Of festivals, saints and the aesthetic appeal of the irrational

In Burgos - the old capital of mediaeval Castilla and home of Spain's dubious national hero "El Cid" - during the festival of the San Lesmes (the city´s patron saint) over the weekend I was struck (as I have so often been in my travels around Spain) by the tremendous attraction that Catholicism exerts on a aesthetic level in this part of the world, despite sharing in the manifest intellectual bankruptcy of all religion and blind-faith based ideologies.

Even a cynic such as myself cannot help but be impressed by the visual grandeur of it all - a grandeur with which evangelical and fundamentalist Protestantism simply cannot hope to compete (although perhaps High Church Anglicanism comes a little closer to matching it). It would seem that the Roman Catholic Church understood better than its rivals the importance of offering something more tangible and concrete than the promise of heavenly salvation, which was why it was able to sink such deep and enduring roots in the soil of the Old Roman Empire. Like 19th century Social Democracy, Catholicism achieved hegemony not so much through evangelical fervour but rather through the slow permeation or co-option of every facet of mass, popular culture.
Possibly this is why evangelism (in both its religious and Leninist variants) has been unable to offer anything other than the most fleeting of challenges to the Old Religions - of Saint Peter and of Kautsky and Bernstein - despite the obvious deficiencies and internal contradictions of both. Perhaps the best option for the anti-capitalist left in its efforts to capture the imagination of the working class is also to cultivate, as another blogger has recently suggested, a sense of the irrational and marvelous - as opposed to the standard devices of logic and reason.

Perhaps, like Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, we should accept that at the end of the day what matters not so much what people believe but rather the objective function that belief fulfils?

Roberto Bolaño: the enfant terrible of Chilean letters

Recently while on holiday I had the good fortune to stumble across two novels by the Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolaño after I was forced to take shelter from one of Auckland's sudden cloudbursts in Unity Bookshop. I had never previously encountered Bolaño's work, but the darkly humourous and marvellously absurd premise of his Nazi Literature in the Americas captivated me at once and I left the shop shortly afterwards having purchased it along with its "companion" piece, Distant Star.

Bolaño seems in many ways the bastard Chilean literary son that Jorge Luis Borges never had - his politics, to be sure, are somewhat different (Bolaño was imprisoned by the Pinochet regime for his revolutionary socialist acitivities and after being rescued from a detention centre went off to join the FMLN in El Salvador) - but the overarching themes and motifs are startlingly similar. In Bolaño you find the same delight in deliberately blurring the lines between fiction and reality, between literature and life. Bolaño is simulataneously fascinated and troubled by the idea that amidst events of world-historical importance (such as the dictatorships of Hitler and Pinochet), certain individuals can busy themselves in the pursuit of avant-garde poetics and literary utopias and relate to political movements such as fascism as purely aesthetic phenomena. This forms the essential background to the two novels (if "novels" is really the right term) in question here: the first an encyclopedia of imaginary fascist poets and writers who in the age of capitalist mass culture and commodity fetishism find solace in the reactionary idyll of Nazism, the second (Distant Star) seemingly an extension of one of the characters whose fictional biographies is recounted in Nazi Literature in the Americas, the aviator "poet of the skies" Carlos Ramírez Hoffman (renamed here to Alberto Ruiz-Tagle aka Carlos Wieder).

Ramírez Hoffman and Ruiz-Tagle are both essentially amoral, Nietzschean supermen who take advantage of the military coup in Chile to further their own macabre artistic project that involves sky writing, murder, photography and verse. Their careers become so fantastical that doubt is cast on whether they are in fact real, while (in a characteristically Borgesian twist) they are themselves pursued by a private detective (who appears to be conflated with the author himself). Although there is plenty of violence and cruelty, the real subject here is not human morality or politics but rather the subversion of reality through art.

Bolaño, despite his radical marxist background, is distinctly unenthusiastic about those who insist that art must be made to serve some higher political or ethical purpose - as he remarked in the very last interview he gave shortly before his untimely death of liver failure at the age of 50 in 2003 (in response to a question about what he would say to Salvador Allende now if he had the chance):

Los que tienen el poder (aunque sea por poco tiempo) no saben nada de literatura, sólo les interesa el poder.

In the same interview he depricates Pablo Neruda and the "empty rhetoric" of the modern-day left which bores him, equally as much as that of the right. More surprisingly perhaps (given his fondness for the great Chilean "antipoet" Nicanor Parra) he is also unmoved by Vicente Huidobro, whose literary career - especially the preoccupations with futurist/fascist imagery - in many ways resembled so closely his own (Bolaño always thought of himself as a poet and only turned to writing fiction in middle age in order to support his family economically). Like Huidobro though his essential nature it seems (though of course he denies it!) is to be contrarian, to rebel against everything that exists.

Thanks to the recent translation of many of Bolaño's works into English he is now achieving a certain measure of posthumous recognition in the Anglophone world - his novel 2666 (which I have yet to read!) has made a number of critics' short lists for the best book of 2008/9 and won the 2008 US National Book Critics' Circle Award.

As one perceptive critic noted, Bolaño's fiction "...can be described as a chronicle of Latin America's dashed utopias" and perhaps for this reason it seems more 'real' and faithful to the lived experience of our own generation than the 'magical realist' style of the earlier, more hopeful generation of writers like Gabriel García Márquez.

Ferrater Mora on Unamuno's Philosophy of Tragedy

A brilliant summation of the pessimistic yet infinitely humanist and courageous outlook of Spain's greatest philosopher:

Because he manifests a revolt of naturalism against the idealism of reason, and of the idealism of reason against pragmatical materialism, all attempts to pigeonhole Unamuno in one definite philosophical system are bound to fail. Unamuno does not advocate the union—which would entail a reconciliation, and eventually, a truce—of life and reason within the framework of a system where the idea of harmony would forever preclude any discord. There can be no harmony in that war which each human being wages against himself and his antagonists, but only perpetual strife, interminable contradiction, and continual—and fruitful incivility. This is the only "formal principle," if that is the proper name for it, which permeates Unamuno's thinking. It may be stated as follows: To be, is to be against one's self.

Unamuno's emphasis on opposition, tension, and contradiction is obviously related to that type of thinking which since Hegel has been customarily called "dialectical." Nevertheless, there are two important differences between the conventional dialectical systems and Unamuno's.

On the one hand, dialectical systems attempt to describe and explain the attributes of the Cosmos as an impersonal being. In such systems, human reality follows the pattern of the cosmic reality. Sometimes "the Reality" is identified with "God," but even then the impersonal traits prevail over the personal ones. Unamuno's dialectic, however, is of an entirely personal nature. Unamuno refers mainly, if not exclusively, to human existence. And when the ideas of God and world are introduced, they are endowed with human characteristics. Even when he uses such abstract terms as 'reason' and 'the irrational', they are to be understood as embodied in unique, concrete human beings.

On the other hand, all the philosophers who have tried to describe reality as a dialectical process of some sort—Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno no less than Hegel—have built conceptual systems in which the opposites end in a reunification in the bosom of some ultimate and all-embracing principle. The war between particulars finds peace in the absolute generality of the essential One, so that the principle of identity overcomes, in the end, all contradictions. The dialectical method is one in which as in Hegel—the total, "superior" truth (philosophical truth) reconciles the partial, "inferior" truths (mathematical and historical truth), one which purports to "save" all within the frame of the Absolute—the only realm in which peace is to be found. But in Unamuno's world, animated by the principle of perpetual civil war and unending strife, there is no place for any final harmony and still less, any identity—which would be, in his opinion, the equivalent of death. Among those thinkers who defended the dialectical approach, there was something akin to a headlong rush toward the very identity they denounced, their attempts to dissemble their own longing for an ultimate unity by calling it an "identity of opposites" notwithstanding. In Unamuno there is not the slightest eagerness to be absorbed in this identity, nor the least desire to pour the past into the future; there is just an everlasting will to abide, "to prolong this sweet moment, to sleep in it, and in it become eternal (etemizarse)." Unamuno wishes to prolong his "eternal past" because only the moment most perfectly expresses what he seeks: a sense of being a man of flesh and blood among other men of flesh and blood, yet still longing to be all that one can long to be, to be "all in all and forever," a finite individual and an infinite reality at the same time.

The two souls of Trotskyism?

The art of this epoch will be entirely under the influence of revolution. This art needs a new self-consciousness. It is, above all, incompatible with mysticism, whether it be frank, or whether it masquerades as romanticism, because the Revolution starts from the central idea that collective man must become sole master, and that the limits of his power are determined by his knowledge of natural forces and by his capacity to use them. This new art is incompatible with pessimism, with scepticism, and with all other forms of spiritual collapse. It is realistic, active, vitally collectivist, and filled with a limitless creative faith in the Future.

- Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 1924

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play, and which psychoanalysis has analyzed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral “ego” and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the advantage of the “ideal of self,” which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior world, of the “self,” which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity: the need for the emancipation of man.

The conception of the writer’s function which the young Marx worked out is worth recalling. “The writer,” he declared, “naturally must take money in order to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and write in order to make money. The writer by no means looks at his work as a means. It is an end in itself and so little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work....The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity.” It is more than ever fitting to use this statement against those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of end foreign to itself, and prescribe, in the guise of so-called “reasons of State,” the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his explorations--these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable. In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must, under no pretext, allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who would urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal, and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula: complete freedom for art.

- Leon Trotsky and André Breton, Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, 1938

Trotskyism and the aesthetic of rebellion

A Brazilian friend told me recently of a proverb that is apparently widely known in his home country, about a Spanish sailor who being shipwrecked on a foreign shore came up the beach to inquire of the locals "is there a government here?" and upon being answered in the affirmative declared automatically "then I am against it!"

I was thinking about this story recently while reading the debate over on British journalist Dave Osler's blog about the links between Trotskyism and the American neo-conservative right, one of whose intellectual godfathers - Irving Kristol - died just over a week ago.

Kristol was not the only Trotskyist to make the transition from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other - others include literary commentator Stephen Schwartz (formerly a member of the dissident current associated with ex-Spanish Trotskyist leader Grandizo Munis) and of course the inimitable Christopher Hitchens.

As a former Trotskyist (who still retains a great deal of sympathy for Trotsky himself, if not necessarily for his followers) I am skeptical of claims regarding the existence of some kind of causal link between anti-Stalinism and neo-conservatism.

However, I do think that Trotskyism because of its marginalised, heterodox status has throughout its history always appealed to people of a certain psychological predisposition, namely those who (like myself) instinctively rebel against the cultural and political consensus in society at any given point in time, those who like our proverbial Spanish sailor feel the need to be siempre en contra.

Michael Weiss, a New York blogger who appears to be part of the same milieu as Schwartz and Hitchens makes a similar point in a recent article entitled "Pilgrim of Doubt" on the life of American Trotskyist Irving Howe (originally drawn to my attention by Poumista), whose greatest influences were the seemingly unlikely pairing of Karl Marx and the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Weiss' point is that what attracted Howe to these two authors (and presumably to Trotsky as well) was their status as rebels and outcasts - the message while important was initially at least secondary to the aesthetic imperative of rebellion (what Weiss refers to as "their fondness for the Promethean").

The same contrarian spirit is alive and well in a 2004 article by Stephen Schwartz that appeared in the Weekly Standard (prop. the late Irving Kristol) entitled "Bad Poet, Bad Man", in which Schwartz takes issue with the literary eulogising/mythologising of the Chilean Pablo Neruda at the expense of some of his contemporaries such as Gabriela Mistral and Vicente Huidobro. Schwartz writes:

In 1938, two singular men sat down to compose a statement about the situation of the global intellect as they then saw it. They wrote, among other things, "The totalitarian regime of the U.S.S.R., working through the so-called 'cultural' organizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to every sort of spiritual value. A twilight of filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made servility a career, of lying for pay a custom, and of excuses for crime a source of pleasure." Nobody more embodied the phenomenon described in these lines than Pablo Neruda. The description was written by the surrealist André Breton and the exiled Leon Trotsky.

While I think Schwartz "bends the stick" too far in his blanket condemnation of Neruda, he hits on an essential truth which is that from the 1930s onwards many avant-garde poets like Neruda (along with Rafael Alberti, César Vallejo, Louis Aragon and others) renounced their revolutionary if fragmented and often contradictory vanguard aesthetics under the baleful influence of the Stalinist Comintern and Lukaçs' "dialectical realism", which was grouned on Hegelian assumptions about the need for reconciliation and unity. Thus in Neruda's case the experimental poetics of Tentativa del hombre infinito and the first two cycles of Residencia en la tierra were followed up by crudely didactic works such as España en el corazón and Canto general.

Those few avant-garde writers who continued to defend the possibility of autonomous art within the context of anti-capitalist politics became for a time (André Breton, Octavio Paz) sympathetic to Trotskyism - or else broke with Marxism altogether (Huidobro).

However the same compulsion to question and to doubt everything, while it provided a steady stream of recruits to Trotskyism over the years, proved less valuable as a stable basis for building a coherent, united political movement. This can be seen clearly in Isaac Deutscher's portrayal of Trotsky as an essentially Romantic figure in his classic 3-volume biography of the Russian revolutionary leader - (The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast). This was at once the source of Trotsky's appeal and his downfall, since critical heterodox figures tend to attract similarly independent-minded and critical followers.

However, perhaps we should be grateful that Stalin ousted Trotsky from the leadership of the Bolshevik Party - in the same way that we should be grateful Che Guevara died at the hands of the CIA in Bolivia instead of living on to become a career bureaucrat like Castro.

Recalling Genet's remarks on the justness of the Palestinian national struggle, we could perhaps say that the only revolutionary movement worth supporting is one that has almost no chance of actually conquering state power...