More Pensées

I want to write, and I have several dishes in the oven, but none of them are quite done. So here’s a bowl of literary chips and historical salsa. 

Great American Novels, Great European Novellas

I've been tracking my reading habits pretty carefully since 2020, which has allowed me to observe some broad trends. The first stops on my literary comeback tour after escaping the academic desert were Stephen King, fantasy, and science fiction — which meant either big novels (The Lord of the Rings, The Gormenghast Trilogy, and It) or short stories (a form in which sci-fi writers excel, especially Roger Zelazny). 

But between finding Donna Tartt’s Secret History at Barnes and Noble (enticed entirely by the cover), rediscovering Chekhov, and delving into the riches of Eastern Europe to process Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, my reading has moved away from genre fiction and toward “serious” or “art” fiction. (Those are misnomers, of course: The Lord of The Rings and Gormenghast are both serious, in their way, and if Stephen King and Zelazny don’t produce art, then no one does.) 

Drifting to art fiction, I’ve found, has meant drifting to European literature. I don’t mean to be snooty; it’s just that Europe’s experience of the last century sure as hell puts the “serious” in serious fiction. The World Wars were devastating and deracinating for Europeans, while for us they were enriching and, for lack of a better phrase, racinating. Our postwar boom defined the 1950s, the decade that numerous Americans — on both sides of the aisle — consider the peak of domestic prosperity. And before enduring postwar austerity, Europe contended with actual fascism and actual communism, and suffered actual genocide. Americans, meanwhile, be they Noam Chomsky or Russell Kirk, have had to invent all kinds of qualified versions of those ideas in order to eat at the big kid table with the cigarette-smoking, beturtlenecked cyniques of Sixties Paris. The same dynamic persists in a lot of contemporary American fiction: we continue to suffer from what Tom Wolfe calls a colonial complex.

America had shown the world the way in every area save one. In matters intellectual and artistic, she remained an obedient colony of Europe. American architecture had never recovered from the deadening influence of the German Bauhaus movement of the twenties. American painting and sculpture had never recovered from the deadening influence of various theory-driven French movements, beginning with Cubism early in the twentieth century. In music, the early-twentieth-century innovations of George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and Ferde Grofé had been swept away by the abstract, mathematical formulas of the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg's influence had faded in the 1990s, but the damage had been done. The American theater had never recovered from the Absurdism of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, and Luigi Pirandello. (Hooking Up, pp. 12-13)

He acknowledges the genius of writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and their ilk, but points out that the heroic age of American literature was only accomplished in dialogue with Europe. 

There’s plenty of genre fiction on the American market (some of it pretty good, some of it — the “romantasy” of Sarah J. Maas, for instance — soft porn in armor), but our homegrown “serious” works still seem to lack that special something. 

And that’s putting it diplomatically. Much that passes for “serious” fiction in this country, especially in major journals, is self-indulgent, psychosexual schlock. America’s literati is four-fifths sham, a clerisy of the de jure have-nots who compose the de facto 1%. European literature may have its share of pomp and arrogance, but it had and still has that something. The pressures of the Old World fading gradually and, in the end, violently into something new, produced all kinds of literary diamonds; some are still forming. 

And many of those diamonds, to make an end, are novellas. Indeed, the outsized reputation of Russian literature might suggest that the Europeans are incapable of writing anything under 1,000 pages, but the reality is just the opposite. The French and the Germans have honed the novella into a unique and rewarding form that features prominently in the oeuvres of big names like Kafka, Mann, and Camus, as well as of obscurer figures like Fred Uhlman, J.L. Carr, and Irène Nemirovsky. 

As I’ve drifted deeper into European literature, I’ve found myself increasingly at home with novellas. Don’t get me wrong, of course. I love a good thick novel — I just read Buddenbrooks, and my favorite book is War & Peace. But sometimes I get the feeling that the gushy reverence of bookish people for novels is just a socially acceptable form of codependency: the books are so damn long that you bond with the characters through the shared trauma of sheer endurance. And I love short stories, too: Zelazny and Chekhov, and all that. But novellas are often in the Goldilocks zone of length and depth: short stories are so haunting because they often end just as you’re getting comfortable in the world of the tale, while novels can sometimes overwhelm you with detail, leaving you blearily questioning the ultimate relevance of recounting, say, one more Derry denizen’s traumatic backstory, or another summer in Travemünde. Novellas, by contrast, give you room to breathe, but send you on your way just before familiarity ferments into contempt. Uhlman’s Reunion, Chekhov’s Three Years, and Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile are so far my favorite examples of the form, but Nemirovsky’s Snow in Autumn and Carr’s A Month in the Country are both earning spots, too. 

Falling in love with novellas has made me want to take a stab at writing some myself, seeing if I can do with contemporary American experience — still not genocidal or fascistic, but no longer unproblematically prosperous and free — what those early 20th century Europeans did with theirs. We don’t need more fantasy tomes, and science fiction seems to be on gender-bending life support: we need good, solid, readable, fiction, and maybe that means novellas. The age of the Great American Novel may well be past, but who knows? The age of the Great American Novella might just be dawning. 

Whose Nietzsche, Which Übermensch? 

Incidentally, that Tom Wolfe quote above continues: 

But, above all, there was the curious case of American philosophy — which no longer existed. It was as if Emerson, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey had never lived. The reigning doctrine was de-construction, whose hierophants were two Frenchmen, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. They began with a hyperdilation of a pronouncement of Nietzsche's to the effect that there can be no absolute truth, merely many "truths," which are the tools of various groups, classes, or forces. From this, the deconstructionists proceeded to the doctrine that language is the most insidious tool of all. The philosopher's duty was to deconstruct the language, expose its hidden agendas, and help save the victims of the American "Establishment": women, the poor, nonwhites, homosexuals, and hardwood trees. (Hooking Up, p. 13; emphasis mine) 

That highlighted portion is a common account of the origins of postmodernism. You can find it echoed by Alan Bloom, William Buckley, Bishop Robert Barron, and beyond. It’s not wrong, exactly… and yet… 

My deepening engagement with European, and in particular with German, literature, has so riddled that smooth history with holes that it looks like Swiss cheese — and feels about as squishy. 

Internal cultural disputes in Germany weren’t, as far as I can tell, between Nietzscheans and anti-Nietzscheans so much as between rival heirs to Nietzsche’s mantle, comparable to the Sunni-Shia divide. 

Nor is that a fanciful parallel: if Thomas Mann and Harry Kessler are any indication, Nietzsche was neither a philologist (his field of expertise) nor a philosopher (an even more dubious appellation), but a prophet.

Only he who grasps [Nietzsche’s] works lyrically, that is, as the revelations of one of the most typical and so the most enchanting minds of the second half of the nineteenth century, the emotional history of a genius who suffered in an unusually sensitive way from the great moral struggles of his day, can judge Nietzsche correctly. Who only picks and chooses from Nietzsche's dogmas or, just the opposite, bewitched by the magic of his language, allows himself to be seduced into thinking them true, must always misjudge him, or apply a mistaken, incommensurable standard to him. Not his philosophy and not even the power of his poetry are the most important things, but rather the man himself, who represents the expression of a new kind of being, the very type of the intellectually superior but emotionally fragile individual struggling against the mounting tide of democratization. (Kessler, Journey to The Abyss, pp. 112-113, January 13, 1894) 

The youth of twenty was clear upon the relativity of this great moralist's "immoralism." I watched the spectacle of his hatred for Christianity and, seeing beside it his brotherly love for Pascal, understood the hate in a moral but not a psychological sense — a distinction which I found to persist in Nietzsche's epochal war upon Wagner, that war upon what he loved best unto death. In a word, what I saw above all else in Nietzsche was the victor over self. I took nothing literally; I believed him hardly at all; and this precisely made my love for him a passion on two planes, gave it, in other words, its depth. Was I to take him seriously when he preached hedonism in art? When he played off Bizet against Wagner? What to me were his "blond beast" and his philosophy of force? Almost an embarrassment. His glorification of "life" at the expense of mind — that lyricism which turned out so disastrously for German thinking — I could assimilate in only one way: as self-criticism. (Thomas Mann, A Sketch of My Life, pp. 22-23) 

There were, in other words, political Nietszcheans, like Hitler, and cultural Nietzscheans, like Mann and Kessler. The former had been seduced by thinking his sensational fulminations true, in Kessler’s words, while the latter contextualized his rhetoric within the continuum of Greco-Roman culture that Nietzsche regarded as canonical, recognizing the man, not his thought, as a model. Mann in particular despised Hitler and the Nazis, but he didn’t repudiate Nietzsche. He was, quite simply, the air you breathed in cultivated Germany. “An interesting remark by Schubin regarding today’s psychological climate, that six educated Germans cannot come together without Nietzsche’s name being mentioned.” (Kessler, p. 102, May 17, 1893)  

So is it fair, then, to lump Nietzsche with the “masters of suspicion,” one of the wily architects of the postmodern predicament? I’m inclined to say no. Merely invoking Nietzsche’s name is no guarantee of doctrinal or tonal fidelity. The same crowd vilifies Marx and Freud for equally simplistic reasons. Consider John Horvat’s latest at The Imaginative Conservative:

Modernity is replete with philosophers who interpret reality through prisms. By simplifying their perceptions, such figures seek to change history. Thus, Karl Marx saw everything through the prism of power and money. His class struggle is the battle between the haves and the have-nots. Freud saw things through the prism of sexuality. Everything can be explained as a struggle between those with complexes and those seeking the free exercise of passions. In both cases, history shifts leftward.*

Marx can certainly be accused of monomania, but he also articulated the theory of estranged labor — a central facet in the contemporary postliberal Catholic critique of capitalism — and inaugurated a revolution in aesthetics. The fathers of so-called “cultural Marxism,” like Adorno and Horkheimer, were traumatized German aesthetes living in American exile, whose revulsion at “late capitalism” was fundamentally an aesthetic reaction to the tastelessness of mass culture. 

And contrary to the popular impression, Freud thought repression was essential to civilization: he wasn’t some free lovin’, burn-your-bras precursor to Kinsey. Summary statements like Horvat’s simplify our perceptions no less than the straw men he’s attacking. 

I think something similar is happening when we treat Nietzsche as one more link in the chain between Scotus and Stalin — a chain Richard Weaver builds link by implausible link and yard by implausible yard in Ideas Have Consequences. The deeper into history you get, the blurrier the lines of causality become. Often that’s something only specialists need to worry about, but I think pigeonholing philosophers should bother anyone who professes to care about truth, goodness, and beauty. It’s a messy business, the human condition: we need all the help we can get, no matter from whom we get it. 

I once encountered a Catholic philosopher who dismissed Nietzsche as a Nazi. I corrected him. He bristled, and decided to berate Nietzsche for writing so many things that could be misinterpreted — if misinterpreted they had been. That’s an absurd criticism: if we can hold people responsible for every misinterpretation of their ideas, then not even the Son of God would be sinless. But if we’re going to exempt the Lord for sounding awfully Calvinist in Matthew 26, or Chrysostom  for his 4chan-worthy fulminating about “the synagogue of Satan,” or Augustine for sounding like Luther and Descartes and Calvin and the Jansenists, then we’re obliged to extend the same concession to Nietzsche.

And if, for the sake of the kingdom, we deny him that right, we’re more like the Nietzsche- and Marx-citing critical theorists than we care to admit.

Walter Benjamin, Sophist Sublime

I am reading Walter Benjamin. Yes, I am. 

I’ve been chipping away at Illuminations, with occasional glances at Reflections and a toying browse through the four-volume Belknap edition of his collected essays. 

I’ll be honest, though, it’s slow going. 

If Benjamin had been a committed aphorist, like E.M. Cioran, I think he’d be easier to read and better remembered. The power of an aphorism derives from its lack of a discursive prelude: each is a flash of dark lightning on a cloud of cream-colored paper. But as soon as you argue an aphorism, you forfeit that foudroyant mystique. (Which tells you something about aphoristic philosophy: a good chunk of its appeal is rhetorical. Someone who tried to argue Cioran’s pessimism would be one sad sack of shit; but the sheer audacity of his aphorisms gives his gloom its badass glamor. In the end, that’s pretty much all he has.) 

That’s Benjamin’s problem. He has an aphorist’s insights with a critic’s urge to justify himself. The combination is fascinating, but difficult to read, and often maddening. 

These sudden insights are sometimes premises and sometimes conclusions, but in either case they bubble up like the metaphysical dicta that St. Thomas Aquinas invokes to settle arguments in the Summa Theologiae — “that which is greatest in truth is greatest in being”, “the first in any genus is the cause of all in that genus”, and so on. To readers unfamiliar with metaphysics (and even to readers familiar with it), these sudden maxims feel like cheap shots, Aquinas conjuring his way out of dialectical thickets with the magic wand of a convenient (and rarely cited) principle. 

With Aquinas, though, you could get to the bottom of his metaphysics — you could unmask the wizard and find a man behind the curtain. (Is it Aristotle? Is it Avicenna? We may never know.) 

But Benjamin? Good luck, mein Freund.

Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. (“Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, pp. 196-197) 

I’m not at all sure that grounding our ideas of happiness on extant but absent sources of satisfaction is just another way of saying that our everyday longing for happiness is “indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.” If he had just said the last bit, though, I might be along for the ride. But the flawed argument that precedes it cuts the force of the insight and poisons my reception of the subsequent ideas. 

Or take this particularly bizarre line of argument: 

a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life. The idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity. Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality. But it cannot be a matter of extending its dominion under the feeble scepter of the soul, as Fechner tried to do, or, conversely, of basing its definition on the even less conclusive factors of animality, such as sensation, which characterize life only occasionally. The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher's task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history. (“The Task of The Translator”, Illuminations, p. 14)

Dismissing the entire empirical tradition of restricting the unmetaphorical sense of “life” to organic life as “tenuous,” treating the Romantic extension of vitality to traditions and works of art as obvious and inarguable, as the only real way of giving “life” its due as a concept? Doubling down on the deliberate equivocation of biological and cultural life, and then insisting that authentic philosophy only proceeds from that equivocation as a first principle? Who does he think he is?

But it doesn’t stop there. 

The relationship between life and purposefulness, seemingly obvious yet almost beyond the grasp of the intellect, reveals itself only if the ultimate purpose toward which all single functions tend is sought not in its own sphere but in a higher one. All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life, but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance. Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages. (“The Task of The Translator”, Illuminations, p. 14; emphasis mine)

Oh, really? They do? Says who? On what grounds? And how many translators other than Benjamin would agree that the core purpose of their profession is not to make a masterpiece in one language available to readers in another, but actually to express the reciprocity of all languages? 

The annoying thing is, Benjamin’s insights, despite being the bastard sons of deliberate sophistry, are fascinating. You may not want them to be true, but you always want to think about them — and not just the way you chew on an aphorism. 

Benjamin’s immersion in the Kabbalah lent his style the unverifiable conviction of a mystic. The profundity of his ideas and his obvious intelligence force you to feel like the joke’s on you, that there must be a warrant for the leaps in logic. And if you can’t confidently engage in critical analysis, if you’re not grounded in logic and the broader intellectual tradition, you just might get duped. 

In that respect, Benjamin is a lot like Hans Urs von Balthasar: they’re both brilliant, they’re both inclined to eccentric readings of canonical texts, and they’re both inclined to state sublime sophisms with unearned mystical confidence. They are, accordingly, both fascinating and well worth reading, but terrible places for half-formed and impressionable newcomers to start. 

*I find it odd that Horvat treats prismatic refraction — presumably what he means by bringing up prisms at all — as analogous to simplifying perception. To my mind, prisms clarify rather than simplify. A ray of white light enters the prism and exits as a rainbow: those six colors were blended in the unrefracted ray until they were distinguished by the glass. Am I crazy? Does anyone else see the oddity of that analogy?

Then again, maybe I’m just prejudiced: