Giovanni Papini - The Failure - 1912

"But I will here quote this one sentence of Novalis: 'The world shall be as I wish it!' There you already have in a nutshell the whole problem of Hitler, the central problem of the dedivinizing and dehumanizing."

Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, 1964

Papini, Giovanni. 2009. Un Homme Fini. 

trans. Y. Pelloso, Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme

In the words of Boris Groys, traditional mimetic art “was based on an adulation of Nature as the whole and consummate creation of the one and only God that the artist must imitate if his or her own artistic gift were to approximate the divine” (GROYS 2011, 14). In contrast avant-gardism wished no longer to imitate God, but rather to replace him, “by subjugating it [the world] to the single organizing and harmonizing will of the artist” (GROYS 2011, 16) ;
Hubris had long been central to the scathing diagnosis leveled against modernity, but it is not until the rise of modernism proper that culture embraced it as the legitimate ideology behind progress. Groys’ work, alongside that of James C. Scott (SCOTT 1998), is one of the few to have focused on this power-hungry dynamic of the movement, that runs a parallel and no less controversial path to the secularization of culture.
Papini’s book, “The Failure” (Un Uomo Finito in his 1912 original, and “Un Homme Fini” in the French I have been reading) is perhaps one of the most outspoken and unashamed exploration of what Groys has called the avant-garde’s “demiurgic” drive, as well a valuable (if biased!) document in early “Recall to Order”(POGGIOLI 1968, 93).
Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) entered the limelight with his publishing of the journal Leonardo (1903-1907) in Florence along with his close friend Giuseppe Prezzolini, introducing Italy to the thought of Bergson and William James, and setting the scene for the further development of avant-garde culture. Unlike those two fervent democrats, he would involve himself early on with Italian nationalism, promoting, with varying degrees of conviction, the end of Giolittian democracy (as editor of Il Regno), Italy’s involvement in WW1 on the side of the allies (as editor and futurist in Lacerba) and much later, from 1933 onward, half-hearted obedience to Mussolini. 

Un Uomo Finito intends to mark a turning point in his life, the end of his old ways and a turn from ruthless monadic individualism to rootedness and a cult of the Toscanità (ADAMSON 1993, 9) which will come crowning and terminate his futurist celebration of nationalism as a mean to cultural renovation. This new concern for “La Terre et les Morts” probably plays a large part in leading Papini to embrace the catholicism he had sometimes victimized to popular acclaim, writing in 1921 what remains his most famous work Storia di Cristo ; Somehow silenced by many of his sympathetic biographers, or wrongly reduced to “christian” anti-judaism, Papini was also a longstanding and vocal anti-semite, long before he was allegedly coerced into joining the Fascist Party in 1933¹. 

Albert Weisgerber - Pfauentanz - in Jugend magazine - 1902

But at the time of writing Un Uomo Finito, in 1911, we have no reasons to believe he held antisemitic views: he had indeed penned the nationalist program for Corradini and voiced his hostility to socialism, but neither Corradini nor his Nationalist Association seem to have supported this ideology (TALMON 1991, 484). In fact, much more than nationalism, the ideology that permeates Papini’s writing up to and including this book, is that of a radical individualism of Stirnerian inspiration: Close to anarchism as a youth, he quickly shed those political commitments in favour of the de facto anarchy of a monadic celebration of the self, in the spirit of Stirner’s “I do not demand any right, therefore I need not recognize any either” (STIRNER 1995): such “might is right” attitude will remain largely theory as he was deemed too myopic and ill-built for serving in WW1 (despite his best efforts) but following the Great War he will have mustered enough clairvoyance to realize it was nothing to be celebrated.
Since it was not with deeds he was to prove his strength, he went early for sarcasm and solitude: at first because his ugly face and thankless character but soon after as an intransigeant discipline and defense against a hostile and mediocre world. For long the young Papini has no friends, and even when he has some, he seems to find it difficult to reconcile this commitment with his egotic worldviews.
With age, those will become somewhat muted, but to the end he remains fond, despite his pestering of all déracinés, of his self-image as an intellectial vagrant, a discreet recalling of his self-education: “Me, I always remained a bit of that  drifting and fanciful nomad from this distant era: (…) I don’t have a fraction of the world I could demarcate with a wall and claim: this is mine!” (PAPINI 2009, 74)

Papini will even eventually find his own “union of egoists” (STIRNER 1995, 161) who share his passion and some of his outlooks, and who will soon get to work and produce first Leonardo, followed by an unsteady stream of other publications some of which will gain national and international recognition: “It was for us, as divine youth, intoxication without wine, orgy without women, a party without women nor dances. It was, everyday, the exultant exhumation of our self, of our deepest and truest self; the discovery, the perpetual reconstruction of our intelligence of poets of the concepts and probers of the abyss.” (PAPINI 2009, 78). At first Papini seems as close as it gets to a leader, but neither does he seem to exhibit an authoritarian personality, nor does his circle really try to wrestle his authority from him. When clashes do happen those seem to be largely motivated by diverging ideals:
His best friend Prezzolini, once a “sworn enemy of all discipline” will eventiually follow Benedetto Croce’s idealism, rooted less in the soil than in reason. While they had run Leonardo together, they depart in the age of La Voce, Papini then founding the incendiary and war-mongering paper “Lacerba,” that will for a time represent in Florence the interest of the Marinetti’s futurists (ADAMSON 1993).
Ardengo Soffici on the other hand, maybe more involved in painting than in philosophy, will remain closer to the vehemence of his early days:
Others yet, like Giovanni Amendola (few in fact…) who partook in both Leonardo and La Voce, would turn to defending democracy against the rise of Fascism and eventually loose his life to the cause.

Hugh Ferris - Lure of the City - 1925

Among this blossoming avant-garde, all opposed to the decadent sensuality of the previous generation (most of all embodied in the Florentine D’Annunzio) we find the foundations of Papini’s poetics, which unlike off his ideas will remain somewhat consistent throughout his life: corollary to their activism is rejection of the unnecessary, of the refined, of all aristocracy but that of action. Aside from emerging populism this expresses itself in a rich, often visual imaginary of earthy metaphors rooted in the quotidian, generally celebrating firmness, simplicity and authenticity.
In Papini this take the form of a fascination for inhospitable nature, for the “the nakedness of the earth and the purity of altitude” (PAPINI 2009, 76) no doubt rousing his “passion for naked thought” (PAPINI 2009, 72) ;
It is hard not to think of a Mediterranean Adolf Loos² when we hear Papini condemning effete prose and demand “return to the nakedness of our souls, innocent as Adam was naked of body” but right away he adds “Reason must be our reason, and history starts today. Year one of our era. Incipit vita nova.” (PAPINI 2009, 94)

This new era shall not be one of positivism nor rationalism: his monadic individualism happily sidestep into solipsism and Papini’s pursuit of emancipation through the negation of determinism rapidly turn to a kind of gnostic liberation atheology: alienating conditioning, pathological self-deprecation, short-sighted materialism all conspire to rob man from “the divine liberty of the self” (PAPINI 2009, 74) and the awareness of his divine omnipotence.
What is proposed instead is the recognition that “I am the world” (PAPINI 2009, 83) and the negation of “the pretentious puppets of my inner theatre” (PAPINI 2009, 85).

Papini claims that following his encounter with Max Stirner’s idiosyncratic philosophy, he moved from “cognitive solipsism” to “moral solipsism” (PAPINI 2009, 89) : as if from his early suspicion the world at large may only exist in his mind, he came to merely doubt the actual individuality of those around him. This seems rather dubious given that down to the writing of Un Uomo Finito, Papini will retain the certainty that sheer will should suffice to bend the laws of the real. It could be argued that Papini takes up Stirner’s diagnosis that “we are the mere servants of our thoughts” (STIRNER 1995, 11) but can only allow the self, transcendent but in his case unconstructed (save by himself) to be so worshiped

What does seem to constitute a genuine transformation, though, is his shift from personal to messianic and collective liberation: His erstwhile rejection, negation even, of all men took his decadent elitism to its paroxysm, the one-man elite relentlessly attacking the rest of the world as unworthy of his attention. This phase came to an end when Papini discovered or acknowledged the significance of mass movements in his metaphysics, gaining maybe enough confidence and recognition to venture proposals not only for himself but for those willing to hear: “No longer a victim: I found myself dominant and superior – the only quick in a world filled with shades.” (PAPINI 2009, 86)
The impact of anarcho-individualism on the development of fascist ideologies has not been, to our knowledge, adequately studied, but this “populist turn” in Papini’s voluntarist political religion suggests a possible articulation: if we are, as Deleuze (DELEUZE & GUATTARI 1980, 281) or Leo Strauss (STRAUSS 1999) do, to speak of fascism as rooted in nihilism, there comes a point when the incipient negation of the world makes room for a conception of the real as popular consensus. 

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - Wie bleibe ich jung und schön - 1925

The life of Papini is littered with what we could call “performative terminations”: spectacular declarations that mark the end of a period, and sometimes the birth of another, or that of an angsty interregnum. His early life is recounted through his successive abandoning of all sorts of megalomaniac scholarly projects, and in his Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi (1906) he proclaims the end of that “anguished cabal of signs around oblivion” (PAPINI 2009, 164), philosophy itself, which he sees as masturbatory contemplation removed from all utility and praxis. The last issue of Leonardo is trumpeting Papini’s editorial infanticide and some five years later in Un Uomo Finito, his acerbic autobiography constitutes a lengthy drumroll for his announcing a new turn in his intellectual life, abandoning nihilistic individualism in favor of rootedness and a more vital austerity. This new Papini will shed once and for all his old self  in 1919.

Where does this need to demarcate distinct phases, as if beating the rhythm in his life, arises from? Purely in terms of style, there is no doubting that Papini enjoyed playing the apocalyptic prophet, with a keen ear for the grand poetics of ill omen. But beyond style there is of course more than one answer:
One of those could be his consistent pursuit of radical extremity, notably difficult to conjugate with the shifts and changes a real life brings about. He feels the need to dramatize his own changes of opinion (no doubt felt as lacking virility), to turn them from failure into changes of heart of metaphysical significance (cf. the first of the “five unpublished chapters” in addendum to the French editions of L’Age d’Homme - see PAPINI 2009, 263) ; 

A large amount of Papini’s self-flagellation and relentless criticism seems to result from this strategy of his, consisting in first pointing out, and eventually embracing his own shortcomings, turning them from weaknesses into badges of “badness” (MAO & WALKOWITZ 2010)

Yet all this was a mere gesture towards real badness – in fact, towards the absolute badness – which Papini openly aspired to: in 1903, the Austrian Otto Weininger, and in 1910, the Italian Carlo Michelstaedter, had each killed themselves aged 23, right after finishing their respective philosophical testaments. We know Papini had been influenced by Weininger’s extolling  virile asceticism (ADAMSON 1993, 91) and that Papini brought public attention to Michelstaedter’s death in an article titled “Un suicida metafisico³“

That peculiar form of nihilism, which demands the author’s death as a correlative and confirmation of their philosophical indictement of the world, had a profound resonance with Papini’s own pessimism: he longed for “sacrifice, great and dignified because absurd, and sacrifice because absurd” (PAPINI 1912, 254) but, for reasons we can only speculate about, he choose to live.

Instead of an actual suicide, which might, at times, have seemed the appropriate full stop to his life conceived as a coherent work of art (WILSON SMITH 2007, 134) Papini concludes Un Uomo Finito with a rebirth: “The best is yet to come: I was only born today” (PAPINI 2009, 253) and “The child is born nine months old, but the man only starts at thirty” (PAPINI 2009, 255). 

It is fairly clear the possibility of his suicide did cross his mind, and he is aware that it probably crossed that of his readers too. “under the guise of trying to do more than others, one does less than all and prepare oneself a glorious defeat: he had proposed things so great his forces were not enough” (PAPINI 2011, 185) – yet the emptiness of life, the lack of a legacy maybe, and no doubt a part of fear too, lead him to live. He dedicate a certain amount of energy to justify this survival: “With this nobility, this grandeur, this ultimate and desperate heroism, I escape both death and mediocrity at the same time” (PAPINI 2009, 238) – But beyond those sorry claims to doing one better than Mishima, the death and rebirth his autobiography heralds displaces the author’s death from the realm of the factual to that of the performative: In the crucial, conclusive chapter XLVII, “Who I am”, Papini paints his portrait as the unlikely cohabitation of two conflictual drives, a destructive one, bent on annihilating all illusions, extinguishing all pretense of hope and celebrating oblivion, and one playful, illusory, creative:

“But after this devouring fury, comes back the dreamer who imagines Impossible stories, distorts reality, projects in the convenient mirror of his imagination his baddest instincts, his most frenzied desires, which makes larger than nature the men he hates and those he loves, drawing from life itself the real point of departure from which to prolongate and widen the dream.
Then I am assaulted by all absurd stories, bizarre projects, incredible adventures, the mad men and the criminals who have never lived and want to live in me, the loves factitious and unreasoned, the singular deaths, incredible.” (PAPINI 2009, 247)

And indeed after this death and rebirth, and his “admitting crudely to the feebleness and of fiction of life” (PAPINI 2009, 186) Papini will embrace more and more his creative side: he will take up poetry, the tales that had sprung up after his “philosophical death” of 1906 will grow into fully fledged novels, and most importantly he will “leap over” his scepticism to embrace catholic faith in 1919. 

Boris Ignatovich - Hermitage - 1931

The papinesque automyth⁴ depicts him setting to work on his magnum opus, the “Storia de Cristo” as an atheist, and warming up to the faith as his close reading of the gospels ignited the embers of his idealism. A recurrent concern in Papini’s work, as with many of his time and milieu, is with the potency, the impact, of art on life: here writing itself operate the conversion, granting it the thaumaturgic qualities Papini had long demanded.

It would be wrong to depicts Papini’s conversion as one more publicity stunt, or just another contrived provocation, as some of his contemporaries have done (LOVREGLIO 1975, 227) – it is in fact precisely in the most inflexible nihilism of his youth we should look for that mystical disposition that has led him from early on to gravitate around religion (PAPINI 2011, 37). He himself writes in the foreword to his Storia de Cristo, “The author of this book once wrote another one, many years ago, to tell the sad life of a man who wanted, at one point, to become God. Now, in the maturity of age and consciousness, he attempts to write the life of a God that made itself man.” (PAPINI 2010, 51);

But more than a contortion to find some continuity in his variegated existence, there is no doubt some some truth in this parallel. The failure to reach godhood must have played its part in his later choosing the more humble and gemütlich path of merely partaking in the divine. This said, to my knowledge, his future writing as a catholic superstar do not engage with origenian or other “authorized” discussions of deification.

His need to act on the world, to make a durable mark on his age, lure him out of his ivory tower: he comes to admit that acting upon men demand “sympathy and love,” demands “a direct and quotidian contact with all, with men of the city and men of the country, with school children and factory workers, with the women who hope and those who suffer”  (PAPINI 2009, 204) – already by then, the program of his strapaesian populism contains the words and seeds of his future Catholicism.

And to justify his old habit of boisterous indictments, he gives it an unexpected twist: 
“Men, I love you, as few loved you. All my inner life is filled with the profound love.” Never mind the fact that a few pages earlier he had claimed his writing was the honest portraiture of that inner life. He goes on: “I would like to see you greater, happier, purer, nobler and more powerful. And my greatest dream would be to be your true and greatest redeemer.” (PAPINI 2009, 206). Hence his blasphemous project to dethrone God is reconstructed into a messiah complex somewhat more sympathetic to the christian values.

In fact shortly after, Papini reveals (maybe unwittingly) a paradox of his metaphysics – or lack of thereof: from his earliest writings but increasingly after Il Crepusculo (1906) he articulates his own creativity in terms of inspiration: nothing very original there, Papini had read Carlyle and there is little doubts he sees himself on the side of Great Men. Describing the ecstatic fervor of such inspirations he write: “And what have I not done, and what would I not do to be shaken and woken up for one instant, to receive suddenly the mysterious dictation of a revelation!
Be it God that inspires me or the Demon, I do not care: but mat someone greater than me, saner than me, more clairvoyant than me, madder than me, speak through my mouth, write through my hand, think through my thoughts.” (PAPINI 2009, 209)
Indeed the reader does wonder, when the early Papini spoke of inspiration à la Boccacio, where did he imagine those sacred thoughts came from? Not from the empty sky, surely, and not from the demon either, in whom, for all his talk, Papini believe no more than he did in God? His artistic activity, and subsequently his quriks, were justified from his status as a chosen among men, his belonging to an elite – who watches the watchers and chose the chosen? Here we might well have the roots of Papini’s faith stretching back into his old life of unbelief… 

Ivan Kliun - Unknown title - Omsk - 1910'

via Avant-Garde Foundation

Altogether we have a book of great significance which does not seem to have received in the English language (or French, for that matter) the attention that it is due: an increasing number of books explore the connection between the avant-gardes and the radical right, and Papini provides us with a crucial testimony of how to pass from the one to the other. It is both exceptionally biased and clear-headed, in that it was written precisely at the time of the transition, and does not yet attempt to re-write history as to ease the fit between the pieces of the puzzle.
For all his flaws and eccentricities it is easy to relate to, if not to like, Giovanni Papini: the existential questions he is asking, in his exotic dialect, were becoming all pervasive at his time, and haunt most of us to this day. His answers, though, are significantly less satisfying.

1 - On Papini being forced into joining the Party, see LOVREGLIO 1973, 141. Despite the sheepish sympathy of the biographer, this account is not to be dismissed as many a catholic writer found actually existing fascism not conservative enough to support it officially. Concerning Papini’s anti-semite activities long before Fascism turned officially to this ideology in 1938, see GUNZBERG 1992, 254. On the same subject, in Italian, see this article.

2 - See Adolf Loos' 1908 "Ornament is Crime". 
3 - in "Il Resto del Carlino", 5th of November 1910.
4 - François Livi , in the French preface, calls the book an "autobiographical myth" - the concept is developed by Westerhoff (in French). 

Adamson, Walter L. 1993. Avant-Garde Florence. From Modernism to Fascism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Deleuzes, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 1980. Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

Gunzberg, Lynn M. 1992. Strangers at Home : The Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination. Berkeley : University of California Press.

Groys, Boris. 2011. The Total Art of Stalinism. Avant-Garde, Aesthetic, Dictatorship and Beyond. London: Verso Books.

Lovreglio, Janvier. 1973. Giovanni Papini. Un odyssée Intellectuelle entre Dieu et Satan. 4 volumes. Paris : Editions P. Lethielleux.

Mao, Douglas, and Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2010. Bad Modernisms. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Papini, Giovanni. 2009. Un Homme Fini, trans. Yseult Pelloso. Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme. 

Papini, Giovanni. 2010. Histoire du Christ. Trad. Gerard Genot. Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme. 

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. London: Yale University Press.

Stirner, Max. 1995. The Ego and its Own. London : Cambridge University Press.  

Strauss, Leo. “German Nhilism”. Ed. Janssens D. & Tanquay D. in Interpretation 26, 3 (1999) 353-78.

Talmon, Jacob L. 1991. Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution: Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century. New Brunswick: Transaction publisher

Wilson Smith, Matthew. 2007. The Total Work of Art. From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. New York: Routledge. 

There might be

"It is not necessary to look for God. Let us give him to the world! There is no God in the world, but there might be. The road of struggle for socialism... is what is meant by God-building."
Anatoly Lunacharsky 
quoted in Roland Boer -  Lenin, Religion and Theology - 2013  

Bruno Taut - View towards the East - Die Stadtkrone - 1919

Vladimir Krinski - A Temple of Machine Worshippers - 1917

Charles Demuth - Incense of a New Church - 1921

"We should not now take fright when the fruits of this optimism ripen, when the acid of this kind of culture trickles down to the very lowest levels of our society so that it gradually begins to tremble from burgeoning surges and desires, when the beliefin the earthly happiness of all, when the belief that such a general culture of knowledge is possible, gradually transforms itself into the menacing demand for such Alexandrian happiness on earth, into the invocation of a Euripidean deus ex machina!"

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R. Geuss & R. Speirs, Cambridge, 2007, 125.

Henri Barbusse, Under Fire, 1916

"This evening, more than ever, in this setting both marvelously calm and exciting, where, in a shelter from the violent emotions and excessive tension of the trenches, I feel breaking out again, in their native form, the impressions deposited in me by three years of war, the Front casts its spell on me. And I seek ardently the sacred line of heavings of the earth and explosions, the line of balloons which are winched down every evening with regret, one after another, like bizarre and extinct stars, then, the line of Verey lights which starts rising."

Teilhard de Chardin, La Nostagie du Front, 1917

translated here

Osvaldo Bot - Trench - 1933

Barbusse, Henri. 2014. Le Feu (journal d'une escouade)
Sayat: De Borée (Poche Classique)

I am generally very wary of patois, créole and other celebration of idiolectic regionalism, as it can be found in French naturalist and late-romantic fiction; There is no doubt a part a question of generation, and a part of ignorance too, but in my experience vernacular dialogues generally tend to make up for uneventful conversation with exotic terminology. So when I engaged the six hundred pages of Barbusse’s “Le Feu” to find that the narrator (pretty much the only character who could be expected to use anything but the language one addresses cattle with) was of the silent type, I kind of wished for d’Annunzio’s (the other extreme...) rather than Barbusse’s Fire. After about a hundred pages, if I am glad I have read the book in my native French (most of the dialogues would be lost on me if it were in English) I have grown very much accustomed to Barbusse’s perverse fascination for the illiterate.  

There are two themes that intersect in Barbusse’s project: the war and the commoners. His project is to write an account of the war as it was lived by the lower class. To a significant extent, and despite outstanding litterary qualities, they come into conflict:

The unending rigmarole of of provincial peasants and proles, despite Barbusse’s laudable efforts at giving them some specificity, start feeling like a litany about half-way through the book: food, booze, an inarticulate indignation and a naive idealization of life before the war comes back in their dialogues again and again, so much so that in fact the diversity of the characters dissolves into the portrayal of a unanimous mass of boorish victims. A couple of Deus ex Machina do discreetly stand out, the caporal Bertrand and the accountant, the first being the fair but distant voice of bourgeois leftism, the other the vessel for Barbusse to provide some hard facts and numbers about the war. 

Completely deprived of subjectivity by first the alienation of the working class, and second by that of life in the trenches, this reader found it difficult to empathize with those characters. 

Barbusse, instead, is found at his best in small epiphanic nuggets where the absurdity of trench-life is in its purest form, unmixed with social tropes: “Around the dead fluttered letters which, while they were deposited on the ground, had escaped from their pockets or their cartridge belts. On one of those little bits of all white paper, that flitted in the wind but which the mud englued, I read, leaning over slightly, the sentence: “My dear Henri, how beautiful was the weather on your name day !” The man lies on his belly; his back was cleaved from one hip to the other by a profound furrow; His head was half-turned; we see the empty eye, and on the temple, the cheek and the neck, a sort of green moss has grown. (…). And if we were to say something in front of this heap of annihilated creatures, we would say: “Poor guy!” (205-6)

This memorable outing of the narrator with his mate Poterloo, among the inhumane landscape where flesh and mud have melted into one choking mass, is a telling highlight of the author’s gruesome but poetic (in fact so gruesome it is poetic) attention to details : “We approached them slowly. They were layed tight against each others: each gesturing with arms and legs, a petrified movement, distinct in agony. Some show half-molded faces, the skin rusting, yellow dotted with black. Some have their face fully blackened, tarred, lips swollen and enormous: negro heads blown like balloons. 

Between two bodies, reaching out confusingly from one or the other, a cut-off wrist finished in a ball of filaments.

Others are shapeless larvae, sullied, were stick out some vague objects of equipment or shards of bone. Further away, a corpse has been moved in such a state that one has had, not to loose it on the way, to pile him up in some wire fencing then attached to both ends of a stake. Like this, rolled up in this iron hammock, he was carried and dropped here. One can distinguish neither the top nor the bottom in this body; in the pile that he makes, we can only recognize the gaping pocket of trousers. We can see an insect that exits and enters.“ (205)

Arthur Dove - Moon and Sea II - 1923

There is something hieratic and abstract, like a painting of Barnett Newman, in the apocalyptic experience Barbusse, like many of the war novelists, takes such pain to depict: visionary revelations of the absurdity of life and of the death of God, they fail to move the cast of characters the author assembled, shielded from abstraction, from all causes or aspirations by their earthly common-sense and their simplicity. 

This isolation seems often contrived by the author to emphasize the tragedy of common men sacrificed for ideals they have no grasp of. History has shown that nationalism was not then the vice of the middle class, as many on the left wished to see it, but a widespread -if suicidal- aspiration, down to the foot-soldier. Of course no one can claim that Barbusse does not depict his brigade as he saw it, closer and better than we might ever do, but we can wish for less angelism (“How happy was life before!”, 204, or “It’s when there is nothing left that we understand we were happy. Ah! How happy we were!”, 212) and more psychology: “Those are simple men that have been simplified further, and whose primordial drives only, out of necessity, can grow: survival instinct, egoism, hope to hold on for ever, joys of eating, drinking and sleeping.” (68)

Surely it has become a commonplace to compare Junger and Barbusse, but it feels even staler to claim they cannot be: the first world war, and the experience of the trenches, had something international, maybe even universal in the words of most of its chroniclers. 

Both Le Feu and Storm of Steel are emphatically direct and realist in their depiction, and are based on journals kept at the front. In a sense, despite a seemingly polar opposition between Junger’s enthusiastic Storm and Steel and Barbusse’s elegiac tone, both share a common stock of poetic image, as did a strikingly large number of trench writers: if the moral judgement on the events vary from one to the other, there is a remarkable consensus on moods and metaphors in depicting “la guerre suprême” (12). 

Indeed, the same mindset, which Barbusse sees both as alienation and innocence, is extremely close to that “liberated” mentality celebrated by Junger, as well as some future fascists (Ardengo Soffici for example) : 

“The soldiers of this war have, for all things, the philosophy of a child: they never look afar, nor around them, nor ahead. They think more or less day to day.” (74)

But Barbusse of course is a pacifist and a humanist – to him, no atavistic return to simple, primitive concern, can salvage those men: what the rightists are celebrating is to him the last stage of degeneration, that which outstrips the man from all its hope and dignity prior to its eventual physical elimination. At times Le Feu even reminded me of Arendt, in its emphasis on the de-humanizing character of war: physically so: "One stumbles upon reefs of crouching beings, curled up, bleeding and screaming, at the bottom." (346) - and mentally too: “I raise myself half-way as on a battle-field. I contemplate once more those creatures that rolled here one above the other among the regions and the events. I watch them all, wedged in the chasm of oblivion and inertia, at the brink of which some seem to cling, with their pitiable preoccupations, with their child-like instinct and their ignorance of slaves.” (257)

How come, sometimes the reader might wonder, are those men so broken, so crushed by the experience, while Barbusse himself retain enough distance, enough aloofness to write about it with such brio?

I suspect this tension is grounded in Barbusse’s frustrated attempt to align himself effectively with a the plebes he outlined too starkly - as if the writer Barbusse found himself unable to resist the poetic appeal of of the spectacle of technological warfare, that which his creations, unsullied by artistic aspiration, can remained aloof from. The sublimity of inhumane, monstruous experience of the Great War shows again and again in the book. 

“But that clutter of sodden corses 

On the sodden Belgian grass— 

That is a strange new beauty.”

Ford Maddox Ford, Antwerp, 1915

Down to the mystique experience, another locus communis of the modernist depiction of war, we find painted by both Junger and Barbusse. Compare: 

“I had felt Death’s hand once before, on the road at Mory – but this time his grip was firmer and more determined. As I came down heavily on the bottom of the trench, I was convinced it was all over. Strangely, that moment is one of the very few in my life of which I am able to say they were utterly happy. I understood, as in a flash of lightening, the true inner purpose and form of my life. I felt surprise and disbelief that it was to end there and then, but this surprise had something untroubled and almost merry about it. Then I heard the firing grow less, as if I were a stone sinking under the surface of some turbulent water. Where I was going, there was neither war nor enmity.” (Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel, Penguin books, p.281) 

“All of a sudden, a formidable explosion fell unto us. I was shaken down to my skull, a metallic resonance filled my head, a burning smell of sulfur penetrate my nostrils and suffocate me. The earth oppened in front of me. I felt raised above the ground and thrown to the side, folded, smoldered and half-blinded in this flash of thunder... Yet I remember very well: during this second where, instinctively, I sought, desperately, haggard, my brother in arms, I saw his body rose, standing, black, arms fully outstretched, and a flame instead of the head.” (230)

Otto Gustav Carlsund - Apocalyptic Landscape - 1933

In fact if the reader was to survey both works in search of a radical difference, he might be disappointed: despite Barbusse’s effort to ground his narrative in “the social experience” of war, with a selection of salt-of-the-earth dialogues rendered in colourful and inflected dialects, both authors remain invariably at a remove from the mass: if in Junger this is rooted in an (reconstructed) aristocratic ideology of cold virtus and sacrifice, in Barbusse it comes from both ethnographic remove and the fascination the author cannot hide in the face of a surreal and visionary experience, unfathomed by his squadmates, yet which he cannot help but share with his reader. 

To those soldiers around him he seems to love or want to love, the war is “merely” extra-ordinary, but to Barbusse and Junger, to the writer and his readers, the war is the brutal incursion of the unreal, of the fictional maybe, inside the most gritty real. The war seems to collapse the constitutive diegesis between the experience and its retelling, bringing the fact ever closer to the metaphor. This surreal collision of fact and fiction prompts in Junger lyrical outbursts and heroic (or absurd) deeds, whereas there seems to be a lingering sense of guilt in Barbusse’s chronicles.

To put it differently, by his very condition of writer or narrator, despite his best efforts, Barbusse has some of the same fascination many more enthusiastic authors have had in the morbid face of trench-war. 

To me there is no doubting that the high-water mark of Barbusse’s prose is to be found not in his sometimes contrived naturalistic depiction of military life, but in the poetic effusions of his description of modern warfare: the fabric of the real pushed in bulks through the shredder of war, falls in an abstract dump of mud and flesh, where gleams from to time, explosions, shrapnel and other machines. The result is surreal, or maybe subreal, the incursion of hell on earth. Apocalyptic visions are regular trope of WW1 depiction, and despite his best efforts to “secularize” his discourse, Barbusse cannot help but giving us some rather successful examples. On him, too, the front has cast 

its spell... 

“We leave. We are the two sole living spoiling this illusory and vaporous scene, this village strewed over the land, on which we step.” (213)

Beautiful Ruins

"Architecture, it's what makes beautiful ruins"

Auguste Perret

quoted in Jean Kerisel - Pierres et hommes - 2005

Tullio Crali - Cityscape - 1939

Erich Kettelhut - Sketch for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis - 1927

Edmond Van Dooren - City with Machines - ca 1930

Heart of Stone

"His heart is like ice, he feels no pain

... For the creatures downtrodden by destiny...

The tears of those unfortunates thrown in the bustle

His heart of stone knows no warmth."

Nella in Alexander Bogdanov, Engineer Menni. A Martian Stranded on Earth, 1913

Lazar Khidekel - Black suprematism circular - ?

Alexander Rodchenko - Logo design for Dobrolet - 1923

Mária Balážová - Serpent Geometry 2 - 1994

Literary syphilis

"A manifesto is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretension is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis. It may be pleasant, and good-natured, it's always right, it's strong, vigorous and logical. "

Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love, 1920

Sara Murphy and Pablo Picasso - Plage de la Garoupe - 1926