Max Blecher - Occurence in the Immediate Unreality - 1936

Blecher, Max, Occurence in Immediate Unreality, 

trans. Alistair Ian Blyth, University of Plymouth Press, 2009, 125.

Epiphanies, as Joyce called them, are one of modernism’s major tropes: instants of clarity, of certainty, filched under the hegemonic gaze of anomie and doubt, humble and fragmentary personal revelations, which gives their ecstatic recipient a taste for absolute without ever giving her the words to tell it with, nor the overarching narrative in which it could make sense¹.

Among the plenitude of senselessness in which the modernist characters are often left to make out the contours, epiphanies act as both a plot element within the story, and a literary device, kindred to both essayism and exposition, a chance encounter of a fabula and a syuzhet on a dissecting table. In one sense it constitutes for the characters a return of the unreal (as well as a “revenge of the profane²”) within a disenchanted world, and in the other, it allows the author to sacralise a concept or an image by embedding it at both narrative levels.

This seems to fit quite well what the “occurrences” of Blecher’s title account for: Intrusions of the extraordinary within the narrow confines of the quotidian, glimpses behind the stage curtain of a mousy and hypocritical reality.
To Blecher this narrow quotidian is that of his childhood and teenager years, that of the quiet life of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Roman, Moldova. Seen through the bewildered eyes of a child, and acknowledging the distortions of memory, the depiction the author gives us insist on the recurrent sense of absurdity: contrived mores, duty-bound to meaningless, cowardly, inconsequential commandments. All those who seem to retain his attention are outsiders, like the town’s madwoman, whom he depicts larger than life and mysterious, whereas his family or his school barely get a mention.

Max Blecher was born in 1909 and left his small-town life aged 18 to gain Paris, where he intended to hone his skills as a writer under the enlightened guidance of the surrealist avant-garde. Although he was to eventually distance himself from the movement in its more ossified and orthodox forms, he would in a sense succeed in integrating the group, keeping a lively correspondance in  the following years with André Breton, as well as other European figures like André Gide or Martin Heidegger.
But of more importance probably, is his being diagnosed shortly after arriving in France with a fatal and incurable form of spinal tuberculosis, which would first drag him throughout various sanatoriums around Europe (France, Switzerland and Romania), immobilize him in bed, and finally take his life a decade later, in 1938, when Blecher was barely 28. A short and tragic life if there ever was one, it is no surprise to find out that his condition had a tremendous impact on his writing, in terms of settings, of moods and maybe even of stylistic devices³.

He left behind four books, one a collection of poetry (Corps Transparent, 1934), one novel depicting experiences of his childhood (Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată, 1936, translated Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality) and two so-called “sanatorium novels” (Inimi cicatrizate, 1937, translated as Cicatrised Hearts, and Vizuina luminată, published in full posthumously in 1971 and as of yet untranslated in English but referred to as the Illuminated Burrow in Mironescu 2014); Instead of novels those stand somewhere closer to a diary “without qualities” than to the somewhat stricter novelistic form of “Occurrence”.  It is surprising the man has not gained greater attention in the West since our readers are often fond of those short and dramatic lives, and that his work is simultaneously concise, punchy, highly original and very readable. Some have pointed out that the succession of unhelpful regimes in Romania has certainly played a part in occulting his legacy, but one could point out that it did not help Cioran either, and yet his work is now fairly well circulated… At any rate he certainly deserves to be better known! 

Angeles Santos - Un Mundo - 1929

Early on, his eccentric experience of world, those crises he thought so intrinsic to himself and maybe to the world, are given a name by the family doctor: “palludism” (p.34); But for Blecher this does not mean those incursions of the unreal into the everyday will give him a chance of analysing them as symptoms, nor does it mean the novel will remain on the fantastical threshold, between the realm of the actual and that of the figure of speech⁴. Instead as a child and as a teenager, he attempts to construct an ad-hoc framework to answer his ever pressing need to give meaning to his experience. Both the meaning of the real, and that of the unreal ultimately resist him, but this theoretical and systematic inclination, if filtered through the mind of a child, is one of the specificity of his books, as well as of his condition.
The experience of Blecher could be surmised under the two “traditional” categories of derealisation and depersonalisation, two symptoms common to both the psychotic trema⁵ and dissociative substances.When “growing distant from [him]self” (p.45), his “ body would have a bizarre stinging sensation of detachment” (p.65). Unlike the “warm” kind, those symptoms are not emotional but removed, even “distanciated” one could say, depicting not only the real as fictive and malleable, but the self as well, resulting in identity being dissolved with varying levels of intensity, into an illusory objectivity.

This dissociation which pervades the novel is not without surrealist precedent: the famed “automatic writing” meet Inuit throat singing in the the form of a children game, where Blecher and a friend engage in fast-paced conversations constructing increasingly absurd pastiche of grown-up gossiping: “the whole conversation took on a kind of ethereal independence. It would float through the room, detached from us like a curious bird. The existence of this bird was wholly external, and had it really appeared among us, we would have no more doubted it than we doubted the fact that our words were unconnected with us.” (p.64)
But I depart from the “surrealist” interpretation of the text, where sexuality and the uncanny are seen as the two suns around which the mind of the young Blecher is orbiting, in that both fail to gain his appraisal, which he seems to reserve for an elusive sense of authenticity. The overall mood is one of tragedy, the narrator powerless not in the face of fate, but in that of the absurdity of life, of an irresolvable but also unbearable existential condition:
On the top of this first layer of absurdity comes a second one, that of the narrator recalling his past, with which he remain connected only by an eerie sense of nostalgia (“the mystery and rather sad charm of my childhood ‘crises’”, p.27) which a lingering, pacified and generalized form of the weltschmerz of his youth.

In a letter to Saşa Pană, Blecher writes his ideal would be a literary form akin to Dali’s painting, oozing “a dementia perfectly legible and essential” ; But more surprisingly he also finds that Dali’s paintings –and his ideal writing- should prefer the decorum of daily life, to those “far away continents, abstract and chimerical⁶”. Now to me, those of Dali’s paintings that are “legible” are also those that look very much “chimerical”.
What we do find in both Dali and the “Occurrence” on the other hand, and which could be found in De Chirico⁷ before either of them, is the heightened sense of meaning, of contrived and overt meaning that translates best in terms of theatricality. 

Gino Severini - Self-Portrait - 1912

Both during and outside his crises, Blecher seems to demonstrate an odd relationship with things and materiality in general. Ambiguous in their power, their quality participates in the “tyranny of objects” (p. 32) from which Blecher longs to be freed. Yet simultaneously they fascinate him, because they stand outside of the real, or better even, in front of the flattened backdrop of the world at large. As commodities, they contrast with the world which has produced them by openly acknowledging their nature “of contorted and artificial objects” (76) and Blecher continuously “encountered immobile objects, which were like walls before which I had to fall upon [his] knees” (p.50).
Further on he tells us “I used to be impressed by everything that was an imitation” (p.56). Unsurprisingly, then, those objects that are redeemed from meaningless absurdity of the whole and given their own, self-standing quality, are often those which in their “self-conscious” artificiality, would be today called kitsch:
An engraving of the royal family which at close examination reveals it is formed of minuscule letters relating their royal biography (p.68), old-fashioned photographs depicting unknown predecessors in contrived theatrical poses and outfits (p.65), a wax cast of the inner ear (p. 51), a “superb, fine, grotesque and hideous” gipsy ring of brass and glass (p.56), etc.

“Among all these things their reigned an air of perfect understanding (…) it was a life reduced to a smaller scale, in a more restricted space, within the limits of the letters and the photographs, like in a stage set viewed through the thick lenses of a pair of binoculars, a stage set intact in all its components, except minuscule and distant” (p. 65-66). For an instant, those objects at the mercy of their playful agency seem to constitute a microcosm more likely to retain the meaning the macrocosm had so far denied them. Elsewhere, “the fair itself formed a world apart, whose purpose was to demonstrate the infinite melancholy of artificial ornaments”(p. 62). Those elect objects constitute, with the fascinating couple Paul and Edda, initiated to the mysteries of the music-hall, an enclave resisting the banality and the pressure of provincial life, full of promises and potential, simultaneously more genuine and more openly artificial than the throngs of well-to-do conformists:
“I saw all too well the pointlessness and boredom in which they consumed their lives: the young girls in the park laughing stupidly; the merchant with wily self-important eyes; my father’s theatrical need to play the part of father; the cruel weariness of the beggars asleep in filthy corners; All these merged into a general and banal outward appearance, as though the world, such as it was, had long been waiting within me, constructed in its definitive form, while I, every day, did nothing more than verify its senescent contents in me.”
The beautiful Edda around whom revolve all men and all generations in the house, become for the young narrator a subject of obsession, whose fleeting eroticism share in the same comforting and fetishized materiality as all the props that have fascinated him. But as his fantasies, whichever they might be, fail to come into being, Edda and the objects starts painfully receding in the background, risking that “the variousness of the world enveloped them in the same uniform monotony” (p. 55);

“All events were thus destined to appear in my life jerkily and abruptly, incomprehensibly, isolated in their outlines from any past. Edda became one more additional object, a mere object, whose existence tormented me and exasperated me, like a word repeated countless time, which becomes all the more meaningless  the more its meaning seems imperiously necessary” (p.76).

Objects, and Edda among them, ultimately fail to bring solace to the young Max. The celebration of their idiosyncrasy seems insufficient to take his mind off the absurdity of the world, and they regain their regain their commodity condition, Edda in death, and the objects beyond his reach.

“Behind objects, no light was ever lit, however, and they forever remained bathed by the volumes that hermetically sealed them, and which sometimes seemed to grow thinner in order to allow their true meaning to show through.” (p.69)
But never does it actually show through in the book: the only revelation, the only truth that objects might bestow upon us, is a confession of their own artificiality. In other words, those are Cretan objects telling us the single truth that there is no truth to be found about them.
 All in all, although Blecher partakes of the surrealist project of “détournement” attempting to abduct objects from their value-systems, retaining fetishism but discarding commodity, there comes from this practice no sense of empowerment, nor even escapism, merely a confrontation with the authentic, which in the aftermath of its ecstatic revelation shows itself no less alienating and absurd as the delusional layer it had been coated with.

Johann Georg Müller - Kids - 1936

Haunting the narrator and the narration through and through, is the continuous intuition that the world –the social, civilized and utterly meaningless world- is staged: “Life, in general, is pure theatre” (p.35). The result is Blecher’s denigration of vision, a “mistrust in all that [he] saw” caused in part by his “myopia for the meaning of all things around [him]” (p.68); Theatrum mundi is a rather common trope, it harks back to the very origins of literature and was present in kindred authors of the period7.
Observing with a recurrent fascination the photographs collated in front of a photographer’s booth, he chances upon a photograph of himself. Instantly projected within the “smaller” and objectified world which those relics had put between his hands, he goes on a long and clear excursus shading in the common thread of his crises, between epileptic and metaleptic:

“That sudden encounter with myself, immobilised in a fixed attitude, there at the edge of the fair, had a depressing effect upon me.
(…) In an instant I had the sensation of not existing except in a photograph. This inversion of mental positions often happened to me in the most diverse circumstances. (…) In an accident on the street, for example, I gazed for a number of minutes at what was happening as though at a hackneyed performance. All of a sudden, however, the entire perspective changed (…) although everything remained intact, it was suddenly as if I was the one that was lying stretched on the ground (…). Likewise, without any effort, as a logical consequence of the mere fact that I was looking, I used to imagine myself in the cinema, experiencing the intimacy of the scenes on the screen.” (p. 60)
It is interesting to note that he seems to find in the cinema the intimacy that real life, alienated from it as he is, seems to have largely refused him. In this sense, as much as an entorse à la représentation, the aporetic mise en abyme that keeps on intruding in young Blecher’s quotidian is a critique of visuality – a critique ad-absurdum since the image remain his favourite media – and in an important sense a hazy prefiguration of the critique of spectacle.

But just as with the objects and their small worlds, the epiphany is always too short to retain more than an intuition, even less to conclude as to the possible meaning of it all. The puzzle of the hinterwelt, “snatching [him] away from everyday comprehension” (p. 61), appears as little more than the extra-ordinary pendant to the absurdity of the ordinary. 

Odilon Redon - Light - 1893

As tension reaches its climax, the young Max’s mind being driven into increasing hysterical compulsions by his obsession for Edda, which stands alone in the emptiness of his inner-life, the same honest, and therefore exceptional, materiality that which had fascinated him in objects, reappear in the plot for a literal experience of oceanic consciousness.
Quoting Simona Sora, Doris Mironescu has noted « Occurrence » was mystical rather than existential, as the later writings of its author would be. I am not sure the two need to be mutually exclusive, and the narration provides us with numerous instances of anguished interrogation (“Who am I?”), often, it is true, filtered through the visionary and concrete mind of a child, but no less existential for all that.

Alina Noir⁸ argues for a Jewish reading of Blecher’s “Occurrence”, but the evidence she presents is rather thin, and somehow manages to dispute the author’s project of reforming biographical writing.
Although Blecher’s “epiphanic” experiences fits in rather well with a multitude of other contemporary works, the presence of “bad places” is indeed idiosyncratic for any modernist mysticism. Post-nietzschean literature seems generally wary of the notion of evil, and when there is a theodicy it is generally a rather abtract condemnation of quantity or utilitarian reason. But is this enough to claim, as Noir does, that those places manifest the kilkul, the “cosmic damage” which Jewish piety is meant to mend? I doubt so, as Blecher’s bleak portrayal of samll-town life leaves little hope to “fix things up” at whichever level you might want to read him. In fact, he tells us early on that no tiqqun was accomplished in his childhood, that the “crepuscular state” which was once the attribute of “bad places” has become generalized, stripped even of its visionary features:
“When I embarked upon adolescence I no longer had crises, but the crepuscular state that preceded them and the profound sense of the world’s pointlessness, which followed upon them, somehow became my natural state.
The pointlessness filled the cavities of the world like a liquid that would have spread in all directions. And the sky above me, eternally prim, absurd and indefinite sky, took on the colour proper to despair.” (33)
To be sure, Blecher’s concern with  the “sudden disappearance of identity” (27) might attest to an occulted interrogation of Blecher’s own middle-class Jewish background, likely obscured, as Noir argues, by the rising anti-semitism of the times. It suffices to look at the life-story of Mihail Sebastian, one of Blecher’s Jewish correspondents, to have an idea of the situation at the time⁹.
 Yet, as much as the Romanian political climate, one could look at his formation in cosmopolitan Paris for a reason to his jewishness taking the back seat.

Paul Klee - Girl in mourning - 1939

The plurality of cohabitating meanings religion and post-structuralism have ascribed to singular texts allow her to see in “Occurrence” that “Max Blecher ‘translated’ his Kabbalistic text into a Surrealist one”; But for a mere contextual interrogation, in Blecher’s modernist context, kabbalah seem as diaphane as any other tradition. Without a convincing elucidation of the “intimate bond between Judaic mysticism and Surrealist literature” she alludes to, I am hard-pressed to find any hint of the author’s religious education:
There is indeed a historical confluence of surrealism and messianic judaism, from Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch to Michael Löwy and Edmond Jabès, but one has to note that Blecher’s surrealism is hardly “messianic”: in fact there is in the book very little projection in the future, and certainly no political program, be it to overturn the calcified society of Roman, or hasten the revelation of the world’s obscured meaning. All takes place in the present and prooves to inarticulate, too fragmented, to be effectively recomposed into a project. If anything, the obsession with both commodity and spectacle is reminiscent of Guy Debord (““The satisfaction that the commodity in its abundance can no longer supply by virtue of its use value is now sought in an acknowledgment of its value qua commodity. A use of the commodity arises that is sufficient unto itself; what this means for the consumer is an outpouring of religious zeal in honour of the commodity's sovereign freedom¹⁰”)…

The most truly religious experience of the book, and that where the flickering silhouette of the Torah can be glimpsed at in the far distance, is that which takes place in the mud field of the cattle market. At night Blecher, febrile and agitated, approaches the field of ground and dung ploughed by the feet of hundreds of animal during the day. With the night’s rain it has changed into an ocean of mud, a “sublime mass of filth” (p. 88) revolting in smell and feel, in which an ecstatic Blecher proceed to make his blasphemous ablutions, embracing litterally the fruits of the earth.
At this point, the silhouette of materiality, which had haunted the book so far, comes into clear focus: man, and Blecher more than any other, has been shaped out of mud. Not however, by a benevolent god, as he has no ruach to claim his own, but only matter, incoherent and demiurgic, malign, even, probably: “Around me stretched the muddy vacant lot… This was my authentic flesh, flayed of clothes, flayed of skin, flayed of muscle, flayed to the mud.” (p. 89)

As his world spirals into insanity, punctuated by suicide attempts and delirious dreams, he comes to the conclusion he is himself matter, gives him great confidence and he goes to Edda. But Hylé is a jealous god, a river of mud in which one cannot enter twice, because he would have to be carried away the first time:
The mud idol, the comfort and torment of his life, the formless, meaningless and self-sufficient materiality of mud and things, must feel threatened for an instant by Blecher’s impossible love for Edda. But with her death, with her return to dust, “mud had entered the rooms, triumphant and insinuating, like a hydra with countless protoplasmic protuberances, (…) it spread along the walls, crawling up the people, climbing the scale and attempting to scale the coffin” (p.107);

At first in Blecher’s world there was only adulterated matter, matter that did not acknowledged its own materiality, going through the demeaning process of civilization and conformity, jumping through the hoops of delusional habits. Then through objects peered the Great Materiality, the authentic, the real thing: matter without civilization, pure in its abjection and fascinating as much as terrible. Last came Edda, and the flicker of meaning which she might have brought to his life. But all to quickly, jealous materiality wants her back, and will not share the adoration Blecher.

“Something in me was struggling somewhere far away, as it wished to prove to me the existence of a truth higher than the mud, something that would be other than mud. In vain… My identity had long since become veritable and now, in a most ordinary way, all it did was to verify itself: in the world nothing existed besides the mud.” (p. 108)

1 – See Hulin, 2008.
2 – See Gumbrecht 2012, 113.
3 – Tuberculosis affected a large number of modernist authors and characters, from Kafka, Katherine Mansfield to Hans Castorp, which was seen as “de-materializing” by Thomas Mann and D.H. Lawrence. 
4 – See Todorov 1976.
5 – See Alistair Ian Blyth’s preface, Blecher 2009, 23. He interestingly defines those crises as manifesting the “empty transcendence of Modernism: an anxious, heightened sense of meaningfulness, but one devoid of cognisable content” (p.24); B – Giorgio de Chirico’s memoirs – as well as his paintings.
6 – See Goldiş 2007, 45.
7 – See De Chirico 1971. Much more than French Surrealism, Blecher could be said to echo Chirico's metaphysical objectivity : "one must picture everything in the world as an enigma…To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many-coloured toys which change their appearance, which like little children we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside." quoted here.
8 – See Noir 2000.
9 – Sebastian, 2003.
10 – Debord 1994, §67.

Blecher, Max, Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality, University of Plymouth Press, 2009, 125.
Debord, Guy, The Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald N. Smith, Zone Books, 1994, 64.
De Chirico, Giorgio, Memoirs, University of Miami Press, 1971, 262.
Goldiş, Alex. L’utopie littérale ou la communication à travers lesobjets. Un avant-gardiste atypique. Synergies Roumanie (2007) num 2, p. 45.
Gumbrecht, Hans, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature, Stanford University Press, 2012, 152.
Hulin, Michel, La mystique sauvage, PUF Quadrige, 2008, 313.
Mironescu, Doris. The ‘New Autobiography’ in 1930s Romania: M. Blecher, The Illuminated Burrow. Dacoromania Litteraria (2014) vol.1, p.107.
Noir, Alina, Max Blecher – the poetics of unreality, Respiro, num. 22, (accessed 15.12.14).
Sebastian, Mihail, Journal 1935-944: The Fascist Years, Pimlico, 2003, 641.
Todorov, Tzetan, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Seuil, 1976, 188.

We will remain Fighters

"Here is what we cannot deny, had we wanted to: combat, the father of all things, is  ours also; It is him who has hammered us, chiselled us and tempered us to make us what we are. And forever, as long as the wheel of life shall dance in us its mighty ronde, this war will be the axle around which she roars. She trained us for the fight, and for as long as we live, we will remain fighters."
Ernst Junger, The War as Inner Experience, 1922

C. R. W. Nevinson - Explosion - 1916

George Grosz - Explosion - 1917

Frank Hurley - Death the Reaper - 1917

Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a New Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler

" 'O man-projected Figure, of late 

Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive? 

Whence came it we were tempted to create 

One whom we can no longer keep alive? "

Thomas Hardy, God's Funeral, 1908, in A. N. Wilson's God's Funeral

If you wonder whether or not you should buy this book, I will try to save you time: go and buy it now, read it first and maybe later come and read this post. In the following paragraphs I might appear more critical of the work than I actually mean to be, and that is only for a couple of reasons: first, reading -and writing- a review that has only praises to share is fairly boring, and second, criticism of such a dense and structured theory prompts, as it should, the groping development of my own ideas, and provide me with a platform to put them in form. 

When Stanley G. Payne writes this book is 'the most important to appear in the history of fascism in a decade or more' I think it is not only to keep his seat in the canonical assembly of the New Consensus, but because this is truly a step forward for his field both in terms of method and of content, a big step on the slippery slope of fascism studies that could have proven fatal to anyone less rigorous, well read and well established than Roger Griffin.

Roger Griffin has published four books, a collection of essays, edited a number of key sources in the area and, Iordachi tells us, written more than a hundred articles. In the process he largely engineered the emergence of a "new consensus" in the field of comparative fascism studies, essentially a definition and interpretation of fascism as an international phenomenon, including both Nazism and Italian Fascism, as well as number of other more or less embryonic related movements throughout the world, stretching from the early XXth century to contemporary examples. 

If you would like a better grasp of the notion, and how he differentiates it from previous accounts of the fascist phenomenon, you will find him unpacking his concept time and again, and summing up the state of scholarly research in the field (here for example) both online and offline - but for the time being, let us focus on the more condensed definition he provides, in its more concise incarnation: 

"Palingenetic Ultranationalism" he finds to capture the essence of the phenomenon, iin somewhat sibylline terms. But Griffin leaves nothing to chance and repeatedly proceeds to explore the meanings of both terms with great skills and minute precision; To keep it short one could define ultranationalism as a form of authoritarian and often violent concern with homogeneity - both ideological and biological - "palingenetic," on the other hand, present a bigger challenge, but also the true specificity of Griffin's interpretation, for it refers to fascism's alleged irrational, mythic and 'political religious' content, an area difficult enough to grapple with for historians already treading a narrow path, to the point it had often before been belittled or completely ignored. 

Palingenesis, more specifically, refers to the quest of (national) rebirth, that New Beginning the subtitle of the book refer to; And indeed, Modernism and Fascism, more than any of his previous books is partly abstracted in order to focus on concepts, and on palingenesis in particular, an elusive notion which Griffin confronts with an extended arsenal of concepts often lifted from studies of modernity and modernism, ranging from Zygmunt Bauman to Modris Eckstein, but also Frank Kernode or, as we will see, Victor Turner. This makes for a rather different book from what his readers might have been used to, stretching defiantly his field of expertise. Save the two central examinations of modernism in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, do not expect the dense, focused, surgical prose one finds elsewhere in his work: this is an ambitious work of theory, of 'reflexive narrative' as the author calls - and as ambitious his endeavour, it worked for me on at least two levels: both in providing a compelling and original analysis, and on introducing me to a entire range of sources and concepts carefully handpicked across many unfamiliar disciplines.  

I suspect an emerging trend of historians calling onto anthropological concepts to untangle difficult notions the 'post-modern' approach did not provide for (just yesterday I heard UCL David D'avray make a similar case.) Here and there they might be found raving defiantly against the Cultural Turn lobby, but it's armed with a precise conceptual apparatus (his signature Weberian 'ideal type' or the 'reflexive narrative') borrowed from very respectable authorities that Griffin sets out on the Grand Projet to provide his readership with an autobahn stretching from generic fascism to the roots of modernism, and even way beyond this into the age old 'psychodynamics' of mankind as a whole:

Umberto Boccionio - Fusion Of A Head And A Window - 1912 - 

via Futurism and the Past

"Destruam et Aedificabo"
Joseph Proudhon's motto, of contentious signification, 

quoted in James H. Billington's Fire in the Minds of Men

The book first attempt to produce a working definition of modernity, in anthropological terms, as a gaping hole left in the ideological fabric of the West, a 'black hole' absorbing mankind's virtus and high-minded ideals. This rotting corpse left over from God's aborted funerals exhale an angsty stench that has fueled many artistic and ideological movements since the Enlightenment. Escaping this dire metaphysical condition, Griffin's modernists experience sparse but intense epiphanic moments, timeless and overwhelming mystical experiences flowing often from Modernity's very heart, and, on the late, set out to construct a world that could render this extra-temporality permanent. 

The construction of atemporality is found to justifies the dual fascist (and modernist) imaginary, often perceived as paradoxical: futural and modernist on the one hand, arcadian, pastoral and sometimes primitive on the other.

Throughout the book he presents his reader with several compelling examples of the oft occulted relationship between modernism and fascism in art and design, from which, for example, I borrowed here. As confirmed by the rich bibliography he provides, the association of fascism with modernism is not as rare he sometimes make it out to be: the real and riskier thesis of his book lies elsewhere, namely in the atavistic interpretation of modernism itself, as the cultural dynamic that spawned and sustained fascism.

Modernism is a movement, loosely defined and certainly blurry on the edges, but none the less recognizable - where it becomes problematic is in identifying it's source and it's logic, since it is undeniably bound up to modernity, not unlike fascism itself: either through conscious identification, or as hostile reaction. Griffin attempts to outline an image of programmatic modernism that transcends the modernist/reactionary duality, but it sometimes feels like somewhat of a pragmatic reaction, attempting by the means of modernity to reconstruct a pre-modern ideal. In order to encompass the cultural pessimism admittedly axial to any interpretation of the development of fascism, Griffin I believe favours the second interpretation, that of modernism being a reaction, to modernity, and to that pervasive 'low-brow' form of secularization Weber coined the 'disenchantment of the world'. 

If modernism was often elusive a concept, modernity is one broad behemoth of a notion, that feels sometimes like it has been misplaced, like belonging to the 'theology shelf' rather than the 'sociology' or 'history' one: to put it differently, modernity might well have drained the world from much magic, but this only made modernity all the more numinous; 

For Griffin's fascists, modernity has robbed the West of it's certainties, of it's meaning and of it's purpose: deprived from an integrated, coherent and self-contained representation of the world, man cannot ward off any longer the ever-present existential terror inherent to his condition as a sentient being. Modernism, the author finds to be a nebula of attempted solutions to this spiritual crisis, particularly acute under the raging capitalism of XIXth century Europe. It manifests itself either in epiphanic form (essentially the contemplation of this numinous modernity I referred to earlier), or, more importantly for the subject of the book, in programmatic fashion, that is as an organized attempt at constructing wholly a re-enchanted world, to forge anew the 'Great Chain of Being' with which to fetter anew the world as it stands.

This is what Griffin calls political modernism, a concept that we could to define away from the ageing tropes of totalitarianism so as to integrate Zionism for example, or democratic nationalism in the colonies. In my eyes this notion, if indirectly treated, appear to be one of the cores of the book's many headed hydra, and it is easy to picture how comparative analysis of political modernism might bring crucial new concepts to the table. 

The other core concept I think is the characterization of fascism as essentially modernist - but a modernism that is not merely an isolated, self-conscious and indulgent aesthetic aping, but a 'primordial', universal and heartfelt reaction to an existential condition. This approach the author wants to be a solution to the perceived "aporias" of fascism, as resolving the paradoxes that have now for decades eluded or polarized scholarship.

This is a courageous stand point, the polar opposite of the still often encountered pathologisation of fascism, and if it by no means justifies or sympathizes with fascist ideology, it also ensures to keep at bay any assertions of fascism's "exceptionalism", in it's psychological or sociological forms. 
As to the resolution of fascism's paradoxes, I am maybe less convinced, as I have come to think of at least some fascist thinkers  as self-consciously, -perversely, even- paradoxical (NR in particular, but also cultural pessimists/traditionalists, and some of the artistic 'fellow travelers', all of which hold a preponderent position in Griffin's narrative). In his interpretation, the modernist, utopian drive, essentially pictures a sort of palingenetic Progress as transcending time to bring about a world where physical and cultural technology has largely been abstracted. This, to me, fails to address to it's full extent fascism's refusal of progress, and their embrace of paradox as transcendence  This would take into account the instrumentalisation of anti-enlightenment thinkers (Joseph de Maistre etc.) of many fascist or proto-fascist movements (for example Action Française) and the theological elements sometimes construed as rhetorical. 

The modernist and fascist peculiar fusion of utopian and arcadian imaginaries is not fully explained by their alleged striving for an extra-temporal, permanent civilization: anarcho-primitivists (by no means fascists!) for example offer an often immanent understanding of the future as a new past. In their case, as, I believe, in some manifestations of fascist (often volkish) thought, it is not progress that is understood to abstract from contemporary existence an idyllic pastoral, but it's very refusal, an epoch-making process not of innovation but of brutal regression. 

Caspar David Friedrich, Zwei Männer am Meer, 1817

"Wie scheint doch alles Werdende so krank"

Georg Trakl, quoted by Theodor Adorno in
Spengler nach dem Untergang, 1950

Anthropology sometimes reminds me of political theology: in Carl Schmitt's often quoted "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver," one can discern the same concern with distinguishing (or establishing) a permanent order of social relations, and an integrated model of both inner and social life.
Anthropology, though, for all it's concern with tribal societies, wrestle heroically a model of change, of transformation, whereas Schmitt, Evola or even at some extent Eliades, are in search of permanence to legitimize their own modern existences, or that of particular regimes.
What Griffin's interpretation, to my surprise, does not take into account, something central to my intuition as to fascist reflexivity, is the understanding of modernity as being essentially irremediable, permanent - In the fascist spectacle, the predominance of style, as is sometimes argued, evidence acute awareness of the sheer infeasability of its project, and fully embrace the subsequent tragedy. It does not so much attempt at re-enchanting the world, as it pretends it does: the true blackness and nihilism of the fascist movement is to be found in this half-acknowledged awareness of the futility, and hence ultimately of it's mere aesthetic character, of attempting any resistance in the face of modernity, 

Griffin here and there throughout the book shows he is quite aware of the uncannily parallel trajectory an historian is bound to follow when attempting to evidence (or to conjecture) the peculiar mindset that would have presided to the development of fascism: his own narrative of this emergence, in all it’s sweeping ‘trandisciplinarity’ and reflexive essentialism, is not without analogy with the very ludic recombination, he elsewhere found to characterize the autodidact intellectuals of the New Right. Sternhell, I hear, was often to be found on the shelves of NR and radical right, but I would not be surprised would his historical work soon come to be dwarfed by Griffin's volume.

This in and of itself does not strike me as problematic in the least, but if the outcome of an informed research work by the leading scholar in the field produce an ideological map so similar to that followed by the alleged fascists themselves, we might need to add on that map some sort of indication as to this peculiar fascist self-consciousness:

Victor Turner, whom I have before mentioned in the context of the ludic metaphore, provides Griffin with the master-key to his 'primordial' interpretation of fascism and modernism interrelations: Turner, an anthropologist (famed for his advocacy of performance studies, and a close collaborator of Richard Schechner) is often remembered for his compelling interpretation of ritual and performance interrelations. 

But what Griffin lifts from Turner's vast analytical framework is a less popular assemblage, a universal typology of crisis. Turner's theory advances that every institutional response to transgressions or conflict, be it in modern or pre-modern societies, takes place in  a peculiar isolated space and time, a land of symbols and rituals both escaping the routine and crucial in maintaining it. Crucially, this enclave Turner finds to act as the 'reservoir' of social and cultural change, providing both a framework and a justification for innovation and adaptation. 
In Turner's model, when a society experience a crisis that requires change, it is often unable to effect those changes itself in it's day to day process - it needs to call for the delimitation of a special time and place, somehow situated outside of the normative boundaries of tradition, a spatio-temporal state of exception if you will, where structural changes and innovation that would elsewhere be perceived as hostile, are allowed to take place. This space and time, that of rituals but also of organized justice, is what Griffin and Turner refer to as the liminal (when it aims at perpetuating the existing order) or liminoid (when it attempts at creating a new one.)

Unknown - Yesterday and Today - 1925

“Theatre is, indeed, a hypertrophy, an exageration, of jural and ritual processes; 

it is not a simple replication of the “natural” total processual pattern of social drama. 

There is, therefore, in theatre something of the investigative, judgemental, 

and even punitive character of law in action, and something of the sacred, mythic, numinous, 

even “supernatural” character of religion action – sometimes to the point of sacrifice.” 

Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, 1982

Griffin sizes the well formed anthropological model as the core of his reflexive narrative of modernity - modernity becomes an extended, permanent sense of crisis, and modernism's ritual and symbolic agitation an attempt at harnessing the power of the liminoid to put an end to the modern condition.
One is bound to agree that all consideration of such titanic concepts as modernity could hardly be pursued without a narrative of sort - yet as Griffin selected, from the gigantic interconnected body of work proposed by Victor Turner (stretching from such universal conceptions as Social Drama, all the way to performative praxis of rituals in school - which in Griffin case's would admittedly be taking "methodological empathy" a step too far!) one is surprised to find he leaves out Turner's emphasis on the relation between reflexivity and performance: in ‘From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play”, he for example advances the existence of a continuum stretching between ritual, a true ‘ideal type’ lost in the midst of conjectural history, and theatre or performance, reflexive and modern. 

Griffin is well aware of the collusion between modernist theatre and political praxis (see his ‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth' or his quoting from Falasca-Zamponi) - but to my surprise, the model through which the author analyses and deconstruct both fascism and modernism gives surprisingly little credence to the development of this reflexivity: whereas he is at pains to insist on the legitimizing presence of the said reflexivity in his own narrative interpretation of modernity, in modernism and fascism, it seems that for all his methodological empathy, he did not find in the fascist train of thought, nor, more surprisingly, in the the modernist one either, enough self-awareness to address nor question the ritual pattern, the ‘eternal return’ of an atavistic concern allegedly transcending time. Reasons and excuses abound when looking at the existing scope (and size!) of the book as it is written – but I cannot help but think that, for example, the Benjaminian debate over fascism manifesting the aesthetization / sacralisation of politics would be seen under a different light if modernism, political or otherwise, came to be interpreted as a spectacular and performative (if not downright parodic) re-enactment of a fabled, yet total and coherent golden-age.

But let's be honest: I am pretty glad he left that much out, because as those who will or have read the book might notice, there is little on this blog that could pass as anything else than a paraphrase of Pr. Griffin in general, and of this one book in particular! 

Unspeakable Space

“When a work is at its peak in intensity, proportions, quality of execution, in perfection, 

there occurs a phenomenon of unspeakable space. 

The areas start shining, radiating, physically they radiate.”

Le Corbusier, quoted by Gavin McKeeney

Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La Padula, Mario Romano - Palazzo Della Civiltà - 1938/1943 - by Agugiaro

Aldo Rossi - San Cataldo Cemetary - 1978/? - Picture by Gabriele Basilico 2007

Yi Architects - Stuttgart Municipal Library

"architecture is not simply construction, or even the satisfaction of material needs; it must be something more [...]. Only when a harmony of proportions is reached, inducing the observer to pause in contemplation or emotion--only then will the constructive scheme have become a work of architecture."
Giuseppe Terragni, Caro Guardiano, 23 March 1931
quoted in David Rifkind, The Battle for Modernism, 2013

All That Is Solid Melts into Air - Marshall Berman

"Suppose, as Marx supposes, that bourgeois forms decompose, 

and that a communist movement surges into power: 

what is to keep this new social form from sharing its predecessors fate 

and melting down in the modern air?"

Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 1982

Monolithic, solid, liquid - the ubiquitous and pervasive influence of modernity has inspired an array of metaphors, so many images that reflect the peculiar interpretations of the modern as a supra-historical force. If modernism's spirituality, as I suspect, is a mystique of history, the indefinable and evasive nature of modernity calls for poetic and negative definitions, not unlike the rich paraphrase that fueled two thousand years of Christianity. 

Marshall Berman - All That Is Solid Melts into Air - 1982

Marshall Berman in All That is Solid Melts into Air apply himself at identifying the history and typology of the modern phenomenon, at producing a different theology -and anthropology- of modernity, solidly rooted in his broad knowledge of literary and intellectual history. 

If modernism is religious in character, it asks from it's students a leap of faith: although the sweeping changes to all landscapes that are described artfully in the book are undeniable, many an interpretation can seem at time to read too much in those events, to find groundbreaking novelty were others could find only the insatiable repetition of age-old conflicts. But this is hardly specific to Berman's views, in fact, it is the rule of the game.The identity between modernism and modernity that Berman seems to presuppose made me at times uncomfortable, I will prefer Paul Greenhalgh's understanding of modernism as a self-conscious phase of modernity, but if such broad concept as a monolithic modernity is to be examined, we will have with to acknowledge modernity as a force, be it a "real" historical phenomenon or at least as a cultural one, undeniably reigning over our collective imagination. 

His understanding is, and this seems to be the originality of his work, intrinsically rooted in a geographical, as well as historical, understanding of the process: the book is structured around five cities, which he presents as five types and five epochs of modernity as a process, each with their own idiosyncratic appropriations and reactions to the cultural, political and social upheavals that characterize the new era. 

Theo Van Doesburg - Arithmetic Composition - 1930

The five sections: first we are guided around the historical phenomenon of modernization by Faust and his various incarnations whom Berman agreeably identifies as the foremost metaphor of the period. The very ambivalence of modernization, offering both unlimited power and insatiable corruption of the established order of things, is highlighted as mephistophelian and, in the process ascribed the fitting role of funding myth in the spirituality he outlines. We then proceed to examine the poetics, and latent spirituality of Marx's thought: beyond the obvious themes of eschatological revolution he identifies what I am tempted to call "gaseous modernity": all that is solid melts into air, and air itself keeps on melting further and further -from air to ether most likely- modernity is here defined as the unstoppable and universal process that brings all things to an end. The process, that is in my eyes, history, is the sole permanence in this world, and therefore the inaccessible source of all transcendence. 

"For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain."

Frederick Engels Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 1886

quoted in V.I. :Lenin, A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism, 1914

Next comes Baudelaire and Paris, which I found to be probably the most compelling section of book, maybe because it was the subject I was the least familiar with: once again the ambivalence of the poet is found to reflect the inbuilt contradiction of modernization, albeit here one that reflects a very material and physical process rather than spiritual or ideological: urbanization. Berman artfully outlines the new spectacles that radical changes in urban life brought to European culture: the confrontation between bourgeoisie and misery, the objectification of the crowds, their links with material and consumer culture and the blossoming society of spectacle. 

We then proceeds to examine, but with a different lens, the "modernism of underdevelopement" he finds in Saint Petersburg. Here is a world apart for Berman, where the spectacle of modernity he identified in the previous chapter take a life of it's own, split from the modernization process. He proceed to identify a form of surrealism he takes to be characteristic of Petersburgian literature  where everyone, from Dostoevsky to Biely, is an ardent humanist, whose ethical concerns are best expressed not in political statements or an ethical praxis, but in their tackling of the strange and the surreal. 

The shortcomings of the soviet regime are bundled together with the autocratic rule of Tsarist Russia in an attempt at imposing "from above" the appearance of modernity, that is, it's technical apparatus, without allowing the process to bring about social and political shifts that can support it. This of course, is reminiscent of the theories ascribing the rise of fascism to Germany and Italy's late modernization, and whereas the argument certainly hold some truth in economic terms it fits awkwardly in a work that belong clearly to cultural and literary history. This results in a very idealist distinction between modernization "from above" and modernization "from below", but more on this later - for now let me just say that his depiction of Tsarist Russia could well be ascribed to his own category of the "pastorals", of fictious and mono-dimensional representations which here allow for a slightly Manichean representation. Lastly a short chapter takes un around NYC which was a compelling read on a field I have virtually no knowledge of, and on which I will therefore refrain to comment. 

Henri Cartier Bresson - Arbres en Brie - Brie - 1968

As compelling a thesis as Berman's, one is bound to have qualms with anyone's interpretation of a concept as broad as modernity. Mine comes with his notion of "Modernization from below" which emerges towards the end, as the analysis take on a more decidedly political turn. The author largely eclipses his own political views in most of the book, as a genuine "theology of modernity" owes to do, keeping them checked in all of his analyses, but it seems that when acknowledging the failure of the soviet regime he feels the need to characterize the soviet project, so as to protect the ethical viability of modernist politics. 

For him, it seems, state-led modernization such as the soviet project, or other guises of authoritarianism he hinted at earlier in the book (Hausmann's urbanism, the Goethean Faust's pursuit of modernization, etc.) belong to the family of "modernization from above", a claim I would be at a loss to reject, but which he goes on to posit in opposition with what he calls the "modernization from below". 

But the paradox he seems willing to ignore is that modernization, if taken outside of the pure field of scientific history, and as he does throughout the book, in the field of cultural history, is essentially a collective phenomenon: modernizing has been done on smaller scales throughout history, but modernity arise with the awareness of the process, an awareness that propels the phenomenon on a cosmic scale (or at least a "suprahistorical" one) and feed onto the very self-reflexivity he so compellingly outlined.

There can only be a "modernization from below" if the said "below" is taken as a group, as a collective, else none of the crucial awareness brought about by modernization will be allowed to exist. To presuppose that the "below", the undifferentiated mass of individuals undergoing modernization, can do so and reflect on the process, requires a "methodological collectivism" allowing for collective identity, wich in my eyes is bound to bring about the very normative and monolithic modernity he is also so eager to reject:

Berman attaches himself at bringing to light what he understands to be a humanistic modernity - an excruciating task no doubt, given the permanent striving of modernists to surpass the boundaries of what they perceive as an outdated concept - this leads him to focus on the self-reflexivity to be found in many of the thinkers he examines, highlighting their shared anguish and something akin to humility, in their restless criticism of everything that surrounds them, including themselves. 

The problem I perceive is that this emphasis relegates a large section of modernity, and of modernism in particular, to the realm of the pathological or reactionary, from the futurists to the CIAM. One could be tempted to absolve him on the grounds of writing in the era of post-modernism, but his animosity towards what I find to be the most stalwarts, unequivocal proponents of modernism seem to be largely an ethical biais: his fascination for the contrary impulses and the psychology of the modern thinker cannot accomodate those movements that appear to embrace modernity in all it's monolithic and crushing unity, they refuse the fragmentary mindset he set out to explore. Does this mean that he owes to deny those manifestations' fundamental modernity? I think not: if indeed self-reflexivity and dualism are characteristics essential to the radical critique (as Greenhalgh would have it) of modernity, the 'total identification' of modernists with modernity is at the very least worth more attention than he gave them. 

Anthony Gormley - Body and Light - 1990

All in all, this is one of those books, beyond all discussions of it's theoretical analysis, whose sheer culture and depth of thinking amply justifies the reading: the author sweeps across the fascinating multitude of modernisms, battles heroically with their contradictions and parting this blood-red sea leads us not to the inchoate Eden of post-modernity but in the Promised Land of a new modernity, a plural one that rely on self-reflexivity to accommodate it's inner contradictions while retaining those of it's ideals that he finds compatible with his humanistic worldview. 

The question as to whether humanism is to find it's place in modernity is probably what actually separate me from his stand point, and I would be more inclined to see in modernity, and especially in modernism, a striving for the supra-human that is bound to negate humanity as a de-facto community. 

Yet surprisingly Berman also echoes, better than most, my understanding of modernism as a religious point of view: he insists on translating Marx's use of "Geist" as spiritual rather than intellectual, and his grasp of the very self-reflexivity of modernism acknowledges the inherent mythical mechanisms involved in the process. 

My copy is scribbled all over and I can only wish there had been larger margins for me to take notes and I will no doubt both explore further many of the authors he has engaged with, and come back to the book in the future as a reference on a meaningful thinker.