The title Harold Kaplan gives to the first section of his critique of James Joyce is Stoom: the universal comedy of James Joyce. As we have seen with Gustave Flaubert, this brand of comedy is as serious as it gets.
(more…)Category: Calling Citizen Writers and Poets
Calling citizen writers and poets. It’s time to re-evaluate the Classics. Many of the authors of the American Classics, as well as their foreign critics, were ‘aristocrats of the spirit’, as Harold Kaplan called them. Some of them had aristocratic ancestors and felt at home in European society. Most of them mistrusted democracy. It is time to re-examine their writings in this light, preferably with the help of knowledgeable sources such as Kaplan and his book Democratic Humanism and American Literature.
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The Historical Context of Modern Literature 1789-1914
As I studied James Joyce to prepare for the next chapter of Harold Kaplan’s book, I realized that I need to at least mention the historical context of modern literature. This background is not included in The Passive Voice. Kaplan probably assumed his readers would be familiar with it, but the missing political and social history was crucial for my own understanding. I suspect its importance will become more clear as we continue with this study.
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The Spirit of Comedy Without Humor
Harold Kaplan entitled his essay on Madame Bovary ‘the seriousness of comedy’. In his view, and that of other literary critics cited by him, this work is a ‘special form of dry comedy’ in that it stresses the conflict between feeling agent and unfeeling object. Its effect is the spirit of comedy without humor.
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Modernism’s Contempt for the Human Intellect
The skeptical mode is the source of modernism’s contempt for the human intellect. Or maybe it’s better to say modernism’s contempt for the human’s ability to know anything. Harold Kaplan1 says we have come to believe this mode is the strongest trait of an enlightened modern consciousness. Metaphysics might seem to be the focus of this skepticism, but its focus is primarily the ordinary human consciousness.
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The Crisis of Knowledge
In this series, I want to share my thoughts about Harold Kaplan’s book, The Passive Voice1. Kaplan deals with several related literary topics, but they all arise from the crisis of knowledge in modern intellectual history. I have some doubts about my part in this endeavor, which I’ll state briefly in this introduction to the series.
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Fascists Like Literary and Historical Fantasy
Roger Griffin argues that nostalgia for a holistic cosmology is important to the Italian sacred Right’.1 This explains why fascists like literary and historical fantasy. According to Griffin, they are motivated by a mode of aesthetic politics. They have this in common with the Left, with some important differences.
An old church door, Stow-on-the-Wold, England. Credit: RichVintage Griffin’s Argument
Roger Griffin came to the field of history by way of literature. Along the way he learned that
“all disciplines develop colonial or neo-colonial attitudes if they do not accept as an implicit premise of their activity that there are areas of human reality they are less well-equipped than others to document or explore.”
Griffin p, 102Unfortunately, the boundaries between literary and historical phenomena are not clear in the case of fascist ideology. This becomes obvious to Griffin in the context of J. R. R. Tolkien.
J. R. R. Tolkien and the Neo-Fascist Right
A group of articles appeared in 1983 to mark the publication of Tolkien’s biography. One of them was written by the president of the Tolkien Society in Italy. It was entitled Why He Became a Cult for Us. The author was Gianfranco de Turris, a prominent propagandist of the neo-fascist Right. De Turris was ‘one of Italy’s major publishers and cognoscenti of literature of the fantastic.’ And he wasn’t the only fascist to appreciate Tokien.
Marco Tarchi wrote in his programmatic, Beyond Right and Left, ‘we had an example of what it means to belong spontaneously to a cohesive group-mind without any leadership in the years in which many of us discovered Tolkien, the fantastic, the saga‘.
Probably the most meaningful indication that the Italian neo-Right had adopted Tolkien as one of its official sources is the name the neo-fascist Movemento Sociale Italiane (MSI) chose for its youth training base in the Abruzzi, ‘Camp Hobbit’.
Tolkien and the Left
The Left has Tolkien and the love of fantasy in common with the Right. Griffin cites William Irwin Thompson’s book, At the Edge of History. This book discusses the new idols of the Aquarian Age. Thompson’s book includes everyone from Blake to Edgar Cayce, the I Ching to Velikovsky, and the Mayas to Arthur C. Clarke.
A hitchhiker introduced him to The Lord of the Rings, presenting it as the real history of this planet. This description led Thompson to formulate a theory. Maybe the history of the world is a myth, and myth is the remains of the real history of earth.
Escaping the Ringwraiths. Credit: Sergei Dubrovskii Griffin expands on this idea.
To ignore the cults the metaphysics growing up outside academia, to put one’s faith in them as the dawning of a new phase of industrial society or to indulge in breast-beating about the threat they pose to high culture may throw considerable light on the psychological make-up of the historian but little on history. What the historian is surely called upon to do is identify causal structural factors shaping events, and what is being argued in this article is that the Italian ‘sacred Right’ demonstrates how important the nostalgia for a holistic cosmology can be as a component of the ideological forces at work in contemporary history.
Evola and A Kinder Gentler Fascism?
At the time Griffin’s article was published, (2005) right-wing authors claimed Euro-fascism was no longer just a revival of the fascist creeds of the thirties. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one fascist program or ideology. That said, Griffin was able to place de Turris, Tarchi, and Rauti within the ‘sacred’, ‘metaphysical’ Right.
Julius Evola influenced all three of them. Evola is important first as inspiration to their youngest recruits; second, as one of the most qualified representatives of Right Wing culture; and third, he has supplied the theoretical basis for neo-fascist violence.
Evola’s Two Forms of Society, the Modern, Unsubstantial Form, and the Superior, Traditional Form
Griffin says the best introduction to the principles at the heart of Evola’s writing is The Revolt Against the Modern World, published in 1933. In this book, Evola identifies two fundamentally opposed forms of society: the ‘modern’ is essentially secular and based on the ‘inferior realm of becoming’. It represents an onslaught on the other form of society. That would be the original type based on the ‘superior invisible realm of being’, the only one with any substantial reality. ‘Traditional is the term for the ‘superior’ type. It is a key term for understanding contemporary neo-fascist thought.
A Traditional society is one in which the individual is an organic part of a hierarchical state governed by a caste of warrior-priests, custodians of supratemporal metaphysical truths, and headed in their turn by a monarch.
Griffin p, 104Myth and civilizations of the distant past are evidence that Traditional states existed. For them, life was an initiatic experience. Ritual, the rule of law and caste protected them against the degenerative forces of secularism, egalitarianism and individualism.
The Forces of Degeneration
In this view, Western society is in an advanced stage of decline. This process is said to be irreversible. (Remember Oswald Spengler and his saga of decline?) Yet the fascists remain, glowering and threatening.
In the 1934 and 1951 editions of Evola’s book, he wrote that international fascism would bring a cultural rebirth and a new Golden Age of Traditional values. In the postwar edition of his book, he advocated a stoic response to the decay. He believed ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘Americanism’ would eclipse the true ‘immortal principles’ for the foreseeable future. The only suitable political response was a refusal to dedicate one’s self to any political cause. This is the Traditionalist worldview.
Is the Answer a New Approach to History?
Griffin speculates that if there are ‘two cultures’, maybe the division has to do with they way the two sides deal with modernity. Some learn to live with partial knowledge. Others only feel at home in a total explanatory system. This second category needs a vision of the world.’ Or is that naive?
The Ring cycle is based on Christian experience; Tolkien hated apartheid and rejected racist policies in his native South Africa. So, maybe this is not a both-sides kind of issue. The differences are crucial here and now.
Conclusion: the Historical Implications of Radical anti-Modernism Have Not Gone Away
Perhaps these differences were overlooked and that’s why the world got German Romanticism, idealism, neo-paganism, and the rise of Nazism. And we can’t forget that the ‘historical implications of radical anti-modernism did not disappear at the end of WWII’.
Tolkien portrayed the modern, secular intellect as the evil Saruman. Perhaps his intuition was sound. But some of the ‘hobbits who are planning the revolt against the Sarumans of the modern world are not mythical, but specially trained in the Abruzzi, confident in the knowledge that they are serving another sentinel: Julius Evola, ‘closed in his tower which is certainly not of ivory, romantic and decadent, but the tower of a castle, a fortress, classical and aristocratic.’ 2
- Roger Griffin, Revolts against the Modern World: The Blend of Literary and Historical Fantasy in the Italian New Right, Oxford Polytechnic, ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2005 ↩︎
- De Turris, Testomonianze, Op. cit. This is how Aniceto del Massa opens his piece entitled ‘The Tower as a Symbol’, pp. 97-101 (as cited by Griffin) ↩︎
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The Poetry of Democracy
Harold Kaplan said ‘humanist aspirations’ are the dominant American intellectual tradition. 1 But an abstract notion of democratic humanism is only part of the story. Kaplan explains democratic humanism in the context of writers of the American classics: Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, Poe, D. H. Lawrence, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Twain, and Henry James. They composed the American classics and the poetry of democracy, and in their works we see hints of the strange continent that confronted them. Kaplan deciphers their experience through the historical context, their own letters and the works of European sympathizers. Their response to this unique time and place was to create a body of literature recognized today as the American Classics.
Humanism and America’s Citizen Poets
“How does one define humanism then? In the American context the necessary assumptions were that man was both the first cause and the final end of his experiences and that he has in some unmentioned respect a dominance over his history, his present state, and his future.” (p. 3)
Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman were citizen poets. But this is also true of Melville and Hawthorne, who had opposing temperaments. They were all critics of their civilization, but beneath the criticism was a deep allegiance. ‘If we have a moral tradition that supports democracy, it is largely their creation’. (p. ix)
The Metaphor of the Frontier
The ancestors of these authors had arrived on the American continent with their heads full of the old world. By the 18th century, they were finally ready to formulate a debate with that world and distinguish themselves from it. This might account for the way American culture developed on a parallel track with native culture. They wrote about the native inhabitants, but they were obsessed with the burden of creating a new, non-European culture.
Kaplan says that in some respects, modernity came to America at the beginning of its history. ‘The frontier supplied the best historical metaphor for both crisis and inspiration in a world without sovereign moral authorities’. These American authors ‘faced the deep insecurity of a quarrel between man and his civilization’. They took the cultural initiative of defining the terms of their own freedom, and for that reason, they seem like an avant garde for the modern consciousness.
The Poetry of Democracy in Debate With the Old World
Democracy was part of the debate with the old world. And freedom. And morality. And it wasn’t confined to American writers. That’s also true today. Hannah Arendt, for example, interpreted Hermann Melville’s Billy Budd as a rebuke against the French Revolution. That may be what Melville intended. However it seems to me that when conservatives disapprove of the French Revolution, they are trying to erase it from history, and that is more troubling than the Revolution itself. And Arendt was a conservative.
An important contributor to our conversation is Chris Hedges, who often quotes Hannah Arendt. Hedges often quotes Melville’s Moby Dick as well. This is fitting because Hedges is a Calvinist, as was Melville’s mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In our conversation, we are fortunate to have Hedges’s view of the American Classics in addition to that of Harold Kaplan and others. We need all of these voices and literary sources together to orient ourselves and our democracy in this time and place.
Billy Budd
The following is Harold Kaplan’s commentary on Billy Budd. This is a spoiler alert. If you haven’t read Billy Budd, you might want to read it before continuing.
“In fact the ability to appreciate him (the ‘Handsome Sailor’) is what marks the line between good and evil, faith and despair… It is clear, from such expressions, as well as the longer development in Billy Budd, that the ‘Handsome Sailor’ was a man who reflected for other men their best sense of themselves...
“The effect is to say that the ‘Handsome Sailor’ is universal in his humanity, and superior at the same time. He is, significantly, a democratic hero in another sense. In his various embodiments he is associated with revolutionary action, with mutiny, and the over-throw of authorities… The tension between resistance and conformity dominates the long development of the theme, a point which fulfills expectations for a democratic hero. In the last complete incarnation, Billy Budd cheers for the ‘Rights of Man,’ but also dies affirming Captain Vere.” (p. 189)
It may seem surprising that Hermann Melville is a model for our contemporary neoconservatives. They appreciate what they see as Melville’s superior resistance to authoritarianism. I hope we can look at these authors through our own eyes and decide for ourselves what they were trying to tell us about our world. Maybe we can also expand on their vision.
Chris Hedges: The Miracle of Kindness
- Democratic Humanism and American Literature, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1972 ↩︎
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American Classics and the Poetry of Democracy
Harold Kaplan said ‘humanist aspirations’ are the dominant American intellectual tradition. 1 But an abstract notion of democratic humanism is only part of the story. Kaplan explains democratic humanism in the context of writers of the American classics: Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, Poe, D. H. Lawrence, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Twain, and Henry James. They composed the American classics and the poetry of democracy, and in their works we see hints of the strange continent that confronted them. (more…)