If Fortuna is a woman, what then? Beat her into submission, Machiavelli urges. Sweep aside all effeminacy (that is, Christianity), and conquer.

Machiavellian spiritedness did not so much conquer the Christian spirit as amalgamate with it, yielding the wars that wracked Europe in the 17th century. Then a saner modernism emerged, one that channeled manly spiritedness into the peaceful bays of commerce and republicanism.

There was a problem with the commercial republican solution. It could not satisfy the most spirited men and women, whom such glory as parliamentarism conferred could never satisfy, for whom business was a bore. Beginning with Rousseau, who revives Machiavelli’s founder in the person of the Legislator, moderns seek a vaster scope for their ambitions than bourgeois waters afford.

The tribe of the lion and the eagle: Stalin was such a predator. The Foundations of Leninism introduces readers to a distinctly modern tyrant, one who justifies his actions according to a comprehensive doctrine reducible to a partisan ‘platform.’ The Party, like the Machiavellian prophet, must not go forth “completely unarmed” (102). The Party must be both “bold” and “flexible,” leonine and vulpine (102-103). The Party’s very doctrine is a weapon; “the Party must be armed with revolutionary doctrine” (103). The Party determines the content of its prophecy in accordance with “a knowledge of the laws of revolution”—laws of kinesis, unlike the laws of yesterday, which do not stabilize human societies but heat and reshape them. The Party does not merely govern; it guides. The head of the Party is no statesman; he is the leader of the Party even as the Party “must lead the proletariat” (103-104), which leads all humanity. The Americans had compared Washington to the leader, Moses, during war, then to Cincinnatus in peacetime. So long as there is the Party, there will be no peace. The Party consists of “the General Staff” (104) of the proletarian army, conquering Fortune—the fluctuating, circulating, up-and-down stock market life of the bourgeoisie. Like Machiavelli’s army in The Art of War, the Party replaces virtue with virtù, piety with discipline. ‘Civic life’ be damned; the proletarian dictatorship has a world to win, and no time for the chattering slackers of parliament buildings and newspaper offices.

“The Party is the embodiment of unity of will, unity incompatible with the existence of factions” (113). James Madison need not enlist; his are the devices of the commercial-republican halfway-house, a drafty structure of rickety architecture, to be demolished by a new, more scientific Corps of Engineers adept at gaining the masses’ “conscious and voluntary submission,” which Stalin (ever the ex-seminarian) rightly sees as the only “truly iron discipline” (114). These incorruptible disciplinarians shall purge their ranks of petty-bourgeois opportunistic polluters, whose dispirited “spirit of demoralization and uncertainty” accords ill with the new spiritedness, the new scientific faith or dialectical prophecy of the bringers of the new order. And what could be more certain than death? Charles de Gaulle told André Malraux that “Stalin said only one serious thing to me: ‘In the end, death is the only winner.'” Genocidal terror gets ‘History’ on your side, with no back-talk. What could be more unifying than a mass grave”

Stalin, straightforwardly a tyrant, needs smart sycophants willing to trick himout in attractive finery. Georg Luckács does the honors, doing himself no honor thereby. His apologia for Stalin is a contemptible performance, and one of the most valuable any young ‘intellectual’—to say nothing of “the young generation of the Communist Party”—could read. It shows how not to be an intellectual, how an intelligent person can ‘dialecticize’ his way into a sacrificio d’intellectio that excuses mass murder, emitting polysyllabic sonorities and gesturing nobly all the while.

Lukács correctly sees that Marx transforms transcendence into immanence, divinizing the course of human events and above—no, wrong metaphor: beyond—all else exalts the Party and its Leader. There are no conceptual constraints on the Leader’s tactics; they are, in Lukács’s fine phrase, “conceptually indeterminable.” They sure are—with a vengeance. “The sense of world history” (which is no rigid concept) alone determines the Leader’s tactics.

This yields a new super-imperative, ‘super’ because it is no longer categorical but supremely spirited: Act as if your action or inaction will change the destiny of the world, All is partisan; the only right consciousness is class-consciousness; you are either with us or against us.

So far, this is standard Marxist fare. But the special Lukácsian signature comes at the end. Ardent but sensitive young comrades, our consciences must not be allowed to make cowards of us all. Prince-of-Denmark vacillation can never be allowed to persist in a young captain of the world-historical revolution. Virtue must become a noble tragic sacrifice of the priests of virtù, inspirited by the historical Law—rather as Christians are adjured to allow the Holy Spirit to think and act through them, martyrs if they must be. So, as I advance upon my class enemy, truncheon in hand, intending to break his kidneys, I shall assure him, ‘This is going to hurt me even more than it will hurt you. I am no Sadist, taking pleasure in your pain. I do more than feel your pain; I feel my own far more exquisite and tragical agony.’

By contrast, Rosa Luxemburg shows distinct signs of sanity and decency. She does not lack a certain old-Whig charm, with her insistence that the proletarian democratic-dictatorship replacing the bourgeois democratic-dictatorship retain the proven forms of republican civic life. She truly sees that rule by terror ultimately will demoralize and not re-inspirit the too-spirited terrorizers. In partly excusing the Leninists by arguing C’est la guerre, she exhibits (calculatedly, perhaps) that winning if foolish generosity her enemies despised.

Her mistake is obvious and comes early. In 1917 Russia, “The democratic republic was the complete, internally ripened product of the first onset of the revolution.” Wrong metaphor: in Russia the democratic republic was the weak infant of the revolution. It needed the most patient nurture, this child of a people who, unlike the Americans of 1776, had little if any experience in self-government. She compounds her error by endorsing the vast project of nationalizing agriculture under large, state-run farms. If done Leninistically, this will bring bureaucratic centralism, injuring civic involvement. If done democratically (as Luxemburg wishes it were) it will load the backs of infant democrats with adult complications unsolved by the most mature republicans. Never fear, she assures us, predicting that “living history,” especially in its scientific-socialist phase, “has the fine habit of always producing with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution.” Caught you, you Emersonian. Would that it were so.

Like his countryman Machiavelli, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti is a founder. Like Machiavelli’s founders, Marinetti’s are men alone. (Even Machiavelli’s Centaur makes an appearance in The Futurist Manifesto, Machiavelli’s educator of founders.) Marinetti’s founders, like Machiavelli’s, distrust the deceiving senses of sight (classical philosophy) and hearing (Biblical prophecy), but while the politic Machiavelli commends the sense of touch—caressing or annihilating, as circumstances dictate—the artist Marinetti cries, “The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts,” our “young lions.” Surely taste will not be the sense preferred, smacking as it does of bourgeois proprieties and genteel refinement.

As in Machiavelli, the castles-in-the-air of old philosophies and faiths must be brought to earth. Away, pachyderms of “pensive immobility”: “There is no more beauty.” Masterpieces must be spirited, “aggressive.” Sing, goddess, of “the man at the wheel”—not on the wheel—of Fortune. “Time and Space died yesterday,” conquered by the speeding vanguard. Like modernity itself up to his time, Marinetti begins with Machiavelli and ends with Nietzsche. Pitliess, ‘unjust’ action and creativity constitute the only real art, which is the best of life, which is superior to truth.

André Breton shares this ‘life-over-conscience’ view, which he associates with freedom, “the only word that still excites me.” His freedom is freedom of imagination, which “alone offers me some intimation of what can be.” In The Surrealist Manifesto, he does not explain why imagination does not equally and perhaps more likely offer me intimations of what cannot be, except in dreams. Realism be damned; it is mediocre, hateful, boring, the stuff of novels.

Breton criticizes logic, meaning analytical logic; he wants do delimit analysis not by noēsis but by imagination. Looking for noēsis, he finds fantasia. The dream is an isle of unlimited, self-satisfying spiritedness or thumos in a vast sea of bourgeois/analytical-rational banality. Like any thumotic personality, he longs for certainty. In this sense he is a Cartesian who rejects Cartesian method, Cartesian rationalism. He drams of a synthesis of dream and reality, surreality, which alone will have the absolute properties of Hegel’s end-of-history with none of the latter’s constricting finality. Surreality is reminiscent of the thumotic Carlyle’s “Natural Supernaturalism.” Surrealism is the dream of Machiavelli’s lion untampered by the shrewdness of Machiavelli’s fox: “Isn’t what matters that we be masters of ourselves, the masters of women and of love too”? To love is to love some thing or some one; love implies the noetic limits imposed by the nature of the object or person loved. but the thumotic man wants to master love, experience pure freedom. Surrealism will make praxis poetic, in acts of Nietzschean fortitude and endurance: having borne, camel-like, the burdens of bourgeois life, having rebelled leoninely, the new artist will be as a dreaming child.

It turns out that Breton too has a method. Thumos must be freed, but only indirectly (and paradoxically) by an act of passivity. This act is ‘automatic writing’ or ‘stream-of-consciousness,’ whereby ‘Freudian’ subconscious forces are tapped without the unfree, scientistic, analytical trappings of Herr Doktor’s couch. This exercise could happen no more in the ancient world, with its sense of limits and balance, than in Christendom, with its fears that such spiritual exercises could call up real demons. (Surrealism is a modest curlicue on the line of Satanists and mock-Satanists of Romanticism and the later ‘Decadence,’ the line that runs, in different ways, from Sade and Blake through Les Fleurs du Mal and such ‘spiritualist’ doctrines as Theosophy. Hence Breton: “We cross what the occultists call dangerous territory.”

Surrealist freedom does necessarily not end in anarchy. Breton quotes Baudelaire on the spontaneous and despotic coming of Surrealist images. ‘Sovereignal freedom’ is the result of unlimited freedom. It is as if Rousseau’s solitary walker also wanted to be Rousseau’s Legislator. A “new morality” will be imposed, but, like many a founder, Surrealist man writes books and denies authorship of them. Like Machiavelli’s and Marinetti’s founders, he too will be a man alone with a godlike power or “invisible ray” that will enable him to triumph. (Tristan Tzara rehearses these and other Nietzschean tropes more playfully; his attack on the characteristic question of philosophy—What is?—is especially amusing, albeit sophistical.)

In art and in politics, the type of soul Plato calls the guardian no longer wants to guard but to rule. In order to rule thumotically, however, it cannot stand still. It must endlessly assert and reassert its freedom. In politics, the triumph over the limits of nature, of the human body, ends in tyranny and death: a stack of dead bodies. In art, the triumph over life—the free, undefinable future of Futurism, the above-it-all freedom of Sur-realism, the comic freedom of the undefinable (thus free, beyond the whatness of nature Dada—all end in another sort of nothingness, the walls of museums and office builders and rich collectors.

Why garden? Why poeticize?
Robert Frost and his much younger contemporary, Mary Oliver, both distinguished themselves as poets of nature, and also as poets whose audiences have far exceeded college classrooms and highbrow bookstores. This 1993 essay compares two of their best-known poems, Frost’s “Mending Wall” and Oliver’s “Writing Poems.”

 

Gardening, human beings govern nature with art. Human art mediates between the gardener and nature. Poetry mediates among the poet, nature, and readers.

Robert Frost knows this. His neighbor tells him, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It is Frost’s neighbor’s father’s saying, a specimen of traditional or folk wisdom. “He will not go behind his father’s saying,” Frost says of him, who repeats himself, and his father. Were Frost’s neighbor a scientist, he would study cloning, an art of exact replication. Frost’s neighbor’s soul finds its deepest satisfaction in remembering. Memory can have the drawback of mischaracterization. Frost’s neighbor calls a wall a fence, and pronounces it good.

Frost’s deepest satisfaction lies elsewhere. Frost wants the exact word, the one that fits the nature of the thing. Frost wants to go behind the sayings of the father. Frost knows of something older than fathers, and the conventions or traditions of fathers. Nature is older than the oldest human father, even older than the oldest remembered human father.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Nature is what doesn’t love a wall. Nature in its entropy acts beyond human seeing and hearing, undoing the work of even the most vigilant and industrious men. Nature is somewhat mysterious, and behind it might be some greater mystery.

Nature’s entropy does not so threaten human works as to force men into a grim struggle for survival. Mending walls is “just another kind of outdoor game.” Together, men and nature play the outdoor version of Penelope’s indoor game of weaving and unweaving. But in Frost’s outdoor game there are no threatening suitors, no need for a rescuing hero.

Frost wants to know, Why play? He wants to know the reason for the game—what he’s walling in or out, and whether someone will take offense at his handiwork. His neighbor, “like an old-stone savage armed,” divides the world into his own and yours, us and them. He respects ancient divisions of politics and property. Frost is not so respectful, seeing the nature shared by all.

A poem, as much an artifact as a wall, another sort of line built on another form of sand, traditionally marking out the wisdom of fathers, limning the spiritedness of political men. In the Iliad the Muse sings of the high-hearted rage of Achilles, indignant at an instance of unjust, conventional rule in a war sparked by erotic disappointment, that is, by both the frustration of erotic nature and an affront to convention. Is there also something that doesn’t love a poem?

As a poet, Frost must wonder at the playful entropy of nature. Will it undo his artifacts? He approaches nature lightly, shrewdly, circumlocutiously, even as he questions human artifice and convention. He takes care not to question too blatantly. He lets his neighbor have the last word, lest a good neighbor become a savage and not merely resemble one, on occasion. The poet-gamesman plays the game in order to moderate the latent savagery of the convention—therefore ordinary, therefore natural—man.

Mary Oliver takes a less prudent tone. She does not question convention. She dismisses it in two sentences, each a kind of negative command. “You do not have to be good” and “You do not have to walk on your knees” are thou-shalt-nots disputing efforts founded on another set of thou-shalt-nots. Eros replaces spiritedness or thumos, and does so directly, without conventional guides. Let “the soft animal of your body love what it loves”; “the world offers itself to your imagination” as a complaisant lover does. You are part of “the family of things,” a nature unmediated by the wisdom of fathers. This unusual family has no parents, only siblings. It is as pliable to desires as one’s imaginings are. Olivier assumes imaginings to be benign. She does not see that if all things constitute a family, all corporeal eroticism is incest. Or if she does, she regards that as just another taboo to be negated.

Oliver’s optimism comes from her replacement of Frost’s natural law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of dissociation, with the law of love, the law of association. Bees go to rhododendron flowers in Eros’ “invisible line”; “otherwise death is everywhere.” It’s as if she’s taken Neoplatonism and made it corporeal, in the way Marx took Hegel’s dialectic and made it material. Her problem is even more acute than Marx’s, and idealism of corporeality being even less plausible than a materialist dialectic.

The bees are like poets, Oliver supposes; they appear in a poem titled “Writing Poems.” Oliver wants poetry to be natural or erotic, not a wall against death but a beeline or a lifeline through it.

Of these two poets, Frost is older, tougher, probably wiser. He knows that poems are artifacts, no matter how natural the impulse urging poets on. If nature is the deepest human satisfaction, and human beings can apprehend nature directly, what need is there for poems? Oliver’s left hand does not know what her writing hand is doing.

Oliver wants to say, nature associates as well as it dissociates, lives as a precondition of dying. Poems are on the side of spontaneous life, the eros that always says yes. But she says this in a poem, not in a spontaneous outpouring. Idealism of the body leads to a didacticism of the erotic.

The canny gamesman Frost smiles at Oliver, the earnest erotic. Eroticism is no substitute for moralism, he tells her; trying to make it that will only confuse the poet. Poetry must never go in a beeline. A one-liner isn’t a poem, and one-line poems teach aphoristically, with an indirectness resembling the dialogues composed by Plato, the wisest erotic. A poet who tries to make a poem go in a beeline will remove the reasons for poetry’s existence.

This is also why gardeners exclude most animals from gardens. This goes for animal bodies soft and hard. Who rules? If not human beings, then it’s no longer a garden. (A garden governed by God would be another matter, and is another story.)

The question, then, is: On what terms will human beings, whether poets or gardeners, govern nature?

 

Maurice Lever: Sade. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993.

Originally published in the Washington Times, September 26, 1993.

 

Democratic nations can’t get the hang of aristocracy. Ask an American to name an aristocratic family and your likely to hear ‘the Kennedys’ (who, being not only American but Irish, are doubly disqualified) or perhaps ‘the English royals,’ whose Windsor line has served as one of this century’s most prodigious sources of rich, white trash. Better still, consider the phrase, ‘Hollywood royalty,’ when referring to famous movie actors—an oxymoron comparable to ‘Coney Island champagne,’ or ‘Duluth chic.’

By contrast, the French are a nation for whom democracy, aristocracy, and despotism remain live wellsprings of conflicting currents. One of the most powerful whirlpools among French intellectuals results from the collision of the aristocratic passions and pretensions with those of democracy. Aristocrats, impelled by what the ancient Greeks called thumos—the part of the soul that gets angry, waxes righteously indignant, quarrels at a straw when honor’s at the stake—detest modern democrats—peaceable bourgeois who pride themselves on being down-to-earth. But perceiving that there is no honor in being undemocratic in a democracy, aristocrats (nowadays more likely to be disaffected bourgeois) quickly learn to pose as plus démocratique que la démocratie—thundering against the modest inequalities of bourgeois democracies while deploring the vulgarity, the complacency, the selfishness, in a word the populism of the populace.

The modern aristocrat wants to be above the law and protected by it; he wants to despise the vulgar while exacting their adulation, or at least their obedience. The Marquis de Sade represented these contradictory inclinations at their pathological extremes. Maurice Lever’s biography exhibits a pedestrian French intellectual’s confusion with respect to this mélange of arrogance and servility, too like his own prejudices to condemn, yet too obviously absurd and nasty to praise.

Something of a literary courtier himself, Lever begins by flattering the Sade family, who cooperated with his research efforts. “The house of Sade distinguished itself over the years through important service to church and state… [producing] men who helped to make the France of the Ancien Regime what it was and whose feudal pride our hero would cherish throughout his life,” and producing as well many nuns, whom our hero did not much cherish. It quickly became clear that the Marquis’s immediate family did not provide young Donatien (as Lever chummily calls him) with a home fit for heroes. His father, a bisexual courtier-littérateur, his uncle, “the very type of the libertine priest,” his mother, absent, his grandmother and aunts, who “welcomed the child as a veritable Jesus—and immediately created a kind of cult around him,” and even his best friend’s guardian, a count whose “favorite amusement was to fire a musket at workmen repairing nearby roofs” (“When he hit one, he jumped for joy”), bent the young twig in decidedly roué directions, unfitting him for life in any of the several political regimes France saw in Sade’s lifetime. “At the age of four his despotic nature was already formed.” By the age of ten he had been moved from Provence to Paris, where a Jesuit grammar school developed his taste for theatrics, whippings, and sodomy. “Let the show begin!” Lever loopily exclaims.

And a wretched show it was. Given to arranging orgies at which he would perform obscene acts with crucifixes while bellowing such challenges as “If thou art God, avenge thyself!” Sade soon came to the attention of civil and religious authorities, who, acting in the name of God, did indeed revenge Him. Lever tries to explain Sade’s antics as the result of bad upbringing and mental imbalance, while allowing that “To whip a defenseless woman is an ignoble act, whatever the torturer’s inner drives.” On the one hand, under the Ancien Regime such acts, when committed by the unnatural aristocrats, were mere misdemeanors; on the other hand, Lever intones, “noble birth was an unfair advantage.” And then again, Sade was made a scapegoat for a public outraged at the ‘aristoi’s’ excesses. But remember, “the torture [Sade inflicted] was more cerebral than actual,” as he preferred to terrify than to cut prostitutes (though he did a bit of both) and, by the way, didn’t the religion of the time exalt flagellation?

The description of Sade’s usual living quarters—ranging from a prison-like château designed for “the sole purpose of protecting pleasure from outside attack” to the real jails and lunatic asylums—affords Lever the irresistible chance to prattle in Foucaultian terms about “carceral space” and to indulge in French lit-crit chitchat about how “existed in language only,” replacing “the hazards of life” with “signs” (portentous emphasis in the original). For the ‘aristocrats,’ the prisons of the Ancien Regime allowed one to surround oneself with excellent books at the price of enduring bad food, tedious or insane fellow-inmates, and intrusive authorities who pestered him with silly rules and red-penciled his prose. That is, an old-fashioned prison resembled nothing so much as a small, mediocre American liberal arts college of today. It being easy to earn a reputation for derangement living in such circumstances, Sade did, acting out the familiar pattern of the undergraduate: spending his considerable idle time writing home with requests for food (he put on weight), alternatively raging at and cajoling the administration, seeking relief in sexual fantasizing and autoeroticism. To top off the parallels, upon his release he found himself “with no idea where to go, where to stay, where to eat, or where to find money.” An American lad would, of course, head home to mom and dad, but Sade, aged 50, had outlived his parents and alienated his pitiably bovine wife of 27 years. He sank to the dregs. He became a writer.

This sets Lever off on some more nonsense about how “Sade may have written masterpieces without knowing it”—his novel Justine being “one of the most powerful and striking creations of French literature.” To Lever, as to Sade in solitary confinement, no device is too squalid: he quotes Barthes, calls Sade’s prose subversive, and shamelessly compares the old hack to Laclos.

The sovereign isolato, who nonetheless gassed up at the slightest affront, careened on, from porno potboiler to potboiler, from jail to mental hospital, ending up, under the Napoleonic regime, as the director of theatricals starring his fellow-inmates at Charenton, the Paris asylum where the saner ‘aristocrats’ were allowed in to gawk and giggle at woebegone thespians, whose performances were deemed therapeutic by the ‘progressive’ director. “Long before Nietzsche, Sade showed that dramatic art was not the fruit of Apollonian clarity alone but also the progeny of Dionysus,” Lever scribbles, having seen that the Marquis is best employed as the intellectual’s equivalent of an inflatable plastic woman, malleable for any sodden pleasure of mind or heart. This is the Marquis’s fitting legacy.