|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0393308812
| 9780393308815
| 0393308812
| 3.93
| 9,597
| 1910
| Apr 17, 1992
|
really liked it
|
Rilke's book reads like the testament of the fin-de-siècle, a bequest to the new century, recapitulating the themes and moods of the closing age with
Rilke's book reads like the testament of the fin-de-siècle, a bequest to the new century, recapitulating the themes and moods of the closing age with unmatched brilliance and reflexivity. There is often a certain quaintness in Malte's aristocratic demeanour, bloodlessness and conspicuous display of antiquarian taste: but the depths of Rilke's observations, and the self-assurance with which he explores his own uncanny labyrinth, redeem any bohemian clichés and decadent affectation.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 05, 2020
|
Jun 20, 2020
|
Apr 05, 2020
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0691086621
| 9780691086620
| 0691086621
| 4.32
| 1,450
| 1965
| Apr 01, 2001
|
really liked it
|
Isaiah Berlin is probably still the world's most famous historian of ideas, and made his mark in history with his 'two concepts of freedom', as well a
Isaiah Berlin is probably still the world's most famous historian of ideas, and made his mark in history with his 'two concepts of freedom', as well as by retrieving, for the benefit of lay and academic audience alike, what is now called the 'counter-enlightenment'. After his retirement, we are told by Henry Hardy, the editor of the present book, he was planning on writing a large book on the closely related subject of romanticism, but passed before the project came to fruition. The present volume is instead a collection of six Mellon lectures he gave in the mid-sixties. Given its origin, the book is atypical, and although carefully pruned by the editor, the reader can still sense a certain orality. This makes it both a very flowing and enjoyable read, but also, pushes the references at the back of the volume, making it maybe less useful for research, as Hardy traced many but not all of the quotes and references, and it is sometimes unclear what is an actual quotation, and what is mere paraphrase. This slight drawback however pales in comparison to the oratory qualities of the author, and the book reads very much like a novel, full, in good romantic fashion, of thunder, anguish and ideals. Berlin's definition of romanticism, when he eventually ennunciates it, is simple and concise (maybe too much so): it consists of "two principles, the necessity of the will and the absence of a structure of things" (134). As his approach is largely chronological, I will sum up his narrative as it appears in the book: The first lecture deals with the ever thorny question of the definition of romanticism, both pastoral and artificial, spartan and decadent, introspective and revolutionary. The diagnosis, advanced famously by Lovejoy, reminds me quite a bit of Jeffrey Schnapp's reading of fascism as 'oxymoronic', as striving to contrast or unite seemingly polar opposites. Berlin finds in radical, all-encompassing rebellion an overlap between romanticism's many strands. He proceeds in the second lecture to analyse Romanticism's reaction and attack against the ideals of Enlightenment, namely the belief in the knowability, universality and unity of knowledge, itself the only form of virtue. Neoclassicism, for Berlin the artistic correlate of the Enlightenment, strives to represent, but to represent not the real itself, rather the perfected and purified ideal toward which nature itself strives � to prefigure, in a sense, what progress will bring about. The first, German, romantics reacts against both the largely French cult of mimesis and the naive belief in continuous progress, preferring bitterly "a kind of retreat in depth" (37). He goes on to explore the specific reaction offered by J. G. Hamann, that 'magus of the North' to whom he elsewhere dedicated a whole book. For Berlin, Hamann starts with a radicalisation of empiricism, which leads him to reduce all knowledge to faith. Emphasising unmediated experience, he rejects classifications as deadening, and claim that the ultimate human aspiration is for a tumultuous and violent experience, in which creation plays the central part. In the following lecture, we move onto 'the true fathers of romanticism'. Those share with Hamann, and Vico before him, a particular awareness of the power of myth to capture aspects of human experience that seemed timeless, precisely those that the deadening classificatory mania of the Englightenment could not but denigrate. The first of those true fathers we examine, is not German but British, and it is Blake. For him "Art is the Tree of Life" and "Science the Tree of Death." (50). Diderot is another, a kind of double-agent who admires the near-criminal hubris of the genial artist. Rousseau, however, does not really qualifies, because 'his doctrines still appealed to reason' (54). More to the point is Lenz, to whom "Action, action is the soul of the world, not pleasure, not abandonment to feeling, not abandonment to reasoning, only action" (55). With Herder (and Hamann) the work of art moves from being a craft object produced by a relatively anonymous specialist, into being an organic extension of its author, "the expression of the attitude to life, conscious or unconscious, of its maker" (59). This leads on the one hand, to Herder's demand that the work of art be analysed in its original context, and thus to historicism. On the other, it fuels the cult of sincerity, and paves the way for expressionism. Of the mixture of those two aspects also arises nationalism, the idea of a cultural community within which a given work 'makes sense' spontaneously, while, lacking the universal qualities claimed by the Englightenment, it remains 'foreign' to another. Moving on to the 'restrained romantics' in the fourth lecture, we encounter Kant, who fit even less the romantic mould than Rousseau, but contributed all the same to their rise. From his insistence on ethical decision, and concomitant emphasis on human dignity and autonomy, derived a new conception of nature as prima materia ready to be shaped by human will. This was picked up by Schiller, who places man's moral will in opposition to nature, titanic in its ambition and often tragic in its dénouement. He then propose art as a model for politics, for an autotelic society. Next is 'unbridled romanticism', where we find Fichte, in whom the will, moral or else, become the organising principle of reality itself � yet this will is still a largely impersonal striving, because the self itself only appear when the real, the not-self, resists its transformation. Thus, in Berlin's words, 'volo ergo sum'. Since the will is not exclusively individual, the same process goes for collectives, in which a schmittian Other must be excluded to produce identity. Schelling takes up much of this vision but rejects the opposition between creative man and inert nature: the impersonal will participates, or is identical, with nature and its perpetual process of creative renewal, and then the artist's own authentic creative activity is but the expression of nature's general movement, manifested, we are told, through his unconscious. Follows a strange excursus that collapses allegories into symbols, the later taken to connect will and unconscious by capturing in images the deeper truths that must elude language. Berlin then covers rapidly the German writers we would more precisely associate with romanticism: Schlegel (whose irony is, in de Gaultier's famous words, 'a weapon in the war against reality'), Hoffmann (whose fantastic, somewhat naively, he finds to echo the paranoid gnosticism of Schopenhauer) and Tieck (whose metafictive elements are reduced to solipsism). As you can probably tell, as Berlin moves from philosophy proper to literature, he looses some credibility, not least because there is no consideration of the demands made by the medium itself: he only takes literature as an expression of philosophy and politics, something which it certainly is, but within the given context of form and its history. The problems only grow with the final chapter, with which I take issue, 'The lasting effects' - which reveals the underlying objectives of the previous narrative and somewhat discredit Berlin's interpretation. The book was never about 'The roots of romanticism' but rather about its alleged legacy: Erly on Berlin claimed that romaticism is born from the pietistic inwardness of the German XVIIth century, which is itself but a consequence of Germany's 'delayed modernisation' (my term not his) � and in particular of its intelligentsia's resentment against french domination, both political and cultural. Here we already have, at the beginning of the book, an element that will return in his concluding assessment, namely that romanticism is resentment: resentment of men whose station in life does not match their expectations, resentment of a (German) culture which feels smothered by the claims to universality of French neoclassicism. Romanticism, Berlin writes, "was a very grand form of sour grapes" (37). Resentment and late-modernisation: you probably can see already where this is going. Fascism, for Berlin, is but a genus of romanticism, and Voltaire's influence on Frederick acts as an early dolchstoss myth. This leaves out, of course, (as indeed most accounts of fascism did, until quite recently) the mussolinesque claims to universalism and 'humanism', as well as the polemics of Carl Schmitt, for example, against 'political romanticism'. Certainly however, the notion of organic state did derive from romanticism, and Berlin introduce Adam Heinrich Mueller, whom I'd never heard of, but who gives clear romantic credentials to political theology � but here Berlin overstates his case, limiting organic society to an oppositional notion, without taking into account for example, the influence that an empirical knowledge of pre-modern societies (as later visible in Ferdinand Toennies for example) might have brought to the table: his view of romanticism is, somewhat predictably for 1965, exclusively eurocentric. Although he claimed to focus on "what occurred in the second third of the eighteenth century" (6) Berlin goes out of his way to unearth many conservative 'commentaries' of the 1900s on romanticism, from the likes of Brunetière or Babbitt, although somehow he must have forgotten to invite Chesterton to his party. One of Berlin's recurrent sources, which I'd have thought by the mid-60s to have been duly forgotten, is Ernest Seillère: a Belle Epoque French literary scholar, often rambling but celebrated in his day, who made it his life-work to tie Nietzsche, Gobineau and romanticism together in a neat little bundle of nefarious teutonism. With the First World War, many patriots in the allied countries would take up the mantle, from Santayana (Egotism in German Philosophy, 1916) to G. A. Borgese (La Guerra delle Idee, 1916, too), but in France, the defeat of 1871 meant that germanophobia flared much earlier. Seillère himself was close to the Action Francaise, whose thuggish royalist politics have been shown to prefigure and inspire the italian squadristi and the SA. However, the Action Française was vehemently anti-romantic, tracing much like Seillère—and like Berlin—romanticism to the Germans, and, orleanists that they were, to Rousseau. In a much puzzling turn of events (which shows how prevalent in the postwar climate the equation of fascism/romanticism/germanism still was) when the Académie Française was purged of collaborators after the liberation, none other than Ernest Seillère, the Action Française sympathiser, was elected to fill one of the seats! Such self-serving 'germanic' theory of fascism is mind-boggling given the evident origins of the word 'fascism' itself, and scholars like Sternhell or Ernst Nolte have since grounded the emerging field of fascism studies in the recognition of its Latin elements. This brings us to what I think is the core issue of the Berlin thesis � an issue that has often been noted of course, and one I should add, that for most of the book does not distract from the author's in-depth understanding of European thought, nor of his outstanding skills as a story-teller. The problem, in fact, might even participates in his story being so clear and readily understandable, but I'll leave the issue of narratives and liberalism for another time. In his conclusion, Berlin traces to romanticism not only fascism, but also existentialism, and if we read between the lines, to Marxism too: the deadening conformity of rationality must be overcome by 'going to the past, or by going within oneself' (138)—two categories which for Berlin intersect in the notion of myth, which he takes as the organic outlook of 'class or nation or Church' (138). There's already a problem here, because he had told us not long before that the romantic myth is a modern one, created by the artist for the purpose of capturing what in essence is the existential stalemate of his experience. Indeed the relationship of romanticism to tradition remain unclear, inasmuch as the shift from individual and artistic sovereignty, which Berlin makes a great job to show in his sources, to the collective and political form of romanticism he proposes, implies the surrender of at least part of the artist's authority. Hence, existentialism, with its rejection of tradition qua tradition, already does not fit the picture. A myth, say, that of Sisiphus, might capture the alienated condition of the free man, but it is an uprooted one, it ties no-one in a community. Furthermore, Berlin comes back, when discussing existentialism, to a point he made earlier: the essence of the romantic mindset is ultimately a form of relativism, inasmuch as it is not the ideas held by someone, but the strength with which he or she hold onto them, which is worthy of admiration. Berlin writes: 'I do not believe that in the seventeenth century, if you had a religious conflict between a Protestant and a Catholic, it would have been possible for the Catholic to say, "the Protestant is a damnable heretic and leads souls to perdition, but the fact that he is sincere raises him in my estimation. The fact that he is sincere, that he's prepared to lay down his life for the nonsense in which he believes, is a morally noble fact"' (139, see also 10). Having just read some Dante, I must first ask, what about Saladin, whom even Dante, none to keen on 'schismatic' Islam, placed in Limbo (Inferno IV, 129)? Is not in fact the very notion of Limbo, rising to orthodoxy as it does to accommodate the virtuous pagans, the Catholic recognition of faith as such, aside from dogmatic considerations? Berlin would probably answer he never claimed that romanticism was free from the pervasive influence of Christianity: in fact according to Aidan Day, the very word 'romanticism' appears first to describe, at the dawn of the XVIIth century, the influence of the literary 'romance' trickling down history from Dante or Chretien de Troyes via Spenser or Cervantes. Yet I should point out that Limbo and its virtuous pagans were much defended by Aquinas, as a way to support his own Aristotelian influences. Then we are left with the puzzle of an Aristotelian 'realist' worldview, which ascribes specific values to specific objects, rather than in their relation to the subject, but one grounded in the encounter of a geographical (Islam) and historical (Aristotle) Other, with the burden of relativism needed to accommodate them as such carried by universal Reason. This limited, 'bounded' relativism, I am sure, Berlin would find quite agreeable, whether we call it romantic or classicist: Vico, whom Berlin finds peripherally romantic, says nothing else. The real problem however would arise when the romantics extrapolate, from the existence of geographical or historical difference, into full-blown, metaphysical relativism (or so he claims) and retreat into solipsism. The core issue then, is not so much romanticism, as it is idealism: but because Berlin presents the whole movement as arising from the 'resentful' and aestheticised movements of the German XVIIIth century, rather than trace its philosophical genealogy, we hear not of Berkeley, for example, who was more in line with Pope than with Swift, and as such might have undermined the picture of romanticism as the return of the repressed. But to return to the 'romantic roots' of existentialism, and Marxism, what all this shows us is that the tradition of engagement and authenticity runs deep within European (and, I would assume, global) history, as does the idealist tradition. The two had met before (I might suggest courtly love as a precursor) and when they did once more in the XVIIIth century, I'd wager it is rather particular economic conditions—namely the rise of bourgeois individualism—which allowed it to achieve unprecedented autonomy and authority. But Berlin is a historian of ideas of the old-school, and social factors play no major role in his narrative: for him, romantics rebel against natural laws or those perceived as such, among which he seems to count that of supply and demand. Here again his focus on Europe fails to account for the western encounter with hunter-gatherers: 'Burke believed . . . that the laws of of commerce are the laws of nature, and therefore the laws of God, and deduced from this that nothing could be done about passing any radical reform, and the poor would have to starve . . . . Romantic economics is the precise opposite of this. All economic institutions must be bent towards some kind of ideal of living together in a spiritually progressive manner. Above all you must not make the mistake of supposing that there are external laws, that there are objective, given laws of economics which are beyond human control' (126). I actually think there is a point to be made in recognising a religious element or structure in actual communist regimes (or for that matter, in most regimes) but tracing it back to Marx I find more difficult. Leaving aside the apocalyptic teleology of progress, which Berlin leaves aside because his idea of romanticism is 'autotelic', an end in itself, Marx, whom I should say I know little of, does I think emphasise the 'relational' character of facts over their 'substance', as do the existential romantics in Berlin's thesis, but it is a relation between objects, rather than between object and a subject. The recognition of the constructed and historical character of political economy, for Berlin, seems a romantic flight from objectivity—and yet he has also argued that the French revolution was the result of Enlightenment ideals rather than romantic one... Given that at the start of his book, the prevalence of action over contemplation was also given as foundational mistake of romanticism, it is easy to see what he is getting at: science should rather be the contemplation of the laws of nature, supply and demand included, than the tool for its transformation. This of courses leave out the instrumental drive of enlightenment science, and the question of why should one trust in supply and demand rather than in the Great Chain of Being, neither of which are strictly empirically testable. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 09, 2017
|
May 09, 2017
|
May 09, 2017
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 2869598025
| 9782869598027
| 2869598025
| 3.67
| 21
| 2006
| Feb 07, 2008
|
it was amazing
|
I've been meaning to read a bit of Tagore for a long time now � I am not hugely familiar with the Indian subcontinent, beyond reading some Coomaraswam
I've been meaning to read a bit of Tagore for a long time now � I am not hugely familiar with the Indian subcontinent, beyond reading some Coomaraswamy many years ago, but Tagore seemed very interesting, and probably not a bad place to start for an ignorant westerner. I was discussing where to start with some Bengali friends and they surprised me with this lovely little book, in French, to my surprise. I don't think the same stories have been printed together in English, unfortunately so as they work very well together. The fantastic short-story is a bit of an 'exercice de style' � they usually follow a single, predictable but winding path to a tragic conclusion, and as such make for great comparisons across authors and culture: Tagore follows closely the model in the footsteps of Maupassant 'le Horla' and other similar classics of the genre, with indirect narrations, a generous scoop of late-romantic set pieces peppered with more realistic and modern elements: the narrator meets a man who recalls a story carefully crafted to leave the reader -and frequently enough, the characters themselves- wondering whether the strange events are the fruit of supernatural forces or of creeping insanity. Thus here one story tells of the sleepless conversation of man with a skeleton, another of the return of a woman drowned by her greed, while a third one that of a poet haunted by his dead wife. The plots themselves are typical, and the supernatural elements, although sometimes alluding to the local folklore, could easily be transposed in another setting � yet one can only be struck, after a few stories, at the fact that most of those ghosts are female: that is indeed where the book's strength is, for in Tagore's stories as in many of his Western colleagues, the fantastic is primarily a tool to comment and dramatise the encounter with modernity. In particular, as with others around the fin-de-siecle, Tagore uses it to express and explore his male anxiety at the changing status of women in his society. Yet here, none of those vamps or nefarious femme fatales that inhabits the western imagination of the time, but rather a deep and thoughtful ambivalence, that often simultaneously acknowledges the impossible and demeaning nature of the woman's position in traditional Indian society, while simultaneously bemoaning, frequently with a touch of humour, the modern male incapable to cope with those shifting gender roles. Romantic love inherited from ancient poetry seems to haunt the mind of those men, who fail, despite their best efforts, to live up to the impersonal standard of colonial modernity. From one story to another the register change drastically, and while in one, the author can comment on the fact that a kind hearted man too compliant with his wife ended up creating a selfish, materialistic and ultimately self-destructive monster (that eventually comes back to haunt him even after her demise) � leaving no room at all for agency or soul to the female character � in another, the narrator's wife, always pragmatic but also profoundly dedicated to her husband, is revealed to be the deeper and the more admirable of the two when she reaches her death-bed. The husband's unspoken love, mixed with regrets and shame, hounds him in his new marriage as the new wife fails to live up to the standards of the deceased. That one is deeply moving and possibly one of the most striking depiction of married life I have encountered in such a short format. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 26, 2017
|
Mar 09, 2017
|
Feb 26, 2017
|
Pocket Book
| ||||||||||||||
| 207013749X
| 9782070137497
| 207013749X
| 4.34
| 158
| 1987
| May 31, 2012
|
it was amazing
|
My discovery of Bataille is fairly recent � but I am still so elated about it that I am destined to struggle in separating the man from his portrait:
My discovery of Bataille is fairly recent � but I am still so elated about it that I am destined to struggle in separating the man from his portrait: Surya's book seems however widely recognised as the reference work on the subject (translated as 'Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography') and convey well, I think, the excitement and fascination I experienced when reading Bataille's essays in the collection 'Visions of Excess'; There is in Surya's prose some superfluous adornment, a taste for the elegant paradox, which might have irritated me, had I not known him for a fellow devotee, but which resonates here with the occasional picturesque of Bataille's own dedicated obscenity. I will go in more detail concerning the surprisingly systematic substance of Bataille's thought in my review of those essays of his I have been reading concurrently � and their short, strident but perfectly controlled and articulated prose make I think the best introduction; What 'La Mort a l'Oeuvre' provide us with is an image their author's existence, intellectual and historical, with the occasional interpretation of specific texts, all of which emphasise the unity of Bataille's art and life (a very avant-garde concern) and the calculated distance between private life, including writing, and public personna (a more modernist strategy, akin to what Magritte will call 'conformisme tactique'). Although educated in France's foremost historical institution (after the mandatory stop by the seminary) Bataille is endearingly self-taught, so that his professional work as a librarian and a medievalist has in fact very little to do with the fiction and theory he is remembered for: it is all the more impressive then to see him engaging confidently, with fields ranging from western Marxism to existentialism, via ethnology and psychoanalysis. A man of his time he emerged in France's interwar literary avantgarde at a time when the gravitational pull of surrealism must have been near inescapable � shaped by its general thrust, he will remain dedicated to the irrational and the experience of limits, but early on he falls out with is grand-pope or with his theories, and starts the salutary pursuit of calling him out on all of his short-comings, hypocrisies and opportunism. I could never stand Breton, Aragon and their zealots, maybe for having had them forced on him back in high-school: how convenient it must have been to find in 'the unconscious' more than enough room to shove all those relics of idealism (Greek ruins and myths, romantic love, spiritual and religious iconography, etc.) a successful (if uncommitted) artist must pepper his works with to gain any recognition! But Bataille would have none of it (or very little � thus I am glad he was robbed of his 'Minautore' project, for no amount 'monstrosity' would suffice to absolve him from classical mythology) : the locus of the 'marvellous' (he abhors the term, I do not know of an equivalent) is not the commodity, the personal, the familial or the quaintly mysterious, as the surrealists would have it � it is instead snot, shit, piss, cum, mud, sweat, dirt and corpses, the lowly, the 'base' : 'base materialism' as he calls his system in the interwar period, is a surrealism de-humanised, a surrealism with no respect for tradition or convenience, profoundly devoid of dignity and seeking its own annihilation in a mystical thirst for release, both physiological and existential. One of Bataille's own coinage is the term 'heterology' and we shouldn't be surprised to find then his only lasting commitment is to heterodoxy: although Marxism will remain his frame of reference until after the war, Surya makes it clear that his constant negativity, his constant probing for the depth and the shameful, made him both fascinating to the artists, and ultimately politically unproductive, as his relationships with Boris Souvarine or Simone Weil show well. As despair seems to set in at the approach of the war, Bataille seems to shrink back from the world, retiring first in theories and practice of smaller communities (the 'Acéphale' period) and ultimately in the negative mysticism of 'L'Expérience Intérieure' that will earn him a scathing review from Sartres. In the post-war era he becomes a peripheral but important staple of the French intelligentsia, developing his original thought (muting it also somewhat, in Surya's view) into new fields such as art history. This is a book I would recommend to anyone interested in the interwar period, in Western Marxism, in philosophy in general, and in Nietzsche and existentialism in particular, in art history and in issues of transgression, eroticism and abjection. It is not an 'introduction' (it can be dry at times) but for anyone already fond of its subject, it is, I think, a necessary stop. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 03, 2016
|
Nov 11, 2016
|
Oct 03, 2016
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1595690581
| 9781595690586
| 1595690581
| 3.49
| 7,535
| 1889
| Dec 12, 2006
|
liked it
|
The Pleasure is Gabriele d'Annunzio's first novel, and I have read not the Georgina Harding translation ('The Child of Pleasure') but the more recent
The Pleasure is Gabriele d'Annunzio's first novel, and I have read not the Georgina Harding translation ('The Child of Pleasure') but the more recent one by Lara Gochin Raffaelli (simply titled 'Pleasure'); So should you: the Harding translation, committed in 1898, is notorious for excising all of the naughty (or just morally questionable) bits she found herself uncomfortable with. With its shock value by now (unfortunately) long gone, that this mutilated translation might still be in print can only be explained by its presence in the public domain. The Raffaelli version is widely available in Penguin Classics, and thus very affordable, as well as far as I can tell, as being of quality. The plot, once bared of its elaborate garb of conspicuous high-society wish-fulfilment, is rather simple: Sperelli, handsome, rich, refined, creative and nobiliary particled, falls in love with Elena, a beautiful, rich, refined, and exalted young widow. They live what seems to Sperelli like the apex of carnal and spiritual passion, and when she mysteriously leave him and disappear for two years, he spirals into a first interval of truly decadent debauchery, culminating in a duel over a woman he does not even like, where he is treacherously and badly wounded. As he recovers in the house of a female cousin of his -incidentally, in love with him, as soon or late are each female character in the story- he meets Sienese Maria Ferres, the beautiful, rich, refined, and modest young wife of a South-American diplomat, who is the 'angel of art' to Elena's 'idol of perversity'; Too spiritual to indulge his unlawful cravings, she leaves the seaside retreat where they have met, to meet Andreas again in Rome where she reside part of the year with her husband. There the hero's once heartfelt love degenerates again in bitter, cruel and corrupting lust, and he successfully endeavour to gain her favours through jealousy and manipulation. As should already be apparent, the book is in large part assembled of the fantasies of success, social and sexual, of a frustrated young author, what I believe is called 'aspirational fiction'; This indulgent, puerile streak revealed and satiated the base yearnings of many ambitious young men across Europe (and of many women too, as the author's life reveals abundantly...), finding for themselves in 'decadence' a degree of intellectual legitimacy. D'Annunzio stretches the limits of this legitimacy, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. The most striking feature of his writing is the formulaic nature of his description of object, which play a central role in endowing with hieratic qualities otherwise undignified pursuits (read: seduction and its culmination). Everything is bejewelled, everything is ancient, everything is over-wrought and ornamented, but meaning remain elusive, or even unimportant. The lack of analysis of the sources of value, be it that placed on moral and intellectual traits, or on physical qualities could first appear merely naive: beauty, most of all, is not here something to be analysed or understood, but merely to be celebrated. This celebration, for all its typical late-romantic claims to disinterest and devotion, soon transparently reveals itself as utilitarian, even opportunistic: Just as the entrenched egotism of the fin-de-siecle culture is a contorted attempt at ignoring the looming crisis of the subject, the cult of beauty here plugs effortlessly into the more philistine bourgeois values, from comfort to status: thus the decadent backward gaze might well be "the keenest sense of organic connection with the monumental legacy of the high culture of the past, along with the painfully proud awareness that we are the last of its kind" (Ivanov and Gershenson), but it is also, most visibly in D'Annunzio, a compromising attempt to salvage the value of a particular form of cultural capital threatened by mass culture. At the best of times D'Annunzio departs from the one-dimensional depiction of his hero's philandering to depict his inner torment, to analyse the 'event' of decadence itself. Noberto Bobbio has called existentialism la filosofia del decadantismo, puzzling many with a historical imprecision which some have taken to reflect the prejudice of a residual crocean against an irrationalism taxed with the collapse of the liberal regime. Reading The Pleasure, however, we can maybe see where such an association comes from: when between two waves of over-wrought ekphrasis and depictions of Rome's artificial high-society, the author take the time to study his character's torment, there shines in his prose glimpses of dostoievskian cruelty, traces of that unflinching gaze at the psychological sources of crimes, of betrayals, of self-conscious debasement. The Russian influence was to become explicit in his next novel, whose titular Giovanni Episcopo (1891) is very much a man from the underground. As you might have gathered this was not a particularly enjoyable read: many descriptions become tedious in their indulgent accumulation of adjectives and references, especially when they constitute in fact nothing more than the background for the plot, and legitimacy for the author. It more than once degenerates into a grotesque layer-cake of ornaments and fineries, which had me laughed out loud in the train: a bitter laugh because here is a striking example of not-so-primitive accumulation, sublimated into the realm of culture, whose ghost still haunts me very much. But that is likely to be the book's main interest: with all its formal self-awareness, it lacks much distance and the irony which pervade much of its British of French counter-parts: here decadence is no longer a posture to be toyed with, but is elevated to a relatively coherent ideology, revealing both its defects and its historical position in the process. As such the book deserve, as argued by Joyce or Henry James, to be read, yet I would add not for entertainment (although as such it must be no worse than any harlequin romance) but as a document in the history of ideas. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 20, 2016
|
May 22, 2016
|
May 20, 2016
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1843910527
| 9781843910527
| 1843910527
| 3.43
| 100
| 1884
| Jun 01, 2003
|
liked it
|
It's funny how the same trait could seem quaint and amusing in say Goethe, and how, when taken to its extreme, it appears supercilious and self-indulg
It's funny how the same trait could seem quaint and amusing in say Goethe, and how, when taken to its extreme, it appears supercilious and self-indulgent in late-romantics like D'Annunzio: the four short-stories which are assembled in this volume were written early on and are set not in the Roman high-society but in the author's native Abruzzi, roughly at the level of Rome but on the Adriatic side of the peninsula. Those circumstances explain a few surprising traits in those stories, such as a verist element in the first story, "The Virgins", and the occasional presence of positivist terminology (emotions are indifferently poised as some fateful force beyond human control, or as tingling of the nerve endings); The "plebeian" presence of the lower-classes is however quickly waved away in the following stories, which adopt the more predictable setting, for a fin-de-siecle pastoral, of the secluded but comfortable, and most importantly tastefully decorated, old-family home. There more conventional love-stories can unfold, with the usual recourse to transgression and feminine perversity to give such exhausted formula the veneer of modernity. As the title makes clear, men exist here as non-entities, blatant mirrors of the author's youthful fantasies, while the focus is on women, either contrivedly innocent and tragically lacking self-awareness, falling victim to the deadly corruption of the world at large, or as "angels of perversity", dominant women depicted as, behind their sense of social appropriateness, fundamentally impervious to emotion, decency or ethics. Those images would become the common stock of decadent poetics, not least that of D'Annunzio, and the format of those stories and the time of their writing certainly present an archaeological interest, in that it displays how from the more moderate realist tendencies of verism, one moves towards the choking isolation of "art for art's sake", and what consequences such a move might bring about in both ethical outlook and formal issues. The translation is remarkable and reflect the wordiness and the youth of D'Annunzio quite well, and several passages of the book prefigure his later qualities, with occasional perceptive psychological observations and intense, if stereotypical, depiction of the abruzzian nature. On the whole I would say this short book seem a good first into the world of fin-de-siecle Italy, not quite yet as dense with incense and over-heated as his later texts seem to be! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Apr 27, 2016
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0007213964
| 9780007213962
| 0007213964
| 4.16
| 673
| Jan 2013
| Aug 29, 2013
|
really liked it
|
When you are planning to write a paper on some subject, you develop a kind of unconscious snobbishness, which had lead me to consider with undue suspi
When you are planning to write a paper on some subject, you develop a kind of unconscious snobbishness, which had lead me to consider with undue suspicion the realm of "popular biographies": Hughes-Hallet's is definitively a popular biography, and it performed the salutary job of reminding me of how great can those be. What is a popular biography, you might ask? Well let's look at the present book: First of all, no foot-notes - despite the book being composed of and built around innumerable quotations from the titular D'Annunzio, those who bore witness to his actions, and historical actors who reflected on the period, the reader would be hard-pressed to trace such utterances to their printed source. This will frustrate the researcher. I'll give you an example: "The Liberal State is a mask behind which there is no face; it is a scaffolding behind which there is no building." This is attributed not, mind you, to Pirandello, but to Mussolini. That's exciting stuff, especially for those keen to read fascism in a jamesonian lens as I do, but if you turn to what stand for "notes", you have an enumeration of the sources for the whole chapter from Mack Smith to Gentile, many of which happen to hang out on my book shelves, but there is no chance I could track down that quote (and a Google search will reveal memes and quote-sites which are no more helpful)... So yes - a popular biography has not foot-notes, which means we must take the author's word for the accuracy and reliability of her sources. Now this freedom from academic constraint allows for the second trait of the popular biography, namely the emphasis on narration. The primary aim is not to present original analysis or research in a structured way, but rather to gather the information provided by others, primary and secondary sources, and to collate them into a narrative which need to have rhythm, suspense, variety and humour, none of which Hughes-Hallet's book is lacking. In part the author practice the very kind of ekphrasis which D'Annunzio himself was know to pepper his works with (the very kind of showy historicism that the avant-garde would reproach him!) : D'Annunzio's life, as Hughes-Hallet is acutely aware, was designed as the grand synthesis of a modern advertising campaign and a romantic Gesamtkunstwerk. Despite the occasional discrepancy between his real experience as we can reconstruct it, and the account of it he gives, one of the man's few redeeming features is the courage and dedication which often led him to act rather than pretend, in an age when the second would have sufficed to his success. As such, he provided the perfect material for a novelised biography, and in many regards that is what we have here. Save for the occasional flashback or anticipation, the book is roughly chronological, starting from D'Annunzio's puglian childhood, going on to his meteoric rise as Rome's number-one dandy, his exile in France, his return in the guise of a military hero and his regency of Fiume, down to his last years in the Vittoriale and his ambiguous relationship to Fascism. In no small part the fascination of the character, despite the hollowness which the modern eye cannot help but notice at every turn of his story, can be accounted for by the length and variety of his interests; As many in his age-group, D'Annunzio honed his skills in the inclusive tradition of italian verism, before turning to the late-romantic nebula which was then rising in Rome. Hughes-Hallet is wrong to dismiss his fashion and high-society journalism as irrelevant hack-writing, as it provided him, as it did for Mallarmé, with material support both financial and conceptual in the development of his decadent style. His turn to nationalism could have received more attention: this truly constitute for me D'Annunzio's historical importance. The exact influence of his napolitan friends or the florentine fin-de-siecle journals like Il Marzocco still elude me, and I wish for a study which could show how the religion of art became the religion of the nation, but obviously such considerations would have been out of place in the present volume. There's a great PHD dissertation by Elena Borelli (“Action or Contemplation�) which look at the Italian fin-de-siecle and its turn from the ideals of the turris eburrae to those of the nation. Fifteen years before the futurist manifesto, and in the context of unswervingly decadent poetics, Burger's attack on the “art institution� took place far, far-away from all marxism... Despite being one of (maybe the) best paid writer of his age, D'Annunzio his whole life lived above his means, in fact so far above he had long lost sight of the real. His whole life he was hunted down by creditors, by bailiffs, and many of his moves, to France for example, are revealed by Hughes-Hallet to have been motivated, or more exactly forced, by his dire financial situation. There is something likeable about someone whose scorn for accounting and pedestrian matters forces him to a nomadic life. Yet when we see with the author that this same irresponsability extended from his own personal comfort to that of the children he fathered but rarely if ever met or supported, and of the devoted men and women who lent money, goods or time to allow for his irresponsibility to go unchecked, we start to see that D'Annunzio, beyond a caricature of the post-romantic, was also a herald of consumer and spectacle societies. Another near-pathological trait on which Hughes-Hallet dwells with gusto is his incessant philandering, which lead many women in disrepute and misery, and quite a few into madness and suicide. This, again, might seem like his fiction stretching its arm, greedy for tragedy and for excess, into the world of life � but the formulaic and mechanical aspects of the romances makes it all too clear that the practice had more to do with canny self-publishing and assuaging his insecurities, than with any of the courtly or mystical allegories he lifted his words from. Hard work and refined craft do not seem to preclude grotesque levels of self-indulgence: Hughes-Hallet's “popular� aspect lead her to leave out much consideration of style or craft, which is where D'Annunzio's true labour took place. We see him act rather than read, and once again this is a concession to her public. How D'Annunzio, and many of his contemporaries, could grow up in the age of historicism, could devour methodically the life of the ancients, and the most varied and often obscure works of literature, and come out of it with nothing but a set of very naïve ideas about heroes, about genius, about faith or about youth, should have us pause. Knowledge he accumulated much like the trinkets and plaster-copies of classic works in his Vittoriale. But at the end of the day, I suspect the quantity mattered much more than the meaning. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Apr 14, 2016
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1781881812
| 9781781881811
| 1781881812
| 3.33
| 3
| Apr 01, 2007
| Jul 21, 2014
|
liked it
|
I was not hugely interested in pre-raphaelites before I started the book : I suffer from that widespread syndrom of having been enthusiastic about the
I was not hugely interested in pre-raphaelites before I started the book : I suffer from that widespread syndrom of having been enthusiastic about them as a goth teenager, and now being unable to see it as anything but navel-gazing covered with a thin layer of mystical/nostalgic mumbo-jumbo. No doubt this comes from my ignorance on the subject and my discomfort at my own early lyrical outbursts, as many intelligent people have shown they knew better! I was a lot more interested in the italian fin-de-siecle, however, although I knew relatively little about it having mostly read into early XXth century liberal italy. Unfortunately, after pushing myself throughout the book, I cannot say I know a whole lot more: The book is a dry historical study of the spread of pre-raphaelite aesthetics throughout Italy from the 1860s onward, which the author, clearly extremely knowledgeable and competent in both fields, is at pain to distinguish from other artistic currents like academic painting, Fortuny's school, aestheticism, symbolism, etc. Addressing a public of specialist she does not bother to quote the defining characteristics of pre-raphaelite painting, which becomes a bit of an issue when you note that, in her own analysis, virtually all of the aforementioned schools (and some earlier ones too, like the purists) where turning to late-medieval and early renaissance painting (that is, pre-dating Raphael) at the time. How, then, can she manage to trace the influence of the english model in a country which hold many of the historical examples, you might wonder? Well that's where she does her job well, through excruciating analysis of correspondance, diaries, journal articles, travels and exhibition. All in all I would say that this is probably a great book for the expert, but that for the dabbler, the absence not only of pictures (and many of the paintings she refers to cannot seemed to be found online either) save for a few B&W tiny reproductions, but also of much non-factual content makes it a rather painful and difficult read. Nonetheless I got the infos I was looking for - some basics about Adolfo de Karolis, and a general picture of the fin-de-siecle milieu, but I wont try and read Pieri's books again until I get my PHD in XIXth century art history. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 16, 2016
|
Feb 22, 2016
|
Feb 16, 2016
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 082621780X
| 9780826217806
| 082621780X
| 4.25
| 4
| Mar 31, 2008
| Mar 31, 2008
|
really liked it
|
Boime's book concerns itself with the religious and political underpinnings of a string of French post-impressionists painters whom he takes to put do
Boime's book concerns itself with the religious and political underpinnings of a string of French post-impressionists painters whom he takes to put down the foundations of modernism: his method, largely narrative with a few rare forays into formal questions, is grounded in the knowledge of fin-de-siecle french culture, where nationalism, anarchism, neocatholicism, occult and other strands intermix in often unexpected and generally complex manners with the debate concerning the autonomy of art. Indeed the book's subtitle, “responses to cultural crises in fin-de-siecle� betrays the likely influence of the culturalist school who has identified the turn of the century as the stage where the synthesis of reaction in politics and formal innovation had first been achived (Sternhell). Boime's attempt at asserting the contemporary relevance of the fin-de-siecle crisis to our “post 9-11� world I personally find disingenuous, but to be honest the theoretical aspect is neither emphasized nor the author's strongest point: rather this would be the breadth and perceptivity of his historical research, identifying potential factual sources, with names and dates, for the content of the painting that caught his attention. The two weakest analysis in my opinion are the frist and the last: Van Gogh's “Starry Night� he endeavour to rescue from the many interpretations emphasizing the painter's religious training, whereas Boime is intent on proving its scientific and astronomic underpinning so as to reveal the increasingly materialist and rationalist views of Van Gogh's later years. This he attempts by comparing the position of the stars in the painting with those astronomers have identified to be visible at the time it was painted: to the naked eye, the artistic license expectable from a painter like Van Gogh make the identification of those constellation rather risky, and Boime's point less than convincing. On the other hand, his recourse to texts of popular astronomy such as those of Flammarion is more to the point, revealing if not a direct influence, at least a shared fascination for the “sublime� skies, rejuvanated from its kantian sources. The final one, and in my opinion the weaker essay, concerns Gauguin's large-scale painting “D'ou venons nous? Que sommes-mous? Ou allons-nous?� in which Boime has decided to trace the influence of the occultist Eliphas Lévi, who happened to be a relation of Gauguin's grand-mother. The more convincing element is no doubt the fact that Lévi had used those very words in the subtitle of one of his texts. However this is introduced only mid-way within a nearly hundred pages of over-stretched comparisons, revealing that Boime suffers from the widespread symptoms of many historians approaching occultism as a non-specialist: terms like occult, esoteric, mystical or magical are used interchangeably, without any attempts to understand the historical specificity that those doctrines may have had at the time of their use by situated actors. Here for example, Lévi who is certainly one of best known occultist, and whose influence peaked rather early in the mid-XIXth century, had obviously very different motives to retain and distort the Christian doctrine in his system, than had the fin-de-siecle Gauguin, living in an age where occultism had become dominated by the orient (theosophy) while Catholicism had become first and foremost a political posture. At any rate Boime's efforts to find pictorial sources of Gauguin in Lévi's famous engravings are unconvincing (such as the blue idol in the afore-mentioned painting being a baphomet) while his attempts to trace terminology and concepts to the same source appear naïve. Both occultism and the fin-de-siecle culture strove on a syncretic and aggregating mindset: thus isolating the constitutive elements of an occult doctrine, such as that of Lévi, and claiming that their presence in another's is a sign of filiation is misguided. Those picked by Boime widely circulated at the time, and to achieve such a project one would have to find an element or a pattern that is very specific to Lévi. This, again, would demand a wide knowledge of the myriad of such doctrines that existed at the time, a knowledge few scholars (understandably) have the courage to gather... A lot more convincing and interesting, however, is the reflections and documents produced by Boime concerning Gauguin's political stance: although his paintings have already been convincingly analysed as the confluence of “male� and “colonial� gaze, he is generally taken to be a stalwart anti-colonialist, which Boime proves to be an idealization. In particular he unearths vicious antisemitic remarks and downright racist treatment, both in words and in acts, of the chinese migrants in Gauguin's paradise. Clearly then, Boime's strength is not in his analysis (generally hostile, by the way) of his subject's spiritual life, but in his reading of their political stance. This shows best in his astute and impressively researched study of Seurat's “La Parade de Cirque�. Boime reposition the haunting scene as depicting a circus parade, trying to attract visitors to their main show, but ostensibly painted in a “minor key�, in grey and uncanny colours, in the context of the boulangeist crisis, which many commentators have seen as prefiguring the populist forms taken by the radical right in the next century: the general Boulanger gained unforeseen popular support within the space of a few years, cleverly exploiting both the emotional impact of the 1871 defeat of the French armies, and the new tools of propaganda made available by the industrial revolution, creating in effect a movement which attracted radicals from the left and the right, without ever committing itself to democracy or dictatorship. Cutting across social class and political boundaries the general's following gathered symbolists and post-impressionists, as well as working class and déclassé elements, including the very circus troupe whom Boime identifies as the inspiration of the painting. The ambivalence of the Boulanger phenomenon, which had as much to do with show business as it did with politics reflects the crisis of representative institutions which fuelled much of the later avant-gardes and continued down to the rise of European fascisms. Seen in this light the tragicomic aspects of the scene is particularly poignant and encapsulate the ambivalence of the artists in the face of both mimesis and democracy. Finally his essay on the work of Cézanne, which was what lead me to get the book in the first place, is an great contribution to a more general vision of abstraction in the visual arts as manifesting an authoritarian metaphysical project: one can think of Boris Groys famous assertion that the russian avant-gardes vied for spiritual authority with the soviet power, or of Herny Mead describing T. E. Hulme's ordering of the “mud bath� of a formless reality into a checkerboard ruled by an artistic fiction. Boime's reading propose that Cézanne's passion for the landscape of his native Provence, and his increasingly reclusive life-style reflect an obsession with land-ownership. The grid he applies onto the land is an attempt at giving solid shape and self-standing reality, in a word at “objectifying� a landscape which impressionism had transformed into a boundary-less extension of the spectator. This role is associated with a clearly anti-humanist streak and build the artist into a demiurgic and solipsistic creator, negating in the process any attributes the world might have had before its representation. At times we are reminded of Peter Gay's interpretation of Mondrian, which I had found detestable at the time, in which the painter's obsession with orthogonal grids were taken to reveal his sexual insecurities: but here taken as a process (a process also visible in Mondrian's series on trees or jugs) the move from organic, external forms into geometric abstraction takes on a programatic, and thus political, aspect, which has less to do with exorcising one's own sense of inadequacy than with a “re-ordering of the world�. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 03, 2016
|
Feb 13, 2016
|
Feb 03, 2016
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1898253102
| 9781898253105
| 1898253102
| 3.13
| 119
| 1909
| Jan 01, 1998
|
it was ok
|
Reading the reviews below, I thought I should overcome my disappointment at this book to point one or two things to prospective readers: there is inde
Reading the reviews below, I thought I should overcome my disappointment at this book to point one or two things to prospective readers: there is indeed a lively tradition bent on seeing futurism, Marinetti and Mafarka in particular as mouth-pieces of the most repugnant, reactionary misogyny, which at first sight it would be hard to deny: Eager to depart from the decadent canon represented by D'Annunzio or Sartorio, the author vocally rejected women and their veneration as a suitable subject matter for avant-garde art. The concern with unity and coherence characteristic of those movements lead them to translate their disregard for traditional female figures of art (love poetry, nude paintings, etc.) into a "practical" demand for "scorn for women" as worded in the founding manifesto of futurism. It comes therefore as no surprise to find in the titular Mafarka's struggles a vociferous rejection of the "debilitating" and pacifying effects of romantic love, and of what Marinetti conceives as its only harbinger: women. A closer examination of the futurist corpus and history, as well as quick survey of the feminist histories concerned with the movement, will reveal a much more complex and ambivalent position. To keep it short and sweet I will stick to Lucia Re's excellent reading (here taken from her essay on Benedetta Cappa, "Impure Abstraction: Benedetta as visual artist and novelist") but there is a wealth of litterature on the issue (most notably Barbara Spackmann and Cinzia Blum-Santini) : The first futurism (between 1909 and 1914) to which Mafarka clearly belongs, despite blatant and brutal misogyny, later attracted many women, and many feminitsts among those. This Re identifies as a resulting from its rejection of women as a subject of representation, and its ultra-virilist emphasis on homo-sociality and masculine bodies. Freed from the male gaze women in futurism in particular, and in the avant-gardes in general, where no longer committed to objectification and otherness, as they were in pure abstraction or in symbolist painting for example, and could become actors and producers of art. I would add that Marinetti's love for the grotesque (see his "Roi Bombance") must be understood as mitigating his pronouncements, as should the performative character of his movement. Paradoxically, futurism had many progressive effects on Italian society, before its insecure attention-seeking left it but a rotting puppet in the hands of the Fascist regime. The liberation of woman as an artist, the collapsing of the frontier between popular and high culture, or the recognition of the public sphere as a space for performance, are but a few examples. Unfortunately, all those qualities do not suffice to make Mafarka a worthwhile read: I really wanted to love the book, but there is rather little to salvage here. As Re mentions, futurist stylistic devices prove more suited to poetry or short prose than to long and constructed fictions like novels. There, boisterous emptiness of many futurist proclamations is generally mitigated by their social, political or cultural context. Here, Marinetti abstracted his tale by placing it in some orientalist wet-dream, which leaves his reader with little of interest save for the monolithic, obsessional, bumptious portrayal of a theme that was by then already old and treated much better elsewhere: vitalism. At his best Marinetti make some interesting uses of the metaphora continua and inject some theatrical forms in his novel, or practice a strange exercise of africanized "subcreation" complete with names, gods and geography (and it might be as a pre-Robert E Howard Sword & Sorcery this book should be read) ; But about halfway through, I've had to force myself to go on... ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Nov 24, 2014
|
Jan 07, 2015
|
Nov 24, 2014
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 067405525X
| 9780674055254
| 067405525X
| 4.33
| 6
| Feb 05, 1993
| Dec 28, 1993
|
it was amazing
|
Adamson has won several prizes for his scholarship in the field of avant-garde studies and interwar culture (and maybe also for his might mustache, I
Adamson has won several prizes for his scholarship in the field of avant-garde studies and interwar culture (and maybe also for his might mustache, I suspect) and I must concur. He isn’t exactly churning them out (four books since his first one in 1983) but boy, when he does get at it, it’s quite something: I’ve been on a bit of a Papini binge as of lately, but he wins the prize hands down. Adamson, following his habit, starts with a solid grounding in the existing historiography (the book is from 93, which means he had little of the superabundent litterature on the fascist/modernist connection at his disposal) and follows with an introduction to Florence, situated in the larger context of Italy and its belated modernity. Cultural, political, economic and, importantly, social, conditions are brilliantly elucidated, with some unusual positions at time (the acerbic portrayal of Giolittian administration) which I am particularly grateful for. If anything one might have wished the author had put the same effort in depicting the precedents in art as he did in litterature, but then again politics might not have had the same bearing on them. The case of Italy is an appealing one because the binary decadent/modernist is relatively clear, thanks in no small measure to those two larger-than-life characters, the Florentine Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Milanese Fillipo Marinetti. The one a libidinous crafter of treacly, refined odes and laments, the other, no less bumptious, a vehement agitator against peace, women and tradition. All they have in common (nationalism aside) is the barrenness of their scalp� Two cities, two movements, two generations. Unlike Paris, the break here between the XIXth and XXth centuriy seems fairly clean. Enters Giovanni Papini, a headful of curly hair, a single crease on the forehead like the mark of the beast, and the fearless gaze of the myopic nerd. I wont go into details on this colourful character, if you want some, you should turn to my review of “Un Homme Fini� or the Lovreglio biography. And behind him, Adamson ushers the rest of the florentine avant-garde. I might be a bit unfair to Adamson actually: I am slightly obsessed with Papini himself, but the present book promise us “a group portrait� of the Florentine avant-garde, and that’s just what he does: along with the polemist Papini we meet the more moderate Prezzolini, and shortly, the painter and poet Ardengo Soffici. We follow them through their various ventures, publications mainly, such as the early philosophy journal Leonardo, that will elicit the enthusiasm of Bergson and William James, to La Voce, where Prezzolini’s Crocean sympathies will bring about a lasting rift between him and his best friend Papini, or the later’s Lacerba, apex of incendiary rhetoric that will for a time, allign itself to Marinetti’s movement. Where the book is unbeatable is first of all, in the author’s disciplined study of those and lesser magazines, but also in his interest in more discreet figures nesting around that trinity. Isolated (to me at least!) figures of the Italian litterary world, like Sibilla Aleramo, Palazeschi, Amendola or Slataper come into focus, revealing how small a world cultural activism at the time must have been, since the same group of friends could house future fascists, and future victims of the regime. Adamson seems to understand modernism primarily as an ideology: a demand for “a fresh start� which would allow intellectuals rather than sclerotic aristocracies or mindless masses to take the role that rightfully belongs to them, namely that of theoreticians and designers of world institutions. Demands for tabula rasa necessarily implies wholesale condemnation of the statu quo and a pronounced pessimism, something of which Leonardo or Lacerba where never short of. Until that Kingdom Come, the social goal, or at least the purpose, of the Italian avant-garde seems to be “to create a greater sense of public space in the Giolittian era� (33), that was sorely lacking or monopolised by a corrupt leisure-class. Among the traits which depart from the expected fascoid rhetoric, and give this scene its particular flavour, is regionalist federalism, quite distant from the later mussolinian statism, which seems in good part rooted in Papini’s pet-hate, monism, and his answer of radical, pragmatic pluralism. How did he, or his colleagues, managed to reconcile those laudable notions with the state policies some eventually came to support, remain a mystery outside of the scope of the present work. Yet let me add that Papini’s own “magical� (understand: “egotic�) pragmatism, might help us understand Mussolini’s puzzling claims to pragmatism. Another trait Adamson is careful to highlight is the obsession with political religion: the need, for the new era to come, to be cimented by a secular religion likely to give society the cohesion and the movement that in liberal democracies they found lacking. They for the most part welcomed and even demanded the Great War, agitating relentlessly for Italy to side with France. Albeit most agreed the conflict had fail to coalesce Italian society around a singular ideal, they had varied reactions to it, from Papini’s conversion to catholicism, to Amendola socialist martyrdom. The story ends with the rise of fascism proper, which seem to the reader so close to what those men demanded, and to them so far from what they hoped. Adamson goes on to venture what exactly fascist rhetoric (or ideology imho) might have herited from those “experiments�. You might be aware of the unending debates on proto-fascism, the sources of fascism, whether Action Francaise was fascist and so. Those sometimes feel like coué rehashing or like academic feuds. Here instead we have a commited work of focused case study which in my eyes, do more to elucidate the relationship between fascism and fin-de-sciècle culture than most of Sternhell’s indictements. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 02, 2014
|
Oct 22, 2014
|
Oct 02, 2014
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 2070407039
| 9782070407033
| 2070407039
| 4.18
| 11
| Jan 01, 1999
| Mar 01, 2001
|
really liked it
|
Most fiction built around ethno-differentialism or cultural essentialism (or any other derivative of racism) tend to start low and age pretty badly: s
Most fiction built around ethno-differentialism or cultural essentialism (or any other derivative of racism) tend to start low and age pretty badly: stereotypes, even for those readers who welcome them or can pass them as litterary tropes, are bound to swiftly join the dustbins of history, overflowing already with kitsch and quack science. That’s one of the reasons why Paul Morand’s “Flèche d’Orient� is worth reading: somewhere between the novel and the nouvelle, it deals elegantly in national identity, taking the reader on a trip to the east of Europe and the depths of the soul. Dimitri is a white Russian who has left his past at the frontier, integrated, married and made his fortune in France, away from the émigré community, wary of its languor and excesses. After loosing a bet he must fly to Bucarest and return to his friends with a kilo of fresh caviar, which seems simple enough but will, of course, resonate in his soul the mute but almighty call of the Motherland. The themes are not highly original, but it is their combination and the meticulous precision of Morand’s prose that spin them into a compelling thread: the very reason for Dimitri’s fortuitous trip to the Balkans is the existence of a liaison between Paris and Bucarest in less than a day. The incredule Dimitri refuses to accept that progress technology might have so collapsed distances and boundaries that the land of his birth, he was so careful to erase from his life, could now be so close. Loosing his bet he prefers to fly to Romania, with little enthusiasm, rather than loose his honour too, and boards the first plane to Bucarest. We often read about the impact of aviation on the avant-garde culture (most notably in the words of Robert Wohl) from bird’s view urbanism to aerofuturism � but Morand’s book is paradigmatically modernist, as opposed to avant-garde: the force and change of modernity, in technology and culture, has nothing exceptional or heroic to it, none of those boisterous panegyrics à la Marinetti(“Why, him, who had never refused himself anything, had never wanted to know danger?�), but a poetic and introspective reflection on the modern-age collapsing of distances: “It was no longer the plane of some years back, hazardous caravels in the hands of daring men ; it was a true modern locomotive, thrusted on invisible rails, caring nothing for storms, unmoved by winds, blind and sure on its route, reaching stations at scheduled times, without hesitation, without failures, without mishaps.� A significant (and enticing) part of the book is spent in planes and in airports, and in fact, the book owes its title to an existing airline (). The impact of the bird’s eye view in visual culture (cf. Sonja Dümpelmann, Christina Lodden and especially Robert Evans) has been well evidenced in recent scholarship and Morand seems to concur: “Soon, thought Dimitri, the land will be read flat, as a map: the frontier-poles will be layed flat and not standing; At night, rivers will spell their electric names along their shores in letters large like a boulevard, and the deserts will be filled with blockletters indicating the continents.� But once again, here flight does not open the pearly gates to uncharted territories, rather reduce, order the world into a procrustean, yet alien, code. “Here an inferior universe, gridded, compartimented, geometrical, offered itself to the gaze of the heavenly wanderer.� Where avant-gardes demanded a fourth dimension, Morand finds it recalled to only two: “The world, seen from top to bottom, is a picture freed from the old perspective, the colours of yesterday: angles, lines, circles, recent issues…� Dimitri is a man of a few words, so most of the book is spent in vivid descriptions of the landscape that put Morand’s great style to excellent use, or in the vapid conversation of those that surround him: serpentine rivers uncoil themselves across a land, the horse-like plane thrust itself towards the rising sun, etc. Morand loves his sustained metaphore, and their periodic return in the narration seem to echo the arousal of his slavic soul Fascist transnationalism was often the fruit of efforts within the “left� wing of the fascist parties (read, those who promoted cultural modernism rather than conservative autarchy) but Morand points us to another avatar of such puzzling currents in the radical right: aside from mimesis of the communist international, we can also look at those elites, in diplomacy or business, whose “traditional� position demanded exposition and knowledge of foreign cultures. As much as Eugenio Coselschi they must have felt the need to negotiate their nationalism with the european-wide reality of their ideology. “Do modern towns deserve better than a seven to eight minutes visits?� wonders Dimitri during a stop in Germany. Despite unseen movements in his mind, Dimitri maintain for the most of the book that elitist aloofness, cosmopolitan but blasé: “He found it amusing to be, like that, incognito, at the heart of this city where he had so many parents and friends� Holding onto nothing, provoking nothing, defending himself against nothing, to be loyal only to the instant, filled him with pride.� Yet as his plane rises in the sky, the protective force of the frontiers seem to falter, freeing his Russian soul from its wester fetters, avakening him more and more to the atavistic call of the wild. It seems to me that it is the dissolution of national boundaries, brought about by technological modernity, that brings back Dimitri to his status of déraciné: From the sky, “The countries united, merged their colours in each others, welded as God, not man, had made them.� Once in Romania, he quickly come across an acquaintance, Zafiresco, “the most congenial of Evil’s emmisaries on earth�, no less cosmopolitan than Dimitri, but lacking that restraint, that “religion of order� to which the hero has sacrificed his Russian soul. Chaos, tsuica, slumber, gypsies, madness and decadence accompany the Romanian and Dimitri in his wake. Fear and prudence make way for asiatic cruelty, nature’s variegated beauty, Old Believers, melancholy music, all conspire to awaken Dimitri’s atavism. In that regard, the notion of “identity� and of slavic roots is treated with relative subteltie, and a certain poetic license that make it maybe more akin to romanticism than to interwar biologism. Yet the book is not free from base and actual racism: Ionica, Zafiresco’s tzigane servant, treacly and diffident, yet “lying, evasive, crawling, ungovernable, and yet always free despite constraints, free in the manner of shipwrecks�, spite in Dimitri an irrational fear and disgust: in particular when, though “his purple lips had something feminine, lubric and repugnant,� he smiles to Dimitri, “with this dire oriental smile that place between beings, through the barrier of perfect teeth, an intolerable intimacy.� Rougly a decade later (the book was written in 1931) Morand will be ambassador to Romania for the Vichy regime, and throughout Europe, both the tziganes and the jews, whom in the racist imaginary shared their oriental effiminacy, would be herded to their death. All in all, from the ideological perspective, we have the marriage of two elements: first, a characteristic example of the transnational radical right, keen to maintain the idea of a nature conditioned by national and racial origins, and yet fascinated by the exchanges and interweaving of those identities as brought about by social and technological modernity. Second, the threat of degenerate races, sketched in unambiguous terms, that make up a background against which the French and Slavic races can be juxtaposed without demanding (too insistently) a comparison. The slavic mind is found both fascinating and primitive in its violence and chaos, a source the vitalis rethotic of fascism had and continued to call upon, often to justify its intellectual shortcuts or shortcomings. The result is compelling, reminiscent as much of Drieu’s “Le Feu Follet� as of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,� if the jungles replaced by cumuli. The dark continent is maybe more a clair-obscur, in accordance with the panslavic mythology of sonderweg, a gateway between East and West, between primordial and civilization, and in this sense Dimitri’s liminal ordeal might well be in agreement with his “national spirit�. The style is very much to my liking, descriptive and verging on the abstract, and if some might find it a bit lacking in terms of rhythm, the book is short enough to read in one sitting, so I would recommend those interested in interwar culture or politics, in aviation, or in the image of Russia in France, give it a try! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 02, 2014
|
Oct 03, 2014
|
Oct 02, 2014
|
Pocket Book
| ||||||||||||||
| 0554719800
| 9780554719801
| 0554719800
| 3.68
| 3,700
| 1897
| Aug 20, 2008
|
liked it
|
Gide's classic is often described as the "gospels" of the naturist movement, this sometimes forgotten articulation between symbolism and the avant-gar
Gide's classic is often described as the "gospels" of the naturist movement, this sometimes forgotten articulation between symbolism and the avant-garde, a creed that disregards the decadent cult of artificiality, refinement and abstraction in favour of a vitalist celebration the direct, unmediated experience of life, spawning many a pantheist dithyramb to the all-pervasive wonder of the world, and, in Gide's case most notoriously, demanding unrepentant enjoyment of all matter in an orgy of sensuality. In terms of the text itself now, we find a curious mixture which strides the path between aphorism, poetry and narrative, centered around the initiatory chain of Menalque, his "disciple" the narrator, and a postulated reader, Nathanael, whom Gide is hell bent on converting, at the very least, to his wandering life. This configuration is the occasion for all sorts of imprecations, lyrical outbursts and biblical aping, praising all things common or rare which demand little thought: this gives the author occasion for numerous poetic effusions, some of which are quite moving, and many of which are also very original. In terms of the "doctrine" of those gospels, about which much inked has been spilled, to the point one might suspect that Gide was careful to preserve the mystery, I find three strands which complete each other remarkably. On the one hand the book from the start is reminiscent of Nietzsche, and of Zarathustra in particular, in its form and in its apotheosis of the "yes-sayer" - second comes that of Bergson, whose Creative Evolution might not have been published then, but whose influence I find time and again: For example in the insistence on the organic continuity between the object and its beholder (admittedly a common place of mystique literature) and in the surprising technical apparté concerning phosphorescence in book VI, a recurrent motif in Bergson's Matter and Memory, published a year before The Fruits of the Earth. Thirdly, the overt inspiration of Sufism, and probably other forms of pantheistic mystique too, although Persian poetry provides Gide with a precedent in his panegyric to pleasures and desires. This pervasive ideology allows Les Nourritures to turn the pastoral on its head, making it as much a celebration of the world as an invite to reject society for the sake of vagrancy. Of course, as has been duly noted, this is the vagrancy of the upper-class, whose bottomless love of all things can only be achieved when their wanderings are supplemented by a comfortable rente - but we have here nonetheless what seems to me an important station between the forbidden kingdom of autonomous art, and the avant-gardes tentatives at reconquering the real. There is already a sense in Gide, of the political impotence of his prose. Between parentheses, he tells us, at the end of the sixth book: "I wish I was born in a time where I would have to sing, poet, all things, only by numbering them." But he seems dimly aware that already mere lauding is insufficient to his age, hence, maybe, the didactic aspect of the dialogue form he opted for. Similarly, a few lines below, he interrupts somewhat abruptly his praise of leaves (much in line as a theme, with the rest of the book) to display a reflexivity which, once again, shows an emerging modernist criticality : "Let's move on to another subject... But which one? - Since there is no composition, there should be here no choice... Available! Nathanael, available!" We see here the author's attempt to re-align his narrator with himself, and announcing in what seems to me unambiguous terms the project of the stream of consciousness already, albeit in a maybe more Bergsonian terminology. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 20, 2014
|
Aug 23, 2014
|
Aug 20, 2014
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0822307677
| 9780822307679
| 0822307677
| 4.04
| 378
| May 01, 1987
| Jun 01, 1987
|
it was amazing
|
The chapter on kitsch is a bit weak, but the rest of the book is absolutely awesome: Calinescu is a very rigorous analyst and although he of course ca
The chapter on kitsch is a bit weak, but the rest of the book is absolutely awesome: Calinescu is a very rigorous analyst and although he of course cannot come close to a full coverage of that "aesthetic modernity" which he has set his views on, he gives us what seems to be the best overview of the subject of modernism I have read so far. The emphasis is probably on literature and poetics, but the author's wide ranging knowledge allows him, when necessary, to step in the fields of philosophy or architecture with confidence and concision. I would heartily recommend this to anyone interested in modernism, and considering how omnipresent it is in relevant bibliographies, I reckon many would do the same!
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jul 08, 2014
|
Paperback
|
Loading...
14 of 14 loaded
