Author: Simon Hammond

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Et Alors?

The autofictional project of the French writer Constance Debré describes a woman ‘packing it all in’ to lead an anti-bourgeois, vagabond existence – rejecting conventions and dumpster-diving for Ladurée macarons in the sixth arrondissement. Seven years ago Debré, whose monastically shaved head and multiple tattoos have become iconic in Parisian literary circles, renounced her career as a lawyer, along with her role as a wife and mother, to become, in her words, ‘a writer and a lesbian in the space of the same week’. Her first work of autofiction, Playboy (2018), was an account of exiting the straitjacket of heterosexuality. Her second, Love Me Tender (2020), recently published in English by Semiotext(e), unravelled the association of womanhood with motherhood by recounting the legal battle between Debré and her ex-husband over the custody of their son Paul. Nom, which appeared in France this year, is the third instalment in this literature of severance – challenging the readers attachments to family names, as well as other markers of lineage and heritage. Debré’s writing aims to eradicate all origins and backstories, and with them the social roles they enforce, replacing them with an ethos of radical self-fashioning.

Debré’s biography justifies her aversion to origin stories. Born in Paris in 1972, she was the only child of journalist François Debré and debutante-turned-model Maylis Ybarnégaray, both of them long-term heroin addicts who shared a dealer with Françoise Sagan. Her grandfather on her father’s side was the French Prime Minister Michel Debré, the so-called ‘father’ of the Fifth Republic; on her mother’s Jean Ybarnégaray, a onetime minister in the Vichy government who was arrested for his involvement with the Resistance. The Debré family, which also includes world-class concert pianists and seven members of the Académie française, has been labelled the ‘French Kennedys’.

Debré, for her part, studied law at Panthéon-Assas University and was elected second secretary of the Conference of Lawyers of the Paris Bar in 2013 – an honour for which she was profiled in Le Monde. Her first two published works, Un peu là beaucoup ailleurs (2004) and Manuel pratique de l’idéal (2007), read more like philosophical reflections than works of narrative fiction; both are indebted to the auto-theoretical writings of Georges Perec and Roland Barthes. The first interrogated the experience of ‘opening to nothingness, to slowness, and to latency’ from the perspective of an unidentified narrator. The second offered a ‘dictionary of survival’, in the mode of A Lover’s Discourse. It name-checked various exclusive Parisian nightclubs and poured scorn on the suburbs: ‘La province is a very ugly space one has to traverse when going between Paris and the countryside.’ The critical reception was hostile. In keeping with her impulse to leave the past behind, Debré has since excised them from her public bibliography.

Arriving after a decade-long hiatus (during which time Debré left her job and marriage), Playboy abandoned this philosophical mode and attempted to sketch a portrait of ‘Casanova in the feminine’. Casting Debré as ‘the boy of the story’ (le garçon de l’histoire), it shattered expectations of a ‘good girl’ from a haut-bourgeois family. The author was unapologetic about equating traditional images of masculinity with the pursuit of personal autonomy. Her literary heroes – Hervé Guibert, Jean Genet, Guillaume Dustan – were, she claimed, bolder in rejecting social mores and carving out distinct identities than any of their female counterparts. Accordingly, Debré’s descriptions of lesbian sex were such that feminist critics denounced them as misogyny dressed up as queerness (one particularly incendiary passage stated that women were ‘made to be handled’ (‘Une femme est faite pour mettre la main‘). A more generous interpretation would be that Debré’s target was not women per se, but anyone who fails to ‘think for themselves’, or substitutes passivity for self-reliance.

Love Me Tender contained familiar elements from Playboy (lawyers’ hearings, sexual conquests, wandering around Parisian garages and kebab shops), but was more concerned with the role of the mother, whom Debré presents as the ultimate scapegoat in French society. ‘Mother is worse than “woman”’, she writes. ‘It’s closer to servant. Or dog. But less fun.’ The work recounts how, as a result of institutional lesbophobia, Debré lost custody of her eight-year-old son after she began to pursue her project of sexual and artistic emancipation. Yet it steadfastly refuses to reify or idealize motherhood, which is cast aside just as Debré’s panoply of feminine accessories – dresses, high heels, makeup – were jettisoned in Playboy:

I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be any different from other kinds of love. Why we shouldn’t be allowed to stop loving each other. Why we shouldn’t be allowed to break up. I don’t see why we shouldn’t stop giving a shit, once and for all, about love, or so-called love, love in all its forms, even that one. I don’t see why we absolutely have to love each other, in families or elsewhere, and why we have to go on about it the whole time, to ourselves, to each other.

Élisabeth Badinter’s theory of maternal ambivalence predates Love Me Tender by several decades, but the novel breathes new life into her ideas: ‘I haven’t seen Paul for six months… Sometimes I can’t remember his face’. The narrator is adamant that guilt or shame will not compromise her commitment to a new life, lived on her own terms. Walking through her old neighbourhood one afternoon, she comes across her former family home:

I guess the windows on rue Descartes should bring back memories of my second life, my family life, my life as a straight person, before I took an automatic rifle to it. I guess these things should make me feel nostalgia, sadness, regret. But no, nothing.

Debré’s sprezzatura writing is the literary equivalent of a shrug: a swashbuckling ‘Et alors?’ that goads the reader into calling the author’s bluff. (‘Do you really not give a shit about other people?’ one of her lovers asks halfway through the book.) But despite her persistent efforts to obliterate sentimentality, Debré’s narrator struggles with the reality of an affectless existence. ‘It’s important to have limits so you don’t lose yourself in the chaos’, Debré writes. Her various practices of self-improvement and self-assessment can appear as attempts to cover the void opened up by the loss of her son and husband. She does daily lengths in a public swimming pool, a ritual that persists throughout the trilogy, punctuating its narrative. Yet this attempt to impose discipline on her life also signals Debré’s desire for weightlessness, her impulse to float above the surface of events.

Beneath Love Me Tender’s wise-cracks – ‘You gain ten years when you become gay. Everyone knows that’ – there is a serious argument being made: that French society has rendered motherhood and lesbianism incompatible. Debré imagines what her former social circle are saying about her now – ‘She isn’t really a mother because she isn’t really a woman because she doesn’t really love men’ – and reflects on the inescapability of such attitudes. Towards the end of the novel, she observes that her most recent relationship with a woman only began to progress once she renounced her connection with her son. Debré presents this as a legitimate decision to elevate her own desire above the sanctioned bonds of dependence and care-giving. Yet the note struck at the end of Love Me Tender is equivocal: ‘Now I send Paul texts, I have his number. Sometimes he replies, sometimes he doesn’t.’

Nom continues to track this evolution from unapologetic divestment to a more complex state of emotional ambivalence. Whereas Playboy and Love Me Tender staged offensives on straightness and maternity, Nom rakes over Debré’s storied childhood to disentangle family history from functional selfhood. (In spoken French, ‘Nom’ can easily be heard as ‘Non’, or a robust ‘No thank you’). ‘A name is nothing, it’s like the family, it’s like childhood, I don’t believe in it, I want nothing to do with it,’ her narrator claims. Yet the defensive posture of maintaining a persona who ‘cares about absolutely nothing’ softens a little, here. The cataloguing of a parade of women lovers gives way to more abstract meditations in the vein of her first books: musings on how our collective obsession with origin stories might be traced to the decline of Marxism and the ongoing popularity of psychoanalysis (at least in a French context). To arrive at such insights, Debré dedicates a fair amount of pages to the life of her intimidating father and glamorous mother. Yet her incisive, manifesto-like pronouncements pierce through this history. Above all, a fierce refusal of victimhood prevails. Her priorities are clear: ‘It’s not my name, it’s my body which most interests me.’

It is tempting to conclude that Debré’s project is about forging one’s own laws rather than submitting to society’s: becoming the highest sovereign of one’s own state. But it may be more accurate to say that her fiction aspires to a kind of lawlessness – a condition of detachment that rejects bourgeois codes and comforts, in line with the author’s aristocratic upbringing, but does not offer a coherent alternative. Debré is part of a recent crop of Francophone writers who write about sexuality as a principled decision, a commitment to a particular way of life. Like them, she gives readers a roadmap for combusting their lives and starting anew. Yet she is also aware of the bruising fallout that can follow such acts of self-invention. Radical decisions have radical consequences; Debré’s trilogy could be read as a sober attempt to take responsibility for them. As she puts it, ‘Writing in the first person is always to write about the people you love, and to hurt them in the process. That’s the way it is.’ Et alors?

Read on: Ryan Ruby, ‘Privatized Grand Narratives’, NLR 131.

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Shadows of an Ideal

2013.28 Julie Mehretu Painting Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation, 2001 101 1/2 in. × 17ft. 4 1/2 in. × 2 in. (257.8 × 529.6 × 5.1 cm)

In his 1908 ‘Notes of a Painter’, Henri Matisse wrote, ‘A work of art must carry within itself its complete significance and impose that on the beholder even before he recognizes the subject matter. When I see the Giotto frescos at Padua, I do not trouble myself to recognize which scene of the life of Christ I have before me, but immediately understand the sentiment which emerges from it, for it is in the lines, the composition, the colour. The title will only serve to confirm my impression.’ A little over fifty years later, in the lecture ‘Modernist Painting’, Clement Greenberg articulated a similar idea: ‘Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first. This is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist.’

The idea shared by the painter and the critic, that painting communicates most powerfully by way of a syntax and semantics internal to itself, rather than through its overt subject matter, has become an unpopular one. Today, artists and critics are inclined to be suspicious of claims to understand a work through its formal elements alone, and to give more weight to a work’s subject – and to the correct reading of it – than Matisse or Greenberg would have allowed. But who would dismiss the significance of a painting’s form altogether? We’re all still modernist to at least that degree. And it’s worth noting that this belief that one can and should see a painting in formal terms before (not to the exclusion of) considering its subject – what one might well call an abstract way of seeing – was held in common by a critic best known as a passionate proponent of abstraction and by a painter who could never quite abandon the model, and who, in an interview toward the end of his life, decried ‘the so-called abstract painters of today’ as having ‘no power, no inspiration, no feeling, they defend a non-existent point of view: they imitate abstraction.’

So having an abstract way of looking at painting never required the artist to paint abstractly, nor the viewer to seek out only nonrepresentational art. This is something that Jed Perl seems to have forgotten when writing his recent essay for the New York Review of Books, ‘Between Abstraction and Representation’. Perl sees the twentieth-century differend between the two modes as nothing less than ‘a war of ideas’. And like an old veteran who feels he was most alive in the heat of battle, he has deep nostalgia for the old conflict.

Perl has long been a defender of contemporary representational painting. Having trained as a painter himself, he began his career as a critic at The New Criterion in the 1980s. Despite being a protégé of its then-editor, Hilton Kramer, Perl did not evince anything of the latter’s hardcore neo-con political views. His aesthetic conservatism, however, was never in doubt. In the mid-1990s Perl moved to The New Republic, where he continued to denounce what he saw as the meretricious fashions of contemporary art – titles like ‘The Wildly Overrated Andy Warhol’ (and then, three months later, ‘The Curse of Warholism’) give the tone. One of his last pieces for The New Republic, in 2014, was ‘The Art World Has Stopped Distinguishing Between Greatness and Fraudulence’ – a takedown of Sigmar Polke, whom he lambasted as a ‘megalomaniacal show-off’. Since then, he’s been a regular at the New York Review of Books. Yet despite the prominence of his venues, Perl’s has never been considered a voice to reckon with by the art world – as even Kramer had undoubtedly been. Presumably his readers among the literary intelligentsia don’t quite realize how quaintly eccentric his views often seem to most artists. Perl’s stance has been to present himself as the courageous objector to the art world’s decadent values, and the defender of the overlooked and underrated artists who’ve continued to mine modernist-inflected modes of figurative painting. But in preferring the likes of Gabriel Laderman or Stanley Lewis to Polke or Gerhard Richter, he merely demonstrates his unerring preference for the less over the more interesting.

In the recent essay on abstraction and figuration, Perl starts from an observation that’s hard to gainsay: that recent years – decades, really, by now – have witnessed ‘a tendency to embrace abstraction and representation as vehicles rather than avowals, means to an end rather than philosophical imperatives’. Well, let’s say, instead, that they can be philosophical propositions rather than religious dogmas. I’ve always felt that I belong to my time in this belief that an artist’s choice between using images and abjuring them could not be an absolute imposed from without, and must be the product of an inner inclination, perhaps even an inner necessity, but not one that is frozen in place. Philip Guston the abstractionist was just as firm in his conviction as Philip Guston the figurative painter would be, and for the same reason. Guston the abstractionist eschewed what he called ‘recognizable art’ because ‘it excludes too much. I want my work to include more. And “more” also comprises one’s doubts about the object, plus the problem, the dilemma, of recognizing it.’ He went back to painting images when he came to feel that his abstraction excluded too much – and that among the things it had come to exclude was the doubt he felt so deeply.

In Perl’s view, today’s artists have lost the passionate commitment that artists of Guston’s time felt toward their artistic choices. They ‘appear to think that it’s possible to be a representational artist one minute and an abstract artist the next’, he huffs. And yet, while he loves the idea of a battle between abstraction and representation, he says they should not be ‘regarded as ideologies’. That puzzles me. If abstraction and representation don’t amount to what he calls ‘ideological absolutes’, then why dig yourself into the trenches for one of them?

What’s strange is that, in an essay lamenting that artists and others no longer take sides on behalf of either abstraction or representation, neither does Perl. In fact, he never even says what he thinks either of those terms means. Instead, he simply takes a pair of examples, Piet Mondrian and Diego Giacometti, as totemic names who stand for all the rest. As Perl rightly says, ‘A creative process is a philosophical search, shaped by matters of practice and procedure that extend from the first touch of the artist’s pencil, brush, or chisel to the final decisions about what constitutes completeness.’ That’s a truism worth repeating, but the critic needs to undertake his own philosophical search before berating others for failing to do so. Perl is confident that the creative process can only be undertaken within the conventional boundaries of established, unexamined categories. Abstraction and representation, he believes, have ‘deep implications’ to be explored but their intersection, or the structures of seeing that underlay both of them? Apparently not. Perl sees that Julie Mehretu, for instance, has a long-standing practice of ‘overlay[ing] abstract and representational elements in her immense canvases’, but doesn’t seem to understand why anyone would pursue such a course or recognize the difference between this consistently developing style and the more eclectic approach of someone painting abstractly one minute, representationally the next. Nor does he address the profound difference between the referential forms that Mehretu employs – schematic and diagrammatic notations – and traditional representation. The referential systems she works into her paintings are also a kind of abstraction – almost the opposite of the ‘mere images’ Perl says they are, though in the same breath he also calls them ‘fixed, inscrutable elements’, which is perhaps more to the point.

Perl seems to be looking past Mehretu, and a couple of other painters whose work he discusses more briefly, at the man whom he appears to consider the big bad wolf of contemporary painting, Gerhard Richter. Richter, of course, unlike Mehretu, really does paint sometimes abstractly and sometimes representationally. To Perl’s mind, it seems that the German artist has been cheating by working in such a way that ‘the juxtaposition of representational and abstract works and their impact as a totality’ is what has made him so admired. That art lovers can savour the way Richter executes these paintings is something that Perl refuses to believe. Twenty or so years ago, Perl unleashed a tantrum of a review on Richter in The New Republic. Its fire-breathing opener: ‘Gerhard Richter is a bullshit artist masquerading as a painter’. Since then, though, Perl seems to have lost some of his polemical energy. Now his grousings could almost be taken for neutral description: ‘Entropy is Richter’s subject. The stylistic free-for-all that in Richter’s work suggests an artistic endgame can as easily suggest a kind of comedy.’ Sounds respectably, if unexcitingly, Beckettian to me.

Perl goes on to cite the critic and representational painter Fairfield Porter – who was a great admirer of much abstract art – for his contention ‘that many artists who identified themselves as abstractionists or realists were producing little more than illustrations – “shadows” – of an idea or ideal.’ That, of course, is what Matisse had already said of the abstractionists, and I suspect he’d have said the same of most realists. The artists capable of raising themselves out of the slough of academicism are the exceptions. Why Perl imagines, contra Porter, that plunging oneself once more into some exclusive conception of abstraction or representation would offer an exit from these imitations of imitations is a mystery.

And while Perl admits that premier venues for new American art in the 1950s and 60s, such as the Tanager and Tibor de Nagy Galleries, ‘embraced a pluralistic view’ and showed abstract and figurative works side by side, he finds it suspicious when today’s galleries do the same. In illo tempore this was apparently done in authentic recognition of the crucial nature of the distinction; these days the same practice is ascribed to ‘muddleheaded eclecticism’ and ‘high-end shelter magazine’ aesthetics. One of the shows he didn’t like paired works by Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi. And while either of those artists’ work would, for that matter, look good in a high-end shelter magazine, I wonder if he’d really be prepared to argue that that’s all there is to either one of them? And if not, what’s different about showing them together – except that it happened in 2021 at David Zwirner and not in 1961 at Tibor de Nagy?

But here’s where my beef with Perl gets personal. Another of his ‘muddleheaded’ targets was a presentation of paintings by Thomas Nozkowski (a committed abstractionist) and Jane Freilicher (a lifelong representationalist) at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation. Perl doesn’t voice any particular complaint about either of those artists’ work, but he doesn’t understand why their work was shown together. Apparently, it’s not enough to know that Nozkowski – who passed away in 2019 but was still alive when the exhibition was first being planned – was a passionate admirer of Freilicher, who died in 2014, aged 90. But isn’t that in itself worth dwelling on – that Nozkowski’s dedication to his own abstract path was no barrier to his recognition of the worth of a very different kind of art, that the pursuit of his idea did not entail a war against another artist’s idea? And doesn’t that imply that in those ideas there might be some commonality worth contemplating? At least one reviewer of the show, David Carrier, found it succeeded in suggesting ‘shared ways of looking that Freilicher and Nozkowski achieved independently’, despite their practising such different modes of painting.

Perl, on the other hand, complains that ‘when the people involved reached for an organizational principle to explain what they were doing, all they could summon were banalities like “There is a commonality more significant than all their significant differences put together: Let’s call it integrity.”’ Here, I’m the one who has to beg the reader to excuse my having committed a banality. I wrote the catalogue essay from which Perl quotes without mentioning my name – I don’t know whether he thought that in veiling my authorship of that sentence he was being kind, or if he thereby meant to condemn me all the more absolutely. No matter. What’s revealing there is Perl’s sloppiness about imputing intentions – his willingness to attribute my words to the exhibition’s organizers, which is to say its curator, Eric Brown, and the Resnick and Passlof Foundation’s executive director, Susan Reynolds, and its president, Nathan Kernan. My contribution to the catalogue came, as it were, after the fact; I was asked for it, I suppose, as a critical supporter and longtime friendly acquaintance of Nozkowski’s who had also written appreciatively about Freilicher, but it was never my role to explain what the organizers had in mind. Beyond that, I’d be curious to understand better why my ‘banality’, which Perl allows ‘could be made about any work that succeeds to some degree’, is more banal than his banality in pointing out that ‘the experience of a work of art isn’t a matter of theory (which isn’t to say that artists and audiences can’t be interested in theories); it’s visceral, whether Mondrian’s spare abstractions or Giacometti’s roiled portraits.’

Yes, there is – must be – something visceral in one’s response to ‘any work of art that succeeds to some degree’, and it’s worth reminding ourselves of this familiar fact. Actually, what Perl says is true even of work that might not succeed: his rejection of Mehretu’s work, which he calls ‘a visual shouting match’, is nothing if not visceral. Like him, I find her work too chilly for my taste, and I question her success in allegorizing grand socio-political themes via abstraction – there’s a lack of mediation that rubs me the wrong way. But I object to his presumption that her attempt lacks seriousness, comparable to every philistine’s favourite example of artistic blague, Marcel Duchamp’s moustache on the Mona Lisa. This points to the great problem with Perl as a critic: his inveterate belief that today’s artists (except for a few personal favourites of his) are all somehow acting in bad faith, and that it was only in the good old days that people pursued art with seriousness. ‘Whether we want to or not’, Matisse insisted, ‘we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.’ We should be critical of our time, and to do so we must be self-critical, but we can’t hide our heads in the past.

Read on: Saul Nelson, ‘Opposed Realities’, NLR 137.

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Rural Sensualist

To say that I knew Jean-Marie Straub (1933-2022) and Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) equally well is another way of saying I knew them equally poorly. Yet I know that they wound up dying sixty-odd days apart in the same Swiss village (Rolle), close to where Godard spent much of his childhood and later shot some of his best (Nouvelle Vague, King Lear) as well as his worst (For Ever Mozart) work – an area I’ve never visited. Straub was born in Metz, which I don’t know either – a small city that belonged to Germany before World War I and then for a spell during World War II before reverting to France, giving him a sort of divided nationality like Godard – who, although born in Paris, was Swiss-French, straddling another kind of division.

From 1963 to 2006, Straub was half of a two-headed, four-handed filmmaking team – based in Paris, Munich and close to Rome – with Danièle Huillet, his French wife, the more practical-minded member of the couple, who only gained full credit as co-author about a decade after they started, which she then retained until her untimely death in 2006. Circa 2011, Barbara Ulrich, who was Swiss, became Straub’s producer, partner, occasional actress and business manager, most likely occasioning their move to Rolle.

One thing that tended to make both Godard and Straub indigestible to Anglo-Americans was their having grown up in a French culture where avant-garde art and mainstream entertainment weren’t mutually exclusive, as the careers of René Clair, Jean Cocteau and Marcel L’Herbier amply demonstrated. Moreover, the fact that both of these chain smokers belonged to the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd (with Straub qualifying as a junior member, like Luc Moullet), which embraced Hollywood populism but shied away from avant-garde elitism, meant that their own avant-garde practices, including a reluctance or inability to tell stories, were couched in mainstream terms even as they confounded mainstream editing protocols.

Godard had anonymously helped in the financing of Straub’s first full-length feature, Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), and politically as well as aesthetically, they remained comrades-in-arms for well over half a century, effectively serving as the two most imposing pillars of cinematic modernism in Western Europe, particularly as this applied to their grappling with texts, their love of direct sound, their preoccupations with history and their sharp critical reflexes.

I knew each of them only fleetingly. I interviewed Godard in 1980 and 1996 and curated the first Straub-Huillet retrospective (supplemented by about a dozen films from others that they considered exemplary) held in the US in 1982, with an accompanying catalogue that benefitted from their input. At the Viennale in 2004, where they were presenting a John Ford retrospective, I had dinner with the two of them and (quite awkwardly) a colleague I wasn’t speaking to, a critic who unlike me was fluent in Italian; the fact that they showed no awareness of the incompatibility and discomfort of their two guests was characteristic of both their single-mindedness and their social clumsiness. (An English friend once described the problems she faced upon presenting them with a gift, which they didn’t know how to receive.)

Another thing Godard and Straub-Huillet had and have in common is that no one quite knows what to do with their work. In the case of Straub-Huillet’s reception in the UK, Screen magazine appeared to be far more comfortable printing their screenplays than explaining why it was important to do so. As for their reception in the US, the silence and/or incomprehension prior to 1982 was such that I was moved to turn the catalogue into an angry polemic. Jean-Marie himself was livid that the New York Times’ Vincent Canby had reviewed their Moses and Aaron as Aaron and Moses, and he seemed equally irritated when another reviewer added a ‘the’ before Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (an error shared by Wikipedia and many others), implying that they had adapted an existing document rather than compiled one of their own invention. (The New York Times’ recent Straub obituary is no less befuddled, maintaining that the lengthy subtitle of their Othon – Les Yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer, ou Peut-être qu’un jour Rome se permettra de choisir à son tour – was given in English and that Straub-Huillet didn’t even care if people walked out of their films.) As for Godard, even in this journal, Fredric Jameson recently found himself asking ‘what we were to do with the final works of the “humanist” period, where they came from, and whether they meant a falling off or a genuine renewal.’

The most significant difference between these figures, at least for me, is that Godard was a city slicker and Straub was a rube, a hillbilly – by which I mean existentially if not literally. In both cases, this was for the better as well as for the worse. It applied to both their respective social skills and (especially in Straub’s case) their lack of the same, which paradoxically seemed just as evident. Both of them were snobs as well as populists, gadflies as well as traditionalists. Each reinvented the medium for his own purposes, as did Alexander Dovzhenko, Federico Fellini, Jia Zhangke (three other inspired hick directors of innovative epics), and indeed William Faulkner (who reinvented the novel in comparably epic and innovative ways).

Straub’s undeserved marginality derives in part from the way we tend to regard country folk, especially when they display the unbridled freedom of avant-garde artists. Many of us unconsciously adopt the city-bred bias that innovative art belongs to urban audiences and depends on some form of city smartness, reluctant to believe it can also come from hillbillies. That these artists seem to reinvent their own art forms may lead us to think that they somehow arrived at their discoveries by brute instinct rather than by study or intellect, but this means overlooking that Faulkner read Joyce and Dovzhenko was exposed to modern art in Warsaw, Berlin and Odessa. Straub and Huillet studied both the subjects of their films (music by Bach and Schoenberg, texts by Böll, Brecht, Corneille, Duras, Hölderlin, Kafka, Mallarmé, Montagne, Pavese and Vittorini, and paintings by Cézanne, among many others) and the films of Bresson, Buñuel, Chaplin, Dreyer, Ford, Hawks, Lubitsch, Renoir, and Tati, their masters.

The ways that they accommodated their subjects to these masters are in some cases fairly easy to detect, as in the traces of Bresson and Dreyer in the performance styles of Straub-Huillet films (especially the early ones); less so for their Hollywood and French commercial models (Ford, Hawks, Lubitsch, Renoir) and comic-independent ones (Chaplin and Tati). But the stamps of these and other populist heroes remained none the less present in Straub’s critical vocabulary and conception of his art. In Pedro Costa’s extraordinary Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001), aptly described as a romantic comedy about Straub-Huillet – which shows Huillet meticulously editing one of the multiple versions of their 1999 Sicilia! while Straub advises, kibbitzes, paces, smokes and pontificates – Straub identifies Chaplin, of all people, as the greatest of all film editors (an argument he often made elsewhere) because Chaplin knew precisely when a gesture began and ended. In an earlier documentary by Harun Farocki, we see Straub suggest to a German actor he’s directing in Klassenverhältnisse (1984) that he deliver a line by Kafka the way that Ricky Nelson says a line in Hawks’ Rio Bravo. (Defying the notion that works of art need to be singular, Straub-Huillet sometimes edited several different versions of their films using different takes of shots so that, for instance, the sound of an offscreen rooster crowing might be heard in the German subtitled version but not in the English subtitled one.)

The seeming incongruity of matching a radical vision with a mainstream product also proposes cinema as a grappling or juggling with a text (written, composed, painted, or filmed) in order to approach history, another trait Straub shared with Godard. This in turn redefines both political will and reality as things that Chaplin, Dreyer, Ford, Griffith, Hawks, Lubitsch, Mizoguchi, Renoir, Stroheim and Tati can teach us important lessons about. Such a perspective was especially apparent when I conducted a Q+A with Jean-Marie and Danièle in New York and attended their lengthy debate session with some art students about why Ford was more dialectically correct than Eisenstein, which left many of the kids speechless. Straub’s often inflammatory rhetoric tended to be leftist and/or anarchist, but the underlying feelings were often related to conservative paeans to preserving the status quo such as Rio Bravo, ably put together by storytellers with often-bittersweet conclusions about upholding the law and bowing to homespun convention. Indeed, Straub’s intense love for the material world arguably suggested a kind of conservativism complicating if not undermining his Marxism.

By the time Straub-Huillet became landscape artists in the 70s and 80s – arguably starting with Moses und Aron (1975) and Fortini/Cani (1976) and climaxing in such masterpieces as Trop tot/trop tard (1982) and Operai, contadini (2001) – the sensuality of places and people, of animals, insects, and vegetation became more central to their art, even as their chosen texts continued to help generate it. (Despite the intermittent power of its visuals, it’s the sound of German being spoken that comprises most of the beauty of Der Tod des Empedokles.) Costa told me that they once spent their spare time translating some of Shakespeare’s plays into Italian, not because they wanted to film the results but simply because they found the existing translations ‘shit’. This passion for exactitude while struggling with texts, meanwhile valuing their resistance to them as well as their predilections, also led them to insert patches of black leader to represent textual cuts in their Einleitung zu Arnold Schoenbergs Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene (1973). But regarding what they did with landscapes, Huillet, in a letter to Artificial Eye’s Andi Engel about Trop tot/trop tard, may have done a better job of describing their art than any of their more discerning critics, such as Gilberto Perez and Barton Byg:

What is recounted: struggles, revolts, defeats, delays and anticipations, statistics; what is represented: history, topography, geography, geology, light, lights, wind and clouds, land (worked and transformed by men), traces – erased or still visible – and sky (lots of sky); we tried finding the right perspective (the only one), the right height, the right proportions between the earth and the sky, to be able to pan without having to change the horizon line, even at 360-degrees.

Unlike Godard, who had social skills even when it came to informing his public that he wanted to be left alone, Straub tended to create unnecessary scandals and misunderstandings wherever he went. For all its sincerity, the angry bluster of his political rhetoric ­– which inspired him to announce in absentia at Venice in 2006 (where he was receiving a lifetime achievement award), quoting Franco Fortini, that as long as there was American imperialist capitalism, there could never be enough terrorists in the world ­­– seemed motored by nervousness and clumsy shyness, which apparently led him to overlook the terrorism of American imperialist capitalism. It was the same provincialism that reportedly led him to reject a Canadian retrospective because ‘you can’t trust Americans with prints’ and prompted him and Huillet to title their early video Europa 2005 – 27 octobre (2006), as if they assumed that everyone in their audience already knew about the electrocuted French teenagers. But it was also a tender provincialism whose innocence produced the splendours and wonders of workers and peasants in a vibrant, humming forest explaining how to make ricotta. If this sounds like hyperbole, Straub made the very practice of spouting and spreading such hyperbole contagious, and, as with Godard, we will continue to celebrate him not only for what he produced but also for what he inspired in some of his disciples and commentators.

Read on: Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Missing Image’, NLR 34.

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Finite Worlds

At the New York Film Festival this autumn, two new films by South Korean director Hong Sangsoo played as part of the main slate. The Novelist’s Film and Walk Up represent Hong’s twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth features since his 1996 debut, The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, meaning that on average he produces more than one film every year. In the last decade, he has made two per year several times, and in 2017 he made three: On the Beach at Night Alone, Claire’s Camera and The Day After. A regular of the festival circuit – the former film premiered at Berlin, the latter two at Cannes – Hong is much loved by its presiding critics, chief among them artistic director of the New York festival, Dennis Lim. This year, in addition to his festival programming, Lim curated a retrospective of the director’s work, screened in randomly paired double features, accompanied by ‘The Hong Show’ – a quiz night where Lim answered audience questions on ‘the ne plus ultra of the modern auteur’. The Hong Show doubled as a celebration of Lim’s elegant new monograph, Tale of Cinema, which grapples with what he describes as ‘the difficulty of seeing Hong clearly, of orienting oneself within a shape-shifting hall of mirrors’. Published by Fireflies Press, Tale of Cinema is the latest of the Decadent Editions, a series set to comprise ten books on ten films made in the 2000s, with works by Nick Pinkerton, Erika Balsom and Melissa Anderson already in circulation.

Lim focuses his attention on Hong’s sixth film, from which his book takes its title. Tale of Cinema (2006), he argues, can serve as an ‘inflection point of sorts’: it was the director’s first self-produced film, his first to employ devices – zoom and voiceover – which became signatures, and the first to foreground the practice of filmmaking. Yet, Lim concedes, there is no keystone: ‘It is a critical truism – and only partially true – that Hong makes the same movie over and over’. That partial truth is found in certain constants. Hong’s films generally take the form of a chamber play, with a cast of recurring characters and players; they are set in the decades after South Korea’s transition to democracy; they play out amidst a consistently middle-class milieu. Their signature frame is of a man and a woman sitting at a table littered with empty bottles of alcohol. The two are likely artists, the man a film director, the woman his muse. He will be lascivious, she – at least in early films – will lack a certain interiority. Conversation will be awkward, sometimes agonizingly so, and this will be exacerbated by Hong’s proclivity for plain framing and long takes. There will be little action and lots of talking, but despite this, the characters will never overcome some fundamental inability to communicate.

Less predictable is Hong’s use of narrative. Walk Up, for example, tells four stories, each corresponding to a different floor of the building where the film is set. Tale of Cinema tells the same story twice, first as a film within a film, then as ‘reality’. ‘Even when they are largely confined to a single plane of reality’, Lim writes, ‘we are compelled to notice the shape of a Hong film, thanks to repeated actions, doubled characters, recurring locations or mirrored situations’. A film might fold back on itself, rhyming like a couplet; at other times, a film may more closely resemble a series of disparate poems, held together by a common metre. This narratological approach is made more intricate still by the fact that Hong’s films all exist in conversation. The oeuvre is recursive, reflexive. In Lim’s view, their ‘meaning and pleasures are cumulative’, and so a ‘single movie gives little sense of his project’. Indeed there is ‘something perverse’, he confesses, about isolating any one film – as the book series demands – given that ‘the parts and the whole are inseparable’. Lim’s solution is a self-consciously ‘Hongian’ one, to take one path ‘through’ the film and another ‘around’ it.

In a 2015 interview with Cinema Scope, Hong doodled a few shapes to explain his working method: two circles side by side, connected by dotted lines (the Locarno festival subsequently made it into a t-shirt design). Beneath them he wrote: ‘infinite worlds possible.’ The two circles, Hong clarified, represent two independent worlds. They exist in parallel. But ‘as soon as there is a clear correspondence between them, these worlds disappear on their own’. This is to say that Hong’s films do not, or cannot, exist in isolation. To see one film without the others is typically to wonder what all the fuss is about. (For me, Claire’s Camera at Lincoln Center. When the screening ended, an elderly gentleman turned to his partner and said, ‘That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.’ I felt the same way.) The pleasures of watching a Hong film stem from familiarity, not just with the works that came before, but crucially also with the director himself. Corpus fits: Hong himself is the ur-shape. His films are self-expression by way of self-obsession. Across them we see the story of a life: an attempted suicide as a wayward teenager (Tale of Cinema); a trip to America to study filmmaking (Woman is the Future of Man); an affair with actress-muse Kim Min-hee (the 2017 films); many affairs with drinking (most films); teaching filmmaking (Oki’s Movie); enduring audience Q&As (Right Now, Wrong Then); discussing – and justifying – his art (The Novelist’s Film); and more recently, a preoccupation with mortality (Hotel by the River, In Front of Your Face, Walk Up).

A key detail is missing here: Hong’s encounter with Cézanne. While studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late eighties, where several of Cézanne’s paintings were on display, he experienced a moment of clarity. ‘I saw this apple painting for the first time . . . I was standing there talking to myself, like, “This is enough. I don’t need anything more.”’ Hong has spoken of his love for Cézanne many times, calling his work ‘perfect’, ‘flawless’. During the retrospective at Lincoln Center, he reflected that ‘maybe his way of proportionalizing the abstract and the concrete is just right for me.’ Lim considers the particular balance between these two poles to be shared by the two artists. Other commonalities include ‘the obsessive repetition – those endlessly re-arranged apples – and the proto-Cubist interest in bending the laws of perspective’. I would also add ‘mundanity’, in that Hong’s films are as mundane as a bowl of apples. By this I do mean dull – tedious, monotonous – but also earthly, terrestrial. The root word here, mundus, means simply ‘world’, referring to either mankind or the earth itself. (Another sphere.) Hong’s worlds, like Cézanne’s apples, are microcosmic in this way: gravitons for greater thought.

Cézanne painted hundreds of still lifes featuring the fruit, but his dedication was not to apples so much as painting them, problematizing them. ‘I want to astonish Paris with an apple’, he said. Their simplicity has been cause for much hyperbole. In the apples, we see everything – everything but an apple: ‘this is no longer fruit, nor is it fruit modelled in paint,’ wrote Ernst Bloch, ‘instead all imaginable life is in them, and if they were to fall, a universal conflagration would ensue, to such an extent are these still lifes already heroic landscapes, so loaded are these paintings with mystical gravity and a yet unknown, nameless mythology’. Critics are sometimes guilty of describing Hong’s simple films in similarly hyperbolic terms, but Hong is a director equally dedicated to the problematics of his medium – his signature zoom has the same jarring effect as Cézanne’s oblique brushstrokes. Both foreground the artwork’s materiality, call attention to its making. Lacan describes this as ‘the vanity of the work of art, of the work of the brush’ – that which betrays its ‘imitation.’ But Cézanne is different. When Cézanne paints his apples, Lacan argues, ‘it is clear that in painting those apples, he is doing something very different from imitating apples – even though his final manner of imitating them, which is the most striking, is primarily oriented toward a technique of presenting the object. But the more the object is presented in the imitation, the more it opens up the dimension in which illusion is destroyed and aims at something else’.

What else, if neither reality nor imitation, concrete nor abstract? In the same Cinema Scope interview, Hong drew another diagram to convey the relationship between fiction and reality in his work: a rectangle, labelled ‘Real’, with an arrow curving toward it. The arrow comes close but never touches, swerving away like a near-miss comet. ‘Imagine this rectangle is real life. I try to come as close as possible to it. How? Using details from my life.’ Lim compares the approach to autofiction, the literary genre wherein auto holds far more allure than fiction. Yet in the case of Hong’s films, the consequences of this approach are more severe, with the author’s omnipresence decentralizing the texts themselves. The films are ultimately less important than their maker, and ironically, Hong’s overfamiliarity serves as a kind of defamiliarization.

For example: The Novelist’s Film concerns a novelist (Lee Hye-young) who encounters several old friends, one of them a filmmaker (Kwon Hae-hyo, who also plays a filmmaker in Walk Up). In doing so, she makes a new friend, the actress Gil-soo (Kim Min-hee) and is inspired to make a film. Yet when I watch The Novelist’s Film, I do not care for the characters except that they represent fragments of Hong; I do not listen to their dialogue except to discern his treatises on film, art, life. When Gil-soo enters the frame, I do not see a newly retired actress, I see Kim Min-hee, Hong’s lover, who inspires him in that same way and who has similarly retreated from acting. When the film ends, my viewing method is rewarded: with a film within a film, purportedly the novelist’s film, which is of course not hers but Hong’s. In this epilogue we see Kim Min-hee, with Hong’s voice behind the camera. Soft music plays while she gathers a bouquet of flowers, bride-like. Though Hong and Kim’s relationship has been public for some time, South Korea’s divorce laws mean that the two have never married, and so with this sequence, Hong realizes his forbidden nuptials.

When Lacan refers to the ‘vanity’ of art, what exactly does he mean? We can think of vanity in terms of an object – a vanity – a kind of mirror-stage that shares the same basic structure as the cinema: seat, screen. These films are vanities in the sense of Hong confronting his reflection. But further, the word vanity is rooted in the void: it describes an emptiness, a fruitlessness. Vanitas therefore defines a form of still life concerning death, like a memento mori, as when Cézanne’s apples turned to skulls. Walk Up is a work of vanity in this way. Scaling the building, floor by floor, story by story, we see a director age and become unwell. He curls up in bed, foetal, and we think perhaps he might die. On the building’s highest plane, he recalls an encounter with God, and in the context of Hong’s reflexive filmmaking, we imagine this confrontation as something like Jesus on the cross: monologue made dialogue, a conversation with the self.

Perhaps no director today embodies the nature of ‘creator’ as dictator-patriarch more than Hong. Thierry Frémaux, director of the Cannes Film Festival, has labelled the director the ‘Korean Woody Allen’ – a comparison Lim rejects (it presumably ‘highlights the neurotic male leads and the quasi-autobiographical elements’, but like similar comparisons ‘fails to hold for anyone looking closely enough’). Yet though there are surface similarities – neurosis, lust, self-abuse – Hong’s worlds are yet more insular and more intricate. He is also in greater control. For The Novelist’s Film, Hong acted as director, writer (Hong, since 2010, is said to write each scene upon the day of filming), producer, editor, cinematographer, and composer, while his would-be wife Kim served as production manager. The film was funded by the proceeds of its predecessor; Hong’s self-sustaining economic model allows each new project a budget in the region of $100,000.

Lim argues that this ‘fundamental modesty and pragmatism’ is something ‘radical’. ‘We never think of Hong as a political filmmaker’ – as he notes, other critics have made the argument that Hong’s films are emblematic of a ‘post-political’ Korea – ‘but what is his entire project if not an act of resistance, a rejection of the norms that dictate what movies should be and how they get made.’ I am wary of these words – radical and resistance – especially when applied to art. Dennis Zhou, writing in The Nation, makes the dubious claim that the films are not apolitical themselves, but rather construct ‘an aesthetics of the apolitical which is anything but’. Hong should be celebrated for his artistic autarky, but there is nothing politically radical in his films, and they resist only intrusions on his creative control. Later in the book, Lim suggests that the ‘democracy of incident in Hong’s films, the absence of hierarchy and the evenness of attention, invites an equivalent way of looking and listening,’ but this is only true if we remove Hong from the equation. It is an observation more appropriate to Cézanne: ‘Cézanne painted the heads of his friends and family as if they were apples’, writes Meyer Schapiro. Hong paints them as if they are Hong.

Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas: there is nothing inherently wrong with such an approach. In almost all fiction, auto or otherwise, one life stands in for many, and it is sometimes easiest to speak generally through specifics. But in Hong’s case, his cinema has developed a chronic overreliance on its animating body – and so have its admirers. One question that recurs while reading Tale of Cinema: what are these films without Hong? Lim undoubtedly succeeds in the endeavour of ‘seeing Hong clearly’, but the films themselves remain elusive. In attempting to make sense of them – perhaps to ascertain their value beyond Hong himself – Lim often defers to cinema’s most prominent theorists: Roland Barthes on spectatorship, Andrew Sarris on auteur theory, David Bordwell, André Bazin, Robert Bresson. A consequence of minimalist art is that we project meaning onto it, filling gaps and imposing symbols. In the case of Hong’s work, there is perhaps nothing more to be said about the man and woman getting drunk (again and again), and so we look elsewhere, toward their author, where we can anchor our thoughts and feelings, sow theories, and participate in the cult of personality which has driven Hong to the upper echelon of festival filmmaking. Beyond the filmmaker, however, we have his films: can they be said to contain ‘all imaginable life’, as Bloch said of Cézanne? Are they ‘heroic landscapes’ replete with ‘mystical gravity’ and ‘mythology’? Or are they just apples?

Read on: Kevin Gray, ‘Political Cultures of South Korea’, NLR 79.

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Sex Pirate

That writing can be a space of freedom is a fraught concept. In its reactionary form, it produces writing that imagines it is free not just to express but identify with every little spurt of fascist emotional aggression that writers can stir from their bowels. There’s no shortage of writing as will-to-power tweeting. Midlist commercial authors pose as victims, looking for something, or someone, to blame other than their own mediocrity for the lack of literary fame – and market share – to which they have an overweening sense of entitlement.

Anglophone modernism often favoured this self-aggrandizing kind of freedom. Fascist, and also usually masculine: Mailer the wife-stabber; Burroughs the wife-shooter. For a writer who appears to the world nominally as a woman, and whose practice of writerly freedom is of a more self-dissolving kind, the problem of creating a public persona as a writer is as acute as that of writing oneself into the freedom of nonexistence.

Kathy Acker was a writer for whom writing enacted a kind of freedom, but of the far more interesting kind. A writing in which freedom did not inflate but rather undermined and dissolved the self. It is writing that is freed in Acker’s work, not the writer. The writing erases and effaces the writer, taking down in the process expected conventions of character, setting, narrative and authorship, tugging away also at the reader’s sense of their own integrity before the text.

To spotlight oneself takes ambition – it takes rather more to immolate one’s self. Thanks to Jason McBride’s definitive new biography, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, we now have in our hands an account of the genesis of Acker’s ambition and the work it sparked. Acker was born in 1947 to an assimilated New York German-Jewish family who appear and reappear as characters in her writing. Her stepfather comes across as at best useless. Her mother left Acker with an enduring impression of being unwanted. Acker escaped the family in ways both conventional and unconventional. She married Bob Acker, whom she met in college. She outgrew him as a writer, although Acker never became what anyone would imagine as emotionally mature and stable. While there were a handful of sustained, loving relationships in Acker’s life, there were also many brief, intense, fragile encounters (one of them with me).

Acker’s more sustained escape from the bourgeois family was through her uncanny ability to find communities of creative intensity: the New York Filmmaker’s Coop, the St Mark’s poetry scene, mail art, new music, language poetry on the west coast, the downtown art scene back in New York, or new narrative and the cyberpunk scene in the Bay Area in the nineties. Acker was never really of any such scene. She was not a joiner. She assimilated what there was to learn, about formal aesthetic tactics, about methods of being an artist, and moved on.

Her early published pieces were chapbooks circulated through the mail art network, using the address list of one of her mentors – Eleanor Antin. Some were signed with what I think of as a heteronym, a partial authorial persona, The Black Tarantula. The notoriety of these led to her break-out book, Blood and Guts in High School, published by Grove Press in 1984. Grove published most of her subsequent works, including Don Quixote (1986), Empire of the Senseless (1988) – from which McBride takes his title – and Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996).

The work can be read as a systematic destruction of the bourgeois novel, at (almost) all levels. At the level of prose, Acker eschews the ‘fine writing’ of literary fiction. The language is blunt, although Acker gave brilliant incantatory readings. She had learned from the New York poets how to write for the breath. Characters lack a consistent subjective interiority which might masquerade as a self’s private property. Characters become other characters, in other stories, other genres. Just as characters mutate, so too does the authorial voice, at one moment retelling a family story, at another retelling a story from Dickens or Hawthorne.

This freedom with writing rubbed up against the banality of literary ‘culture’, particularly in England, where Acker was embroiled in an absurd ‘plagiarism scandal’. In Acker, language is communism, the product of collective labour. To write is to rewrite. What’s interesting in Acker is always the combinations of material she works on and works over. The sudden jumps from one reworked text to the next, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, crack open the seam between reader and work, pushing against their assumptions of subjective coherence.

The tension in her work is between this depersonalization of the writing and the persona of the writer. Acker’s writing aimed to abolish private property in language, and yet the books still had to be sold on the literary market under her name and copyright. Given their challenging form, she had to make an image of herself to help sell them, a persona. A persona made necessary by the demands of media and marketing but also for navigating the perils of appearing in the world as a woman making serious claims as an artist. The result was a series of Acker avatars, which Jason McBride elegantly short hands as ‘a deranged kewpie doll, a pirate from the future, an alien courtesan’.

Acker was a mythmaker, fond of inventing fables about herself. While walking through Central Park, she told me her honeymoon was at the Plaza Hotel, adding that Jews had their honeymoons at the Plaza, and WASPs across the street at the Sherry-Netherland. There was no honeymoon. The story isn’t true, except as a way of explaining an internal divide in New York within the class into which she was born.

One of the dangers of biography as a genre is it can render its subject banal – it turns out Great Writers wipe their asses like everyone else. In puncturing the image Acker crafted for spectacular consumption, McBride gives us something more: a narrative account of the struggle of one woman to extend and inflect the trajectory of modernist writing in the late twentieth century. Her aim was to divert its course toward the self-dissolving kind of freedom, which among other things might be a freedom not so much against as beyond the reach of patriarchy.

McBride writes that Acker ‘wanted to live somehow outside of, or in-between, gender binaries’. I would give this more emphasis than McBride. I think this dissolution of the self into the space of writerly freedom was also and crucially a dissolution of gender, or rather of sex, as Acker was far more interested in flesh than social ‘constructs’. Much of her work is also a detailed investigation of the sensations of the body.

Acker never wanted labels, so I’m not going to claim that Acker was trans. As McBride notes, when asked for a sexual identity, Acker claimed it was ‘writer’ – although that takes on added meaning when one understands the kind of shape-shifting writing Acker practised. Rather, I think a dimension of the writing unfolds when one suspends the assumption that the writer is cis. In this case, the assumption that Acker was a cis woman. A dimension of writerly freedom is the freedom not so much from gender as within it.

The will toward freedom within gender is present in Acker’s life as well as in the work. The various, evolving Acker personas were improvised up against the constraints of image-making for the media. Working in the space of appearances is less free than working alone, writing in her endless journals, cross-legged on the floor, masturbating – a practice of Acker’s that I witnessed. Not freedom from gender, which inevitably ends up as some fascist, conformist demand, one particularly punishing toward femininity. Freedom within gender. Rather than being a unitary subject – ‘Kathy Acker’ – there were various Ackers, variously gendered. On the page, in public appearances – and in everyday life.

If one must think through identity labels, this is a way to square Acker’s affinities for queerness with the desire to be fucked, and by men. Sometimes Acker might be a girl, or a woman, being fucked, but sometimes Acker might be a man, or a boy, being fucked, or occasionally doing the fucking. It’s a quality she appreciated in others sometimes too. Among Acker’s lovers, I’m not the only one who was or is or could have been in some sense trans. Acker liked cis men, mostly, and sometimes cis women, but also had an affinity for gender pirates.

Among Acker’s most consistent personas was the pirate, imaginary avatar of worldly freedom, tacking away from state and capital. But it seemed like you had to be a man to be a pirate. So rather than sail the seas, Acker became a pirate of literature. In the open space of the old ocean of language, Acker could be free, and among other things, free within gender. Acker pirates are mythic rather than historical. They are amoral libertines. The free is not the good in Acker’s philosophy.

Piracy was an allegory for her own methods, and one of her myths. Acker liked the way myths began, as open-ended potential, not how they ended, when the hero slays the monster. The practice of writing is mythic in the sense that once a sentence begins it can go anywhere. In Acker-texts, beginnings never end.

McBride describes Great Expectations, one of Acker’s early books, as a ‘felicitous marriage of mutiny and momentum, rage and humour’. And so it is. Fiction is supposed to be free from mere facticity, but this is so rarely the case. Most fiction is just banal rearrangements of the obvious. Most sentences in fiction end pretty much where one expects. Stories might have ‘twists’, but they still have predictable arcs. Acker’s prose is not like that, and it’s a hard-won quality. McBride documents the various tactics deployed at different stages by different Ackers to undo the relentless obviousness of most writing, including much modernist writing. As he writes, ‘Literature was both her life and her adversary’.  

Literature whether high or low was treated not as ‘inspiration’, but as raw material. Acker’s was a materialist practice, a labour of making texts out of texts. Like all interesting writers, Acker was an interesting reader. Through voracious reading, Acker found blocks of text that could be altered, juxtaposed, undone, redone. One might say Acker read ‘sideways’ against the line of the text, unfolding the map of possibilities.

One of the texts from which Acker appropriates is memory. Shards of family life appear in multiple irreconcilable versions. Accidental births, unloving mothers, fathers who aren’t real fathers. For McBride, ‘the negative space of her past, with all its gaps and contradictions, remained a bottomless source of images and provided a kind of prefab pulp fiction’.

From literature, from life, from memory, from dreams, Acker drew the materials for writing as a mythic practice of absolute freedom. McBride: ‘She wanted to replace the old myths, the old superstructures – the double-bind patriarchal ones, the oedipal ones’. The moments of formless possibility in myth are what attract Acker, out of which other narrative practices and cultural forms could be drawn. That we can all make our own myths by cracking open the old ones is her gift to the reader.

It didn’t always work. McBride is one of the few who have noticed the influence of African writers on Acker, particularly Yambo Ouologuem and Ayi Kwei Armah, although I suspect there are others. There’s a book yet to be written on Acker’s complicated relation to race. Attempts at solidarity with anti-imperialist colonial movements tip into a kind of romanticism of the African or ‘Oriental’ other.

In many ways, Acker is still our contemporary. Most of her writing life was spent in New York, the Bay Area and London – three centres of what she sometimes called ‘postcapitalism’. Acker was an acute observer of the nexus of money, sex, art, tech and real estate in these metropolises, where the economy of things came increasingly under the command of an economy of information.

And then there’s Acker’s sexual politics, which owed less to second wave feminism than to sex workers. But for me, Acker is our contemporary mainly in opening up trans-ness as one of the axes of freedom within writing, and beyond. What we might become, on the page, is limitless. What we might become, in life, has to deal with the banalities and constraints of embodiment, on which Acker could write so well. Flesh too can be otherwise, if one reads and writes the languages of the body.

Read on: Julian Stallabrass, ‘In and Out of Love with Damien Hirst’, NLR I/26.

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Where to Begin?

Even as a child, I was behind the curve. The toy store in the upscale shopping centre put my militia of Ninja Turtles, Jedi and Care Bears to shame. Unfamiliar brands glowered in judgment at my snot-nostrilled provincialism, the Play-Doh under my fingernails marking me as a suburbanite weaned on basic cable, a proper bourgeois childhood just out of reach. Instead of Barney, Babar. Instead of Barbie, American Girl. Most telling, on the shelves of these upper-class emporiums of Knoxville, Tennessee were the storybooks. No Goosebumps or Poky Little Puppy, here was another world: D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, The Eleventh Hour and Roald Dahl, the appropriate companions of a growing mind that would soon expand to accommodate Robert Louis Stevenson, JRR Tolkien and The Secret Garden. How had I ever been content with Theodor Geisel and the Berenstain Bears?

This fall, New Directions – known as a pioneer of American modernism and foreign writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Roberto Bolaño and WG Sebald – published six ‘storybooks’ for adults, or perhaps especially precocious children. The stated aim of the series is ‘to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvellous book from cover to cover in an afternoon’. Curated by the Egyptian-born writer-translator Gini Alhadeff, each volume comes handsomely outfitted with a silvery spine and a design by book artist du jour Peter Mendelsund. Four of the books are brand-new works for English-language readers by contemporary New Directions authors – Helen DeWitt, Cesar Aira, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Yoko Tawada – while the other two, by Clarice Lispector and Osamu Dazai, are drawn from the stockpile of their late authors’ output. All but one is a translation: two from Japanese, one from Spanish, one Portuguese and one Hungarian.

What to make of this array, both as individual ‘storybooks’ and as a series? Only the fourth book to be published under DeWitt’s name (not including Your Name Here, co-written with Ilya Gridneff, which never saw publication but occasionally circulates as a PDF), The English Understand Wool has unsurprisingly garnered the most critical attention. The storybook format suits DeWitt’s text well. It is the story of well-spoken seventeen-year-old Marguerite, whisked away from her life in Marrakech by her maman to have a tweed suit made in London. Once there, Marguerite is abandoned and soon learns from a detective that her life has been a lie: she is in fact an orphan whose presumptive parents have fleeced her of her fortune and made a break for it. Now a cause célèbre, possessed of only her excellent taste and prim expectations, she undertakes to tell her story in a memoir, but each instalment of her manuscript is meddled with by her New York publishers. That DeWitt, a genius famously ill-served by the publishing industry, has written a novella about a genius ill-served by the carrion gatekeepers of literary culture has not been lost on critics. But Marguerite’s story, as she is quick to remind her editors at every impasse, belongs to her alone. She won’t be told that she is a victim, that she is too young to account for herself, or that she should substitute ‘suit’ for her preferred word tailleur. That a ghost writer should commute her story – that of a ‘missing child’ raised outside the culture she was born into by imposters – to the kind of neutered copy the masses expect is quite out of the question. I am who I tell you I am, DeWitt seems to be saying, and I will speak for myself in the language of my choosing.

A more unusual choice is Laszlo Krasznahorhai’s Spadework for a Palace, translated by John Batki. It’s the second novella to appear since the oracular Hungarian writer announced his retirement in 2019; a third, A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, is due shortly – Krasznahorhai says this is because he doesn’t consider these to be ‘books’. Subtitled ‘Entering the Madness of Others’, Spadework’s narrator is herman melvill, one letter and two capitals short of literary immortality, a meek to the point of non-existent librarian who sees shadows of the great mystic and mariner not only in his own biography (he too lived on East 26th Street, he too apprenticed at a customs office), but in the alcoves and belvederes of Manhattan through which he roams in a mania of overidentification with his near-namesake. The circumstances of melvill’s own life – the wife who has deserted him, the tedium of his post at the NYPL, even his grand ambitions for a Permanently Closed Library housing every lost, secret, or unread volume ever authored and into which no man can enter – occur as afterthoughts. Nor is Melville the only spectre haunting melvill’s wanderings: there is also Malcolm Lowry, the patron saint of dipsomaniacs whose Under the Volcano is equally plagued by unhomeliness, and the American artist and architect Lebbeus Woods, whose impossible designs, which seem to be both ascending and in the midst of collapse, capture melvill’s crisis.

‘Manhattan’, melvill thinks, ‘is a nightmare come to life’, and dreams, whether good or bad, seem to displace its residents as surely as climbing rents. Hence, we have a book that is not a book, about a non-person in a kind of non-place. ‘People must be told the truth,’ agonizes melvill:

and, if you are truly an artist, this is the spirit in which you have to create architecture and poetry and music and science and philosophy, you have to look people in the eye as you tell them the truth about this universe in which we exist, that in fact this universe means danger, hazard, stress and destruction – nothing is whole and intact, the very notion of an intact whole is a lie – peace and tranquillity, permanence and rest are illusion far more dangerous than the truth . . .

But melvill is no artist and has no instrument with which to articulate his disquiet or vent his demons. His interior monologue, rendered in one long sentence, comes closer than Krasznahorhai ever has to Thomas Bernhard’s eloquent stutter. But while Bernhard’s fanatical monologues were calculated to insulate their speaker from other people, to insist on uncontaminated individuality, melvill is all influence and no inspiration. For a man always on the move, he is a true paralytic. If anything as commonplace as a climax can be said to occur in Spadework, it comes through the sentences of another, as melvill turns to the ‘Resistance Checklist’ Lebbeus Woods inscribed in his notebook: ‘Resist that feeling of utter exhaustion. Resist hoping that next year will be better. Resist accepting your fate. Resist people who tell you to resist. Resist the panicky feeling that you are alone.’ And if Spadework has a moral, as storybooks are supposed to, it is that ‘There is no duality in existence.’ We have one life to live, this storybook tell us, and it is not ours.

The Famous Magician by Cesar Aira, translated by Chris Andrews, is my favourite of the new books. Aira is the ludicrously prolific Argentinian author of over a hundred short books that invariably come apart while somehow keeping their shape. Rules are established before being merrily violated, ho-hum personal accounts become far-fetched zombie stories, serious literary rumination gives way to comic book pastiche. I’m a little baffled by the avant-garde bona fides of Aira’s practice, which he calls el continuo, in which he writes a page a day (so, like a writer?) and resists the urge to revise (so, he keeps going?). But the method appears to have been working: the results have been books that don’t read like the ones you encounter in life but the kind you might pick up in dreams.

Meeting the titular figure at an outdoor market in Buenos Aires, a sixty-something writer who resembles Aira is offered the power to transmute sugar into gold if he gives up literature (‘a waste of time and dangerous for the purity of the soul’). The Aira-narrator is intrigued – he has tired of life and craves renewal through the miraculous – and finds himself torn between the ‘sham magic’ of his novels and ‘the real magic’ opening up before him. The Aira-like writer quizzes his friends about the magician’s ultimatum, then journeys to Egypt to give an absurd talk about contemporary art that seems to be mostly about airports, and later winds up over the Nile at midnight, engaged in a magical duel with the warlock. Our hero is narrowly rescued by a deus ex machina which, as in most of Aira’s output, splits the difference between idiocy and inspiration. Aira’s story could never survive the oxidation of logic, but sealed in its hermetic repository of senselessness, it’s a magic trick of its own.

The other three storybooks are all grab-bags. 3 Streets by Yoko Tawada contains three ghost stories set in Berlin, where the Japanese writer has lived since 2006. Tawada writes in both Japanese and German, and tends to be concerned with displacement, embodiment and the accidental epiphanies of exophony. Her books engage these themes by, for instance, telling the story of a kidnapped Vietnamese woman whose life begins to transform into the films of Catherine Deneuve, a circus polar bear who becomes a bestselling memoirist in the Soviet Union, or a closed-off island nation where children become frail and the elderly exuberant. Ghosts are a natural subject, as guests who nonetheless have an older claim on the land than the living. Each ‘street’ in the volume, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is both charming and unnerving. In ‘Kollwitzstrasse’, a shopper in a grocery store meets the ghost of a child whose narrow taste in foodstuffs, the narrator realizes, must date from when this neighbourhood of the city was part of East Germany. The story ends by imagining the grief of the artist Käthe Kollwitz after the death of her son in a war fought for the wrong ideals. The narrator of ‘Majakowkiring’ walks the city enmeshed in a mélange of histories, having been visited by the discontented ghost of Mayakovsky, who steps out of a photograph in a restaurant:

The city is an amusement park of the senses, a rehearsal for revolution, a restaurant where loneliness is devoured, a workshop for words. Surrounded by city scenes that look like the future, you believe you’ll soon be able to grasp the future itself. This is especially true when you’re intensely, violently waiting for someone. The fact that even if you meet the awaited person at the appointed time you still have the days after that to live through, slowly, stoically, moment after moment. You want everything all at once, right now.

In ‘Pushkin Allee’, the stone soldiers in a memorial to the Red Army come alive and, hearkening to the distant words of Stalin, prepare to fight the Nazis in Kreuzberg. This may well be Tawada’s finest work, partly because of how moving it is when someone capable of so much wit knows when to be reverent. A perfect story.

Early Light, a kind of chaser to Osamu Dazai’s classic novel of decadence and depersonalization during the demise of the Japanese Empire No Longer Human (1948), is ostensibly another unexpected inclusion. Yet it is here that themes explored throughout the series – identity’s abnegation under the weight of art and history, the attendant wish for an alternative that fails to arrive – appear in their most unvarnished form. During the war in Tokyo, Dazai was left half-buried by rubble after a bombing raid, leading him to join his family in Kofu, only for bombs to fall there too. This enigmatically informs the story, written in the immediate aftermath, of a drunkard who feels himself extraneous to his wife and children (one of whom, blinded by the attacks, may never see again) and struggles to find heroism rather than degeneracy in his character.

The destruction wrought by modern life pervades the second story, ‘One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji’. Unable to enjoy the view of what is after all a dormant volcano (‘Fuji from the window of an apartment in Tokyo is a painful sight’), a writer finds himself unable to reconcile representation with the real thing, or to connect with the people around him. He feels helpless to protect those for whom he feels responsible (‘Those who suffer shall suffer. Those who fall shall fall. It had nothing to do with me, it was just the way the world was.’). It’s the definition of fatalism, but shorn of any nobility; he’s lived in indifference to himself for so long that there’s nothing left for other people. The end, in which the narrator, asked to take a picture for a pair of tourists posing in front of the mountain, cuts them out of the shot, could either cap the tragedy of a scoundrel who has decided to have done with humanity once and for all, or symbolize a more hopeful insistence that the only thing that endures be allowed its own frame at last. Or both. The title of the final story, ‘Villon’s Wife’ – an old translation by Donald Keene; the other two are by Ralph McCarthy – refers to Francois Villon, the medieval poet beloved by lowlifes. An indolent alcoholic who drinks what he earns for his stories remains swaddled in the life of the mind while his wife works off his debts and keeps secret her rape by a customer. In the last line, she reflects ‘There’s nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive.’ She, too, is no longer human.

Clarice Lispector’s The Woman Who Killed the Fish, first published in Portuguese in 1968 and translated by Benjamin Moser, is the only volume originally composed with children in mind. A writer of formidable modernist pedigree, it is something of a relief to find her working in a chatty, mischievous mode and concerned with that most storybook of subjects, the ‘intimate life’ of animals. First, let’s exonerate the murderess of the title story: she forgot to feed the fish. It could happen to anyone. Throughout, she maintains her love of all things small and clear in their desires (‘Animals speak without words.’). It is a life’s story in animals: we meet cockroaches, a little lizard, two dogs, a monkey baptized Lisete who dies wearing the narrator’s earrings and necklace, an enchanted island of parakeets, fish, and tapirs, and a quarrelsome dog named Bruno Barberini de Monteverdi. The same enchantment extends to the next story, ‘The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit’, which is flecked with lovely little asides like ‘as long as they’re loved, they don’t mind being a little dumb’, ‘every nature has its advantages’ and ‘a happy rabbit knows a bunch of things’.

The French writer and diarist Jules Renard also puzzled over the inner lives of animals and lamented that the weasels, dragonflies and ants he wrote about would never read his work. For his part, Ulisses, the dog-narrator of Lispector’s ‘Almost True’, has more on his mind than tummy-rubs and relates a kind of chivalric romance about a rooster, a witch and a fig tree. The last story, ‘Laura’s Intimate Life’, tells the life and times of a ‘quite advanced hen’. In the last episode in Laura’s eventful life as livestock, the question of interiority is turned on its head: she is visited by a diminutive being from outer space and together they wonder ‘what humans were like inside’. In these six books, we have six attempts at an answer, but each seems to say, ‘Well, where to begin?’ This one, at least, ends as all storybooks should, assuring us that all is well, at least for the birds, and with the words ‘the end’.

Read on: Ricardo Piglia ‘Theses on the Short Story’, NLR 70.

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Getting Closer

On 17 October, Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz invoked his constitutional privilege under Article 65 of the Grundgesetz to ‘determine the guidelines’ of his government’s policy. Chancellors do this rarely, if at all; the political wisdom is three strikes and you’re out. At stake was the lifespan of Germany’s last three nuclear power plants. As a result of Merkel’s post-Fukushima turn, intended to pull the Greens into a coalition with her party, these are scheduled by law to go out of service by the end of 2022. Afraid of nuclear accidents and nuclear waste, and also of their well-to-do middle-class voters, the Greens, now governing together with SPD and FDP, refused to give up their trophy. The FDP, on the other hand, demanded that given the current energy crisis, all three plants – accounting for about six percent of the domestic German electricity supply – be kept in operation as long as needed, meaning indefinitely. To end the fighting, Scholz issued an order to the ministries involved, formally declaring it government policy that the plants continue until mid-April next year, par ordre du mufti, as German political jargon puts it. Both parties knuckled under, saving the coalition for the time being.

The Greens – recently called ‘the most hypocritical, aloof, mendacious, incompetent and, measured by the damage they cause, the most dangerous party we currently have in the Bundestag’ by the indestructible Sahra Wagenknecht – are rather more afraid of nuclear power than nuclear arms. Anesthetized by the rapidly rising number of Green fellow-travellers in the media and mesmerized by fantasies of Biden delivering Putin to The Hague to stand trial in the international criminal court, the German public refuses to consider the damage nuclear escalation in Ukraine would cause, and what it would mean for the future of Europa and, for that matter, Germany (a place many German Greens do not consider particularly worth protecting anyway). With few exceptions, German political elites, as well as their agitprop mainstream press, know or pretend to know nothing about either the current state of nuclear arms technology or the role assigned to the German military in the nuclear strategy and tactics of the United States.

As post-Zeitenwende Germany increasingly declares itself ready to be the leading nation of Europe, its domestic politics becomes more than ever a matter of European interest. Most Germans conceive of nuclear warfare as an intercontinental battle between Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) and the United States, with ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads crossing the Atlantic or, as the case may be, the Pacific. Europe may or may not get hit, but since the world would anyway go under, there is no need really to think about any of this. Perhaps afraid of being accused of Wehrkraftzersetzung – subversion of military strength, punishable with the death penalty in the Second World War – none of the suddenly numerous German ‘defence experts’ seems willing to confirm that what Biden calls Armageddon is a future that may become a present only following a protracted phase of ‘tactical’ rather than ‘strategic’ nuclear warfare in Europe, and indeed on Ukrainian battlefields.

One weapon of choice here is an American nuclear bomb called B61, designed to be dropped from fighter planes on military concentrations on the ground. Although all of them have sworn to devote themselves ‘to the well-being of the German people [and] protect them from harm’, no member of the German government will talk about what kind of fallout the use of a B61 in Ukraine may produce; where the winds will likely carry it; how long the area around a nuked battlefield will remain uninhabitable; and how many disabled children will be born nearby and afar over how many years, all so the Crimean peninsula can remain or become again Ukrainian. What is clear is that compared to nuclear warfare, even of the localized kind, the 1986 nuclear accident in Chernobyl (which hastened the rise of the Greens in Germany) would appear utterly negligible in its effects. It is notable that the Greens have up to now refrained from calling for precautions to protect the population of Germany and Europe against nuclear contamination – assembling stocks of Geiger counters or iodine tablets, for example – which one might think would recommend itself after the experience with Covid-19. Keeping sleeping dogs asleep obviously takes precedence over public health or, for that matter, the protection of the environment.

Not that ‘the West’ is not preparing for nuclear war. In mid-October, NATO staged a military exercise called ‘Steadfast Noon’, described by the Frankfurter Allgemeine as an ‘annual nuclear arms drill’. The exercise involved sixty fighter planes from fourteen countries and took place over Belgium, the North Sea and the UK. ‘Facing Russian threats to use nuclear arms’, the FAZ explained, ‘the Alliance actively and providently released information about the exercise to avoid misunderstandings in Moscow, but also to demonstrate its operational readiness’. At the centre of the event were the five countries – Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey (!) – that have a ‘nuclear participation agreement’ with the US, which provides for some of their fighter planes to carry American B61s to targets designated by the United States. Around one hundred B61s are allegedly stored in Europe, guarded by US troops. The German air force maintains a fleet of Tornado bombers devoted to ‘nuclear participation’. The planes are said to be outdated, however, and during the coalition negotiations it was a non-negotiable demand of the incoming foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, that the Tornados be replaced as soon as possible with thirty-five American F35 stealth bombers. These are now being ordered and will likely be delivered in about five years, at a price of 8 billion euros, to the dismay of the French who had hoped to be cut into the deal. Maintenance and repairs are estimated to cost two or three times that during the lifetime of the planes.

It is important to note precisely what ‘Steadfast Noon’ is about. Pilots learn to shoot down the enemy’s interceptor planes and, when close enough to the target, perform a complicated manoeuvre, the so-called ‘shoulder throw’. Approaching at a very low height, with one bomb each attached to their underside, planes suddenly reverse direction by flying a forward loop, releasing the bomb at the apex of their climb. The bomb thereby continues in the original direction of the plane, until it falls in a ballistic curve eradicating whatever it is supposed to eradicate at the end of its trajectory. At that time the plane will already be on its supersonic way home, having avoided the wave caused by the nuclear explosion. Ending on a feel-good note for its readers, the FAZ revealed that ‘strategic B-52 long-range bombers’ from the United States, ‘designed for nuclear missiles that can be dropped from great altitudes’, also participated in the exercise.

Those disposed to undertake a close reading of the public pronouncements of the governing coalition of the willing can recognize traces of debates going on behind the scenes, over how best to prevent the Great Unwashed getting in the way of what may be coming to them. On 21 September, one of the chief editors of FAZ, Berthold Kohler, a hardliner if there ever was one, noted that even among Western governments ‘the unthinkable is no longer considered impossible’. Rather than allowing themselves to be blackmailed, however, Western ‘statesmen’ have to muster ‘more courage… if the Ukrainians insist on liberating their entire country’, an insistence that we have no right to argue with. Any ‘arrangement with Russia at the expense of the Ukrainians’ would amount to ‘appeasement’ and ‘betray the West’s values and interests’, the two happily converging. To reassure those of his readers who would nevertheless rather live for their families than die for Sevastopol – and who had hitherto been told that the entity called ‘Putin’ is a genocidal madman entirely impervious to rational argument – Kohler reports that in Moscow there is sufficient fear of ‘the nuclear Armageddon in which Russia and its leaders would burn as well’ for the West to support to the hilt the Zelensky view of the Ukrainian national interest.

It was, however, only a few days later that one of Kohler’s staff writers, Nikolas Busse, plainly announced that ‘the nuclear risk is growing’, pointing out that ‘the Russian military has a big arsenal of smaller, so-called tactical nuclear arms suitable for the battlefield’. The White House, according to Busse, ‘has through direct channels warned Russia of severe consequences’ should it use them. Whether the American attempt ‘to raise Putin’s potential costs’ would have the desired effect was, however, uncertain. ‘Germany’, the article continues, ‘under the presumed protection of Biden’s strategy, has allowed itself an astonishingly frivolous debate over the delivery of battle tanks to Ukraine’, referring to tanks that would enable the Ukrainian army to enter Russian territory, overstepping what is apparently the Ukrainians’ assigned role in the American proxy war with Russia and likely provoking a nuclear response: ‘More than ever one should not expect the United States to risk its head for solo adventures (Alleingänge) of its allies. No American president will put the nuclear fate of his nation into European hands’ (unlike, one cannot avoid noting, European presidents putting their nations’ fate in American hands).

Busse’s article marked the outer limit of what the German political establishment was willing to let the more literate sections of German society know about debates with the country’s allies and what Germany may have to put up with if the war is allowed to continue. But that limit is changing rapidly. Hardly a week had gone by when Kohler, expressing the same doubts regarding the United States’ willingness to sacrifice New York for Berlin, explicitly called for Germany to acquire nuclear bombs of its own, something that has been completely and seemingly permanently outside the bounds of admissible political thought in Germany. While German nuclear capacity, according to Kohler, was to offer insurance against the unpredictability of American domestic politics and global strategy, it would also be a precondition of German leadership in Europe independent from France and closer in line with the worldview of Eastern European countries such as Poland.

Frankfurt, Goethe once noted of his hometown, ‘is full of oddities’. The same can be said today of Berlin, and indeed Germany as a whole. Bizarre things are happening, with public consideration of them tightly managed by an alliance of the centrist parties and the media, and supported to an amazing extent by self-imposed censorship in civil society. Before one’s eyes, an apparently democratically governed mid-sized regional power is being turned, and is actively turning itself, into a transatlantic dependency of the Great American War Machines, from NATO to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon to the NSA, and the CIA to the National Security Council. When on 26 September the two Nord Stream pipelines were hit by a massive underwater attack, the powers that be tried for a few days to convince the German public that the perpetrator could only have been ‘Putin’, intending to demonstrate to the Germans that there would be no return to the good old gas days. It soon became clear, however, that this strained the credulity of even the most credulous of German Untertanen. Why should what is called ‘Putin’ have voluntarily deprived himself of the possibility, small as it might be, of luring Germany back into energy dependency, as soon as the Germans became unable to pay the staggering price of American Liquid Natural Gas? And why would he not have blown up the pipelines in Russian rather than international waters, the latter more heavily policed than any other maritime landscape except, perhaps, the Persian Gulf? Why risk a squadron of Russian shock troops, which would undoubtedly have been sizeable, being caught red-handed, triggering a direct confrontation with several NATO member states under Article 5?

Lacking even a remotely credible ‘narrative’ – the new word in elevated jargon for a story manufactured for a purpose – the matter was effectively dropped, after no more than a week. Two days after the explosion, a lone reporter for a local newspaper based at the entry to the Baltic Sea observed the USS Kearsarge, an ‘amphibious assault ship’ capable of transporting up to 2,000 soldiers, exit the Baltic west-bound, accompanied by two landing boats; a photograph of two of the three mighty ships made its way onto the internet. Nobody in German politics or the national media took any notice, certainly not publicly. By mid-October, Sweden, currently applying for NATO membership, announced that it will keep the results of its investigation of the event to itself; the security rating of its findings was too high ‘to share with other states like Germany’. Shortly thereafter, Denmark also withdrew from the joint investigation.

As for Germany, on 7 October the government had to answer a question from a Die Linke Bundestag member on what it knew of the causes and perpetrators of the pipeline attacks. Beyond stating that it considered them ‘acts of sabotage’, the government claimed to have no information, adding that it would likely not have any in the future either. Moreover, ‘after careful consideration, the Federal Government has come to the conclusion that further information cannot be given for reasons of public interest’ (in German, aus Gründen des Staatswohls, literally: for reasons of the welfare of the state, a concept apparently modelled on another neologism, Tierwohl, animal welfare, which in recent German legalese refers to what breeders of chickens and pigs must allow their animals so that their farming practices can count as ‘sustainable’). This, the answer continues, was because ‘the requested information is subject to the restrictions of the “Third-Party-Rule”, which concerns the internal exchange of information by the intelligence services’ and therefore ‘affects secrecy interests that require protection in such a way that the Staatswohl outweighs the parliamentary right to information, so that the right of MPs to ask questions must exceptionally take second place to the secrecy interest of the Federal Government’. To this writer’s knowledge, there has been no mention whatsoever of this exchange in the Staatswohl-oriented media.

There have been further ominous events of this kind. In an accelerated procedure lasting only two days, the Bundestag, using language supplied by the Ministry of Justice held by the supposedly liberal FDP, amended Section 130 of the Criminal Code, which makes it a crime to ‘approve, deny or diminish (verharmlosen)’ the Holocaust. On 20 October, an hour before midnight, a new paragraph was passed, hidden in an omnibus bill dealing with the technicalities of creating central registers, which adds ‘war crimes’ (Kriegsverbrechen) to what must not be approved, denied or diminished. The coalition and the CDU/CSU voted for the amendment, Die Linke and AfD against. There was no public debate. According to the government, the amendment was needed for the transposition into German law of a European Union directive to fight racism. With two minor exceptions, the press failed to report on what is nothing other than a legal coup d’état. (Two weeks later the FAZ protested that using Section 130 for the purpose was disrespectful of the unique nature of the Holocaust.)

It may not be long before the Federal Prosecutor starts legal proceedings against someone for comparing Russian war crimes in Ukraine to American war crimes in Iraq, thereby ‘diminishing’ the former (or the latter?). Similarly, the Federal Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution may soon begin to place ‘diminishers’ of ‘war crimes’ under observation, including surveillance of their telephone and email communication. Even more important for a country where almost everybody on the morning after the Machtübernahme greeted their neighbour with Heil Hitler rather than Guten Tag, will be what in the United States is called a ‘chilling effect’. Which journalist or academic having to feed a family or wishing to advance their career will risk being ‘observed’ by inland security as a potential ‘diminisher’ of Russian war crimes?

In other respects as well, the corridor of the sayable is rapidly, and frighteningly, narrowing. As with the destruction of the pipelines, the strongest taboos relate to the role of the United States, both in the history of the conflict and in the present. In admissible public speech, the Ukrainian war – which is expected to be termed ‘Putin’s war of aggression’ (Angriffskrieg) by all loyal citizens – becomes entirely de-contextualized: it has no history outside of the ‘narrative’ of a decade-long brooding of a mad dictator in the Kremlin over how to best wipe out the Ukrainian people, facilitated by the stupidity, combined with greed, of the Germans falling for his cheap gas. As this writer found out when an interview he had given to the online edition of a centre-right German weekly, Cicero, was cut without consultation, among what is not to be mentioned in polite German society are the American rejection of Gorbachev’s ‘Common European Home’, the subversion within the United States of Clinton’s project of a ‘Partnership for Peace’, and the rebuff as late as 2010 of Putin’s proposal of a European free trade zone ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok’. Equally unmentionable is the fact that by the mid-1990s at the latest, the United States had decided that the border of post-communist Europe should be identical to the western border of post-communist Russia, which would also be the eastern border of NATO, to the west of which there were to be no restrictions whatsoever on the stationing of troops and weapons systems. The same holds for the extensive American strategic debates on ‘extending Russia’, as documented in publicly accessible working papers of the RAND Corporation.

More examples of the publicly unsayable include the historically unprecedented arms build-up on the part of the United States during the ‘war on terror’, accompanied by the unilateral termination of all remaining arms control agreements with the Soviet Union of old; the unrelenting American pressure on Germany to replace Russian natural gas with American liquid natural gas after the invention of fracking, culminating in the American decision long before the war to close down Nord stream 2, one way or other; the peace negotiations that preceded the war, including the Minsk agreements between Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine, negotiated by among others the then German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, which fell apart under pressure from the Obama administration and its special envoy for US-Ukrainian relations, the then Vice President Joe Biden, coinciding with a radicalization of Ukrainian nationalism (today Steinmeier keeps publicly confessing and repenting for his past sins as a peacenik, in language that effectively bars him from considering any future European security regime which does not include regime change in Russia); and not least the connection between Biden’s European and South East Asian strategies, especially the American preparations for war with China.

A glimpse of the latter was provided when Admiral Michael Gilday, US Chief of Naval Operations, in a hearing before Congress on 20 October, let it be known that the United States had to be prepared ‘for a 2022 window or potentially a 2023 window’ for war over Taiwan with China. For all its obsession with the United States, the fact that it is common transatlantic knowledge that the Ukrainian war is at bottom a proxy war between the US and Russia completely escapes the official German public. Voices of the likes of Niall Ferguson or Jeffrey Sachs urgently warning against nuclear brinkmanship go unnoticed; the former in an article in Bloomberg, entitled ‘How Cold War II Could Turn into World War III’, an article that no Staatswohl-minded German publisher would have accepted.

In the Germany of today, any attempt to place the Ukrainian war in the context of the reorganization of the global state system after the end of the Soviet Union and the American project of a ‘New World Order’ (the elder Bush) is suspicious. Those who do run the risk of being branded as Putinversteher and invited on one of the daily talk shows on public television – for ‘false balance’ in the eyes of the militants – to face an armada of right-thinking neo-warriors shouting at them. Early in the war, on 28 April, Jürgen Habermas, court philosopher of the Greens, published a long article in Süddeutsche Zeitung, under the long title ‘Shrill tone, moral blackmail: On the battle of opinions between former pacifists, a shocked public and a cautious Chancellor following the attack on Ukraine’. In it, he took issue with the exalted moralism of the neo-bellicists among his followers, cautiously expressing support for what at the time appeared to be reluctance on the part of the Bundeskanzler for headlong involvement in the Ukrainian war. For this Habermas was fervently attacked from within what he must have thought was his camp, and has remained silent since.

Those who might have hoped for Habermas’ still potentially influential voice to help increasingly desperate efforts to prevent German policy becoming forever fixated on a Ukrainian Endsieg, cost what it may, are left with the leader of the SPD parliamentary party, Rolf Mützenich, a former university docent of international relations. Mützenich has become a hate figure of the new war coalition inside and outside the government, which tries to brand him as a relic from before the Zeitenwende when people still believed that peace might be possible without the military destruction of whatever evil empire may get in the way of the ‘West’. In a recent article on the thirtieth anniversary of Willy Brandt’s death, hidden away in a social-democratic newsletter, Mützenich warned of an impending ‘end of the nuclear taboo’ and argued that ‘diplomacy must not be limited by ideological rigour or moral teaching. We must recognize that men like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Mohammed bin Salman, Bashar al-Assad and the many others will be influencing the fortunes of their countries, their neighbourhoods and the world for longer than we would like’. It will be interesting to see how long his supporters, many of them young newly elected SPD MPs, will manage to keep him in his position.

What is nothing short of astonishing is how many hawks have come out of their nests in recent months in Germany. Some figure as ‘experts’ on Eastern Europe, international politics and the military, who believe it to be their Western duty to help the public deny the approaching reality of nuclear explosions on European territory; others are ordinary citizens who suddenly enjoy following tank battles on the internet and rooting for ‘our’ side. Some of the most warlike used to belong to the left, widely defined; today they are more or less aligned with the Green party and in this emblematically represented by Baerbock, now the foreign minister. A strange combination of Joan of Arc and Hillary Clinton, Baerbock is one of the many so-called ‘young global leaders’ cultivated by the World Economic Forum. What is most characteristic of her version of leftism is its affinity to the United States, by far the most violence-prone state in the contemporary world. To understand this, it may help to remember that those of her generation have never experienced war, and neither have their parents; indeed, it is safe to assume that its male members avoided the draft as conscientious objectors until it was suspended, not least under their electoral pressure. Moreover, no previous generation has grown up as much under the influence of American soft power, from pop music to movies and fashion to a succession of social movements and cultural fads, all of which were promptly and eagerly copied in Germany, filling the gap caused by the absence of any original cultural contribution from this remarkably epigonal age cohort (an absence that is euphemistically called cosmopolitanism).

Looking deeper, as one must, cultural Americanism, including its idealistic expansionism, promises a libertarian individualism which in Europe, unlike the United States, is felt to be incompatible with nationalism, the latter happening to be the anathema of the Green left. This leaves as the only remaining possibility for collective identification a generalized ‘Westernism’ misunderstood as a ‘values’-based universalism, which is in fact a scaled-up Americanism immune to contamination by the reality of American society. Westernism, abstracted from the particular needs, interests and commitments of everyday life, is inevitably moralistic; it can live only in Feindschaft with differently moral, and in its eyes therefore immoral, non-Westernism, which it cannot let live and ultimately must let die. Not least, by adopting Westernism, this kind of new left can for once hope to be not just on the right but also on the winning side, American military power promising them that this time, finally, they may not be fighting for a lost cause.

Moreover, Westernism amounts to the internationalization, under robust American leadership, of the culture wars being fought at home, inspired by role models in the United States (although there the war may be about to be lost at least domestically). In the Westernized mind, Putin and Xi, Trump and Truss, Bolsonaro and Meloni, Orbán and Kaczyński are all the same, all ‘fascists’. With historical meaning restored to the uprooted individualized life in late-capitalist anomie, there is once more a chance to fight and even die for, if nothing else, then for the common ‘values’ of humanity – an opportunity for heroism that seemed forever lost in the narrow horizons and the hedged parochialism enshrined in the complex institutions of postwar and postcolonial Western Europe. What makes such idealism even more attractive is that the fighting and dying can be delegated to proxies, people today, soon perhaps algorithms. For the time being, nothing more is asked of you than advocating your government sending heavy arms to the Ukrainians – whose ardent nationalism would until a few months ago have seemed nothing short of repulsive to Green cosmopolitans – while celebrating their willingness to put their lives on the line, for the cause not just of regaining Crimea for their country but also of Westernism itself.

Of course, in order to make ordinary people rally to the cause, effective ‘narratives’ must be devised to convince them that pacifism is either treason or a mental illness. People must also be made to believe that unlike what the defeatists say in order to undermine Western morale, nuclear war is not a threat: either the Russian madman will turn out to be not mad enough to follow up on his delusions, or if he doesn’t the damage will remain local, limited to a country whose people, as their president reassures us on television every night, are not afraid of dying for both their fatherland and, as von der Leyen puts it, for ‘the European family’ – which, when the time is ripe, will invite them in, all expenses paid.

Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’, NLR 54.

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Mike, in Memory

Dustin Hoffman once remarked that the experience of a film is like living: you don’t remember most of it; you remember moments. ‘This incident, that one, boom, boom – these vivid colours – the rest is like a blur … Banging on the taxi in Midnight Cowboy, “I’m walking here!”’

You can always go back to the movies, of course. Most of life is unrecorded; then it’s done. The moments linger, boom, boom – the colours sometimes muted, a different kind of vivid. I first met Mike Davis over the phone. He had borrowed Alex Cockburn’s 1964 Newport station wagon, I can’t remember why, but it had broken down, this great boat of steel, glass and chrome, now marooned by the side of a road. Alex was off somewhere – these were the days when anyone looking for him, from friends to bill collectors and one elderly astrologist, called The Nation with messages – but Mike had time. Maybe he was waiting for a tow. He called himself a truck driver, a former meat cutter. Prisoners of the American Dream was either just out or soon to be, but everything about that first chat suggested someone oblique to the familiar publishing world. He had a theory about what made the Newport fail, which soon gave way to stories about manoeuvring unsteady vehicles over unworthy roads, and shopfloor circumstances that contributed to this or that unreliable feature of a car. There was something riotous in his manner of speaking about things deadly serious, a quality I would notice again, later, among insurgent electricians and boilermakers and longshore workers.

For what seemed like the longest time after that, I imagined him reading at truck stops and writing in the dim light of the cab between hauls. That was a reflection of his romantic self-presentation, but maybe some of my own projection too. It was the 1980s. The working class was losing and hungry for troubadours from its ranks. Mike was a class jumper who carried the explosive tension of the class inside himself. In a statement before his death he railed against hope, yet when I think of Mike he is perched at the fulcrum between joy and dread, the point where material reality, rage and a radical hope converge. Like the LA Wobblies of the 1920s, whom he admired for their pungent analysis, ‘suicidal bravery’ and ‘gallows humor’, like the militants from Homestead who were putting up the final stand for steel-working communities at the time we first spoke, he had an eye for the absurd.  

* * *

Before there was City of Quartz, Mike pointed me to Louis Adamic’s Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (1931). Later, he would extol Street Rod (1953) by Henry Gregor Felsen. Of all his many recommendations, those two stick fastest. Adamic figures in Mike’s excavation of Los Angeles for ‘his emphasis on the centrality of class violence to the construction of the city’. Replace ‘city’ with ‘country’ and the sentence is still correct, the impacts of ruling-class brutality against labour throughout American history still vastly underappreciated, including on the left. Dynamite is also a withering examination of the instrumentalization of violence by union bureaucrats to entrench their own power. Street Rod is something else, a dime novel about surly boys in small-town Iowa and their mixed-up dreams of freedom, screeching cars and manhood. It especially appealed to Mike’s enthusiasm for verbs:

Ricky Madison was going too fast to do anything but watch the highway. How good it felt to split the night like the point of a knife, pipes blasting against the road! Speed … speed … speed … Link was eating his smoke now. And it was bitter.

It ends badly for Ricky Madison. Mike was teaching writing at the time and had students read Mickey Spillane, Cormac McCarthy, a literature of tough verbs, aka a literature of tough men. Verbs were the lesson, but the rootball of beauty and violence could not have been lost on the students. In various iterations, this was always Mike’s subject: sunshine and noir.

Dynamite also represents an irony, one I recognized only later. Adamic features as a debunker of LA myth-making in Mike’s chapter ‘Sunshine or Noir?’. When Adamic moved to the East Coast, Mike writes, that role was filled by Carey McWilliams, who would go on to unmask California agribusiness in Factories in the Field (1939) and by the 1950s would become The Nation’s most courageous editor, defying the Red Scare. Thirty-some years on, I read an early manuscript for a different chapter of Mike’s ‘LA book’ – it didn’t have a title then – and asked if he’d be willing to let The Nation publish it. At the time, black and brown young men were being stopped, humiliated, rounded up and arrested by the LAPD, in large numbers, every week, their names etc. entered into an anti-gang database for future crackdown. Operation Hammer was key to Mike’s discussion of the centrality of class violence to the contemporary era’s construction of LA. This was the first piece I tried to commission for the magazine. The other editors put the kibosh on it. ‘Who’s Mike Davis?’ some asked. ‘Part of that NLR crowd’, one of their number said, sniffing at Mike’s use of the word ‘proletariat’.

* * *

When we finally met, in New York, there was dinner with a bunch of people at a corner table at The Spain, a wonderful old place, now shuttered, its high-ceilinged stucco back room ringed crazily with reproductions of Spanish nudes and landscapes. The conversation swirled, as did the dishes, borne to the table by waiters in red waistcoats. I remember shrimp in garlic sauce, and Mike talking about the moral economy of the working class. It was an idea I’d not thought about – Peter Linebaugh’s magisterial book The London Hanged (1991), about customary takings, capital punishments and imposition of the wage system, was not yet published – but I felt certain that Mike’s point, that factory workers typically take just enough from the Man to meet what they think their labour is worth beyond the official wage, did not apply to my father. He was a tool and die maker, meticulous, a by-the-books kind of guy. Really, Mike said, your father never made anything on the side at the plant? Well, he sometimes fashioned little parts for the car or the house, like a customized bracket out of brass that my mother needed for hanging a lantern. And so we all laughed and laughed.

The next time I recall seeing Mike the subject was heartbreak. Carousing on the streets of New York, who remembers maudlin talk about lost loves? Alcohol-fuelled, probably embarrassing, certainly amusing. One of our stops was a bar decorated with tiles, whose workmanship we appreciated, maybe overmuch, as distraction from the details of our separate woes. I walk past that bar nearly every day in New York, its tiles and associated thoughts of the anonymous souls who laid them a mnemonic.

* * *

The last time I saw Mike he was in San Diego with Alessandra and the twins, James and Cassandra, along with his son Jack, then living with his girlfriend. His eldest child, Roisin, and he kept in steady touch. The pater familias, Mike called himself, with enjoyment. He couldn’t hear so well and joked about getting a horn, but that evening when he held his little girl in his arms as she recounted her day, he seemed keen to every word and emotional note.

I had been driving along the southern border since Brownsville, Texas, and was headed north. Aware of my interest in things coming apart, Mike traced what he deemed the ideal route on a map of California’s fault lines. It would take me along the San Andreas to where it meets the Walker Lane near China Lake, up through Death Valley and so on. His finger followed faint lines, small roads, dirt roads and washes ­– no Escondido, San Bernardino, Barstow freeway in this plan. He conceded it would be a challenge for my 1963 Valiant, but interesting; you’re allowed to sleep in your car on some of Death Valley’s dirt roads.

He took me for a lightning tour of El Cajon, now a bedroom community to San Diego, once a farm town and later, during Mike’s youth, a noir-ish crossroads where one local bully was a psychopath and another a secret philosopher. He once said that growing up he was terrifically patriotic until about the age of 15 but that in rehearsing the wonders of the US he’d always falter when it came to describing El Cajon: ‘the unspoken thing – the sound of somebody being beaten, the religious intolerance and, above all, the sheer stupidity of it … in the depth of the ’50s cold-war culture.’ Here was the Hell’s Angels clubhouse; there had been the elegant movie theatre, demolished in the name of development; these were the streets of teenage drinking and danger and longing, the boulevard that 3,000 youths commandeered one summer night in 1960 for a protest drag race that culminated in a police riot and paddywagons. Street Rod suddenly took on another dimension.

This wasn’t primarily a tour of the used-to-be, though. It was an encounter with the sacred and the profane. About five miles north of El Cajon, between Bostonia and Winter Gardens, where Mike’s parents had once lived, the town of Santee boasts the Creation and Earth History Museum, which derides evolution but also says humbug to the consolations of blind faith, appropriating science to justify the Bible and ultimately concluding where creationism usually does, with politics: to wit, Marx was a Satanist, and Hitler was the dramatic, though far less lethal, precursor to godless women who say abortion is a matter of choice. The Unarius Academy in El Cajon is more congenial, beginning with science – the cosmos and humankind’s ever-expanding technology for understanding it – and concluding with a hearty embrace of ‘our Space Brothers’, with whom Unarians say they have been in mental and spiritual contact since 1973. Airy matrons in the lobby greeted Mike like a familiar. And he, eyes twinkling, directed me to a sprawling 3D model: the Unarians’ utopian city, its roads and fantastic structures radiating from a centrepiece Tesla tower. I bought a small badge of a spaceship with coloured glass chips and pinned it to my jacket. Wear it all the time, the matrons urged; when they come, the Space Brothers will recognize you as a friend.

* * *

I never captured Mike on tape, his clipped, rapid commentary and acute detail, his stories, his jagged mirth. I don’t remember much of what he said as we drove along, don’t recall how it happened that, on the return leg of the tour, we were climbing up a rough road to the top of a mountain. I remember the Border Patrol truck that passed us, the way we reflexively tensed but ultimately knew better than to fear that a white-haired, white-moustachioed white man confidently steering a four-wheel-drive vehicle up a restricted road would be stopped. I remember the view from the top, Mexico, the purplish array of mountains and the remnants left by people who had crossed them to just that point: a few empty cans of tinned fish, a disposable razor, a cracked mirror. I remember the feeling of sorrow and fury.

And then we drove down another path, in a kind of wilderness, to the bottom, where just ahead, maybe a hundred yards, stood a fence, and beyond it a toll road, virtually empty in the late afternoon because the people of San Diego hated it, baulked at the toll, resented the abuse of public dollars and public space. We’d found ourselves in territory that was uncharted to Mike though not to some previous travellers, because in an instant Mike noticed a spot where the fence had been nearly flattened. He was racing to it now, and quick, quick, he said, jump out and hold that part of the fence down over the ditch on the other side. The vehicle’s weight did the rest, I hopped back in, and in a flash we were clambering over dirt, careening round a cement block, finally onto the shoulder and thence to the toll road proper, sprinting alone to the nearest exit. Mike whooped like an old-time outlaw.

Read on: Mike Davis, ‘Why the US Working Class is Different’, NLR I/123.

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Recourse to History

The French writer Éric Vuillard’s latest book, Une sortie honorable, opens with a brief lesson in colonial vocabulary. In a travel guide to French Indochina published in 1923, after an advertisement for a Hanoi-based gunsmith, vacationers find a list of phrases to help them communicate with the locals: ‘go find a rickshaw, speed up, slow down, turn right, turn left, turn around, put up the hood, take down the hood, wait for me here for a moment, drive me to the bank, to the jewellers, to the café, to the police station, to the plantation.’ The list of commands is not only testament to the brazen arrogance of colonial tourists. As Vuillard put it in a recent interview, it displays a ‘grammar of servitude’. The vocabulary ultimately ‘traces a geography of conquest: the bank, the police station, the plantation’, key sites in the colonial topography Vuillard’s book outlines, which also includes political assembly halls, military camps and television studios. Together, they make up what Vuillard – drawing on Marcel Mauss – refers to as the ‘total social fact’ of colonialism.

Une sortie honorable draws on many such sources in its account of the final years of the French occupation. Its narrative is broadly oriented around two pivotal defeats: the Battle of Cao Bằng in 1950, which marked the beginning of the end, and the fall of Diên Biên Phu in 1954. The exception is the opening and concluding chapters. The former recounts a disturbing visit by colonial labour inspectors to a Michelin rubber plantation outside of Saigon in 1928; the latter Saigon’s fall in April 1975. The book’s tragic-ironic title is taken from a directive given by the President of the French Council of Ministers, René Mayer, to General Henri Lavare upon the latter’s nomination to take over military action in 1953: ‘The situation in Indochina is quite simply disastrous,’ Mayer confides. ‘The war is as good as lost. The best we can hope for is an honourable exit.’

Mayer and Lavare are among the many figures that people what Vuillard intends as a ‘little comédie humaine, with planters, politicians, generals, bankers, all sorts of characters.’ Vuillard’s portraiture is highly caricatural, leading critics to reach for Rabelais and Daumier in comparison. Une sortie honorable goes to some lengths for instance to mock Édouard Herriot, who presided over a National Assembly meeting in the days following Cao Bằng and is depicted as a lumbering turkey, while, in the final moments of the siege on Diên Biên Phu, General de Castries is shown hiding in his barracks and shitting in his helmet (‘Don’t shoot me!’ he is said to have cried when he was discovered). The personal pasts of politicians, officers, and industrialists are plundered for family ties, nepotism, and remnants of a dynastic order which binds them together as a class or, as Vuillard puts it, a ravenous body:

We see clearly that we’re always walking in the same paths, that we’re always tying the same threads around the same puppets, and these are not the iron wires binding famished wrists, they are golden threads connecting and reconnecting the same names, the same interests, and we retrace endlessly the same nerves, the same muscles, in order that in the end all blood abounds in the same heart.

Heroes are rather few, besides the implicit, yet only indirectly rendered collective protagonist of the Việt Minh. There is Pierre Mendès France, whose ineffectual assembly floor speech against the war Vuillard portrays favourably (he would, in fact, go on to negotiate withdrawal as Prime Minister after Dien Bien Phu), and the communist deputy Abderrahmane-Chréif Djemad, who rails against France’s sacrificial treatment of Algerian, Moroccan and other colonial soldiers in the war, only to be ignored. But heroes are not the point of Une sortie honorable: the characters who interest Vuillard most are those pulling the strings from the banks, boardrooms and political assemblies.

The action of Une sortie honorable is largely split between discussions in the halls of power in Paris and their disastrous effects in Vietnam. By juxtaposing the rich and powerful in the metropole with the oppressed in Indochina, Vuillard hopes to evoke what he calls ‘the very heart of the colonial enterprise’. In order ‘to paint a more complete, more terrible portrait’ of life in Vietnam, he has explained, he had ‘to try to hold together two worlds’, ‘these two sides of social life’: ‘one of forced labour, violent treatment, tortured coolies, and another of government assembly meetings and hushed board of directors gatherings… to put Assommoir with L’Argent, Coupeau in front of Saccard, the manual labourer next to the banker.’

For Vuillard, literature has the power to connect these seemingly disparate worlds into an intelligible whole, and this has been the ambition of his own writing of the past decade. In both its historical subject matter and formal experimentation this has represented something of a departure from his early work. Born in Lyon in 1968, Vuillard has written eleven books (as well as directed three films). The style of his first works – Le Chasseur (1999), Bois Vert (2002), Tohu (2005) – is poetic and allusive, but Vuillard eventually abandoned this mode with his first properly historical literary work, Conquistadors (2009), an account of Pizarro’s conquest of Peru. Seven short works – ‘récits’ as they are labelled– have since appeared in quick succession. ‘Récit’ has no direct translation in English, but often denotes formally self-referential literary works, in which the act of writing is foregrounded, and the reader is not allowed to forget the constructed nature of the text. This describes Vuillard’s style quite precisely. Its effect is rather like being led by the hand from one historical scene to the next, with Vuillard a whispering guide pointing out keyholes and back entrances. Vuillard describes his technique as ‘a manner of indicating that throughout literary history, it’s not fiction which dominates, but reality’. Or put otherwise, in the ‘historical récit’, literary form provides a means to bring history to the fore.

The works that Vuillard has produced since this historical turn have been remarkably wide-ranging. La Bataille d’occident (2012) and Congo (2012) concerned, respectively, the vested interests behind World War I and the 1884 Berlin Conference and its aftermath in the Congo. These were followed by La Tristesse de la terre (2014), which explored the protracted dispossession and near-extermination of American Indians, refracted through the life of the buffalo poacher-turned-showman Buffalo Bill. Next Vuillard immersed himself in the origins of the French Revolution in 14 Juillet (2016), retelling the siege of Bastille from below. After that came the L’Ordre du jour (2017), which dramatizes the role of bankers and industrialists in Hitler’s rise, and then in Germany’s occupation of Austria in 1938, and which was awarded the Prix Goncourt. Vuillard’s last book, La Guerre des pauvres (2019), which was shortlisted for the International Booker prize – bringing him increased visibility in the anglosphere – is devoted to the peasant revolt led by Thomas Müntzer in 16th century Southern Germany. Each of these books aims to illuminate structural relationships of social inequality and oppression in what Vuillard terms the ‘history of domination’. (This concern also animates his public engagements, as in recent articles and interviews in support of NUPES (in Libération), striking workers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (in L’Humanité), and against the extradition of the Italian militant Vincenzo Vecchi (in the Nouvel Observateur.)

As a critic from the French journal Ballast observed, Vuillard’s oeuvre contains two general tendencies: accounts of ‘revolts led by an anonymous or unknown peoples (14 Juilliet, La Guerre des pauvres)’ and stories about ‘the criminal detachment with which rulers and industrialists make decisions that lead to the worst violence and conflicts (Conquistadors, Congo, L’Ordre du jour).’ To this we might add a third tendency: a commitment to both staging and dismantling a presentation of history as spectacle. In La Tristesse de la terre, for instance, the line between reality and performance becomes blurred as Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and others play themselves in the revisionist ‘Wild West Show’ which travelled through the US and Europe staging (and rewriting) old west battles. And in Une sortie honorable – arguably the finest synthesis of the three tendencies – a central chapter is dedicated to a farcical restaging of General Jean De Lattre De Tassigny’s appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press in 1951 during his American tour in search of military aid. Vuillard is also drawn to theatre as a metaphor when discussing what happens ‘behind the scenes’ of history in boardrooms and backchannels. ‘Imagine actors who never return to being themselves,’ he writes of a meeting of the directors of the Bank of Indochina. ‘They would eternally play their roles.’

How does Vuillard select his subject matter? He insists that he does not make an a priori decision to take up a particular historical episode. Rather, his works grow out of chance encounters with stories that disturb him: ‘I read, I watch films, I watch documentaries, photos, and it happens that I encounter something which unsettles me and gives me the incentive to write.’ The stimulus for Une sortie honorable was a 43-second film by the Frères Lumière titled ‘Annamite Children Gathering Sapèques in front of the Ladies’ Pagoda’ (1899–1900). In the film two women in white dresses laugh as they toss sapèques (French colonial currency) to a group of Vietnamese children in rags, who scramble to catch the coins, until one child stops short and turns to gaze sternly into the camera. As Vuillard put it, ‘he gazes across time’. The child’s disquieting gaze ‘signals something very profound’ and ‘permits us to grasp the colonial unconscious.’

‘One always writes what one doesn’t know’, says Vuillard, ‘one plunges into obscurity.’ Some of the materials that informed and inspired Une sortie honorable find their way explicitly into the final work. Such curation is inherently political. Vuillard has been repeatedly criticized for the tendentiousness and less than impartial tone of his historical récits. In a review of L’Ordre du jour for the New York Review of Books, the historian Robert Paxton criticized the book for its explanatory shortcomings as a historical narrative. Vuillard, he observed, has chosen ‘his details not for their explicative value’ but for literary effect. ‘He likes to heighten the impression of absurdity’ and his ‘delight in irony seems to have outweighed exactitude’. Paxton concludes by suggesting that Vuillard may eventually fall into the obscurity of earlier Prix Goncourt winners, ‘a procession of largely forgotten names’.

Vuillard’s response to Paxton’s review (and its ‘brutal conclusion’) is worth reading: he accuses Paxton of falsely supposing ‘the existence of a distant, neutral way of writing’, the alleged reserve of history; meanwhile literature ‘ought to behave itself and keep to the art of the novel’. But it is elsewhere, in an interview published in the journal Le vent se lève, that he elaborates his position most clearly:

At its core, recourse to History is necessary in a world where hegemonic discourse is in appearance so depoliticized, so neutral, so objective, and where all literature which claims to be nonpartisan is in reality an official, servile production. In such a harsh context, writing can only be political in order to be truly literary.

And, then, more to the point: ‘Writing cannot be neutral.’

Read on: Pierre Vilar, ‘History in the Making’, NLR 136.

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Damiba’s Ousting

On one level, the ousting of Paul-Henri Damiba just eight months after he led the ousting of President Roch-Marc Christian Kaboré on 31 January of this year, is a simple story. Damiba staked his legitimacy on ending Burkina Faso’s Jihadist tragedy. At the beginning of April, he announced there would be a stocktaking of his ‘reconquest mission’ in five months’ time, billed as an ‘appointment with the nation’. The underlying pledge was that by that point, Burkina would be liberated from ‘the forces of evil’ – the Islamic-State and Al-Qaeda-affiliated Jihadists plaguing the so-called ‘three-border area’ of the Sahel (the other countries concerned are Mali and Niger). But when the appointment finally came in early September, it took the form of an uninspiring, somewhat deflated speech, parts of which now sound prophetic. Our ‘grave problem’, Damiba explained, was the result of multiple failures, ‘first of all from us, defence and security forces in charge of defending our territory and protecting our populations. Internal divisions have weakened us.’ His account of the progress achieved so far was essentially that this was only the beginning of the beginning – not even, à la Churchill, ‘the end of the beginning’.

The studied humility was sensible: 24 hours after Damiba’s address to the nation, Jihadists remotely detonated a bomb on the road to Djibo, the largest town in the country’s northern Sahel Region and a symbol of the Burkinabe state’s resistance against the forces of evil. It became a symbol of Damiba’s failure. The bomb destroyed a heavily guarded convoy bringing food and other supplies to the besieged town, killing 35 and wounding 37, all civilians. Dijbo was once the largest cattle market in the three-border area, with traders travelling from as far as Senegal to attend its weekly fairs. It is also the birthplace of Burkina’s first Jihadist armed group, Ansarul Islam, now merged into the Al-Qaeda franchise Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM). In recent years, JNIM has occupied all the rural districts around Djibo and established a sadistic version of Sharia that sent many fleeing to the town, now the last state sanctuary in what has become Al-Qaeda country. Djibo thus became a refuge of over 200,000 people – nearly four times its official population – living under a JNIM blockade that has stoked the joint scourges of famine and hyperinflation.

The coup against Damiba was set in motion in Gaskindé, a small town just south of Djibo, where another supply convoy fell to a Jihadist attack on 26 September. This time, at least 11 soldiers were killed along with dozens of civilians, while the convoy trucks were capsized and burned. Details suggested that the sloppy military strategy associated with Kaboré’s tenure remained unreformed, and anger among the troops reached the same perilous levels as before the January coup. Two days after the attack, Damiba flew to Djibo and told the soldiers stationed there that he ‘felt for them’. But to no avail. One widely-circulated WhatsApp message I received in the days before the coup correctly read the temperature: ‘Be careful with your comings and goings, it would seem things aren’t smelling right with the troops, possible temper [grogne] with uncertain outcomes. Letting you know just in case. You never know. Thanks.’

The troops at Djibo did not believe that Damiba ‘felt for them.’ When he spoke of ‘internal divisions’ in his stocktaking speech, he may have been thinking of the effective military caste system found in many armies in the region. This is the division between ‘special forces’, trained to protect the powers that be, and the common soldier. The two other coup-makers in the region, Assimi Goïta of Mali and Mamady Doumbouya of Guinea – who came to power in May and October 2021 respectively – were both commanders of their countries’ special forces, and Damiba was a member of Burkina’s, the Forces Spéciales, established by Kaboré in June 2021. These élite corps enjoy superior treatment and status. In mid-September, Burkina’s regular troops heard that Damiba was granting the special forces a bonus – each was allegedly promised six million francs (about 9,000 USD) and a villa – in spite of the fact they were not fighting on the frontline.

A further aggravating factor was that most officers of the special forces – including Damiba – were once members of the infamous Regiment of Presidential Security (RSP in the French acronym), former despot Blaise Compaoré’s own special forces. Compaoré, the man who toppled charismatic revolutionary Thomas Sankara in 1987, was chased out of the country by insurrectionists in October 2014. The RSP survived his fall and predictably staged a coup to restore him a year later. The attempt, labelled ‘the stupidest coup in history’, failed after a week and the RSP was disbanded. It became clear to the public that Damiba was still an RSP man to the core when he tried to engineer the return of the exiled Compaoré to the political stage in July, under the pretence of ‘national reconciliation’, just four months after a court sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment for ordering Sankara’s murder. Compaoré flew to Ouagadougou and stayed a few days in a state villa, arousing such anger that air traffic controllers at the capital’s airport reportedly considered preventing his plane from departing so that he could be arrested.

Damiba’s actions rekindled the major conflict in Burkinabe politics, between revolution and rectification. The latter is the name that Compoaré gave to his policy agenda some years after he took power in 1987, and is viewed by partisans of the revolution as irredeemably reactionary. Damiba appeared as a rectification man in a country where the more acceptable attitude among opinion leaders is revolution. The name he gave to his governing outfit, the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration, soon became suspicious; ‘what exactly did he wish to restore?’ ‘Restoration’, according to a democracy activist I interviewed in August in Ouagadougou, ‘sounds like the opposite of revolution’. (Shades of Charles II and Louis XVIII, the latter better known in Burkina). Damiba meant to ‘restore’ the integrity of the national territory, but it was a poor choice of words, especially since he also refused to use the rousing Sankarist call, ‘the fatherland or death, we will vanquish!’, replacing it with a watered-down ‘for the fatherland, we will vanquish’, which imprudently reminded people of the real thing.

In January, the Burkinabe broadly approved of Damiba’s coup – some of them boisterously, others cautiously – because they were tired of Kaboré’s incompetence in the fight against Jihadists who had embraced mass murder as a war tactic. This meant that Damiba could stay in power only if he succeeded where Kaboré had failed. But since he had so clearly failed by the deadline he set, and there was no democratic means to remove him, a coup was preordained. In May, facing off with protesters at Bobo Dioulasso, the country’s second largest city, he told them, ‘If you are so strong, then make your own coup d’état and rule the country as you see fit.’ Speaking to angry but unarmed civilians, the jibe sounded like easy derision, but others were listening.

Those others, the military rank-and-file, were already feeling betrayed – but apparently they did not want to act violently at first. In late September, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, the new coup leader, was sent by the disgruntled soldiers to meet and talk with Damiba. He spent a week in Ouagadougou, but his requests for an audience were ignored. Frustration played a visceral role in the coup, which at first sight looks like the revenge of the lower-caste on the battlefield against the upper-caste who are not. Even members of the auxiliary civilian-staffed force VDP (French acronym for Volunteers for the Defence of the Fatherland) took part. But there may be more to it than this. In the initial phase of the coup, Traoré, faced with the resistance of Damiba – who controlled much of the capital and the security services in it – went on national television and announced that his adversary had found refuge at the French military base of Kamboinsin, on the outskirts of Ouagadougou. ‘He could plan a counter-offensive’, he warned, against ‘our firm commitment to reach out to other partners willing to help us in our fight against terrorism’ – in this context, an ostensible allusion to Russia.

This was an intervention in a debate of sorts (I say ‘of sorts’ because only one side is actually heard) on the ‘diversification of partners’, a euphemistic phrase for ditching the French and finding another patron, preferably Russia. But it was also a ploy: Traoré knew that, although Damiba was not actually in Kamboinsin, this rumour would detonate a public-opinion bomb given Burkina’s rampant Francophobia, and thereby force the incumbent to negotiate. It was a risky move – the French Institute and the French embassy, both located in the city centre, were attacked by angry mobs and had to be defended by the coup-makers. But it worked. Damiba negotiated his resignation, while Traoré insisted that France had not interfered, explaining that his phrase ‘other partners’ did not necessarily mean Russia (the US was thrown in). His first interview was given to Radio France Internationale – an outlet reviled by the militant Francophobes of Ouagadougou – not to Sputnik or Russia Today, whose audience in the Francophone world is highest in Burkina.

At the time of writing, many issues remain unresolved. The coup aims to be a form of rectification, to use a word perhaps unpalatable in Ouagadougou. Damiba had deviated from his mandate, and now the army intends to return to it. ‘We must do in three months what needed to be done in twelve months,’ Captain Traoré asserted, a statement that indicated the continuity of objective, only now with significantly less time to fulfil it. But it is not yet clear who would lead this process. Traoré, a thirty-something low-ranking officer who claims to be uninterested in power, may not be the most suitable candidate. But who might be? Abdoulaye Diallo, a political activist keen on revolutionary figures – he is working on a documentary about the life of Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings – told me in August that only a Promethean figure of the calibre of Sankara could pull Burkina out of its quagmire, not uncharismatic soldiers like Damiba (or Traoré?). This is a bit like hoping for a Shakespeare or two in every generation. But one may wonder how such an intensely national and ideological leader as Sankara would have fared in a regional conflict and in the current geopolitical fog of war.

Damiba made the point that he was trying everything: the stick and the carrot. He beefed up military control of the territory (maillage territorial) as well as engaging in talks with the Jihadists. What he did not do was to increase support from foreign powers or regional cooperation, in particular with Niger and Mali, two measures without which it is impossible for Burkina – and indeed Niger and Mali – to win the war. Damiba preferred French help, which was provided only in emergencies on the ground and without fanfare, for fear of antagonizing the more active sections of public opinion. But Niger, France’s ally in the region, and Mali, which is in the Russian camp, are opposites. Damiba sent feelers to Bamako and visited Niamey, in an awkward dance that did not get him very far. A new leader, whoever he is, must have the skills for carrying on with Damiba’s stick-and-carrot approach, navigating the treacherous shoals of Burkina’s volatile public opinion – where Yevgeny Prigozhin, the now in-the-open master of the Wagner mercenary enterprise, has started his manipulations – and working with neighbouring states. A tall order, but an imperative.    

Read on: Rahmane Idrissa, ‘Mapping the Sahel’, NLR 132.