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Friday
“Why Fascism and Illiberalism Are So Seductive to Writers,” a recent Literary Hub article by Ed Simon, recently caught my eye as it goes against the grain. In my view, great literature is inherently anti-fascist because it honors and respects the full personhood of individuals whereas fascism reduces the Other to depersonalized caricatures. The greatest authors—Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—create characters who are so three-dimensional that they resist the ideological stereotypes upon which fascism relies. Even Shakespeare’s Shylock or Tolstoy’s Napoleon can be used as political cudgels only if one ignores their complexity.
While Simon may not disagree with this, he goes at literature from a different angle. In the figures of Russian punk novelist Eduard Limonov, Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the rightwing Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, he sees authors for whom fascism is a logical extension of their art.
Simon notes that Limonov celebrated, as punk rock provocation, skinheads in Doc Martens with their Hitler salutes and Orthodox mystics ranting about a greater Mother Russia. Such art is not my cup of tea but, okay, there is a place for it. But although Limonov suffered for his art, fleeing the Soviet Union as a free speech martyr and later, when he returned to post-Soviet Russia, being imprisoned by Putin, his major target was liberal values. Thus, it’s not surprising that he would go on to embrace the genocidal Bosnian-Serb Radovan Karadžić. (You can read my comments on Karadžić, himself a poet, here. )
About D’Annunzio, who after World War I captured the city of Fiume and set himself up as the Commandante, Simon writes:
Always drawn between extremes of left and right, the author incorporated elements of corporatism and syndicalism into the constitution, but it was his own potent cult of personality that was the organizing principle. Bored by policy, D’Annunzio rather saw governance as a massive theatrical project, and to that end he introduced certain novelties, including black shirts and Roman salutes, balcony speeches and martial marches, with the man known as “The Poet” and “The Prophet” taking on a new sobriquet—”Il Duce.”
Simon adds,
A fantastical, filibustered country imagined into existence, governed not by reason but something chthonic, primal, and occult. Authoritarianism was D’Annunzio’s poetic theme and he blazed as the morning star of fascism, that nihilistic ideology the result of art for art’s sake pushed to its inhuman extremes.
Reading about D’Annunzio’s theatricality, I think not only of Donald Trump but also of Adolph Hitler. As I note in my book (I’m quoting Jonathan Gottshall’s The Storytelling Animal here),
Hitler essentially “ruled through art, and he ruled for art.” Citing Frederic Spotts’s Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, [Gottshall] notes that Hitler’s goals were more “broadly artistic” than military or political. According to Spotts, “Hitler’s interest in the arts was as intense as his racism; to disregard the one is as profound a distortion as to pass over the other.”
About Mishima, who after the war wanted to return to an imperial Japan and who, with his followers, attempted to capture a Tokyo military base, Simon notes that he was a “body-building, Samurai-obsessed, ultra-nationalist, fascist paramilitary leader that masturbated to pictures of Catholic martyrdoms.” In his 1959 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Mishima notes that “his sense of beauty contained the ‘darkest thoughts that exist in this world.’”
Simon finds in all authors—not only these ones—a narcissism that has something in common with fascism. As he puts it, there is something
Janus-faced [in the] nature of writing, of thinking of yourself as a writer, of believing yourself capable of producing literature, which is to say of reorganizing reality. It requires a narcissism that’s the hallmark of the totalitarian. What is a totalitarian leader other than an individualist taking that creed to its cruel conclusions, erasing the uniqueness of every other person into mere characters in a drama?
The reason that authoritarians “court writers as easily as they oppress them,” Simon writes, is “because words are occult, they are magical, they make things happen.”
He also points out that fascists, like novelists and poets, are drawn to myth and fantasy and that the artistic temperament, at its most extreme, can be fascistic. Unlike poetic fantasizing, however, fascist fantasizing comes always “at the expense of our souls.”
One sees artistic extremism, Simon writes, in the Dionysian impulse that Nietzsche describes and celebrates in the Birth of Tragedy. According to Nietzsche,
the artist “enriches everything out of one’s own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taught, strong, overloaded with strength” until all of reality merely becomes “reflections of his perfection.”
The Greeks would have cautioned that, while Dionysus must be respected, so too must Apollo. Both gods have a role in the artistic process, as the best authors understand. While I don’t know much about the three authors that Simon examines, I think it’s possible that their works are wiser than they are and that the authors would have had to distort and violate their works in order to weaponize them.
One can more easily weaponize lesser works—we see this all this time with novels like Atlas Shrugged and Camp of Saints—than greater ones. That because the best artistic creating is the opposite of narcissism, involving as it does the channeling of higher truth and beauty.
Take Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Height, for example, a work I choose because it has a strong Dionysian component. In fact, the all-absorbing passion that Heathcliff and Catherine have for each other destroys them both. But while the work provoked its society to such a deep extent that it took years for people to appreciate it—readers were especially scandalized that it was written by a woman—it is Apollonian as well as Dionysian. And while Wuthering Heights depicts narcissism, it is the opposite of narcissism because Bronte was looking beyond herself when she wrote it. As her sister Charlotte wrote in Emily’s defense, “the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master — something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.”
Rather than erasing the uniqueness of Catherine and Heathcliff or making them “mere characters in a drama,” Emily captured something essential about women and men that her society couldn’t recognize at the time. Art does this, fascism doesn’t.
