ILB's favourite fascists

Started out of discomfort at my own interest in these writers tbh.

carl schmitt

Celine ftw!

yeah voting Céline myself (haven't read any Hamsun tbh). I think his horror at the fuckedness of the world, the energy of his bile (spilling into the hallucinatory), is directly connected to the worst of him; that tired, sorrowful tenderness that flashes through in Journey/DoC (& a sort of attentiveness) is the balance for me.

Celine (as that attack on Sartre shows) was at pains to stress how independent from the Germans he was. You couldn't say, from reading his early novels and his brilliant late trilogy (I just got the final vol), that he was right or left. What you do get is a measure of the mess everyone was in, in all sorts of ways, at the end of the wwii. You do end up thinking that this is some ways valuable, even when you know the person telling you this was a disgusting shit of a man.

A wider answer is you ought to try and split the life and work. A lot of great work comes out of this darkness (not just an incorrect opinion to be having at the time of writing) and you'll end up playing a game of censorship...not just of writing and art, but of your own mind. I think we should be big enough to acknowledge the people behind them -- what they've said and done -- but also read them.

It will never be an answer that is good enough for everybody, but carrying on with that conflict is what I'll carry on doing.

Like Hunger a lot, couldn't get into The Cantos when I tried...Heidegger I have become sorta interested in because of how a couple of German authors engaged w/him and I'd like to go deeper into that. Doubt I'll build the chops for it tho'.

pound is my fascist fave for sure. for a great perspective on how right wing fucks think of pound i recommend eustace mullins' genteelly batshit this difficult individual, ezra pound.

doomed to be in love with EP forever, his fuckheaded bigotry makes me v. sad when so much of his character seems to have been pure love and fire. and at least out of these he served some kind of small atonement.

Yeah it's hard to reconcile something like "ABCs of Reading" to a fascist project in anything but its strident iconclasm... I think EP was maybe always a fascist aesthetically (read: an advertising man with 'ideas' about 'society'), but, like Heidegger, seems to have been confused about the actual objectives of the people he was getting into bed with.

Not sure I have a 'favorite' from this bunch. Celine seems most 'representative' of the historical moment that gave rise to the whole problematic, so I guess he gets my vote.

Hamsun was very elderly when he got caught up with fascism. The last worthwhile novel he published was Wayfarers in 1927. Having read about eight of his books I can't detect any fascistic ideas being propagated in them, other than a certain tendency to romanticize and mythologize his characters, which chimes well with some obvious tendencies of Nazi propaganda. If Knut was racist and anti-Semitic he keep it pretty buried in his novels, by keeping strictly to purely Nordic characters and settings. He was an old man and was manipulated.

Hamsun gets my vote in terms of being both an author I enjoy and the easiest to exonerate.

Of those mentioned, Ezra Pound was the greatest writer with the greatest legacy of work, but as much as I love some of his poetry and criticism, Ezra's love affair with Italian fascism was blatant and his ability to turn a blind eye to its use of beatings and torture to solidify its power was reprehensible. It was born out of his boundless self-love and intellectual arrogance. You can't get around it, no matter how you twist and turn. He manipulated himself, willingly and shamefully.

Wodehouse.

No, wait.

there's been a couple of times when this has come up on ilx before for me - here:

Think I'll go for Céline. Frank Kaffer (lol) in all sorts of ways 'better', more profound, ecompasses the dark heart of matters etc, but the sustained energy of Céline's philosophic cynicism is so appealing on a sentence by sentence level. It's curiously enlivening, optimistic even in an admittedly bizarre way. ('With such a view, nothing unpleasant can surprise me, and I am fully forewarned and forearmed against hatred and death, I feel compassion for everyone that has to go through a similar thing, even though humans are disgusting and contemptible' - something like that.)

and here:

Fascism had lots of modernist appeal. It took care to project itself as sleek, shiny and up-to-date.
― Aimless, Saturday, 21 April 2012 17:23 (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think some care has to be taken with that - there were all sorts of sects of eugenicists and Christian progressives and mysticists, as well as 'I rather like this funny little man they've got in Germany' civil service/city types who found Hitler's germany appealing. The specific association of modernism with Fascism and anti-semitism, while it certainly holds water, is not an exclusive thing, in fact the fascistic traits it displays are rather more notable for being very commonplace than specific to modernist aesthetic movements as such.
I don't think what you say is wrong by any means, but more often than seems entirely right, modernism and modernist artists seem sometimes to be exclusively associated with fascism and the rise of nazi germany, producing a distorted picture of a shared cultural appeal
Fascism was itself terrified of artistic decadence and its regimentation was not of the same aesthetic as modernism I think. Probably.
That said, Eliot's anti-semitism is not a phantom, Lewis' fascism, tho recanted comparatively early to some others let more easily off the hook, is still what it looks like, and Pound's usury/anti-semitism is credulously naive at best. And certainly the cult of the machine as developed by Marinetti, with its mechanised belligerence, was unpleasantly inhuman, but it's worth remembering i think that it was the first world war, and not the second, that killed off a lot of the most extreme aesthetics of anti-human modernism.
Difficult area.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 22 April 2012 14:54 (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't like that 'credulously naive' bit about Pound; it's too commonly repeated, and handwaves the cultural and intellectual abdication that Pound's fascism involves. NV's 'fuckheaded bigotry' is better.

I have been a Pound, Lewis and Celine fan amidst the woods, and feel about each of them differently. I still think that Lewis, although extraordinarily tiresome a lot of the time, is at his best a superb artist. He has a heavily external approach to the world and denies anything that might imply an existence outside that which can be seen, unless it is that which has been constructed from internal elements. This aesthetic can by extension into his other works, particularly Time and Western Man, The Best Satire is Non-Moral and perhaps The Apes of God if you can read it, be seen as fascistic to a greater or lesser degree.

That is to say, his ferocious and futile attack upon Bergsonian time, on relativistic and internal experience is essentially a satirist's attack, which sees mutability as despicable, effectively indicative of a suspect morality (tho the term is complicated in Lewis). It denies change as a positive force, distrusts outsiders, loathes mixed blood both actually and metaphorically, and will happily fill itself with the most disgusting and retrograde of misogyny, racism, insult and opinion - lowest common denominator stuff, we are swamp scum basically, and all attempts at selflessness are basically selfishness in one form of another.

In other words, the aesthetic that I enjoy is by extension fascistic.

So what do I do? Well basically I try to cut off that extension by all sorts of smudging and havering over certain crucial points, drawing rather ineffectual lines in the sand, which ultimately amount to 'I like reading about this stuff, but I despise it in the world.'

Why do I like reading this stuff? I like it because I think the vicious view of a world propelled entirely by a hypocrisy of emotions and beliefs commonly perceived to be bad is correct, when holding the prism of understanding up in certain lights. I certainly do not believe the remedy is more of it in the name of fascism. The content of satire used to be presented in order excoriate the vicious and promote the virtuous. That has other problems, but there's a part of my mind that tries to hold it as I read.

There are other interpretations:

1) I like it because in a enfeebled bourgeois way I find it exciting to contemplate the annihilation of everything from my cozy armchair.
2) I'm a typical white male middle-class cockend who tends to feel p similarly, but just

About Pound I feel a bit differently, because his fascism seems stupid, and structurally embedded in his art, not as a nihilistic world view that permeates it, but as a sort of moral recommendation presented in it. (is this fair? perhaps not). I don't really like that. To use an Eliot example, it's the 'Jew is beneath the lot' problem. It's not a fevered collapse that sheds vile opinions as it goes optimistically on (Celine) or an strange, almost beautiful aesthetic, that is at times movingly compassionate to failure and death, or obscurely in love with its absurd menagerie (Lewis - tho i'm giving him considerable help there). It's a the opinion on the authority of the Poet. That seems... wrong to me.

I've gone on about what can be interpreted from their writing. As for reading people who supported fascism, I don't know what to say. At my weakest all I have is that there were plenty of bad people in the past - using the telescope of history to make them little basically. I don't think that's in the slightest bit an adequate response.

what xyzzzz__ said basically:

A wider answer is you ought to try and split the life and work. A lot of great work comes out of this darkness (not just an incorrect opinion to be having at the time of writing) and you'll end up playing a game of censorship...not just of writing and art, but of your own mind. I think we should be big enough to acknowledge the people behind them -- what they've said and done -- but also read them.

It will never be an answer that is good enough for everybody, but carrying on with that conflict is what I'll carry on doing.

So, Celine, because I think he cares about humans. I'm sure he'd call you a loathsome shitbag as he held you in his arms while you died, and somehow the words would be comforting.

oh wait, i didn't finish a couple of sentences. nm, gotta watch some football - 1 + 2 were basically the same anyway.

like i always want to claim that the fullest expression of a negative value-system will inevitably include its own critique

i think this petitions the principle though. anyway, voted pound

like i always want to claim that the fullest expression of a negative value-system will inevitably include its own critique

yeah, ikwym, but the problem with this for works that apparently hold all of creation in contempt or portray despair as the only meaningful spiritual state is the "set of all sets" difficulty - that portrayal of the world necessarily includes the work you are reading (it would be contemptible if that were not the case) which therefore constitutes its own critique. They are perhaps singularities in this respect - and petitioning the principle becomes circular, if my logic circuits aren't totally screwed up.

I'm throwing up chaff a bit here obv, having addressed the nature of the works that these fascist authors write rather than whether the fact they're fascist presents an obstacle to enjoying them.

the answer is yes, it does a bit (niggles at the back of my mind, makes me feel slightly uneasy). In this situation it becomes necessary to enquire whether there is a connection between their personal political beliefs and the nature of their work.

the other possible approach is that these are people hurling themselves into the abyss so that we may see the hell without having to experience the hellfire. they immolate themselves in the name, paradoxically, of art and humanity and, presumably, because they must.

Celine, for the reasons others have articulated on this thread. Have a copy of TS Eliot: Anti-Semitism & Literary Form on the bookshelf that I should really get around to reading.

(Been thinking a little on this lately wrt/what happened to Japanese & Chinese modernisms/modernists, even before you get to Mishima - Mu Shiying & Liu Na'ou getting assassinated by ... communists? nationalists? ... while working for the collaborationist govt in Japanese Shanghai, etc)

there is also a much simpler objection to my claim viz that it is possible that a persons most fascist artworks could be 'worse' or 'less honest', be not actually the 'full expressions of a value system' but catch then on an off day. i doubt that pounds two cantos in Italian are good enough to contain any sort of key to their own critique, nor is hamsun's obit for hitler

idk if I feel uneasy about reading pound though! I feel like the experience of getting something out of pound has been a sufficiently hard won one that I find myself never really nodding along; it seems like his being Wrong About So Many Things is a necessary part of coming to read him

i do really want to read junger tho and i feel uneasy about that

that Eliot book iirc is pretty good but it's been a while

I still have the most trouble with Pound, or maybe just the Cantos – can't see how to split that 'moral recommendation' (and political recommendation) away – he spends an awful lot of time telling the world how it should be run, & MAKING A POINT about history… and what's left if you take out the social and economic and political argument? Poetry about poetics? I suppose when I enjoy Pound… the active, upfront wrongness or confrontation makes it an engaged reading, Thomp otm. & I can see it as a forcing of this poll's question ('you like this beautiful art, here's some stuff that comes along with it & don't pretend it doesn't')

^ and went down to the sea iirc

only one of these authors had a polar bear named after them

now thinking of doing a series of children's illustrated books about Céline the Polar Bear.

http://www.i-italy.org/files/imagecache/545x/files/still_photos/Orsi-in-sicilia_1351908042.jpg

Pound or Cioran. I don't know any Céline.

céline. (dis)honourable shout outs to gottfried benn and wyndham lewis as late renouncers.

there's also Curzio Malaparte, but honestly I gave up on Kaputt, a totally fascinating book, because I hated his narrator so much.

Eliade might be a third, but I haven't read enough.

felt like I had to confront myself after deciding to buy a Francis Stuart novel - part of my reasoning seemed to be 'hmmmm a fascist, yes, that sort of thing is usually pretty interesting.'

I haven't yet able to read more than a few verses of The Cantos at a time, which is fine because the delicacy and precision of the early work still impresses me.

Eliade might be a third, but I haven't read enough.

― alimosina, Monday, June 23, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

His entry on wiki is gigantic! What have you read?

wow. that is a really long wiki entry.

(I've only read a bit of the Shamanism book – i was interested because it seemed to help Ted Hughes + a few of the British Poetry Revival types towards an anthropological-bardic thing)

What have you read?

Parts of Myths, Rites, Symbols and parts of the alchemy book (in my unhappy literary youth).

eliade has 277 wiki footnotes and just about the longest article of anyone apart from hitler (who he seems to have been a fan of)

― nakhchivan, Saturday, 18 December 2010 05:13 (3 years ago)

this has now swolen to 288, obama however has rushed to 374, while hitler is still imperious at 400

has anyone read brasillach

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I am more likely to get through Finnegans Wake than that wiki entry on Eliade. wtf!

Haven't read Brassilach. Couple of mentions of him on Celine's trilogy. His execution is certainly something he was angry about. After all it could've been him.

Peter Handke is another one - don't know enough details about his support of Milosevic but they liked each other.

I've never been able to finish a Céline novel - my fault no doubt. I have read "Hunger", but suspect it wasn't a very good translation, and "Mysteries" (which I couldn't get out of my head after I'd finished it). Never read Ezra Pound or Heidegger, though Thomas Bernhard's attacks on Heidegger (in "Old Masters") are highly entertaining. Voted Knut.

Celine Interview from the time he wrote Castle to Castle, the first part of the trilogy.

Great little rant to the last question, starts at 16:42. "...they are heavy"

Having known nothing about Ezra Pound's history, and only a few of his poems, it was a thrill to read his wiki the other day... the way it starts with the most superlative positivity from Hemingway ("he'll stay up all night by your bedside") as foreshadowing for what follows? Brilliant narrative, why aren't all wikis written like this. Gonna read Eliade's now.

I like this one:

http://thenewdirectionoftime.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/abc.jpg

^^ Ezra, as the charismatic, didactic, wild man. One of his best sides.

D.H. Lawrence too I suppose. Want to start reading some stories this summer.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

with lawrence, i dunno. there are certainly plenty of reactionary elements in his thinking, but the two works of his that i can think of at the moment that deal explicitly with fascism (aaron's rod & kangaroo) both reject it as an equally poisonous alternative to liberal democracy. plus there's his lingering sympathy for, i think, guild socialism. but, yeah: the whole leader/follower thing running throughout his work (among other things) is problematic. /lawrence apologist

and no mention of marinetti!?

missed a trick by not including morrissey

you can work out how many votes he'd've got from the other thread