Re: Nobel Prize?

["Umberto Rossi" <urossi@programatic.it>]

Well, this list has been sleeping for a long time, but now we have
found a topic which is warming it up.  And it has shifted the issue
from philosophy (a field that I have cultivated in such a disordered
way that I feel badly equipped to cope with it) to literature, and
to the specific realm of novel, a place where I feel quite at home.

Thank to Dr. Ujma (whose full name I am curious to know) we have
several interesting topics to discuss, and I will try to do it.

> As to Nobel-Prize for Ernst Juenger, why should he get it, even the
> greatest admirers of his amongst the literary critics have never ever said
> that he produces great literature, or that any of his novels come anywhere
> near the great literature of the 20th century, or that his narrative could
> be compared with the novels of the great modernists, for example Woolf,
> Joyce, Th. Mann or even Hermann Hesse or the great 20th century Italian
> authors. As a 'Literaturwissenschaftlerin' I can simply say, Juenger's
> novels are not very convincing as novels, if you judge them from a
> traditional or a modernist perspective, his narrative techniques as well as
> his characters are not very skillfully developed.

Well, here you express an idea I'd have enthusiastically subscribed
to ten years ago.  Today I have some doubts about it.  I cannot tell
you "you're wrong, because..." but rather I can say that some
implications of your judgement do not persuade me today as they did
when I was younger.

Let me explain this.  We have structured our historical narrative of
the evolution of novel on a line which leads more or less directly
from Flaubert to Joyce.  Those whose works fall on this evolutionary
line or close to it belong to the history of the novel, those who are
far from it are not convincing, are retrograde authors or worse.

It seems--if we accept this evolutionary line of European novel--that
in this century only destructured novels can have a full right of
citizenship.  If you write a "classical" novel (whatever that may
be), you are out of your time, you are writing best-sellers or
useless works.  (If this is true, I wonder why they awarded the Nobel
prize to Solgenitsin, who writes perfectly traditional novels--or to
Grazia Deledda, who still used naturalistic techniques in the
Twenties, well after the accomplishments of James, Joyce, Proust and
even Kafka).

Well, I suspect this scheme is just a scheme, i.e. it is schematic, it is
oversimplified.  And it derives from a certain philosophy of history
which is surely respectable, i.e. the one devised by Hegel, but is
not to be acritically accepted today.  Not if one takes into account
the critic of that philosophy operated by--say--Walter Benjamin (but
this is just *one* of the radical interrogations of Hegelian theory of
history in this century).

Is there a *necessary* development of novelistic writing?  Are
Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mann's Zauberberg points
of no return?  And here comes up the first doubt:  how comes we have
*points* of no return?  You have mentioned 3 rather dissimilar
authors, one of which is not as experimental--Mann--as the others;
and surely Woolf and Joyce didn't go in the same direction.  Thus we
have a plurality, not a standard of 20th-century novelistic technique
by which we should judge or measure Juenger's achievements.

But you said that "Juenger's novels are not very convincing as
novels, if you judge them from a traditional or a modernist
perspective, his narrative techniques as well as his characters are
not very skillfully developed".  Ok, but here you are perhaps mixing
up two different issues.  If you want to judge Juenger on the basis
of narrative techniques, all right;  but the problem is that not all
the writers you mentioned as great 20th-century (or modernist)
novelists satisfy this requirement of yours.  Surely Joyce is
extremely innovative, and the famous stream-of-consciousness is just
a part of his contribution to the modernist techniques.  But Mann?
Is he so innovative?  All the techniques you can find in his novels
come from 19th-century novels.  Even the exasperate parodic dimension
of Mann's texts (which has been so finely explored by an
unfortunately forgotten Italian germanist, Furio Jesi) comes directly
form Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey (if young
Lukacs was well aware of the importance of Sterne--though he almost
demolishes him in his essay--, I can't believe Mann ignored the
achievements of good ol' Laurence).  And Sterne belongs to 18th
century.

But if you want to focus on the skilful/unskilful development of
the characters, sorry but that is usually considered the field of
19th-century novels (many call those texts the "classical" novels).
The skilful development of characters implies the acceptance of
some tenets of "classical" novels, i.e. realism, psychological
coherence and depth of characters, spiritual evolution, etc.  We are
deep in 19th-century novel, aren't we?  While modernist authors do
not seem so interested in that--you didn't mention Kafka, who surely
is one of the best writers of this century but was not very much
interested in portraying "realistic" characters.  And also Joyce's
Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are on the verge of sheer
allegory.  What about Woolf's Orlando, then?

But let's stick to the narrative techniques issue.  Your accusation
seems to me only apparently right.  If "20th century" means Joyce,
surely Juenger does not belong to it.  But perhaps even Kafka should be
expelled from our century in that case--and Mann is still more "19th
century".  But the 20th century is larger than your words seem to
imply (maybe I am just a poor interpreter of your message, so please
correct me if I got it wrong).

The fact is that the distance between these two centuries are smaller
than it seemed at the beginning of the latter.  It's hard to define a
watershed between 19th and 20th century, and the only one which seems
appropriate to me is the Great War.  The line of the front is thick
enough to separate those two eras--but if this is true, we are in
Ernst Juenger's territory.

I think that books like In Stahlgewittern, Der Kampf als innere
Erlebnis and Sturm are relevant literary achievements.  Surely I
wouldn't put them on the same level of, say Der Schloss or the
Recherche, but they have an important place indeed in the literary
landscape of both German and European narrative of this century.  And
when I say that Der Kampf.. belongs to narrative I mean it.
Notwithstanding it is presented as an essay, it is full of narrative
sections, and I bet that the materials you find there originally
belonged to the Dekameron des Unterstandes Juenger talks about in
Sturm (betting is not a sound critical method, but this is a rather
informal message, not an essay;  I wouldn't write that on a journal
or a book, but I think those who are familiar with Juenger's WWI
production will agree).

And then there is Afrikanische Spiele. That is a very good piece of
narrative, and if we accept in the 20th century writers like Gide,
Drieu La Rochelle, etc., I suspect we have to admit that also that
novel is a citizen of our time.  A great exercise in Stendhalian
narrative, and a great book on disillusion.  It belongs to the same
tradition of Céline and Genet:  the exploration of the underworld.

(Here you could object that Stendhal is one of those 19th-century
classics, but here I have to disagree.  Stendhal is a very complicate
figure, belonging to the main line of development of the novel--it is
the junction between the English novel of Fielding and Richardson and
the Balzac-Flaubert-Tolstoy-Proust plateau--but the fact that he was
rather underrated duting his century should make us reflect on his
position.  The fortune of Stendhal begins with our century.  It is
not a case if he is explicitly quoted by 20th century novelists like
Juenger and Drieu La Rochelle--they probably felt Stendhal was a
contemporary...)

But my answer is long enough--maybe too much.  Now I'd like to know
what you think of this.

> His fictional work is a mere fictional illustration of theoretical
> ideas, which of course are very interesting. But since there is no
> Nobel prize for political or literary theory the idea of giving him
> the one for literature seems to be mildly absurd and has nothing to
> do with political correctness.

That is an accusation which I could accept with a less dubious state
of mind.  But I could apply it to Eumeswil--and maybe to Auf den
Marmorklippen, not to Afrikanische Spiele or In Stahlgewittern.

>  It is a bit absurd to moan about Political Correctness in connection with
> Juenger, because nearly all the prizes he has received, he received for
> political reasons, as for example the 'Goethe-Preis'. He is the only really
> important conservative intellectual in the country and if he dies our poor
> CDU politicians will be in real trouble, because there is nobody left who
> could serve as a standardbearer or as we say 'Gallionsfigur'.

Well, I won't discuss the matter of the current relationship of Juenger with
some German political groups.  I'm rather ignorant about that, and I
have to say that what you tell us sounds quite interesting, and I'd
like to know more about it.  But the Nobel Prize is surely was desolate
case of political correctness well before the term was invented in
the USA.  The prize awarded to Solgenitsin has surely political
reasons.  And the prize which was never awarded to an infinitely
better writer than Solgenitsin, that is, Jorge Luis Borges, is
another specimen of this trend.

With this I do not want to say that the jury of the Nobel cannot do
that.  But they should clearly say that the prize is awarded to
writers which have written works with a political relevance.  They
could do a very useful job by making this point clear.

> His early works are definitely important, but not so much as literary works
> as as examples for conservative or reactionary modernist thinking, which
> are quite special because German reactionaries are usually radical
> antimodernists.

Well, the bunch of reactionary modernists should include also Benn
(obviously it is a species which is more common in other countries;
just think of Ezra Pound, Céline, Drieu La Rochelle...).

> Therefore Juenger has his place in German literary history, but one should
> not overestimate his achievements.
>
> c. Ujma

No, Dr. Ujma, saying that he is (not always) a good writer is not
overestimation.  Saying that he is one of the most interesting heirs
of Stendhal and Goethe, and an outstanding narrator is--am I
wrong?--a fair assessment of his value.  And let me add that Das
abenteurliche Herz is one of the most fascinating texts (but that is
not narrative, rather prose poetry) in 20th century German
literature.

And--well, this sounds like an appeal to a higher authority, but
consider it as a curiosity--do you know who appreciated Junger's WWI
narratives from a literary point of view, though he disapproved
Juenger's ideas of those years?  Georg Lukacs.  If you are interested
in this, I could send you a quotation I have from Die Zerstoerung der
Vernunft.

Umberto Rossi

"A commission is appointed
To confer with a Volscian commission
About perpetual peace"--and nobody told me!