like the Colorado silver miners took to Oscar Wilde (see my “Wild Boys and Hard Men” in The Homo and the Negro [San Francisco: Counter Currents, 2012]). “Remember, Texas invented Buckminsterfullerene, which is the Texas state molecule, and Deep Fried Butter. It is hard NOT to write Weird fiction here.” — “Interview with author Don Webb” in Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 (s. l.).

3. To be distinguished from “Knowledge is Good,” the motto of Animal House’s Faber College.

4. “Calling Cthulhu: H. P. Lovecraft’s Magical Realism” in op. cit.

5. Erik Davis, “Cthulhu is not cute [4]!” Davis references the Cthulhu plushies, which turn up again in Webb’s tale “Plush Cthulhu.”

6. Referring, I assume to Graham Harman’s Weird Realism; see my review, “Lovecraft as a Heideggerian Event” here [5] and reprinted in The Eldritch Evola … & Others (San Francisco: Counter Currents, 2014).

7. In many places, but especially in The Hermetic Tradition (Inner Traditions, 1994) and Introduction to Magic (Inner Traditions, 2001).

8. For example, the original Faust tale, as opposed to Goethe’s Gnostic reworking. Webb’s tales allude to Faust a couple of times: the heroine of “Emily‘s Rose Window” muses “Dark knowledge and gold and women — who would have thought that Faust lived in the late twentieth century in Kingsport?” while a Mexican immigrant hopes to jump start his career by stealing a magical book from Forest Ackerman, thinking “All good Americans want Faust’s deal.”

9. Many have pointed out that the Dunwich tale is Lovecraft having some blasphemous fun parodying the Christ myth, but as always with blasphemy, the kick comes from the residual belief, as in the Black Mass. As I suggested in my essay “The Eldritch Evola” — here and reprinted in The Eldritch Evola … & Others — Lovecraft’s idea that our minds would be “blasted” if we ever dared to “correlate their contents” is “spooky” only on the assumption that our egoic mind is all we are; but what if the death of the ego is the birth of a new, higher consciousness, as the Hermetic or Heroic Tradition would have it?

10. His non-fiction books include Uncle Setnakt’s Guide to the Left Hand Path and The Seven Faces of Darkness.

11. In fact, Webb intersperses some of the first tales reprinted here with some blank verse poetry written by Wilbur, Lavinia, and other Dunwich characters, giving them the chance to tell their side of thing.

12. See Leslie Klinger’s discussion of what one scholar calls “Lovecraft’s pseudomathematics” in note 3 to the tale as printed in his New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Liveright, 2014).

13. In the steam punk tale “Powers of Air and Darkness” the “difference engine” is an alien-inspired tool to fool mankind into thinking in 1/0, yes/no dualities, but this is itself a Gnostic idea that relies on the notion of a higher, salvific mathematics.

14. See it all laid out most conveniently — and free! — on their website, Armageddon conspiracy.co.uk; among their kindles, the best place to start seem The God Game (The God Series, Book 1) by one Mike Hockney. [6]

15. In such works as Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrine, and above all, The Symbolism of the Cross. Guénon himself, of course, was trained as a mathematician, wrote books on calculus, and was disparaged by the more Abrahamic Traditionalists as being “an eye without a heart.”

16. Just as Evola make a three-part distinction between ordinary conscious experience, the picture unfolded by empirical science, and the higher-states of mind evoked by the Hermetic or Magical Path (see “The Nature of Initiatic Knowledge” in Introduction to Magic), so the illuminati distinguish their higher path of mathematics from both Abrahamic faith and Dawkins’ bumptious, veddy British empiricist dogma; see Richard Dawkins: The Pope of Unreason (The God Series, Book 16) by Mike Hockney.

17. “When we let the world become predictable we die a little, we become more of a machine. Conventional religion with easy explanations has the same effect as science — it removes that uncertainty that is the basis (the space if you will) that consciousness needs.” — “Author of the Week: Don Webb,” Lovecraft e-Zine, Sept. 28, 2014, here [7].

18. Those who responded with fear and loathing to my suggestion that the music of Wagner, however “beautiful” or “racially uplifting” is — judged by what might be called higher mathematical standards (metaphysics, music and mathematics being interchangeable) — spiritually enervating, might consider the Martian decadence described in this story as “the objective art of the past [such as the “mathematically perfect music of the Martians”] was increasingly replaced by an outrageous subjectivity.” Or, when reading “Emily’s Rose Window,” reflect on the trans-dimensional aliens who use the transmitted and magnified images of “beautiful” human women to torture captured enemies with their worst nightmares. The latter is also a bit of homage to Rod Serling, which also crops up when a character in “The Megalith Plague” imagines waking up in a hospital bed à la Twilight Zone‘s “Eye of the Beholder,” and become explicit in the last tale, “Casting Call,” a homage to Night Gallery.

19. Just as I have suggested that if Evola sounds like Lovecraft, we should therefore pay more attention to Lovecraft than less attention to Evola; see “The Eldritch Evola” here [8] and reprinted in The Eldritch Evola … & Others (Counter-Currents, 2014).

 


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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/11/knowing-all-the-angles-the-lovecraftian-fiction-of-don-webb/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/donwebb.jpg

[2] Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1614980845/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1614980845&linkCode=as2&tag=countecurrenp-20&linkId=ZNRUM2ICD7ZENGFP

[3] Calling Cthulhu: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.techgnosis.com%2Fchunkshow-single.php%3Fchunk%3Dchunkfrom-2005-12-13-1057-0.txt&rct=j&q=erik%20davis%20cthulhu&ei=tvM5TdH7CsWblgeT643rBQ&usg=AFQjCNEN0cnIB67UuXUWCVPt9ODqzLI6Jg&cad=rja

[4] Cthulhu is not cute: http://techgnosis.com/chunkshow-single.php?chunk=chunkfrom-2010-05-03-1521-0.txt

[5] here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/lovecraft-as-heideggerian-event/

[6] Mike Hockney.: http://www.amazon.com/Mike-Hockney/e/B004KHR7DC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

[7] here: http://lovecraftzine.com/2014/09/28/lovecraftian-weird-fiction-author-of-the-week-don-webb/

[8] here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/the-eldritch-evola/

mardi, 18 novembre 2014

Edgar Poe: "La Puissance de la Parole"

Edgar Poe: "La Puissance de la Parole"

Lu par Laurent James

vendredi, 31 octobre 2014

«Il mio amico Pound ha ragione»

«Il mio amico Pound ha ragione»


di Adriano Scianca 
Ex: http://augustomovimento.blogspot.com
 
«“Ma qvesto”,
disse il Duce, “è divertente”
afferrando il punto prima degli esteti».
 
L’incipit del canto 41 in cui Ezra Pound rievoca il suo incontro con Benito Mussolini (the Boss, nella versione originale) avvenuto esattamente 80 anni fa costituisce da sempre un vero rompicapo per gli storici e i letterati. Se la “v” in “qvesto” sembra alludere in parte alla romanità e in parte al marcato accento romagnolo di Mussolini (un particolare, quest’ultimo, che viene sottolineato proprio per segnare ulteriormente la natura popolare e popolana del capo del fascismo e la conseguente distanza tra lui e “gli esteti”), il giudizio si riferisce, come noto, alla lettura, da parte del Duce, dei primi 30 Cantos. Ma facciamo un passo indietro.
 
Informazioni di prima mano su Mussolini, al di là di ciò che il poeta leggeva nei giornali e vedeva per le strade, Pound le aveva avute da Olga Rudge, che già nel 1923 aveva suonato il violino per il leader fascista, riportandone un’opinione lusinghiera: il Capo di Stato appariva alla musicista americana come un uomo politico illuminato, amante dell’arte, che sapeva a sua volta suonare il violino e sembrava molto competente della materia per essere un profano. Tali racconti dovevano aver fatto grande presa su Pound, che da sempre auspicava una politica più attenta al mondo dell’arte e della cultura. Nei primi anni Trenta il poeta, come detto in precedenza, cominciò a muoversi per cercare di incontrare Mussolini. Anni dopo cercherà di fare altrettanto con Roosvelt, senza riuscirci. Con Mussolini dovette insistere un bel po’, ma alla fine lo incontrò (ulteriore conferma, ai suoi occhi, della superiorità dell’Italia fascista sull’America democratica), precisamente il 30 gennaio 1933, alle 17.30.
 
Il poeta portò a Mussolini una copia dei canti 1-30. Il Duce li sfogliò, lesse per un po’, poi esclamò: «È divertente». Il commento appare a prima vista naif, superficiale, quasi irridente. Tale, almeno, è sembrato negli anni ai soloni della cultura. Non così all’autore dei Cantos, che proprio a questo episodio dedicherà l’incipit del canto 41 che abbiamo già visto precedentemente. Come spiegare l’entusiasmo di Pound? I più propendono per l’accecamento puro e semplice del poeta di fronte al suo eroe, ma forse che le cose stanno diversamente. Secondo Tim Redman, infatti, Mussolini era rimasto colpito da un passaggio in cui un personaggio dei Cantos parla in dialetto e aveva chiesto di cosa si trattasse. Dopo la spiegazione, il Duce si mise a ridere e disse che la cosa era divertente. Pound rimase folgorato e il perché ce lo ha spiegato di recente la figlia Mary: «Solo pochi giorni prima Joyce si era lamentato con mio padre perché nessuno gli aveva detto che l’Ulysses era divertente. Bisogna conoscere i retroscena». Antonio Pantano, invece, ha ricondotto il divertimento di Mussolini alla comprensione del metodo poundiano per eliminare le imposte, tassando direttamente il denaro con il ben noto meccanismo della moneta prescrittibile. Eliminare le tasse: quale governante non riterrebbe questo “divertente”?
 
Nello stesso incontro, comunque, pare che Mussolini e Pound abbiano discusso di cultura cinese e del concetto confuciano del “mettere ordine nelle parole” per mettere ordine nelle idee. Al che Mussolini, evidentemente molto ben ispirato, quel giorno, chiese al poeta perché mai volesse mettere ordine nelle sue idee, confermando a Pound l’impressione di stare parlando con un uomo geniale. Idea che molti commentatori hanno giudicato ingenua, anche se uno studioso non certo fascisteggiante come Hugh Kenner ha potuto scrivere: «Nel 1933 sembrava possibile credere che Benito Mussolini comprendesse queste nozioni. Forse, in un certo senso, era così». Anche il fatto che Pound lo chiamasse “the Boss” (ma altre volte utilizzava nomignoli come “Mus” o “Ben” oppure, curiosamente, lo appellava “il toro”) non va trascurata: Pound, evidentemente, riconosceva nel capo del fascismo anche il proprio capo.
 
La convocazione dell’udienza venne appesa nello studio di Pound, mentre sulla carta da lettere finì la frase mussoliniana «la libertà è un dovere», liberty, a duty. Nel 1945, nei primi interrogatori con il comando militare americano, ricostruirà ancora una volta l’incontro con Mussolini, sbagliando la data ma aggiungendo ulteriori particolari: «Intorno al 1929, ho avuto un’udienza con Benito Mussolini che era a conoscenza del mio libro “Guido Cavalcanti” che gli avevo presentato l’anno prima. Lui pensava di discutere di quello, ma io invece gli ho sottoposto una serie di domande di argomento economico molto incalzanti». Altre richieste di colloquio finirono invece nel vuoto, spesso bloccate sul nascere dalla segreteria del Duce, decisamente poco a suo agio di fronte alla prosa creativa dei testi che il poeta continuava a inviare a Mussolini. Eppure il nome di Pound ricorre più di una volta in un testo centrale per la comprensione del pensiero del capo del fascismo: i Taccuini mussoliniani di Yvon De Begnac. Come noto si tratta della mole sterminata di appunti che il giovane giornalista conservò in occasione dei suoi colloqui con Mussolini avvenuti fra il 1934 e il 1943. Da questi taccuini avrebbe dovuto infine nascere una biografia del Duce che non vide mai la luce per le contingenze storiche, mentre gli appunti vennero in seguito pubblicati così come erano, con lunghi monologhi privi di domande sugli argomenti più disparati. E in tutto questo, come detto, compare più volte il nome di Pound. La citazione più importante recita, fra l’altro:
 
«Il mio amico Ezra Pound ha ragione. La rivoluzione è guerra all’usura. È guerra all’usura pubblica e all’usura privata. Demolisce le tattiche delle battaglie di borsa. Distrugge i parassitismi di base, sui quali i moderati costruiscono le loro fortezze. Insegna a consumare al modo giusto, secondo logica di tempo, quel che è possibile produrre. Reagisce alle altalene del tasso di sconto, che fanno la sventura di chi chiede per investire nell’industria, e aumenta il mondo del risparmio, riducendone il coraggio, contraendone la volontà di ascesa, incrementandone la sfiducia nell’oggi, che è più letale ancora della sfiducia nel domani. Allorché il mio amico Ezra Pound mi donò le sue “considerazioni” sull’usura, mi disse che il potere non è del danaro, o del danaro soltanto, ma dell’usura soltanto, del danaro che produce danaro, che produce soltanto danaro, che non salva nessuno di noi, che lancia noi deboli nel gorgo dalla cui corrente altro danaro verrà espresso, come supremo male del mondo. Aggiunse in quel suo italiano, gaelico e slanghistico, infarcito di arcaismi tratti da Dante e dai cronachisti del trecento, che il potere del danaro e tutti gli uomini di questo potere regnano su un mondo del quale hanno monetizzato il cervello e trasformato la coscienza in lenzuoli di banconote. Il danaro che produce danaro. La formula del mio amico Ezra Pound riassume la spaventosa condizione del nostro tempo. Il danaro non si consuma. Regge al contatto dell’umanità. Nulla cede delle proprie qualità deteriori. Contamina peggiorandoci in ragione della continua salita del suo corso tra i banchi e le grida della borsa nelle cui caverne l’umano viene, inesorabilmente, macinato. Il mio amico Pound ha le qualità del predicatore cui è nota la tempesta dell’anno mille, dell’anno “n volte mille” sempre alle porte della nostra casa di dannati all’autodistruzione. La lava del denaro, infuocata e onnivora, scende dalla montagna che il cielo ha lanciato contro di noi, mi ha detto il mio amico Pound; e nessuno, tra noi, si salverà. Il mio amico Pound ha continuato con voi, come mi avete detto, nella casa romana dello scrittore di cose navali Ubaldo degli Uberti, l’analisi di come il danaro produce soltanto danaro, e non beni che sollevino il nostro spirito dalla palude nella quale il suo potere ci ha immerso. Non è ossessione la sua. Nessun uomo saggio, se ancora ne esistono, ha elementi per dichiarare esito di pericolosa paranoia il suo vedere, tra i blocchi di palazzi di Wall Street e tra le stanze dei banchieri della City, le pareti indistruttibili dell’inferno di oggi. I Kahn, i Morgan, i Morgenthau, i Toeplitz di tutte le terre egli vede alla testa dell’armata dell’oro. Pound piange i morti che quell’esercito fece. E vorrebbe sottrarre a ogni pericolo tutti noi esposti alla furia del potere dell’oro. Con il vostro amico Pound ho parlato di quello che Peguy ha scritto contro il potere dell’oro. Conosce quasi a memoria quelle pagine. Ne recita brani interi, senza dimenticarne alcuna parola. Il suo francese risale agli anni parigini in cui la gente di New York, di Boston, emigrata a Parigi, pensava ancora che l’occidente fosse fra noi. Illusa, quella gente, che scegliendo Parigi, il potere dell’oro sarebbe andato per stracci, almeno per questi migranti della letteratura. È, quel francese di Pound, come un prodotto del passato, come una denuncia del troppo che stiamo dimenticando, tutti noi che corriamo il rischio, o che già lo abbiamo corso, di finire maciullati dal potere dell’oro».

 

jeudi, 16 octobre 2014

Ezra Pound on Endless Trial

Pound-Ezra_Erker-Verlag_St-Gallen.jpg

Ezra Pound on Endless Trial

By Alex Fontana casillo

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

Robert Casillo
The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound [2]
Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

Robert Casillo’s The Genealogy of Demons is unique in Pound studies because the explicit purpose of it is to give critical insight into Pound’s anti-Semitism, and it accomplishes this by way of multiple techniques, which it must employ, because Pound’s anti-Semitism is prismatic. A great many games are played herein to discredit Pound’s views on the Jews, although this is sophistic liberal revisionism and intellectual masturbation at a very high level. For example: “One might view Pound’s anti-Semitism as in part a revolt against the punitive parental rival and superego, a conflict between the religion of the forbidding father Jehovah and that of the messianic son” (Casillo, p. 287).

Casillo often relies on Freudian psycho-babble. Advanced Frankfurt School techniques are not the limit of his probing deconstruction, but they are the preferred method. Nevertheless one can learn much from Casillo’s efforts — specifically his work on detailing the thought of French fellow travelers Charles Maurras and Maurice Bardèche. The earlier chapters are especially rewarding as they are the prologue to the trial, thus they are concerned with establishing the relevant background information, the intellectual anti-Semitic precedents and proto-fascistic streams of thought that foreshadowed and shaped Pound’s thinking. The later chapters then seek to wrap the a priori guilty verdict — of Pound’s insistent ‘demonological’ anti-Semitism — in a nice bow.

As a Ph.D. in literature, you might expect Casillo to shy away from social-historical analysis of the validity of anti-Semitism and instead rely upon highly creative abstract devices to explain away this “irrational phenomenon” — and you would be right. For that is exactly the type of analysis that Casillo employs. Never does Casillo ask it it is possible that Pound blamed usury first and those who monopolized the mechanism secondly, or if, by way of studying the Social Credit economic system of Major C. H. Douglas, Pound was led to what Jonathan Bowden delightfully called the opposite of philo-Semitism. For Casillo, as for those who refuse to awaken to the reality of Jewish subversion and usury, there is a missing link.

By way of illustration, take a brief snapshot of the current situation in Argentina, which I plan on detailing in a forthcoming essay for Counter-Currents. While Argentina defaulted on $81 billion in 2001, as a result of President Menem’s neoliberal (laissez-faire) reforms, which allowed for the IMF and World Bank to secure short-term investments with the accompanying liberalizing policies of privatizing state enterprises, and constriction of government monetary policy. All this really means is that by breaking down the autarky of the nationalist-socialist strain of Argentina — most fully expressed in Peronism — the IMF and the World Bank enabled the country to slide $155 billion dollars in debt through securing short-term loans which artificially inflated the value of the Peso and simultaneously disabled government control on how the loans could be withdrawn. Essentially, foreign investors poured their money into Argentina only to pull the rug out when the dividends reached a certain level of profitability. This left bonds on the market at heavily discounted prices, which the vulture capitalists (economic terrorists) then acquired.

When we observe the facts, that the debt holders came forward to claim their pound of prime triple A Argentinian flesh, it was none other than the usual suspects: Paul Elliott Singer, a real New York Jew and CEO of Elliott Management Corp, who is described by Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez as a “vulture capitalist” and whose “principal investment strategy is buying distressed debt cheaply and selling it at a profit or suing for full payment,”[1] and another tribesman Mark Brodsky of Aureilus Capital. Fellow tribesman George Soros has emerged as another of the bond buyers who is suing BNY Mellon for withholding funds from the initial settlement with Argentina. Of course calling the whole thing a criminal enterprise, which will negatively impact millions of Argentinians for generations and enrich a few investors like Soros and Singer, is beyond the pale. But not to worry, because the tribe has one of their own inside: Axel Kicillof, the economic minister of Argentina, overseeing the whole transaction of a nation’s wealth into the pockets of some Jewish hedge fund types. It is hard to avoid conclusion that the facts are anti-Semitic.

Unsurprisingly, israelnationalnews.com is quick to join a growing cacophony blaming the victim, Argentina, for the country’s woes.[2] This is not unlike the NSDAP’s post-WWI claim that Germany was stabbed in the back by Jewish financiers, who sought to gain economic leverage over the nation by plundering it into debt and destabilizing the Second Reich. But the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy is, according to the Frankfurt School analysis, the result of projection and scapegoating by the German people because of their loss in the war. Never mind that Bavaria fell to the Reds in 1919, first under a Jewish socialist in Kurt Eisner then into a bloody regime of Bolsheviks under the Jew Eugen Levine, with fellow tribesmen Ernst Toller and Gustav Landaver filling out the vanguard, murdering Countess Heila von Westarp [3] and Prince Gustav of Thurn and Taxis [4], among others. The strategy detailed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which many commentators have suggested that despite being a “forgery” conforms to reality. But then the facts are anti-Semitic!

Now the Casillo types would point to these assertions of a Jewish strategy of domination as fanatical delusions, processes of psychological projection and scapegoating for failed artistic types (Pound and a certain Austrian corporal come to mind). Liberals (I use the term broadly) like to play the individualist card and don’t employ notions of groups or peoples or essences (stereotypes), which to them seems a highly barbaric and unenlightened form of thinking. Singer, Brodsky, and Soros are individuals who conform to negative stereotypes and not representatives of the Jewish people as a whole — while the Jews refuse to hold their own to the fire. Pound, however, understood the distinction between the “big Kikes” and the “little Yids” but still managed to see the forest as well as the trees.

Individualism vs. collectivism is the great divide between the Semitic Freud and the European Jung. Jung was able to image a collective unconscious that is a social-historical aspect of the psyche, while Freud could only imagine the isolated individual struggling with his neurosis. Jung was social, while Freud was anti-social. Pound sides with Jung, who, like Pound, would likely look upon individual Jewish usurers — Rothschilds, Soros, Kuhn, Warburgs, Sachs, etc. — and see not only individuals but archetypes or mythologized symbols of Jewish subversion of Western civilization as it has morphed into different forms through the centuries. The essence is the constant, or as Jung would write: “Because the behavior of a race takes on its specific character from its underlying images, we can speak of an archetype.”[3]

But Pound was not an individualist thinker. He did not see himself or others as isolated individuals concerned only with their own morality and conscience. Pound was a European thinker, whose thought worked in the poetic language of myth and tradition: “The Pound-Eliot ‘revolution’ was a return to the past in order to renew the links connecting past and present.”[4] Pound was a holistic thinker who entertained a certain amount of essentialism. He concerned himself with European civilization as a living, breathing entity entirely connected to the smallest of its parts, and thus objected to forces undermining its coherence. Thus, his identification of the Jews as bacillus and related imagery is a “natural” thought within the processes of racial and cultural consciousness. Correspondingly, Pound followed “Douglas’s idea that the basis of credit is social and not private.”[5]

The trick of the liberal education/indoctrination establishment today is to isolate the individual from these modes of thinking, to atomize him as a neurotic member of a diffused society – to put him on Freud’s chaise-lounge (or in a psychiatric ward in St. Elizabeths mental hospital) while the Schiffs, Warburgs, Soros, et al. plunder the public purse. Pound sought to bring the diffusion and subsequent confusion together under a fascism which Europe would be reborn (experience a renaissance) under a more unified and pagan directive.

Casillo classifies Pound’s anti-Semitism as a result of personal “pressures” and as a “poetic strategy.” This discards all of Pound’s factual, historical, social, cultural, and spiritual reasons. Pound’s anti-Semitism is thus divorced from any real manifestation of Jewish misconduct and instead grafted onto Pound’s deficient personality complex. Pound is engaged in projecting his own short-coming onto the Jews.

Pound’s anti-Semitism was multifaceted and not just limited to economic exploitation. Pound was a man of the West. He felt not just an identity with the West but a moral responsibility for its preservation. This is “totalitarianism” as viewed by a Confucian: “having a sense of responsibility” and “thinking of the whole social order” and “creating a balanced system” (Casillo, p. 128). He saw our civilization through a fascist lens as “a supra individual spiritual entity capable of infusing with heroism and purpose the lives of those who fight for it.”[6] It is essential to understand these traditional holistic foundations of Pound’s anti-Semitism.

As a general rule, whenever Casillo presents us with a “paradox” of Pound’s or fascist thinking it only appears paradoxical upon willful under-examination of their underlying principles. The Genealogy of Demons represents the most “rigorous” — i.e., niggling — attempt to deconstruct Ezra Pound’s fact-based political philosophy into “thoroughly arbitrary construct” and a psychological malfunction. But it has to be. Because the facts are anti-Semitic.

Notes

1. Michael Sheehan, “Vulture funds – the key players,” [5] The Guardian [6] (London).

2. Gil Ronen, “Argentina’s President Sees Jewish Conspiracy?”http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/185676 [7].

3. http://www.american-buddha.com/nazi.wotancarljung.htm [8]

4. Stock, Poet in Exile, p. 30. Quoted in Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right: Resisting Decadence (San Francisco: Counter-Currents Pub, 2012), p. 98.

5. Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 69.

6. Roger Griffin, Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 43.

 


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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/10/ezra-pound-on-endless-trial/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/casillo.jpg

[2] The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810107104/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0810107104&linkCode=as2&tag=countecurrenp-20&linkId=NNXI2W5SHHID6ATP

[3] Heila von Westarp: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Heila_von_Westarp&action=edit&redlink=1

[4] Prince Gustav of Thurn and Taxis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Gustav_of_Thurn_and_Taxis

[5] “Vulture funds – the key players,”: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/nov/15/vulture-funds-key-players?intcmp=122

[6] The Guardian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian

[7] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/185676: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/185676

[8] http://www.american-buddha.com/nazi.wotancarljung.htm: http://www.american-buddha.com/nazi.wotancarljung.htm

jeudi, 11 septembre 2014

Pound poeta

samedi, 28 juin 2014

Le cauchemar climatisé selon Henry Miller (1940)

Le cauchemar climatisé selon Henry Miller (1940)

henry-miller.jpg« Le spectacle le plus pitoyable, c’est celui de toutes ces voitures garées devant les usines et les aciéries. L’automobile représente à mes yeux le symbole même du faux-semblant et de l’illusion. Elles sont là, par milliers et par milliers, dans une telle profusion que personne, semble-t-il, n’est trop pauvre pour en posséder une. D’Europe, d’Asie, d’Afrique, les masses ouvrières tournent des regards envieux vers ce paradis ou le prolétaire s e rend à son travail en automobile. Quel pays merveilleux ce doit être, se disent-ils ! (Du moins nous plaisons nous à penser que c’est cela qu’ils se disent !) Mais ils ne demandent jamais de quel prix se paie ce privilège. Ils ne savent pas que quand l’ouvrier américain descend de son étincelant chariot métallique, il se donne corps et âme au travail le plus abêtissant que puisse accomplir un homme. Ils ne se rendent pas compte que même quand on travaille dans les meilleures conditions possibles, on peut très bien abdiquer tous ses droits d’être humain. Ils ne savent pas que (en américain) les meilleures conditions possibles cela signifie les plus gros bénéfices pour le patron, la plus totale servitude pour le travailleur, la pire tromperie pour le public en général. Ils voient une magnifique voiture brillante de tous ses chromes et qui ronronne comme un chat ; ils voient d’interminables routes macadamisées si lisses et si impeccables que le conducteur a du mal à ne pas s’endormir ; ils voient des cinémas qui ont des airs de palaces, des grands magasins aux mannequins vêtus comme des princesses. Ils voient la peinture et le chromé, les babioles, les ustensiles de toute sorte, le luxe ; ils ne voient pas l’amertume des cœurs, le scepticisme, le cynisme, le vide, la stérilité, l’absolu désespoir qui ronge l’ouvrier américain. Et d’ailleurs, ils ne veulent pas voir tout cela : ils sont assez malheureux eux-mêmes. Ce qu’ils veulent, c’est en sortir ! Ils veulent le confort, l’agrément, le luxe qui portent en eux les germes de la mort. Et ils marchent sur nos traces, aveuglément, sans réfléchir. »


Henri Miller, Le cauchemar climatisé, 1940.

lundi, 26 mai 2014

Jeff Frankas’ De-World

Jeff Frankas’ De-World

By James J. O'Meara

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

big_1671Jeff Frankas
De-World
Amazon Kindle, $2.99

“The world today is nothing more than a world built on lies, illusions, and false narratives. The so-called masters of governance and economics feed the masses events based off their own narratives seeking to have them believe whatever it is they want them to believe.”[1]

De-World is Jeff Frankas’s first novel, and it’s self-published. Ordinarily, these would be signals to run for the hills. Like most stereotypes, there’s some solid truth behind that, but it’s my job as your Trusted Reviewer to let you know when exceptions should be made, and this is one of those times.

De-World takes place some years after a mini-sub in the Potomac takes out Washington with a mini-nuke. The reconstruction of the government in Denver gives The Movement their chance to shit-can the moldy old Constitution and let the creepy old America of Hate just die, replaced by a new America of love and equality, whose rules are embodied in a new document, The Sanct. It’s kinda like you woke up to find Amy Goodman is absolute ruler.

The new reality is constantly delivered and promoted by the latest communications technologies, networked or implanted. “People need to hear what they want to hear.” The foolish oldsters who cling to their guns and God and still think elections matter are sneeringly known as “derelicans.” Our boy Geroy is an ambitious Federal Teacher who thinks his new job at De-World, the company that manufactures the new reality and massages the messages into the masses is the next step in his advancing career. But things, as they say, are not what they seem. Truth really is Hate.

Frankas claims to be “a part of the group of emerging New Right authors” and that his book is “an expression of the emerging New Right pop literature style, displaying a unique glimpse into the next America,” but don’t let all that frighten you. There’s no heavy-handed symbolism or didacticism — none at all, in fact — nor does the author have the Answer or a Plan. And the writing makes no attempt to emulate Trollope or some other model from the Good Old Days. These two points — New Right sensibility and New Right style — are connected with the two hurdles a “futuristic” novel must overcome, and Frankas clears both.

First, the language problem. The author has to suggest, with more or less subtlety, that this is, of course, the Future. Languages evolve, slang goes in and out of fashion, and new developments in technology and elsewhere in culture lead to plenty of new vocab. The lazy way is some variation of “space X.”[2] Anthony Burgess is the gold standard here, A Clockwork Orange going almost but not quite too far in its Joycean game, using barbarous adaptations of Russian to suggest a post-Cold War world where the economic and cultural differences have been drowned rather than overcome.[3]

Frankas succeeds by crafting a believable mashup of entertainment jargon, Techno-hip babble, and the frankly infantile. HOM (home online monitor, government issued and controlled, of course) where you can watch “sodies” (although I might have preferred “sods”) of your favorite shows, perhaps augmented by pulse screamers (legal amphetamine) and then polishing off the night with Luciax (prescription lucid dreams). Rivetheads are the new wave of state bureaucrats — “know the rivethead” as Frank Herbert might say, “by his glossy black Mohawk.” The learning curve is a bit steep but not imposingly so, and Frankas has even provided a little YouTube tutorial [3] to get you up to speed.

Other coinages suggest the mentality of the new, post-Hate America. The homeless are now “vagwalkers,” free to roam the walled-off “post-funct zones”; immigrants are “improve settlers”; both types might be qualified as “wayward,” meaning what we might call “criminal.”

de_world_cover3 [4]These words suggest the smarmy, warm and snuggly nature of post-Hate America, which gets us to the second hurdle, constructing a believable development of our current situation. The great problem here is imagining the Left’s tyranny as some kind of “liberal fascism” — i.e., buying right into the Left’s basic mind control device: fascism as the greatest imaginable evil. Neocons and talk radio “conservatives” always fall into this: “jackbooted” Feds, “barbed wire FEMA camps,” “Mussolini would call bailing out GM just his kind of fascism,” etc. Baby Neocon Joshua Goldberg even wrote a whole treatise on the subject — liberals are so evil, they’re nothing but . . . fascists!

Frankas gets it right: the liberal future is endless bureaucracy, endless red tape, and of course endless control. Not Nietzsche’s Superman, however distorted, but his Last Man, seeking nothing but comfort and pleasure, and actually welcoming anyone willing to take charge and make things better.

This is perhaps best illustrated by an early scene that at first might seem a bit unnecessary; getting to an event in Denver, Geroy needs to take a plane. Anyone familiar with post-9/11 hassles can imagine what air travel would be like after Washington is nuked, and that leads to us to a low-key but hilarious airport interrogation at the hands of a barely functionally literate Third World female FSA goon. It perfectly encapsulates the mind-bendingly irritating and banal nature of life in Good America.

This is how Frankas’s New Right — I would prefer to say, alt-Right — sensibility helps him craft a dystopian future that’s more believable than the usual Right-wing fantasies. Now, to get back to New Right style, it’s future oriented pop rather than backward glancing establishment. Style and sensibility come together when this boring, over-controlled future seems to lead out protagonist to space out periodically, represented by interludes in which a kind of computer mini-program or script takes over the narration. I thought this was an interesting reiteration of the “Penny Arcade Peepshow” routines that are interspersed throughout Burrough’s The Wild Boys, serving, I think, the same function — suggesting ways in which the script, as both authors would call it, can be subverted from within, challenging the illusion of Total Control.

If I have any real problem with the book, it is, at the risk of sounding rather PC myself, the lack of female characters. There are really only two, admittedly playing major roles, but definitely coming out of the Emma Peel/Trinity/Agent Scully realm of adolescent fantasy, right down to the preference for wardrobe of the leather, catsuit and high heeled boots variety. Even “in black camo. It makes her a little scruffier, more in command of the task at hand. The rugged pin-up, solution can-do woman on the offensive.”

Not that I have any problem with that myself — like the jackbooted Feds, it’s more evidence that, as Jonathan Bowen has observed, the Right retains its hold on the unconscious — but it seems out of place in the overly maternal world of the Left. If Amy Goodman were President, would the Veep travel around with his own squad of Solid Gold Dancers, as the grotesque Samoan Veep does here?

On the other hand, Geroy is an interesting, though ultimately repulsive, character, rather than the dull ciphers they usually are (hello, Neo?). For one thing, he has an odd sense of fashion and design, that crops up in his thoughts, habitually turning to the question of his re-worked backsplash, or whether visitors find his new prints banal. He knows precisely what kind of chair he’s in at any time.

He’s not so much metro-sexual — Frankas makes his interest in women clear (“I see determination. I see honesty. I see cleavage.”) but rather an interesting mutation resulting from several generations of exposure to DIY design and home improvement cable shows. For Geroy and the other TV-mutated Leftists of our time, it’s all about Me, as he frankly admits over and over.[4] It makes him the ideal candidate for Operation Mirror Image — like Manhunter’s Tooth Fairy, what feeds his fantasy is what he sees reflected in the eyes around him, despite his frequent attacks of scopophobia– which is also his fitting punishment.

It also makes him far more effective as a first person narrator; as he says, “I notice things.” But then, “Everyone notices something. The real art is getting them to notice forever, to stay with it, coming away awestruck with a lasting impression.”

I’d say Frankas has succeeded at that, too, crafting a kind of fusion of Brave New World, Neuromancer, and The Man in the High Castle. He deserves your notice.

Notes

1. “The Great Forest of the Overman: Dismantling the Illusion from Within” by Conor Wrigley at Aristokratia, here [5].

2. Duly noted on MST3k, “Manhunt in Space” : Joel: “Movies like this are always trying to show how futuristic they are by putting the word ‘space’ in front of everything.” For an exhaustive listing of the “Space X” trope, see TVTropes, here [6].

3. Close attention to Kubrick’s film shows he gets it too — the Top Ten chart Alex views (or viddies) lacks the cliché “Space Disco” or “Gas Music from Jupiter” nonsense, instead featuring Mungo Jerry’s recent hit “In the Summertime”; Alex’s droogs turned cops wear “E[lizabeth] R[egina] II” badges. Kubrick clearly intends the film to take place a few years, not decades or centuries, after 1972; though even he likely didn’t think Elizabeth would still be around in 2014.

4. Identifying an approaching thug’s suit as “probably Versace” is so odd that it must link him, I think, to that other post-modern airhead, the protagonist of Showgirls whose name — Nomi, get it? — suggests that there is less to Geroy’s “Me” than he thinks.


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URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/big_1671.jpg

[2] De-World: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00K5HGM6E/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00K5HGM6E&linkCode=as2&tag=countecurrenp-20&linkId=DPBDJG5Z546YHHQA

[3] YouTube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GklQZF562dM

[4] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/de_world_cover3.jpg

[5] here: http://www.aristokratia.info/the-great-forest-of-the-overman.html

[6] here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceX

mercredi, 23 avril 2014

"Beauty is difficult"

samedi, 30 novembre 2013

Ezra la Surf

lundi, 28 octobre 2013

ELEMENTOS Nº 55. EZRA POUND. LOCURA CONTRA LA USURA

ELEMENTOS Nº 55. EZRA POUND. LOCURA CONTRA LA USURA

 
 
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Sumario.-



Ezra Pound. Reseña biográfica, por Denes Martos

Ezra Pound, un poeta del siglo XX, por Richard Avedon

Ezra Pound: los cantos y la usura, por José Luis Ontiveros

Ezra Pound. La voz de Europa, por Joaquín Bochaca

Ezra Pound: santo laico, poeta loco, por Manuel Vicent

La radicalidad poética de Ezra Pound, por Mariano Antolin Rato

Ezra Pound, en sus ideas difíciles, por Manuel Domingo y José Manuel Infiesta

Espacio y Tiempo en Pound, por Vintila Horia

Goces subterráneos: Ezra Pound y la poiesis ambigua de la imagen, por Kathryn Stergiopoulos

Ezra Pound y la crítica, por José Luis Ontiveros

Ezra Pound: Vanguardia y Fascismo, por Nicolás González Varela

Ezra Pound, filósofo de taberna, por Samuel Putnam

Ezra Pound y el Bel Esprit, por Ernest Hemingway

Ezra Pound y Neruda, por José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois

Pound: la música de las palabras, por Héctor Alvarez Castillo

Sobre un poema de Ezra Pound, por Mariano Pérez Carrasco

Apuntes sobre Pound y el fascismo, por Claudio Quarantotto

Ezra Pound, la última entrevista, por Grazia Livi
 

samedi, 19 octobre 2013

Sixth Annual H.L. Mencken Club Conference

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The Sixth Annual H.L. Mencken Club Conference

Decadence

MER_Mencken.jpgNovember 1-3, 2013

 

Friday, November 1

5:00-7:00 PM - Registration

7:00-10:00 PM - Banquet

Introduction - Richard Spencer

Presidential Address - Paul Gottfried

Life on the Traditionalist Fringe - Tito Perdue

 

Saturday, November 2nd

9:00-10:15 AM - Panel 1: Decadence and the Family

Moderator: Byron Roth

Dysgenics and Genetic Decline - Henry Harpending

The War on Masculinity and the Traditional Family - Steven Baskerville

10:45 AM – 12:00 PM - Panel 2: Social Decadence

Moderator: Keith Preston

The “Inclusion” Obsession - James Kalb

In Defense of Decadence - Richard Spencer

An Introduction to Decadence - Thomas Bertonneau

In-Defense-of-Women.jpg12:30-2:00 PM - Lunch

The Normalization of Perversity - Special Guest

2:30-4:00 PM - Panel 3: Political Decadence

Moderator: Robert Weissberg

Decadence and Democracy - Michael Hart

The End of Citizenship - Carl Horowitz

Politics and Intelligence - John Derbyshire

7:00-10:00 PM - Banquet: Thrown off the Bus

William Regnery, John Derbyshire, Paul Gottfried, Robert Weissberg

 

Saturday, November 3rd

9:00-11:00 AM - Breakfast for H.L. Mencken Club Members Only

 

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Speaker Biographies

 

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Steven Baskerville

Stephen Baskerville is Associate Professor of Government at Patrick Henry College and Research Fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, the Independent Institute, and the Inter-American Institute.  He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and has taught political science and international affairs at Howard University, Palacky University in the Czech Republic, and most recently as a visiting Fulbright scholar at the Russian National University for the Humanities. More recently, he has turned his full attention to the politics of the family in global perspective, and his most recenty book is Taken Into Custody: The War against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House, 2007).

Thomas Bertonneau, visiting Professor of English at the State University of New York College, Oswego, New York.  He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. He has contributed to numerous journals and websites including Alternative Right, and is co-author of The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction.

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Thomas Bertonneau

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John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire is a mathematician and cultural commentator. He is the author of several other books including Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (2003). He writes for VDare.com and TakiMag.com.

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Paul Gottfried is the President and Co-founder of the H.L. Mencken Club, and the author of nine books including Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America (2012)

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Paul Gottfried

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Henry Harpending

Henry Harpending is distinguished professor of anthropology and Thomas Chair at the University of Utah, and co-author of the book The 10,000 Year Explosion (2009). Together with Gregory Cochran, he contributes to the blog “West Hunter“.

Michael Hart is the author of three books on history, various scientific papers, and controversial articles on various other subjects. His best known book is The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. His most recent book is The Newon Awards: A History of Genius in Science and Technology , published this year by Washington Summit Publishers.

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Michael Hart

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Carl Horowitz

Carl F. Horowitz is affiliated with the National Legal and Policy Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting ethics and accountability in public life. He holds a Ph.D. in urban planning, and specializes in labor, immigration and housing policy issues. Previously, he had been Washington correspondent with Investor’s Business Daily, housing and urban affairs policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation, and assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Jim Kalb is a lawyer (J.D., Yale Law School) and author, The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisatorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command (2008). His latest book is Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime Is Flattening America and the West and What to Do about It .

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James Kalb

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Tito Perdue 

Tito Perdue is the author of several works of fiction. He has been dubbed “one of the most important contemporary Southern writers” by the New York Press, and his iconic character Lee Pefley has been called “a reactionary snob” by Publisher’s Weekly.

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Keith Preston is the chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com. He was awarded the 2008 Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize by the United Kingdom’s Libertarian Alliance for his essay, “Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy.”

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Keith Preston

William Regnery is the founder of the Charles Martel society, publisher of The Occidental Quarterly and a past chairman of the National Policy Institute, which he co-founded with Sam Francis.

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Byron Roth is Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Dowling College and is author, most recently, of The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature.  His work has appeared in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Public Interest, Academic Questions, and Encounter. His books include, Decision Making: Its Logic and Practice, co-authored with John D. Mullen and Prescription for Failure: Race Relations in the Age of Social Science.

Richard Spencer is a former assistant editor at The American Conservative and Executive Editor at Taki’s Magazine (takimag.com); he was the founder and Editor of AlternativeRight.com (2010-2012). Currently, he is President and Director of the National Policy Institute and Washington Summit Publishing and Editor of Radix Journal.

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Richard Spencer

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Robert Weissberg

Robert Weissberg is author of Pernicious Tolerance  and other books including Bad Students, not Bad Schools (2012). He is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Illinois

 

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mardi, 10 septembre 2013

The Gentleman from Providence

The Gentleman from Providence

By Alex Kurtagić

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

iap

S. T. Joshi
I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft [2]
2 vols.
New York: Hippocampus Press, 2012

When it comes to a truly comprehensive biography of Howard Philip Lovecraft, one cannot do better than S. T. Joshi’s I am Providence, a 2 volume, 1,000-page, 500,000-word mammoth of a book that aims to cover everything there is to know about the American master of the weird tale.

As with Mark Finn, whose biography of Howard I reviewed recently, it would seem that L. Sprague de Camp was what spurred Joshi into action: after reading the latter’s Lovecraft: A Biography upon initial publication in 1975, Joshi dedicated his life thereafter to the study of the author from Providence. His choice of university was dictated by its holding the Lovecraft manuscript collection of the John Hay Library. And when he discovered that At the Mountains of Madness, his favourite Lovecraft story, contained no less than 1,500 textual errors, he devoted the ensuing years to tracking down and examining manuscripts and early publications in order to determine the textual history of the work and make possible a corrected edition of Lovecraft’s collected fiction, “revisions,” and other writings. What we have here, you may confidently conclude, is the product of decades of fanaticism and obsessive investigation.

Lovecraft was born in 1890, into a conservative upper middle class family, in Providence, Rhode Island. His father, Winfield, was a travelling salesman, employed by Gorham & Co., Silversmiths, and his mother, Sarah, could trace her ancestry back to the arrival of George Phillips to Massachusetts in 1630. His parents married in their thirties.

The young Lovecraft was talented, intellectually curious, and precocious, able to recite poetry by age two, and to read by age three. Growing up at a time when school was not compulsory, Lovecraft would not be enrolled in one until he was eight years of age and his attendance would be sporadic, possibly due to a nervous complaint and / or psychosomatic condition. But he was well ahead of his coevals in any event, having been exposed, and thereafter enjoyed ready access, to the best of classical and English literature. From Lovecraft’s perspective, this meant 17th and early 18th century prose and poetry, and, indeed, so steeped was he in the canonical literature from this period that he regarded its style of writing not only the finest ever achieved, but, for him, the norm. In the process, he also absorbed some of the archaic tastes and sensibilities permeating this literature, which would subsequently be reflected in his writing, speech, and attitudes, fundamentally aristocratic and at odds with the 20th century. What is more, Lovecraft was never denied anything he may have needed in the pursuit of his intellectual development, be it a chemistry set, a telescope, or printing equipment, so he became knowledgeable enough on these topics, and particularly his passion, astronomy, to contribute articles to a local publication from an early age. He also regularly produced—while still in infancy—his own amateur scientific journals, many of which still survive and were personally examined by Joshi for this biography. Thus, from early on, Lovecraft, a somewhat lonely boy with a charmed boyhood, was committed to a life entirely of the mind.

With such beginnings, it would appear to a casual observer that Lovecraft was well-equipped to become a success in life. But, instead, in adulthood he experienced ever-worsening poverty, squalor, and, though well known for a period within the specialised milieu of amateur publishing, growing professional obscurity. That his legacy has endured owes—besides to the intrinsic value of his works—perhaps in a not insignificant measure to his having been a prodigous correspondent: it has been estimated that throughout the course of his life Lovecraft may have written as many as 100,000 letters (only about 20,000 of which survive), and these were not hastily penned missives, as can be seen in the many excerpts herein presented, but thoughtful communications, sometimes of up to 30 pages in length, which are works of literatue in themselves.

In examining his overall trajectory, we can identify a number of negative vectors early on. The loss of his father, who, following a psychotic episode and permanent committal to a local hospital, suffering from what Joshi presumes to have been syphilis, meant that, from 1893, Lovecraft passed into the care of his mother, aunts, and his maternal grandfather. Whipple van Buren Phillips, a wealthy businessman, proved a positive influence, but died in 1904, and, his estate being poorly managed, this eventually forced the family to downsize. This badly affected the young Lovecraft, to the point that he briefly contemplated suicide. He was eventually dissuaded by his own intellectual curiosity and love of learning.

In 1908, just prior to his high school graduation, Lovecraft suffered a nervous breakdown. Joshi speculates that failure to master higher mathematics may have been a factor, since Lovecraft’s ambition was to become a professional astronomer. (Failure to master meant not getting straight As, but, among the As, a few A-s and Bs.) Whatever its cause, the breakdown prevented Lovecraft from obtaining his diploma, a fact he would later conceal or minimise. Lovecraft then went into seclusion—hikikomori, as it would be called today—in which condition he remained for five years, mostly reading and writing poetry. Joshi expresses alarm at the sheer volume of reading undertaken by Lovecraft during this period, a large portion of it consisting of magazines.

Lovecraft’s re-emergence owes to his irritation with a pulp author, Fred Jackson, whose stories in Argosy magazine he found maudlin, mediocre, and irritating. His letter was published in the magazine, whereby it detonated an opinionated debate. When Lovecraft’s expressed view led to attacks, he responded in lofty and witty verse, thus instigating a months-long war—in archaic rhyme—in the letters’ page. This got him noticed by the president of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), Edward F. Daas, who invited Lovecraft to join. This inaugurated Lovecraft’s amateur career, which led to his return to fiction—something he had dabbled in years before—and, by 1919, to his first commerically published work. During his early years in amateurdom, Lovecraft would also produce his own literary journal, The Conservative, a publication that truly lived up to its name and that has only recently been reprinted by Arktos in unabridged form.

Throughout this period Lovecraft continued to live with his mother, who sustained them both off an ever-shrinking inheritance. Trapped between the expectations of her class and dwindling resources, she grew progressively more neurotic and unstable. She already had an unheathily close, love-hate, relationship with her son, and Joshi records that she considered her son’s visage too ugly for public view. By 1919, suffering from hysteria and clinical depression, she would be committed to hospital, where she would remain for the rest of her days. Mother and son stayed close correspondents, but she was a perennial source of worry. Thus, when Sarah died in 1921, initial grief led to a sense of liberation, and an improvement in Lovecraft’s general health—though he, at this time a tall man of nearly 200 lbs, always regarded himself as ailing.

Yet there were further turns to the worst ahead. In 1921, at a convention for amateur journalists in Boston, Lovecraft met Sonia Green, an assimilated 38-year-old Ukrainian Jew from New York, whom he would marry in 1924. Interestingly, Lovecraft only told his aunt after the fact, writing to her from New York, where he had by then already taken residence at Sonia’s apartment.

Joshi notes that at this time Lovecraft’s prospects appeared to be improving: Sonia earned a good living at a hat shop in Fifth Avenue, and Lovecraft’s professional writing career was taking off. Lovecraft, then in a decadent phase, was also enthralled by the city, where he had a number of amateur friends. However, Sonia lost her job almost immediately when the shop went bankrupt. This forced Lovecraft for the first time to find regular employment, but without qualifications, work experience, nor, apparently, marketable skills, he was unable to find a position. The consequent financial difficulties impacted on Sonia’s health, who entered a sanatorium for a period of recovery. Eventually, she would find a job in Cleveland, leaving Lovecraft to live on his own, in a tiny apartment, in Brooklyn Heights (then Red Hook), back then a seedy neighbourhood. Sonia sent him an allowance, which permitted him to cover his rent and minimal expenses, but otherwise Lovecraft lived in poverty, stretching as far as possible a minuscule fare of unheated beans, bread, and cheese.

This was, however, genteel poverty. When, on one occasion, Lovecraft’s apartment was burglarised, he was left with only the clothes on his back (while he slept, the thieves gained access to his closet and stole all his suits). His reaction says much about Lovecraft: first priority for him was to get four new replacements: light and dark, winter and summer—no easy task, given his slender wallet. A gentleman may be poor, but he must still dress like a gentleman! The ensuing hunt for suitable attire taxed Lovecraft’s ingenuity, and ignited his frustration at the shoddy quality of modern suits (Lovecraft’s original suits had been made in happier times). Eventually, he succeeded, with minimal compromise.

Seething with immigrants of all descriptions, crowded, and filthy, Lovecraft came to despise New York, recognising it as an emblem of modern degeneration (remember: he already thought this in 1925!). This negative opinion does not sit well with Joshi: having immigrated from India at a young age and having been a New York resident for 27 years, Joshi puts Lovecraft through the wringer for failing to appreciate the city’s vibrancy. Here and elsewhere, he attacks Lovecraft for his enamourment with Anglo-Saxondom, his fierce resistance to racial egalitarianism, and his rejection of the multicultural society. In Joshi’s estimation, Lovecraft ought to have considered Franz Boas’ research, which was beginning to transform anthropology at this time; Joshi views this as contrary to Lovecraft’s rigorous scientific outlook—in other words, as Lovecraft having been blinded by prejudice. However, this overlooks the fact that there were different strands of opinion in anthropology at this time: this was the Progressive Era, when the American eugenics movement was at its height, enjoying institutional legitimacy, famous proponents (e.g. John Harvey Kellogg), and backing from the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution, and the the Harriman estate. Boas’ findings were politically motivated and not universally accepted, and he had by no means proven his case. (Worse still, since then there have been accusations of scientific fraud.) It would, therefore, seem that Lovecraft was entirely consequent with his aristocratic and scientific worldview.

Though Joshi deems it necessary to shoehorn his views on race and racism—zzz . . . —he shows admirable restraint, all things considered—though he has still been criticised by readers. He clearly struggles to reconcile his admiration for Lovecraft with an imagined rejection by him, which is coloured by the absurdities of the modern discourse on these matters. As the author of The Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting it Wrong (2006), where he invects against liberals like William Buckley and Rush Limbaugh, and where he welcomes the Leftward drift of American values, he can understand Lovecraft’s own merely as a reflection of the times in which he lived. Yet, Joshi has expended an immense amount of time and energy studying and writing about Lovecraft’s thought and worldview, as expressed both in correspondence and in fiction, and thus makes a fair attempt at describing them at length in a temperate fashion.

Lovecraft would eventually return to Providence, thus marking the beginning of the most productive phase of his career. By this time his marriage to Sonia was essentially over; a final attempt was made, but Lovecraft’s aunts rejected the idea of Sonia setting up shop in Providence, regarding her—or rather, the idea of a businesswoman—as somewhat declassé. Joshi again takes Lovecraft to task for not having shown more backbone before his aunts, but he is, nevertheless, of the opinion that Lovecraft was unsuited for marriage—being emotionally distant, stiff-upper lipped, and sexually sluggish—and ought never to have taken a wife. The Lovecrafts would in time agree on an amicable divorce (though, in the end, and to Sonia’s shock later on, he never signed the decree).

Despite his peaking productivity, Lovecraft’s economic prospects continued to decline. His stories became longer and more complex, and it became increasingly difficult to place them. Farnsworth Wright, Weird Tales’ capricious editor, repeatedly rejected them, though sometimes he would accept some after a period, after lobbying or intercession by one of Lovecraft’s correspondents. His seminal essay on horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature [3], completed at this time, appeared haphazardly and incompletely in tiny amateur publications, and would never appear in its final, revised, complete form during his lifetime. Therefore, Lovecraft, now living in semi-squalor with his aunt in cramped accommodation, was increasingly forced to survive through charging for “revisions,” which, given the amount of hands-on editing and re-writing involved, was for the most part tantamount to ghostwriting. Lovecraft was too much of a gentleman, too generous for his own good, and charged very modest fees. We must remember, however, that Lovecraft, in this same modest spirit, saw himself as a hack.

All the same, through extreme frugality and resourcefulness, Lovecraft still managed to travel yearly around New England, mainly as an antiquary. This resulted in extensive travelogues, written in 18th-century prose, replete with archaisms and therefore neither publishable nor intended for publication. Joshi mentions that some have criticised Lovecraft for expending excessive energy on correspondence and unpublishable travelogues, rather than writing fiction, but he argues that this was Lovecraft’s life, not his critics’—who are they to tell him, posthumously, what he ought to have done?

Joshi notes that the Great Depression forced Lovecraft to reconsider some of his earlier positions, and that he—encouragingly in his view—embraced FDR’s New Deal. He also notes, although briefly, that Lovecraft may have misunderstood the nature of the program. All the same, he likes to describe Lovecraft as having become a “moderate socialist,” even if he is later careful to point out that his socialism was radically distinct from the Marxist conception—in fact, Lovecraft instinctively sympathised with fascism and Hitler’s movement, and would remain firmly opposed to Communism. Lovecraft’s conception of socialism was entirely elitist. From his perspective, the culture-bearing stratum of a civilisation should not, in an ideal world, be shackled by the need to waste time and energy on trivial tasks, out of the need to earn a living: the production of high culture is often incompatible with commercial goals, so, in his view, it demands freedom from economic activity. And this implied some sort of patronage, in the manner that kings, popes, or wealthy aristocrats or businessmen provided to artists in the past. In other words, a portion of the nation’s wealth should be channelled into things of lasting value—and, therefore, into seeing to it that the very few individuals capable of producing them are in a position to do so. Lovecraft conceived this as socialism because he saw it as the task of the best to better the rest, and high art and intellection played an important rôle in that endeavour.

By 1936, Lovecraft, already in constant pain, was diagnosed with bowel cancer. He would die a few months later, on 15 March 1937.

As with Finn’s biography of Robert E. Howard, Joshi carries on beyond the grave to trace Lovecraft’s legacy, and the development of Lovecraft scholarship over the past 75 years. Like Finn, he has complaints about L. Sprague de Camp’s biography, which he deems substandard and inaccurate; he describes de Camp as business-minded (a euphemism for opportunist). Joshi also criticises August Derleth, one of Lovecraft’s correspondents, who acted early on and energetically to preserve Lovecraft’s legacy through his publishing company, Arkham House: as de Camp did with Howard, Derleth sought to extend Lovecraft’s mythology with posthumous “collaborations,” wherein he distorted the mythology by infusing it with his own preconceptions. To Joshi this was a disreputable attempt to market his own fiction using Lovecraft’s name, though Derleth would later become a well-regarded author in his own right.

While Joshi’s biography is impressive in its comprehensiveness and level of detail, I found his compulsion to provide a plot summary of every single story that Lovecraft ever wrote rather tedious and beyond requirements. One can see that the biography’s comprehensive logic dictates their inclusion, and they can be useful, but I wonder if the tomes’ objectives could not have been met without this overwhelming prolixity.

Joshi recognises his subject’s superior character in that, though Lovecraft would have been able to prosper economically had he compromised on quality, produced more, and stuck to what was popular, he remained steadfast in his refusal to do so. Whatever he did, he did to the best of his ability, without homage to Mammon. Readers, says Joshi, should be grateful for that, as it was this that has guaranteed the lasting value of Lovecraft’s work as well as his enduring legacy.

 


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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/09/the-gentleman-from-providence/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/iap.gif

[2] I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1614980519/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1614980519&linkCode=as2&tag=countercurren-20

[3] Supernatural Horror in Literature: http://shop.wermodandwermod.com/supernatural-horror-in-literature.html

mercredi, 10 juillet 2013

E. A. Poe scopritore di una nuova malattia dello spirito: la modernità

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E. A. Poe scopritore di una nuova malattia dello spirito: la modernità

 

Autore:

Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it

 

eapoeIl pubblico, specialmente il pubblico europeo, possiede una percezione parziale dell’opera di Edgar Allan Poe: la sua notorietà come scrittore di racconti del mistero e del terrore è così grande, ampliata anche dal cinema che si è impossessato di quei soggetti, da aver messo decisamente in ombra un altro aspetto della sua produzione: quella lirica.

 

Leggere le poesie di Poe, immaginando di ignorare l’identità del loro autore, rappresenta una delicata e suggestiva escursione in una provincia artistica leggiadra e nostalgica, pervasa dal rimpianto della Bellezza ideale che il mondo materiale, e specialmente il mondo moderno, con le sue brutture e il suo affarismo, sembra avere irrimediabilmente compromesso; si resta un po’ sorpresi nel confrontare questo poeta delicato e un po’ platonizzante, che vibra al più lieve tocco della Bellezza, sensibile come un rametto di mimosa, al cupo autore di racconti orrorifici come La maschera della morte rossa, Il cuore rivelatore o La caduta della Casa Usher.

 

D’altra parte, c’è un tratto caratteristico e inconfondibile nelle liriche di Poe, dal notissimo – e forse troppo celebrato – poemetto Il Corvo (The Raven) alla raffinata, nitida poesia A Elena (To Helen), lieve come un impalpabile sogno ad occhi aperti – o magari chiusi, chi può dirlo?, l’atmosfera onirica si presta a tali giochi di specchi fra realtà e fantasia -: vogliamo dire l’attenzione alla pulizia stilistica, la sapienza della struttura lessicale e compositiva, la ricercatezza formale, simile ad un prezioso lavoro d’intarsio e di compasso; tanto da suggerire l’idea che non di poesia sentimentale si tratti, romanticamente intesa, ma di una poesia intellettualistica, razionalmente pensata ed impostata, secondo i canoni rigorosi del “secolo dei lumi”.

 

È un’impressione che va ridimensionata, tenendo conto che nel Poe lirico esiste un sapiente gioco di contrappunti e di armonie fra la dimensione istintiva, passionale, sentimentale – o, come lui dice, immaginativa -, e quella logica, razionale, “scientifica”; e che il pregio maggiore delle sue poesie consiste proprio nel sapiente dosaggio e nel raro equilibrio che egli riesce ad ottenere fra le ragioni del cuore e quelle della mente; nella linea, del resto, di altri grandi pre-romantici, a cominciare dal nostro Ugo Foscolo, e specialmente il Foscolo dei sonetti.

 

la-tempestaAbbiamo accennato alla “scientificità” dei procedimenti poetici di Poe, pur subordinati ad una concezione generale del fatto estetico che è d’impostazione idealistica, per la quale le cose sono le ombre o i riflessi di una realtà ulteriore, sovrannaturale o, comunque, non umana, secondo la lezione del mito platonico della caverna, ma anche dello Shakespeare dei sonetti, dei “romances” come La tempesta e di alcune struggenti e delicate commedie, a cominciare da Sogno di una notte di mezza estate (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), della quale ci siamo già occupati a suo tempo (cfr. il nostro precedente saggio Malinconia e platonismo nel Sogno d’una notte di mezza estate di Shakespeare).

 

Ebbene, il rapporto con la scienza è un’altra preziosa chiave di lettura per accostarsi alla produzione lirica di Poe. Egli non è nemico della scienza, anche se, sulla scia di altri grandi lirici anglosassoni, in particolare del “visionario” William Blake, le rimprovera aspramente di aver gettato un’ombra desolata sul mondo, strappando il velo della poesia e imbruttendo la realtà, ingrigendo gli orizzonti della vita; ma tale rimprovero non è rivolto alla scienza in quanto tale, per la quale, anzi, egli nutre un vivo e sincero interesse e al cui metodo logico ritiene che anche il poeta debba attingere, per non parlare del prosatore (e si pensi ai suoi racconti di genere investigativo, come I delitti della Rue Morgue, caratterizzati da un rigoroso impianto razionale e deduttivo); bensì alla scienza presuntuosa e arrogante, in definitiva allo scientismo, che pretende di assolutizzare il proprio sapere e di ridurre al rango di saperi di seconda scelta quelli propri alle altre forme di conoscenza del reale, a cominciare dall’arte medesima.

 

Poe, dunque, non rifiuta la scienza in se stessa, così come, si potrebbe aggiungere, non rifiuta la modernità in quanto tale; ne rifiuta semmai la bruttezza, il cinismo, l’utilitarismo esasperato, il produttivismo cieco, il materialismo grossolano, la pretesa totalizzante a livello estetico, etico e filosofico; rifiuto deciso, intransigente, donchisciottesco, se si vuole, e quindi ingenuo e velleitario, ma non per questo meno sincero, non per questo meno sofferto e umanamente significativo, perché testimonia la crisi e il dramma di una civiltà faustiana che si vede presa nella propria vertigine ed esita, brancolando, sull’orlo dell’abuso, a imboccare sino in fondo la strada di un “progresso” senz’anima, foriero di sempre nuove, sconvolgenti sottomissioni dell’anima alle ferree leggi del Logos calcolante e strumentale.

 

E che altro è, del resto, la “caduta” della Casa Usher, se non la nemesi di un progresso disumano e accecato dall’umano orgoglio, che non riconosce limiti né misura alla propria “hybris” e che pretende di farsi legge e norma infallibile e inderogabile di ogni agire umano, di ogni pensare, di ogni sentire, come se nulla vi fosse oltre a ciò che la mente razionale può accumulare, manipolando gli enti senza sosta, sovvertendo le leggi naturali, capovolgendo il giusto rapporto fra la vita e il suo insopprimibile bisogno di bellezza?

 

Tutto questo appare evidente nella “protesta” di Poe, ché di una autentica protesta si tratta, ora esplicita, come nei racconti, ora implicita, come nelle poesie; ma sempre si tratta di una pretesta ferma e intransigente, non tanto in nome della nostalgia del passato pre-moderno (tentazione che, peraltro, fa sovente capolino, specie nelle liriche, in particolare sotto le forme di un richiamo alla grazia impareggiabile del mondo classico), quanto piuttosto in nome di una umanità che, pur confusa e smarrita, non è disposta ad abdicare a se stessa, al proprio sentimento di ciò che è umano, ai diritti sacrosanti della “imagination”, della fantasia creatrice di bellezza.

 

Così sintetizza la questione Tommaso Pisanti nel suo saggio introduttivo all’opera poetica del grande scrittore americano, E. A. Poe poeta (E. A. Poe, Tutte le poesie, a cura di T. Pisanti, Roma, Newton Compton Editori, 1982, 1990, pp. 15-21):

 

«Già da fanciullo “mentre era azzurro tutto l’altro cielo”, Poe vide una nuvola prender forma di demone (“of a demon in my view” (“Alone”). E lungo una tale direzione si svilupperà, più tardi, la “selvaggia visionarietà di “The Haunted Palace” (Il Palazzo stregato) e – meno compatta – quella di “Dream-Land” (Terra di sogno), col terribile, soffocante senso di una duplicità e anzi ambigua e stregata “doppiezza” angelico-demonica. Perché se il “demonico” s’accumula in Poe inizialmente come per un’intensificazione della disperazione stessa, interviene e subentra poi anche una specie di contorto sadismo “dello spirito” e dell’immaginazione, che conosce le sue orge non meno di quello fisico-corporeo. Poe vede insomma la vita come divorata e spazzata via dal gigantesco “Verme trionfante” di “The Conqueror Worm”: e ne piangono gli angeli stessi, “pallid and wan”, “pallidi ed esangui”.Nell’intollerabile tensione, Poe si volgerà anche alla Vergine, invocherà Maria: in “Catholic Hymn” (corretto poi in “Hymn”), con suggestione forse dantesca o byroniana (“Don Juan”, III st. 101 ss). Naturalmente, è sempre da tener presente quanto d’impulsivo, d’immediato, quanto dell’istinto e della multilateralità dell’attore-istrione e, al limite, di mistificatorio è in Poe. Il poeta vive, “trasognato, giorni estatici” (“And all my days are trances”), dirà in “A una in Paradiso”. Certo, Poe fu “evasivo”, “disimpegnato”: ma nel senso della “immaginazione angelica”, disincarnata, indicata da Allan Tate. Il suo esplorare la surrealtà non si risolve poi infine, tuttavia, in una più sottile conoscenza d’una più globale, estesa realtà? […]

Le poesie riservano tutto un più largo spazio, rispetto ai racconti, a quella componente dell’ardore per la Beltà, a un mito d’armonie remote e perdute […]: ardore e mitopoiesi classico-platonica soffusi d’ombre orfico-pitagoriche, e con qualche finale riverbero, magari, pur sempre goticheggiante.Una componente, questa, fondamentale, che stacca comunque Poe dalla dimensione, diciamo, soltanto “gotica” e romantico-hoffmaniana per accostarlo anche al nitore d’una linea e d’una mitizzazione classico-neoclassica, alla linea di Hölderlin, di Keats, di Foscolo: come nella splendida, esemplare “To Helen” […], pubblicata già nel 1831 e poi continuamente ricesellata. […]

E a difesa dei vecchi miti e, leopardianamente, degli “ameni inganni”, anche Poe lamenta, nel sonetto “Alla scienza”, che il “progresso” abbia tutto ingrigito e livello, che la Scienza con le sue ali “grevi” (“dull”) abbia “sbalzato Diana dal suo carro” e “scacciato l’Amadriade dal bosco” e “strappato la Naiade al flutto / l’Elfo al verde prato e me stesso infine / al sogno estivo all’ombra del tamarindo”. Ma è solo un’accentuazione particolare : giacché Poe è in realtà vivamente sensibile allo sviluppo scientifico, nella misura in cui esso è, innanzi tutto, collegato con una “mind” lucido-geometrica e anche per quanto può offrire, di nuove aperture e di nuovi strumenti, all’esplorazione e all’osservazione sottilmente operate dall’occhio e dalla mente umani (e nella mente umana). Insieme al rimpianto quindi Poe ingloba in sé un attento, tenace interesse nei riguardi della lucidità dei metodi e dei procedimenti, una ferma attenzione alla rigorosità del linguaggio matematico-scientifico, al linguaggio del pensiero e delle definizioni, che possono offrirgli materiali e stimoli proprio per il lato di rigorosità e di definizione laicizzante che egli intende dare alla sua macchina stilistica. […] Si tratta, naturalmente, di un uso “strumentale” della scienza, proprio al fine di ristabilire quella riunificazione tra il sensibile e il soprasensibile che è il supremo proposito di Poe e il supremo proposito della poesia, secondo Poe: nel quale resta nettissima, s’intende, l’avversione alla scienza come pretesa sistematica di spiegazione e interpretazione puramente ed esclusivamente logico-razionale. […]

Anche se, alla base, è la “prescienza estatica” che dà il primo scatto, è all’intelletto e alla “tecnica” che tocca poi partecipare per il fattuale concretarsi della poesia. “Non vi è peggior errore che il presupporre che la vera originalità sia semplicemente questione d’impulso e d’ispirazione. Originalità è combinare in modo attento, paziente e comprensivo”. Poe è insomma tutt’altro che immerso nella totalità romantica, resta anzi legato ad eredità settecentesche, “è un razionalista del Settecento con inclinazioni occultistiche”, ha perfino scritto il Wellek. […]

Il senso della “combinazione” non deve tuttavia indurre ad eccessive, facili accuse di “cerebralismo” e “meccanicità”. Lawrence scrisse perfino che Poe “è quasi più scienziato che artista”. Ma i meccanismo che Poe mette in movimento puntano a un “effetto”, cioè a risultati: d’eccitazione e d’intensa emotività.

Poe fu insomma scopritore- può dirsi ancora, e concludendo, con Emilio Cecchi – “di una provincia che non è quella del’orrido, dell’ossessivo, ma è semplicemente la nuova provincia dell’arte d’oggi. Solo una delle nuove province, a voler precisare. E fra tentativi e approssimazioni, se si vuole. Ma è innanzi tutto in se stessa, nella sua intrinseca composizione che la poesia di Poe va riletta e ripensata: una lampeggiante associazione di “gotico”, di tradizione classicista e di inquietanti fosforescenze anticipatrici, sì, ma già “poesia” per se stesse.»

 

In questo senso, e sia pure forzando, ossia andando oltre, la stessa interpretazione del Cecchi, ci sembra di poter concludere che Poe, e specialmente il Poe lirico, tanto meno conosciuto, ma non meno interessante del Poe narratore, si possa considerare come lo scopritore non solo di una nuova provincia dell’arte, ma di una nuova malattia dello spirito: la modernità.

 

Negli stessi anni di Kierkegaard, anch’egli leva la sua voce per protestare contro il cancro della società massificata, petulante, presuntuosa, che, forte dei propri successi tecnici ed economici, pretende di imporre il suo dominio tirannico sui regni dello spirito e sui diritti inalienabili dell’io individuale. Poe, dunque, fratello in spirito di Kierkegaard: chi l’avrebbe detto? Eppure è così.

 

Certo, la protesta di Poe è quella di un poeta: non possiede né la forza, né il rigore del grande filosofo danese. Davanti alla bruttezza che minaccia la vita fin nelle sue intime radici, Poe non sa cercare rifugio se non nelle braccia della donna idealizzata; ed ecco le numerose donne angelicate: Elena, Elizabeth e le altre. Fragile rifugio, quale potrebbe cercare un bambino spaventato da un brutto sogno: «Io vivevo tutto solo / in un mondo di dolore, / e la mia anima ristagnava immobile, / finché la bella e gentile Eulalia non diventò mia timida sposa» («Eulalia»). Ma la vita, è altra cosa…

 

* * *

 

Tratto, col gentile consenso dell’Autore, dal sito Arianna Editrice.

vendredi, 17 mai 2013

Robert E. Howard & the Heroic

 

RobertEHoward.jpg

Robert E. Howard & the Heroic

By Jonathan Bowden

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

Editor’s Note:

The following text is a transcript by John Morgan of a lecture by Jonathan Bowden, “Robert Erwin Howard: Pulpster Extraordinaire,” given at the 26th New Right meeting in London on Saturday, April 17, 2010. The audio is available on YouTube [2].

Unfortunately, significant portions of the audio were cut off at the beginning of the second and third segments on YouTube. For the purposes of publishing this essay in the Pulp Fascism [3] collection, I also removed some 2,300 words of digressive material. If anyone has access to a complete copy of the lecture, please contact me. Also, if you have any corrections or if you can gloss the passages marked as unintelligible, please contact me at editor@counter-currents.com [4] or simply post them as comments below. If and when a complete transcript can be assembled, we will publish it here as well. 

I’ll be talking about Robert Ervin Howard. A while back, I had a talk about H. P. Lovecraft, Aryan mystic, and he was one of a triumvirate of writers who wrote for a fantasy magazine called Weird Tales, a pulp magazine; they were incredibly cheaply produced magazines in the 1930s, with quite good art, graphic sort of art, printed on cheap bulk newsprint paper which was very acidic and fell apart very quickly. And yet three writers, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Ervin Howard, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft have survived and been inducted into literature. I saw in my local library that Penguin Classics, or Modern Classics, the ones with the grey covers, now include Robert Erwin Howard’s Heroes in the Wind, from Kull to Conan: The Best of Robert E. Howard as a book. Penguin Classics, you see? So it begins as a pulp, and a hundred years later it’s redesignated as literature.

Howard is a very interesting figure. He only lived 30 years. He was born in 1906 and shot himself with a revolver in the head in his car, outside his home, when he was 30 years of age. We’ll get on to that afterwards. He wrote 160 stories, and the interesting thing about these stories is that they are pre-civilized in their settings, they’re barbaric, they’re ultra-masculine stories, and they deal with many themes which have been so disprivileged from much of mainstream liberal humanist culture that they no longer exist.

Howard had a range of heroes and wrote in most popular genres. He wrote to make money, but he began as a poet, and a poetic and sort of Saturnalian disposition influenced his work and his friendship, by correspondence, with Lovecraft, and to a lesser extent, Clark Ashton Smith, throughout his life. He was of Irish descent, and he was born in a town which became a boom town in the oil booms of the early 20th century in Texas. For those of you who don’t know, Texas is enormous. England fits into Texas twelve times, and Britain, eight times. He was born in Peaster, Texas, and spent some of his early life in a town called Brownwood, a quintessentially small-town American, which is the experience of most white Americans through the settlement of Western civilization in North America. The state capital, of course, is Austin, and you have the big cities like Houston, Dallas, and Galveston.

Now, Howard hated the oil booms, and what happened. When the oil boom happened to Cross Plains, a town of about 1,200 with a mayor and so on, morphed into a large, sprawling, lawless place of about 10,000. An enormous number of prospectors and drillers and criminals and people seeking easy money, all heavily armed of course, came in to Cross Plains. The town burst out beyond its limits in all directions. Oil was discovered everywhere. Fortunes were made, and fortunes were lost.

At the time he was born, lynchings were still in vogue right across the South and the ex-Confederate states. Everyone displayed and carried weapons openly. Sometimes the Rangers, as they were called, a man alone in the sun with a rifle, was basically all you had of semi-ordered civilization. People don’t realize how, if you like, wild and open certain parts of the United States were, certainly until the 1860s, 1870s.

The psychological experience of an intuitive and sympathetic and radically imaginative young man like Howard invests the tall Texan story, and stories of prospectors and ranchers and drillers in the oil industry, and Texas Rangers and Marshals and so on, with an added piquancy. His family supported the Confederacy in a previous generation, and he was mildly descended from certain Confederate commanders.

His attitude towards life is expressed in the stories, which is why they survived. The stories are like lucid dreams. You walk straight into them, and the action begins. Most of them were dreams, and in a way, most critics believe Howard’s an oral creator. He’s in the oral, folklorist, and narrative-oriented tradition. He’s a storyteller par excellence. It’s said he wrote at night, and he used to chant the stories to himself, which of course is a very old Northern European and Nordic tradition. It’s the idea of the skald. It’s the idea that things are illuminated to you, and you speak because you hear the voice.

He had a series of masculine heroes beginning with certain Celtic and Pictish/Scotch-Irish heroes such as Bran Mak Morn and so on; Conan, the hero that he’s most associated with, whose name, of course, is abstracted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s middle name. Howard would take from all sorts of roots, many of which related to heroic, Celtic, Indo-European elements which he imagined to exist in his own past.

robEHow.jpgHe was very influenced by G. K. Chesterton’s dictum at the beginning of the 20th century that myth is the commingling of emotional reality with what is understood to be fact. If you mix together eras and peoples, but you keep the emotional truth of the substance of what we perceive their lives to have been, then you can influence the present and the future. It’s noumenal truth, as Aristotle said 2,000 years ago, the idea that certain things are artistically and emotionally true irrespective of what you think about them factually.

His most famous series of stories, the Conan stories that he wrote pretty much towards the end of his life, were based upon a false yet true/factual world history, the so-called Hyborian Age that he created for himself. Maps of the Hyborian Age have been produced, and they are based upon a realistic sociology, ethnography, geological history, and a coherent view of economics. The country of Aquilonia that Conan ends up conquering at the end of the mythos is partly Britain. The Picts are partly the Scots, of course, covered in woad, barbaric, kept out by a wall, that sort of thing.

War is the dynamic of all of Howard’s fiction, and his attitude towards life was conflict-oriented. His stories are described as ultra-masculine and non-feminist stories. Unkind critics say that they’re Barbara Cartland for men, where all women are beautiful, all men are heroic, where magic works instead of science, and where force decides all social problems, and there is a degree to which the genre which he has founded, called sword and sorcery—of which one supposes J. R. R. Tolkien, an Oxford professor, is the senior representative in the 20th century—is an example of the literary and the heroic in contemporary letters. It’s interesting to notice that the early great texts of the Western civilization, Homer, Beowulf, are deeply heroic, and yet over time, the heroic imprimatur within our language and within our sensibility dips.

It’s said that boys aren’t interested in reading at school, and that 80 to 90% of those who do English literature courses in further educational colleges and universities, the tertiary sector, are women. It’s said that men don’t disprivilege literature, and it’s also said in the West that boys get bullied if they’re regarded, as Howard was when he was younger, as sissies because they read too much, and this sort of thing.

I think one of the problems is that literature that appeals to men is often not the concern of the people who run these sorts of educational establishments. If the sort of people that influenced Howard, people like Noyes, people like Robert W. Service, people like Byron, people like Kipling, people like the heroic imperialist literature of William Henley, who was the basis for Long John Silver in Treasure Island, and was a close friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, a man who could go from bonhomie to murderous rage with a click of your fingers, as Silver does in Treasure Island, of course, because he moves from extreme malevolence to a sort of Cockney paternalism in the same breath. Now, if this literature was normative much further down the social and the educational scale, one would imagine that boys and youngish men would be much more interested in literature as a whole.

Howard essentially sold stories from about the age of 20, certainly 19. He started writing when he was 9, and the interesting thing about him is that his stories are not really derivative. There are connections to enormous writers that were prominent at the time, principally Jack London, but Howard emerged fully-formed and had his own voice from the very beginning.

London’s a very interesting figure, because London’s often been associated, truthfully and yet forcefully, with the extreme Left. Trotsky, of course, wrote an introduction to his famous dystopia of American life called The Iron Heel, and yet London, as George Orwell intimated in one of his essays, was proto-fascistic, and was in many ways a Left nationalist, or even a National Bolshevik, or somebody who would be now described as a Third Positionist. London’s positions were those of socialism from the outside, but also a form of socialism, with and without quotation marks, that was Right-wing rather than Left-wing, and was both national and racial. The interesting thing about London’s discourse is the radicalism of the racialism. [. . .]

We had at the last meeting, or the meeting before last, a speaker from Croatia called Tomislav Sunić who wrote a book which I edited a long time ago, actually, called Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age. Among the very important points about that book is his recognition, as a European ex-Catholic in his case, of the Protestant fundamentalist nature of the United States. I think this is a crucial point to understand the United States. The influence of contemporary Jewry in the United States is due to the fact that it’s a Protestant fundamentalist country and many, many Americans really believe in their deep and even subconscious mind that the viewpoint that they are a self-chosen elect to rule by right, by divine imprecation, is so deep in their consciousness, the idea as Pentecostalists sing, that “we are Zion,” goes so far down that the difference between their identity and their group specificity and their militant patriotism and that of a small country in the Middle East, and people who didn’t begin to emigrate en masse into the United States until the latter stages of the 19th century, and only really began to have major socioeconomic impact, particularly culturally, in the first quarter to a third of the 20th century makes these things, to my mind, easier to understand.

Now, Protestant fundamentalism doesn’t seem to have scratched Howard very much, and yet one of his heroes is a Puritan called Solomon Kane, and Solomon Kane, who comes between Bran Mak Morn, Kull, and Conan, is in some ways his first major hero. Solomon Kane is very, very interesting because he’s one of these Protestant extremists of the 1620s—well, they’re set before—but that’s when the movement comes to power in the Cromwellian Interregnum in England, and yet stretches way back into the previous century, and yet in a strange way he’s an outsider, even in that movement.

Kane dresses all in black with a little white sort of a bib round his neck. He’s extraordinarily heavily armed, as most of the Puritans were, had a sword on either side, had pistols in the belts, had a knife in the boot, because you were fighting for the Lord, you see! “I am the flail of the Lord.” They had these endless quotes, largely from the Old Testament, but to a degree from elements of the New, which they would roll out on occasions when they had to justify what they were about to do, and that their instincts wanted to do, in a way that nothing could restrain them.

There’s a famous moment in Northern Ireland, when James Callaghan was Northern Irish Secretary under Wilson in the late 1960s, slightly sympathetic to Social Democratic, Catholic nationalism in Northern Ireland, as part of the local movement was then, but in a very moderate way, and then said in a concerned and perplexed way to the Reverend Ian Paisley, who softened a bit as he’s got older, and in turn wanted to be Prime Minister of Northern Ireland before he died, he said to Paisley that, “But we’re all the children of God, Reverend,” and Paisley said, “No! Nooooo!” He said, “We are the children of wrath!

And that is the attitude of those Puritan extremists, loyal to the Old Testament in many ways. Men of a sort of always implacable fury, and elements of their dictatorship, under Cromwell of course, were increasingly maniacal. The banning of Shakespeare, our greatest writer. When an English national revolutionary movement bans the country’s greatest-ever writer, you do begin to think there’s something slightly wrong, don’t you, no? Similarly, the flogging of actors under the New Model Army in Newcastle for performing Shakespeare, these were the latter stages, these were the Buddhas of Bamiyan moments, weren’t they really, of these English revolutionaries of the 1640s, or what was really going on.

Now, the sort of Puritanism that Howard puts into this character is different, because Howard’s character, Solomon Kane’s a loner, a man who always fights for his own cause, but when he hears those almost voluptuous pagan stirrings in the background, it’s always Christianized, and it’s always put in a Protestant context.

Cromwell once had a phrase: “I disembowel you for Christ’s love.” And that’s what he said in the Putney Debates. When the parliamentary side won the Civil War, the whole New Model Army, which of course was a revolutionary army of that time—no brothels, no drinking; in the Royal army, you went to the back, and there was endless entertainment at the back of the battlefront. With the Puritan armies, there was none of that. You went to the back, and there was no drinking, and there was a chap ranting at you about whether you’d sinned that day.

It was less fun, but at the same time, when they raised their pikes together, not in a higgledy-piggledy way, or one bloke at the back didn’t want to, but they raised them together, as one unit. They would all chant, “God is our strength.” Cromwell understood as Shaw said early in the 20th century that a man who has a concept of reality that is metaphysically objectivist, a man who believes in something as absolute truth is worth fifty men. And that’s the type of revolutionary ideology that these people then had.

But at the Putney Debates, there was a debate about how the country should go, and Ireton and the other supreme commanders were there. Under Cromwell they committed regicide of course, they killed the King, so the future of the country was theirs. There was another tendency known as the Levellers, who in some ways of course were retrospectively the first socialists, so-called because they wanted to level down distinctions. There was an even more radical movement called the Diggers that came along later. But Cromwell told Ireton, “Either we hang them or they will hang us.” And that’s the Levellers. And at the end of the Putney Debates, the army moves aside, the Cromwellian regime has been established, and the Levellers are hanging on the trees. So Cromwell had got his way.

The importance of Protestantism to the United States, in a complicated way, is the reason why there has never been an extreme Right-wing movement of any great success in the United States, except in a localized way like the Klan to deal with particular circumstances at a particular time. America, you could imagine, is ripe for such a movement, as Australia always has been, and yet there has not been one, not really. Not a national movement. There were figures in the 1930s: there was the Silver Shirt movement; there were Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts, which had all sorts of interesting ramifications in American life, as Catholic priest giving the radical Right to essentially a Protestant nation, which of course set up a cultural tension and contradiction in and of itself.

There are also interesting liberal counterparts to this. Most people remember Orson Welles’ treatment of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, when the Martians invade New York, and then he admitted it was a fiction retrospectively, and tens of thousands of ninnies leave New York because they think the Martians are landing. “Gee, they’re up the road!” And they get the pickup truck, and they go. And then they broadcast later that it was all a stunt and it was an artistic show, and people shouldn’t take it literally.

Welles deliberately did that to discredit Coughlin. He said afterwards, “We did it because too many people believed everything that fascist priest was telling them on the radio, so we proved them, don’t believe what you hear that comes out of the radio.” And that’s a purely sort of aesthetic response to the impact that sort of thing had.

robEHow2.jpgYet still movements lie there, Aryan Nations, National Alliance, these sorts of movements, very small, very isolated, geographically and in other ways. National Alliance was quite interesting because it morphed from Youth for George Wallace. That’s how it started, and then it took various transformatory steps until it emerged as a very hard-line group under the late Dr. William Pierce at a later date.

And this culture of extreme Protestantism—which contained elements which are to the Right of almost anything you’ve ever seen, mentally, psychologically, conceptually—seems partly, because, of its extreme individualism, to be incapable of generating radical Right mass movements. Most Americans still adopt a deliberately materialist, liberal humanist and individualist way of looking at life. They divide into two basic political parties that have switched over during the course of the last two centuries. Don’t forget in the 19th century the Republican Party was the party of the nominal Left, and the Democrats were red. The Democrats were conservatives who supported states’ rights—not the right to secede, but certainly the right to own slaves. The party led by a man who’s proud to have ex-slaves in his own family, the present President, would have actually, in a strange sort of way, not been able to join the Democrat Party in the 19th century, and yet the switch around, that you can vote in each other’s primaries, and that “Isn’t everyone a Democrat? Isn’t everyone a Republican?,” hence the meaninglessness of the names, adds to this sort of feeling that you get in the contemporary United States that all that matters is money and social success. America’s very important, because America, of course, dominates this country now culturally and geopolitically. We can’t almost do anything without them, and all the wars that we’re now dragged into are due to American hegemony.

But the repudiation of parts of American power should never blind ourselves to the cultural excellence of what many white Americans have achieved, both for their group and individually. If you actually look at all the radical Right literature, the alternative side of an isolationist and American nationalist posture, there is some great work there by people like William Gayley Simpson, who wrote an enormous book of over a thousand pages called Which Way Western Man? Again, without going on a tangent too much, he’s a very interesting man because he’s an ex-Trappist monk. He began as a liberal and an aching humanist whose heart bled for the Third World and who had all the correct sort of UN-specific attitudes, and gradually he changed step by step by step, and he ended up, if not a member then a fellow traveler, of the National Alliance. That is quite a change. That is quite a leap. But it is also true that tens and tens of thousands of educated Western people who are liberal-minded now will have to change their views, will have to begin to change their mindset in this and the coming generation if Western civilization is virtually not to slide off the cliff. [. . .]

Now, to return to Howard, Howard’s writing, by the end of his sort of period, and don’t forget that he was sort of mature at 22 and dead at 30, he produced 160 stories, 15, 16 volumes basically, and other fragments. There was an unfinished fantasy novel called Almuric, the early Celtic stories, Bran Mak Morn and the others morphed into Solomon Kane. There were associated Westerns and humorous stories. There were some detective stories, but he never particularly liked that genre, although his attitude towards life was hard-boiled. There were also some Crusader stories as well, and some slightly mythological stories about a sort of white man in the East called Gordon, presumably named after the Gordon of Khartoum, but actually an American, and these were the old Borak stories set in Afghanistan, where he goes native and fights along sort of inter-tribal and group-based and clan lines in that context.

Howard’s attitude toward politics is quite complicated and not entirely logical, and primarily emotional. He supported the New Deal because he believed the American economy had collapsed and something needed to be done. He argued strongly with H. P. Lovecraft, he was more of a “reactionary” in these respects, a classical liberal, didn’t like the Roosevelt and the people around him, didn’t like intervention in the market in that sort of Protestant, American way. He felt that you fail commercially, you suffer punishment, because God has chosen that punishment for you. Destiny involves sacrifice.

The irony is that the banks have been saved in the United States by Bush, costing trillions of dollars, but the metaphysic which founded the country would have allowed all of those banks to fail, all of those banks to fail and all those bankers to hang themselves and throw themselves off buildings. That happened in 1929, and then you rebuild quickly, because the pure, American, sort of Randian view is that capitalism is an insatiable animal and vortex of energy, and if people go to pot, if people lose everything they have, if as a trader, an insurance agent I vaguely knew years ago at Lloyd’s, lost all his money in the Names scandal, and goes there on a Sunday and unlocks the door and goes down to the toilets and sits there and drinks Domestos and kills himself and is found by the cleaners, Africans probably, on Monday morning, and his senior partner in Lloyd’s said, “Well, that’s capitalism for you.” And that’s it! What goes up goes down! This was the view that founded the United States

And yet the irony is, why have these Western politicians intervened, why have they saved these structures: few collateral damage moments, Lehman Brothers; they’ve charged Goldman Sachs with fraud. Well, that’s a bit late, isn’t it, really? And yet why have they intervened? They’ve intervened because of the voting danger. The fact that there are radical parties on the fringe of all Western societies, everyone knows who they are, that people could vote for in a major moment of fiscal/physical/moral/emotional distress, and the whole Western clerisy that’s bought into the contemporary liberal package knows that. Many of these parties are actually quite moderate in relation to the traditions they come out of, but they terrify the present establishment that often sees the more populist ones as just the start of something worse that’s coming behind, see?

And there’s also a certain guilt there as well, because these people are well aware of what’s happened to Western societies because they’ve been running them for 70 years. This idea it’s all an accident, “I didn’t really mean it,” and the turning of Western societies into a sort of version of Brasília, en masse with a tiny, little elite at the top that’s creaming most of the goodies off for themselves.

I’m not an egalitarian in any sense, but it’s interesting to note that this country’s slightly more unequal now than it was in 1910 in terms of 90% of all equity and all capital and all wealth is owned by the top 10%, and the top 2% of that 10%, and yet the society has changed out of all recognition, 1910 to 2010. Most Western people born in the first [unintelligible] part of the 20th century would not believe the transformation of the West just in a lifetime, basically, after they died. And it occurred because of the extraordinary wars, largely amongst ourselves, that we fought in the 20th century that also gave outsider ideologies like Communism their chance to vulture-like pick over the defeat and the carrion corpses of what was left.

The heroic attitude towards man and society that Howard’s work depicts exists virtually nowhere except as play and pleasure in computer games for boys and adolescents, in comic books and so on. The areas of life where that sort of ethos remains, the armed forces, the army, navy, and air force of most contemporary Western societies, particularly their specialist or elite forces, in Britain the Special Air service, the naval equivalent the Special Boat Service, and all of those novels, these Andy McNab sort of novels about the heroic and this sort of thing, which are lapped up by a largely male audience, largely male audience. Other than that, there is not really the imprimatur of the heroic in Western life, the extraordinary demilitarization of Western life, hardly ever see a policeman, hardly ever see soldiers. When do you ever see British forces? And that’s because they’re always outside the country as globalist mercenaries fighting American and Zionist wars all over the world. They’re never seen here, and many of their commanders don’t want them here, either, because they regard parts of British life as so irretrievably decadent that they actually want to keep their troops away from much of what’s happened in relation to the society. There are towns in Berkshire where a lot of the military stay, like Arborfield and these sorts of towns, where it’s quite clear there’s a sort of military zone and there’s a civilian zone. You all know what British towns are like on Friday, Saturday night: no police; they’re all in their vans; they’re all in the station; they’re at home; they’re filling in forms. They wear yellow bibs when they’re out, but when you want one, you can never see them, can you?

And a lot of our older people are, let’s face it, frightened to go into town and city centers on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, certainly after 6. And why is this happening? It’s partly happening because the concept that Howard’s fiction deals with, masculinity, has been completely disprivileged, completely demonized and rerouted in contemporary liberal life. Hostility to masculinity, certainly as defined, say, before 1950 is very considerable, and it’s had a very corrosive effect ideologically, aesthetically. Men can have their own pleasures in various zones, which are sort of sneered at and disprivileged, but the centrality of the heroic as a myth for life has largely gone.

The way to explicate something like Howard, as I did with Lovecraft before, is to maybe to concentrate on one of their stories. With H. P. Lovecraft I chose “The Dunwich Horror,” and with Howard I would choose “Rogues in the House,” which was published in Weird Tales in the early ’30s. One fantasy critic has called it the greatest fantasy story of the 20th century, but that’s just one individual’s opinion. It’s relatively early in the Conan series.

Conan is a northern barbarian, and because everything’s fused together in Howard, he’s got slightly Nordic, Germanic, and slightly Celtic traits. He’s an outsider, but he has a clean code of masculine barbarism. Civilization is always seen as slightly weak-kneed and sybaritic to Howard. And yet at the same time, barbarism has its own inner order.

Now, there are counter-factual and countercultural elements there that will be used by social anthropologists in a totally different context, like Lévi-Strauss and others, in the middle of the 20th century, but Howard means it in a different way.

There’s a Left-wing streak to Howard, as there was to London, a siding with the outsider, with those ruined by capitalism, by tramps. London’s book about the East End is one of the most extraordinary books about mass poverty before George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and “How the Poor Die,” were quite extraordinary works. A poor little hospital in Paris before any sort of socialized medicine, where those who were in the bottom 10%, their corpses were just thrown on the ground! And they died in agony, and they kick you away and put another one on top. This is how the poor die! And Orwell said to this chap in this hospital, “But look at the state they’re in!” And he said, “Well, they gave up slavery. Here’s another batch.” This was the attitude then. This is why things like the labor movement, even in the United States in an attenuated way, were created, to correct that imbalance as it’s seen from the bottom.

The far Right, of course, always wanted not the class war of the contemporary Left, but to socialize mass life in a way that preserved the traditions of the civilization of which we’re a part, that brought on what was excellent about the past and yet realized that the 50% of people who own no capital, the 50% of people who are largely excluded from all center-Right parties’ definition of patriotism, are part of the country, are part of the nation, fight the country’s wars for the most part when they’re asked to do so, and therefore have to be within the remit of social consideration in relation to education, health, and other matters.

My explanation for Howard’s support of the New Deal and that type of politics largely is along those sorts of lines. It’s the sort of apolitical chap who likes country and western in a Midwestern state and supports socialized medicine up to a point, as long as it’s not too costly, doesn’t like Obama, and supports our troops, you see. But it’s in a sort of apolitical zone which has got no real knowledge above that. Some of the instincts are right, but the ideological formulation in which that takes place is likely wrong, because even these wars—do you think Iraq was fought for ordinary white Americans? Do you think Afghanistan has anything to do with ordinary families living in Nebraska or Nevada or Kansas? None of these wars have anything to do with them at all. Even the Black Muslims have worked out that white gentiles largely are second-class citizens now in the society that they created. But that’s another story, and I’d just like to concentrate on Howard.

This particular story concerns Conan from the outside, Conan as perceived by an aristocrat and fop called Murilo. Howard’s a little bit of a Nordicist. He thinks southern Europeans are a bit foppish in comparison to northern Europeans. There’s a streak of this, and some of the society is seen to be Italy, Corinth, Zamora, but they’re not. But they seem to be Italy.

Well, there’s this Italian city-state that’s run by a corrupt priest called Nabonidus, who’s known as the Red Priest. These myths are set, these stories, mythologically encoded, are set before the beginning of recorded history and after the sinking of Atlantis, possibly a fantasy itself. So he sets them far back enough that he can do whatever he wants with them, but at the same time he can import a large amount of retrospective historical insight.

The interesting thing is the Machiavellianism of the politics of these stories. All of these societies are run extremely ruthlessly and are run completely for the power interests of the people in charge. The nationalities don’t really matter, but they are, if the gloves are off, as marauding and vengeful as their own leaders who they represent at a lower level. Truly Howard believes, with the Roman dictator Sulla, that when the weapons are out, the laws fall silent.

Now, Murilo is a courtier, a relatively corrupt courtier, in this city-state, and Nabonidus comes to him one day at a royal council meeting and gives him a small casket that contains a severed ear. And this is a warning, as it would be if a Renaissance prince in post-Medieval Italy, gave it to a rival, and it’s, “Clear off. Get out of the city-state as quickly as possible. I’m giving you one day.” And Murilo wonders what he’s going to do. He can flee, but he’s not a coward, why should he leave his own city? And in any case he’s got lots of rackets on the go, you know, so he wants an out, and he thinks, “I need to assassinate Nabonidus,” who runs the drunken King as a sort of priest/philosopher-king/leader of a native death cult within the city like a puppet master controls his dog.

So he needs a vassal, and he finds it in the prisons of the city where a young, heathen, northern barbarian has been captured and lays there in chains after various escapades and thefts, and this is a young man of 19 called Conan, who’s twice the size of a normal man. All Howard’s heroes are physically enormous, and all incredibly violent, although they all have an honor code of their own which is interesting, particularly towards the end of the story, what you might call an innate code of masculine morality and honor which is part and parcel of natural law.

The Social Darwinian view that was spread throughout mass culture, particularly these types of fictions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is not entirely true as all prisons and all armies testify, there’s a code of honor and morality even in very extreme male behavior. Rapists are always amongst the most disprivileged in any prison. Men who attack and feed on women, for example, in very all-male and male-concentric cultural spaces are always disprivileged, always disliked, and that’s because of innate feelings about how, in a very traditionalist way, what we call partly a sexist way now, men should treat women, and these things pre-date all modern ideas and are partly innate, and in some ways, because Howard is such an instinctualist, he brings these sorts of forces to the fore.

Now, Nabonidus wants Murilo to leave the city. Murilo hires Conan to murder Nabonidus. Nabonidus is [unintelligible]. Conan is in his cell sucking some beef off a bone, and besides, Nabonidus is an upper-class priest—so why not murder him for money, he’s an adventurer?—so he decides to go with Murilo on this plot. As always with Howard, a synopsis never does justice to the sort of the lucid dreaming of the story itself. Howard always said that he was there and that Conan was next to him like an old soldier dictating his stories, some of which will be tall stories as well.

Now, Murilo then hears that Conan has been captured because the guard that he bribed to get him out of the prison has been arrested on another offense. Conan’s actually escaped in another way and joins Murilo later. Murilo, desperate, a Borgia without any sort of a family fortune decides to murder Nabonidus himself, so he creeps up to his fortified estate, which is on the edge of town, described in this Gothic way—it’s dark, it’s sepulchral, it’s moonlit, there’s an enormous dog that roams the grounds.

Remember Conan Doyle’s stories? There’s always this enormous mastiff that the villain has that roams the grounds to bring people down, but Watson shoots on Holmes’ behalf usually at the end. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is extraordinarily amusing because the hound is covered with phosphorous to make it glow in the dark when it races after some poor chap who’s looking back, terrified, on a sort of West Country moor, and yet phosphorous is so poisonous that, the dog licks itself all the time, one lick and its dead. But these stories are metaphorical. They’re extreme exercises in the imagination. They’re not concerned with these pettifogging details of which critics make too much.

Now, Murilo creeps into the garden and, horror of horrors, what does he find? He finds the dead body of the dog, and it looks as though it’s been savagely mauled in a way by something he doesn’t understand, by some weird thing or ape or monster. He then proceeds into the house and finds much of it wrecked. Nabonidus is nowhere to be seen, and one of his servants, Joka, has been murdered.

Suddenly he gets into the inner chamber of Nabonidus’ villa, which is modeled on a Renaissance palace essentially, and he sees the Red Priest, so named because he wears this red cowl, sitting on a throne, made of alabaster, and everything’s heavy and ornamental, a bit like those Cecil B. DeMille films from the ’30s, everything extraordinarily overdone and luxuriant. And he creeps up to Nabonidus to stab him, and the figure turns, and it’s a were-thing, or a monster, something of the imagination. It’s not human at all, simian rather than human. And Murilo faints, and then the story closes.

This story’s in three acts. Traditionally, like a lot of Western drama, like Dante’s Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise, you’ve got this three-pronged triadic element, the thesis, the antitheses, the synthesis at the end. So that’s the first part.

The second part is Murilo awakens in dungeons or interconnected corridors underneath Nabonidus’ house, manse, mansion. He crawls along a corridor and somebody hisses, and it’s Conan. He’s come into the house to murder Nabonidus because Murilo’s going to pay him, and because he’s a member of a cult that he dislikes and so on. Murilo scents his hair, like the young aristocrats of his era, and Conan’s senses are so acute that he detects that with his nostrils, and that’s the reason he doesn’t attack him in the darkness.

They both decide to, they swear loyalty to each other—don’t forget this is an oral culture where bonds and legal sanctions are expressed orally. Howard despised the element of modern life where people say anything they want just to get their own way at any particular time. In pre-modern, say Nordic societies, the oath or something which is given verbally with strength is as binding as any legal document ever could be, even more so.

Conan and Murilo proceed looking for Nabonidus. They come out into the body of the house, which as I said resembles just sort of Renaissance, Florentine palace, and they see Nabonidus stripped, semi-naked and wounded, in a neighboring corridor, and they wonder what has replaced him up inside the house.

And what has happened, as he in a dazed way explains once he returns to full consciousness, is that his servant, who’s this ape that he’s taken from one of the outlying countries in Howard’s imaginary kingdoms, has supplanted him as the master in the house. Howard, to a moderate degree, believed in science, believed in evolution, it was very much almost  a cult then, as was eugenics, and Thak as he’s called, this ape-man who wears the red because he’s supplanted the human he wanted to supplant, has thrown his master, Nabonidus, into the pit and has seized control of the house. Thak sits, waiting for them to come out of the pit because there’s a bell underneath there in the pits that they’ve crossed, a trap basically, and he knows humans are down there, and he’s waiting for them.

Nationalists emerge. There’s an interesting political element here, because Nabonidus is a very corrupt ruler and has the King in his thrall, so nationalists of the city-state—you could be a nationalist and of a city-state because it was the unit of civilization essentially, and a country would be city-states federated together. Attempts to assassinate Nabonidus in a way that Murilo wanted to, Thak deals with them. The story fast-forwards in a very filmic way, because Howard is a visualizer. The male brain is visual and always thinks in images. And these sorts of stories are extraordinarily cinematographical in their nature and their forward, pumping lucidity.

Thak senses that they’ve come up from under the ground, and there are interesting pseudo-scientific elements. The Red Priest, Nabonidus is a scientist and a mage and a magician combined. It’s Religion and the Decline of Magic in some ways if you view it academically. He has this construction of mirrors whereby from one room you can reflect light through tubes that contain small mirrors, and it ends up being able to look into another room, so you can actually look round corners, and they can see Thak, and he can see them.

Because he needs to dispose of the bodies of the nationalists who’ve come into the house, Thak disappears for a time, and Conan and the others seize their chance, and they go up. Nabonidus becomes terrified when all the doors are locked and he can’t find the weapons they need to fight against his servant who’s turned against him.

In the end, Conan has to face off against Thak in this quite extraordinarily violent scene. Howard was one of the most brilliant writers of physical force and conflict between men in the 20th century. There’s little doubt about that. It’s so immediate you’re almost there and it is essentially visual. Conan and Thak have this clash-of-the-gods-type of titanic duel with each other, much like a scene from Homer basically, Hector before the walls of Troy. Thak is done down in the end, and Conan, half-dead, is saluted by Murilo.

Nabonidus then tries to betray both of them, and Conan does for him, really, with a stool. He whips up a stool and throws it into his head, and he falls, and all Conan can say is, “His blood is red, not black,” because in the slums of the city they said the Red Priest’s blood was black because his heart was black, and Conan’s a barbarian and a literalist, you see. “His blood isn’t black.”

There’s an interesting moment when Conan is helped by Murilo because he’s so hurt and wounded in the fight with Thak, and he pushes Murilo aside and says, “A man walks alone. When you can’t stand up it’s time to perish.” That’s not an attitude you heard from the Blair government too often, is it? These are pre-modern attitudes, you see. As somebody on Radio 4 would say now, “But that’s a dangerously exclusionist notion. What about the ill, what about the weak?” And of course in that type of barbaric morality, the strong look after the weak, but only in an assent of being and natural law which is codified on the basis of the morality of strength. That’s what those sorts of civilizations thought and felt.

And the other interesting thing is that he looks down on Thak, this sort of beast, sort of man that he’s killed, and he says, “I didn’t kill a beast tonight, but a man! And my women will sing of him.” And there’s two cultural views of these sorts of things. One is to regard them as remarkable pieces of creative imagination. There is other is to sort of laugh and sneer at them, and think that they represent old-fashioned values that we’ve thankfully gotten rid of, or moved away from.

The stories, with the exception of the Kane stories, are all pre-Christian in the most radical of terms, and yet pre-liberal and liberal secular, which of course in the modern West is what’s replaced Christianity. I would say that contemporary Catholicism is rather like the Protestantism of yesteryear, and Protestantism has become liberalism, and liberalism has morphed, strangely, without the Protestantism that gave it a moral compass, into a form of cultural Marxism, and that’s what we have now.

And yet Howard’s stories are very, very interesting and very dynamic and very much appeal to an imaginative element in certainly a lot of men. The belief in self-definition, the belief in the heroic as a model for life, the belief in strength but with an honor code that saves it from wanton exercise in strength without purpose, and the beliefs that one is part of even a tribe or a community.

In the stories, Conan’s a Cimmerian. He’s from a northern group. He’s always introduced, he’s only got one name, he’s so primal, he doesn’t have any other names. Conan. Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, he only had one name. Heathcliff, he doesn’t need any other names. He’s just a force, you see? A force of the female imagination, which is what he is. And in a strange way, the way in which he’s described in that novel by Emily Brontë is very similar to the way Conan’s described, but Conan’s a bit more beefed out, a bit more muscular.

Many films have been made, many TV series have been made, there’s a Conan industry in the 20th century. What Howard would have thought of all that no one knows. He’s there, possibly on a slightly lower tier, but with Tarzan and Doctor Who and James Bond and these other iconic sort of mass popular fantasy figures. Yet in all of them, certainly in this sort of material, there’s a truth to experience, there’s a vividness, there’s a cinematographical and representational reality, and there’s a concern with courage, masculinity, and the heroic which is lacking from most areas of society, and there’s also an honor code, a primitive morality if you like, which goes with it and gives it efficacy and purpose.

The other thing which he differentiates in this type of literature is respect for the enemy. When Terre’Blanche was murdered, I noticed liberals on the BBC giggling and sort of laughing and thinking it was all a jolly joke. These are people who are against the death penalty and believe that murder’s a terrible infraction against human rights, jurisprudence, and all the rest of it. But the sort of cultural space that this work comes out of respects the enemy. Kills the enemy, respects the enemy, which of course is a soldier’s emotion. Many who’ve fought in wars don’t disrespect the enemy. They know what they’re like. British soldiers who’ve fought in the Falklands, American soldiers who’ve fought against Islamist militants, and even some of the militants themselves when they’ve fought against Western warriors, understand the code of the soldier and the code of the warrior on the other side. But many of these men are spiritually, fundamentally similar men in a way, born in other groups.

Men will always fight with each other, and they’re biologically prone to do so. How, in an era of mass weapons of destructive warfare, some existing and others not, that is to be worked through. It is a part of the destiny of the relationship between groups and states. But the hard-wiring that makes men competitive and egotistical and conflict-oriented is ineradicable and irreducible, and modern liberal societies which are based upon the idea of inclusionist love without thought of conflict are sentimental to the point that they will fall apart, bedeviled by their endless contradictions.

And I personally think that if you inculcate yourself, with a bit of irony and estrangement, from some of the elements of the culture of the heroic that certainly subsisted as mainstream cultural fare in our society before 1950, you have a different attitude towards what spews out of the telly every evening, and you have a different attitude towards the sort of culture that you’re living in, and you have a different attitude towards great figures in your own group and even in others, and you have a different attitude towards yourself and the future.

I give you Robert Ervin Howard, 1906 to 1936, a man who walked alone but spoke for an element, not just of America, but what it is to be white, male, Western, and free.

Thank you very much.

 


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lundi, 04 mars 2013

Lovecraft as Heideggerian Event

hp-lovecraft.gif

A General Outline of the Whole”
Lovecraft as Heideggerian Event

By James J. O'Meara

weird-realism Graham Harman

Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy [2]
Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012

A winter storm in NYC is less the Currier and Ives experience of upstate and more like several days of cold slush, more suggestive—and we’ll see that suggestiveness will be a very key term—of Dostoyevsky than Dickens.

On a purely personal level, such weather conditions I privately associate[1] with my time—as in “doing time”—at the small Canadian college (fictionalized by fellow inmate Joyce Carol Oates as “Hilberry College”[2]) where a succession of more or less self-pitying exiles from the mainstream—from Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan to the aforementioned Oates—suffered the academic purgatory of trying to teach, or even interest, the least-achieving students in Canada in such matters as Neoplatonism and archetypal psychology.[3]

One trudged to ancient, wooden classrooms and consumed endless packs of powerful Canadian cigarettes, washed down with endless cups of rancid vending machine coffee. No Starbucks for us, and no whining about second-hand smoke. We were real he-men back then! There was one student, a co-ed of course, who did complain, and the solution imposed was to exile her—exile within exile!—to a chair in the hallway, like a Spanish nun allowed to listen in from behind a grill.

Speaking of Spain, one of the damned souls making his rounds was a little, goateed Marrano from New York, via Toronto’s Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, no less, who was now attempting to explain Husserl and Heidegger, to “unpack” with his tiny hands what he once called, with an incredulous shake of the head, “that incredible language of his,” to his sullen and ungrateful students.[4]

I thought of this academic Homunculus, who played Naphta to another’s Schleppfuss[5] in my intellectual upbringing, when this book made its appearance in my e-mail box one recent, snowing—or slushy—weekend. For Harman wants to explain Husserl and Heidegger as well, or rather, his own take on them, which I gather he and a bunch of colleagues have expanded into their own field of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) or Speculative Realism. And to do so, he has appropriated the work of H. P. Lovecraft, suggesting that Lovecraft play the same role of philosophical exemplar in his philosophy, as Hölderlin does in Heidegger’s [3].

“That incredible language of his” indeed!

Part One tries to explain this Object Oriented business, but only after he tries to justify or excuse dealing with someone still often regarded as a glorified pulp hack on the same level with the great Hölderlin. He tries to short-circuit the attacks of highbrow critics, still exemplified by Edmund Wilson’s, by denouncing their rhetorical strategy of paraphrase.

Paraphrase? What’s wrong with that? Perfectly innocent, what? Well, no. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the “stupidity of content”—the equal plausibility of any proverb, say, and its opposite—Harman insists that nothing can be paraphrased into something else—reality is not itself a sentence, and so it is “is too real to be translated without remainder into sentences” (p. 16, my italics). Language can only allude to reality.

What remains left over, resistant to paraphrase, is the background or context that gave the statement its meaning.[6] Paraphrase, far from harmless or obvious, is packed with metaphysical baggage—such as the assumption that reality itself is just like a sentence—that enables the skilled dialectician to reduce anything to nonsensical drivel.

Harman gives many, mostly hilarious, examples of “great” literature reduced to mere “pulp” through getting the Wilson treatment. (Perhaps too many—the book does tend to bog down from time to time as Harman indulges in his real talent for giving a half dozen or so increasing “stupid” paraphrases of passages of “great” literature.)[7]

Genre or “pulp” writing is itself the epitome of taking the background for granted and just fiddling with the content, and deserves Edmund Wilson’s famous condemnation of both its horror and mystery genres. But Lovecraft, contra Wilson, is quite conscious, and bitingly critical, of the background conditions of pulp—both in his famous essays on horror and, unmentioned by Harman, his voluminous correspondence and ghost-writing—and thus ideally equipped to manipulate it for higher, or at least more interesting, purposes.

The pulp writer takes the context for granted (the genre “conventions”) and concentrates on content—sending someone to a new planet, putting a woman in charge of a space ship, etc.[8] If Lovecraft did this, or only this, he would indeed be worthy of Wilson’s periphrastic contempt. But Lovecraft is interested in doing something else: “No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess” (p.3, my italics).

Since philosophy is the science of the background, Lovecraft himself is to this extent himself a philosopher, and useful to Harman as more than just a source of fancy illustrations: “Lovecraft, when viewed as a writer of gaps between objects and their qualities, is of great relevance for my model of object oriented ontology” (p. 4).

Back, then to Harman’s philosophy or his “ontography” as he calls it. I call it Kantianism, but I’m a simple man. The world presents us with objects, both real (Harman is no idealist) and sensuous (objects of thought, say), which bear various properties, both real (weight, for example) and sensuous (color, for example). Thus, we have real and sensuous objects, as well as the real and sensuous qualities that belong to them . . . usually.

All philosophers, Harman suggests, have been concerned with one or another of the gaps that occur when the ordinary relations between these four items fail. Some philosophers promote or delight in some gap or other, while others work to deny or explain it away. Plato introduced a gap between ordinary objects and their more real essences, while Hume delighted in denying such a gap and reducing them to agglomerations of sensual qualities.

Harman, in explicitly Kantian fashion this time, derives four possible failures (Kant would call them antinomies). Gaps can occur between a real object and its sensuous qualities, a real object and its real qualities, a sensuous object and its sensuous qualities, and a sensuous object and its real qualities. Or, for simplicity, RO/SQ, RO/RQ, SQ/SO, and SO/RQ.

Take SQ/SO. This gap, where the object’s sensuous qualities, though listed, Cubist-like, ad nauseam, fail, contra Hume, to suggest any kind of objective unity, even of a phenomenal kind—the object is withdrawn from us, as Heidegger would say. It occurs in a passage such as the description of the Antarctic city of the Elder Race:

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism. (At the Mountains of Madness, my italics)

SQ/RO? This Kantian split between an object’s sensuous properties and what its essence is implied to be, occurs in the classic description of the idol of Cthulhu:

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. (“The Call of Cthulhu,” my italics)

SO/RQ? Harman admits it’s rare in Lovecraft, (and elsewhere, though he finds hints of it in Leibniz) but he finds a few examples where scientific investigation reveals new, unheard of properties in some eldritch or trans-Plutonian object.

In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. (“Dreams in the Witch House”)

And RO/RQ? You don’t want to know, as Lovecraft’s protagonists usually discover too late. It’s the inconceivable object whose surface properties only hint at yet further levels of inconceivable monstrosity within. Usually, Lovecraft relies on just slapping a weird name on something and hinting at the rest, as in:

[O]utside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes. (Dream Quest of Unknown Kaddath)

You can see, in each case, how the horrific effect, and the usability for Harman’s ontography, would entirely disappear if given a Wilsonian “paraphrase”: It was a squid with wings! The object, when analyzed, revealed new, hitherto unknown elements!

Confused yet? Bored? Don’t worry. The whole point of Harman’s book, to which he devotes the vast portion of the text, is analyzing passages from Lovecraft that provide vivid illustrations of one or more of these gaps. In this way Harman’s ontography acquires its Hölderlin, and Lovecraft is rescued from pulp purgatory.

While there is considerable interest in Heidegger on alt-Right sites such as this one,[9] I’m sure there is considerably more general interest in Lovecraft. But Harman’s whole book is clearly and engagingly written, avoiding both oracular obscurity and overly-chummy vulgarity; since Harman is admirably clear even when discussing himself or Husserl, no one should feel unqualified to take on this unique—Lovecraftian?—conglomeration of philosophy and literary criticism.

The central Part Two is almost 200 pages of close readings of exactly 100 passages from Lovecraft. As such, it exhibits a good deal of diminishing returns through repetition, and the reader may be forgiven for skipping around, perhaps to their own favorite parts. And there’s certainly no point in offering my own paraphrases!

Nevertheless, over and above the discussion of individual passages as illustrations of Speculative Realism, Harman has a number of interesting insights into Lovecraft’s work generally. It’s also here that Harman starts to reveal some of his assumptions, or biases, or shall we say, context.

“Racism”

Harman, who, word on the blogs seems to be, is a run-of-the-mill liberal rather than a po-mo freak like his fellow “European philosophers,”[10] tips his hand early by referring dismissively to criticism of Lovecraft as pulp being “merely a social judgment, no different in kind from not wanting one’s daughter to marry the chimney sweep” (“Preliminary Note”). And we know how silly that would be! So needless to say, Lovecraft’s forthright, unmitigated, non-evolutionary (as in Obama’s “My position on gay marriage has evolved”) views on race need to be disinfected if Harman is to be comfortable marrying his philosophy to Lovecraft’s writing.

His solution is clever, but too clever. Discussing the passage from “Call of Cthulhu” where the narrator—foolishly as it happens—dismisses a warning as coming from “an excitable Spaniard” Harman suggests that the racism of Lovecraft’s protagonists[11] adds an interesting layer of—of course!—irony to them. As so often, we the reader are “smarter” than the smug protagonist, who will soon be taken down a few pegs.

But this really won’t do. Lovecraft’s protagonists are not stupid or uninformed, but rather too well-informed, hence prone to self-satisfaction that leads them where more credulous laymen might balk. “They’s ghosts in there, Mister Benny!”

Unfortunately for Harman, Lovecraft was above all else a Scientist, or simply a well-educated man, and the Science of his day was firmly on the side of what today would be called Human Biodiversity or HBD.[12] Harman may, like most “liberals” find that distasteful, something not to be mentioned, like Victorians and sex—a kind of “liberal creationism” as it’s been called—but that’s his problem.

It would be more interesting to adopt a truly Lovecraftian theme and take his view, or settled belief, that Science, or too much Science, was bad for us; just as Copernicus etc. had dethroned man for the privileged center of the God’s universe, the “truth” about Cthulhu and the other Elder Gods—first, there very existence, then the implication that they are the reality behind everyday religions—has a deflationary, perhaps madness inducing, effect.

Consider this famous quotation from the opening of “The Call of Cthulhu” as quoted by Harman himself in Part Two:

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. 

Thus Harman could argue that HBD may be true but bad for us to know—something very like the actual position of such liberal Comstocks as Richard Lewontin.

Consider, to switch genres, Dr. No. Quarrel [4], the ignorant, superstitious but loyal native retainer, is afraid to land on Crab Key, due to the presence of a dragon. Bond and his American buddy Leiter mock his fear. (Leiter: “Hey Quarrel, if you see a dragon, you get in first and breathe on him. With all that rum in you, he’ll die happy.”) But of course the dragon—which turns out to be a flame-throwing armored tractor—incinerates Quarrel whilst Bond and the equally superstitious but much more toothsome Honey Ryder are taken prisoner. While in this genre we know that Bond is the heroic knight who will ultimately slay the dragon, for now he does seem to be what Dr. No calls him, “just another stupid policeman” who would have done well to listen to the native—not unlike any number of Lovecraft’s educated protagonists.[13]

This smug assumption that knowledge leaves us safe, and indeed safer, is what Lovecraft is satirizing when the narrator of “Call of Cthulhu” dismisses the warnings of the “excitable Spaniard,” not, as Harman would have it, lampooning “racism” on some meta-level.[14]

Also, Michel Houllebeq, an author Harman otherwise praises, has emphasized that Lovecraft is anything but self-assured, either as a White man, or for the White race itself.[15] If “racism” is able to play the self-debunking role Harman wants it to, this is only because of Lovecraft’s self-doubts, based on his horrific experiences in the already multi-culti New York City of the 1920s, that the White race would be able to survive the onslaught of the inferior but strong and numerous under-men. As Houellebecq says, Lovecraft learned to take “racism back to its essential and most profound core: fear.”

“Fascistic Socialism”

On a related point, Harman puts this phrase, from Lovecraft’s last major work, The Shadow out of Time (which he generally dislikes, for reasons we’ll dispute later), in italics with a question mark, and leaves it at that, as if just throwing his hands up and saying “well, I just don’t know!” Alas, this is one of Lovecraft’s most interesting ideas. Like several American men of letters, such as Ralph Adams Cram, Lovecraft concluded that Roosevelt’s New Deal was an American version of Fascism, but, unlike the Chamber of Commerce types who made the same identification, he approved of it for precisely that reason! [16]

More generally, “fascistic socialism” was essentially what Spengler and others of the Conservative Revolution movement in German advocated; for example [5]:

Hans Freyer studied the problem of the failure of radical Leftist socialist movements to overcome bourgeois society in the West, most notably in his Revolution von Rechts (“Revolution from the Right”). He observed that because of compromises on the part of capitalist governments, which introduced welfare policies to appease the workers, many revolutionary socialists had come to merely accommodate the system; that is, they no longer aimed to overcome it by revolution because it provided more or less satisfactory welfare policies. Furthermore, these same policies were basically defusing revolutionary charges among the workers. Freyer concluded that capitalist bourgeois society could only be overcome by a revolution from the Right, by Right-wing socialists whose guiding purpose would not be class warfare but the restoration of collective meaning in a strong Völkisch (“Folkish” or “ethnic”) state.

But then, Harman would have to discuss, or even acknowledge, ideas that give liberals nose-bleeds.

Weird Porn

Harman makes the important distinction that Lovecraft is a writer of gaps, who chooses to apply his talents of literary allusion to the content of horror; but gaps do not exclusively involve horror, and we can imagine writers applying the same skills to other genres, such as detective stories, mysteries, and westerns.[17] In fact,

A literary “weird porn” might be conceivable, in which the naked bodies of the characters would display bizarre anomalies subverting all human descriptive capacity, but without being so strange that the erotic dimension would collapse into a grotesque sort of eros-killing horror. (p. 4)

Harman just throws this out, but if it seem implausible, I would offer Michael Manning’s graphic novels as example of weird porn: geishas, hermaphrodites, lizards and horses—or rather, vaguely humanoid species that suggest snakes and horses, rather like Harman’s discussion of Max Black’s puzzle over the gap produced by the proposition “Men are wolves”—create a kind of steam punk/pre-Raphaelist sexual utopia.[18]

Prolixity

Speaking of Lovecraftian allusiveness not being anchored to horror or any particular genre or content, brings us to my chief interest, and chief disagreement, with Harman’s discussion of Lovecraft’s literary technique.

I knew we would have a problem when right from the start Harman adduces The Shadow out of Time as one of Lovecraft’s worst, since this is actually one of my favorites, and the one that first convinced me of his ability to create cosmic horror through the invocation of hideous eons of cosmic vistas. Harman first notes, in dealing with the preceding novella, At the Mountains of Madness, that while the first half would rank as Lovecraft’s greatest work if he had only stopped there, the second half is a huge letdown: Lovecraft seems to descend to the level of pulp content, as he has his scientists go on a long, tedious journey through the long abandoned subterranean home of the Elder Race, reading endless hieroglyphs and giving all kinds of tedious details of their “everyday” life.[19]

For Harman, “Lovecraft’s decline as a stylist becomes almost alarming here” (p. 225) and will continue—with a brief return to form with “Dreams in the Witch House,” where Harman makes the interesting observation that Lovecraft seems to be weaving in every kind of Lovecraftian technique and content into one grand synthesis— until it ruins the second half as well of Shadow.

In a series of articles here on Counter Currents—soon to be reprinted as part of my next book, The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others—I suggested that not only should Lovecraft’s infamous verbosity no more be a barrier to elite appreciation than the equally deplored but critically lauded “Late Style” of Henry James, but also, and more interestingly, that conversely, we could see James developing that same style as part of an attempt to produce the same effect as Lovecraft’s, which fans call “cosmicism [6]” but which I would rather call cosmic horror (akin to the “sublime” of Burke or Kant).[20] Or perhaps: Weird Realism.

While Harman has greatly contributed to a certain micro-analysis of Lovecraft’s style, he seems, like the critics of the Late James, to miss the big picture. Although useful for rescuing Lovecraft from pulp oblivion, he still limits Lovecraft’s significance to either mere literature, or illustrations of Harman’s ontography. I suggest this still diminishes Lovecraft’s achievement.

The work of Lovecraft, like James, has the not inconsiderable extra value, over and above any “literary” pleasure, of stilling the mind by its very longeurs, leaving us open and available to the arising of some other, deeper level of consciousness when the gaps arise.[21]

But this is not on the table here, because Harman, like all good empiricists (and we are all empiricists today, are we not?) rejects, or misconstrues, the very idea of our having access to a super-sensible grasp of reality that would leap beyond, or between, the gaps; what in the East, and the West until the rise of secularism, would be called intellectual intuition.[22]

Reality itself is weird because reality itself is incommensurable with any attempt to represent or measure it. Lovecraft is aware of this difficulty to an exemplary degree, and through his assistance we may be able to learn about how to say something without saying it—or in philosophical terms, how to love wisdom without having it. When it comes to grasping reality, illusion and innuendo are the best we can do. (p. 51, my italics)

As usual in the modern West, we are to shoulder on as best we can, in an empty, meaningless world, comforted only by patting ourselves on the back for being too grown up, too “smart,” to believe we can not only pursue wisdom, but reach it. As René Guénon put it, it is one of the peculiarities of the modern Westerner to substitute a theory of knowledge for the acquisition of knowledge.[23]

Notes

1. On such “private associations” see Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, (New York: Holt, 1969), pp. 70–71.

2. Whose biographer, Greg Johnson, is not to be confused with our own Greg Johnson here at Counter Currents—I think. For the fictionalized Hilberry see The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies (Boston: Black Sparrow Press, 1974). Allusive—there’s that idea again!

3. Did they succeed? Judge for yourself: Thomas Moore: Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992).

4. Eventually he would sink so low as to teach “everyday reasoning” to freshman lunkheads.

5. See Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Doktor Faustus, respectively.

6. The hero of this vindication of Rhetoric over Dialectic turns out to be . . . McLuhan! The medium is the message—don’t be hypnotized by the content, take a look at the all-important effects of the context. I’ve suggested before that my own work be seen, like McLuhan’s, less as dogmatic theses to be defended or refuted (dogmatism is for Harman the great sin of worshipping mere content) but rather as a series of probes for revealing new contexts for old ideas. See my Counter-Currents Interview in The Homo and the Negro as well as my earlier “You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong!” here [7]. Once more, we find that education at a Catholic college in the Canadian boondocks is the best preparation for grasping post-modernism, no doubt because it reproduces the background of Brentano and Heidegger. It was Canadian before it was cool!

7. The Wilson treatment is on display whenever some Judeo-con or Evangelical quotes passages from some alien religious work—usually the Koran these days—to show how stupid or bloodthirsty the natives are, while ignoring similar or identical passages in his own Holy Book. So-called “scholars” play the same game, questioning the authenticity of some newly discovered Gnostic work like the Gospel of Judas for containing, “absurdities” and “silliness” while finding nothing odd about the reanimated corpses—reminiscent of Lovecraft’s genuinely pulp hackwork Herbert West, Reaminator—of the “orthodox” writings. Indeed, some have suggested that Lovecraft’s Necronomicon is itself a parody of The Bible, its supposed Arab authorship a mere screen. This typically Semitic strategy of deliberately ignoring the allusive context of your opponent’s words while retaining your own was diagnosed by the Aryan Christ, in such well-known fulminations against the Pharisees as Matthew 23:24 : “You strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” or Matthew 7:3: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

8. Bad sci/fi hits rock bottom in the content-oriented department with the ubiquitous employment of the “space” prefix: space-food, space-pirates, space-justice, etc., frequently mocked on MST3K. David Bowie’s space-rock ode “Moonage Daydream” contains the cringe-worthy “Press your space face close to mine” but this is arguably a deliberate parody, while the rest of the song brilliantly exploits the Lovecraftian allusive/contextual mode of horror, moving from its straight-faced opening—“I’m an alligator”—through a series of Cthulhuian composites—“Squawking like a pink monkey bird”—ultimately veering into Harman’s weird porn mode—“I’m a momma-poppa coming for you.” Deviant sex and cut-up lyrics—another context-shredding technique—clearly points to the influence of William Burroughs, who created subversive texts based on various genres of boys’ books ranging from sci/fi (Nova Express) to detective (Cities of Red Night: “The name is Clyde Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole.”) to his alt-Western masterpiece The Western Lands trilogy.

9. Harman does a better job explaining Husserl and Heidegger than my little Marrano, but then he has had another three decades to work on it. He does, however, focus mainly on Heidegger’s tool analysis, and his own, somewhat broader formulation. For a wider focused, more objective, if you will, presentation of Heidegger, see Collin Cleary’s series of articles on this site, starting here [8].

10. Needless to say, he never notices that his liberalism is rooted in the ultimate dogma-affirming, context-ignoring movement, Luther’s “sola scriptura.” His liberalism is such as to allow him to tell a pretty amusing one-liner about Richard Rorty, but only by attributing it to “a colleague.” On the one hand, he cringes for Heidegger for daring to refer to a “Senegal Negro” (p. 59) but dismisses Emmanuel Faye’s “Heidegger is a Nazi” screed as a “work of propaganda” (p. 259). See Michael O’Meara’s review of Faye here [9].

11. “Not even Poe [another embarrassing “racist”, well what do you know?] has such indistinguishable protagonists” (p. 10).

12. Indeed, “racism” is one of those principles Baron Evola evoked in his Autodefesa [10], as being “those that before the French Revolution every well-born person considered sane and normal.”

13. Kingsley Amis has cogently argued that the key to Bond’s appeal is that he’s just like us, only a little better trained, able to read up on poker or chemin de fer, has excellent shooting instructors, etc. But if we had the chance . . . See Amis, Kingsley The James Bond Dossier (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965).

14. It might be interesting to apply Harman’s OOO to a film like Carpenter’s They Live. In my review of Lethem’s book on the movie [11], reprinted in The Homo and the Negro, I mentioned liking another point, also from Slavoj Žižek: contrary to the smug assumptions of the Left, knowledge is not necessarily something people want, or which is pleasant—hence the protagonist has to literally beat his friend into putting on the reality-revealing sunglasses. Here we have both Lovecraft’s gaps and notion that knowledge is more likely something you’ll regret: Lovecraft and Žižek, together again!

15. Michel Houellebecq [12], H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life [13] (London: Gollancz, 2008). See more generally, and from the same period, Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man, ed. Alex Kurtagic, introduction by Kevin MacDonald (Shamley Green: The Palingenesis Project, 2011).

16. See my “Ralph Adams Cram: Wild Boy of American Architecture” here [14].

17. Again, just as Burroughs applied his cut-up technique to various pulp genres.

18. See my discussion of Manning in “The Hermetic Environment and Hermetic Incest: The True Androgyne and the ‘Ambiguous Wisdom of the Female’” here [15].

19. Everyday life of pre-Cambrian radiata with wings, of course.

20. My suggestion was based on some remarks of John Auchard in Penguin’s new edition of the Portable Henry James, that James’s work could be seen as part of the attempt to substitute art for religion, by using the endless accumulation of detail—James’s “prolixity” as Lovecraft himself chides him for—to “saturate” everyday experience with meaning.

21. Colin Wilson’s second Lovecraftian novel, The Philosopher’s Stone (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1971)—originally published in 1969, republished in a mass market edition in 1971 at the request of, and with a Foreword by, Joyce Carol Oates, bringing us back to Hilberry—introduced me to the idea of length, and even boredom, as spiritual disciplines. One of the main characters “seemed to enjoy very long works for their own sake. I think he simply enjoyed the intellectual discipline of concentrating for hours at a time. If a work was long, it automatically recommended itself to him. So we have spent whole evenings listening to the complete Contest Between Harmony and Invention of Vivaldi, the complete Well Tempered Clavier, whole operas of Wagner, the last five quartets of Beethoven, symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, the first fourteen Haydn symphonies. . . . He even had a strange preference for a sprawling, meandering symphony by Furtwängler [presumably the Second], simply because it ran on for two hours or so.” The book is available online here [16].

22. With the inconsistency typical of a Modern trying to conduct thought after cutting off the roots of thought, Harman advises us that “It takes a careful historical judge to weigh which [contextual] aspects of a given thing are assimilated by it, and which can be excluded” (p. 245). What makes a “careful” judge is, of course, intuition. Cf. my remarks on Spengler’s “physiognomic tact” and Guénon’s intellectual intuition in “The Lesson of the Monster; or, The Great, Good Thing on the Doorstep,” to appear in my forthcoming book The Eldritch Evola but also available here [17].

23. How one can transcend the limits of secular science and philosophy, without abandoning empirical experience as the Christian does with his blind “faith,” is the teaching found in Evola’s Introduction to Magic, especially the essay “The Nature of Initiatic Knowledge.” “Having long been trapped in a kind of magic circle, modern man knows nothing of such horizons. . . . Those who are called “scientists” today [as well as, even more so, “philosophers”] have hatched a real conspiracy; they have made science their monopoly, and absolutely do not want anyone to know more than they do, or in a different manner than they do.” The whole text is available online here [18].

 


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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/lovecraft-as-heideggerian-event/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/weird-realism.jpg

[2] Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1780992521/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1780992521&linkCode=as2&tag=countercurren-20

[3] Hölderlin does in Heidegger’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6lderlin%27s_Hymn_%22The_Ister%22#Part_three:_H.C3.B6lderlin.27s_poetising_of_the_essence_of_the_poet_as_demigod

[4] Quarrel: http://www.007james.com/characters/quarrel.php

[5] for example: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/hans-freyer-the-quest-for-collective-meaning/#more-36698

[6] fans call “cosmicism: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/cosmicism

[7] here: http://jamesjomeara.blogspot.com/2011/03/youve-misunderstood-my-whole-fallacy-i.html

[8] here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/06/heidegger-an-introduction-for-anti-modernists-part-1/

[9] here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/heidegger-the-nazi/

[10] Autodefesa: http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/julius-evola-radical-traditionalism/

[11] my review of Lethem’s book on the movie: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/09/they-live/

[12] Michel Houellebecq: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32878.Michel_Houellebecq

[13] H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life: http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3196799

[14] here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/09/ralph-adams-cram-wild-boy-of-american-architecture/

[15] here: http://jamesjomeara.blogspot.com/2010/12/hermetic-environment-and-hermetic.html

[16] here: http://lucite.org/lucite/archive/fiction_-_lovecraft/14047169-the-philosophers-stone-by-colin-wilson.pdf

[17] here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/the-lesson-of-the-monster-or-the-great-good-thing-on-the-doorstep/

[18] here: http://www.cakravartin.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/Julius-Evola-Introduction-to-Magic.pdf