Will Morrisey Reviews

Alice Yaeger Kaplan: Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, May 27, 1987.

 

Neo-Marxism means Marxism plus whatever’s trendy. It has colonized many university departments in the United States—mostly in the social sciences but increasingly in the humanities, as well. Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s study of fascism among French intellectuals before the Second World War excels many products of this ideology. She writes what she calls “progressive” literary criticism, trying to nudge fascism into refuting itself. But her lively mind is so honest, it allows readers to nudge neo-Marxism into refuting itself, too.

Almost every extended act of literary criticism today begins with a discussion of ‘theory,’ the scholar’s beliefs about language and ‘texts.’ Because almost no literary scholar today has any real knowledge of philosophy, these exercises incline toward confusion. Kaplan burns the obligatory incense before such idols as psychoanalysis, feminism, the Frankfurt School, and ‘deconstructionism.’ She is best when her intelligence ascends from the cave of academic fashion and sees for itself.

She notices the many contradictory elements in fascism: elitism and populism, modernism and primitivism, paternalism and “mother-bound feelings,” ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’ But she also wants to show how fascism—the world derived from the Latin fasces, the axe with rods bundled around its handle, symbol of authority in ancient Rome—could bind together disparate ideas and sentiments, make them into a usable instrument of political power—the ‘totality’ of totalitarianism, that word Mussolini invented to name a new form of tyranny. She patiently looks for coherence beneath the apparent contradictions, eschewing the partisan histrionics that mar so much Marxist writing.

She does find several coherent patterns, but presents them in a way that reveals her ideology’s defects. Following the neo-Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin, she accurately observes that many fascist intellectuals veil economic and political reality with esthetic categories. Such men can even “describe objects that are used to kill as if they are purely creative.” She concedes that this strategy “is not necessarily fascist; we have seen it since.” She does not say where. She might be thinking of the less extreme ‘New Left’ rhetoric of the 1960s and early ’70s. (“Small is beautiful,” they claimed.) If so, estheticism does not distinguish fascism from other ideologies, including at least some variants of neo-Marxism.

The same criticism weighs against many other insights Kaplan offers. Yes, as the fascist state establishes itself, “the populist ideal” of revolutionary fascism “mutates toward an elitist one”—but the same is true under communism and even, to a much lesser degree, in republics. True, the lack of a strong middle class made Italy and Germany more vulnerable to fascism than was France—but the same held true for the conditions of Marxist victories in Russia and China. Granted, fascism used intellectuals, then swept them aside after gaining power—as did Marxists, who used ‘fellow travelers’ in exactly the same way (and this doesn’t make the latter Marxists, or even proto-Marxists). Unquestionably, fascists use language to subvert truth—as do totalitarians of the ‘Left’ and, more moderately, almost all rhetoricians. Fascists did indeed “place invective on the side of science” (or maybe vice-versa), but in this they could teach nothing to Stalin and his Lysenko.

I do not suggest that Kaplan should have written as extensively about communists, or French communists; authors need not be taxed for the books they choose not to write. But by almost entirely omitting any reference to communism, she goes too easy on her own Marxism and fails properly to ‘frame’ her picture of French fascism. She sees that fascism “was conceived by its enthusiasts as a new form of revolt, competitive with Marxism,” but she neglects to show concretely how this—so to speak—dialectic worked.

The neo-Marxist emphasis on political economy, psychology, and esthetics neglects the moral dimension of politics. Her dismissal of “moralism” serves Kaplan fairly well in her chapters on Marinetti and Céline, but it spoils her chapters on Sorel and Drieu la Rochelle, and weakens those on fascist broadcasters and film critics. Sorel’s notion of the general strike, for example, appeals less to estheticism than to a kind of morality: to heroism, and particularly to the refusal of vengefulness even within a violent revolution. Drieu la Rochelle’s anti-feminism, along with his admiration for ‘masculine’ warrior virtues, likewise comes from a moral impulse; he does not so much celebrate killing (as Kaplan would have it), but risk, self-sacrifice.

Kaplan makes much of the “banality” of French fascist writing, by which she means its apparently “unserious” character, the unthreatening frivolity that makes it easy to ignore but also easy to disseminate among the unwary. This is oversophisticated. Not “banality” but fascism’s undeniable appeal to the spirited virtues neglected in modern democratic life—courage, honor, manliness—makes it dangerous. Without that, and left with only the likes of Céline, fascism would have little or no attractive force, even among intellectuals.

And even insofar as fascist writers were “banal” or unserious, does that really set them apart from much of the inter-war Parisian literary scene generally? Only racism and economic conservatism appear to distinguish fascism from communism. On economics, Kaplan asserts that fascism subordinates it to “ideology.” This is true, but not in the way she means it: in Germany and Italy, “the economic structures of the fascist state are basically unchanged from those of the capitalist one.” Obviously, no major aggrandizement of the state can leave an economy “basically unchanged,” a fact embarrassing to Marxists, whose states never get around to withering away (as promised by Lenin) precisely because they too put ideology above economics.

This leaves racism, or at least nationalism. Because Kaplan’s neo-Marxism prevents sympathy for nationalism, she cannot begin to account for its appeal to French intellectuals. Without that account, she cannot adequately explain the virulently racist nationalism of the worst fascists.

“Fascism seems to be about making life into art—a transformation that promises to give artists an enormous role.” This appearance pleases certain notable inclinations both intellectual and French. Yet Marxism in its own way also wants to transform life into art. So, in a different way, does capitalism. And what of ‘post-modernism itself? Does it not attempt to The whole modern enterprise, beginning with Machiavelli, is ‘about’ using human art to conquer nature. If this is a problem, and I think it is, then neo-Marxism cannot solve it. Neo-Marxism cannot get past its own deeply modern presumptions.

Jean Cocteau: Past Tense: Volume I, Diaries.  John Howard translation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, September 9, 1987.

 

Novelist, playwright, filmmaker, painter Jean Cocteau stayed at or near France’s artistic avante-garde for most of his long career. His diary records the confrontation of a predominantly ‘Greek’ mind and sensibility with a radically non-‘Greek’ world. A certain Aristophanic wit whets itself thereby: When he hears that Monaco’s prince claims to find the casino that underpins his country’s economy embarrassing, “I answered that the prince was wrong, that the casino was the last temple. The acknowledged Temple of Chance: a god much more powerful than is imagined in our age of economic planning.” The ancient Greeks saw this more clearly than moderns do, and Cocteau rather likes the older gods—”Gods with nothing terrible, nothing vague about them. Gods who are concerned with human affairs, who marry the wives of men and give them children.” Americans will find him a bit reminiscent of his contemporary, Ezra Pound, who also preferred Hellenism to Hebraism for its clarity of thought and cleanness of style.

Cocteau is ‘Greek’ both when he looks at art and when he makes it. “To admire is to efface yourself. To put yourself in someone else’s place. Unfortunately so few people (and so few French people) know how to get outside themselves,” escape their own (very modern) individualism or ‘subjectivity.’ From Descartes to Rousseau to Sartre, the French trap themselves inside themselves; when they break out, their politics inclines toward dream-work, the residue of excessive inwardness.

In his own work, which he always calls poetry though it comes in many genres, Cocteau insists not on ‘creativity,’ as moderns do, but craftsmanship, the Greek technē. Today, he complains, “Whatever is botched and perfunctory is called ‘human.’ The profession, the craft, which consists in fabricating the vehicle by which the human is expressed, passes for an intellectual task from which humanism is excluded. The well-written, well-painted work is ‘cold’…. This is the defense of the mediocre. It has the advantage of numbers on its side.” In his own way, he extends Tocqueville’s insights on democracy.

Cocteau therefore applauds Matisse, who buys phonograph records to play while painting, but who “stops at Beethoven,” that Vesuvius of emotion whose eruptions thrill mass audiences. Even the diary form itself, the most personal genre, bends to Cocteau’s non-individualistic purposes. He uses it not to confess but to record. Events do not serve introspection, or self-advertisement; they stimulate (often aphoristic) expression of perceptions registering the world instead of the feelings.

Nor does such poetic expression imply estheticism. “It is likely I would not have devoted myself to poetry in this world, which remains insensitive to it, if poetry were not a morality.” “In a world of disorder, set oneself in order.” Cocteau calls this “acute individualism,” but he means something ‘Greek’: “One’s own equilibrium collaborates with a universal equilibrium whose advantages we shall never know.” Expression of oneself—the disciplined ordering of oneself, not ‘self-expression’—”is what I call an ethic.”

“What is more hateful than Jules Laforgue and free verse? True freedom must be won within the rules. To escape prison under everyone’s nose.” Such freedom calls for “hard virtue,” not “the soft kind.” It requires not only discipline but intelligence to guide that discipline. Cocteau would “restore to God the intelligence transferred to the devil’s account, especially in the sixteenth century, when the devil took the leading role…. The older I get, the more I believe that it is not only goodness which counts—but a goodness which does not extinguish mind.” Cocteau thus admires Nietzsche’s “diamond edge” in the aphoristic writings but deplores Zarathustra.

Cocteau departs from the Greeks in at least one respect. While lauding intelligence as integral to morality, he claims to dislike prudence, rather as Nietzsche does. He nonetheless exercises it, in his own way. When dealing with a journalist, “I say a few words which he makes as much noise out of as he can. Whereupon I am held responsible for the noise. This conspiracy of noise has replaced, in my case, the conspiracy of silence. Moreover, the two get along famously together. For noise conceals real work and establishes the reputation for brio which critics confuse with professional conscience.” When he says, “I am a lie that always tells the truth,” Cocteau means that social life imposes masks no poet removes; the poet uses his mask, speaks the truth through it, as Greek actors did.

Moderns try to dispense altogether with masks. This leads to the comedy of sincere effusion. “Our age is academic and uneducated; everyone is a professor who knows nothing and is eager to teach it to everyone else.” Cocteau sees that “the trouble started with the Encyclopedists,” those devotees of ‘Enlightenment.’ “They told everyone to think. As a result, stupidity thinks—something which had never been seen before.” Unlike any other Frenchman on record, Cocteau rates Gulliver’s Travels over Candide, saying, “Laputa is a very good account of what is happening right now in America and Europe.”

It is the dogmatism as much as the misjudged egalitarianism of ‘Enlightenment’ Cocteau dislikes. “Don’t close the circle. Leave an opening. Descartes and the Encyclopedists closed the circle. Pascal and Rousseau left it open. One must avoid filling in the gaps. Our age has made this mistake.” Politically, one must avoid the temptation—one almost imposed on prominent artists—to have an opinion. “Our modern terminology is very dangerous; if people can no longer use words like ‘message’ and ‘commitment,’ they doubt their own intelligence; they reach a point where they claim that the refusal of political commitment is a negative commitment.” But the refusal to ‘take a stand’ need not betray opportunism; it may be a very sensible thing to do.

Cocteau learned this in the harsh school of experience, and it took more than one lesson. He flirted with fascism in the 1930s, then had his brush with Communism after the Second World War. He failed to heed his own advice, yielding to the temptation of petition-signing and remark-making. He tries to explain one of his acts of idiocy: “I once said there is one great politician of our time: Stalin. This had nothing to do with the system [i.e. the Soviet regime]. Stalin refuses all dialogue because he knows that a conversation with fools always degenerates into a dispute.” Yes, but even such degeneracy might be preferred to mass murder. Cocteau evidently shared the illusions (circa 1952) of French intellectuals generally regarding Stalin’s crimes, reports of which only became believable to the Left after Khruschev reported a few of them in 1956. He does offer one sensible political comment: the Americans, he observes in the early  1960s, are giving the Soviets time to strengthen themselves militarily; this will prove ruinous for the Americans. Twenty-five years later, no prudent person could simply deny this prediction.

He is better on his fellow-poets. “Will the monstrous stupidity of Gide’s Journal ever be discovered?” “It was the child in Gide that I liked. His immoralism seems to me a lot of nonsense. And his Nobel [Prize] is a hoot.” Proust “is very hard in his judgment of snobs and pederasts in order to deflect attention from his own person.” Charlie Chaplin “has [the] childlike fury of humanitarianism,” as he attempts to involve his audiences in his own self-pity.

Five more volumes of Cocteau’s Diaries await translation, and they make a good introduction to his other works, which, except for the films, do not travel easily overseas. Intelligent ‘Greekness’ may have its limitations, and Cocteau’s version, for all its celebration of hardness, has soft edges (the old gods didn’t always marry the wives of men). But his form of intelligence does put overweening modernity in perspective, often in a salutarily jarring way. Many of us get what we deserve in life, but only a remarkable man metes out what he deserves in his very style of writing.