From Big Brother to Big Brother : Nihilism and Literature in America, Britain, France and Australia in the Age of Screens 9781936320622

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FROM BIG BROTHER TO BIG BROTHER

FROM BIG BROTHER TO BIG BROTHER NIHILISM AND LITERATURE IN BRITAIN, AMERICA, FRANCE AND AUSTRALIA IN THE AGE OF SCREENS

EDEN LIDDELOW

ACADEMICA PRESS BETHESDA - DUBLIN - PALO ALTO

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Liddelow, Eden. From Big Brother to Big Brother : nihilism and literature in Britain, America, France and Australia in the age of screens / Eden Liddelow. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-936320-62-2 (alk. paper) 1. Fiction--History and criticism. 2. Literature--Philosophy. 3. Nihilism in literature. 4. Existentialism in literature. 5. Literature and morals. 6. Nihilism (Philosophy) in motion pictures. I. Title. PN3347.L53 2013 808.3--dc23 2013008501 Copyright 2013 by Eden Liddelow All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Academica Press, LLC Box 60728 Cambridge Station Palo Alto, CA. 94306 Website: www.academicapress.com to order: 650-329-0685

To the dear memory of Ian MacNeill whose support was as unwavering as his critical eye. For Graham Marsh and Jennifer Crone too, with love.

CONTENTS Preface

ix

Introduction: The Roots of Disaffection

1

Chapter 1 Britain: What Remains

37

Chapter 2 America: Lost in the Funhouse

77

Chapter 3 France: A Literature of Attenuation

121

Chapter 4 Australia: No-one Home

173

Chapter 5 From Big Brother to Big Brother

217

Endnotes

235

Select Bibliography

251

Index

261

PREFACE The intention of this book is to examine the influence of Nietzschean nihilism on the consciousness of the West in the later twentieth century. It is not to examine nihilism in all its forms, although many are discussed. The chapters that follow will focus on the society and fiction of four countries – Britain, America, France and Australia. It was primarily in the Anglophone nations – the ‘Washington consensus’ – that the signs of nihilistic crisis have been so marked, each in its different way. The exception is France, included because it is often an opponent of that consensus. Australia was selected over Canada, New Zealand or South Africa because one has more understanding – I hope – of the place one comes from. Each of the four chapters has seven parts, the first a socio-political introduction giving a short overview of the events and opinions leading up to 1948, as well as a brief discussion of premonitory fiction or fiction from 1948 on which I do not intend to study closely. These are contextual samples. I use the term ‘telescreen age’ for the period stretching from the year 1948 – when Orwell’s Big Brother was born – to the present day. This was the age when the screen became reflexive. ‘Big Brother is watching you,’ said the Stalinesque face to Winston Smith via his telescreen. The face had echoes too of Lord Kitchener’s in World War One, as he pointed outwards towards the viewer, saying ‘Your country needs you.’ At the end of the twentieth century there would be 4 million closed-circuit cameras in use across the British Isles, and the most popular

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programme on television would be Endemol’s Big Brother. The observation of people behaving uncomfortably began also in America in 1948 with Candid Camera. There, however, the participants did not know they were being watched. Now the frame has deepened. In the television series, the public observes discreet cameras observing people who know they are watched and may become rich and famous just for this. Just as Winston Smith was punished for nothing, so the contestants are rewarded for nothing. One connection between Nietzschean nihilism and the telescreen is that they both can be said to represent, in Guy Debord’s phrase (see chapter 3), a visible negation of life. The remaining six parts of the chapters dwell on one novel each. These important works were chosen, apart from their literary-philosophical attractions, as emissaries from each decade, ending with the millennium. They represent to some degree shifts in character between decades – and amount, altogether, to a broad picture of Western culture in the telescreen age. Some novels were chosen because they had postmodernist or other theoretically significant leanings, others because they did not. My purpose in this study is to show everyday as well as historic nihilism in Nietzschean terms – that is, crises of consciousness when conventional value, meaning and desirability are radically challenged. These moments are dramatized particularly well by the novel: not so well by the screen image. There can be no final agreement on definitions of nihilism, because one is talking about what is not, which is a wide field. The one I have just used is Nietzsche’s, as outlined in ‘European Nihilism’. This is, he assumes, ethically neutral. Value for him is something beyond good and evil (but not always) which goes to the heart of belief. This book traces how radical challenges to value, meaning and desirability came about, with often mixed results, in our time. In Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, for example, the feared radical nihilist ‘dissolution’, which seems omnipresent in the new atomic age of the Cold War, turns out to be, on a personal level, a real and necessary liberation. In Gracq’s The Opposing Shore, nihilism is both the passivity and decadence of the old State and

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the violence into which it will be plunged. In Updike’s Rabbit Redux the Mickey Mouse Club on the television hectors the young with empty moral messages. Nihilism arises often where you did not expect it – which is why Beckett, Barth and Vonnegut are not studied here, though they are not disregarded. Nihilisms that smile are as common, and as destructive or liberating, as those that scowl. Nihilism’s relation to conventional morality is contradictory for Nietzsche. In the popular use of the word, of course, something deemed nihilistic – terrorist attacks, apparently motiveless killings – connotes meaningless destructiveness, which is always bad. Nietzsche saw what others had not: that nihilism was not all bad. The truth is often in the eye of the beholder, as shown in the example of the ‘terrorist’ who can also be a ‘freedom fighter’. There are cases, however, where there is no doubt about the immorality of nihilism. Immorality has been a taboo word in the telescreen age, since Freud exploded sexual repression and Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power became normalised in the West. Chapter Five will examine the final implications of this.

We who are homeless in this fragmented broken time of transition…the ice that supports people has become very thin…We ourselves conserve nothing – not by any means ‘liberal’ we do not ask for progress, we do not need to plug up our ears against sirens who sing of the future – ‘equal rights’ – ‘freer society’ – ‘no more masters and servants’. We refuse to be captured, reconciled, castrated. We think about the necessity for a new slavery. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science My books here and there attain the highest thing attained on earth, cynicism Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo Nihilism deserves critique as much as Christianity John Berger

INTRODUCTION THE ROOTS OF DISAFFECTION Value free? It is rare for people to be fully conscious of what they believe. In the West, it is assumed that in the past people were Christian in the same way that it is now assumed that people, with certain exceptions, are not. Yet assumptions, then as now, are only assumptions. And people can believe several things at once. Until the Enlightenment the agricultural calendar was organised around the Zodiac; not a belief, it would have been claimed then, but astronomical knowledge. Now we have immeasurably advanced our astronomical knowledge, but the brute numbers of believers in astrology have multiplied exponentially. Why? Because for all that we fervently endorse the birth control and anaesthetic – inter alia – made possible by the Enlightenment, the spiritually-minded are troubled and seek beliefs. Further, since the new threatens as much as it attracts, a belief seems all the more solid for being primordial. We cannot be sure what others actually believe – not only because we do not understand our own belief, but because of the faith paradox that often accompanies unbelief: ‘Because I can’t believe, I cannot believe that you can believe’. The paradox is currently implacable in arguments about religion, while people are less exercised about karma or I Ching or feng shui. Why bother arguing? one may ask. These things are harmless. Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings toward the end of the nineteenth century, notably The Birth of Tragedy (1882) Thus spake Zarathustra (1885), Beyond

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The Roots of Disaffection

Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887), saw Christianity as harmful. To him life’s normal purpose lies in self-expression, cultivation of one’s own strength, struggle for dominance. Christianity seemed to invert all these, elevating self-denial, weakness and withdrawal: in short, negation of life, nihilism. He believed Christianity would collapse from within as a result of the Christian practice of examination of conscience (the fanaticism he called will-to-truth). The truth is that Christian morality has failed. The highest values revalue themselves.’1 Without Christian morals Christianity could not survive. This prophecy led to his announcement in 1887 that ‘God is dead’ – although he was by no means the first to say this, or the last, judging by Time Magazine of October 1965. 2 By the middle of the twentieth century, Nietzsche’s prophecy seemed fulfilled: …Without a doubt, from now on, morality will be destroyed by the will to truth’s becoming-conscious of itself: that great drama in one hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries, the most terrible, most dubious drama but also the one most rich in hope. 3 The hope comes from the rise of the dynamic individual, he who makes waves, since Christianity and Judaism alike are slave-moralities, wedded to naysaying and pity. Yet could we accept in their place nihilism – ‘the radical rejection of value, meaning and desirability?’4 This means that mankind faces solitude, without God or any other transcendent ideal, and one must in the face of perhaps meaningless suffering learn to love one’s life and one’s fate. The French philosopher Pascal said (borrowing from Montaigne) that to take a ‘wager’ on God costs us nothing and may bring eternal life.5 Nietzsche’s view on the Pascalian wager was near-unprintable. At his moment of history, a Christianity that was sentimental, hypocritical and morally tyrannical was certainly ripe for attack. His goal was the construction of a future in which people thinking beyond idealist notions of good and evil could avert decline. For Nietzsche, we cannot rely on (but at the same time are spared entrapment by) any single or transcendental being, in the sense of either supernatural person or abstract quality. We are bound to struggle and contest, so that we may become what

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we are. The existentialist movement experienced this anti-idealism with the sense that from moment to moment, through our actions, we choose ourselves. Religious existentialists like Kierkegaard committed themselves to a negativity while not ruling out revelation. They almost believed that a self-protective doubt might be rewarded with the joy of certainty. Existentialists start from a position of deprivation, even abandonment, ‘with no excuse’. This was not Nietzsche’s way. For him the self, to prevail, needs not doubt but total self-belief, not choice but amor fati, the joyful embrace of one’s fate. The God who was our centre is dead: but we are sufficient to ourselves. This book will consider ways in which the questions of late twentieth century life, are lived in our literature, and ask, What were we believing when we thought we were not believing in anything? Faith in doubt: Descartes ‘I think, therefore I am.’ This reflection was among the first glimmers of the European Enlightenment, hollowing out the dogmatic fourth century philosophy of Augustine of Hippo, Crede ut intelligas: ‘Believe so as to understand’.6 The cogito of Descartes (1596 to 1650) is a kind of precipice. It sounds solid and assured; but what it says is that nothing is as it seems, and the only reality lies in our distrust of that seeming. What we would now call the self may be no more than a dream, and external reality can change as water changes to snow. Descartes’ intention was to trace thinking back to its first step, in the hope of arriving at a process which can assure us of true certainty. Belief was not in question, and so was not seen as belief but as knowledge. Man’s rational soul was the ghost in the machine of his body and other mutable externals. The clear and distinct perception of certain ideas, he reasoned, made them true; and they were clear and distinct because they were methodical and logically perfect, as were the arguments for the existence of God. Just as 2 + 2 = 4, God is. Never to accept anything as true which one does not clearly know to be such; to divide any problem into its component parts; to start with the part that was simplest, and to review by checking nothing has been left out: this is the way to think. Descartes thus laid down the rules for scientific method.

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The Roots of Disaffection

But his rationalism was inseparable from his faith; man’s first doubting step into the modern era was assisted by the hand of religion. Spinoza, writing in the same period, moved God further into the scientific realm. God was no more than the impersonal exercise of natural law. David Hume saw nothing convincing in the panacea of religion for Descartes’s rational doubt. Enlightenment philosophers henceforth upheld a general scepticism, although some shared Descartes’s faith. This scepticism’s consummation in science was achieved by Darwin. It was the theory of evolution which stood up, finally, against God. And the paradox of theory was born. In the twentieth century, that time of speculative proliferation, it was not so much thinking that was trusted, but theories. In science, theory is a necessary step on the way to truth. Scientific method is the most effective tool available for understanding the behaviour of the natural world. But even science, that ‘pure’ enquiry, is limited in its ‘purity’. Too much induction – generalising from European observation – denies the existence of black swans. Poor organization of experiments and trials may lead to results that are in fact statistically insignificant. The publication of results may not include such deficiencies. By their very nature, scientific results need replication for findings to be considered proved. As it is, in the telescreen age reports of findings are often overstated, or contradicted by the next trial, leaving the public in doubt about what to believe. In the face of a great deal of data that seems to come and go, the most informed public attitude is doubt, regarding findings as theories merely until a final truth emerges. But news of such a truth may not reach the viewer/reader. Individuals will turn the interim version into a truth in which they believe. The scientific model seemed in many academic circles by the fifties to have a rigour and professional methodology that eluded the somewhat worn-out, even decadent, humanities—especially literature. In response, apparently watertight casts of ‘pure thought’ in the humanities and social sciences developed soon after, arising usually from philosophy and psychology but spreading in reference and influence across disciplines, and often romantically enlivened by their originator. The

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impoverished Marx, the scandalous Freud, the handsome rebel Che, the Iron Lady Thatcher, those suave Lone Rangers Foucault and Derrida, are only some of many whose abstract programs were adopted as much out of a structure of feeling, to use Raymond Williams’s term, as to a structure of thought.7 These individuals became icons, objects of pure fascination and power, who do not have to explain themselves. Result: an idiosyncratic, radical impenetrability in the humanities and social sciences, posited on language uses that may not be defined at the outset, and even when looked up may elude the general educated reader. The major schools were phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty), structuralism (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Jakobson) post-structuralism (Barthes, Foucault) deconstruction (Derrida, de Man) Marxist (Althusser, Jameson, Bourdieu) psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva) feminism (Irigaray) and postmodernism (Lyotard, Levinas). ‘Theory’ claims an absolute privilege not to define its terms, although some do. As for argument, Jean-Paul Sartre foresaw what passes for argument in cultural theory: ‘An opponent is never answered: he is discredited’.8 Margaret Thatcher, the first major practitioner of Friedmanite theory, did not defend a position; she said ‘There is no alternative’. To advance in the humanities and social sciences you could be required to join one of these theoretical camps. A theoretical specialty became an essential part of the managerial attitudes to rhetoric and affairs. With theories, both scientific and ‘cultural’, becoming more and more speedily replaced by other theories or new interpretations, society as a whole has fallen back, bewildered, on bold living, acting out, experimenting. For Freud showed – following on the insights of Descartes and Nietzsche – that what we believe to be true may be just a fantasy, the clue lying in unconscious desire. In order to free oneself from the Blakeian ‘dark Satanic mills’ which are superstructures of thought, power and doubt, one longs to lodge the theories that lie so heavy on one’s life safely in the hands of the experts, and surrender to postBlakeian impulse. Think, for example, of what happened to third-wave feminism. Part of the reflex reaction from its intellectual weight was the raunch culture. The Nietzschean revaluation of all values often means that as a result of all the advances in human thought, doubting – relieved by impulse – is all we do. It is

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as if, rather than saying, I think therefore I am, we are saying I think, therefore I doubt. And in the anguish of that Enlightenment-born doubt, we either burrow into a (temporarily) safe theory or surrender primacy to desire – the ‘passions’ that Descartes and Pascal sought to overcome by reason. For while one wishes to think clearly, one is bound firmly by the twentieth-century command, never give up on your desire (a Lacanian dictum).9 Or, as Blake put it, Sooner murder an Infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.10 Doubt is so pervasive that it drives individuals into two reaction formations: ‘pure’ thinking – theory – and ‘pure’ impulse. Both are illusions of mastery and control. Faith in nothing: nihilism If you should doubt that truth has gone out of fashion, consider how often you use the word false. In the public sphere it is a word entirely, now, without meaning. If everything is doubted, absolute values exist, it seems, only in history. The real – which in both its everyday use and the Lacanian sense of overwhelming, unsayable, inescapable – is an idea that after World War Two came to mean something both true and false.11 For example, a powerful shocking artwork – Clockwork Orange, American Psycho, Volcano Lover, No Country for Old Men – is not true but is almost all the more real for that. But if the real is the unreal on an escalating scale, then we have arrived at a kind of nihilism: a crisis of truth, meaning, value and desirability. Nietzsche’s definition dates from his time. Absolute nihilism – at root, denial of being, Heidegger’s ‘forgetting of being’, or ‘rage at being’ – has a long history.12 Gorgias of Leontini in classical Greece provides, perhaps, the first formulation: ‘(1) that there is nothing; (2) that even if there were something, we could not know it; and (3) that even if we could know it, we could not communicate our knowledge to anyone else’.13 It sounds like Beckett. Gillespie suggests that ‘the origin of “European nihilism” is located in the medieval period’s ‘collapse in the scholarly synthesis between reason and revelation’.14 God becomes an omnipotent will supported by no concept of the good. God is pure will to power. The first modern use may be Friedrich Jacobi’s in a letter of 1799 to the philosopher Fichte, claiming that his

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romantic idealism was so centred on the self that it ‘seeks to reduce to nothing all that lies beyond it, namely the true or God’.15 This was the inevitable corollary of Descartes’ modernity, the launch of the self. Till the nineteenth century, these formulations were sporadic and abstract. Nihilism developed full force in Russia in the 1850s not just as a critique of being, but also of value, and was dramatized in Dostoyevsky and personified by Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862). Bazarov says, presciently, ‘You don’t need logic to put a piece of bread in your mouth when you’re hungry. What do we need all these abstractions for – principles, liberty, progress?’16 Hegel’s belief in the ineluctable progress of history is directly challenged. All that matter for Bazarov are science and the material, and he ends badly, unable to transform passion into love, intellect into achievement, solitude into strength. The dark side of late nineteenth century politics, somewhat fancifully narrated by Dostoyevsky, is taken up by Conrad in his picture of violent anarchism – some prefer the term ‘political nihilism’ – The Secret Agent (1907), following Heart of Darkness (1905), which charted the descent of colonial man into anti-value. Anarchism certainly did some bomb-throwing, but its positive side – seen in the antiFascist resistance during the Spanish Civil War – urged citizens to draw on their innate capacity for co-operation. During World War Two, the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote ‘The essential characteristic of the first part of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value’.17 This, and Bakunin’s Nietzschean dictum, contemporaneous with Nietzsche, ‘The passion for destruction is also a creative passion’ seems to apply to the twentieth century as a whole.18 The philosopher Karen L Carr identifies five categories of nihilism. They are epistemological, denying knowledge; alethiological, denying truth (although she leaves out theological nihilism, denial of the existence of God); metaphysical or ontological, denying the independent existence of the world (solipsism); ethical or moral, denying that any system of ethics is valid; and finally a somewhat contested existential or axiological nihilism, which Carr calls ‘the feeling of emptiness and pointlessness that follows from the judgment, “Life has no meaning”’.19 Semantic

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nihilism, adds Will Slocombe, deprives words of their power to express concepts.20 Political nihilism has already been mentioned. (The categories can be confusing enough on their own when you try to apply them, without getting into nihilism’s difference from atheism and existentialism. Atheism is not necessarily nihilist, nor is nihilism necessarily atheist. Consider Kierkegaard, whose angst in the face of nothingness did not rule out faith; or nihilist Nietzsche, who mourned others’ killing of God, rather than claiming that there was no God at all. Nietzsche would not give up belief in God; Kierkegaard would not give up disbelief.) All of these, plus other formulations, appear in this work. Carr, especially, remarks on the emergence of a culture of (passive) nihilism that she calls smiling or cheerful nihilism, drawing on Nietzsche’s Gay Science. But it is notoriously difficult to discuss nihilism. Will Slocombe and Shane Weller can lead the reader expertly through the logical minefield, without necessarily resolving the questions. Is Samuel Beckett’s work simply ‘nihilist’, as it depicts ‘nothing’, or ‘anti-nihilist’, as Weller claims, opposing nihilism? For the ‘will to negate’ can also be affirmation.’21 Faith in instinct: Nietzsche Nietzsche’s position in philosophical history is an ambiguous, if powerful, one. A voice crying in the wilderness for a return to a greater authenticity in living, he argued for an alignment of the dark Dionysian forces of instinct and artistic expression with the Apollonian values of order, a synthesis best seen in Greek tragedy. For the modern world has lost that glad morning of the ancient (preSocratic) Greeks which created unparalleled spirit and art as well as wisdom. Later in Nietzsche’s work the dark Dionysian comes to rule alone. In his parable of 1882 a madman runs into the town square, crying that we have killed God: What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideways, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? 22 Culture must start afresh, in full recognition of the fertile Dionysian forces that are culture’s unconscious, whose repression engenders guilt masked as morality. It is

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more important to be truly oneself than to be ‘good’ or ‘right’, to be free of resentment of those few who can act whole-heartedly, with spontaneity and strength: great men. Not only has the term ‘nihilism’ been used in different ways, it was also used in different ways by Nietzsche himself. The question is what human beings do with the suffering that marks our humanity. Nihilism as ‘decadence’ described the outworn values of his time, the mawkish and passive Christian attitudes attacked by Swinburne: ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean /The world has gone grey from thy breath’. This is the first stage, ‘passive nihilism’, with pejorative intent. In our time, one might think of ‘comfort zone’. The second stage, ‘active’ or ‘dynamic’, says nihilism is inevitable – let us embrace it, celebrate it, driving out all moralizing and dusty practices. We are familiar with Nietzschean nihilism’s Sermon on the Mount: ‘I teach the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome.’23 Outworn thinking is nihilistic (negative in the sense of lifeless, repressive) but new, creative thinking (beyond good and evil) is a nihilism that is a good thing. An up-todate interpretation: decadence or passive nihilism is going with the flow. Active or dynamic nihilism, the nihilistic moment, is making waves. The crisis of consciousness which brings revaluation of all values – that could engender dynamic nihilism, the imposition of will – is the radicality that Nietzsche professes. It is the necessary periodic rejection of conventional meaning, value and desirability, which is my – and Nietzsche’s – definition of nihilism for the purposes of this book (see note 4). This can be seen on the level of art in the twentieth century. Popular culture split off radically from the old high culture after the catastrophe of World War One. It sought release in the sexual, hedonistic, and shocking. High culture, affronted, became increasingly defensive. Outside the cultivated few, people found the new high culture equally shocking: over-intellectualized, impenetrable, empty of pleasure. The parallels with theory and impulse are evident. After the opening of the telescreen age, there was a great deal of money to be made in fanning the fires of popular culture, as long as it continued to be new, and offering the shocking along with the soothing. (Passive nihilism found its expression, perhaps, in the ‘light music’ of the 1940s to the 1960s which tried to pretend there was no Dylan

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and no Presley – or, for that matter, no Webern and no Boulez. One thinks, uneasily, of Mantovani.) Nietzsche was engaged in the musical politics of his day, and controversially repudiated Wagner whom he had earlier praised to the skies. Writing that Wagner’s Ring cycle was decadent, ‘a lie’, Nietzsche extolled in its place Bizet’s Carmen. He saw in it the new and shocking, confronting the Northern Protestant middle classes with something dramatically different, full of colour and life. It is harder these days to distinguish passive from dynamic nihilism. After the bovver-boy disruptions of punk rock – the Sex Pistols and others – rock and later rap became in many ways more brutal and strident, while pop was mostly more anodyne. Was such popular art still dynamic nihilism – continually destroying in order to create, making waves – or slavishly following, which is passive nihilism, going with the flow? The same question could be put to high culture. Can the return to tonality on the part of Peter Maxwell Davies, Richard Meale and others be seen as a disappointing lapse, or strikingly new? Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, made a significant remark: ‘When proper society went down, we gave it a good kicking.’ In other words, and as Nietzsche himself believed, you may be shocked when destructive impulses lash out at the outworn and decadent; but then you should whole-heartedly throw in your lot with the destructive new. Do not just accept the violent change; become part of it, celebrate it, no matter how others feel. Nietzsche also wrote, however, that morals have to be historicized, i.e. reconsidered in the light of the contemporary context. This could then be interpreted to mean that when everything is expressing negatives (like his Birth of Tragedy) it is dynamic nihilism to be cheerful and simple (like his Gay Science). When ‘new music’ was at its height, spiky and atonal, the shocking newcomers were the soothing and tonal Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt. Nietzsche’s assertions contradicted themselves diametrically, although commentators often find a unity at a deep level. As Foucault said, there is no single Nietzsche. His most passionate feelings for or against are liable to swing into their absolute opposites: this is his way of denying doubt. Primarily, he was against metaphysics, yet his enduring worship of Dionysos is religious. Many of these tergivisations are simply play, a refusal to be boring.

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Nonetheless his influence, not only on the humanities and social sciences but the world at large – since his reframing by Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) – has been so great that his nihilism in all its guises now calls for critique. His theorizing of dynamic and passive nihilism is of great interest in any analysis of modernism. We will in the end, however, have to decide if this distinction has value, meaning or desirability in the new century. Having said that the cogito was a precipice, I see the Nietzsche reader as irreversibly launched across or into it; Nietzsche commits you to either flight or fall. ‘It is difficult not to believe,’ he writes, ‘that 2 times 2 is not 4. But does that make it true?’24 These speculations follow almost exactly those of Dostoyevsky in Notes from Underground (1864) which Nietzsche admired; later this 2+2 interrogation appears not only in Orwell’s 1984 (1948) but also in Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1946). Destabilising of established truth would be called alethiological nihilism, something Nietzsche particularly relished. There are no facts, only interpretations.25 The symbolist poet Mallarmé wrote: ‘Is there a way, O self, no stranger to bitterness, to take flight with my two featherless wings /At the risk of falling throughout eternity?’26 We shudder now at the implacability of Nietzsche’s vision, and its role in the great devastations of the half-century to follow. Just as atheism may contribute to nihilism but is not itself nihilism, existentialism is one tributary of the nihilistic stream inaugurated by Stirner, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, the anarchists, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and others. Existentialism is not, however, Nietzschean nihilism. Both the latter and existentialism as professed by Kierkegaard and Sartre reject orthodox Christianity, but for different reasons. Kierkegaard’s existentialism says ‘I doubt that there is anything, but my choice is whether or not to jump in all the same, and if I do I may find, somehow, what I doubted.’ Sartre and his existentialist generation merely laugh at religion. Yet the ‘Do as you would be done by’ dictum, the bridge between faith and morality, is explicitly promoted in Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism, whereas Nietzschean nihilism has no credo except the power and privilege of the master-Self, and a certain consideration – sometimes – to others. It does however lament the killing of God.

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The Roots of Disaffection While insisting on the anti-foundationalism it shares with nihilism,

existentialism is based on choice, and requires the individual to consider himself as responsible for the whole world. We choose ourselves through our actions, nothing is given. Nietzschean nihilism does not entertain choice, and its attitude towards responsibility is contradictory at best. You do what is ordained by your selfhood; free will is largely an illusion. The strong man is driven by amor fati, love of his fate (an idea from Epictetus). Nietzsche exhorts you to ‘become what you are’; but for existentialism the choice may include becoming what you are not. Sartre is purer in his (axiological) nihilism than Nietzsche in denying any conception of ‘what you are’. Nietzsche is purer in (ethical) nihilism than Sartre, in his refusal of all moral facts. Faith in power ‘What is the good? It is no more than the will to power.’27 Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is the sage of freedom, solitude, triumph, compassion (sometimes), poetry, music, philosophy, anger, sadness and joy. He bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus rejoicing in his rejection of ordinary life, creating values, and overcoming himself, attended sometimes by animals and (frequently dismissed) acolytes. Lyricism and aphorism stream from him, as well as tears and vituperation. He is the artist of the self, trading the life of the herd for a solitary, if vulnerable, power. Since nihilism is here, he will be dynamic about it. The figure of Zarathustra influences all the telescreen-age icons, and is an inspiration for young dreamers – which may have a bearing on the fantastic success of gurus from the Reverend Moon and Kahlil Gibran to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Beatles fame and L Ron Hubbard. Zarathustrian mood swings, withdrawal from society, jokes and contradictions dominated the ministry of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, guru of sophisticated young Orange People. Many Zarathustras have appeared in the world of art and music, but also in the ‘creative industries’ which have come to include business, public relations and technology. The pathology of the twentieth century is guilt for not having been a Superman who creates values. Andy Warhol’s dictum ‘In the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes’ claims for

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everyone the capacity to be minimally super. The greater then the shame if we do not pull it off. There are few positive vocabularies since the nineteen eighties (except for the ‘caring professions’) for not valuing dynamic nihilism. Nietzsche’s aims go beyond the ‘noble’ individual sensibility to racial superiority. Civilizations come and go, but certain ancient ones are held up as models of ‘spirit’ which, in their eternal return, prove themselves élites, despite or because of the destruction they cause. ‘At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the raging blond beast avidly prowling around for sport and victory. This hidden centre needs release from time to time…the beast must return to the wild – Romans, Arabians, Germans, Japanese, the Homeric heroes, the Vikings.’28 They are the masters; the dark races serve. Suppression of the instincts led to internalized ressentiment, also guilt requiring a judge-God and Christ as sacrifice. The enslavement of the ancient Hebrews led them, in their suffering, to use their energy and intelligence for the creation of revenge. This view, recurring in different forms through his writings, is ‘The Jews place themselves at the head of all decadent movements. They are a means to making mankind sick.’ The basis for this claim: ‘It was

the

Jews

who,

rejecting

the

aristocratic

value

question

(good=noble=powerful=beautiful=happy=blessed) ventured to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of their unfathomable hatred’.29 Yet one finds, elsewhere, sweet reason: ‘The whole problem of the Jews occurs only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, have been so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred… the obscenity of leading the Jews to slaughter as scapegoats of every conceivable misfortune is spreading’.30 This passage supports the various claims that Nietzsche’s ‘negative evaluations’ of Jews are not anti-semitic: first, in public Nietzsche opposed anti-semitism, especially that of his sister and her husband; second, his sister herself later tampered with his texts; third, the whole climate of the time across Europe was strongly anti-semitic; fourth, he was not opposed to all Jews, only to those of the recent past, and the ancient priestly caste; fifth, his ‘negative evaluation’ of Jews was really rooted in his contempt for Christianity; and sixth, he changed later, anyway.31 (The texts I cite are,

14

The Roots of Disaffection

I hope, not sister-infiltrated.) There seem to be more negative passages, however, than positive. The theologian Dr Giles Fraser and many others are convinced Nietzsche was not anti-semitic; on the other side Tariq Ramadan says: ‘He had so many positive thoughts and he was so creative; but at the same time his thoughts were used by the Nazis, because there are sentences of anti-Semitism in his work – unacceptable, completely unacceptable. But people do not demonize the whole work of Nietzsche; they put things in context.’32 Just another emotional swing, one might conclude. Yet, to quote Arthur Danto, ‘If he was not an anti-Semite, his language is misleading to a point of irresponsibility’.33 Orwell’s 1984 satirically picked up the racialism of the Nazis, the Soviets, and their forebears. ‘Goldstein’, the telescreen icon of badness, is the ‘Jewish primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity’ (p. 14). Contempt for pity, a famous Nietzsche doctrine (although he also claims sometimes that one virtue of the noble man is sympathy) would be resurrected in Hitler’s ‘Have no pity. The stronger has the right’.34 Indeed, responsibility for the Holocaust is laid at Nietzsche’s door by Theodor Adorno and Karl Löwith: Camus also withdraws his earlier support.35 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe claims: ‘If it is true that the age is the accomplishment of nihilism [in the popular sense of meaningless destructiveness], then it is at Auschwitz that the accomplishment took place in its purest formless form.’36 In extolling the release of the instincts, however, Nietzsche genuinely sought a joy lost not only since classical Greece and the Enlightenment, but also since the dawn of his own century – the triumph of Napoleon, the Ode To Joy of Schiller and Beethoven, Wordsworth’s ecstasies over the French Revolution. Not that Nietzsche approved of the French Revolution: attacking an established order means attacking a hierarchy which keeps the noble in their rightful place. One might consider the French Revolution to be the acme of dynamic nihilism; but Georg Brandes’ encapsulation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, with which Nietzsche enthusiastically agreed, was an ‘aristocratic radicalism’, which always allied beauty and blessedness with the strong.37 The ‘creative destruction’ of dynamic nihilism lies behind Nietzsche’s ‘To see others suffer does one good. To cause others to suffer, still more so’, following Blake’s

From Big Brother to Big Brother ‘Energy is eternal delight’ and ‘The cut worm forgives the plough’.38,

15 39

Certainly

Blake’s ‘I must invent my own system or be enslaved by another man’s’ finds its echo in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra praising his own power, freedom and creativity.40 The doctrine of the will to power turns Nietzsche’s head, Janus-like, one minute toward Apollonian order, and the next back to Dionysian dark and disruption; one minute to nihilism as weakness, the next to nihilism as strength; one minute to ‘no absolute truth’, the next to ‘the question is, truth’s value’.41 Further, the haunting of all his writings by Christ, figure of power loathed though occasionally loved, and always in competition with Dionysos as an identification, reminds one of Karl Jaspers’ and J.P.Stern’s charge that in the end Nietzsche remains ‘a Christian apostate’.42 At the end of a century in which fifty million innocents were wiped out because tyrants said: ‘Have no pity: the stronger has the right’, a moral tabula rasa seems a dangerous base for the future. Napoleon did not stay a liberator, as Nietzsche well knew; and neither did Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, the US in Vietnam, the Americas and the Middle East, or Britain in India and Iraq – all entranced by the Nietzschean Superman. As Alain Badiou – a Platonist like Weil – notes, ‘Any conversation about the real advent of a new man is characterised by a steadfast indifference to its cost; and this indifference legitimates the most violent of means.’43 The will to power is a will to geopolitical supremacy which may opt for a tranquillized, rather than exterminated, populace. The term ‘smiling’, ‘cheerful’ or ‘gay’ nihilism – from The Gay Science, (1882) – meant innocence, brightness, harmlessness, Mozart rather than Wagner. It also meant that self-assertion need not be weighty, troubled or guilty. (Regarding Wagner, however, Nietzsche swung for, then against, then finally for, as was the pattern.) Karen Carr sees in ‘smiling nihilism’ the danger of an attitude that ultimately ‘allows raw power alone to determine a moral and intellectual hierarchy’.44 Power in earlier centuries was august and near-absolute. Today it is apparently shared, and public relations make it seem approachable. In ‘smiling nihilism’ – dynamic at the top, passive at the bottom – one may remember the fixed smiles of television shows from the Cold War period, and Ronald Reagan’s confiding smile as he destabilized

16

The Roots of Disaffection

the government in Nicaragua. The relentless voluntarism of the century was accompanied by a smile, if not by a gun: sometimes both at once. Power is as intransigent as it has ever been, and in the West it smiles. Although slave races are despised, acolytes are required by Zarathustra; many people, similarly, are beguiled into mass attachments to figures of power, who from Rajneesh to George W Bush subdue them with smiles. The concluding chapter of this book will assess the nature of nihilism at the century’s end, and how smiling nihilism led one man to a position of greater power than any other. Faith in the screen In Orwell’s novel 1984 (1948) ‘Big Brother is watching you’ through the two-way telescreen. The image of the all-seeing Big Brother on that telescreen is moustachioed, authoritarian and kindly, like famous images of Stalin. A clear antecedent is the poster of Lord Kitchener in 1916 with his military cap, equivalent moustache and pointed finger, the caption saying ‘Your country needs you!’ Each of these is an icon of power, ‘the inclusive image’, in McLuhan’s phrase.45 Kitchener’s power impressed on the public a strong but simple statement of social solidarity. The propaganda of Orwell’s image is however problematized. Big Brother’s supposed social inclusiveness fails to mask intimidation of the masses. For McLuhan the image’s strong ‘physicality’ is ‘tactile prompting’; the pointing finger of Kitchener gave way to the ‘scanning finger’ of the viewer, ‘ceaselessly forming the contours of things’.46 Television is an extension of the sense of touch. This is how the icon is experienced: it is not content that matters, but contour. Just looking at it changes the viewer. ‘The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’.47 In other words, power. Michel Houellebecq says something similar – but balder: ‘What confers dignity on a person is television’ (see chapter 3). On television in 2004 footage was shown of soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison as they subjected Muslim detainees to Orwellian humiliation, possible torture, and surveillance, captured on their mobile phones. Just as Big Brother’s image in Orwell refers faintly to the fierce-faced image of the phoney Wizard of Oz (1939), so the

From Big Brother to Big Brother

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detainees’ pointed hats are old-fashioned images of wickedness – also dunces’ caps, implying stupidity. ‘When the television image encounters a literate culture it necessarily thickens the sense-mix, transforming fragmented and specialized extensions into a seamless web of experience.’48 The private soldiers responsible for the detainees had heroes’ status by comparison, according to the ‘form of human association and action’. One can almost feel the prisoners’ skins and the touch of the chain held by Lindie England. The two soldiers were punished, but the pictures of this soldier and ‘her’ detainees will be remembered for a long time. In her smiling association with the prisoners she was as totally effective as the tools of her dominance. Formerly low in the hierarchy, she used the screen image and humiliation of a ‘slave race’ to achieve her fifteen minutes of fame, and more. Children and teenagers were captivated in the 1950s and 1960s by the Mickey Mouse Club, a television program in which teenagers with orthodontic smiles and mouse ears danced nervously while a choir sang ‘Mickey Mouse! Mickey Mouse! Forever let us wave his banner high – high – high!’ It was a guilty and baffled fascination, in those early days of television. What was the hidden meaning, which would justify both the production and one’s own watching? Why were those children making such (enviable) fools of themselves? Marshall McLuhan writes ‘It is the total investment in an all-inclusive now that occurs in young lives via television’s mosaic image. The child cannot see ahead because he wants involvement.’49 All rational questions were eclipsed by the desire to, in Baudrillard’s words, ‘interface and enter into communion’.50 The children – ordinary enough to be oneself, but marked with grace, since they were on television – looked out anxiously, an uncanniness in their brooding faces and joyless dance, ghosted by the voice-over’s platitudes. Being watched was something of a crisis, because they were not super and doubted their own meaning, value and desirability. ‘From today,’ writes Baudrillard, ‘the only real cultural practice, that of the masses, ours (there is no longer a difference) is a manipulative, aleatory practice, a labyrinthine practice of signs, and one that no longer has any meaning.’51 It was also in 1948 that Candid Camera appeared on television. Random

18

The Roots of Disaffection

individuals were duped into contrived, far-fetched and embarrassing situations, which delighted the home audience. The mass media were extending their power, as were security agencies; and again it was the telescreen watching you. Thus in 1948 the telescreen age begins, and it shows no sign of winding down, although the novels studied here stop at the millennium. The ‘reality show’ is a pandemic, but Big Brother stands out. The function of Mickey Mouse, television, cinema, games, music videos and other screen forms, is obvious: it is the unconscious masses acceding to Godhead by attaching themselves to icons (and hence to advertisers).52 ‘The Star,’ writes Simon Watney, ‘personifies an institution as it wishes to be seen. The Star does not generate his or her own meaning. The Star is one in an elaborate system of signs’.53 But there are many stars, icons and advertisements, many claims to Godhead, and doubt can be lacerating. Indeed, the imposition of constant choice between things that are not easy to distinguish is considered by some a kind of nihilism (see chapter 5). The power of the telescreen unites both surveillance and a ‘necessary’ amusement. Not only is CCTV the norm in the West, capturing images of citizens, but the inside of their heads can be watched. Simon Jenkins writes of the UK: ‘The national identity register allows all phone and internet browsing to be collected, possibly by private companies, and passed to the state. Under an amendment to the 1998 Data Protection Act, information gathered by one branch of government can be shared with others ‘for policy purposes’.54 Now, owing to the Internet, especially blogs and Facebook, there are almost no limits to what and whom can be looked at. One accedes to Godhead in everything one posts. The closest to the power formerly claimed by religious figures, however, is the Artist, whose art must be – like McLuhan’s view of the television image – disturbing. To understand how this began, long before the telescreen age, one must go back to the dynamic nihilism of 1916. Faith in chance: Dada and surrealism The Big Bang of the Great War, among other causes, was to expel a thousand

From Big Brother to Big Brother

19

angry fragments into the century, whose art has still not cooled. In the novel the sparks flew from Voyage to the End of the Night and Ulysses to Gravity’s Rainbow and Lost in the Funhouse. It has been a centrifuge culture, a culture of outburst in every sense. The cosmos is not order but explosion. But the Big Bang’s earliest projectile was its most far-fetched and farflung: Dada. Just as Descartes demanded a tabula rasa of thought, and Nietzsche a tabula rasa of morals, Dada demanded a tabula rasa of art. Dada, which emerged partially from revulsion by the Great War, was also a rejection of Western humanism stretching back to the Renaissance. For Dada broke language down into art, and art into language (like Marcel Duchamp’s urinal of 1917, inverted and entitled ‘Fountain’). Dada as universal doubt fuels Tristan Tzara’s ‘Motionless Dance’, theatrical performance is actors hurling potatoes at the audience; and random assemblage of words cut from a newspaper is poem. For Dada, the discoveries of Einstein, Freud and Bergson show there are no ineluctable laws, only the irrational and unpredictable. Above all, there is in art and thought no autonomous human agency. This art is a nihilism, but a dynamic one, full of life, Dionysos come at last. Picabia’s Dada Cannibal Manifesto went ‘Dada itself feels nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing /It is like your hopes, nothing / Like your heaven, nothing / Like your idols, nothing / Like your politicians, nothing / Like your heroes, nothing / Like your artists, nothing / Like your religions, nothing …’ 55 This is also the voice of May 1968. Andy Warhol comes out with a similar list of nothings, including ‘If you know life is nothing, then what are you living for? For nothing’.56 Dada abolishes any distinction between nihilism as ontology – not-being rather than being – and as absence of value. Yet there is a surprising resemblance to the ideas of Richard Rorty, leading pragmatist philosopher of the later century and absolutely no Dadaist, who said ‘Nothing grounds our practice, nothing legitimates it, nothing shows it to be in touch with the way things are’.57 But what united Dada was its refusal of all belief in human progress. ‘The trickeries of today,’ said Man Ray, ‘are the truths of tomorrow’.58 The Enlightenment is over. By 1920, when Dada was at its manic height, André Breton was turning aside

20

The Roots of Disaffection

from it, in a stubborn desire to defend the integrity of the artwork. This was the downward moodswing of Dada into the depressive phase called surrealism, nailing down the fragments flying from Dada; for surrealism was a hermeneutic. It distorted normal forms, like the will-to-power of the unconscious. L’amour fou, convulsive beauty, volcanoes, moons, piazzas and canaries admit no human agency. The sexual shock which underlay the marvellous for many surrealists marked it off from Dada whose energies were undifferentiated. For Dada the bourgeois humanist is an imbecile; for surrealism he is merely repressed. Dada’s nihilism is impulse; surrealism’s is theory, haggard with experience. Surrealist art and writing – one thinks of Breton’s novel Nadja – occupy a place somewhere between analyst and patient. Everywhere doubt challenges the thesis of an oppressive authority, a new impulse springs up, but doubt again seizes the impulse with a heavy hand and a new theory – ‘freezing,’ as Gertrude Stein said, ‘its fountain’. For Nietzsche the fountain must never stop flowing: ‘Art and nothing but art,’ he wrote (but retracted later), ‘if we are not to die of the truth!’59 Throughout the century popular culture expanded in the West, and high art retreated to its theoretical tower. In literature, the playful impulses of postmodernism sprang from the too, too solid tomes of a modernism whose experience needed an excess of theory to explain. But the aporetic – doubting – collapse of art into language and language into art, begun with Dada and surrealism, has continued in the unflagging dedication of art to concepts and to chance. Good and bad faith: scepticism and cynicism Sceptical is a word seldom used today (unless you are a cynical climate change denier, and must be placated). Scepticism is dispassionate and legitimate doubt. Cynicism, as Oscar Wilde said so succinctly at the turn of the twentieth century, is knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is a mental state appropriate to nihilism and certainly in accord with the aspersions cast by Bazarov on principles, liberalism and progress. The first official definition of the word in

From Big Brother to Big Brother

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this modern sense – that is, evolved away from the philosophy of the post-Socratic philosophers called Cynics – comes from 1591: ‘[the tendency] to deny or sneer at the sincerity or goodness of human actions or motives’ (OED). When journalists say ‘The people are feeling cynical about this government program’, they really mean that the government’s motives are dubious, and the people smell a rat. Cynicism is the argument of Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic: that justice is the interest of the stronger: no more, no less.60 Since 1980 the managerial class has censored out words for feelings, integrity and honest doubt in public life. Everything is doubted – it goes without saying. Nothing is true, not even the real. Cynicism is a garment of disillusion which s/he need never take off, like piercings or a fake tan: a faux, but knowing, attitude. Cynicism can be a defence against unrealised hope; it can arise from a loss denied; it is experience’s rebuff to innocence. Watching others suffer does me good because – apart from sheer Schadenfreude – it ‘strengthens’, that is ‘toughens’ me, for further competitiveness. Cynicism annihilates scepticism as much as belief. Scepticism is the hope of Descartes; cynicism would be his despair, for it pre-empts not only thinking but also the trust in the good that underwrites clear thinking. Nietzsche uses the word frequently, in admiration – but is still oxymoronic: ‘The exceptional man will encounter cynics who acknowledge what is animal-like, common, ‘the rule’, and still praise spirituality’ and then ‘My books attain here and there the highest thing attained on earth, cynicism’.61,62 He often means, by this, resistance to seduction by demagogues and the herd; at other times, however, mere knowing superiority. Nietzsche’s two faces are those of the telescreen age. Nietzsche’s sense of crisis, of humanity’s self-reflection, must be related now to the question of belief in the possibility of good action. There has been little discussion of the nature of nihilism in a century which has annihilated more people, by a long chalk, than any other. Hobsbaum’s and Badiou’s view that the twentieth century was ‘short’ – that it started only after World War One – implies that certain ideas and ideals died with that war. But it is before turns for the worse, when the worse is presaged, that words emerge and are put, prophetically, before the public.

22

The Roots of Disaffection

When the forces of change are too powerful and the warnings fail, the prophetic words are swept away. So it was with nihilism – although ‘decadence’ and ‘will’ turned up in the work of Shaw, Lawrence, Rand and others. The century judged that an idea whose time has come has no need to be expressed; and those who benefited from the exclusion were able to make the word look naïve or passé. The silencing of a prophetic word is part of the process of history. Despite their cultural relevance, the words ‘conformist’ in the sixties, ‘permissive’ in the seventies, ‘materialistic,’ hedonistic’, ‘superficial,’ about aspects of society from the eighties on were soon occulted. That quaint critique of mid-century suburban materialism, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, was the voice of conventional morality. It said, first, that thou shalt not covet (the last gasp of Christian thinking); and second, that it is all right to be poor. The phrase was silenced by the ascendancy of the ‘organisation man’ and the associated culture of public relations. Of course, one now desires to have all one’s neighbour has; this is ‘natural’. The old critique is censored by the phrase ‘politics of envy’. Scepticism is doubt in good faith: cynicism is doubt in bad. The triumph of managerialism sees humans, in the words of John Ralston Saul, as inferior machines. An everyday example: to hear ‘Your call is important to us’ in response to a business call is to question its value, meaning and desirability, and that of your own. The euphemistic message inverts the Platonic ideal of the professions, which emphasised that the doctor, carpenter or business person works for the good of the weaker party in the situation, patient or client, not for a fee – which is the object of another activity, that of earning one’s living. Platonism is of course idealism, which Nietzsche (mostly) opposed. The long wait with the recorded message is the dismissed voice of the human in the interests of profit and share price, which determine power in contemporary society. Even less powerful than the average consumer is the ‘cold’ caller in a call centre ringing to get something from the consumer, suffering dehumanising conditions, poor pay and the wrath of the public. Justice is in the interests of the stronger. The cooings of the corporate message are largely false, but being only inferior machines the public has no right or indeed capacity to protest. Truth lies in the machine, which reproduces so accurately the voice of the sunny

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female described by advertising experts, at her heyday in the detergent commercials of the 1950s, as the ‘happy slave’. But there is a deeper sense of betrayal coming from daily life: nothing is sacred. The only valorization is the utilitarian/pragmatic ‘appropriate’ or managerial ‘best practice’. Dada and surrealism exploded the sacredness of art; now business, in an age dominated by service industries, has exploded the sacredness of service. If employers really cared about ‘best practice’, they would hire more employees to deliver it. In fact, employers hope to divest their staff of belief in good action, so that their docility will confirm their status as inferior machines. Smiling nihilism dominates commercial communication. Only the visual counts. It is cynicism that speaks through the recorded message: ‘Your values, nothing’. Faith in transgression The transgressive/subversive thought, act or purchase is the only authentic one, say many humanities theorists. But now that is to be doubted. The new, the shocking, the edgy sell too well. And the transgressive discourse, once learned, can be dismally conformist. Tattoos are an interesting example of dynamic nihilism trying to resist becoming passive. Their vogue among young women since punk and grunge suitably shocked their elders, being of dubious taste and associated with low life, violence, and maleness as brute power. How to maintain their radicality when so many were doing it? Answer: their indelibility. Something you cannot just toss out next year demands commitment: like the surrealist beauté convulsive, it changes things forever. Removal – if possible at all – would be as painful as the original process; which makes tattoos more dynamic and other than mere piercings. A shop which sells clothes for young teens is called ‘Pervert’. The owner might say that ‘pervert’ is related to ‘voyeur’, the moviegoer’s role honoured by film theory and ‘transgressive’ theory in general. This means cynically putting a price on goods, rather than value on the good. Publicity for deviance seems to justify uncontrolled impulse. The psychologist Richard Davis speaks of the ‘hostile personality’ as ‘judgmental, aggressive and cynical’.63 One thinks of Patti

24

The Roots of Disaffection

Smith’s ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine’ and Johnny Rotten’s ‘I am an Antichrist’. The violent sexual impulse is regaled by some punk and rap songs, like ‘I’m no fucker/ I’m no punk / Gonna stick my dick in ya bitch’s cunt’. There is a subcultural theory to explain and valorize these transgressive lyrics; but many might be sceptical, for there is no doubt that they are a brutally radical rejection of value, meaning and desirability. The clothes shop boasts perversion; does the song admit rape? What sort of society encourages rape, in defiance of the law, then rarely convicts? The ‘options’ generation is expressing on the one hand the cynical ‘What do you expect? Things can’t be otherwise’, and on the other the sceptical and uncommitted ‘What else is there?’ It is hard to discern the true. One remembers Man Ray’s ‘The trickeries of today are the truths of tomorrow’. And since Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye (1957) lambasted the phoney, everything is so phoney that no-one needs to say phoney any more. Irony can be the voice of both experience (it knows the score) and of innocence (most beasts in Orwell’s Animal Farm, like those in Zarathustra, are simple creatures). But just as irony is both innocent and experienced, art has been caught in an instability of purpose. There is often heated argument about whether an artwork, in bland representation of the crude, shallow, the violent, the exploitative, is holding up this vision of humanity as real, as an example, or ironically undercutting it. Whether, that is, its shock is passive or dynamic nihilism. Take for example society as shown in Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy or Nabokov’s Lolita. Reader responses will be complacent, outraged, or amused by their ironies. As Nietzsche said, there are no moral facts.64 His introduction of a histrionic and ravaging irony into his works destabilized traditional accounts of irony and also meaning in his text. Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Houellebecq’s Atomised and many other narratives will be remembered for their dubious irony. Irony is particularly necessary in times of overwhelming orthodoxies; but there is a swagger about it in post-modernity, the famous self-parody, which sometimes seems slack, evasive or simply self-regarding. Irony is a weapon of precision. It must ultimately be called compromised when it refuses to say true or

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false. Is such irony a worthwhile attack on convention, or just negation?65 What can be said in favour of the compromised ironies of Nabokov, Houellebecq, Updike or Rushdie is that they faithfully record the distaste and fascination experienced in representing a society too complex, confused and over-represented to know true and false. Theorists have judged novelists to feel that no ‘straight’ narrative was possible any longer, the culture being shellshocked by the clash between the cognitive advances of the century and its abjections, and also by the burden of competing older narratives. The orthodoxy – considered ‘authentic’ by artists and intellectuals then emerged that meaning is, and by extension value is, indeterminate. This orthodoxy was not shared by Susan Sontag, who wrote in 1997: There has been a daunting shift in moral attitudes in the last two decades in advanced capitalist countries. Its hallmark is the discrediting of all idealisms, of altruism itself; of high standards of all kinds, cultural as well as moral. The ideology of Thatcherism is gaining everywhere, and the mass media, whose function is to promote consumption, disseminate the narratives and ideas of value and disvalue by which people everywhere understand themselves. Intellectuals have the Sisyphean task of continuing to embody and defend a standard of mental life and of discourse other than the nihilistic one promoted by the mass media.66 (my emphasis) Sontag was brave to use the taboo word ‘moral’, with its overtones of sexual prudery. When the category ‘moral’ was banned with the relaxation of censorship at mid-century, the sex-and-violence element in entertainment, formerly forbidden, became near-obligatory. Liberals approved the deregulation of the sexually explicit in film, art and literature while ‘disapproving’ of violence. A disingenuous distinction, perhaps. By the nineties no-one dared object to the representation of violence any more, and pornography is normal in all media – indeed, the word is disappearing. Giving free rein to the instincts may require, however, infinite recourse to therapy. In the words of Madeleine Bunting of the think-tank Demos, ‘At some point in the twentieth century, we pretty much junked security in favour of freedom. The price we pay for that is a nervy, risktaking roller coaster ride of adrenalin and depression. We’ve replaced lives that were nasty, brutish and short with lives that are insecure, disoriented and long.’67

26

The Roots of Disaffection Stoic philosophers, and psychologists studying the role of the amygdala in

people’s accelerated lives, would urge them to be neither flustered nor apathetic.68 This would tend to mean cool. Some sceptics will critically acknowledge social conditioning but seek to resist and act freely. Cynics may deny the adrenalin and depression (or impulse and theory) alternation, and claim that violent emotions and their representations are ‘transgressive’ of conventional values, and therefore good. For them ‘catharsis’ – quite complex in Aristotle – means that violent emotions are simply, somehow, flushed away by their expression. (Nietzsche’s ‘To see/make others suffer…’) ‘Mimesis’ on the other hand means, for some cynics, that individuals should identify happily with icons in the form of celebrities and advertisements, and this is good. The reality, rather than the fantasy, is that a poorly-understood identification with someone better endowed is not more being, but non-being. Deleuze and Guattari see cynicism as the inherent affect of capitalist societies, rather than cruelty and terror which sustained the primitive and the despotic.69 Yet there is a place for all three in the telescreen age. Quod scripsi scripsi: nihilism and fundamentalism After the events of September 11, 2001, the critic Christopher Hitchens objected to the characterization of the Islamicist attackers as fundamentalists. ‘They’re not fundamentalists,’ he said. ‘They’re nihilists.’ Nihilism, with its associations here of anarchy and secret agents, sounds appropriately, resoundingly, empty. This is the popular/general use of the term: mindless destructiveness. Their arguments are absurd, their purposes vain, their methods diabolical. As stressed earlier, Nietzsche used the term both negatively (decadence) and positively (exploding the given social order so that the true hero could emerge.) Since the midpoint between these can be hard to judge, my definition of nihilism throughout this book is the challenge to conventional value, meaning and desirability. Susan Sontag, like Hitchens a New Yorker, had already denounced nihilism as the discrediting of ideals and altruism, the privatisation, the relativism and the anti-excellence ideology of her own countrymen, emphasizing the intellectual’s responsibility to oppose these. Perhaps Sontag’s use of ‘nihilism’

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meant more passive than active in Nietzschean terms, and Hitchens’s the other way round, dynamic – the US public going with the flow, the jihadists making waves. Again the familiar opposition comes up: terrorist (from our point of view) and freedom fighter (from theirs). Ideology, whether al Qa’ida’s, Stalin’s, or Ronald Reagan’s, shades into fundamentalism. An absolute view of the literal, fundamentalism appears to give language a radical power, while in reality denying its creative force. Tariq Ali reacted to Hitchens by describing the US/Islamicist opposition as ‘a clash of fundamentalisms’.70 It is clear that as soon as ‘extremist’ tactics are concerned, the words fundamentalism and nihilism are almost interchangeable. A remark made by a British infantryman, Arthur Halestrap, still alive in 2003 after fighting at Ypres in 1914, is instructive. On Armistice Day 1918, he says, ‘We stopped and looked at one another. We had no objective. Nothing we looked forward to doing.’71 This is Carr’s axiological nihilism: absence of purpose. The Dadaists turned the emptiness into anger and art: ‘Your hopes: nothing. Your politicians: nothing. Your art: nothing’. As Bűlent Diken might say, they have converted negation of will into will to negate.72 There were those who lived with the doubt and rationality of the Enlightenment, and those who turned uncritically to various gospels. Of Marx: blame property. Of Hitler: blame degenerate groups. Of the American Way: blame socialism. Fundamentalism is nihilism’s panacea. Karen Carr notes that ‘alethiological nihilism [that sense that there is no truth] ultimately culminates in its opposite: dogmatism.’73 The stepping stones through the quagmire must all be in a straight line. This may require some intermediary to straighten them out for you. Fundamentalism is Nietzsche’s category ‘will to truth’ – escape into fanaticism.74 The American Way was confirmed as a saving and infinitely productive ideology. Buttressed by the evangelistic Christianity that was its founding principle, the USA committed itself in the 1970s to a market fundamentalism which over twenty-five years has penetrated and reconfigured the political systems of not only the Anglophone nations but also, through the globalization

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practices of the International Monetary Fund, Europe and the developing world. According to the doctrines of market fundamentalism – known also as neoliberalism, Hayekism, Reaganomics, Thatcherism, monetarism, Friedmanite economics and economic rationalism – the only good economic actions are freeing business from all restraint, to maximize growth and profit and, thanks to the ‘trickle down effect’, choice and general prosperity. It has, however, proved reckless and unethical in pursuit of these, and appropriated public service provision while expatriating jobs, costs and accountability. Meanwhile, those lower down the ladder – the precariat – worked with less money, protection or security, while exhorted to borrow and spend. This system was called, after the nineteen fifties, the consumer society. The term ‘consumer’ kept the human being in the reckoning. Later developments in market fundamentalism were, however, ‘mathematical’; the human factor has disappeared, only an abstraction remains. In return, western societies are better provided with goods and conveniences than ever before, if there is enough economic security to buy and enough time to shop, but at the price of financial stability. Intervention in the political affairs of others, from Korea through Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, has been backed by the theory of the market and mediatised corporatism. The written word has become a less secure source of understanding – and a bearer, like the image, of disvalue. It became clear that no added sugar can mean added sugar, that natural can mean adulterated; and that the results of an opinion poll mean nothing unless scepticism is applied to the cynical wording of questions. Politicians never keep all their promises, but the concept of the Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s ‘non-core promise’ is an oxymoron entrenching disvalue. Sontag cites the disparagement of élites, meaning intellectuals with independent opinions. Only those most profoundly captured by the market system, spending most of their income on goods and services, that unstable and uninformed fraction of the demographic in swing seats, are granted the moral title ‘aspirational’. Economic fundamentalism is not necessarily dissociated from religious

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fundamentalism. Some Christian groups – those which believe in the literal truth of the Bible, including creationism and speaking in tongues – grew in power over the century, from the televangelists to the End-Timers, who by century’s end, through their close connections with the White House, had engaged in a terrible dance with the fundamentalists of Islamic jihad. Armageddon is at hand, the Saved will be taken up to Heaven and the Second Coming depends on a maximized Israel (see chapter 2). The passion of the End-Timers could be termed a dynamic nihilism, like that of the Islamists. On the one hand, a salvific theory; on the other, violent impulse. The two religious fundamentalisms form a strangely symmetrical binary – like the less symmetrical binary within the borders of the state of Israel. Faith in theory Western society has been run by fundamentalist psychologies too. Psychoanalysis, from Freud to Lacan, instituted grim masculine orthodoxies which claimed to be theories of everything and within which disagreement was heresy, until after excommunication came sainthood in the form of a new school (Jungianism, Kleinianism, R D Laingian anti-psychiatry). As did surrealism in art and literature, it turned impulse – drive, libido – into theory. Psychoanalysis is a conventionality almost impossible to keep up with. But its opposite number, behaviourism, has had the ascendancy where it really matters – commerce. Psychoanalysis was the archeology of consciousness, with behaviour a mere acting-out. In the search for an objective science of behaviour, Watson and Skinner ended up with a theory even more determinist than that of its rival: operant conditioning controls our past through our environment, part of which is of course advertising. Though the popular view of behaviourism – Pavlov’s dog – is a stereotype, the reduction of the human mind to a brute system of rewards and punishments, together with its jibes at ‘mentalism’ – the view that human consciousness is deserving of study – could overlook, along with introspection, human exploration and human value. The rat in the maze and the housewives

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ticking boxes in response to pictures of soap powder are signs of science leaching into business and vice versa. In this psychoanalysis and behaviourism are one: they valorize impulse by means of theory. Along with a rise in living standards, behaviourism has brought advances in the supply of pleasure and the control of upsetting habits, reinforcing the utilitarian position that the good equals the greatest happiness of the greatest number. As Orwell, Huxley and Anthony Burgess will show, behavourism can work the other way too, inflicting pain to elicit a desired response. Religion-surrogates are also powerful theories too, like the immensely wealthy Scientology. More widespread are the New Age practices of the second half of the century. Nietzsche foresaw that we would ‘plunge abruptly into the opposing values with the same measure of energy with which we were Christians’.75 The case of astrology may seem trivial. Until the Renaissance, however, it served as calendar in the Western world, and was accepted by the Church (it is represented beautifully in Chartres Cathedral). As science advanced with the Enlightenment, its influence seemed to wane, but now it is undoubtedly the major New Age belief, which can overlap, as Chartres Cathedral shows, with old-fashioned religion. Its Western adherents alone – there are still more in the East – are in the millions, and its influence is astonishingly powerful since its portfolio expanded from simple forecasts in women’s magazines to the psychological profiles of Sun signs (based on raw birth date). Full birth charts gave a still more detailed picture, catering to the new self-absorptions of babyboomers, and for the first time in the West the man or woman in the street could find PAIBH – Richard Eckersley’s lists of personal goods: purpose, autonomy, identity, belonging and happiness – in the virtual world of the Zodiac.76 As psychoanalysis creatively defended itself against interpretive error with the repression factor (any heterosexual can be a repressed homosexual) and religion can hide its undesired features behind priestly discretion, astrology leant on the influence of lesser planets and stars within personal horoscopes to modify or reverse your Sun sign profile. If one is a Virgo and not perfectionist, or a Leo and

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not dominating, or a Capricorn and not ambitious, then it is because one’s Moon is in Pluto, or ascendant in Pisces, etc. While fate and destiny are words now laughed at, determinism is in force in mass capitulation to this fundamentalist theory which dominates lives. ‘I’m Libra, I’m hopelessly indecisive.’ ‘We chose January 21 for the birth, we didn’t want him to be a Capricorn.’ ‘Hullo, is that Stargazer? I’m Leo and my girlfriend’s Aquarius, is that all right and can we go OS in August?’ ‘I’m so glad I’m Aquarius.’ These are true examples from educated people. Nietzsche scorned astrology; but he did not believe in free will either, though he sometimes uses the phrase. Both Nietzsche and astrological adherents believe (though the latter may not say it) those who do not share their views to be nihilists. Faith of youth Part of Thus spake Zarathustra’s enduring appeal for the young is its strange and vivid poetry, its intense life, its call to stand out, to turn away from the herd so as to truly live. Ideas of a natural aristocracy are also particularly welcome to students who are, like other young people, confused by the array of possibilities from which to seize success. If you are Superman, everything you do is right. Stricken by doubt, an infinity of choice, and no clear idea of their character, many are saying with Hamlet ‘There’s a divinity which shapes our ends/Rough-hew them as we may’. But the divinity is seldom established religion, and almost never Christianity. ‘We can enjoy believing in these things,’ one young person says, about astrology or Reiki or crystals, ‘because they’re not true.’ The unreal is more real than the real. Yet the above citations show how deeply they do believe – while imagining that they are not oppressed like adherents of established religions or social movements. But who will tell Scorpios how to behave now that Pluto, their ruler, is judged to be no longer a ‘full planet’? Presumably they will not be worried. Like all fundamentalisms, astrology relieves anxiety at the cost of reducing freedoms and skewing judgment in a world where you have to make yourself, from moment to moment, with ethical guidelines that have to be

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scrounged from somewhere. The propagation of astrology – not only by women’s magazines – is cynical, and addictive for those choosing five careers and three partners in one lifetime, whose decisions have to start somewhere. ‘Karma’ is a euphonious borrowing from Hinduism. People feel intuitively that what goes around comes around (‘as ye sow, so shall ye reap’). But the doctrine, far from being voluptuously exotic, was in fact taught by many Western figures. Besides, who is on the committee which decides if you come back as a peasant, an angel or a mouse? The marketing of Eastern esoterica is virtually mainstream. ‘Past lives’ have been very fashionable, a fantasised karmatic preconditioning which allows you to parent yourself, erasing actual ancestors. You are God of an interior universe. Fundamentalisms can be identified by their longing for and fear of the impulse. Their strength lies in preventing or justifying it. In times of instability it is a rock against ravening doubt. Those who sell belief’s hardware know that infinite gullibility means infinite sales. Any religion consumable at will, free of rules and exclusions, is very popular; and the goddesses, witches, Sufis, Pagans, Hare Krishnas, shamans, Kabbalists and other creative visualisations seem part of the pantheon of screen images in constant motion around us. Charles Taylor calls this the ‘nova effect’, ‘across the span of the thinkable and perhaps even beyond’.77 It at times seems as if involvement with these beliefs belongs to youth, and are clung to as a means of staying young. The churches, like science and politics, are for the hopelessly old. Julia Kristeva writes: ‘The loss of the Imaginary is loss of the capacity to fantasise and have a unique psychic space. In a society of spectacle, where everyone is flooded with images, fantasies have been standardized: our little bit of freedom deriving from the negativity constitutive of individuality has evaporated’.78 Perhaps this is part of the catastrophe predicted by Nietzsche. The flood of images, tending more and more to the cartoonish, pornographic, violent and all together, has indeed something demonic about it. Confrontation with external authority and law is no longer possible, ‘they have become empty and

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insubstantial forms’. Without revolt, interior or exterior, we weaken the self, and are prey to ‘nihilisms and fundamentalisms’.79 Other beliefs not usually recognized as fundamentalisms are the Myers-Briggs personality taxonomy (recalling Eysenck’s mid-century theories on introversion and extroversion) and the Enneagram, both of which have considerable intellectual respectability. George Ritzer writes that ‘we suffer from too much of nothing’, and Milan Kundera suggests that the demonic is that condition with too little meaning.80,81. There is no greater Nietzschean crisis of consciousness than, as Kristeva sees it, an ‘assemblage of recalcitrant individualisms’. Recalcitrant because the self without the inner resources to make sense of one’s own experience clings tight to others’ visions, either disconnected images or faux theories. This is what Blake meant by ‘black-robed priests’ and ‘dark Satanic mills’ – the closing off with systems of those energies thrown up by innocent desire, those energies that had Zarathustra drinking and rhapsodizing with his friends, and Tristan Tzara and his friends throwing potatoes at the bourgeois audience. (But was that a ‘genuine revolt’ or an ‘assemblage of individualisms’?) Young people try to assert control over what they take into their minds. In Cartesian dualism the mind was sovereign – with training – and everything outside it doubtful. This is difficult, however, in an age without centre. The young seek something stable on which to build lives full of change, and full of the attractions of impulse. But control can slide into theory, and instinctual revolt into a passive rather than dynamic nihilism. Faith in the novel: value and disvalue Nietzsche prophesied a forceful move into values opposed to Christianity. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1865) is prophetic of Nietzsche himself, depicting a student who devises a theory about the power, and freedom from sanction, of the superior man to justify an impulse to murder which is at root purposeless. Nietzsche himself, however, would not have condoned such crimes. The plunge was also foreseen by Robert Louis Stevenson, a significant standardbearer of early modernism. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appeared in

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1886. Like Dr Frankenstein before him, Dr Jekyll, inventor of the transformative potion, is the picture of nineteenth century pieties: the company of scientific men, the reading of improving works, the comfortable British fireside. But the total undesirability of Mr Hyde corrects the romantic fantasy of Frankenstein’s monster. Dr Jekyll’s plunge into opposing values is much deeper than that of Mary Shelley’s scientist, for she had him create a monster outside himself, whereas Dr Jekyll is Mr Hyde. Conventionally religious but given to shaming pleasures, Jekyll invents first a theory then a potion allowing him to consign his ‘bad’ self to an other. (Dostoyevsky was once again the precursor, in The Double (1846). But the Russian’s double was better than his hapless original.) Released from Jekyll’s ‘improving conscience’, impulse is given free rein. ‘My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring’ (p 75). The will-to-power is inevitable: ‘I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts’ (emphasis mine). Jekyll turns desperately to God when Hyde’s crimes multiply, but he is powerless to ‘turn off’ the monster. Impulse has taken over, and to kill Mr Hyde he must kill himself. As Nietzsche said in anticipation of Freud, ‘nothing can be more incomplete than [man’s] image of the totality of drives which constitute his being.’82 The Jekyll/Hyde polarity illustrates not only an existential crisis but a nihilist one; failure to accept the ambiguity of all human endeavours means one succumbs either to inauthenticity or animality. In Dr Jekyll, Nietzsche would see everything he detested: ‘I condemn Christianity [and its] corruption. It left nothing untouched by its depravity, made of every value a disvalue, every truth a lie’ (my emphasis).83 The slinkings into doorways and concealed night movements of the narrative recall Nietzsche’s image of nihilism as the ‘uncanny guest’ knocking at the door.84 Mr Hyde is dynamic nihilism sweeping away Jekyll’s passive nihilism. Will Slocombe notes that any attempt to overcome nihilism is itself a nihilism.85 How then do we make disvalue into value? Monster and scientist are ‘disavowal of existing civilisation’ (Löwith’s view of nihilism) and ‘separation of the world from its absolute relation to God’ (Thielecke’s).86 In this vein Kirilov in Dostoyevsky’s The Devils argues that the

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purest example of free will is suicide, an idea taken up fifty years later by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus and other works. In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoyevsky dramatises the same struggle between good and evil – dramatized by Father Zossima and the Grand Inquisitor – as does Stevenson. There is no escaping the sense that to be conscious in a life devoid of certainty is to suffer; but the religious impulse is still there to stand for hope – or delusion. In The Devils, Peter says to Kirilov, ‘If you shoot yourself, you’ll become a god – that’s it, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, I’ll become a god’.87 Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil envisaged galaxies of gods with a small g, foreseeing that when nihilism becomes commonplace, religions do too. But Kirilov’s belief is more chilling. He has doubted to the point of distraction, and now a warped theory (see chapter 3) justifies destructive impulse. Now, a century and a quarter after Dostoyevsky and Stevenson, the era of sensation has banalised nihilism, made it commonplace. The challenge to conventional value, meaning and desirability is the norm. More or less suiciding pop stars can indeed become gods thereby. Other gods are plucked from soon-to-be-chic sources and banalised by commercialisation. Wide-eyed backpackers return from India with a little statue of Lord Shiva doing his dance of destruction to put on the mantelpiece. People at dance parties or clubs ingest things that may kill them. But they will be briefly ecstatic gods, it is hoped, before they die; and if death comes sooner rather than later, some would not argue. They might say, with the soldier Arthur Halestrap on Armistice Day 1918, ‘We looked at one another and saw no objective, nothing to look forward to.’ They might, however, be having innocent fun. For it can be said of Nietzsche that he gave people back their youth. Semi-suicide and solitary ecstasy are both delayed responses to the crisis of value, meaning and desirability that emerged long ago and remains unresolved. Like Dada, the dance party and the music video are almost impersonal paths to ‘pure’ creativity and ‘pure’ pleasure. Jigging on the spot to techno was almost Tzara’s ‘motionless dance’. Visuals and pop music were the particular forms of artistic expression of the twentieth century. But the novel best illustrates that interior passage to balanced selfhood rarely captured by screen images. Pleasure and edification to be had from

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books – for the novel, it is generally recognised, is a moral form – are ‘slow release’.88 Plato’s famous analogy still represents the difference between the flickering shadows projected by the sun on to the cave wall and the real world outside (cognate with Descartes’ doubts about the empirical world).89 The inference that Plato’s analogy relates to modern media-dominated societies has been frequently made. But the thoughts of the caveman, which no-one knows, are imaginatively accessible to novelist William Golding (see chapter 1). What both Descartes and Stevenson contributed directly to the twentieth-century novel is our obsession with crime and our heavily-conditioned doubt about who did it. Crime novels, movies and television series totally dominate sales. Most do not move beyond the generic rules of popular culture. Crime writers acknowledge that their work is reassuring, because the good guys get the bad guys. But even more reassuring is their ‘explanation’ of death. On any screen we see people who might be entering into the ambiguous assertion ‘There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not he’– a formulation not far from the famous Leopold and Loeb case in Chicago in 1924.90 Screen projections are projections of narcissistic dreams. The line between dynamic nihilism, self-apotheosis and nihilistic delusion is a fine one, as these novels show. The difference between Dostoyevsky and the logic of the telescreen is that the former offers a critique of society’s arguments by looking into the heads and the histories of characters. We can discern the process that led them from there to here, with their limited but precious independence. The screen production is face: the novel is mind. Every literary novel dramatizes – and at times resolves – crises of value, meaning and desirability.

CHAPTER 1 BRITAIN: WHAT REMAINS In Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1992), attempts are made at two British hospitals during World War One to treat shell-shocked soldiers so that they can be sent back to France.1 The first is a requisitioned stately home. Here a caring psychiatrist, Rivers, alert to the new ideas of Freud, encourages his officer patients – among them the poets Sassoon and Owen – to speak freely of themselves and their experiences of the trenches, in the hope that with better understanding they will be less likely to break down in future. He is appalled by the treatment he sees imposed on enlisted men at a crowded city hospital by an authoritarian psychiatrist, Yealland, who believes that the patients suffering mutism, paralysis and other extreme conditions are simply degenerates who would break down later in civilian life anyway. He locks them into a room and applies electrodes until they talk and move and recover sufficiently to be shipped back. And most of both groups do recover, whether they be ‘neurasthenic’ officers receiving the talking cure, or other ranks receiving torture. The point is that both methods send the men back to hell. This caring psychiatrist, who had believed in the war for the sake of future generations, now grieves over his complicity, concluding that a society that devours its young deserves no unquestioning allegiance. He considers the contract between Abraham and Isaac, from which patriarchy has grown. ‘If you who are young and strong will obey me who am old and weak, even to the point of sacrificing your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit and be

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able to exact the same obedience from your sons’ (p. 133). But Britain was breaking the bargain. ‘All over France in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell holes the inheritors were dying, one by one…while old men and women of all ages gathered together and sang hymns’ (p. 133). And nothing was really gained from the war to end all wars, except the chance to punish Germany severely at Versailles, so severely that she would breed a new war. Part of the tragedy for Europe as a whole was that so many of the young men who returned were not ‘matured’ by the war, but had become individuals in whom the ‘prematurely aged man and fossilized schoolboy existed side by side’ (p. 150). Instead of attaining a normal balanced adulthood, a man became fixed, like Barker’s character Burns, stuck, swinging from obsessive theorising to wild impulses. Neither form of conduct was much appreciated in England. In 1925 E M Forster published A Passage to India, in which the Empire reveals itself as exhausted, decadent, its British masters not much better able to communicate with one another than with their colonial underlings. They may administer relatively well, but for what? The best of the English, those who appreciate India, leave India. One of them, Mrs Moore, experiences the echo in the Marabar Caves, a hopeless axiological nihilism which says as much about the Britain of the post-war period as about the Indian experience: The echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, ‘Pathos, poetry, courage – they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value. If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same – ‘ou-boum’. ….no-one could romanticize the Marabar because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness, the only quality which accommodates them with mankind. …But suddenly at the edge of her mind Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from ‘Let there be light’ to ‘It is finished’ only amounted to ‘boum’.2 There might have been no ‘boum’, no nihilist sublime, without the grim colonial competition that contributed to the Great War, epitomized in Conrad’s

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Heart of Darkness (1905) as ‘The horror! The horror!’ The 1920s experienced the strange, shrill expression of the post-war ‘lost generation’, when the broken contract between parents and sons turned those remaining into quasi-orphans, ‘bright young things’ of uncertain gender, the girls boyish and the boys pretty, dancing frenziedly to a foreign music. The war to end all wars had succeeded in ending only established civilities – distinctions between high and low, male and female, parent and child, and justified social rigidities in the name of honour and continuity. Aldous Huxley told his father that his novel Antic Hay (1923) was intended to reflect ‘the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch’.3 The 1920s instigated a perhaps cynical pursuit of pleasure which has persisted into the twenty-first century. No holds are barred. Theatre and music are separated from cultural ideals. They speak for the impertinent self. The new generation has no hopes that it will survive much longer than its dead or damaged older siblings, but it is going to make death a more enjoyable process. Authority turns upside down; but in a penultimate burst of energy, the upper classes glitter. Such is the world Evelyn Waugh painted in Decline and Fall (1927) and the satirical novels that follow. Barker’s ‘fossilised schoolboy and prematurely aged man’ are visible in the incompetent teacher in an antebellum private school hugging to himself old values he hardly comprehends, a pale hero assailed by brilliantly amoral women, drawn into parties and fantastically played with. His position was and is one of appalled doubt: the straight man, the fall guy, the decent person left over from the war with no peers to share, promote, enforce ‘standards’. Shared values – comradeship, sacrifice, God, progress, freedom, England – proved to be suicidal. But so, Paul Pennyfeather suspects – without knowing why – is amusement. The novelistic dance of death had started in fact with Aldous Huxley’s novels, notably Antic Hay: ‘God as truth, God as 2+2 = 4 – that wasn’t so clearly all right’.4 They are already novels of ideas. Both Waugh and Huxley set their novels among hysterical aristocrats who patronize writers and painters as trophies

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of their own creativity (‘Art and nothing but art...’) These important commentators are calling the upper classes to account for a failure of leadership, for insufficient seriousness at a time of national reconstruction; but they are also in love with the brilliance of a doomed circle. British society was being challenged. By the time of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) the dynamic nihilism of novels like Waugh’s seems the last gasp of the ancien régime derided for thirty years by an articulate Fabian socialism, the Webbs’ tracts and meetings about the plight of the urban poor, the didactic plays of Shaw and the sciencebased predictive novels of H G Wells. All these novels, but Wells’s in particular, had forecast an England in decline, in which a new monied class displaced the solidarity and strength of the working class and the genius of the aristocracy. The Depression cut across all these, and socialism – whether revolutionary as in Russia or gradual, as the Fabians preferred – presented itself as the panacea of the middle-class left and the last straw for an increasingly irrelevant and discredited upper class. The power of science and technology to create a modern and safe Britain was, as ever, questionable. Brave New World’s roots lie in Wells’s The Time Machine, which had appeared as far back as 1895, and envisaged a society divided into two classes, the subterranean workers – Morlocks – and the decadent Eloi; A Modern Utopia (1905) pursued the theme. The very title of Huxley’s novel is despairing, an ironic displacement of Ariel’s rejoicing cry in The Tempest on the arrival of new humans. It depicts a society without society, carved no longer simply into upper and lower, but into many rungs on the hierarchy reminiscent of India’s caste system. (They are in fact modelled on Plato.) The society of the future, emerging from the Nine Years’ War of 141 AF – After Ford – is based upon the principle that natural societies are unstable, the traditional family and its extensions always prone to madness and suicide. People, it is argued, had always lived too close together, and wanted what they cannot have. Democracy as a political force and Christianity as a religious one both played their part in the book’s Great Economic

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Collapse. The new society then used three technologies: in vitro reproduction, social predestination (the more oxygen in the blood-surrogate the higher the caste) and hypnopaedia, or subliminal suggestion. The operant conditioning must, to be effective, be no more gentle than Yealland’s in Barker’s Regeneration: Delta babies are exposed to pink blossom and pretty picture books before suffering violent noise and electric shocks. They are never again drawn to flowers and books, and like the soldiers in the trenches will fulfil their abject duty without aversion. Hypnopaedia implants insistent messages about why it is best to be in one’s caste. This is not explaining – ‘moral education ought never in any circumstances to be rational,’ says the World Controller – but personalized prejudice: ‘I don’t want to play with Delta children. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.’ In ‘Old clothes are beastly’ we hear a distinct upper-class note (p. 32). Citizens like what they are made to do, and stability is achieved. ‘What man has joined together, nature cannot put asunder.’ Sex is free of moral constraint and generous leisure time is spent in weekends abroad and sport. ‘Religion-surrogate’ is a weekly ceremony uniting the group with stamping to drum-beats and the happydrug soma, in praise of Our Ford (devotees make the sign of the T on their stomach). The highest values are devalued, as Nietzsche said. The Savage is white, but raised among Indians on the Reservation preserved for anthropological study outside the Utopian pale. Schooled only on a stray volume of Shakespeare, he is a mine of instability, gravitating to the heights of Hamlet’s ideations before plunging to the jealous depths of Othello’s, under the shadow of Christian/Elizabethan mores. Desiring ‘pneumatic’ Lenina, he is ashamed of himself. The dénouement opens with the Savage’s intervention in the distribution of soma to a group of ‘black, brachycephalic’ Deltas. ‘O brave new world, that has such beings in it!’ he cries. Irony: he is revolted. ‘Don’t take it! It’s a poison!’ (p. 167) The World Controller, amused, gives the misfit heroes a lesson about the past, including Shakespeare: ‘You can’t make tragedies without social instability’ (p. 173). The old world did not allow people to be ‘sane, virtuous, happy’, a view confirmed by Lenina’s ‘Progress is lovely, isn’t it?’ The

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Controller genuinely regrets that the pursuit of happiness should displace a purpose in life, an ‘intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge’ (p. 141). The Savage is allowed to live alone, but is pursued by the media and his own conflicted lust for Lenina, and after losing the battle with both, kills himself. Noble doubt kills. ‘Brave new world’ is no more than ‘boum’; and the scene of the Savage’s death, surrounded by media, little more than a Big Brother house. The Controller was right. The Savage’s large Shakespearean impulses cannot co-exist with the theory of the Utopian state; the resulting nihilistic crisis of value, meaning and desirability is one that this society cannot entertain. What is left now is passive nihilism, a culture of nihilism, the persisting ‘lying, phoney happiness’, discerned by the Savage. A society which defines progress as stable consumption, a reflexive society in which means become ends, a society in which science is used to ‘join what man cannot put asunder’ has an unassailable power as smiling nihilism. Utopias become dystopias when – usually in the works of Wells – they mercilessly exclude the weak; but Huxley’s system ironically sidesteps that objection to echo Marx: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Brave New World has been called ‘a dystopia of plenitude’, and part of its greatness is its ambivalence: Huxley was seduced as well as horrified by California, the dystopia of the Good Time. In Huxley’s writing, however, there is always a residual intellectual élite. Just as in the World War One of Regeneration both the Freudian psychiatrist Rivers and the behaviourist Yealland, together with the exemplary Siegfried Sassoon, tower over their men, those Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. The other British dystopia, George Orwell’s 1984, is situated after the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Soviet Russia and World War Two, in which half a million British troops died, including those from former colonies. Forty-five thousand died in the London Blitz. But 1984 – its title the reverse of its year of publication – springs from the lure of ideology. Unresolved nihilism leads straight into fundamentalist dogma and strict enforcement. Having nearly died in the

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Spanish Civil War, Orwell was appalled by the conduct of the Communists, his supposed allies, and feared that the special English decency on which he had reported in essays and novels was endangered by the Communist leanings of the English left. Influenced perhaps in 1984 and Animal Farm by Wells and by Zamyatin’s We (1920), he may also have felt the need to rewrite Huxley more starkly. There is no ambivalence here; the totalitarian nightmare is unrelieved. And Brave New World’s science is unnecessary. You can brainwash people with a fiendishly designed ideology, maintained through control of the media, surveillance, and brute force. A country ravaged by scarcity and exhaustion is a seedbed for theory. Orwell made Ingsoc (English Socialism) a decadent nihilism which denies the spirit. So the famous coinages emerge: Big Brother, the loved panoptikon; the Ministry of Truth where Winston Smith uses doublethink (lies) to refine doublespeak (propaganda), putting papers – and indeed people, when they become unpersons – in memory holes: the unceasing mythical wars between Oceania (anticipated merger of the UK and the USA) and either Eurasia (Russia) or Eastasia (China), in which our hard-pressed troops usually emerge victorious; and Room 101, where our worst fears come true, and the rat cage will be strapped to Winston Smith’s face. The lovers betray each other listlessly after torture; they admit that 2 + 2 = 5; Julia’s waist thickens; they drink putrid cheap gin; their skins go grey; they love Big Brother. Most painful is the corruption of our most innocent images – the smiling old man in the antique shop, the music box playing ‘Oranges and Lemons’, the clearing in the woods where they make love. Most pessimistic for democracy, hope does not lie in the proles. As in Huxley, what man has joined nature cannot put asunder. In Brave New World, however, Alphas could enjoy the natural without being watched. 1984 marks the dawn of an epoch because instead of watching television we are watched by it, a paranoid prophecy that came true in libertarian Britain within Orwell’s own century. Death to all qualities, all values: love is a sentiment egested by an abused brain – boum – and the upright Englishman of ‘Burmese Days’ is a bad joke. Anthony Sampson, in an

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article, ‘We used to run the country’, analyses the fate of his hero, the strong silent Englishman with the stiff upper lip. ‘We are the people of England, and we have not spoken yet,’ wrote G.K.Chesterton in 1915. But they turned out to have not much to say, and as the empire disappeared the English gentlemen were blamed for the economic decline, while the young rebels of the 60s reacted angrily against the imperial aftermath. ‘Damn you England,’ wrote John Osborne in 1961. ‘You’re rotting now.’ Strong silent men are not much use in competing with immigrant salesmen or on TV talk shows.5 The year 1948 was also the year that Britain pulled out of India, that antiself of colour and extremity. Winning wars was, however, no substitute for Empire; and in any case could not have been won without the Americans (imperial competitors) or the Russians (ideological enemies). The British working in the tropics came home to the little worn island, and many of these were colonials rather than colonists. Even without the economic privations, the social pyramid of class had lost firmness. Although the dystopic novels were bleak about the lower orders, it was the upper classes that were losing caste in the twenty years after the war, under the impact of the withering of empire, the welfare state, American financial and cultural ascendancy, Suez, the Profumo affair, Swinging London, death duties and the wild surrealist mockery of Monty Python. All the above led to a sense of decadence, actively opposed by the Angry Young Men, notably – in fiction – Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, John Braine’s Room at the Top, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and David Storey’s This Sporting Life. The message was best expressed in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956) ‘People of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. There aren’t any good causes left’ (p. 43). The débacle of Suez would bear this out. The working-class hero as New Man defied Orwell’s despair of the lower classes. The point that Anthony Sampson goes on to make in his article is that immigration, ‘peoples who were the subject of empire’, broadened the base of Britain, revived it and led, in part, to the ‘unparalleled prosperity’ under Thatcherism of the last thirty years. Yet in 2004 Sampson asked ‘Who runs this

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place? Publicity is the new secrecy. The old aristocracy is richer than ever, ordinary British people less socially mobile…After all the promises of democratization and openness, central government has become still more concentrated and impenetrable, [making it] easier to cut civil liberties.’ Individual freedom: boum. The masterly spy novels of John le Carré documented the long arm of state and more recently corporate power over nearly half a century. Now, Britons are watched by CCT cameras from Land’s End to John O’Groats – 4 million of them, one for every 14 people. And the radical nihilism of 1984’s picture of lovers destroyed by ideology has been flattened into a culture of nihilism in which Big Brother means scrapping and smooching among near-strangers on TV in front of a national audience for more hours than could have been imagined. Reality TV is both real and unreal, both true and false; and if everything is not permitted quite yet, it may well be, for the sake of advertisers as much as audiences. Meanwhile draconian national security laws receive very little attention, although Simon Jenkins, writing in July 2009, attempts to keep track: [Government ministers] have passed some 14 measures intruding on the privacy of British citizens in the past decade, powers that outstrip those in any other democratic state. The notorious 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act authorises the Home Secretary to collect information without limit on any citizen, not just for national security but for ‘public health and national economic wellbeing’.6 Margaret Atwood observes that Brave New World and 1984 were written because ‘the West had had a crack at two Utopias. They sweep away the old order, but what do you do if you don’t fit in? Anything can happen anywhere given the right conditions. If there’s enough disruption, people will trade away freedoms for security. And that’s happening now.’7 Shared values, often ‘innocent,’ are also the screen that watches you. The shell-shocked soldiers of Regeneration who had to be got back into the trenches were offered psychoanalysis – theory – if they were officers. The rest got behaviour therapy: impulse, at the end of an electrode. These forms of social

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encouragement have continued unabated throughout the century, the second in the form of screen programming, including advertising: still electrical, but with its current concealed behind plastic tubing. The Iraq war that wound up the millennium, opposing pole to the Great War, reinstated – with the help of ‘extraordinary rendition’ – the electrode as encouragement to compliant behaviour. After so many wars, are therapy and retail therapy the only values humans share? Now there is Lok: William Golding’s The Inheritors The inheritors die, as Pat Barker said of the flower of young manhood cut down in World War One. In William Golding’s The Inheritors (1955) the opposite happens. But as Primo Levi said of the concentration camps in World War Two: ‘The fittest survived. That is, the worst.’ Perhaps. ‘The people’ – Neanderthals, low-browed and covered in hair – make their spring migration from the sea to the mountains and their overhang above a terrace by a waterfall. It is Lok’s point of view we share; and this is hard for the reader because Lok is not very bright, and things have to be explained. Or rather, ‘a picture shared’. Their world of mountain, cave, river, roots and berries, is entirely familiar, and there is no great need for speech. But a new thing happens – the log over the river ‘has gone away’. Things are animate, including parts of themselves – ‘Lok’s ears spoke to Lok’. Human agency is not suspected. Lok and Fa smell ‘other’ on the path by the cliff. But their report is dismissed: ‘This is a new thing’. There has never been other. Empathic and careful, the people are forbidden killing. Their chief has lived too long. Seeing smoke and then beings on the island, Fa and Lok make their way across. ‘The other had tugged at strings that bound [Lok] to Fa and Mal and Liku. If they broke, a man would die’ (p. 78). We then enter a point of view a little away from Lok’s. The others are killed, the children Liku and the ‘new one’ are stolen. ‘Now there is Lok,’ says Fa, repeatedly. Meaning, you are the only man left. But ‘Lok has many words and few pictures’. Fa and Lok hide in trees overlooking the ‘new people’s’ camp,

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looking for the children but increasingly fascinated by what they see – people with ‘white bony things’ – faces – cooking, rowing, drinking, making love, and finally conducting ceremonies with a painted stag and fermented mead to drive away the red devils. Longing for connection, Fa and Lok run in crying ‘Where is Liku?’ The new people, terrified, scatter or attack. ‘A stick grew shorter at both ends. “Clop!” said a twig near Lok’ (p. 106). The ‘old people’ have become other to themselves; they long for the selfhood of the new, the moment of dynamic nihilism. The new people’s point of view shows them to be cunning designers of boats and sails, ivory daggers and clothes of skins, decorations. They are more confounded, however, by their encounters with the strangers than the Neanderthals. They have other problems too. The woman Vivani’s fondness for the little ‘devil’ – the ‘new one’ – has caused tensions. Tuami, young, aggressive and talented, dreams of killing the chief Marlan but has doubts. What was a sail, Tuami thought bitterly, when Vivani wanted to be comfortable? What a fool Marlan was, at his age, to have run off with her for her great heart and wit, her laughter and her white, incredible body. And what fools we were to come with him, forced by his magic, or at any rate forced by some compulsion there are no words for. He looked at Marlan, hating him, and thought of the ivory dagger that he had been grinding so slowly to a point (p. 226) Here are the enduring myths of the heroic age – of Tristan, King Mark and Isolde; of Paris and Menelaus and Helen; of Theseus, Phaedra and Hippolytus. Homo sapiens kills the chief he wants to supplant. Homo sapiens was as different from homo neanderthalis as modern man from an ogre; that is, not much. Except that the ogre is the more innocent, pacific, decent and family-loving of the two. The ogre does not kill, and is humble, diligent and sober in his religion. Golding’s Neanderthals are a powerful and tender presence. Lok is left dancing in grief on the shore, defeated by the crisis of value, meaning and desirability. If the old world is gone, what remains? Tuami and his people are progress; but they are also violent in thought and act, competitive,

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racked by ambivalences; his hand is always on his knife. Post-lapsarian, they commit every sin from which the obedient Neanderthals were free. Bazarov’s words apply: ‘You don’t need logic to put a piece of bread in your mouth when you’re hungry. What do we need all these abstractions for – principles, liberty, progress?’ The capacity for art which painted the stag in the new people’s religious ceremonies went with Dionysian excesses and the killing of Liku, which Lok could not imagine. In his experience no human had ever killed another. This is the nihilistic moment in Hope’s ‘Imperial Adam’: The proud vicuña nuzzled her as she slept Lax on the grass; and Adam watching too Saw how her dumb breasts at their ripening wept, The great pod of her belly grew and grew, And saw its waters break, and saw, with fear, Its quaking muscles in the act of birth, Between her legs a pygmy face appear, And the first murderer lay upon the earth.8 But art comes from and with negativity. If Cain had not killed Abel – mythologically speaking – A D Hope would not have written his poem. From chipping at flints for arrowheads and knives, Tuami has learnt how to carve a haft for artistic representation. And the images of stag and ogre drawn in ochre at the new people’s camp have been created out of devotion, terror and need for cultic unity, and are thus the first art. Here English literature begins: the rampage of Fa through the camp in search of Liku recalls the mother of the creature Grendel returning to avenge her son in Beowulf. And the drunken abandonment in the clearing around the great images could be a Euripides bacchanalia – the birth of tragedy as imagined by Nietzsche, close to that unstable boundary of land and water, where Mal in his great age slipped, and the others went slowly over the waterfall as if consigned there by a magic ceremony – or history. Bertrand Russell wonders:

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There is a further consequence of the theory of evolution, which is independent of the particular mechanism suggested by Darwin. If men and animals have a common ancestry, and if men developed by such slow stages that there were creatures which we should not know whether to classify as human or not, the question arises: at what stage in evolution did men, or their semi-human ancestors, begin to be all equal? Would Pithecanthropus erectus, if he had been properly educated, have done work as good as Newton’s? An adherent of evolution should maintain that not only the doctrine of equality of all men, but also the rights of man, must be condemned as unbiological, since it made too emphatic a distinction between men and other animals. 9 This is the injustice that the new people do to the old; for in Golding’s text we see the latter as more human, less ‘nihilistic’ in its popular sense – that is, mindlessly destructive. They look down from their tree at the animal antics and noises like wise parents. Yet it is they who, like apes, are supposed to come down from the trees to become fully human. In ‘Quiet! Fa says, do this!’ – Fa has a dignity and purpose superior to the surrender of the new people to impulse. As Russell continues: ‘There thus arises a new belief in power: first, the power of man in his conflict with nature, and then the power of rulers as against the human beings whose beliefs and aspirations they seek to control. The result is diminution of fixity; no change seems impossible’. Russell is writing about nineteenth century German thought. Yet this applies to all new in conflict with all old. Tuami and his world are simply will-to-power. They struggle in large endeavours, fail and are whipped, but finally succeed. Perhaps, however, for this Nietzschean reason alone: With all the values that may adhere to the true, the genuine, the selfless, it could be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for all life might have to be ascribed to appearance, to the will to deception, to selfishness and appetite. Every drive is tyrannical. 10 Only Tuami’s will gets the new people away from the haunted island and the forest of the devils. Determined on survival, he acts, the Nietzschean new man. It is his will, too, after that success, to create something from his ivory knife-

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haft. For all his turbulence, his lack of ‘fixity’, it is civilization which sublimates his aggression towards the old chief into art, his intentness on the knife blade into intentness on the handle. Doubt and disvalue take the individual through history to art. The rump and the head fitted each other and made a shape you could feel with your hands. They were waiting in the rough ivory of the knife-haft that was so much more important than the blade…His hands felt for the ivory in the bilges and he could feel in his fingers how Vivani and her devil fitted it (p 233). It is evolution: governing passion, governing matter, not being the ‘slave race’. But you cannot evolve on your own. It was the ‘new one’, the little ‘devil’, backing out of Vivani’s hood with his rump in the air, smiling and settling down on her neck, which made them laugh and relax, forgetting their animosities. Though Lok’s fate is sealed, the old people are not all, one realises, wiped out. Nor is their capacity to love – because the ‘new one’ has awoken love in all those in the boat who have reason to hate and fear him. Through him they may master their demons. The ‘new one’s’ gladness is untouched by the new people’s turmoil and darkness, his innocence by their experience. Yet the ‘new one’ is also the old one. And thanks to his people’s ancient gifts from the Mother, of love for all nature and all people, he will be an inheritor too. This is perhaps the message for Golding’s post-war British audience. Violent change displaces a more closely-knit, more idealistic, more ‘natural’ but perhaps decadent old order. It is gone, it is sad, the future seems dystopic. The ‘new man’s’ dynamic nihilism may bring, all the same, civilisation as well as instability – and with these, laughter. What’s it to be then? Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange Perhaps the idea came from the English-sounding Russian word XОРОЩО, pronounced horrorshow, meaning pretty good. That was the first entry of the language of little Alex and his droogs into the English language proper. Droogs was another. The really shocking thing about A Clockwork Orange is the love

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affair of a violent psychopath with language and art. ‘Dratsing creeching pusspots…I cracked her a fine fair tolchock on her gulliver and it shut her up real horrorshow and lovely’ (p. 64). Beautiful language means literature, and literature means a sensitive, evolving hero. Here Alex is, at the beginning, drinking spiked milk in the café and seeing in his trip Bog and His Holy Angels. The reader is seduced by his antinomies – milk and drugs, angels and the unlovely-sounding Bog, the exhilarating vernacular, and the not only Kiplingesque but Zarathustrian oratory of ‘O my brothers’.11 Then it is straight into the bashing of a gentle man with a rare old book who loves words. ‘I started to rip up the book. Pete kicks him lovely in his pot. [There were letters] saying “My dearest dearest” and all that chapooka’ (p. 6). The smart psychopath picks up on what is loved and destroys it. And he picks victims out in a Nietzschean way: ‘Whenever the will to power declines in any form there is every time a physiological regression, a décadence. They do not call themselves weak, they call themselves “good”.’12 Alex, Dim and Pete come upon a country cottage, ‘Home’ – ‘a gloopy sort of name’ – and knife the husband, tear up his typescript titled A Clockwork Orange, bash and rape the wife. This rejection of value, meaning and desirability was too much, in the sixties, for public sensitivities; and Stanley Kubrick took the astonishing step of banning his own film’s English distribution, soon into its run, for many years – owing to ‘copycat’ violence. Alex reflects on his conduct. ‘If loodies [people] are good that’s because they like it…badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?’(p. 40) An accurate explanation of the authentic Nietzschean self in all its contradictions. Alex’s cocksure metaphysic is compelling. This is because transgression is the new nostrum, and liberals like F. Alexander whose life he has just annihilated are no match for him, their beliefs about his behaviour being too

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sympathetic, that is to say decadent, passively nihilist, and therefore despicable. Alex’s monologue about badness places him at the end of the romantic line, where a debased creativity collapses in on itself – demonstrated by Alex’s special relationship with Ludwig Van. When Alex plays the Ninth (Choral) Symphony he has visions of unspeakable violence and is full of joy (see chapter 3, pp 127-128). It is surely no coincidence that the ‘Drunken Song’ in Zarathustra has lyrics closely resembling those of Schiller used by Beethoven.13 His odd hedging around ‘God or Bog’ relates not only to the quasi-bilingualism of his argot but also to semantic overtones: God as powerful/strong and Bog as squelchy/hopeless, the dynamic and the passive. A Ludwig Van sort of God, and a debased Christian one, again along Nietzschean lines. When Alex is nabbed and imprisoned, he helps out in the chapel putting on the Bach and Handel when required. ‘I viddied myself taking charge of the tolchocking and nailing in’ (p. 79). A new treatment by aversive therapy becomes available which will reward him with a speedy release. The tearful prison chaplain cannot approve because ‘goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man’ (p. 84). But Nietzsche sees free will as an error: the most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind ‘accountable’ in his sense of the word, that is to say for making mankind dependent on him…Men were thought of as ‘free’ so they could become guilty…The priest rules through the invention of sin.14 The reality is, however, political. Alex lives in a twilit, Orwellian state, where criminals overflow the prisons. He opts to enter the therapy, and is shown scenes of ever-increasing atrocities, while injected with nausea-inducing drugs. The Beethoven behind the Nazis becomes, to his despair, the unconditioned reflex. Released, cured, he finds no pleasure in life; for even when the drugged milk in the café evokes his old vision, he cannot be violent with it. His case is trumpeted in the pro-Government media. The author F. Alexander – blindfolded when Alex conducted his mayhem – talks about ‘clockwork oranges’, brainwashed people. Being against the government, he sympathises with what

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Alex has endured, and offers a refuge. But in the new flat the door is locked and the Ninth is played loudly. It is Alex’s Room 101. He jumps from the window. While recovering in hospital he is de-brainwashed, the government having fallen. ‘Bird’s nest full of eggs? Smash ‘em. Peacock? Pull out the feathers.’ He is cured of his cure. ‘”Yarbles,” I said snarling like a doggie. “Bolshy great yarbles to thee and thine.”’ (pp 180–181). F. Alexander is put away. The Ninth is restored. ‘Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum like very light and mysterious nogas carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cutthroat britva’ (p. 184). The old life is resumed. But interest is lacking. He starts to fantasise about families. ‘Goodplate of dinner – ptitsa all welcoming room next…googoo my son. O my brothers I was like growing up!’ (p. 195) Is A Clockwork Orange all about social control? Faceless authorities, dystopia, and cheap government-issue stimulants make the novel the parodic child of 1984, and the surveillance society of the Blair and Cameron years. The government has to control Alex: F. Alexander has to document this control. But they all fail. It is the natural – or even Bog – that makes him grow out of being a bovver-boy. Alex, for all his apparent creativity, does not choose. Do you need to choose to be good? Is such a choice, when governed by a priest, a choice for guilt and weakness? The choice for him to return to Ludwig Van – ‘[life’s] transfiguration and eternal yes!’ – was made by others. However, this hoodlum’s progress is also totally Nietzschean in its yea-saying amor fati. Aversive behavioural therapy, prefrontal leucotomy, insulin therapy and other radical treatments flowered in the 1950s, before the side-effects of such invasive methods, with other ethical questions, came to be seen as greater than the chances of success. Operant conditioning usually serves the interests of the stronger, as some say cognitive behavioural therapy does now; and questions of enrichment of the practitioner/corporation continue to be raised in fields of medicine, psychiatry and consumer ethics. But it has its place. One must ask, however – was Alex evil in the first place? That he is suggestible is evident from his language. The psychologists call it ‘odd bits of rhyming slang, gypsy; most roots are Slav. It’s propaganda – subliminal

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penetration’ (p 106). His argot is a bastardised Newspeak. One knows no more whether droog-speak is Alex’s own language than whether his acts are his acts. As in the beginning: ‘You may O my brothers have forgotten what those mestos were like …synthemesc or dreneron give you nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog and His Holy Angels’ (p. 71). His violent impulses arise after the drugged milk – much more transfigurative, or noxious, than Huxley’s soma or Orwell’s cheap gin. Who is responsible? The druggies or the dealers? It is the story of the twentieth century. ‘What’s it to be then?’, the recurring question that he puts to his droogs in the café, seems sinister and cynical, since the only question is violence to whom. But perhaps Alex wanted to hear what other options there are. Perhaps Alex is the literary embodiment of an epoch overwhelmed by social loss, an epoch in which all responses, or impulses, were driven by someone else’s set of stimuli, or theory, because there wasn’t anything else. Britain won the war, but you wouldn’t know. So what is the good worth? The Nazis too loved Beethoven. Anything good or lofty can now be easily associated through conditioning with anything bad or low, like the Winfield cigarette commercial coupled with the climax of Tschaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Youth – not so much like an animal as much as a malenky toy – made of tin, winding handle – grr grr off it itties like walking O my brothers straight line bangs into things cannot help what it is doing…he would not understand, do all veshches…like yes even killing some poor old starry forella surrounded by mewing kots and koshkas…I would not be able to stop him and so it would itty on to the end of the world round and round like Bog himself turning and turning and turning (pp. 195–6) He wants a new God, not the old one, the mescaline one he had to buy, as Winston Smith glumly consumed his oily gin. A new, adaptive nihilist moment, dynamic and creative, not a culture of nihilism: a consciousness rather than a conditioned unconsciousness. But Alex is a dual parody – of the Nietzschean Superman, and also of the manipulative Cold War world, eastern or western. Alex’s passion for Beethoven not only recalls the Nazis but also Nietzsche’s insistence that the end of all history is art. It is hard, nevertheless, to resist the

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apparent creativity of Alex’s vernacular. It rebels against cause-and-effect automatism. As I A Richards wrote in ‘Science and Poetry’ (1926) The most dangerous of the sciences is only now beginning to come into action. I am thinking less of Psychoanalysis or Behaviourism than of the whole subject which includes them… a mental chaos such as man had never experienced may be expected. We shall then be thrown back, as Malcolm Arnold foresaw, upon poetry. Poetry is capable of saving us.15 Richards’s anti-scientific panacea does not convince, but he was right about the mental chaos. Burgess’s hero is the Superman of the telescreen age, a small-time thug with aspirational tastes acting out someone else’s fantasy. Alex’s poetic identification of the child as a little blundering toy, in a world turning endlessly and to no purpose under a nihilist God is a powerful and haunting one. Real XОРОЩО. What price the comrades now? Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook There is no greater cynic than the idealist manqué. Anna Wulf, writing in four separate notebooks, is fighting the loneliness and cynicism that follow the decline of both relationships and faith in the British Communist Party. It is the 1950s. It is the crunch. There had never been a book like this in English. A novel written by a woman, an essay novel, reportage, a novel within a novel, autobiography, political commentary: an intimate life in four different points of view. It is a painful account of the period when women were reaching out to freedom amid daily statistics about the Korean War, atom bomb tests, uprisings in Soviet states and the American witch-hunt against communists and their sympathizers: the Cold War. Anna’s group of friends are Molly, Molly’s ex-husband Richard and son Tommy; then her ex-lover Michael, represented with her in the Yellow Notebook by Paul and Ella. All are subject to the crunch, caught by this book at a moment when whether to make a break or continue with the group is a question which will not wait. It is finally clear that even after the lessons of forty years of war,

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innocent people are still being politically attacked, often through new technologies of destruction and surveillance, often by their own states. This generation of women experimented with life in the hope of achieving with a maximum of freedom a maximum of commitment. ‘People on the left were the only people,’ after the war, ‘with any moral energy’ (p. 87). Why join the Communist Party? ‘The literary world was so prissy; there was an atmosphere [in the CP] of people working for a common end’ (p. 164). But now in 1958 ‘people are leaving the CP in droves, the more bitter and cynical in relation to the degree they were eager and innocent.’ Value is disvalue. Is communism to blame, when it is so frequently abused? In her notes about the African period, Anna says ‘Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution…this emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue’ (pp 61–2). One recalls the account in Regeneration of the First World War’s betrayal of that Abrahamic pact whereby fathers of good faith place burdens on their sons which will be passed down, for everyone’s good, down the line. This betrayal means that a will to negativity is seemingly a foundation of the modern world. Happiness is compromised, loss is integral, and not just because so many died for a freedom which has not been delivered. Anna and Molly’s critique of their century requires them to be bravely Nietzschean in their claim on freedom. But Anna and Molly, ‘free women’, are now alone, each with a child to raise. Another crunch has come with Tommy, Molly’s and Richard’s son. He is twentyish, brooding over what to do with his life. All three adults loftily discuss Tommy, and he overhears. Later he interrogates Anna, saying she is dishonest, hopelessly divided and a failure. ‘“Oh he’s in a difficult phase.” I was unhappy, worrying. It cancelled me out. We are simply temporary shapes of something. Phases. What are we alive for? So many choices – a hundred things to do, but only one thing to be. What do you live by now? …I’m sorry my father didn’t bring me up. ‘It’s terrible to pretend you don’t need love when you do’ (pp 257– 266).

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Anna tries to respond honestly to his questions about progress. ‘Every so often,’ she says, ‘there’s a sort of act of faith, and an enormous heave forward in one country or another. ‘Then the well runs dry, because as you say the cruelty and ugliness are too strong. Then the well slowly fills again…another painful lurch forward, and every time the dream gets stronger. If people can imagine something, there’ll come a time when they’ll achieve it’ (p 272). The next day Tommy puts a gun to his head. He survives, blind. Tommy – a patronizing diminutive – is the vortex into which the adults’ negativities flow, a narrative device also employed half a century later in Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun. The voice that said ‘It’s terrible to pretend you don’t need love when you do’ is the voice of a grieved adult rather than an adolescent (unless that of the fossilized schoolboy described by Pat Barker). Tommy’s is one of the first fictional voices of sceptical/cynical mid-twentieth-century children – Salinger’s Holden Caulfield is another – who feel they are bringing up their phoney parents. Anna and Molly are too busy being free women to see this new problem for children; their priorities attempt, with misgiving, to overcome dependence on men while welcoming love: ‘People are still defining us in relation to men,’ says Molly scornfully; and Anna replies, ‘Isn’t that what we do?’(p. 25) Molly does not define herself through her relation to Tommy, who had no professional help for his depression, although both women are themselves in long-standing analysis. Anna’s daughter also seeks security. The contingency that is freedom to their mothers, their political metaphysic, is to the children chaos – the not-yet-realized pitfall for political feminist mothers. Indeed, the women’s commitment to ‘causes’ – the Left, feminism, pacifism, anti-racism, nuclear disarmament – is part of the ferment of the nineteen-fifties. Jimmy Porter’s complaint in Look Back in Anger that in the complacent nineteensixties there are ‘no good causes left’ is an unhappy irony: Jimmy Porter is the failed idealist who becomes cynical. Cynical herself now, grieved and desperate after the failure of a long love affair, Anna has brief flings with three Americans – but there is too much ressentiment. The third is a slide into violent ambivalences in which the man, Saul, moves from self-surrender to angry dislike and other women. Anna,

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enraged and engulfed, now loses control. Her daughter happily at boarding-school, Anna is free to love, argue – and collapse. Now a Nietzschean, experiencing the limits of her knowledge of the ‘totality of drives that constitute the human being’, she enters the active nihilistic state of longing for dissolution that she earlier denounced. Finally they part, each giving the other the first line of a new novel; and she gives him the ‘golden’ notebook she has bought for herself. Attempts to change a society in which Eurasia is still at war with Eastasia, or Oceania, fail. But unlike Winston Smith, Anna Wulf can leave the Party, and does, while ‘missing the company of people whose lives must be related to a central philosophy’ (p. 338). ‘I think, therefore I am not,’ says Tommy when he comes to the crunch. He survives to find a new mother. (The novel has several mothers of a Kleinian cast – that is, the centre of powerful and ambivalent fantasy – from Tommy’s to Saul’s to Anna’s analyst Mother Sugar.)16 ‘I think, therefore I doubt,’ says Anna, breaking with the past. Milan Kundera’s famous line says that the writer pulls down the house of his life and with the stones builds the house of his novel. But Anna has pulled down both. Finally, the text is left open. The fiction that an original novel of the mid-century can be resolved is over. So many foundations – theories – have been discredited. ‘Your hopes – nothing. Your politics – nothing.’ For Camus, however, the anxiety that accompanies the existential hero has a revelatory power. He is the individual who lives in self-conscious confrontation with a meaningless world, refusing either to deny or succumb to its power. Loss of confidence in reason and history adds to ‘the growing sense of the sterility of the romantic subject.’17 Years before the action of the novel, Anna recalls the idle destruction in Rhodesia by correct-thinking young socialists – including herself – of the life of an estimable black man. It involved thoughtless Evelyn Waugh-style partying at the Hotel Mashopi. The false retelling of that story was Anna’s bestselling novel. The betrayal of socialism is not confined to institutions; and colonialism remains, despite the pretensions of the privileged. Political correctness: boum. Yet at the close of the book, all foundations and all theories dismantled, there are signs of hope. Kierkegaard writes: ‘The step of even the most tried tragic

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hero goes like a dance compared with the slow and creeping progress of the knight of faith’ who has no home any more in the universal.18 Tommy’s leap of faith, his suicide attempt, has found him a refuge in the mother he did not have. For Anna, true and false are now clearly distinguished. The exchange of openings for their new novels means that for Anna and Saul truthful fiction will be their foundation. An existentialist view of suffering is offered by Kierkegaard: ‘When the sufferer actually takes his suffering to heart, then he receives help from the Eternal toward his decision. Because to take one’s suffering to heart is to be weaned from the temporal order – from cleverness and from excuses.’19 Anna’s freeing of herself from cleverness and excuses, however – as Tommy would prescribe – is more of a Nietzschean ‘angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution’. Apart from the need to express grief, this is one way of renouncing the Communist Party. Nihilism can be a necessary, dynamic, Dionysian impulse such as Anna and Saul’s, or a banalised, passive-nihilistic state more like Molly’s, lasting too long and drifting into cynicism – that sense that ‘a great dream has faded and truth is something else, that will never be any use’ (p. 71). It is this banalised state that is opposed by Saul at the moment of the golden notebook: ‘Listen Anna if we don’t believe the things we put on our agendas come true for us there’s no hope’ (p. 553). Their hope should not have been in the CP, but in its values; their values. This involves relationship with the other, not with theory. After wrestling so long with a disembodied, ideological America, Anna has done a deal with the human America, made it give up some of its power, and given something back – to the future, which is the golden notebook. The comrades are free to be comrades. Fleeing from enchanters: Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea Meanwhile the Murdoch novel is still the Murdoch novel – the eternal flight from the enchanter. Her characters are lost in apparently gratuitous amateur theatricals,

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the customary mix of glamour, philosophy and sin. The porosity of society is Murdoch’s meat. Everyone impinges, philosophically, on everyone else, in a head-on encounter between the idealism of Plato – a well-ordered society, the good – and the angst of the Existentialists, still picking themselves up after Nietzsche and the crisis of modernity. In The Sea, the Sea Charles, a successful theatre director, retires to an isolated house by the sea. His riotous life is over, this will be his solitary and philosophical Utopia; remembering his ‘good’ father he is looking for a Kierkegaardian ‘purity of heart’. This is the theory. Old theatrical friends and lovers arrive and are spurned. But he is theatrical. It is hard to will one thing, to cast them out altogether. Then comes the discovery that the love of his boyhood, his schoolmate Hartley, has settled in the nearby village. Though both are now in their sixties, his passion is redoubled, and he sets about the dubious task of both winning her back and ‘protecting her marriage’. As a girl she had rejected him, saying he was ‘sort of bossy’ and ‘would stray’ (p. 498). All too true: he wills everything at once. He now wants to adopt her already adopted son Titus, who has run away. He wants to see all his friends without having relationships with them. But most of all he wants Hartley, breaking common rules of decency on the premise that he is involved in a rescue. Charles has never but slenderly known himself, as King Lear’s daughter said. The coiled sea-monster with green eyes that he sees rising from the ocean is put down to the vestiges of a bad acid trip, but the reader recognises the image. (It announces, also, that Murdoch enjoys the sublime.) The boy Titus warns him at one point about Hartley and Ben: ‘You mustn’t interfere in the lives of married people. They’ve got their own way of hurting each other, they enjoy it’ (p. 376). Charles finds this cynical, indeed nihilist. But Titus is closer in maturity to Charles’s enigmatic cousin James, a military man, collector and Buddhist, from whom wisdom and magic come. Gradually Charles comes to see that his own magic, which worked in the theatre – that cave of flickering images – is disvalue outside it. The climax has James magically saving Charles from death but losing himself in the effort. In his hazy longing for ‘the good’, Charles is portrayed as falling deeper into

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the bad – into ‘a banalised nihilism which paradoxically results in an absolutism both pernicious and covert’.20 He thinks he can ‘have’ Hartley’s innocence by having her. He destroys Titus. He finally sees, however, that the magic of purity belongs either to some utopia or the distant past (the same fantasy) and that the two are connected by guilt. What attaches him so fiercely to Hartley is her judgment of him; the guilt he felt is ‘not because one has sinned, but because one is accused’ (p. 498). In truth, what he feels for Hartley is ressentiment of the strong one who resists, the one who got away. This is a sophisticated take on a theme not infrequent in telescreen age English fiction of the schoolgirl left and betrayed by the callow hero – William Golding’s Free Fall; David Lodge’s Therapy. In those, the hero repents and makes reparation. In this novel, the going back is not penitent, but retributive. ‘She made me a worldly man by rejecting me and that failure ruined me morally’ (p. 84). In a twist on Victorian melodrama, she is the villain. Cousin James’s Buddhism is the foil to Charles’s fierce attachment. Both are in their way dynamic nihilists, James taking radical steps to gain extinction of desire. But Charles is deluded about his motives, and committed only to damage, contributes to Titus’s death. Now, in protecting Charles from the fruits of his actions, James atones for past errors: ‘the Wheel is just’. He leaves Charles a London flat full of antiquities, and memories of last chats. All religion is superstition. Religion is power...for example to change oneself, even to destroy ourselves. But that is also its bane. The worshipper endows the worshipped object with power, real not imagined, that is the sense of the ontological proof, one of the most ambiguous ideas ever thought of. But this power is dreadful stuff. Our lusts and attachments compose our God. All spirituality tends to descend into magic. Goodness is giving up power and acting on the world negatively. The good are unimaginable (pp 444–5). What followed Charles’s theatre magic – actors and others more or less drunk or emotional surging through his isolated cottage – was sub-theatre, melodrama. When Charles surrenders to an understanding of James’s sacrifice (or the priceless antiquities? questions the cynic) he is ‘filled with the most piercing and tender joy as if the sky had opened and a stream of white light descended’. He

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is finally alone and free of attachments. What remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no-one. James and I missed each other because of misplaced dignity and English taciturnity (p 500). Philosophical novels are usually overplayed. Charles is made to move in the course of one book from Übermensch to moral ruin to Buddha, from the city, through nature, to the Middle Way; very neat, renunciation without renunciation, a crisis of consciousness resolved; the achievement of Nirvana, far from the changing moods and terrifying fertility of the sea. From making waves to going with the flow, Nietzsche’s pairing inverted: the former as negative, the latter as positive. The criticism is that Murdoch is a Prospero fundamentally malicious and libidinal, however philosophical her language. That the web of attachments and impulses the characters appear to address in fact evades the issues of their time. That while the kitchen-sink fiction of Storey and Sillitoe and the post-modernism of Beckett acknowledge the massive changes in post-war Britain, the Murdoch intellectual élites cavort uneasily in games based primarily on old-world class. ‘Damn you England you’re rotten now,’ cried Osborne’s Jimmy Porter. Like Charles the director, Murdoch-the-enchanter is ‘sort of bossy,’ and ‘will stray’ from the truth she purports to be pursuing. Yet this novel is honest in its fantastic realism. The existentialist pulse in her work – everyone does have to choose, all the time, and so many are angstridden – is its consistent driver; and upon this [lack of] ground she builds characters who paradoxically seek the Platonic good. But opposing these is the Nietzschean drive for power. ‘Oh Charles,’ cries one character, like Nietzsche’s madman in the square, ‘if only there was a God, but there isn’t, there isn’t at all’ (p. 165). This decadence should not go with the artistic life. But ‘Drama, tragedy, belong to the stage, not to life. The soul [is] missing. All art disfigures life. [It is] turned into a vulgar trick’ (p. 165). This is the strictest Plato, along with ‘We cannot just walk into the cavern and look around – what we think we know is pseudo-knowledge’ (p. 175). These concerns are indeed the problems of the post-war years. Since the glad morning of the altruistic seventies clouded over, there has been a brutal suppression

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of the good in public discourse and practice by market fundamentalism. Murdoch’s work is prophetic of this. It also addresses the lie of representation. She recognises and resists in the screen age the dominance of the images cast on to the cavern wall, as does Charles, in the end. She is very much of her time in the aching contingency she brings to fiction. No God, yet a strong sense of sin; no security, but a strong love of impulse; worship of power, but a will to overcome it. One has to find the good in the midst of all this; Charles, in his pursuit of Hartley, has to overcome his own will to power. Zarathustra says, ‘Consideration and pity have always been the greatest dangers for me.’21 As an icon to him of true innocence, she attracts his false innocence – false in that his desire to be good does not stop him killing Titus or distressing her. The worshipper, as Melanie Klein says of the deprived feelings of the infant, wants to ‘scoop out’ and ‘devour’ the breast that will not satisfy it, often out of envy of its plenitude.22 The stronger party has been ‘founded’ by the weaker– a Hegelian dialectic in which many Murdoch ‘slaves’ empty out their ‘masters’. Murdoch always supplies narrative resolutions of the Nietzschean position of ‘no moral facts’. Her characters ‘are lost for a time...we plunge abruptly into the opposing values with the same measure of energy with which we were Christians.’23 Hartley and Ben emigrate, as did the Micawbers in David Copperfield, not being gentlefolk; and Charles ends up Buddhist. Nihilism has, in the end, perhaps produced the good – at considerable expense. Making waves – at the risk of getting a sea-monster – has to happen. Nietzsche, Marx and Freud are one in their commitment to demonstrating the illusoriness of morality. Yet Murdoch is surely following Nietzsche in placing all her characters squarely in mid-crisis of value, meaning and desirability, beyond good and evil in their conventional forms. The Murdoch novel will be always ambivalent about enchantment, that will-to-power, by means of art or religion. We must proceed without foundation to our lives, fleeing to and from enchanters, who may bring us back to life again. ‘I shall return,’ Zarathustra proclaims, ‘with this sun, with this earth…I shall return always to this self-same earth.’24 The enchanter is both the one who takes over your life, and the one who gives your life meaning. Sometimes you

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need one, and always, doubting your doubt, you want one. Before night falls: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses This is a book/scandal about how newness enters the world. There is no doubt that Rushdie is a prophet as well as a lightning conductor. Midnight’s Children (1986) recorded the future trauma for Islam of the Hindu/Muslim partitions of India, Pakistan and Kashmir. In Shame (1984) he foresaw, yet perhaps failed to see, his own calumniation for taking issue with an Islamic state: But suppose this were a realist novel! It would have done me no good to protest that I was writing universally, not just about Pakistan. The book would have been banned, dumped in the rubbish bin, burned…Fortunately, however, I’m only telling a sort of modern fairy tale, so that’s all right; nobody need get upset, or take anything I say too seriously. No drastic action need be taken then, either. What a relief! (p 68) Then in 1988 came The Satanic Verses, and the rest is history. Inter alia it speaks of a certain Imam in exile in Europe, waiting to return home to the Middle East. The Imam feels emanating from his fingertips the arachnid strings with which he will control the movement of history. No! Not history. His is a stranger dream. We will make a revolution that is a revolt not only against a tyrant but against history, the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of lies – progress, science and truth – against which the Imam has set his face. .knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day Al-lah finished his revelation to Mahound (p.209). It was this Imam or rather Ayatollah who, returned from exile to Iran, pronounced the fatwa – sentence of death – upon Rushdie for the ‘blasphemy against Islam’ that is this book. From that day, multiculturalism was dead in the West, despite appearances, and Rushdie was a hunted man, spirited with bodyguards like the Imam’s in the novel across the United Kingdom, from safe house to safe house. This bears an uncanny resemblance to the fate of the novel’s hero, Saladin Chamcha, a cultivated Bombay Muslim working in London in the

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media, who suddenly acquires the aspect of the Devil and has to be hidden: I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. However it had happened, I am no longer myself, or not only…Why? Why me? For what was he being punished? Had he not pursued his own idea of the good, dedicated himself with a will bordering on obsession to the conquest of Englishness? Had he not worked hard, striven to be new? Devil, goat, Shaitan: I not. I. Not I. Another. Who? (p. 258) As Saladin Chamcha’s incarceration in the attic of the Shaardar B and B lengthened into weeks and months, his condition was worsening steadily.(p. 288) I am, he accepted, that I am. Submission (p 289). Submission – the translation of the word Islam – saves Chamcha. We do not know what saved Rushdie. Considering the accretion of such attacks in his books, the denunciation over hundreds of pages of the fundamentalist Imam is foolhardy as well as brave. Worse, he adapts the name of Muhammed the Prophet to read the word for devil. In cultures rejecting books in favour of the book, the distinction between fact and fiction, the author’s self-defence in Shame, would not count for much; and this, too, the author would know. Rushdie condemned himself as devil – and indeed there is a character Salman in Satanic Verses – out of his own mouth. Knowing his enemy as he did, was the publication of the book as much a nihilist act – Bakunin’s ‘the passion for destruction is also a creative passion’ – as an attack on nihilism? Would it provoke a reaction in fundamentalist Islam that would be damaging to ‘progress, science and truth’ in general? The religious scholar Karen Armstrong writes of the affair: ‘Of course I believe Rushdie has the right to publish what he chooses. But I was also shocked by the raw pain experienced by more thoughtful Muslims who condemned the fatwa and the book burning but had to explain why the book occasioned such outrage. They spoke of the insult to the Prophet in startling images – a violation, a rape, a knife through the heart.’25 Other writers with grave anxieties included John Berger, Roald Dahl and John le Carré. Rushdie replied, in Shame, to the sensitivities of individual Muslims: ‘So-called Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ does not spring [in Pakistan] from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith… This is how religions shore up

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dictators; by encircling them with the words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked’ (p.251). So if the book risked dishonour to Western liberal values in the eyes of fundamentalist Muslim authorities, is it enough to say that it is a good book, if it is a good book? One thing is sure: The Satanic Verses, like Shame and Midnight’s Children, is a political novel. In the beginning Chamcha falls out of the sky, his plane suicide-bombed (prophecy number four?) But he survives – together with Bombay film star Gibreel Farishta – and they land on a Channel beach. It is here that Chamcha begins to turn into a goaty devil, while Farishta emanates golden light and seems to be the Archangel Gabriel. Good and bad come and go with no clear attachment to anyone or anything. The Devil has free rein, and is impossible to pin down; ‘He wanders,’ as the Defoe epigraph tells us. With postmodernism, exterior and interior, high and low, no longer inhere; all is surface, aiding wandering. Chamcha, though supposedly pompous, does not ‘deserve’ his new goaty signifiers – though they may relate to the television sitcom ‘The Aliens Show’ in which Chamcha plays the voice of a freak. Some ironic Producer somewhere is playing games. ‘Nothing is forever,’ says the erratic authorial voice, ‘even evil’ (p. 539). ‘Fallen and newly sulphurous’, Chamcha hides in the Shandaar Indian Restaurant attic, ‘nibbling absently at the bedsheets’ (p. 285). His appearance is pure icon to the English-raised daughters of the house: ‘Radical.’ ‘Crucial.’ ‘Fucking A’ (p. 245). Revaluation of all values. With submission to his new form – ‘separated from history’, like the Imam – comes release from it. To survive the fall from the plane they had instantly to transform themselves, as Darwin said can be done in times of absolute crisis. Lucretius and Ovid see metamorphosis differently. For Lucretius transformation is the old self gone; Ovid sees a persisting, essential self underneath. Both Rushdie’s heroes have already changed names and countries for their careers. Chamcha’s case turns out to be Ovidian, not too radical; Gibreel Farishta’s Lucretian, all selfhood gone. As an actor whose looks and charm allow him to play many gods and heroes, he is already in trouble with his ‘essential self’. Theologically he is a mess, guilty of all sorts of profanities, having ‘been’ so many gods almost in the Nietzschean sense. He longs

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for death and rebirth, believes himself to be the Archangel, and seems possessed by the destructive spirit of Rekha Merchant, his former lover, who jumped to her death with her children when she thought herself rejected. It is hard to follow the dramas, rages, loves and public prancings of Gibreel throughout this very long book. Suffice it to say that through an unstable identification with the Archangel he foresees calamity, revenge, the end; he is apocalypse. He is Nietzsche too in his category slippages, warning of nihilism, then capitulating to it. A character even reports reading Nietzsche – the ‘pitiless end of the small over-extended species called man’ (p. 206). Chamcha in a dream says ‘Things are ending. This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls’ (p 184). We will die of the newness we have created. Tied to Gibreel’s story is the narrative of the Prophet, and of the time when Muhammed received the Koran on the mountain from the Angel. Not Muhammed here, but Mahound (devil). The eponymous Satanic verses arose, historically, when the Prophet – also called here The Businessman – in writing the Koran allowed for a brief period a compromise with the old religions, which meant acceptance by Allah of the three goddesses of Baal – Utta, Manat and Al-lat, the mother: black, flying women like the Greek Furies. Shortly afterwards Muhammed cancelled the three verses, calling them the work of the Devil. So their godheads were temporary things, like personas adopted by actors, like lapses of all kinds; but these get out into the world, as Pandora found. Gibreel’s worsening madness could be the persecution of these three, notably Al-lat, in the form of Rekha Merchant on her flying carpet. In Libération, Rushdie wrote that in wresting power from the old matriarchal system, the Koran took balance from the world, and the result is revenge and Nietzschean ressentiment.26 Consider the ‘vision of hell – four armed, shouting figures [women] running down the aisles [of the plane]’ (p. 75) and Hind, the Prophet’s wife saying: ‘I am your equal and your opposite. I am for Al-lat. My opposition to Allah is implacable’ (p.114). There is a balancing female non-implacability in the novel’s third thread, about the possibly saintly Aisha who reconciles Hinduism and Islam.

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Rushdie has also publicly endorsed Al-lah over Al-lat. The ostensible subject is what a wandering devil does to point of view – Pee Oh Vee, as the text archly puts it. Can there be value, meaning and desirability without a stable point of view? This devil is anti-foundationalist. Instability, bafflement, cacophony reign, rather like surfing between endless television channels, especially when the two heroes are practically extra-terrestrials. Is the self-satisfied Voice Off a producer, or a bit-part nobody? (Actors are replaceable.) The ‘I’ that frequently interposes identifies himself knowingly but inconclusively – ‘I in my wickedness’, ‘I know: devil-talk’. All is game: ‘Next narration begins – God of love coming up’. God, Devil, POV: boum. But its subject is equally that of nihilistic impulse’s relationship to fundamentalist theory. Writing about fictional angels in the 1980s seemed merely faddish; yet it may have arisen from desperation at the rise of the bad – market fundamentalism, Hollywood values, growing inequality, in short, disvalue. Angels are nostalgia for spiritual security. ‘Question – what is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief – too closed. A kind of belief. Doubt’ (p. 92). Such an emptying-out of Descartes is not the ‘opposite of faith’, but probably enough faith for Kierkegaard. A doubt that has hardened into cynicism in the knowing, jokey, questions of the ‘Moi?’ variety and at other times merely sceptical. Kierkegaard writes: Irony in the eminent [i.e. general irony] sense directs itself not against this or that particular existence but against the whole given actuality of a certain time or situation. It is not this or that phenomenon but the totality of existence which it considers sub speciae ironiae.27 But a century and a half ago Kierkegaard – while understanding our doubt, dread and paradox – had not experienced a telescreen age which can see us as not only inferior machines but inferior representations. Douglas Muecke comments ‘Such inescapable contradictions and incongruities as emerge from a consideration of the human condition are not ironic in themselves. They can become so only by the addition of innocent unawareness, “alazon”’. 28 We the readers are entirely alazon, naïve, at the beginning, but so – much of

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the time – is the voice telling the story. So the extent of radical irony, indeed radical anti-foundationalism, in this novel is overpowering. The rhetorical interjections seem alazon, innocent, in their not-knowing of the situation, but so arch and knowing in their expression – ‘Pee Oh Vee’ – that that innocence is falsified. The insistent cool compromises the irony. ‘The ironic attitude of a General Ironist is complicated by his own equivocal position,’ says Muecke. Cosmic irony deals with man’s position in the universe and relation to God, explored notably by Muecke in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, narrated by the angel Satan, who crushes humans without thought, and resumes chatting with his international visitors – who are the shocked alazon.29 The proliferating and unopposed irony of the telescreen age, built on ‘selfparody’, its large numbers of unprioritised characters sharing endless comment (there are no facts, only interpretations) is also compromised, using irony to have it both ways. First, to invite the reader to admire a technique; and then to expect the reader to be convinced, as if the technique had escaped notice. It may present horrors but deny that they are horrible because they are used ‘ironically’. The result exceeds even compromised irony, and becomes radical cynicism. After 450 pages of authorial ‘Who am I?’ ‘What, me?’ ‘Yessir!’ the reader may just walk away.30 Compromised irony is a move into radical cynicism. I believe that this radical cynicism is related to the deep problem of intention in the novel. In one of the most nuanced pieces ever written about the novel, Pankaj Mishra cites a remark Rushdie made in 1984: ‘Politics and literature do mix, are inextricably mixed, and that mixture has consequences.’31 After the affair broke out, however, we heard little of this; because he would have to acknowledge that he knew his writing The Satanic Verses was at least in part a political act leading to consequences that included great harm to many. This is part of the collapse in the contract with the reader, who expects to be engaged rather than duped, unduped and duped again by a novel. The critic James Wood accuses Rushdie of ‘hysterical realism’. Too many characters, too little character: dynamic nihilism done to death. ‘The lack is the human.’32 One touches bottom, in a sense, in the closing scenes where Chamcha lovingly, if unconvincingly, cares for his sadistic dying father. Stable point of view returns. What suddenly turns

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The Satanic Verses into Middlemarch is Chamcha’s deeper accommodation with, submission to, good Islam, good faith, helped by the splendid woman in his life and by his acceptance of the migration of forms. Meanwhile Farishta may in his last, violent act have contained the Devil in the Hell into which the two characters fell so long ago. The book will not often be read, however, for its plot; rather for the stable value, meaning and desirability of its intentions. The Satanic Verses is a text about impulse fiendish in its demand for interpretation. The Ayatollah supplied his. You bury bones too: John Berger’s King: a street story Are we at the end of an era, in a convulsion that brings people down to the level of animals – that is, barbarism? Marxism has for generations now called our economic age ‘late capitalism’, and predicted that the West would collapse under the pressure of its internal contradictions. Perhaps the only times capitalist leaders took this prophecy seriously were 1929 and 1974. But the economies of the West were saved first by war and then by placating the Wahhabi tendency of Islam, which brought its own consequences. As a Marxist novelist and critic – his famous Ways of Seeing unveiled the modern history of Western art as the history of private wealth – John Berger is not reliant solely on Marx, however, for a philosophy of history. In King, a street story, the dog-narrator goes to live with Vico and Vica in the hut they piece together on a vast vacant lot/rubbish dump called St Valéry. Here a number of solitaries live: not homeless, far from it, as they have fashioned their dwellings ingeniously, individually and with love. St Valéry is to the narrator, surveying it from the top of the junk heap, a ‘coat’. King sees Anna’s blockhouse at the back of the collar, Joachim’s tent in the left cuff. Corvina’s van and Danny’s container fit other parts of the coat’s shape. The Vicos are in the cuff of the right sleeve. Berger insists on images which, though ungainly, anchor things to the organic, the earth, the human at its most basic. In the same way his early novel The Foot of Clive centres on a hospital ward, ‘Clive,’ which is L-shaped. The men in the bottom of the L are in the foot. Human need requires us to have two opposing visions. First, to see things from above, so as to rise above the merely individualistic and see where

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things lead; and then the ever-more-fully human, down among the dirt (Nietzsche’s ‘Human, all too human’.) Thus King chooses to see a pattern, the ground-plan, as something protective, a human image. But King is a dog. What does this mean? The proto-Vico, Giambattista, 1668–1744, wrote The Principles of a New Science of Nations in 1725, viewing human history as a series of phases, corsi e ricorsi, corresponding to barbarism, heroism and reason.33 The close of cycles is marked by a fall into disorder; these phases have clear linguistic, cultural and political characteristics. James Joyce was influenced in Ulysses by Vico’s correspondence of the heroic phase with the language of poetry. Perhaps W B Yeats’s conception of cultural alternations – the gyres – owes something to Vico; also Northrop Frye’s literary modes that correspond to phases of culture, and of course Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return.34 Apocalyptic visions are common in the twentieth century, from Samuel Butler and Wells through Beckett and science fiction to McCarthy’s The Road, not forgetting those seminal authors whose dystopias ushered in the telescreen age. Berger also disbelieves in linear time, holding that ‘everything exists simultaneously’ and that ‘you come to an event in which there is everything’35. The fictional Vico of St Valéry used to be a wealthy Naples industrialist; Vica was a young opera singer he met in Zürich. Now they are sans domicile fixe, demolished, close to death. Despite this, ‘the Hut is the best thing I’ve had in my life...the three of us are inside. It’s inestimable’ (p. 123). Its walls are iron bedsteads, with panels of polystyrene and plywood; it has a cupboard, a bed, and something to heat up tinned food on. Vico had not paid enough insurance to the Camorra to save his factory from the fire. As for the rest of his decline, he was perhaps too sensitive. Vica gets noisily drunk if she sells any radishes or chestnuts on the street. But the pair – the only couple in St Valéry – lives quietly and sympathetically with their neighbours. It is partially thanks to King. He can haul a supermarket trolley – the heroic chariot – back from the service station where Vica fills the water-can from the toilet block. He plays an alert supervisory role. ‘When we are asleep, the three of us together, we are protected. Nobody mucks around with us. Sleep is best. Sleep is best.

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Sleep is best’ (p. 33). Each takes off a glove to hold the other’s hand for a moment. But he is more than a physical presence. ‘She prefers talking to me. I make people feel that, whatever they tell, I’m hearing it for the first time. It’s a gift I have: a kind of childish naïvety. My eyes don’t bear a trace of what they’ve seen’ (p. 39). King is not, however, doing justice to himself. He can report on the Tabriz carpets in an old book they found: ‘I notice a gold ring with probably a lapis lazuli’ (p. 49). He knows that ‘Today everything is disappearing, yet there’s no thief visible since the thieves are offshore’ (p. 71). There is more. ‘The world is so bad, God has to exist. I asked Vico what he thought.’ A dog not only retains enough innocence to reassure others about their fate, but he can argue about morality: I’m thinking of the forest…the world is well-made. Only man is vile. If the world of men is vile and the rest so well-made, there has to be a force for evil. Nothing else makes sense. If there’s a force for evil, there has to be a force for good. No? And that means God (pp 78–80). Soon Vico is explaining the other Vico to King. We wonder, can King talk because Vico and Vica require such humanity of him? Or because the world is so far advanced in barbarity that, as disorder spreads, the corsi e ricorsi are moving men into beasts and beasts into men? Or is King simply doing what all animals have always done, talking to their domestic humans without being understood in the least? For although King understands Vico’s philosophy lesson, we have no indication that Vico understands King’s. All these questions remain open, as King moves to and fro across the boundary between animal and man. Now he is all dog: ‘I open my mouth. Do you want to play? We are four, boy ball wall myself.’ Now not: ‘He doesn’t know I can talk’ (pp 83–4). In this life of unforeseen crisis, nothing is what it was. Just as in The Inheritors we saw an ambiguous evolutionary progress at work, and in The Satanic Verses a sudden evolutionary leap in response to extremity allowed men to fly, something is rapidly pushing out the boundaries of this dog. As first person in an impersonal, implacable narration (one almost hears Beckett’s ‘Something is taking its course’) King is unsure of this nature of his that seems to be on the rise

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as Vico and Vica are of theirs in decline. ‘I have a strange way of talking, for I’m not sure who I am. Everyone in St Valéry needs a madness to find their balance after the wreck. Me, I believe I’m a dog’ (p 129). Like Rushdie’s characters, like all of us according to Nietzsche, he is in transition. The centre of the novel is a memory, recounted to King, of glad times: the festival of Nostra Madonna di Regnos Altos in Naples when Vico first took Vica there. As in St Valéry, people are gathered outside, but in light and colour and love; art, beauty, belief, and community all together at once – a moment that represents all that was bright and human in Western civilization. Now, at St Valéry, the positive goes negative, all is à l’envers, inside out. ‘What we see is das Unform, the formless, post-Auschwitz sublime’.36 Vico’s despair, despite the protection of King and the Hut, is beyond bearing. Death is so close. Even when someone gives them money, the feeling is just ‘The traffic can’t kill me today’ (p. 73). This is a reprieve only – for, we remember, humans are just inferior machines. That something in the Neapolitan festival which allowed you to believe that the tall Madonna would transfer her blessing to the little Madonnas which would in turn bless the peoples’ houses has gone. For God may exist, but he is only the opposition. ‘The philosopher Vico was the first to say God is powerless’ (p. 162). Naples has its Catholic votive festival but also the Camorra, and at the end of the twentieth century it is easy to see which institution has more status. In the final section huge vehicles with spotlights are occupying the dump, and the 117 residents are ordered to leave and be taken to better housing. The Hut has been flattened. Not even the hyacinth bulb in the tin remains. A mistake is worse than an enemy, says Vico, and must be destroyed: ‘We are their mistake’ (p. 210). King resists from the top of the junk mountain, and when all is lost hides the people in a hollow. Then, running, he precedes them on a shortcut to the sea. Looking round at last, however, he sees no-one has followed him. Are the people simply paralysed by this thing they always dreaded: ‘Let the big pain not come yet!’? Or could they not understand what this mad dog was trying to tell them? Vico unfortunately knew too much:

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Britain: What Remains The first period is the Age of Gods when everything is new and everything, even the worst, is possible. Next comes the Age of Heroes when Helen fucks around in Troy and the Greeks discover the tragic. Afterwards it’s the Age of Man which is the time of politics and sacrifices – no longer for Gods but human justice. And finally comes the Age of Dogs. After which the cycle will begin again (p 179). We do not know whether King, this most human of dogs, is in fact the last

man. He helps others, and that is what man has often done. But there is a clear connection, for Vico, between Gianbattista and the uncynical four-legged inheritor of the new world. ‘My ancestor, King, believed that the word humanity came from the verb humare, to bury. The burying of the dead is what he meant. Man’s humanity began with respect for the dead. Yet you – you, King, bury bones too, don’t you?’ (p. 103) It is possible to conclude that King is, in fact, all phases coming together through extremity into one. The extreme beauty of the book is that these lives, these surroundings and indeed these minds are reduced to an elemental poetry. Berger, like Sontag – carefully defamiliarises his language to make it pan-European, ‘translated’. ‘Me, I run.’ ‘Every morning we’ll take breakfast in the Via Venezia!’ Above all its tone is of the past, as if the unrecognised Nietzschean crisis of value, meaning and desirability is approaching not its beginning but already its end. Berger, an Englishman living in rural France, has points to make about the border-crossing of people and commodities. Pizza Hut and the Elf service station where the three get water are the only sources of food and drink. But this is not the only point about globalization and extremity. Pizza and petrol are not strictly necessities of life. Yet Vico and Vica’s locally-picked chestnuts and radishes, peddled outside Pizza Hut, do not sell. St Valéry is clearly anywhere that is wanted for redevelopment into luxury units and shops. This is evident from the first; its details are given as a certain distance from the sea and the city centre and the airport and the convenient motorway. It is progress that is in question. Yet, if the men on the bulldozers could only see, St Valéry is one of the most progressive places on earth. Houses can be made out of rubbish; Vico and Vica’s was the best. Jack, who manages the

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community, makes his clothes out of newspaper. Old stoves can be used as tables and cupboards. You can grow things in cans and crates. And as for mobility – what better than a shopping trolley, especially with dog-power? It is no accident that the French word chariot, ‘shopping-trolley’, has been left in that language. Because of the chariot and King we know that the Age of Heroes is not wholly behind us, nor the age of men and politics or of gods; the age is just mix-up and collapse, like the dump itself – fearful and forlorn at first, but full of promise, ‘pregnant with future’. People need not progress but a little bit of order. ‘Jack doesn’t believe anything can make the world better than it is, yet he insists on no mucking about’ (p. 9). The people of the dump would agree that principles, freedom and progress mean nothing if there is nothing to eat. Vica says, ‘Do we ever know how to say what we believe? When we can say it, it’s no longer true, the belief has gone’ (p. 159). A deconstructionist position perhaps, certainly testimony of nihilism. King is like the young lovers near the Pizza Hut, like the boy he plays ball with; he can seize the moment and go forward. He is a leader, Nietzsche’s new man in fact, becoming himself, bounding away from the bulldozers towards the sea, his strength coming from the earth. But the group of homeless people huddling in the long hollow called the Boeing is unwilling to follow. This Boeing will not take them anywhere. The truth-value of its name, like Elf and Pizza Hut, is particularly scorned by the observation ‘when we can say it, it’s no longer true’. Language is empty now. It is dumb King who progresses, and finally he has to make the choice whether to ‘progress’ alone, or be present to humanity: be man or dog – or something else. This is not only King’s decision, but everybody’s. The Camorras are global now. Many people do not feel they belong to anything. Berger’s waste dump people are, however, a real community in that their belonging together where they are is all they have. The men behind the loud-hailers say they will be taken to better housing. Even if this were true, they would lose what is more valuable. Berger said in an interview: ‘An experience must be passed from one to another with hands round it to protect that flame, that story. And that’s what happens on the page.’ Value and meaning are passed on in words; this is part of

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the Abrahamic pact discussed by Pat Barker in Regeneration. Vica’s ‘When you can say it, [a belief] is no longer true’ is a lament for that verbal value. Belief: boum. Berger also said, ‘Nihilism deserves critique as much as Christianity.’37 The apparent rapprochement currently taking place between Marxism and JudeoChristian ethics, in opposition to nihilism (see chapter 5) may well include Berger. Vico, Vica and King are like Huxley’s ‘savage’ family from beyond the pale, heroic in their affections and their belief in one another – as are Golding’s Lok and Fa, facing a civilization that appears to them the purest barbarism. Burgess’s barbaric, Orwellian society is a rambunctious critique of Nietzschean nihilism; Alex’s pure and destructive self-will can be manipulated easily this way and that by behaviourism, and will ultimately resolve into belief in a sentimental, though disabused, orthodoxy, the other side of the nihilistic coin. Murdoch’s characters are all impulse in their quest for belief. She puts theory and impulse on a war footing, with Plato as official historian. Nietzscheans get their moral come-uppance and become enlightened. Lessing shows that in a fearsome world it is more noble and human to fall apart into a nihilistic dissolution than to stay a believer in theories that enslave. Further, women are as fully engaged and heroic in the political struggle for meaning as men. Rushdie demonstrates how the highest values devalue themselves. The Prophet becomes The Businessman and potentially even The Devil. The Oxbridge graduate works on a television show about freaks. And Point of View itself – that is, judgment – is lost in translation; major characters and their gods are mere personas. In King the Abrahamic pact between humans has broken down; man cannot believe in man or God, and there is no-one to look after Vico and Vica, these fossilized children. Tradition: boum. To cling to power, Airstrip One allies herself ever closer with Oceania: a dangerous strategy. What remains of Britain is a bit of every defeated enemy and colonized offspring.

CHAPTER 2 AMERICA: LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE1 After the First World War, many survivors concluded that it had been a pointless slaughter. Few people, apart from the defeated, thought that the Second World War had not been worth fighting. Nonetheless, the war deeply injured the general faith in human nature, a faith which had been insulted, but not destroyed, in the previous conflict. Between 1939 and 1945, in Europe and the Pacific, unbelievable horrors were committed, often by ordinary men with no strong political views. At the centre of this horror were the Nazi concentration camps. Young British officers were taken by the thousand to see Belsen, and many – who had not taken ‘war propaganda’ seriously – were at odds with the world ever after. The great reporter Martha Gellhorn went into Dachau as it was liberated, and wrote much later, ‘I know I never felt again that lovely, easy, lively hope in life which I knew before, not in life, not in our species, not our future in life.’ Neal Ascherson 2 But the war was also the making of modern economic America. It had put paid to the Depression, boosted industry and in some way incubated the baby boom whose consumer patterns, belief systems and sheer numbers would export optimism to the world. Gellhorn, like her husband Ernest Hemingway, had reported fear and loss back to America, on behalf of displaced emigrants. Such writers represented also the individual voice of the Great America which spoke fearlessly then and is still speaking now, about ideals and trauma, the inner-directed life. The living-rooms of America were, however, soon to be irradiated by nugatory forms of electronic distraction which would spread world-wide, uniting a culture of immaturity with a culture of money. It was a fusion that seemed to bring a peace passing all understanding, as families

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gathered round the cathode tube in growing prosperity. Cultural critics moved in from outside, like the formerly left-wing producer Elia Kazan denouncing his artist friends to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Left-wing immigrant intellectuals wrote musicals and soap operas. ‘That lovely, easy, lively hope in life’ which was lost for Gellhorn and other observers had to be reinvented as farce by the mass media and other corporations, while modernist art went into contortions on the sidelines – its practitioners attempting, in part, to dramatise the outrage perpetrated by political power out of control. Mickey Mouse Club, Disneyland, Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, The Nelsons were, while socially cohesive, a tyranny of fatuity. The more, says Terry Eagleton, the mass work slipped painlessly into eye or ear, the more high art fought off a too-easy consumption, ‘fragmenting its vision and pulverizing meaning. For it to refer, in a reasonable intelligent way, was for it to be instantly complicit with the degraded discourse which surrounded it.’3 (There was, however, a countervailing form of popular culture which opposed a dynamic to this passive nihilism: the Western.) The only recourse for art was nihilist, exposing puny pieties, meretricious institutions, bad art, unradical Christianities. Complacency in happy-family religion, especially on religious television, is passive-nihilist in Nietzsche’s worst sense, denying that trauma which is as essential to Judeo-Christianity as it is to psychoanalysis. The brittle, mindless utopia which we associate with the American century and satirized in The Truman Show was blueprinted as early as 1932 by Huxley in Brave New World – which he differentiated from Orwell’s later 1984 thus: ‘In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain: in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less dehumanizing pleasure’.4 Today relaxed attitudes to sex, religion purged of doubt, insidious social stratification (As, Bs, Cs etc have indeed popped up since as market segmentations) have ‘vindicated’ Brave New World. But the dark side of the moon – non-bland, non-processed, non-hierarchical – in the novel is also America. The Savage is the nihilist Superman or Zarathustra, loving, suffering, leading. Christ-like he cleanses the temple of Epsilons; Dante-like he dreams of the perfections of the child-woman Lenina; and Caliban-like is finally driven by an

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access of lust and self-hatred to ravish her in front of delighted paparazzi before hanging himself. The unconscious of the futurist metropolis, he is best and worst, heroic and suicidal, Christlike in taking on trauma experienced only by the Epsilon infants. More than destabilizing, he is Dionysiac. His death is perhaps for the new world the Nietzschean birth of tragedy. He is also the impulse that counters theory – any determinism, whether Fordist utopian theory or the behaviourist theory of advertising and mass media. He is the black or Hispanic man on death row watching the coiffed blond men and women on the networks. Or, more constructively, he is the hero of the Western: Robert Mitchum directed by John Ford, in a dynamic nihilism of self-will and a tabula rasa of values in the frontier society. In Brave New World, Huxley had a character say ‘Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games while doing nothing whatever to increase consumption!’(p. 35) That would seldom happen today. Sports are privatised. Žižek reports on an electronic game in which you pump a man in an electric chair full of voltage.5 And Trivial Pursuit is the megabucks game devised, as Postman observes, to capitalize on the fragmentation of information which now has no other use than for games and quiz shows.6 History having lost its context, people have lost access to the structured thought provided by print culture. For knowledge has been, like politics, sport, news, education and religion, subsumed into and reconstructed by the entertainment industry of television and advertising. As Marshall McLuhan said so succinctly, the medium is the message; change your expectations. From typographical discourse, which was founded on principles of coherence, seriousness and reason, popular culture moved in the 1950s into a debased and irrational discourse. The replacement of word-based by image-based commercials in the 1970s is seen by Postman and others as ‘the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since Das Kapital’.7 In the sixties you were supposed to know what you were getting in the product, because the advertising spoke to you about it. But now we know little, because what is sold is a feeling rather than a product (Toyota’s ‘Oh what a feeling!’ or McDonald’s ‘I’m lovin’ it’). As Susan Sontag said, language is the means we use to challenge and dispute what is on the surface. The words true and false come from the

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universe of language. The photograph offers no assertions, and is thus not refutable.8 Gellhorn’s ‘lovely, easy, lively hope’, a healthy instinct, was replaced by a manufactured disposition: that progress is here, it is unshakable, and it is tied to consumption. As the century wore on, religious and political figures increasingly used television to advertise themselves, the religious ones competing with God and each other for dollars, the politicians appearing as guests in quizzes and sitcoms and as celebrities in commercials. Ronald Reagan is credited with winning his most crucial television debate with a gag about his age. George W. Bush also based his success on relaxed humour rather than argument. How, Postman asks, does one take arms against a sea of amusements? Amusements have disguised the facts: between 1945 and the millennium the USA bombed China (twice), Korea, Guatemala (twice) Indonesia, Cuba, the Congo, Peru, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Sudan, Afghanistan (twice), Yugoslavia and Iraq (twice). One takes arms against these countries first to make them into utopias from a certain point of view and because the voters at home are not expected to distinguish between a true fight on TV and a false one; even if they did, its gravity would soon be dissipated by the discontinuities of the TV screen. In 1956 William Whyte raised fears of the ‘organisation man’ who will not challenge the system. This is the prophecy of de Tocqueville, the tyranny of the majority. Company men are ‘the interchangeables’, espousing social values instead of truth. For ‘they are all in the same boat. But where is the boat heading?’9 The boat was going, ironically enough, away from social values. The ‘togetherness’ theme was unmasked when the 1980s ushered in, with market fundamentalism, contempt for the little man, innocence and tradition, and a naked fetishisation of money. But ‘togetherness’ was always a sell-out. Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) was a close encounter between the ambiguous teacher/parent and that new thing, the teenager, created for consumption purposes. At one point in the long wanderings around America by car, Humbert Humbert observes Lolita in the gift-shop of a reservation motel, wanting ‘Indian dolls, copper jewelry, candy. She was a disgustingly conventional little girl, an

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ideal consumer’ (p 146). But it is Humbert who since the beginning has cynically showered her with pretty things: ‘What little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?’ (p. 106) The ‘father’ and his little orphaned girl are received tenderly not least because Humbert, handsome and a fastidious dresser, has learnt to sell himself. Origins fade to nothing in this tale: Humbert is of a background so ancient, so dispersed, so wasted into words, that he barely exists apart from his fixation. Lolita, parentless and friendless, demotic, could barely be closer physically to Humbert but can accept neither his love nor his culture. He seems all experience, she all innocence. Yet this polarity could be reversed. When she first seduces him, he calls it ‘a bit of backfisch foolery, imitation of some simulacrum of fake romance and, as the psychotherapist as well as the rapist will tell you, the limits and rules of such girlish games are fluid’ (p. 102). Her ‘Dad’ is spoken with ‘ironic deliberation’. (‘Daddy-O’ was not long in coming; all fixed relations melt into air.) ‘Togetherness’ is as much the poison in the wound as Humbert’s lost first love and sexual obsession. The American family at that time was, it is said, both too close and too cold, as in the phrase ‘frigidaire fifties’. So is the strange coupledom of Humbert and his companion in obsession Clare Quilty, the doppelgänger who could be a projection of Humbert’s fantasy except that Humbert is arrested (but is he? Think about it) for killing him. Where Humbert and Lolita could be called decadent, it is ‘Quilty’ who is the devilish destroyer of meaning, value and desirability. An image of America that stays in the mind is the ‘zoo in Indiana in which large troops of monkeys lived on a concrete representation of Christopher Columbus’s flagship’(p 155). America making a laughing stock of heroic European imagination? Or the Portuguese expedition itself seen as a mob of irresponsible hucksters and religious fanatics? Either way, it is a picture of rich fantasy but grotesque loneliness. ‘I had a sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream world, where everything was permissible’ (p 132). A brave new Dostoyevskian world indeed, where your dream ‘of wide-eyed unsung innocent surrender’ is purchasable. But this is purchasable only once. Humbert – even in name – is always too late. This is Snow White’s situation too, in Donald Barthelme’s novella of the

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same name (1968). On page 3 she is described in much the traditional way: then on page 4 ‘Bill is tired of Snow White now’. Bill is one of the seven dwarves, whose affairs are reported in short chunks of text, and whose job is to make Chinese baby food, at nights. Snow White has discovered feminism and gone to college. Bill says, I had hoped to make a powerful statement coupled with a moving plea. I had hoped to make a significant contribution. I had hoped to bring about a heightened awareness. I wanted to effect a rapprochement...I wanted to engage in meaningful dialogue. (pp 51–53) This Newspeak shows that fairy tales are no longer simple in the late 1960s. Walt Disney’s monopolisations of them are, arguably, disenchantment. ‘O,’ cries Snow White, ‘I wish there were some words in the world that are not the words I always hear!’ Fairy tales are supposed to bear re-telling. Snow White is suffering from a general semantic nihilism – and it is spreading. The dwarves experiment with new words, the post-modern ‘browsing among cultural forms’, but all are meaningless. Revolution is in the air: all the players want to know the future will not be like this. But the dwarves’ attempts to renew their imaginative life are limited: ‘THE HORSWIFE IN HISTORY. FAMOUS HORSWIVES, 1892 is their idea of how to understand women’s new role. Everything is too fragmented, and great stories are now just advertising. The dwarves’ short block-letter paragraphs aim at the status of newspaper headlines, or synopses, or text advertisements, or posters, something to grab the attention, seduce, command and sell at the same time. They fail. They are print, after all. Dan says ‘Per capita production of trash is up from 2.7 lb per dollar in 1920 to 4.5 in 1965, the last year for which we have figures, and is increasing at a rate of about 4% a year. I hazard that we may soon very well reach a point where it’s 100%’ (p. 97). He is trying pathetically to be organisation man. All the characters feel strongly, thanks to advertising, that the future is now, and this has paralysed them. As Zelda Fitzgerald once said, ‘We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising.’10 Now it is trash. A certain Hogo de Bergerac is brought in to advise on the status of Snow White: ‘He knows the terrors of the heart, the terror of aloneness,

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and the rot of propinquity, and the absence of grace’ (p. 62). Togetherness has failed, along with language. But all Hogo says is ‘The world is full of cunts’ (p. 73). There is nothing left to do but hang Bill. Before the insights of modern psychology – and Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders – certain things could perhaps be assumed; that people knew what they wanted, that people could tell the truth about their desires, that people could be trusted to behave in a rational way.11 Now individuals are forced to defend ourselves against desires they did not know they had, and against the unpredictable desires of others. Indeed, David Putnam observes, in a discussion about trust, faith, honesty, community life, citizenship and values generally, that ‘at century’s end a generation with a trust quotient of nearly 80% was being replaced by one with a trust quotient of barely half that’.12 Deeply rooted in the world of media and advertising, Claire Booth Luce is unequivocal in her interpretation that ‘advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the twentieth century than any other factor.’13 Doubt of one’s acceptability is always reanimated by advertising. Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) is perhaps the most shocking work of fiction ever written, and one that the author now renounces (though he did not prevent the film’s distribution, as Kubrick did with A Clockwork Orange). What A Clockwork Orange was to the British 1950s, this novel is to the American 1990s. Both little Alex and Patrick Bateson hang out with their mates and take a pride in their clothes. Both novels entice with ritualized and inventive language; the characters never mix with ‘normal’ people. But Alex’s droogs were the dregs of society, whereas Patrick and his friends are the New York financial elite. And Patrick commits acts of psychopathy which Alex could not dream of. Patrick and his peers are the New Men. As Badiou puts it, ‘We find ourselves in the real moment of commencement; the nineteenth century announced, dreamed and promised; the twentieth century declared it would make man, here and now.’14 On the one hand the lovable, powerless hippie; on the other, this. Patrick and his associates relate primarily to designer labels and herd behaviour. The novelist Jay McInerney attests to being in the same 1980s ‘brat pack’ as Ellis. (The phrase is based, probably, on the sixties Hollywood grouping of Frank

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Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior and Peter Lawford, known for enjoying laddish behaviour.) This quasi-autism means that although booking the right table at the right restaurant at the right time is almost their only social activity, its stresses often requiring extra Xanax or cocaine, when it comes to it they may not recognise one another. As John Barth wrote in Lost in the Funhouse, ‘Stepping from the treacherous passage at last into the mirror-maze, he saw once again how readily he deceived himself into believing he was a person’ (p. 93). The characters are William Whyte’s nightmare come true: they are the Interchangeables. When, after fucking, torturing and slaughtering many women Patrick murders one of these male peers, the victim is not missed. Indeed, someone claims to have eaten with him since, in London. At the end, when Patrick tries to confess, the others quite literally do not hear him. They also tend to think that he is someone else – despite, or because of, the facials, the tan, the hair. For the first part of the book, however, all is as usual: Price seems nervous and edgy and I have no desire to ask him what’s wrong. He’s wearing a linen suit by Canali Milano, a cotton shirt by Ike Behar, a silk tie by Bill Blass and cap-toed leather laceups from Brooks Bros. I’m wearing a lightweight linen suit with pleated trousers, a cotton shirt, a dotted silk tie, all by Valentino Couture, perforated cap-toe leather shoes by Allen Edmonds. Van Patten is wearing a double-breasted wool and silk sport coat, button-fly wool and silk trousers with inverted pleats by Mario Valentino, a cotton shirt by Gitman Bros … (p 29) There are similar catalogues for facial treatments, apartment interiors, hi-fi, menus and cars; and banal, set-piece reviews of certain bands. Identity comes through labels. Johan Goudsblom sees a ‘nihilist problem’ in the very legitimacy of any number of mutually exclusive judgments.15 How to choose the best restaurant, the best piece of apparel? (We do the same with olive oil. Lower income budgets, however, allow for fewer choices, hence less anxiety perhaps about mistakes.) The scenes of overwhelming sex and violence become formulaic too. Apollonian order (the right selection of consumer items) and Dionysiac disorder (the killings) are self-parodic. Achieving aesthetic perfection is a goal of the Nietzschean Superman, and financial supremacy the goal of Ayn Rand’s influential Nietzschean novels The Fountainhead

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(1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Then what, however? All civilization stops. Germany, with its high aesthetic standards, fell all the lower into barbarity. American Psycho also points out that our smug moral distinction between sex and violence is less likely in extremist psyches. Violence, of late, has even been built into sales-pitches. FCUK and Benetton: through shock, buy into social awareness. Jim Beam and Marlboro: get in touch with your masculine side. For the man who lives on the edge: Kurt Lagerfelt KL Cologne. The little boy warrior as loner: Ralph Lauren and Rolex. These last both picked up on polo, with the man alone (though he has a team) rugged on horseback.16 As the violence in American Psycho takes over Patrick’s life his panic makes him increasingly invisible – as Price was to him when ‘nervous and edgy’ – and inaudible to his peers for whom life is smooth impenetrable progress: ‘So what do you do?’ ‘I’m into, oh, murders and executions mostly. It depends.’ ‘Most guys I know who work in mergers and acquisitions don’t really like it.’ (p. 196) The next text has been much quoted: My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared long ago… I still do hold on to one bleak truth: no-one is safe, nothing is redeemed. (p. 362) Just as market fundamentalism apotheosises ‘the invisible hand of the market’ in balancing and blessing all ‘progressive’ societies, Easton Ellis shows that invisible hand to be mindlessly murderous. Even within the charmed circle of preppy financiers, man is in Hobbes’ words enemy to man – a conclusion endorsed by the columnist Thomas Friedman: ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist’.17 Many overseas adventures were undertaken in the course of the telescreen age to secure America’s economic interest. Whether in international relations or Easton Ellis’s impeccably uncompromised irony, the hardening of thought into economic theory leads to the short-circuit of violent impulse. Those on the receiving end barely deserve mention. And this novelist is

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not pure: violence seems what these women deserve – whether corporate highfliers or prostitutes – for being submissive fools. When stuffing bits of themselves into others’ orifices, and vice versa, they are given incoherent voices of pleasure. When tortured and killed they are as silent as mannequins: encouraging news for an imitator, impulse worship in full triumphal impunity. Child abuse also relies on the silence of the victim. Could one argue that the child-abuse revelations of the last twenty-five years (here I remember the trendy clothes shop called ‘Pervert’) owe nothing to general complicity in the sexualization of children, as prefigured in Lolita? Even if not – there has always been sexual crime against women and minors – there are other contemporary ways of achieving the silence of victims. The reason that Patrick’s personality is so ‘sketchy’ is that it is so totally corporate. He is not a person, but a deviant fragment of a brat-pack. Simone Weil wrote in her essay ‘On Human Personality’ that we lack character because we are indelibly inscribed into the collective, in all its guises.18 Patrick has a fantasized relationship with the firms that make his consumer labels. Since a highly significant series of Supreme Court cases, starting with Santa Clara v. South Pacific Railroad 1886, these corporations are in law legal persons. Under the 14th Amendment they have the same rights as individuals, and are able to control processes of state regulation and taxation especially by claiming discrimination. They are not liable for debts accrued by shareholders, and have the standing to sue or be sued. Just as humans have become inferior machines, they have become superior humans. In the twentieth century utopians and dystopians alike require that some of their members be more equal than others. Corporations have offered delights and dispensations unknown in history, and western populations are more happy as a result than we often allow. But Patrick’s ‘truth’ comes not just from Nietzsche but from the corporation’s boot stamping on the human face. It is an anti-foundationalist view not far removed from pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, along the lines that truth is never anything more than an expression of a particular community’s values: the Party’s, the ‘finance community’s’. Patrick might feel more redeemable if he realized that there is such a thing as a free lunch. There is, of course, for corporations; he needs to be convinced

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that for individuals too there is grace, in whatever sense of the word. The origins of American Psycho lie in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, whose picture of the idle urban rich predated Waugh’s: disinhibition and disillusionment go with a narrator who is a ‘bond man’. It all comes down to fun: corporate fun. For most of the book Patrick is having excellent fun in all the things he does – making money, dining out, ripping out women’s eyes – just as buying clothes is fun, music and TV are fun, advertisements are fun. You doubt the big things of course – love, trust, security, fidelity, permanence, equality, the common good. They cannot exist for the cynic in the real – i.e. the risk – society. The modern American sense of freedom is not far from fun, whose other side is cynicism, or smiling nihilism. Susan Sontag wrote about the torture of Iraqis by Americans at Abu Ghraib Prison in 2004, and also of the practice of handing suspects over to known torturers in other countries: People do these things to other people. Americans, too, do them when they have permission. When they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable, race or religion…The pictures were meant to be circulated…it was all fun [which] is alas more and more ‘the true nature and heart of America’ (George W Bush). America has become a country in which the fantasies and practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun.19 If nothing is true, as Nietzsche said in Genealogy of Morals, everything is permitted. 20 Since we have seen the price to be paid for such hysterical absolutism, the least we can say is that if some things are true not everything is permitted. Nietzsche, Marx and Freud all strove to demonstrate the illusoriness of morality. But those three citizens had a strong concern for humanity’s future. A century later there is not that concern among western society’s leaders, and some of the results of this were September 11 and the agnosia at the highest levels about global warming. As Marcuse wrote in the 1970s: ‘In a world of “repressive desublimation” [read: forced fun] human energies are no longer deflected into “higher” ends, but safely released into trivial, politically innocent ways. Capitalism now is an essentially totalitarian regime, and the cult of the individual processes and massages social conflict.’21 That is, the cult of the

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icon, the outrageous star, the hero with the gun. The name of Superman is both the noble Nietzschean fantasy and the fun comic/movie grossing megabucks. But we do not – should not – live in fantasy, and so far there has been no human Superman who cannot be brought low. About the corporate legal person that is the brat-pack, one cannot be so sure. Strange attractors: Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away In O’Connor’s second and last novel, two worlds are set up as fundamentally antagonistic: the great-uncle Tarwater’s tragicomic world of damnation and redemption, and his nephew Rayber’s dogmatic world of instrumental reason. In Nietzschean terms, both are ‘will-to-truth’ – that is, unhappy fanaticism: ‘these pale atheists, Antichrists, immoralists...last idealists of knowledge, very far from being free spirits because they can still believe in truth.’22 There is a third party who must choose between them: the fourteen-year-old young Tarwater, who lives with his great-uncle in a shack in a clearing of Deep South forest. This great-uncle has raised him in the turbulent and fanatical belief that the boy has been saved to be a prophet, preaching redemption in the cities, and will be ‘burned clean; for he himself had been burned clean and burnt clean again. He had learned by fire’ (p. 5). ‘Children are cursed with believing,’ says Rayber, bitterly (p. 170). He is witheringly called ‘the schoolteacher’ by his uncle. ‘If you were living with him,’ the old man says to his great-nephew, the boy Tarwater, ‘you’d be information, you’d be inside his head’ (p.16). The boy resists his prophetic mission, with primitive good sense: when there was no fire in the uncle’s eye and he spoke only of the stink and sweat of the cross and being born again to die and of spending eternity eating the bread of life the boy would let his mind wander off to other subjects (p 8). When the boy was young Rayber tried to rescue him – ‘rescue’ is a key word in this book – but the great-uncle shot him in the ear and the leg, and he fled. ‘He can’t act,’ crowed the old man. Gilles Deleuze writes that ‘the man of ressentiment is one who does not act’.23 The old man’s plan of action for the boy

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includes baptizing Bishop, Rayber’s ‘dim-witted’ little son. Then the old man dies of a stroke. In a re-working, perhaps, of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, young Tarwater remembers all too well the old man’s instructions for his burial – especially a cross to mark him out on Judgment Day. But the boy can’t get the hole dug, much less erect a cross – ‘I ain’t bothering with trifles’ – gets drunk, and causes havoc. Then he hitches a comical ride to the city and the nephew. But Rayber is another who wants his soul, out of abhorrence of the old man, whom he had committed for a time to an asylum. Marked as a boy by the old man’s fervour, Rayber’s conversion to the secular and rational has not freed him of violent ambivalences. Visits to museums and hamburger joints are punctuated by Rayber’s intense accesses of ‘horrifying love’, and young Tarwater is obsessed by the injunction to baptize Bishop and become a prophet. A mediator in all this is the invisible ‘helper’ sent to him at the old man’s death: He was crazy all along, the stranger continued. Wanted to make a prophet out of that schoolteacher too, but the schoolteacher was too smart for him. He got away. No no no there ain’t no such thing as a devil. I know that for a fact. It’s Jesus or you (p.37). At a fountain in a public park, point of view splits the text bewilderingly open, with close but unidentical accounts – the boy’s and Rayber’s – of the play of water. The boy’s sees a ‘blinding brightness on the lion’s head and the gilded stream rushing from his mouth on to [Bishop’s] white head.’ The schoolteacher snatches Bishop away as Tarwater lifts him for baptism. ‘A wavering face seemed to be trying to form itself. Gradually it became distinct and still, gaunt and cross-shaped’ (p 165). ‘Goddamn you!’ Rayber cries to Tarwater. ‘It fell on us both alike…the difference is I know it’s in me and I keep it under control’ (p. 192). He is already cracking, it is clear, when he takes the two boys to Cherokee Lodge on a fishing trip. ‘Come here to have a nervous breakdown,’ thinks the woman at the desk. The predictable happens; and soon Tarwater is hitch-hiking back home, but still denying his mission. From the high melodrama of the scene on the Cherokee lake – reminiscent of Dreiser’s American Tragedy – we cut to young Tarwater and the truck driver who has given him a lift:

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America: Lost in the Funhouse ‘I ain’t hungry for the bread of life. If I ate it I would throw up.’ ‘You belong in the booby hatch. I won’t see nobody sane again until I get back to Detroit’ (pp 209–213). After further degradation at the hands of a man in a lavender car, Tarwater

makes it home, to find that the Negro hired man has buried the old man and ploughed the corn. Then, as in O’Connor’s short story ‘Revelation’, the sky shows him transcendence, and hearing the command “Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy”, he turns back to the city. Flannery O’Connor is a subversive author, and her greatest skill is perhaps humour, a neglected aspect of the Gothic. Real presences, however, matter. Asked about the Eucharist at a dinner party with Robert Lowell, O’Connor said, ‘If I thought it was only a symbol, I’d say “To hell with it.”’24 So the boy’s first vision – which all his actions have tried to suppress – is passionate: The other boy [Bishop] stood there, dim and ancient. Then the revelation came. His own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, until at last he received his reward, a broken fish, a multiplied loaf (p 91). So it is not an active nihilism, drowning a child in the process of /on the pretext of baptizing him? Yes and no. The Gothic is from one point of view a passive culture of nihilism in its preposterous decadent obsessiveness, its determinism, its sermonising, soap opera implausibility – its death. But it raises one of the few critiques against an Enlightenment rationality which denies what most disturbs it. The ‘obscurity’ of the Gothic is ‘why power is sublime, apprehended, not comprehended’.25 The pragmatic view that truth is no more than consensus of communities is the voice of the truck driver who may spend his life on the road to and from Detroit but isn’t going anywhere. Knowing what would happen, and knowing his own dependencies, the rationalist Rayber handed the boy over to Tarwater, simply to be free for one hour of Tarwater’s challenge. His doubts mean that he cannot act, and that passion rules. O’Connor’s fiction largely excludes the moderate middle. If the Tarwaters are fundamentalist and ‘nihilist’, in the popular meaning of ‘meaninglessly destructive’ –

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one almost thinks Taliban – it is because Rayber is a decadent liberal. Humanist, he believes in improvement, but brings no authority back from the museums he visits and the school he works in. Nor is there any nourishment from city life: no hamburger can satisfy Tarwater’s hunger, or the breakfast ‘shavings from a box’. With the old man, there was ‘no morning he didn’t eat a fatback from the stream’ and home-made bread. In Catholic doctrine the bread of life is the living Word, the Body; the corn, the fish, even the still liquor are as unalienated as the old man’s Scripture. Ironically the boy is possibly a Nietzschean hero, and not because ‘I can act’: he cannot act, until the end. The Christians Nietzsche despised are those typified by Mrs Rayber, ‘the welfare woman’, who insisted on the mission to rescue Tarwater but ran away when the old man opened fire. The only Christian, said Nietzsche, was Christ.26 The two backwoodsmen, carving out their free, natural life in the forest, are almost Zarathustras: young Tarwater’s moment of dynamic nihilism leads to his return as prophet of doom to the city, ‘his eyes burned clean’ in the old man’s Nietzschean injunction to ‘become what you are’. The baptism-loss, like love-death, of the child Bishop is reminiscent of Abraham’s submission to the sacrifice of Isaac. This ‘suspension of the ethical’ in the name of suffering and paradox made Abraham for Kierkegaard an existential hero. The Gothic allows for such acts. In Terry Eagleton’s view the Gothic gesture, the commitment sustained until death, the one action which will fix your identity for all eternity – like Surrealism’s beauté convulsive – is an intriguing absolute. The vision and the act are fatal, immensely powerful, unlike the phrases of intellectuals. This is one of ‘modernity’s myths of extremity, along with the belief that language is so dismally inauthentic’.27 In the end the word ‘rescue,’ so desperately repeated at the beginning, is abolished. Will will out. The mass production of human beings is already being practised in schools where Rayber tests them for distribution into separate streams of utopic social conformity. There is no sense that Rayber’s tests are nefarious or even simply materialistic; the danger is that they are meaningless. ‘I ain’t taking no test,’ says the boy. ‘I’m outside your head. I ain’t in it.’ Baudrillard says, ‘It would be beautiful to be a nihilist if there were still a radicality.’28 This is what O’Connor gives her world. The

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Tarwaters are nothing if not radical. They cannot be known by Rayber’s intellectual systems: they subject themselves to the power of those ‘strange attractors’ which drive systems at their deepest level, ‘the trajectory towards which all other trajectories converge’, unpredictable, like a black hole swallowing all matter in its vicinity.29 The timespan of the novel is that dynamic moment before the capitulation of a whole society to a culture of nihilism, or passive nihilism, no longer able to reflect upon itself. It is perfectly possible, nevertheless, to read the novel as a wholesale critique of Southern Gothic religiosity – fundamentalism pure and simple. The extreme sanity of the minor characters, like the truckdriver and the Negro Buford, pitches the Tarwater family into the absurd. O’Connor’s other novel Wise Blood, based on similar themes, has a lot of comedy. The young hero, also resisting his vocation, proclaims ‘I preach the Church without Christ. I’m member and preacher to that Church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Jesus was a liar’ (p. 105). He goes on a little later – because he has spent all his money unwisely on a green car – ‘Nobody with a good car needs to be justified’ (p. 113). Wise Blood satirises consumerist, as well as religious, fundamentalism. Much of the argument for the Tarwater story as an attack on religiosity comes from the voice of the ‘friend’ and ‘stranger’ who is perhaps the boy’s better nature, even guardian angel, advising him after his great-uncle’s death. The ‘stranger’s’ face is ‘sharp and friendly and wise,’ cautioning him against the family paranoias. ‘Old men are selfish. How do you know the education he gave you is true to the facts? As for Judgment Day, every day is Judgment Day’ (p. 42). At the fountain, ‘Look, you have to quit confusing a madness with a mission’ (p. 165). That is the danger facing those who flee from conformity. All this needs to be said in that part of America that has advanced still further into fundamentalism since O’Connor’s death. Dispensationalism – the theory that provides the timescale and sequence of events preceding the imminent Second Coming of Christ – now has an alarming constituency of adherents. The Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins series of novels, Left Behind, relates what happens to those End Timer unfortunates not taken up by the Rapture into Heaven. It has reputedly the highest volume of sales – over 50 million

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copies – ever recorded for fiction, and will soon be on a screen near us.30 The religious Right is having creation science taught in government-funded schools throughout the Anglophone West. It makes up a significant portion of the Republican Party membership and donors, and exercised a strong influence on George W. Bush’s Middle East policy. The restitution of Israel’s Biblical borders and population is a central feature of dispensationalist belief. The O’Connor reader is alert to the implications of extremism, and glad of the ‘voice of reason’ speaking to young Tarwater in the first moments of his solitude, for both boy and reader are confused about authority in the novel. Stuart Sim writes. ‘The challenge to authority with the rise of liberalism has generated a counter-reaction because so many individuals feel threatened by the insecurity the breakdown of authority brings.’31 Indeed the loss of white authority in the South after defeat in the Civil War and reconstruction by the northern carpetbaggers seems a kind of implosion. The ‘stranger’s’ critique seems a perfectly satisfactory reading; he is rational, and the Tarwaters are a brat-pack. There is nevertheless ambiguity in the title, Matthew 11:12: ‘From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away’. The violence may not be justified, but it may be ordained. ‘Yours not to ask!’ cries the old man when the nephew sneers about God’s hand in Bishop’s condition. The commands of Revelation are mysterious and there are wars in Heaven. One remembers Abraham. But the sweet reason of the ‘stranger’s’ words is suddenly thrown into doubt when we read that his eyes become ‘malevolent and yellowrimmed’. Reason is just one of the temptations to renounce the prophetic vision that gives Tarwater authority both to kill and give new life. Is there free will? Can one ‘act’, or must one submit to the preordained? Is Bishop’s baptism, in the end, creative and apocalyptic, a Nietzschean yea-saying, or the act of a brutalized child acting out mad backwoods ideas? While these agonistic and antagonistic struggles have been going on, the ‘nigger’ Buford has been quietly burying the body of the old man and ploughing the corn. It is only at this point that the boy sees his confirming vision – not only the ridge of fire, but a hillside covered with dim figures sharing bread. Instead, however, of going in with Buford to eat as he had

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hoped, he turns and goes still hungry to the city – cursed with belief, bearing the Kingdom away from this scene of peace and resolution to the cities of the plain, lost in violence. One hopes it is this pacific vision of Buford that liberates Tarwater from the old man’s violent one. But perhaps not. In Buford and young Tarwater one may see the Prodigal Son and his patient brother – or Cain and Abel. There are always these questions when the radical acts upon the world. Ain’t I your baby too? James Baldwin’s Another Country After such a show of solidarity with the world in the forties, America declared that half that world was politically anathema, sought solidarity at home, and was surprised and angered not to find it. Some Americans would be, like the European exiles and the ‘Beats’, determined to embrace new ideas. But authority was not going to give up its power: solidarity was imposed. Blacks who had endured the hierarchies of war for good reason came back to find an old hierarchy still there for no good reason. The civil rights movement rose up, but for both many blacks and whites it was already too late. Rufus, the black New York drummer in Another Country (1962), remembering ‘boot camp in the south, felt again the shoe of the white officer against his mouth’ (p. 20). Another Country documents American life on the fault line of that period: the life of the people who refused the lie of togetherness. Rufus and his sister Ida are not the orderly blacks of the South who bury old Tarwater decently and plough his corn. They are continuously angry. But so is bohemia everywhere, led by the libertarian cry of the Beats following a kind of existentialism. The characters of Another Country are pursuing art, freedom – and power. Among Rufus’s white friends Vivaldo is writing a novel, like his former teacher Richard who with his wife Cass is a liberal. Eric, who is gay, comes back from Paris to star in a production of The Devils, playing Stavrogin. The Dostoyevsky reference is not an idle one. Anyone who has read The Devils will recognise the brutal emotions, the absence of trust, the loneliness and looseness, the poverty and envy: cynicism, in fact. Across the West, the wrath of the young people of the peace will explode in the copycat uprisings of 1968. But this is only 1962. Baldwin’s characters express directly

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the alienation of the American individual for whom social cohesion is a formula to sell soap, the family is a mere stagnation, religion something Mahalia Jackson sings about, and love violence. Vivaldo’s father said to him as a child, ‘“I want you to tell me the truth.’ [So when I did] he’d slap me against the wall. So in the end I’d tell him any old lie, I didn’t give a shit’ (p. 112). When Rufus, in his last hours, says ‘You’re the only friend I’ve got in the world, Vivaldo,’ the answer is ‘And that’s why you hate me’ (p. 174). Rufus picks up a poor-white girl from the south, takes her to a party. Then, on a balcony, forced her beneath him and entered her…under his breath he cursed the white bitch, beat her with all the strength he had and felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-and-white babies (p 28). Her family, vengeful against her as Rufus, put her away. Then it is he who breaks down, wandering at night selling his body, remembering ‘allowing Eric to make love to him so as to despise him more completely’. Finally, on Brooklyn Bridge, Rufus raised his eyes to heaven. He thought, ‘You bastard, you motherfucking bastard, ain’t I your baby, too?’ He was black and the water was black… ‘All right, you motherfucking Godalmighty bastard, I’m coming to you’ (p 89). Rufus’s last compelling words are like the paranoid hate-love of the hungry infant.32 Even God, the ‘motherfucker’, is a despoiler of the source of love too alienated now for him to recognise. The breast and the Law are both his indifferent parent America. ‘Ain’t I your baby, too?’ is a question his leap of (un)faith betrays. Everyone, says the text elsewhere, was reading Kierkegaard. One may be reminded of Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov in The Devils, who has pledged to kill himself. ‘God is necessary, and therefore must exist. But I know that he does not and cannot exist. Don’t you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?’ (p 611). Marya Timofeevna of The Devils makes an observation that applies as much to Another Country: ‘You’re all angry, you’re all quarrelling; you get together and you can’t even laugh from the heart’ (p. 274). There is good reason for this. Dostoyevsky’s and Baldwin’s characters are artists and outcasts confronting a mass

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culture whose hierarchies of raw power and repeated invocations of God are reviled as self-serving hypocrisy by the radical fringe. The young people of 1869 and 1960, vilified then and now, are dynamic nihilists, making waves at their own expense, in the hope of becoming what they are. Ida, Rufus’s sister and Vivaldo’s lover, judges all who ‘let Rufus die’, and suspects the motives of liberal whites. People are blamed for not having ‘paid their dues’. Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus says that ‘all systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimate or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd is ready to pay up.’ Ida seems then to be part of a new ethic.33 Vivaldo, who defended Rufus in a bar-room fight, and lives monastically in the service of his novel and Ida, responds ‘What a filthy little moralist you are.’ Like many moralists, Ida has skeletons, ressentiments, in her cupboard. In order to advance her own career, she has slept with her white agent, becoming what she despised, a black ‘that whites wipe their dicks on’. Cass’s Richard is also no libertarian as soon as his entitlements are threatened by his wife’s explorations: ‘You’re just like all the American cunts. A man feels around for his cock and balls, she’s helped herself to them’ (p. 237). In the 1960s, the oppressions of the myth of togetherness kept the sexes at war as much as the races. The wife in advertisements was conceptualized as the ‘happy slave’ in advertising theory. But in reality this wife is like Barthelme’s Snow White, tired of life as it is, and her attendant males are tired of her attempts to extend herself. The bisexuals Eric, Vivaldo and Rufus do better; only one loses out completely. Eric brings his young lover Yves over from Paris and both, in the full knowledge that it might not last, are happy. The plot’s constant warfare seems soap opera today. Such a conflictual novelistic form was developed by Dostoyevsky and called ‘fantastic realism’ to describe the constant emotional crisis in his novels. Like Dostoyevsky Baldwin was writing about enormous social shifts: this is the essence of the real. An influence, perhaps, in Lacan’s use of the term ‘the real’ for the unknown, the unconscious, the unspeakable, most powerful forces acting in us. Further, the testimony of the 1950s and 60s libertarian ascendancy is that life was like that – and if it was not, it was

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bourgeois. One’s sexual freedom went with freedom of self-expression and politics. Instability, the deadliest fear of the Controller in Huxley’s Brave New World, was the pride and joy of the Beat revolution. They would do anything to avoid becoming the organization man. Kierkegaard features in the existential irruption of the Beat Generation; and Rufus’s leap mocks surrender to the third ‘religious’ stage of personal evolution, which is heavily paradoxical, mysterious and full of risk. If Baldwin were being faithful to the Dane here, then doubt would be thrown on the first stage, the ‘aesthetic’, where most of the characters have their being, only Cass, Vivaldo and Eric representing the second stage, ‘the ethical’. Kierkegaard highlighted anxiety and dread as modern conditions, abundantly reflected in this novel, where ‘growing just means learning more about anguish. You see that the innocent and upright have contributed to the misery of the world’ (p. 388). The characters are would-be Nietzscheans, refusing slave-mentality, accepting the cross of their self-creation. Yet they are full of ressentiment, a brat-pack replicating in their small world the raw power struggle of the country as a whole. Baldwin also imports a Sartrean existentialism, no doubt brought back by Eric from Paris. For Kierkegaard, the individual is alone, and ultimately must return to an atypical God for authenticity if not peace. But Sartre is committed to a cooperative social philosophy which provides an ethical framework without denying anguish and without falling back on God. Man is always thrown toward a future which, by creating himself, he will create. Since essence does not precede existence, the subject is an endless project. Humans live in anguish because they are committed to others, within the terms of the Kantian rule: only do that which you would have applied as a universal law. If, Sartre says, this is what we commit ourselves to, then we can never choose anything bad. If we do, it is out of bad faith; for we are responsible for all other human beings.34 Is this what Ida means when she says ‘No-one is willing to pay their dues?’ Baldwin is essaying, it seems, a mix of existentialist and nihilist positions. Kierkegaard, like all existentialists, urges choice. Nietzschean nihilism deemphasizes this. (Superior) man is his indomitable self, and neither chooses nor pays his dues. As for woman, she has no prospects.

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hopefully. Half way through the book, Vivaldo had felt ‘something in him was breaking; he was briefly and horribly in a region where there were no definitions, only the leap and the rendering and the terror – the surrender’ (p. 291). From that dissolution, that crisis, he took the path Sartre speaks of: ‘I think you can begin to become admirable if when you’re hurt you don’t try to pay back’. Eric replies, ‘Otherwise you just get stopped with whatever it was that ruined you and you make it happen again and again and life has ceased.’ They are deciding ‘not to contribute to the misery of the world’ (p. 374). The test comes later for Vivaldo when he hears Ida’s confession – still with a sting in the tail: Vivaldo: ‘You gave in to me and pretended to trust me.’ Ida: ‘Yes. I had you where I wanted you. I’d got my revenge’ (p 404). One must remember, at the end of the twentieth century, how rigid and pitiless was the sexual separation of the races in America until quite recently, and how hard it was to forgive oppression. Ida now sees the cynicism of her position. Vivaldo does not pass on the hurt of his betrayal – merely inserting a serendipitous piece of the situation into a vacant spot in his novel. Ethic and aesthetic meet. The two have overcome ressentiment, which marks off the slave-mentality from the will to power: it is content to let the past rest, saying ‘I willed it thus’.35 Baldwin too refrains from paying back: his whites and bisexuals do best. Eric is stable in his affections and benevolent to the others, yet is to take the part of Stavrogin in The Devils, more psychopathic even than Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The novel’s title comes from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, where Barnardine says ‘Thou hast committed –’ and Barabas replies ‘Fornication? But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.’ Most of Baldwin’s characters ‘fornicate’; a cynical word. The will-to-power of others has left them negative and enslaved. The suppressed Chapter 9 of The Devils has Stavrogin seducing or raping a girl child, and unmoved when she hangs herself. There are similarities with Rufus’s story. Striving, yearning and blaming is everywhere in

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fantastic realism. Eric is in fact the best kind of Zarathustra, capable of solitude and solidarity, an artist growing in his art and the art of others. He loves unreservedly without the need to possess. His power allows him to ‘direct’ others towards their greater freedom and creativity. As a gay man – at that time, a criminal – he denies nothing, and becomes more proudly what he is. Eric’s power to be together with all the group – without inauthenticity – de-venoms Stavrogin. The French boy Yves, rapturously arriving in ‘the city of the angels’, seeing Eric waving to him, seems to bring liberation from devils, coming toward a beloved elder in the way the doomed Rufus – calling to a maligned God, ‘Ain’t I your baby too?’ – could not. It helps to be white. But in making his Superman white, and competent, his blacks consumed by slave-race negations, Baldwin has made of Another Country a testament not just of existential enquiry but of a complex Nietzschean nihilism. Recycled WASTE: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 Fun is to the loco near allied. Pierce Inverarity says as much to our heroine, Oedipa Maas, in one of his 3 a.m. B-movie spoof calls: ‘“The old man in the funhouse was murdered by the same blowgun that killed Professor Quackenbusch,” or something’ (p. 6). ‘Or something’: a throwaway like ‘whatever’, meaning that one account of reality is as good as another. Everything on the first page of the novel confronts a giant presupposition – that Inverarity, vastly rich from real estate, has died and appointed Oedipa as executrix to his will – with giant doubt. And then that doubt, or paranoia, must be disavowed, ironised, laughed at. The Crying of Lot 49 is a gospel of postmodernism, that style of the second half of the twentieth century which saw itself as essentially light, ironic, putting aside all the heavy social and psychological trappings of character and history we saw in Another Country, concerned rather with the infinite recesses of communication. Its foundation is antifoundationalism. Oedipa is named for a myth which was the unique foundation of modernism’s grand narrative,

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psychoanalysis, in 1963 still a mental icon. But to name a woman thus is both sacrilege and logically corrupt: Oedipus is only, foundationally, male. A snook is cocked. Irony blooms in every sentence, a ‘blank irony’, as Jameson calls it, but not a compromised one, since in the style of Alice or Candide, the guileless heroine moves through a landscape of cut-out characters without loss of authorial discrimination between genuine and fake.36 Oedipa develops in human responsiveness to others; but the others stay temporary, cut-out figures on the edge of a tabloid glossiness into which they will, in the main, disappear. Only two things seem real – virtual connectedness at the expense of human continuity in time, and paranoia. Baudrillard says that the public space is lost, being no longer a spectacle; while the private is lost because it is no longer secret.37 In this strange Californian interspace, connected by freeways, Oedipa moves between chance and libidinous encounters to and from the exercise of her duty under the will. And as a mysterious network of hidden meaning begins to take shape around her, she is caught in a hyper-paradox. The giant Inverarity executorship may not exist, because she is seeing a psychiatrist for paranoia (Dr Hilarius, already in the loco department himself) and there might have been too much kirsch in the fondue (the domestic certainties of the sixties are vulnerable). ‘‘‘You’re so sick, Oedipa,’’ she told herself, or the room, which knew’ (p. 5). Paranoia is not so sick in a world newly full of screens. Nothing is outside the box of representations; she is caught, like her husband Mucho, who sees in the dismal cycle of auto trade-ins a reflexivity ‘like incest’. Between LA and SF is a non-place called San Narciso, where it is wholly holy to regard oneself. Mucho complains of doubt, saying about the group Sick Dick and the Volkswagens that he’s ‘fond of them but doesn’t believe in’ them. Perhaps he believes in their existence – as he cues each record with movements as stylized as the handling of the chalice – but not that they are icons, gifted with celebrity as one was once with holiness, around whom multitudes gather. In San Narciso, whose houses look ‘all grown up together’ – that is, where history is brief and homogeneous, like a printed circuit – there is a kind of sub-revelation, an ‘intent to communicate’, which comes over Oedipa, ‘as if words were being

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spoken’. Then there is her perception of the freeway: Illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape – it wasn’t. What the road really was was a hypodermic needle inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of the freeway nourishing mainline LA, keeping it happy, protected from pain (p 16). The first sign of a mystery appears – a symbol doodled by an engineer, like a muted post-horn, which she sees in unexpected places accompanied by the letters WASTE. There is a Jacobean play running locally called The Courier’s Tragedy whose convoluted plot includes the bones of massacred soldiers turned to charcoal, then to ink, in which the Black Duke writes his communications. There is thus a secret relation between murder and communication. The conclusion of Act 1V runs thus: He that we last as Thurn und Taxis knew Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn, And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn. No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero (p 50). Thurn and Taxis were a family who held since medieval times a postal monopoly in the Holy Roman Empire to develop new markets. The Trystero, it seems, were an artful alternative mail service in black uniforms, moving by night. The lakeshore murders and the Trystero converge in an attack of 1853, memorialised in a plaque on one of Pierce Inverarity’s lake developments. Oedipa’s observations and her various informants – lawyer Metzger, theatre director Randolph Driblette; Genghis Coen, philatelist, and others – all offer more or less tangential fragments of knowledge / dream / red herring suggesting not only that the Trystero opposed the Holy Roman Empire’s official mail system but emigrated to America in the mid nineteenth century to oppose the mail monopoly there. They are, perhaps, continuing to exist. Oedipa sees their symbol in California toilets and on walls. And an alternative mail – Driblette uses the term The Adversary before he disappears – travels in America via bins marked W.A.S.T.E. – WE AWAIT SILENT TRYSTERO’S EMPIRE. Why should anyone care if an alternative mail system

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exists? Why should Metzger and Driblette disappear? How could Oedipa have known at the start that the Inverarity legacy was America? In the sense, that is, that Inverarity owns or control much or most of it. WASTE – generically something of no commercial value – is a challenge to corporate interests. Ordinary people communicate, through WASTE, with their true selves, dreams and emotions, leaving fines and bills and officialdom to the monopoly mail. This is subversive. ‘Send this to my wife,’ says the old sailor with DTs, nearing death. ‘I left her so long ago’ (p. 87). Ostensibly the dustbin of history, WASTE is the treasure-house of meaning. The Other is always past, while the Inverarity estate is indivisible, meaningless, and exponentially present. Inverarity’s America is ecstatic. WASTE may be sad. The mystery that excludes her may ‘make up for having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night’ (p. 81). The hermeneutical cycle that assures meaning has been broken: all the communication going on is non-communication, screen to screen, urge to urge, this instant to this instant: the nascent Net. Because Inverarity’s legacy is America, we might say by extension that it is also – through the development of corporate power – the world. Further, a will is an intent to assert, will to power. ‘Execute a will’ is ambiguous. We are told of no commands or bequests. So it is sheer voluntarism which will control Oedipa unless her own will is exerted. C S Peirce was the inventor of semiology, the study of signs. Oedipa will try to find their foundation in meaning. Entropy in the system is winning and communication failing, as it did for Driblette, the producer of The Courier’s Tragedy, who walks into the Pacific. ‘If I were to dissolve what you saw tonight would vanish too. You also. The only residue would be the Thurm und Taxis mail system. Stamp collectors tell me it really did exist. Perhaps the other, too. The Adversary. But they would be traces, fossils’ (p 54). This is deconstructionist theory, which is another word, one could argue, for entropy (John Banville calls DeLillo ‘the poet of entropy’). Driblette does not believe in the written word, only the existential project of the production, signs on a stage, whose importation of deviant text can never be proved, or

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meaning preserved beyond the instant. What is in the bins marked W.A.S.T.E. is not waste. That means that language does not mean, but it also means that things survive. Oedipa takes the old man’s letter and walks, as he told her, to the bin ‘under the freeway’ (p. 86). The alternative mail connections are sites of resistance, but also of dreams and counter-anonymity – indeed, the counter-culture, which existed then. One recalls the freeway system as the hypodermic plugging pleasure into LA – fun and loco at once – and know that under it is heroic pain. That plugged-drug has death at its heart, for the freeways were built by ripping up cemeteries. A remark from the lawyer Metzger invites paranoia: ‘Old cemeteries have to be ripped up. Like the path of the East San Narciso Freeway, it had no right to be there, so we just barreled on through, no sweat’ (p.41). Who are this ‘we’ who just ‘barreled on through’? Since when have cemeteries had no right to be there? Only since the telescreen age and the car. ‘The subject,’ says Baudrillard, ‘has become a computer at the wheel, not the drunken demiurge of power. The vehicle becomes a capsule, the issue becomes communication with the car itself. The driver has perfect and remote sovereignty, that of the astronaut in his capsule.’38 Or so he imagines: in his car, his screen glowing, he fakes the sovereign Nietzschean will of those who connect the freeways to the real estate. And rather than the bright intelligence in the machine in Descartes’ image, he is its inferior. Nothing in this book is not about communication, but it is the dead who speak. Genghis Coen offers Oedipa dandelion wine which becomes cloudy each year in spring: ‘As if it remembers. As if the dead persist’ (p. 68). For Pynchon, our temporal bandwidth, a term adapted from radio technology, is the measure of our humanity – how far back into the past and forward into the future our imagined experience can reach. The dead and those not yet born must be empowered to communicate. Obscured by the freeways are other living dead: ‘the squatters who stretched their canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards all along the highways, they slept in stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths...a web of lives, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication’ (p 124). They are Drifters, ‘speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if in exile from somewhere else’ (p. 125). These

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inferior machines but real people of the wastelands exist also in John Berger’s King. Oedipa now joins in spirit – and in true Nietzschean crisis – with the other survivors of disinheritance. Pierce’s will, his revelation to her, is the appalling smoothness and impenetrability of systems that have become paranoid – Orwellian in their fear of the dead, the past consigned by dutiful operatives to memory holes. These systems, stored in the monochrome sleekness of freeways, office blocks, computers, are like the ‘desiring-machines’ Deleuze and Guattari called the ‘body-without-organs’, pure flow, indivisible, total impulse, beyond the human.39 They are smiling nihilism, a nihilism of insinuation banalised into a culture. But the exiles – the disinherited/disenchanted/disregarded/discarded – still listen for something beyond the city and the freeway for ‘that magical Other’ who would reveal herself out of all the noise, ‘whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word’ (p 125). The final scene awaits a solution to the riddle of the Sphinx. By whom, Oedipa or some other Other, we are left wondering. With meaning oppressed, as are value and desirability, everyone is lost in the funhouse. But it is appropriate that it should be an event which will turn the rarest of anomalous icons into money. These will then disappear from the collective memory, unless by the sheerest chance. America is both freeways and Trystero. Whose will will Oedipa execute? Putts.Fucks.Orbits: John Updike’s Rabbit Redux Is the American dream anything more than sex? Possibly not, considering the words of the docking astronauts that provide the epigraph for Rabbit Redux (1971): I am heading straight for the socket Easy, not so rough It took me a while to find you, but now I’ve got you (p. 7) They may be Russian astronaut voices, but they preface the American moon landing at the centre of the novel, the second in the Rabbit tetralogy. A sexual meeting in the middle of nothing: this is the American sixties, both its heroism and its nihilism, both the male conquest of the far, hostile, female Moon and the tragicomic

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couplings of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, salesman and linotyper, of Penn Villas, Brewer, USA. Aldrin, Armstrong and Co were going up, but America was going down, after ‘the decades when Americans moved within the American dream. Rabbit had come in on the end of it, as the world shrank like an apple going bad’ (p.250). Now, in Rabbit, the dream meets nature. And ‘things don’t mix’. In Rabbit, Run we first met Harry in his mid-twenties coming home from his job demonstrating a new kitchen peeler, and pausing to join some neighbourhood kids in a basketball game on a vacant lot. In tender, indeed poetic prose Updike showed what it was to be joined-up youth in small town America: then there were things to do, now there are only things to buy. Though Harry does not reflect on this, all his actions are escapes, mainly involving women. He attempts to escape from his wife, Janice – ‘Who’d want that mutt?’ She is so often found drinking and watching Mickey Mouse Club on television when he gets home that he gets in his car and heads south – only to turn back, to stay with his old basketball coach. Totheroe is full of the mixed messages of the time; be a God-fearing boy and go back to your wife and son; but in the meantime come and meet my mistress, who has a friend. Rabbit finds himself living with the friend, Ruth, with whom he has intricate sex, and claiming love, although she has no more going for her than Janice. Rabbit is like those investigating the estate of Peirce Inverarity, or the Baldwin characters: at times genuine seeker, at times angrily cynical. Women are for sex, and none are out of bounds, not even the wife of the local minister Jack Eccles who tries to get Rabbit back to Janice. Eccles says: yes, he is a worthless heel, and yes, Jack has charged Rabbit with his cowardice and indifference. But, Jack adds, Rabbit makes him feel so cheerful that he forgets to remonstrate with him. An old lady Rabbit gardens for briefly expresses the same thing. He is the likeable American, a radiant wisecracker and dreamer, frank and beguiling in his half-commitment to the present moment. A dedicated and smiling, it seems, nihilist. Rabbit tries to patch things up with his family but when the new baby is lost, Rabbit is off again. ‘He runs. Ah! runs; runs.’ Rabbit, Run, so delicate and ardent in its telling, is prelude to the fugue that

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is the trilogy. Rabbit is both a moral imbecile and a Kierkegaardian knight of faith: when Eccles says wearily ‘Be a good husband. A good father. Love what you have left’, he replies ‘And that’s enough? What about that thing we talked about? The thing behind everything?’ (Rabbit, Run p 281) This is not Rabbit the pragmatist and Eccles the truth-seeker, but the other way round. Rabbit’s and Janice’s old, plaintive parents, fighting about everything, will say ‘We are defenceless against the violent few. All our institutions are based on trust’ (p.225). Their clinging bewilderment in the face of furious change both depresses Rabbit and confirms him in his only behaviour pattern: impulse. Grim, trapped by history and convention in a resigned nihilism, the parents drive Rabbit’s inarticulate longing for a glad morning of power and instinct. He flees, Zarathustra-like, into the delicious wooded hillside. Let the dead bury their dead! But smiling nihilism does not sustain. When we meet him again in Rabbit Redux he is bound closer still to parents, Janice and suburbia, working with his father on the linotype in a printing firm. His son Nelson is thirteen, and it is 1968. There are riots in the universities, hair is long, the Apollo moon shot is under way, and Rabbit is made to think about public policy as well as private. On the one hand there is the moral input of Mickey Mouse Club: Proverbs proverbs they’re so true Proverbs tell us what to do Proverbs tell us how to BEE Better Mouseketeers! (Rabbit, Run p. 9) Dumas’s Musketeers were in a book and had a history. How can a Mouseketeer give us advice? The logic of the sentence is broken in the ‘hot’ media. Presumably Disney, in old man Springer’s words, is ‘an American institution based on trust’ (p. 73).40 On the other hand there is Vietnam. For Janice’s car salesman lover Charlie, the violent few are the American army. They challenge the ‘institution based on trust’ which is America’s proud tradition of liberating other countries from oppression. For Rabbit there is no question; better a little war than a big one, better there than here: the violent few are those opposing America’s global freedoms. He has nothing but rudeness for those who ‘knock this country’. As one saw again in the

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context of the Iraq Wars, the charge of anti-Americanism against all dissidents was unarguable under George W Bush. ‘Wherever America is, there is freedom. Beneath .

her patient bombers, paradise is possible’ (p. 46). This concept of a cowed global dystopia could have been created by Orwell or Huxley. Rabbit is, however, changing. Although he continues to dismiss Janice’s Charlie as a ‘spic’ and a ‘greaseball’, he is inclining to an interest in the otherness of blacks, and meets Skeeter, newly returned from Vietnam. When Janice moves in with Charlie, Skeeter’s white friend Jill is more or less promised to Rabbit by a black work colleague: ‘Man has to have tail’. Smoking Skeeter’s pot, Rabbit takes Jill home. Like Updike’s determination to enter a mind of otherness with his novel Terrorist, Jill and Skeeter seem characterisations taken on as a challenge, far removed from his own experience and convictions. Jill and little Nelson discuss God, beauty, and meaning. She is the gentle Sixties. ‘The point is ecstasy. And energy. God is in the tiger as well as the lamb.’ ‘Yeah,’ says Rabbit. ‘God really likes to chew himself up.’ She replies, ‘You are cynical’ (p 272). When Skeeter turns up, fleeing bail, their life degrades. Sharing Jill’s bed with Rabbit, Skeeter gradually induces her back on to hard drugs; and entrancing Rabbit with brilliant and horrific accounts of Vietnam and the history of black oppression, begins to unveil his anti-religion. While on mescaline, Jill has seen God. Skeeter, devilish, wants the same, and he wants to destroy. ‘He got her to drop some mescaline. She’ll snort smack...she’ll shoot. He has her’ (p. 333). He has them all in his brat-pack: Rabbit, in his own words ‘not so uptight’, is a pushover. Skeeter proclaims his Beatitudes, which derive from Dada and other revolutions: ‘Power is bullshit / home is bullshit / common sense is bullshit / Confusion is God’s very face / Nothing’s interesting save eternal sameness / There is no salvation except through Me’ (p 333). As things rush to an over-predictable climax, Skeeter says ‘I am the Christ of the new Dark Ages. Do you believe?’ Rabbit replies, ‘I do believe’ (p. 239). One recalls Nietzsche’s scream at the end of Ecce Homo: ‘Dionysos versus the Crucified!’ After the disastrous events which follow, the novel closes on the rapprochement between Rabbit and Janice, the result of no particular evolution on Rabbit’s part. The luck of the picaresque – cheerful nihilism, sometimes

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active, mostly passive – keeps him afloat, the luck that goes with dream, belief, desiring. His mother makes a pithy if Parkinson’s-affected response to man’s arrival on the moon: ‘That’s just. The place for him’. But Uncle Sam as all-powerful male in Vietnam is a Dionysian dream all the more powerful to Rabbit for being unattainable: he failed the medical and was not sent to Korea. ‘The shame of his life. He has never been a fighter but now there is enough death in him so that in a way he wants to kill’ (p. 252). Gentle Jill becomes the Crucified, sacrificed to the deathly narratives with which Skeeter enslaves Rabbit’s will. All women are sacrificed. The men are not selfdirecting, their relationships are threadbare, because like Miller’s Willy Loman they have ‘American’ dreams. ‘I think,’ says Charlie, ‘our generation, the way we were raised, makes it hard for us to love life’ (p. 68). Their parents went through three wars, interleaved by a Depression, and feel the ‘little man’ of history. In response to a sense of powerlessness, couples war between themselves. ‘Revolution, or whatever, is just a way of saying a mess is fun’ (p. 279). This is the way Rabbit sees the shambles of his life, ‘like a hellish funhouse’. His sister tells him that he likes anything that sets him free: the baby’s death, Janice’s departure, Skeeter’s vengeance. It is the suspect freedom of the libertine. For women Rabbit is death (although he gives them babies); for men, his amorality is a fascination. Jack Eccles, the minister in Rabbit, Run, says ‘That’s what you have, Harry: life. It’s a strange gift’ (Rabbit, Run p. 236). Eccles and his religion are Nietzschean decadents. Harry goes his heedless way, living, because he is so wholly what he is, a believing and desiring machine from Brave New World, for whom public and private are not different: incoherent, useless and excessive. As Baudrillard puts it, he is ‘in too great proximity to everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance.’41 At a baseball match with Nelson, Rabbit notes why the experience is a failure for Nelson especially. ‘The screen of reality is too big…the child must have running commentaries, the audacious commercials’ (p. 76). It is true for him too: much reality is boring. His last connection to the old world of ordinary reality, the world before the telescreen age, is broken when he loses his job as linotype operator at Verity Press. The firm is going

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over to offset, ‘beamed by computers, programmed even for hyphenisation and runaround’ (p. 376). Neil Postman writes: ‘Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was genuinely coherent, serious and rational. Universal conceptions of truth are tightly bound to the structure and logic of the written word.’42 Susan Sontag adds that ‘this new language [of visual reproduction] denied interconnectedness, explained nothing, offered fascination instead of complexity and coherence.’43 Rabbit’s ascendancy is that of the telescreen age. His impulses are those of electronic circuitry. There is no more emotional involvement with the climactic scene of Rabbit Redux than any television viewer’s. Is the scene in its charred blackness too like a television set already turned off? Postman and Sontag find little true and false in the telescreen age. When Skeeter asks Rabbit ‘Do you believe?’ in seduction and death, in his crusade of chaos, Rabbit assents. It is the way of fascination: let spectacle say all. Let us, in fact, have Vietnam here. Only a dove has died. ‘Have no pity. The stronger has the right.’ Orwell’s Winston Smith also observed that ‘on the telescreen marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army’ (1984, p. 15). Skeeter lives by a grand theory. Between Rabbit’s impulse and Skeeter’s theory the voice of reasoned protest and genuine innocence is that of the boy Nelson, received as no more than the old voice of outraged authority, to be ignored rather than resisted. Rabbit is not an existentialist. He does not choose. He lives always in the Nietzschean glad morning. Updike was criticised as the only eminent American writer of his time to be in favour of the Vietnam War. He has claimed since that his position was misconstrued, and that his article on the subject was intended to startle the literati out of their complacent unanimity. Rabbit Redux sometimes strains credulity. But it remains a bitterly powerful polemic against the emptiness or narrowness of Christian observance in the 1960s, the stupefying effects of narrow suburban groupings, and the commercialisation of life. Disney tells young people to be ‘better Mouseketeers’ and that God wants you to ‘be yourself’; but can these mean dancing in docile rows in identical pleats and mouse ears? And do you learn to ‘be yourself’ by watching television?

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below, while Apollo goes up, out of sight. ‘Putts. Fucks. Orbits.’ They are all about straight shots into round holes. Is that all there is to a universe? He Drove an Orange Mazda: Don DeLillo’s White Noise A life lived in a supermarket lacks, it would seem, experience of death. Jack Gladney and his family have it all. He teaches Hitler Studies at the expensive college in their small town: his fifth wife, Babette, who has ‘important hair’, runs the household of children from different marriages. Like all families they watch television and shop a lot. Published (significantly) in 1984, White Noise anticipated the global selling of college courses. Jack sells Hitler in his course of Advanced Nazism, less semiotics than newsreel. Jack sells all the better for wearing a black gown and dark glasses: he needs the look, and the initials, J.A.K., rather than Jack – like A.J.P. Taylor, perhaps. The less one is a historian, the more one has to present as one. Jack lacks some kind of presence. But now, as his new colleague Murray Jay Siskind says, (‘Jay’ adds credibility), ‘You’ve got Hitler’. Babette reads New Age tosh from the tabloids to a blind couple. As Huxley said fifty years ago, the mass communication industry is concerned with neither true nor false but with the irrelevant.44 On one numinous occasion little Steffie talks in her sleep; and Jack catches her murmured words – ‘Toyota Celica’. He is disappointed but appreciates the purity of the sounds. (Sound and sense are of course, since Saussurean theory, considered unrelated). On Friday nights it is Jack’s habit to ‘read deeply in Hitler well into the night’, a PoMo version of the Jewish Shabbat – and a perversion. But in an anti-foundationist world, however, why not devote yourself to Hitler? The parents are indiscriminate believers, in baby-boomer style. Like Nelson with Rabbit, the children have to straighten out their parents as to fact. Babette, full of psychobabble, deters Jack from being a strong father, as this would be oppression. ‘Life is good, Jack,’ says Babette. But you have to pay at the checkout: to die. Both dread death, their own and the other’s. Babette confesses that to secure her place

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in a trial of a pill to suppress fear of death, Babette slept with the man in charge. Jack is torn between envy and fascination. That yearning for authority and added life which led him to Hitler requires also the pill. Jack named his son Heinrich because a German name sounded strong and right (‘What is the good? It is the will to power’). The Nietzschean hero is authentic because he is wholly himself, beyond good and evil. Jack however keeps failing at his German lessons. He feels weak not being Hitler. An industrial accident giving rise to a toxic cloud presents real danger, to Jack especially. He is told later by the SIMUVAC officer with a computer: You’re generating big numbers…not just you were out there so many seconds. I tapped into your history, and I’m getting bracketed numbers with pulsing stars. Your genes, your personality, your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-hospitals. It comes back pulsing stars. It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that (p 141). Jack had earlier derided – as would Nietzsche – Heinrich’s ‘little fistful of facts’ about the cloud.45 Heinrich is sceptical about everything, but for Jack fascination is all. The diagnosis of ‘just the sum of your data’ is unbearably limiting. It is Bazarov’s surrender to the scientific and material. It is about counting, not experiencing. And it is about the reduction of humans in the screen age to electronic theory. Lines from Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse come again to mind: ‘Stepping from the treacherous passage at last into the mirror-maze, he saw once again how readily he deceived himself into believing he was a person.’46 Here the intelligent comedy of the novel, an academic satire like those of Lodge, Bradbury and Lurie, takes off into a Wild West solution. Following the ensuing bloodshed Jack finds himself in a hospital run by old German nuns and is childishly drawn to their lurid religious pictures of JFK and the Pope. It is his nihilist weakness for the iconic. ‘Saved? What is saved? Show me an angel,’ says an old nun: We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for long life. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us (p. 319). Delightedly swapping German baby talk with the old women, Jack finds a

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willingness in this language that so harshly resisted him. There is something after all in expression: it matters what you say. He could not learn Hitler’s German. There is a limit to seeming. In question is nihilism – the query over meaning, value, desirability. Like Hitler, the nun rejects simple belief in God. She too is saying Look at this show! Marvel at these uniforms, these colours, these candles (for Hitler, flaming torches). But the difference is that the sisters are taking in the homeless. Not believing in the hype does not mean not believing. The closing scenes show Jack, Babette and Wilder discovering the natural world as art, a representation of which the bright addictive colours of the supermarket are originals. The natural world is not to be trusted since the Toxic Airborne Event. But they enjoy it. Many questions raised in the novel were also raised by Christopher Lasch and Richard Sennett in their studies of narcissism and the loss of ‘public man’.47 We prefer to believe in the icon, the representation, the fantasised self. It has its place in protests and parades. But icon is not ethic, emptied of all meaning except social power. Projection of self into a worshipped other ultimately means narcissism, depression (you are even more nobody for thus having subjected yourself) and rage with the other for failing to return one’s devotion. Exclusion is compounded. Idealisation is unstable, as the victims of stalkers know. The vituperative nun, repairing victims of emergencies, demystifies the religious images on the wall, refusing to identify with either JFK or Pope; the idea of heaven is no glib promise. Simple narcissistic identification with the powerful, she might say, can lead to disastrous enterprises like the Crusades, indefensible dynamic nihilisms. The nun confounds Nietzsche’s view of Christianity as pietistic and decadent. That characterization belongs to Jack. DeLillo is at his ironic best – the scared faculty as alazon – in his portrait of popular culture theorists, a tribe whose relationships with their screen icons are absolute, at a self-referential remove from the ambivalences of life with the living: Alfonse Stompanato looked hard at Lasher. ‘Where were you when James Dean died?’ he asked in a threatening voice.

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‘In my wife’s parents’ house before we were married, listening to Make Believe Ballroom on the old Emerson table model. The Motorola with the glowing dial was already a thing of the past.’ ‘What were you doing?’ ‘She’s my wife, Alfonse. You want me to tell a crowded table?’ ‘James Dean is dead and you’re groping some twelve-year-old.’ Alfonse glared at Dimitrios Cotsakis. ‘Where were you when James Dean died?’ ‘At the back of my uncle’s restaurant in Astoria, Queens, vacuuming with the Hoover.’ Alfonse looked at Grappa. ‘Where the hell were you?’ he said… ‘I know exactly where I was, Alfonse. Let me think a minute.’ ‘Where were you, you son of a bitch?’ ‘I always know these things down to the smallest detail. But I was a dreamy adolescent. I have these gaps in my life. Ask me Joan Crawford.’ I watched Grappa throw a cracker at Murray. He skimmed it backhand like a Frisbee (p. 68) Like Cordelia with Lear, Grappa has not loved enough. Stompanato being also Hitler, the acolyte has erred in not showing enough love for/identification with a Wagnerian Siegfried. Alfonse has no pity for the rest of the brat-pack. The stronger has the right. Further, he convinces: he is a much better Hitler than Jack. Like Hitler and Siskind, he is the ‘magnetic’ figure who ‘darkly looms’ over anxious individuals. The danger lies, says Joanna Hodge, in a ‘completed’ nihilism no longer able to reflect on itself.48 Society may be self-satisfied, like Stompanato, in its assumption that contempt for the true and the good in the ordinary is still a dynamic thing. Jack is far closer to a crisis of consciousness than Alfonse, being naïf. His commitment to appearance on campus is only an appearance. His own death seems so looming, so ‘unnatural’, because the deaths of six million including Hitler’s own are not only so unnatural but so denied in Jack’s teaching. As for Babette, her death-horror is coupled with denial that old people in facilities

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do not need to learn posture before they die. No becoming for them. Murray Jay Siskind, the loner colleague, gave Jack a gun with which to turn into a dynamic, rather than a passive, nihilist. Now, discussing death, Murray says ‘Once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth or Jesus-Christ afterlife or out-of-body experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever else …We simply walk toward the sliding doors. Waves and radiation. Look how well-lighted everything is. Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think’ (p. 38). Life in White Noise is a total matter-energy flow in which Jack gravitates hopelessly to everything, Murray to nothing. But Jack’s attachment to his quest for non-attachment will get him there in the end, with the help of the toddler Wilder. Free of material attachments, dependent yet on his trike autonomous, Wilder explores fearlessly. He is Blakeian, in Nietzsche’s phrase ‘pregnant with future’. But just as Jack carries his poisonous, invisible, determinist load, so does Wilder – he will soon lose the disengagement of babyhood, and will join the others, where the terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly-coloured goods (p. 326). The tabloids from which Babette reads absurd things to old people are there at the checkout, like the trivia about James Dean and Joan Crawford, the ‘cults of the famous and dead’, like the barn which everybody photographs because it is labelled ‘the most photographed barn in the world’. What generated the supermarket generated the toxic cloud. One is still identified by what one buys there. One may not want to be identified after one’s death as ‘the guy who drove the orange Mazda’ – an orange Mazda is a cognitive, moral and aesthetic nullity – but we remain something worse than market fundamentalists: we are ourselves nullities, passive nihilists, hooked into someone else’s market fundamentalism, someone else’s theory and impulse, which has meaning only for them. Jack and Babette must recognize their place on the time spectrum – Pynchon’s temporal bandwidth – as midway between Wilder and the old nun: adults.

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Hey, we were only having fun: Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover It is hard to know whether the ‘permanent prematurity’ which William Whyte saw in mid-twentieth-century America was the cause of violent change or its result: the effect of two consuming early wars, or the origin of them.49 Innocence and experience were in collision. As an aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville judged democracy in America as always weakened rather than strengthened by its denial of an innate layering to society. ‘Why do I see in democracy a despotism? Because democratic peoples want equality within freedom and if they cannot get it they want it still more in slavery. They will endure poverty, oppression, barbarism, but they will not suffer aristocracy. A numberless crowd of similar and equal men caught up in an endless round of procuring for themselves small and vulgar pleasures with which to fill their souls.’50 The voice of the self emerges with revolt, whether political or, as Kristeva would have it, interior. Probably revolt is one necessary cause of selfhood but not, it seems, a sufficient one, since de Tocqueville’s words convince. Innocence may rise up against experience, but impulse is inadequate on its own. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ have, in this telescreen age, a hollow ring. Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover appeared in 1992. Her essay of nearly forty years earlier, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, spoke of the ‘predatory embrace of self-consciousness’ in which the country was caught up. She meant a sense that everything has already happened, rather than a ceaseless round of small pleasures, but these are linked. In The Volcano Lover she will explore the clash between an enervated upper class, for whom everything has happened, and revolutionaries so starved of pleasures that their revolt is worse than murder: it destroys that thing most demonstrative of pleasure – art. The opening paragraph shows just how firm – and yet fragile – is the writer’s inscription of herself, at the flea market, in the present: Admittance free. Sloppy crowds. Vulpine, larking. Why enter? What do you expect to see? I’m seeing. I’m checking on what’s in the world. What’s left. What’s discarded. No longer cherished. What’s had to be sacrificed. But it’s rubbish. But there may be something valuable, there. Not valuable, exactly. But something I

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expressive; late, it is estranged. The second millennium is late, then. This woman expects nothing, but has forlorn hopes nevertheless. Her very language is estranged: ‘enter’ instead of ‘go in’ is French usage: ‘vulpine, larking’ are, though English, neararchaic. Her words question the value of art in our time; to her it means, ‘speaks to my longings’. What is bought, however, is no longer about art, but as Robert Hughes has asserted, money. Indeed, the first modern art gallery director to introduce big moneymaking strategies in 1963 cheerfully confessed his ‘nihilism’.51 Sontag’s persona will be partly satisfied with vestiges. Her desire is overwhelming: she needs completion. Everything has happened, has been expressed, and she as a result is barely able to produce a sentence. Her ellipses stand for the lost object; her culture, the good breast of Europa, dead perhaps soon after her birth. Sparkling profusions of good objects – treasure – you must go to earlier centuries for: in literature, adventures of innocents like Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). This woman’s voice is jaded but for all that desiring, hopeful. It is a Nietzschean moment, not only because art was so precious to Nietzsche but because of the volcano as image. The Prologue describes what it is like to be on the edge of an active volcano – the ‘sky-wide ear-inundating vomitous roar’, the revulsion and fear, the ‘creeping field of viscous black and red ooze.’ In its inhaling and exhaling, devouring, shitting, ‘this is the inexorable’ (pp. 6–7). The volcano is a crisis, a sublimity whose crisis extends over centuries. Both the modern voice and the geographical account of Vesuvius are consciousness of life on the edge, as inferno, revolution, democracy, holocaust, telescreen age. Although Sontag calls the novel A Romance – the main characters are larger than life – it is also a realist narrative of historical fact. At the end of the eighteenth century, local intellectuals sought to extend the French Revolution into the Kingdom of Naples. Sontag calls the nineteenth century the ‘heroic age’, when literature allowed its characters fully to express. The major players are first drolly and then more dubiously designated as the Cavaliere, the Beauty, the Hero, the King, the Queen. The

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Cavaliere is Sir William Hamilton, ambassador at the court of Naples, art collector and melancholic. His wife Emma, demi-mondaine and actress, is the Beauty; the Hero is Horatio Nelson, post-Trafalgar, into whose hands the Cavaliere commits his wife. The King of Naples is a gross baby, his Queen violent and cruel. The infamous Baron Scarpia from the opera Tosca – based on fact – also plays a part. The irruption on the scene of the Beauty lays the ground for the paradigm shift from Classicism into Romanticism. She has a great aptitude for Attitudes, ‘tableaux vivants’, and can express them, switching rapidly from one tragic heroine to another – Medea, Niobe, Iphigenia. For her, time has speeded up. She is a breath of fresh air, and Admiral Nelson, who comes to Naples to recover from his wounds, falls in love with her. Aided by young intellectuals like Eleanora de Fonseca Pimentel, revolution breaks out. This republican revolt is, however, a barbaric inversion; the reformists, coming from the propertied classes, are betrayed by the mob they served. ‘Everyone with something to steal must be Jacobin.’ All afternoon the burning went on. The Raphael, the Titian, the Coreggio, the Giorgione, the Guercino, and all the other sixty-four pictures...into the fire. And the books, works of travel, history and science, and on arts and manufactures; the complete Vico and Voltaire and d’Alembert… The Duke’s feet were red – he had been shot in the legs – but he still kept upright in the chair. The barber stepped forward, his razor in hand, and sliced off the Duke’s ears. As they fell from his head, an apron of blood appeared on the lower part of his face. The crowd yelled. […] And was he dead then? Nearly dead. He’d lost so much blood. Still alive? Yes. Yes. Then more of our people came up, and went at him with their knives. Someone slashed at the front of his breeches and cut off ...you know, and held them up to the crowd. And then we dumped the body in the tar barrel and threw it on the fire (pp. 271–3). The Cavaliere, the Beauty – now fat, loud and drunken – and the Hero join the Queen on a ship in the Bay of Naples. The Queen issues warrants for the death

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of people already targeted by the mob. All values are upside down; it is macabre carnival. The city is wrecked, the Cavaliere is cowed, the Hero is saturnine, the Beauty exults. These major players are confirmed by history in their particular expressiveness – the Cavaliere melancholic, the Beauty sanguine, the Hero phlegmatic, the Queen choleric. Later there will be fertility but now only destruction – of that nobility that was creative and on the side of the people, as well as the nobility that was harsh, self-serving and reactionary. Our four characters, like the picture-cards of the four suits in a deck, are signs of the last gasp of pre-modernity, the four ‘humours’ of classical and medieval psychology. The Prologue showed us, in close-up, the quality of eruption, the sliced up sentences of post-modernity, as against the long view afforded by the traditional social novel with its large cast, its empirical setting, its slow play of cause and effect. Sontag is showing us technological change as well as crisis of consciousness, and especially in certain sentences: ‘The Cavaliere marched firmly up the slope. The point is to get a good rhythm…And that is what is happening, this morning’. Another: ‘She feels stronger, has more energy, and (as the Cavaliere noticed) looks prettier. He was improving, under her benevolent influence.’ These tense slippages are clearly signposted by the ‘right’ tenses next door. Walter Benjamin wrote The need to bring things spatially and humanly ‘nearer’ is almost an obsession today, as is the tendency to negate the unique or ephemeral quality of a given event by reporting it photographically. There is an ever-growing compulsion to reproduce the Object – photographically – in close-up.52 Baudrillard took this further: ‘The insubstantiality of communication has miniaturised our exchanges into a succession of instants.’53 We have no one life, one speech, one steady sense of time. Time and space are now a volcano capable of devastating the person: the altered state of time and place induced by drugs, the collapse of marked time-zones in plane travel with the rapprochement of places, and the close-up vivid seeming of the screen. Sontag’s print version of these contrasts is the ‘zoom sentence’, sudden present in a past context. The impact of

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these effects was such, in the 1960s, that societies in the West which repressed present enjoyment exploded into the BE HERE NOW moment of the 1970s. Between these two lay the volcano of 1968, whose first eruptions were in Paris. At the close of The Volcano Lover are four monologues: unmediated moments in which several characters speak directly, as it were, not to the camera, or microphone, but to us about their deaths. These set-pieces have the solemnity, frankness and disclosure of certain photographs, speaking as they do from beyond the grave, and as if stripped of their stereotypes. The Beauty made a bad end, in total abjection, all physical boundaries dissolved, like the volcano she was. Eleanora de Fonseca Pimentel makes, however, an exemplary end on the scaffold where the others sent her, citing from Virgil: ‘Perhaps one day even this will be a joy to recall.’ Eleanora is both woman and hero, aristocrat and revolutionary – and idealist. Not for her the pragmatism that says there is no truth behind language and belief. Ideals, groups, ideas of progress, rights of women: all were impermissible to Nietzsche, although Eleanora seems one of ‘the noble’ of whom he writes so rapturously, having ‘sympathy’ rather than ‘pity’. Sontag herself frequently used the word ‘noble’. The contemporary world, its aftershocks unceasing, led her to write as she did in 1997 about the discrediting of altruism and high standards, the ‘nihilism’ of the mass media and hatred of excellence. One remembers in this context Huxley’s words in Brave New World, out of the mouth of the Controller and co-architect of Fordist society: ‘Civilisation has no need of nobility or heroism’ (p. 185). In 2002 Sontag published ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, a long essay on what it means to look at images of suffering in war. Iraq (first time around, 1921) and Bosnia had led her to visit a field considered also by Virginia Woolf in ‘Three Guineas’ and depicted by Goya. Photographs haunt, wrote Sontag in On Photography. But one really understands war and suffering only in seeing the unfolding of a history, as in the documentary or an artwork such as Jeff Wall’s that includes narrative. Otherwise such images may remain voyeuristic and nihilistic. It was in 2004 that the Abu Ghraib prison images of torture and humiliation were shown on television, prompting a new essay from Sontag about

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the American desire to be amused. The defence of the two accused was that they were only having fun: Tocqueville and Sontag however see ‘small and vulgar pleasures’ and smiling nihilism. Into the manufactured togetherness of the prosperous nineteen fifties Flannery O’Connor brought the violent disruptiveness of fundamentalist religion. The Tarwaters’ religion is not nice. It is not appeased by home comforts or breakfast cereals, nor can theory oppose its towering impulse. Nihilist perhaps, it will not banalize its message as the televangelists do with smiles. For America’s blacks of the same period, the way into the wider culture is ‘Art and nothing but art, if we are not to die of the truth!’ reinforced by European thinking on nihilism and existentialism. But ressentiment interferes, and the bratpack has to be governed. Pynchon has had enough of brutal emotion in art. He will ironize the European ideas, let some fun back in, and spin a faux-Disney story about a little naïve girl, a Snow White, caught up by communication empires trading not products but systems. She has to fight smiling nihilism – forgetting – with a renewed will. Updike’s Rabbit’s daily betrayals of value, meaning and desirability present him as completed nihilism, lacking any creative negativity. He enjoys Vietnam, drugs, death, the sexual revolution: the bratpack of capitalism keeps things lively. By the eighties, for DeLillo, consumerism is the only value. Hitler sells. Universities are showrooms, and humans can be reduced to waves and radiation: inferior machines. His fun-loving couple are on closer inspection pure smiling nihilism. Sontag’s long view in Volcano Lover is so apocalyptic that it could be her characters, not Nietzsche, crying ‘Build on the slopes of Vesuvius!’54 It was a tragedy for Naples that both its rulers and its revolutionaries should turn out to be brat-packs. Has anything changed since?

CHAPTER 3 FRANCE: A LITERATURE OF ATTENUATION ‘Mais il n’y a plus de père, plus de règles!’ exclaims the narrator in Camus’s The Fall (1955: p. 84). No more father or rules: a tricky situation for a nation like the French one, established on an authoritarian model. Modern France, of course, is founded as much on revolution as authoritarianism, and alternance between stern and indeed absolutist rule and the political fruit of popular uprisings is clear from 1789 onwards. Sometimes the alternance is paradoxical, even deconstructed. At the volcanic beginnings of the modern French state, the Committee of Public Safety – a revolutionary group of like-minded and equal citizens defending their peers – ruled and eliminated those peers with a murderous despotism learnt from the absolute monarchy. Absolute rule and absolute revolt are the double face of France, from the opposition monarchy/revolution and revolution/ Napoleon to May 1968/de Gaulle and beyond. At the heart of this dialectic, especially in the twentieth century, stands the writer as intellectuel engagé. A long-century analysis would have the French twentieth century start in 1898, when Emile Zola, author of Nana and Germinal, published in L’Aurore his famous letter to the President of the Republic, J’accuse! Captain Arthur Dreyfus, a Jew, had been deported already for four years after being convicted of spying for Germany. Anarchist attacks, between 1892 and 1894, had led to laws severely restricting freedom of the press. Zola levelled the accusation of anti-semitism not only at the army but society as a whole; and for good reason, considering that the Catholic paper La Croix claimed proudly to be

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the ‘most anti-Jewish paper in France’. Zola’s letter had wider causes and effects than the merely sectarian. Patriotic reaction led to an attempted coup d’état, resisted by a radical group of republicans in government, henceforth strengthened in its commitment to human rights, justice, secularism and defence of parliamentary values by the ‘Dreyfusards’. Dreyfus himself was finally released and the plot exposed. It could be argued that this rallying-point, this crisis which had divided the country into two, was the nihilistic mill which produced, in 1905, the law separating Church and State. This law laid down the shared values of the Republic: free education for all; assistance in the purchase of property; limitations on capitalism; the protection of agriculture, and the famous laïcité, whose closest translation is ‘secularism’. It is this law which, a century later, refused – for good or ill – the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in schoolrooms and other places administered by government. The State became state religion. Marcel Proust was a Dreyfusard, and head of a long and notable list of modern intellectuels engagés who upheld the idea of the citizen free to think. It is Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir who stand out internationally. France places philosophy at the pinnacle of its school system. Absolute principles of thinking, thinking a priori, are enshrined with Descartes, yet after him in all spheres the absolute is in doubt. Even absolute transgression, as we will see with Bataille. Doubt and the absolute will henceforth oppose each other. Scientific optimism and the heroic power of republican virtues were shaken at the start of the twentieth century. Darwinism as much as republican values had dealt religion a mortal blow by 1905, and the dissolving of elemental boundaries in science found a response in France in the psychology of Bergson. The idea of the self as an active, unitary and responsible agent was to be threatened by Freud, who theorised the undermining power of the unconscious. Behaviourism, especially in advertising and Taylorism – time and motion study – would segment the individual in the interests of commerce. The historian Pierre Miquel concludes: ‘For positivism and scientism, science enables us to understand all natural or social phenomena. However, from 1890 on, scientific discoveries have rocked

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every conception about the nature of the universe. Then, the use of science in the First World War and later by totalitarian regimes announced the age of doubt.’1 With this doubt came economic losses and social dislocation: industrial production fell in France by 40% by the end of World War One, and in World War Two a third of industrial production fed the German war machine – while agricultural production fell by a quarter. Bridges and railways were destroyed along with half a million buildings and 60,000 factories. Loss of life was compounded, in World War Two, by loss of the republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity. Vichy collaborated in the deportation and killing of 80,000 Jews. Individual collaborators aided these machines incognito in a nauseating abnegation of republican values, opposed, among others, by the intellectuels engagés of the Resistance. After the second world war, hunger persisted, as Simone de Beauvoir movingly relates.2 And as if these horrors were not enough to breed nihilism, the eight brutalising years of the Algerian war broke out as part of the general traumatic loss of colonies – as the rhetoric had it, a loss of parts of France herself. A million Algerians died. Still shadowing the post-war years of reconstruction and great prosperity, known in France as les trente glorieuses, the der des ders – the war to end all wars, the Great War – and its successor scarred the very notion of heroism. Modernism in French literature was black from Sade – and the Revolution – onward. The philosophical roots of nihilism, as we have seen, go back to Descartes and beyond. But the dark, abstract character of the twentieth-century French novel seems to come from three things: first, a philosophising that opposes all authority in questions of truth and virtue (following Nietzsche) or conceptions of reality (following Husserl); second, the Bergsonian privilege of art over society; and finally the fact of America. Well before the telescreen age, Proust’s mighty series of novels, Remembrance of Things Past (1913–1927), was a farewell to the Belle Époque when novels had plenitude, social distinctions, rounded characters, descriptions, origins and destinies, an unfolding of hidden

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qualities, hopes, passions, sensibilities, details. Bergson, Proust’s academic accompaniment, spoke of the ‘creative evolution’ of psychological as distinct from abstract time (which is merely numbers). For the artist, the content of lived concrete time cannot be extended or contracted like the parts of a day or an hour: time does not run alongside but is an integral part of the artist’s invention, whose results are the product of an ‘unforeseeable nothing’ which is everything to a work of art. ‘And it is the nothing which takes time.’ Nothing in material terms, it creates itself as form. ‘We imagine that future time can be unrolled the way we wind back the past…But time is invention or it is nothing.’3 In the same way Proust’s technique in Remembrance of Things Past is releasing the creative energies of past experience from a concealed store of the unconscious. The madeleine dipped in tea which brings back Combray abolishes the stable co-ordinates of realism and of consciousness. Bergson defines art thus: ‘whether painting, sculpture, poetry or music, art had no other object than to push aside symbols, conventionally and socially accepted generalities, in short everything which masks reality, to bring us face to face with reality itself.’4 This Nietzschean project Proust also undertakes. But Bergson and Proust support each other in claiming that the only real universe is that of the work of art; and by extension Proust is saying that the only true paradises are the one we have lost. We do die of the truth against which Nietzsche cried ‘Art and nothing but art!’ Where does literature go from here? Like French philosophy, to the surenchère. Surenchérer: to outbid, be bolder, overstate, gazump, take to its logical conclusion. The dialectic of absolute principle/ absolute revolt becomes, as we move into the telescreen age of the 1950s, a developing nanotechnology: shrinkage of conventional reality, expansion of questioning, of le vide, nothing. It will end up in André Gide’s acte gratuit, the act for nothing, notably in The Counterfeiters. But first, the shredding of that pre-war Belle Époque, so lovingly reconstructed in Proust, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage to the End of the Night (1932). ‘In the beginning was a war that caused me to be in a state of fear.’5

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This primal cause he varies elsewhere: ‘In the beginning was emotion’. Contradiction is the name of the game, during the war and after; the generals didn’t know what they were doing, nor the imperialists in the colonies, nor the slaves who obeyed. But both Ur-statements agree broadly with Proust and Bergson: it is your affective self that defines both reality and art. He goes, of course, further – further even than St John’s somewhat definitive ‘In the beginning was the Word’. Which could lead one to the concern that the written work of art is negated, as well as transcendent; but either way the world is gone as a going concern. Bardamu the hero, having denounced war for what it is, a shambles, gets up from his café table and joins a regiment out on an enlisting drive. Impulse. The music, the handsome captain: in the beginning was emotion. The mood will swing: ‘When one’s in this world, surely the best thing is to get out of it’(p. 56). Appalling events ensue – in the war, in the hospital, in Paris, in a parodic French colony, in America, back in France as a doctor; but told with anarchic gusto and, finally, the Céline violent word-rhythm, punctuated by groups of three dots. The three dots are a sign of ungovernable drive and recalcitrance. ‘Existence was reduced to a kind of hesitation between stupor and frenzy.’ Or between theory and impulse: the theory which Céline was to support in World War Two: Nazism. ‘Ours but to Jew or die!’ ‘Christian religion? Judeo-Talmudo communism! A gang! The Apostles? Jews. All of them! Gangsters all!’6 This is Nietzsche. Céline’s theory, maintained throughout his violent and instinctual wanderings in a broken world, is his surenchère. ‘At the doors of the feminine,’ writes Julia Kristeva (Céline wrote his thesis on the origins of puerperal fever, the hands that deliver babies coming straight from handling a corpse) ‘abjection with Céline is the ‘drive foundation’ of fascism. For this indeed is the economy, one of horror and suffering in their libidinal surplus value, which has been tapped, rationalised and made operational by Fascism.’7 Céline is for absolute revolt, but its emptiness drives him to the surenchère of absolute power. How else to manage a self-loathing that infects even one’s own language: ‘The mechanical effort we make in speaking is more complicated and arduous than defecation.’ This

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prefigures the (anti)nihilism of Beckett. But Céline’s voyage to the end of night, in its Bergsonian elaboration of an artistic timespace, is still a reference – however inverted – to Proust. The horror of existence begins to be seriously philosophised in fiction by Jean-Paul Sartre in Nausea (1938), though this term is Nietzsche’s.8 The horror for Céline is in society, wrecked by a series of bastards, a projection in chaos and malevolence of his own tortured beginnings. For Sartre the surenchère is the refusal of individual psychology, of being handed down. (Which of course Céline showed to be literally dangerous.) The destabilisation of individual identity has no recourse to social institutions or pre-existing values. Antoine Roquentin is alone with Bergsonian time, noting only ‘Tuesday’ or ‘6 p.m.’ in his journal, like a character from Gogol or Dostoyevsky. And indeed the names Roquentin and Raskolnikov are not so dissimilar, the difference being that Roquentin’s crime is simply to exist: ‘We are condemned to be free’.9 The hero’s insidious attacks of nausea come in encounters with objects which are more themselves, more centred and independent, than he. He, stuck in Bouville (Le Havre), working in the library holding the papers of the eighteenth-century aristocrat M. de Rollebon, on whom he is writing a book, becomes gradually aware of false consciousness: ‘I cannot become what is expected of me: I have to choose’(p. 85). Inspecting portraits of local grandees, he thinks ‘I do not have the right to exist’. Yet the existences of others are not to his taste: the Autodidact, a naïve companion at the library, is trying to create himself by reading every book in the library from A to Z, and loving all men [sic] through socialism (Nietzsche’s will-to-truth). A particularly unappealing old man seen in the park is suspected by Roquentin of having the thoughts of crabs and lobsters. Anny, his former lover, mocks his Cartesian desire for the ‘dignity of the thinking reed’, for clear and ordered thought, ruled by an Absolute. Finally, after surrendering in a park to surrealist convulsion of all externals – ‘The tongue had become an enormous centipede and it had become a part of me – I tried to rip it out’ –, he comes to himself (pp 184–8). The jazz improvisations he hears on a jukebox are, he realises, total and contingent choice,

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and he too, an intellectual in total contingency – there is nothing beyond phenomena – can commit himself to self-creation. There are many critics of Sartre’s fiction but in my view it is impossible to overestimate the influence of this book. Its ideas predate those of Camus, Lacan, Beckett, Perec, Derrida, the Beats and many others. The individual is alone in and with contingency, and fine ideas like fine manners can be meaningless. Our only being comes from choosing and acting. This is a Nietzschean jusqu’auboutisme – an all-the-way, extreme position. Sartre argued later that in its insistence on responsibility and left-wing orientation this existentialism was more humanist than nihilist.10 These mark Sartre off clearly from Nietzschean nihilism: responsibility, care for the underprivileged and choice itself are scorned. Even in Sartre’s lifetime the word ‘choice’ was itself becoming a convention, a suspect fine idea, mauvaise foi (bad faith). It would indeed become the shibboleth of market capitalism, a delusion as well as an anguish, not just for the intellectuel engagé but the powerless person in the street. From Céline Sartre took the idea of responsible choice in a meaningless world. From Céline Georges Bataille took a Nietzschean communion with explosive ecstasy and death. The variety of his writing, from philosophy through anthropology to literary criticism and what might be called erotic fiction, centre on a literal surenchère, ‘surpassing of being’.11 This takes the form, mostly, of the need to admit pain, whether in the ‘degraded’ form of visualisations which intensify sexual pleasure or photographs of torture which can unaccountably generate ecstasy. (Nietzsche: ‘To see others suffer does one good. To cause others to suffer…’) Indeed, Bataille calls Nietzsche, approvingly, a philosopher of evil. But it is ‘that dazzling dissolution into totality’ that is prized in Nietzsche, not his ideas, which Bataille sees as a maze of contradictions.12 The appeal of a terrible dance whose rhythm culminates in collapse is an obviously Dionysian one. The language is familiar: ‘The main impulse that leads Western humanity entirely is tantamount to madness. I let go of good, of reason. There is nothing but a movement of energy which flows from one point to another.’13 A premonition

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perhaps of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which reduces the structure of the human personality – and present day capitalism – to undifferentiated intra- and intersubjective flows. Impulse and theory meet in a work that abolishes the human. But there are principles in Bataille. There is no real revolt without ‘fidelity’ to what is challenged, no jouissance without the involvement of a dear and powerful taboo. So in Madame Edwarda the old prostitute in the street, showing her ‘old rag and ruin…hairy and pink, just as full of life as some loathsome squid, cried ‘I’m God’ (p. 53). Or, in ‘My Mother’, son and mother flee, by using intermediaries, their ultimate sexual meeting; but it will happen. Bataille says in relation to eroticism ‘God is nothing if He is not, in every sense, the surpassing of God: in the sense of common everyday being, in the sense of dread, horror and impurity, and finally in the sense of nothing.’14 The destabilisation of identity and sexual identity are now part of a transgressive theology. (This did not, of course, start in France with Bataille, Céline or even Nietzsche. The Marquis de Sade, writing in the Bastille before the French Revolution, is the true heresiarch of transgressive fiction, as Bataille has described in Literature and Evil – followed by Poe, Sue and of course Baudelaire.) Compared with the surenchère of Bataille, all subsequent uses of the word ‘transgressive’ in English literary criticism are derivative if not illegitimate. But ‘trangression’ has to be a legitimate term for the project of French feminism, in which Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Michelle LeDoeuff and others struggled – in theory, rather than direct action – against a wholly gendered language and society. For French women did not get the vote till 1944, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) was deeply shocking to the bourgeoisie. These three radical writers take us to the beginnings of the screen age in France, and in many respects lay the ground for the philosophers who will generate, for the English-speaking world, ‘literary theory’ – de Saussure, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Debord, Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Foucault, Lyotard, Bourdieu, Badiou and others. They are, in the main,

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engagés; Barthes talked about boxing and the Citroën DS, Baudrillard about our responses to electronic communication; Foucault was an authority on prisons and hospitals, Kristeva pronounced on China, child-rearing, and the epidemic of depression in France. Jacques Derrida said, about September 11 2001, ‘My unconditional compassion for the victims does not prevent me from saying with regard to the crime that I do not believe anyone is politically guiltless.’15 For what distinguished the twentieth century, as Alain Badiou has said, is the ‘passion for the real’ (real meaning, here, unreal, Lacan’s sense of unsayable). But French thinkers also have a passion for the laws of thought, and this has increased in the second half of the century. Why? In Paris you can buy a postcard which at first sight is unbelievable. Behind an industrial Paris street an angel rises, white, but with a forbidding expression and a torch like a sword in her hand. It is the Statue of Liberty being built, a spectre which seems to haunt the small figure of a man who hesitates between two factory doorways. America last century has been a similarly ambiguous figure in France. She came into both world wars in a liberating role (though she inflicted many humiliations in return); her financial aid to Europe thereafter – through the Marshall Plan particularly – was great; her cowboy films fascinated Sartre and Beauvoir, her great writers and detective films alike captivated Duras. Jazz – the liberating force in Nausea – has had a great influence on French life and art.16 One must not forget that the American Revolution predated the French. But by 1991 France had to beg an exceptional status from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to protect her film and television industries – temporarily – from certain death as a result of American imports. And French life is not what it was in 1948. The ‘passion for the real’ was detournée into its opposite: illusion. ‘The spectacle,’ as Guy Debord wrote in 1967, ‘is a visible negation of life’, and the world has been turned on its head by its falsehoods. ‘Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream and the former unity of life is lost forever.’17 80% of French film box office receipts were until recently American, and the films are usually dubbed unhappily into French, leaving no clear line

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between what is ‘imported’ and what is not. The images are American; the source and authority of the French language spoken is in doubt. The ethos also. Gilles Lipovetsky has documented in The Era of Emptiness – drawing on the work of Sennett and Lasch – the culture of narcissism which since the 1960s has been dominant in the West. In this light, the May 1968 riots were perhaps the last ‘genuine’ utopian revolt against an entrenched and formalised authoritarianism, the logical conclusion of Dada. (But all former revolutions seem ‘genuine’). Now an individualism American in origin has led to the normalisation of consumerism, drug use and dreamless depression for an ever-growing and ever-younger part of the French population. Those who have nothing, condemned to youth unemployment, still protesting in the streets, would seem to be rebels. Especially youth from North African backgrounds cast out to the margins of metropolitan society. But in Lipovetsky’s view narcissism, part of a process of pseudo-choice which Lipovetsky calls ‘personalisation’, has increased a violence which he claims is not revolt but a rise in extremism, dissociated and cynical, linked to the dissolution of principles, frameworks, self-control. “The ‘hard’ manifestation of the ‘cool’ style.” 18 A passive nihilism, going with the flow. The French ‘theory’ of the post-war period is in many ways a response to an American-derived personalisation. In its pure Nietzscheanism, the chase of signs plus the anti-Enlightenment worship of impulse is both principle and protest, both absolute and revolution. It retreats from the person into an abstract anti-humanism, becoming, as Bataille would say, the authority which resides in violent transgression against the manufactured real which engulfs us. English is now the language of many professions. And, as Antoine Compagnon wrote recently, ‘The nouveau roman and literary theory so sterilised our fiction that the French would rather read American epics.’19 The French language, bearer of a unique literature and philosophy and a unique attitude to authority, will continue to oppose, in the spirit of that poster from May 1968: ‘Qui fait l’ange fait la bête’ – play the angel, become the beast.20 Now in a perceived déclin those in power blame the soixante-huitards, the generation of May 1968. And so it goes, in this

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culture so radically divided that the waves from its continuing shock disturb the world. Qui vive? Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore The Seignerie of Orsenna, the council of nobles of this imaginary city-state, is assured of political stability. But this does not dissipate doubt about its future. For ‘a distant annunciation warned the city that she had lived too long and her hour had come.’ Julien Gracq’s Le Rivage des Syrtes, translated as The Opposing Shore, appeared in 1951.21 It is, for the Anglophone reader, a near-untranslatable hotbed of obscurities – portents, fevers, miasmas, stagnant waters, moonlight, fog (even piled watermelons give off fog) strange winds and sudden invasions of elation or grief. One wonders how the novel’s concern with authority and its dissolution can be pursued within what seems, at the outset, a mere gaslight melodrama. But a surrealist poetics, necessarily over the top, does not preclude a surrealist ethics. And 1951 is an appropriate moment for reflection on political portents. Which society is alive and which dead? One acute war is concluded in tragedy, another has insidiously taken root: for what should we be on the qui-vive? There are plenty of rules, it seems, pace Camus, but the strong father is obscured, suspect. The narrator Aldo, young and high-born, has a strong sense of the stagnation and indeed corruption of his native state. Having passed through the customary forms of training, ‘the usual young men’s games’, he chooses a post as ‘observer’ – officially sanctioned spy – at a barely functioning naval base on the southern border, on the mer des Syrtes, ‘les Syrtes’ being the province separating Orsenna the capital from the sea and across it Farghestan, with whom Orsenna has been officially at war for three hundred years. The Admiralty building at the base is vast and crumbling; the coastline blurred by mud flats and lagoons. In charge is the benevolent Captain Marino, who becomes close to Aldo. However, when Aldo lingers too long in the secret underground map-room Marino warns him not to make trouble. By a strange coincidence – this is a surrealist novel – Aldo is visited

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here one night by Vanessa, a beauty from a princely but treacherous family in Orsenna: they renew their earlier affair in her strange palace in miasma-bound Maremma. (Maremma is a real, marshy Italian place, mentioned in Dante’s Purgatorio, V, 133: ‘Disfecimi Maremma’ (‘Maremma undid me’). Decadent parties take place, and the authorities savagely punish workers and prophesying ecclesiastics. The populace, while afraid, is surrealistically excited. Events speed up when Vanessa takes Aldo south to see, from afar, the conical volcano Tängri, the gateway to Rhages, capital of Farghestan. His fate is sealed. He takes the patrol boat out one night into forbidden waters to see the volcano up close, a cone topped by an inverted cone of vapour. ‘An almost divine pleasure, crossing to the other side – we are poets of event’ (p. 250). Earlier Aldo had said, ‘Interminable waiting feeds the certainty of an event.’ Their ship is shot at. Aldo’s exaltation alternates with horror. While it was Aldo’s longing ‘to touch, not to be separated’, it was Vanessa who licensed in him the ‘fever’. She speaks of ‘the beauty of those cruel deathly angels who brandish their iron swords over a thunderstruck city.’ Is Vanessa opposing the decadence of Orsenna, or part of it? An ambiguity one finds also in André Breton’s novel Nadja, about another surrealist femme fatale. Vanessa is repudiation of value and meaning if not desirability. From now on, it is mystagogues who prevail. The alien priest rousing the masses at Christmas with Gnostic apologias for a perhaps dubious Birth, for overpraised Darkness, is perhaps not so different from ‘old Danielo’, leader of the Seignerie or governing council, who is – irrationally – for war. It is a question of the ‘inextinguishable voice of desire’; as if for Danielo too ‘on all sides the coasts of Farghestan are rushing towards us’. Grown men seem to be calling for ravishment by a Rough Beast out of Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’: ‘Have you not seen the Signs? I have always seen the city as the stake for burning. It is now only a question of hastening the Coming’(p. 313). It would seem that Gracq (a pseudonym), in his revealing essay in praise of the poet Lautréamont, might place himself in the grim lineage of Sade and

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Bataille. But he shows little interest in cruelty and in fact owes as much to Sartre, who in the final section of Nausea shows, through essentially surrealist imagery, the mystification of everyday perceptions. Reality goes through the same climactic convulsion for Roquentin looking at the tree root distorted by his own sense of false consciousness as it does for Aldo looking at the volcano. But though Aldo is feeling like Roquentin ‘I cannot become what is expected of me’, more importantly he is not, like the existentialiststs, choosing himself – he is rather an instrument of destiny. L’amour fou, the bolt from the blue, changes everything, for surrealism, for all time. And so does convulsive beauty, which leads Aldo to steer Fabrizio beyond territorial waters. Shortly after, ‘there was no doubt that the Thing had taken place’. This is the start of the convulsion: Suddenly the power to cross over had been given to me, to slip into a world recharged with tremor and intoxication…Since I had left the highway of childhood where I had been at the centre of life’s warm beam it seemed I had lost contact, journeying forth in absence, astray in a landscape ever more dismal, far from the essential Murmur which like the cascade of a great river sounded on the other side of the horizon (p. 206). The young man’s reality will be rocked forever, for fusion is lethal, and fusion has come: And now on the sea paved with light another pole was opening up where paths converged – the beauty of Vanessa and the blinding daylight of the sea – I had a rendez-vous. (p 207) This is with the Tängri: On the right, the Tängri was a forest of lights sparkling on the sleeping sea. In front of us, like a ship all lit up which thrusts its stern to the vertical before sinking, a vertical suburb. We smelt the perfume of nocturnal gardens and right at the top, far above this black emptiness, fixed to the sky by a cupping-glass both obscure and voracious, there emerged from a plume of nothing a kind of sign of the end of the world (p 215). It is the Sublime, overwhelming, fascinating and unknowable. The novel had no definable time and space to begin with; now the unconscious has reared up, inside has become outside, and the Malefic is unleashed. In a novel as anti-

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realist as this, like the novels of Janet Frame, the hermeneutics of surrealism are to be found. First, Hugo Ball’s urge to retreat into the secret alchemy of the Word, that Murmur, that sacred. Then, the desire of Max Ernst to penetrate the meaning of the disturbing experience.22 The first tendency absorbs the Seigneurie and the increasingly riotous populace inflamed by the veiled words of the priest. Only Aldo goes forth to explore meanings, to penetrate mysteries. But he is in no position to control them. Julien Benda, writing in 1944, may have anticipated Alain Badiou’s Lacanian phrase ‘the passion for the real’ as summing up the twentieth century. He called ‘fury for the total’ – language in keeping with the Realpolitik of his day – the hermetism he saw in French literature, a ‘religion of the absent and the ineffable’. This new spirit wished to dissolve all boundaries between literature and rationality. The result is ‘Byzantine France’.23 Certainly he had a point. But so does Gracq. In On Lautréamont (1947) Gracq explains his use of surrealism, and one can spot references to The Opposing Shore. The ‘fissures’ which are metaphors for the ill-health of Orsenna are to be found, for him, in the rationality of French literature over the last three centuries. Despite the claims of romanticism, the ‘orgiastic’ qualities of the Renaissance, despite the periods of alternating euphoria and anxious reflection (I can only suggest here Rabelais followed by Pascal), French culture has demanded a perfect classical performance from its practitioners and learners alike. And the few lézardes, or cracks, ‘which leave an earth tremor in the middle of the road’, are indeed signs of an apocalypse to come, when the collective unconscious rebels against enforced reason and the result is July 1789 or May 1968.24 Like Nietzsche, Gracq implicitly questions whether 2+2 = 4. Absolute reason and authoritarianism in art, as in society, will have their response: if ‘sleep’ and ‘stifling’ are as frequent in the Gracq lexicon as ‘dark’ and ‘deep’, it is because, to subvert Goya, the sleep of the irrational breeds monsters, not the sleep of reason. Such monsters, Gracq claims, arose in French society with the Enlightenment and the mercantile bourgeoisie, and express the same values. As for the euphoria/anxiety periodicity that Gracq notes in European

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history, he sees it as doubly reactionary. In Germany, an innocent nineteenth century romanticism was mauvais signe because its return a century later, with fascism, would be diabolical. This is not to say that Gracq’s essay is irrationally irrational. He acknowledges the progress – for which we have to thank the Enlightenment – made in reducing the influence of religious obscurantism. More clues have emerged, then, to the meaning of The Opposing Shore. Three hundred years of cultural oppression by reason: is this not the length of time Orsenna has been at war with Farghestan? We also have a social context for the novel: ‘The refusal of the collective unconscious to accept the atomic bomb is expressed in a will to resentment and the desire for a way out – even if this should lead to the worst’.25 Pure Nietzschean language: the play of Apollonian and Dionysian qualities. Can a nihilist ethic also account for Gracq’s praise of Robespierre? The ‘sea-green incorruptible’ sought to address the needs of man as a whole, hence the cult of the Supreme Being, to rationalise God but keep the uplift and the art. (For many French historians Robespierre saved the Republic.) As for the Russian revolution, as repressive as pure reason, it was for Gracq responsible for ‘the demented explosion of Hitlerism’ (p. 18). Reason has a slim carapace which gives rise to ‘admirable plays of light’: here one sees the old fortress of the Admiralty on the mer des Syrtes which the troops restore. Weeded and whitewashed, glittering in the sun, the complex (which houses nothing) is a whited sepulcher, and also newly visible and threatening to the other side. Brightness and reason: darkness and emotion: too long separated. But we have not yet got to the real nub of Gracq’s essay on Lautréamont’s long poem Les Chants de Maldoror. It is about the cellule primaire de la famille, and the exile of its sons to internment in boarding schools run by the strict and arbitrary rule of so-called reason. The rise of the boarding school, he claims, coincides with the rise of reason in the seventeenth century. The result, ‘a being forever ripped apart’. He details violence visited on boys and violence inflicted in return by gangs of boys on teachers and whole schools. One is indeed struck, on

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reading Gracq’s novel, by the childish effusions of so many characters: ‘Fabrizio’s tongue stuck out, like very young boy’s’ and the frequent ‘I was invaded by a feeling of joy/boredom/sadness’. Aldo’s father expresses ‘a childish jubilation’. No couples, no family lives appear, Aldo and Vanessa experience alienated, passionate, sleepless nights; there are only unstable but rationalising men and demonic but vulnerable women. Vanessa declares her disgust at Orsenna’s decadence: she only ‘gave it a little push’. Indeed, the nihilistic moment is made for these young adults to play with. Gracq concludes his essay on Lautréamont with his own grim experience of school, and traces its effect – ‘an elated and outlandish ferocity, unbridled, always drawn to overstep the mark’ ( p. 32). And he envisages boys ‘bounding from college into life’, in ‘absolutely unconditional revolt’. The young poet of Maldoror himself, in actuality Isidore Ducasse, was raised in Uruguay but dumped in a brutal boarding school in Tarbes. Ducasse’s masterpiece, published in 1869, its author dead at 24 is, in its wild humorous, gargantuan sadism, le puéril revers des choses, ‘the boys’ own version of things.’

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de Maldoror, while taking in Sade, looks further back to Gargantua himself, the Rabelaisian rabble-rouser of what Gracq calls the ‘orgiastic’ Renaissance. It would be a mistake to ignore the ‘boys’ own version’ which is present too in Zarathustra. The surenchère of Gracq in The Opposing Shore, this will to limitless emancipation, is full of danger. As Germany, Russia and indeed France tyrannised their young for three centuries in the name of the Enlightenment, essential energies were constrained, to burst forth murderously with Nazism, Stalinism, Fascism and Vichy. And the alternation of impulse and theory – child and parent – becomes a simultaneity. Meanwhile the strong is to be located on the other side: ‘Rhages is adult’. Aldo, trying to ‘cross over’ (passer outre) is in a sense seeking adulthood but will not reach it – for he is obeying the self-destructive covert instructions of Orsenna. Indeed, flashbacks early in the narrative suggest that Aldo is bitterly remorseful after the consequent conflagration. For he has more

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awareness than the others of the fine line between existential failure and acceptance of destiny, of a Nietzschean amor fati – embrace of one’s fate – and eternal return. He is enough of a realist to see how emancipatory events are being manipulated by the forces of reaction. The surrealist hope is for a third term arising from revolution and reaction: a new man for a new world, fusion, l’amour fou, la beauté convulsive, the dynamic moment of nihilism. But the Other Side is not only what you hope for, but what you are yourself, the ‘exterminating angel, sent to re-open the doors to Paradise – the unacknowledged desire of a return to childhood’.27 The aesthetic theme is not far from Proust’s. Alain-Fournier’s popular sub-Proust Le Grand Meaulnes wants to convince us – a claim derided by Gracq – that you can actually go back. Proust too knew better. Time is regained only randomly and briefly. While dramatising the hopes of both Nietzsche and surrealism, The Opposing Shore suggests that while poetic and liberating, dreams bursting forth unchecked are as dangerous as unopposed reason. (Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1946) suggests the same). More. Aldo kills, ambiguously, his father-figure, Captain Marino; the only stable figure, the only object of unalloyed love. But Marino let things happen, while saying no: decadent. And the boys take over the school. When we read ‘By day, people denounced the supposed weakness of Orsenna to contain the disturbances; by night people demonstrated this by smashing up empty shops and stealing watches,’ (p. 293) we wonder what hope had the shopkeepers of Kristallnacht? Vox clamens: Albert Camus’s The Fall In Camus’ last, unfinished novel The First Man, the father of the narrator comes across an infantryman ambushed in the Moroccan war left with his throat slit and his genitals stuffed into his mouth. ‘They fight any way they can in this country,’ says his companion. ‘A man doesn’t do that,’ says the father. The female reader of Camus feels wearied by the frequency in Camus of the word man. Women in Camus do not undertake free or reasoned action. But the incident is archetypically Camus for other reasons. In 1959, when this draft of the novel was completed,

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Camus was still within the lineage of Céline that emerged from the period after World War One. Céline’s ‘In the beginning was war/emotion, that caused me to be in a state of fear,’ remained a troubling reality. And we recognise the title of Céline’s great novel Voyage to the End of the Night elsewhere in this unfinished one: ‘wandering through the night of the years in the land of oblivion where each one is the first man’. That is how, perhaps, the individual must place him or herself in history: first, in that while responsible for others, one can lean on nobody; and perhaps last, in that you may not be remembered. We have to act as if we will, though the world, already finite, is also unreasonable. The title of the draft novel also recalls Camus’ debt to Malraux, who perhaps stands between Céline and Camus, showing that while international relations in general are pitiless and cynical, the man who acts honestly and with courage has a claim to heroism and even poetry. Another resonance in Malraux for Camus is the evocation of poor people on the land who stand behind those in power, and are not innocent but share in the hero’s suffering, endurance and selfrespect: Resting against the cosmos like a stone, that’s the French peasant. Doors half-open, washing, barns, signs of men, biblical dawn where the centuries jostle, the whole dazzling mystery of morning deepened in him who brushes those worn-out lips with his! With a faint smile the mystery of man reappears and the resurrection of the earth is no more than a trembling stage-set. I know now the meaning of the old myths of beings snatched from the dead. I hardly remember the terror; what I carry in me is the discovery of a simple and sacred secret. This is perhaps the way God saw the first man.28 ‘First man’ has religious connotations, whether of a Johannine Christ or Adam. The word ‘soul’ appears frequently in The First Man, implying purpose. Without it, the absurd, as Nietzsche describes (see note 8). In his state of prerebellion, Meursault of The Outsider is as if both first and last: no history, no future, only a devouring present. As in Sartre’s Nausea – mentioned but unattributed in Camus’ long essay The Myth of Sisyphus – the individual faces the

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purest contingency. Meursault kills out of this contingency. In The First Man is an apparently factual account of an Algerian barber going mad from the heat and slitting the throat of a customer (p. 202). Which brings me back to the castration and what followed: they are not something ‘a man’ would do because they are a nihilism, in the way Camus used the word – the popular sense of meaningless destructiveness. True rebellion is not contaminated by ressentiment. Rebellion, our cry for justice, will continue to make history, ‘will only die with the death of the last man’. Rebellion is the only action which will liberate from the absurd condition, defined in various – contradictory – ways in The Myth of Sisyphus. It is meaninglessness that has replaced our hope of immortality and thus made suicide reasonable. ‘The world in itself is not reasonable. But what is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild call for clarity in the human heart.’29 The Apollonian ‘Know thyself’ has the value of the Christian’s ‘Be virtuous’. And yet, absurdity does not rule out happiness. Meursault rejoices in the Algerian sun and sea, just as Camus found that while his family was overcome by poverty, poverty was overcome for him by the Algerian sun. The experience of being in nature, being powerfully in one’s body, carrying out one’s task once more – all of these lead Camus to imagine Sisyphus (half the time) a happy man. Further, ‘The absurd joy par excellence is creation’ (p. 186). Camus cites Nietzsche – ‘Art and nothing but art – we have art in order not to die of the truth’. Proust adds: ‘Creating is living doubly’.30 In 1941 France had surrendered to the Nazis, the Resistance was not yet formed, Hitler was invading even his ally the USSR, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and were advancing through China; the concentration camps were for the first time exterminating racial groups; and the quasi-Fascist Vichy government was approved, a form of French self-occupation. An extraordinarily hopeless time. But the seeds of the absurd, which Camus distinguished from nihilism, had been sown by Dostoyevsky who declared himself in ‘Diary of a Writer’ (1876) ‘convinced that human existence is an utter absurdity for anyone without faith in immortality.’ Kirilov, the engineer from The Demons, feels God is necessary and

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must exist. But he knows that he does not and cannot exist. ‘Why do you not realise,’ he exclaims, ‘that this is sufficient reason for killing oneself?’ After several changes of heart, he arrives at a mixed feeling of revolt and freedom: ‘I shall kill myself in order to assert my insubordinate, my new and dreadful liberty’.31 To this intent he adds the remarkable assertion that in killing himself he will become God. The logic now becomes: If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov therefore in killing himself becomes free. ‘The attribute of my divinity’, he says, ‘is independence’ – that is, to be free on earth, not to serve an immortal being. Since he is showing others the way to freedom, his suicide is not an act of despair, but of love for his fellow human beings. Whether this is simply an absurd act or a revolt is hard to judge; the example takes us, however, to The Rebel of 1951, many of whose themes appear in The Plague of 1947, whose characters are intellectuels engagés but not actually in politics, rather saving lives modestly and decently. The absurd world is that place into which you have been thrown and where you do your best – as teacher, priest, doctor. The plague is like war, a heightened condition of absurdity and testing; but Camus – not without contradiction – stresses that this condition is an internal struggle: the absurd is ‘lucid reason knowing its limits’ as much as a meaningless cosmos. Rebellion, though it may seem negative, is positive in revealing the part of us that must always be defended. Not resentment, but a solidarity that takes the relentless doubt of the Cartesian situation into a new cogito: I rebel, therefore we exist. Metaphysical rebellion brings Camus back to Dostoyevsky, this time Ivan Karamazov. Ivan puts God on trial, placing himself on the side of human innocence, rejecting judgment. Ivan cannot accept that if one is let die, any others can be saved. Since this in unjust, he wishes to renounce immortality altogether. But with no immortality, no reward or punishment, how can there be virtue? And if no virtue, how can there be law? In a fierce jusqu’auboutisme – the most hardline position – Ivan finds coherence only in crime. For if – implicitly – nothing is true, and we are already sentenced to death, then everything is

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permitted. This famous equation (Dostoyevsky did not include ‘if God is dead’) is the brink of nihilism, over which Nietzsche throws himself. The barrier to free fall had always been the list of ‘Thou shalt nots’, those rules originating in religion. When man subjects God to moral judgments – ‘this is not what a man/God does’ – he kills him in his heart, and there is no basis for morality. This is Nietzschean as well as Dostoievskyan nihilism. Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor towards the close of The Brothers Karamazov shows Christ returned to earth but derided, blamed and sentenced by this Cardinal, scourge of heretics. Christ, he says, brought disorder, anguish and absurdity, because the people have to make endless choices between good and evil. The Church has not only rendered unto Caesar but become Caesar, bringing happiness to the people by relieving them of the burden of moral choice.32 Christ, the Grand Inquisitor is implying, is a nihilist – destructively, dynamically making waves, when people should just go with the flow of orthodoxy. In a sense the Grand Inquisitor has taken the same course for himself as Nietzsche. In what Camus calls ‘absolute affirmation’, Nietzsche creates a system out of lack of faith, turning to himself alone to find law and order. ‘He who cannot stand his ground above the law must find another law or madness.’33 For what is possible must be established as well as what is impossible. Without law there is no freedom. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is thus forced out of human society, in the hope of pushing through anguish into a law unto himself and ultimately joy. This is, Nietzsche implies, what a man does. But it is not the philosophy of Camus. Camus is in no sense a nihilist. He promotes the value, meaning, and desirability that are common human knowledge and common human heritage, albeit in an absurd world: what Huxley might call the perennial philosophy. In the brilliant novella The Fall (1956) Jean-Baptiste Clamence, Parisian, introduces himself to a nameless interlocutor in the Mexico-City bar in Amsterdam. Urbane, ironic, he likens Amsterdam’s concentric canals to Dante’s circles of hell, locating the bar ‘in the last circle’. He will also remark that

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Descartes was another exile there, and that his house is now a mental asylum. Clamence conforms to the image of the dandy that Camus describes in The Rebel, insouciantly, indeed winningly, recounting his experiences amorous and existential. Single, talented and good-looking, a criminal lawyer, he charmed others with his selfless legal representation of the poor and innocent, his good deeds. He charmed and deceived women à la Don Juan. He is eager to confide his mockery of God and drolly tells a story of road rage against himself, saying ‘I felt a bit of a superman’ – to the point of considering that the death of some people would be useful, as does Ivan Karamazov and also Georges Bataille who left his father to die under the Nazis. Nietzsche, too, said ‘The weak and the illconstituted will perish, and we will help them to do so.’34 One night walking alone on the Pont des Arts he heard a burst of laughter behind him, yet no-one was there. The absurd: Nietzsche’s ‘I heard a laugh that was no human laughter’.35 Some years before, he had passed a young woman on the quai looking out over the parapet, and after hearing an unmistakable splash had walked on. Resuming the story on another occasion on an Amsterdam dyke, the surroundings colourless, a universal wipe-out, ‘a hell, a nothingness’, Clamence talks more abstractly of judgment, as white doves gather overhead. There can be no afterlife: if Clamence had had that certitude he might have suicided just to see people’s faces after: ‘But the wood is thick, my friend, and you can’t see through a shroud’. He loves life, his talk now is all of avoiding judgment – ‘We are in the vestibule, dear friend’ – and he insists there is no immortality, no virtue. As Nietzsche cried, ‘We cannot be judged in the name of nothing!’36 Now Clamence admits that he betrayed truth and loyalty as a matter of principle, and we remember Ivan Karamazov’s resort to crime as a necessary logic; but Clamence cannot, despite protestations, disbelieve in judgment, his only hope being the power to turn witness for the prosecution. He is creating a law which he will be entitled to break. Christ was not innocent: others were massacred for him. And we have been left to carry on, like medieval prisoners kept in a cell called a malcomfort, its dimensions insufficient for standing or lying.

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It is an irony that the more Clamence’s secular law is elaborated, the more he brings religious ideas to its defence. And now he is beginning to rave. He receives the interlocutor at home, feverish ‘from the malaria I caught when I was pope’. In a prison camp, self-appointed in carnivalesque style for having the most faults, he took command of the hut’s management and did well, except for his appropriation of the water ration of a dying man: ‘It would be no use to him’. Again someone is let die. Homage, we observe, is thus paid to the Grand Inquisitor, who upholds the venality and good management of the Church of Rome. And one becomes gradually aware that this Jean-Baptiste, this Clamence, vox clamens in deserto – the voice crying in the wilderness, like John the Baptist – could have done other disinterested things with the water ration, were it not perhaps for the ‘bitter water of my baptism’. Compare this with the experience at the First Communion of the young Jacques in Camus’ The First Man – ‘the nameless mystery, the thunder of music that filled him with dread and extraordinary exaltation where for the first time he felt his strength, his boundless ability to prevail and live’(p. 134). But Jacques, like Albert, is a man, while Clamence is only a dandy and fantasist, more a figure from an eighteenth-century conte moral or Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew – a fabric far too stretched to portray realistically the thoughts of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche in unleashing the nihilist crisis on the world. The dénouement comes in two guises. Clamence seems now on the verge either of death or delirium. He unveils a stolen Van Eyck – explaining its provenance in self-redemptory fashion – a panel from the celebrated Ghent Altarpiece showing the upright judges coming to adore the Lamb. Clamence’s alienation of the work prevents the judges ever receiving their due or making their judgment. A further one-upmanship. It means the ‘true judges’ on show in Ghent are false. Then, after titillating hints, he unveils also the role he has arrogated to himself, of ‘judge-penitent’. This entails his laying bare his soul for another’s judgment only so that he can do the same for the other. He embroiders, taking on the other’s faults, universalising – in so doing, inviting the other to up the

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sympathy-bid when his turn comes. The other, seeing so many faults, will perceive his own among them: he is looking in fact at a mirror. Hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable – mon frère. Judge me if you can. Camus cites Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer in The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘Convinced that human existence is an utter absurdity for anyone without faith in immortality, ‘in my capacity of plaintiff and defendant, judge and accused, I condemn that nature which, with such impudent nerve, brought me into being in order to suffer – I condemn it to be annihilated with me’.37 If Clamence can imagine all these functions for himself, then perhaps the interlocutor has been dreamed up too. All along, the interlocutor has been credited with tastes and experiences in common, and at the last is said to be a lawyer. Clamence’s monologue may be all inside his head, a deathbed fantasy, madness, confession. Has he then, in his exile, come up with a Nietzschean law, a positive nihilism to save him from madness? Or the opposite? A third scenario draws on Dante’s Canto 32: ‘I await Carlino my kinsman here / Whose deep guilt shall wash out mine’. And ‘Where I beheld two spirits by the ice / Pent in one hollow, that the head of one / Was cowl unto the other...the uppermost /Did so apply his fangs to the other’s brain /Where the spine joins it.’38 The last circle of hell is frozen: the circle of betrayers, hopeless, inextricably joined to one another. One recalls Orwell’s chilling refrain in 1984: ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree/I sold you and you sold me’. Camus’s radical surenchère, both in his philosophical books and his fiction, is his invincible admiration – for good or ill – of human beings, and his refusal to turn them into theory. For him, Nietzsche is one surenchère too far. We may have no father, and no rule, but human insufficiencies make humans more rather than less valued for what they are. Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘The absurd is lucid reason knowing its limits’.39 Tell that to Derrida or Lacan. Refusing to bow either to impulse or theory, Camus says So far, no further – yet manages to belong at the same time to the telescreen age. In his phrase ‘the wild longing for clarity in the human heart’, two things are odd: the frequent reference

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to the heart, against Anglophone notions of what it is to be a man; and then ‘clarity’, a similarly old-fashioned word, unacceptable to proponents of theory and impulse. In translation it is ambiguous, connoting both clarity and brightness. To ask for it condemns honnêtes gens all too often in our time to categorisation as naïve or passé. Like George Orwell, whose concerns for clarity as well as freedom and equality gave integrity to his work across journalism, fiction and essays, Camus stepped away from the in-thing, the movement that swallowed up – often at a cost to his reputation – individual conscience. Perhaps Camus’s most important contribution of all is his humanist stand against nihilism and for that implicit virtue that he usually disdains to define. After a searching review of Nietzsche’s writings and admiration for his project as a rebel, Camus reluctantly concludes that, despite Nietzsche’s own moral uprightness as a person, it was inevitable that his written words would be taken up and used by the unscrupulous. ‘The Nietzschean affirmative, forgetful of the original negative, disavows rebellion at the same time that it disavows the ethic which refuses to accept the world as it is’.40 The ‘eternal yes’ is not sufficient reason to throw away the ‘Thou shalt nots’ in a claim that this is rebellion. Nietzsche prayed for a Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ. To his mind, to say yes to both was to give one’s blessing to the stronger of the two, namely the master. ‘When the ends are great,’ Nietzsche continued, to his own detriment, ‘humanity employs other standards and no longer judges crime as such even if it resorts to the most frightful means’. Significant, since the direction of the human race would be in his hands: ‘The task of governing the world is going to fall to our lot’. And elsewhere, ‘The time is approaching when we shall have to struggle for the domination of the world, and this struggle will be fought in the name of philosophical principles.’41 In these words he predicted the twentieth century. But he prepared the way for a certain ascendancy. What happens inside the mind of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, this Nietzschean voice crying in the wilderness, is a desperate attempt to escape from a real Absurd which is all the same necessary and valuable: lucid reason

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knowing its limits. Validating the most frightful means to great ends: a man doesn’t do that. As anonymous as blood: Nathalie Sarraute’s The Golden Fruit Nathalie Sarraute was of Russian extraction, and admired Dostoyevsky. Writing in defence of the ‘disordered leaping and grimacings’ of his characters’ emotional lives, she sees his text as representing ‘those subtle, barely perceptible, fleeting, contradictory, evanescent movements, faint tremblings, ghosts of timid appeals and recoilings, pale shadows that flit by, whose unceasing play constitutes…the very substance of our lives.’42 The text is not disordered: we are. The text is as faithful as the magnetic needle of the galvanometer capturing variations in the current, an image – or rather an idea – to which she constantly turns, and one which also marks a common history with the surrealists. The magnetic needle shivers also in Gracq’s The Opposing Shore. The desire for fusion in surrealism – impossible closeness between psychologies and things hitherto kept apart – operates too in Dostoyevsky’s fantastic realism: indeed, Sarraute insists that there is never any separation in Dostoyevsky. So she would seem to have little in common with Turgenev’s Bazarov: The tiny space I occupy is infinitely small in comparison with the rest of space, and which has nothing to do with me; and the period of time in which I have to live is so petty beside the eternity in which I have not been, and shall not be. And in this atom, this mathematical point, the blood is circulating, the brain is working and wanting something…Isn’t it loathsome? Isn’t it petty?43 Pascal’s concept of the deux infinis saw the infinitely great and the infinitely small both out of our ken yet full of meaning. Bazarov the nihilist, however, sees the workings of humans as not only infinitely small but infinitely contemptible, infinitely separated, while for Sarraute the small is the most human: she praises the religionist Dostoievsky for his characters’ fragile but infinite connection. And yet there is not such a distance between Bazarov’s position and Sarraute’s.

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The Golden Fruit (Les Fruits d’or, 1965) is a novel within a novel – sort of. Its subject is itself; or rather, the way we view any novel called The Golden Fruit. It is difficult to describe – either to paraphrase or to analyse – because it is both totally personal and totally abstract. Like body chemistry. It opens with conversation: ‘Oh! You’re really awful, you could make an effort. I was so embarrassed.’ ‘Embarrassed? What are you on about now? Why embarrassed, for God’s sake?’ (p 5) The second speaker may have treated slightingly an eminent literary man – possibly elderly – who passed him, at a gathering, a postcard with a reproduction of a painting by Courbet, with an effusive ‘Admirable, don’t you think?’ This the second speaker felt – we assume – to be affected, presumptuous, and/or patronising. He refused to comment and passed the card along. His companion reacts with panic that good relations may be lost. She must repair the fragile tie, and quickly defers to the literary elder. What is his opinion of the new novel, The Golden Fruit? His reply, that it’s very good, is as banal as her question; her anxiety is unrelieved. Her companion, a kind of Bazarov, jeers at her sensitivities in his indignation at being treated like a literary vassal. But for her (I am assuming genders here) faced with a loss of trust and intimacy, ‘The ground opened up before my feet. Huge crevasse’ (p. 12). In the ceaseless ebb and flow of impulses and sensations – Georges Bataille also, in the 1930s, was interested in these sub-human ‘flows’ – words and gestures mean little, and neither of these speakers is at all concerned with Courbet. Or with The Golden Fruit. These signs merely disguise imperceptible shifts, which Sarraute calls tropisms, in a kind of vegetative psychology. The speaker most likely to be a woman, intent on observing the forms, is prey to ‘all the tiny tentacles that constantly reach out and cling to him, loosen, reform, slacken, collide, come together again like organs no longer used, atrophy and disappear.’44 Such patterns of attraction and repulsion, secretions one might call

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them since they are both fluid and hidden, are psychological only insofar as they graph mental states. They do not account for them, as would psychoanalysis. Crucially, they govern not only organisms, humans, but also groups. So in this novel the course of love for The Golden Fruit will never, despite the literary elder’s approval, run smooth. ‘They’re all against me,’ concludes the literary elder. ‘Is there a law, a decree, taken in high places, which authorises me to refuse to see these charming, these cultivated – people?’ (p 21) This is the trouble: there is no such law, there is no law at all, there is no authority and no value. One can be sure of nothing: one is on one’s own. Who knows which way things will go? ‘Everyone casts suspicious glances around them, they are anxious, on their guard’, because – there being no value or authority – there is no-one to protect them or their opinions when things change. The process of reception of both the Courbet and the novel is increasingly paranoid. ‘Who does not speak consents,’ broods the literary elder over that brusque response to his postcard. But the succès fou of The Golden Fruit in the literary community depends entirely on the refusal of silence, the insistence that consenting voices echo each other. Since there is no law, there is only experience of either ‘undefined threats’ or religious ecstasies, in a Dostoievskian overwroughtness but a highly metaphorical, mocking language: ‘And he all in sackcloth and hair-shirt lifts from their sacred places the statues of divinities, lights the votive candles, kneels, his eyes fixed on the flickering flame’ (p 55). There is someone moving among these thrusting and hyperbolic voices who does not like The Golden Fruit. (But she – let us say it’s a she – is hard to pin down, as person is occulted.) The literary elder is beginning to ‘distrust’ the novel merely because everyone’s talking about it. He implicitly denies the persuasiveness of ‘talk’ by praising the Bergsonian silence of writing: ‘my liberty, my power, my duration – a foretaste of eternity’. Yet it is the voices that determine literary success – ‘the ecstasies, the raves’ – turning the work into an object closed in upon itself, complete, smooth and round, flawless. The artwork alone can be self-sufficient since, as Sarraute writes in ‘The Age of Suspicion’,

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‘the character today is reduced to a shadow of its former self. Even a name is a source of embarrassment to the novelist, who dispossesses the reader and entices him into the writer’s territory…He is immersed and held under the surface till the end, in a substance as anonymous as blood, a magma without name or contours.’45 The reader is indeed lost: who is who? Is the I which appears every few pages the same I? Do Lucien, Bréhier, Mettetal, three names introduced half way through, share identity with the earlier he’s and she’s? The copious religiosities and paranoias – ‘Religion’, said Freud, ‘daughter of paranoia’ – certainly assert the primacy of the author and her product over the floundering readers of The Golden Fruit, that bleating flock, both within and without the novel. In a world where artworks have more reality than either their characters or their consumers we must sink or swim. The artwork is God. ‘Qui ose broncher?’ is a recurring phrase: ‘Will anyone rock the boat?’ Repeatedly Sarraute provokes the inner and outer reader to jib, buck, baulk, dig in their heels, object, differ. In a word, revolt. The seamless flows which maintain literary fortune, the authoritarianism of an ardent critical mass, threaten instant exclusion. And as the Sarraute character, only partially distinct, yearns not to be a pariah, the Sarraute surenchère comes into being: up the ante of art. The more shifting the quicksand of our identity, the more fleeting our relationships, the more we seem caught in closed systems of thought like political ideologies, theoretical schools, factional camps, systems all the more oppressive for adopting evangelical terminologies and having no intelligible rules. This is the surenchère of the twentieth century itself. In all of these the created object takes on the aura of God’s work, and language goes mad as devotees compete to pronounce. In an age of suspicion we must have unbending faith. ‘Admirable!’ Higher. ‘A pure work of art.’ Higher. ‘Nothing comparable in our literature’. Higher, still higher. I’ve had enough of their snide games, their over-the-topness. The hype. It’s always who can go further, who can be stronger. No-one bucks the system (p 32). Yet of course someone does. A nondescript character speaks up saying the

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novel is cold and grey, resembling, ‘crypts vaults sepulchres museums sarcophagi’. She is suavely dismissed, but argument is beginning. However, asking questions like ‘Can you explain why it is so good?’ still means ‘She is falsehood! She is Evil!’ (p. 50) ‘The vacillating flame, keep it alight! (p. 13) The Golden Fruit is the best novel for fifteen years! The poor idiot!’ (p. 63) Big guns must be brought in. If the artistic impulse is beyond her, it’s time for theory. ‘The novel is a very new and perfect appropriation of rhythmic signs, which transcend by their tension what is to be found in every semantic of the inessential.’ A crony caps: ‘Yes, obviously. We see a flight which abolishes the invisible by dissolving it into the equivocation of the signifier’ (p. 64). Sarraute’s novel was written at the opening of the culture wars that would preoccupy the humanities for forty years to come under the shadow of phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, feminism and postmodernism. The literati are enchanted, and The Golden Fruit seems safe for ever. But the two conspirators hang on. When one dares to say there isn’t enough reality in the novel, ‘Ah Madame,’ sighs one of the experts, shaking his head, ‘What is reality?’ (p. 80) Now questions of cosmic order, justice, peace and harmony arise; nay, Innocence and Truth. The surenchère of artistic opinion ratchets up still further. ‘This barefoot madwoman in rags, beating her breast – they are stoning her with their eyes – is excommunicated; the circle closes again, mouthing values: comic and tragic at once, black humour. Macabre. Innocent. Bright. Sombre. Sunny. Human. Pitiless’(p. 85). In our time art (along with economics) is theology. And now a Reformation is due. Someone important and new says he has heard that The Golden Fruit is a real dud; and debate now centres on the ‘flat’ parts of the novel, whether a writer can justify banality by saying it was done on purpose. Rimbaud is cited. The dissidents are beginning to enjoy themselves. The book is bad, they say, and the authority of Mettetal and Parrot can change nothing. Now we feel the tropism: the collective infatuation is dissolving, there is ‘a line, fragile and strong,

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reaching out, an arabesque both knowing and naïve, an unseen osmosis’ (p. 136). So much of what has gone on till now has been cynicism. When the dust has cleared, the two heroes who stood up for the truth have begun to argue between themselves; and is a voice heard, at the end, to say that he/she likes The Golden Fruit. The virtues of Sarraute’s arrangement of nameless voices are manifold. It allows the tropism itself, the turnaround, to take the place of these faint and unreliable narrators. For, when we read, towards the end, ‘The sneers would crush us. They’re so good at it. We’re so vulnerable, they’re so strong’, the speaker could be one of either party (p. 154). Let us suppose that the book is now out. Have our heroines hardened into ideologues and bullies like their predecessors? They may have ‘held firm’ despite the change in circumstances. We do not know. But this person speaking at the close has worked out a position on recognising a work of art. ‘It must smell fresh, like the first grass, and have the feel of an intact, unopened crocus, or a child’s hand in one’s own’ (p. 152). Suddenly, for the first time in the book, there is character. A value. In the absence of value as opposed to ego, these flows of opinion, ‘as anonymous as blood,’ have certainly something ‘loathsome and petty’ about them, as Turgenev put it through Bazarov – who feels the circulation of his blood, the workings of his brain, to be meaningless. Sarraute’s voices are circulating, unconvincing

protests

against

this

meaninglessness

and

helplessness.

Insufficiently bounded and grounded, they define themselves by impulses of mimicry, and when severe doubt sets in, resort to theory. (Nietzsche’s ‘chase of signs.’) Both are nihilisms. The extent of their insecurity reveals itself in their paranoia, their obsessive going with the flow. Like Céline, whose stylistic device is the propulsive, chaotic, fragmentary triple-dot, her characters are saying, ‘In the beginning was war/emotion, which led me to be in a state of fear’. The Holocaust is a strong element in the formulation of Sarraute’s essays. How is mass opinion formed? she seems to be asking in The Golden Fruit. Where does the movement begin, what impels it and how are the resistances deployed? A

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work of art, an ideology: both are so smooth, so complete, that they solicit a faith which is subject to less criticism within the circle if this is silenced by a variety of means. The violence of language within this literary world is indeed a ‘tropism’ if we consider that word’s other meaning in French, excess. The ebbs and flows of secretions in the circulating blood are excessive when great fears destabilise. Losing the confidence of a powerful friend will indeed threaten the existence of the weak. ‘The ground opens up before my feet. Huge crevasses.’ The Golden Fruit could be underestimated as a slight literary satire. But its intensity relates it to Winston Churchill’s remark in 1943 that ‘the empires of the future will be empires of the mind’. That humanity in the blood, from which Bazarov turns away in a magnetic movement of repulsion, is Sarraute’s centre, no matter how anonymous – and no matter how cold the nouveau roman is reputed to be. Indeed, the book-within-a-book sounds to me eerily like a novel by RobbeGrillet or Butor or Simon, something repudiated by the woman with chubby cheeks and badly-cut hair who calls it ‘stiff and cold’. Robbe-Grillet was to translate well to the cinema, something that Sarraute perhaps foresaw when she wrote in ‘The Age of Suspicion’ that ‘the novel pursues with means that are uniquely its own a path which can only be its own; it leaves to the other arts – and in particular to the cinema – everything that does not actually belong to it. In the same way that photography occupies and fructifies the fields abandoned by painting, the cinema garners and perfects what is left it by the novel.’46 Here indeed is Sarraute’s clear and novelistic response to the telescreen age: the inner over the outer. After the Holocaust and the Stalinist murders, not to mention Korea, Vietnam and the Iraq horrors, meaning, value and desirability are better served by becoming closer to faceless humanity than to special effects. And it is the nothing which takes time: Patrick Modiano’s Street of Dark Shops Paris, as Camus’ Clamence said, is a stage-set. It seems that not lives but ideas and fantasies are played out there. Where, said Baudelaire, the passerby is

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accosted by ghosts in broad daylight. Modiano dedicates his novel of 1978 to the two ghosts who haunted his life and his books: his beloved brother Rudy who died young, and his father who disappeared from family life in 1960 when Patrick was fifteen. The ‘Time of the Father’ and the ‘Time of the Brother’ were his lost paradises. The novels are set mostly in occupied Paris and concerned with état civil – your status on your identity papers. In the opening of his first novel, La Place de l’Étoile (1967) a young Jew is approached by a German officer in occupied Paris and asked for directions to this famous square – literally, place of the star – the centre of German command. The young man points, in reply, to the right hand side of his chest. A demeaning mark of imposed identity is also the sign of a heraldic place and a place usurped. The strangeness of this triple layering makes it hard to avoid an excursion into literary theory – for a start the structuralist Jakobsonian distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Freud saw the mechanisms of the dreamwork as images condensed or displaced. The Czech linguist Jakobson called condensation metaphor, displacement metonymy.47 The yellow star is not a relation of likeness, that is, metaphor; like the Place de l’Étoile it is a relation of association, that is, metonymy. To what lengths should you go for the identity of metaphor? Metonymy is safer. Metonymy will take you somewhere. But not far, and it does not explain much about anything essential to you. Aporia – doubt – remains. This inadequacy and complexity of identifications kept Modiano from full membership of the 1968 riots. ‘How could I be in it? They were rebelling against the family, I haven’t got one; against the University, and I’d hardly been there; against society and the system, and I was so little a part of them.’48 In May 1968 he was terrified by police tactics in Paris. The secretiveness of the father’s life, coupled with the secretiveness of post-collaborationist France, led to an obsession on the part of the son with both the father and the apatride condition of his whole generation. He collected facts, in the form of newspapers, journals, documents, phone books. As Eliot said, these fragments I have shored against my ruin. The narrator begins: ‘I am nothing.’ Not even ‘no-one.’ Amnesiac for ten

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years – the novel’s setting is 1965 – he has also just lost mentor and employment. Hutte, owner of a Paris detective agency, who procured him an état civil as ‘Guy Roland’, is retiring. Hutte is generous to Guy, although their relationship is eerily formal. When Guy declares he wants to search his past, Hutte puts the agency library at his disposal: street and phone directories going back half a century, These are priceless co-ordinates: so much information on the crammed venerable pages: the text of the present novel, by contrast, is slight, mainly records of interview or short reproduced documents, in roman policier style. We do not know how Guy starts off on his journey. But we meet him heading for his first interview with a M. Sonachitzé and a M. Heurteur at Heurteur’s restaurant. The men conclude that they saw Guy Roland with a group led by a Russian. Guy is all too ready to concur, though he seems to remember little. By coincidence a funeral is taking place nearby, where he meets the Russian and is shown photos of a little blonde girl called Gay Orlow, and a grown-up photograph of her with a tall dark young man Guy thinks is himself. From here, through subsequent somewhat abortive meetings, Guy forms the impression that he was one of a group consisting of Gay Orlow, her lover Freddie Howard de Luz, a jockey called André Wildmer and a young French woman called Denise. But Guy’s recollections are minimal. It seems that Guy was called Pedro, but other sources indicate both a Jimmy Pedro Stern and a Pedro MacEvoy working at the Dominican Legation. Coincidences will continue to appear: Guy seems to remember an overwhelming fear of arrest, of looking out at policemen on duty from the window. ‘Everyone should have several passports,’ he is reported as having said; and indeed the time came to use them. After a dozen or so brief, elusive talks with strangers, Guy finds memories returning: he sold jewels for cash, five of them left on a night train to Mégève on Dominican passports for the chalet lent by friends; the hiding out over winter, and an attempt to cross the Swiss border in the snow, en route to Portugal. But perhaps none of this matters. Identity and place support but also undermine each other. No-one else finds a resemblance between him and the

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photo with Gay Orlow. He is not recognised as Jimmy Pedro Stern, authenticated husband of Denise Coudreuse. Finally, even if her recognition is accurate, and a narrative line takes Guy unbroken – the birth certificate again comes through Hutte’s contact – to Paris life to Mégève, there is no great benefit. He will still know nothing of his parents; and as Lacan has proclaimed, it is the Name of the Father that carries the power to mean.49 The road to the centre of this mystery lies with Freddie Howard de Luz, who knew him – perhaps – at school. Where is Freddy now? Far away across the world: and it is probably too late to find him. Nietzsche said, in one of his dazzling contradictions, that the subject is only a fiction.50 ‘Guy Roland’ of course is. And the existence of Pedro Stern or McEvoy is attested only by quasi-chance encounters. Guy’s relation to the people in question is metonymic at best; there is no likeness which would indicate anything about the nature of himself. What is stranger is the meagreness and banality of the information, and the unrelatedness of the informants. For the informants had only bit parts, as waiters or barmen or gardeners, like Bob at the abandoned and derelict château of the Howard de Luz family; only its ornamental maze is still maintained, at the symbolic mid-point of the book. The billiard table where the group used to play is still there under the stairway. ‘No point in going up,’ says Bob, ‘It’s all been sealed off, up there.’ An odd motif in the story, the stairway is always down. Restaurants are in basements; people descend the stairs and sit there to talk. From the estate to the station, through a wood, is a sombre descent, recalling Dante’s opening to The Inferno. Somehow this quest is wrong. As people follow trails they expect to get closer to the truth, and in a sense Guy does; more is becoming known about the lives of ‘the others’, places and journeys seems more real. But all is circumstantial evidence only. The reader’s expectations from the downward spiral are morally intolerable revelations, like complicity in Nazism rather than victimhood. The endless snow that accompanies the flight to Mégève reminds one also, as in Camus’ The Fall, of Dante’s frozen circle of betrayers. No greater pity or turpitude can there be than in a self so disseminated that directories offer more knowledge of you than any person.

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France: A Literature of Attenuation This was of course the situation of the hero in Kafka’s The Trial and The

Castle. It is as if Modiano is saying to Kafka’s K or J: ‘But at least you had a narrative’. Not only does Guy’s imagined one not join up all the dots but it cannot, since his relation to the others with him is not that of a self. ‘Maybe I’m not Pedro McCoy. I’m nothing, but waves go through me and identities occupy me temporarily…these sparse echoes floating in the air crystallise into me’(p 127). Like the secret postal system in Pynchon, like the self in most theories of post-modernity, it is the connection which means, rather than the identity. ‘Guy’ wonders, late in the novel, if this is his life, or another’s, that he has ‘slipped into’. And we see a wider picture in considering the background of ‘the others’. Freddie is

Mauritian/English/American,

Gay

Russian/American/French,

Wildmer

English/French/Jewish, de Wrédé Russian/French. Even Denise, the only one who is ‘just French’, has – at times! – Asian features. The group is the post-war world. Modiano’s surenchère reduces characters to grammatology. In his 1967 work of that name, his defining work, Derrida showed how the opposition nature/culture can be gazumped when culture, first seen to add to nature, then becomes it. It has become supplement in two ways: it adds on, and it substitutes.51 Différance is both identity and difference. However, what if there were only, ever, ‘culture’? What if there were never any ‘true’ nature? Nature, the originary (not as absolute as ‘original’) term, is made under erasure (half abolished), supplemented from the outset. And so for primary/secondary. This is paradoxical and antifoundational: without ‘true’ founding relationships, without memory, ‘Guy Roland’ would seem in a position of absurdity, without a base of authority from which to spring in response, for identity or rebellion.

52

If the reader casts her

mind back, no basis is given for Guy’s first interview with Sonachitzé and Heurteur, on which the whole chain of narrative and meaning depends. ‘Thus the pure identity, the uncontaminated thing, the ‘immediate’ presence, the pristine object and the undivided origin come forth necessarily as fictions – under pressure from an infiltrating chain of supplements, which appear at or in all moments of primordial genesis (this word under erasure). Ensemble is a model for

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supplementarity’53 This is dissemination, Nietszche’s ‘chain of signs’. The group is as whirled away from ‘true’ origins as the cultural activity of modernity can carry them. ‘Jimmy Pedro Stern’ is an exemplary chase of signs in the dissemination process. So is Freddie Howard de Luz, legally English/American by birth (through the Mauritian joint mandate) passing through France to Tahiti and beyond. We want to know: how has this person of non-being survived the years between the war years and 1965 when the minimal documents are produced? Answer: thanks to the dissemination of the originary function. These fleeting, trifling, strictly contingent people supplement/substitute the essential. They father him forth: as does the cultural supplement of the originary father, C.M. Hutte, who provides the speechless amnesiac with that cultural supplement to speech, but in fact essential replacement/precursor of speech, writing. The identity papers, and the bibliothèque of directories reunite him personally with his disseminated self, the group. Finally, through Hutte’s contact J. Bernardy, he knows the precise état civil of the group who constitute his disseminated self. If Guy manages to find Freddie, who knows who his father is, well and good; but the supplementary father, C.M.Hutte latterly of Nice, already is there, and has given him his name. All the rest is no more, still, than fantasy – or fashionable literary theory. As Bergson said of time and art, ‘We imagine we can unroll time the way we wind back the past. But the future is nothing if not invention. It is the nothing which takes time’. Guy Roland is unrolling back the past as if it were the future. He has to invent it. All the story of The Street of Dark Shops is his creative act. Future and past are two further oppositions to be deconstructed. We resort to theory, here the philosophy of Derrida, when twentieth-century doubts about identity become insurmountable. As for the story: there are almost no impulses. Life is too attenuated. ‘Full circles’ there are, but this being French literature of the telescreen age, they are elliptical. Denise, the lost wife, may be only partly lost. The clues are there to read, but we are free to ignore them. Much is made by critics of

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scenes in which children are skating by, or cycling, or playing football in deserted squares. And of the fascination exerted on Guy by the photograph of Gay Orlow revisited, in the last scene of the novel, a little child ‘crying because she has to leave the beach’. She moves away. And do ‘our lives not dissipate as quickly in the evening as a child’s tears?’ I do not believe that Modiano’s images of little children playing – or crying – reconnect the displaced characters with their Blakeian innocent selves, or are images of the Bergsonian enterprise which Guy, in his inner story-telling, is hopefully engaged. Guy Roland is, in an impossible way, Gay Orlow, this blonde woman who suicided. He is absolutely everything she is not. He, born in Greece, she in Russia, may have become part of a group of friends in Paris. And she, being represented before she was lost, but crying as if she foresaw all the things that would happen, is that image of a brief but violent impulse to tears, like that visited on Western culture by an event which threw millions of lives in all directions and mixed us all up within the false polarity America/Russia. Whether that catastrophic event was nature or culture has become meaningless. But in a sense Gay Orlow is nature, Guy Roland culture; she the voice, he the writing, she among the last to die, he among the first to survive. She never grew old: he was never young. In discovering these various children playing in his path, like her child image, he almost finds himself as father. Almost. Crossing the Mekong: Marguerite Duras’s The Lover Still no father and no rules. Still the claim on the absolute. The absurd condition is love, and revolt is killing. Or is it the other way round? This is the world of Marguerite Duras, whether as part of the mythic-colonial cycle of The ViceConsul and India Song, or the nouveau-roman, tropist-paranoia of Destroy, She Said, or the autobiography-based accounts of rebellion and resistance, Hiroshima Mon Amour, La Douleur and The Lover (1984). After the emotional blankness of a Modiano text, the plain masculine démarches, the emphasis on action and identification, it seems that Duras texts

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scorn propositions in favour of a heroic emotion. Indeed, ‘I restore the profound silence of literature’.54 Within tragic and operatic themes, personae – hollowed out, repetitive, fatal – abandon themselves to a ‘dreadful love’. The Vice-Consul says, not of Anne-Marie Stretter as such but of that thing that is with her, as the Word was with God – ‘I am not free of that love’. What is the worm at the heart of love? Double impossibility – an erotics of aversion, displacing an earlier betrayal. ‘Duras’ herself is a displacement. Not only does her mother’s ‘concession’ in Cambodia dispossess its peasant owners (as described in The Sea Wall); not only are the three children raised in Indochina disturbed in their French identity, but Marguerite changed her surname from Donnadieu to the name of the coastal region of Lot-et-Garonne where the family had had property and Marguerite had been happy. Almost everyone knows, since the film, the image of the little girl in the high-heeled gold lamé sandals, the brown silk dress, the plaits and the fedora. ‘So, I’m fifteen and a half. It’s on a ferry crossing the Mekong river…I’m fifteen and a half. We have just the one season, hot, monotonous, we’re in the long hot girdle of the earth, no spring, no renewal’ (p 8). No propositions, no plans, there is only repetition: ‘I’m fifteen and a half’. The laconic, anecdotal telling rings true. The girl is returning after holidays at the school where her mother is headmistress to her high school on the other side of Saigon and the boarding school where she sleeps. Her mother, strict, venturesome, unlucky, is ‘a queen’, lively, poised, who ‘would give you anything’, but also depressed, unpopular with her colleagues, beating her daughter, egged on by the adored older son. As in Sarraute no names are given, except one: Paulo the younger son, he who ‘did not understand and was afraid’, loved by the girl but cruelly taunted by the older brother. All are will-to-negate: Never a hallo, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant. It’s a family of stone, petrified so deeply it’s impenetrable. Every day we try to kill one another, to kill (p 58). The girl meets, on the ferry, the young Chinese man in the black limousine, son

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of a wealthy property owner, and becomes his lover, going every day for a year and a half to his flat in noisy Cholon and the room with the lowered wooden blinds. The scene’s tropisms, fine faint sensations of attraction or repulsion, remind one of the detached experimental nouveau roman, and especially Robbe-Grillet’s Les Jalousies (a play on the words for shutters and jealousy). The girl discovers pleasure, telling the man to do with her what he does with other women. The erotics of aversion becomes an erotics of abandonment. The man is weak of body, he weeps and moans, loves her ‘unto death’. She is shameless, physically attacked as a whore by her mother and older brother, ostracised at school. But when she instructs the Chinese to take the family out for meals, they gorge themselves, in silence. The girl too is silent. After the year and a half she finishes high school and the family leaves for France. Questions of authoritarianism and revolt are obscured by the erotics of aversion. Both are a rejection of meaning, value and desirability. The French colonial scene is brutally assimilationist; the French placed their people in all top positions. Although submissive, the girl knows she has the Chinese man ‘at her mercy’. Her physical childishness, his guilt, his sexual power over her, make up his ‘dreadful love’. The girl’s prohibition on love is intended as a protection of them both, since killing is love of the other. Death is never far away, even in rare joyous moments with the younger brother, ‘we laughed…fit to burst, fit to kill’. The girl’s revolt against colonial society and an authoritarian – though also ‘innocent, candid’ – mother is also a docility. For in a mood-change the mother is more than indulgent, complimenting the girl on her outfit, in effect ‘sending her out looking like a child prostitute’. For the mother, her concession ruined by salt and other misfortunes, needs money. Innocence and venality, indifference and yearning, separation and complicity – all compromise both power and revolt in a family where ‘the beast my mother my love’ is a centre of avidity, all her love trained on her wastrel eldest son. Revolt involves complicities. Duras says: ‘The more you rebel, the more anti you are, the more you live.’55 Is it writing she is talking about – Nietzsche’s ‘art and nothing but art, if we are not to die of the truth’? The truth is that ‘I have no story, just as I have no life. There’s never any centre to it’56. She goes on to explain early in The

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Lover that her other writing about ‘the crossing of the river’ was ‘still something moral. Nowadays it seems as if writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realise that if writing isn’t all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing.’(p. 12) There are indeed ‘contraries confounded’ in this logic, many obscurities, much aversion. But it does seem that like Nietzsche and Camus’s Clamence she favours creating a law above all others or else go mad. Duras’ surenchère, her real rebellion, is to take George Bataille’s erotic and feminise it. Bataille locates the height of sexual pleasure in the scandalising of the most revered taboos, the profanation of the most loved objects and the most holy places. The old prostitute baring an obscene sex and shouting ‘I’m God’, the apparently virtuous mother leading her son inexorably into sexual union: these will be translated into Duras’ Indochinese experience. Duras took up feminism in the 1970s, and there are many echoes from Hélène Cixous in her writing. On reading the girl’s first experience with the man from Cholon – ‘The sea, formless, simply beyond compare’ – one may recall Cixous’ ‘The sea for my keel, split open, the sea is calling me, the sea!’ While Duras writes, ‘Never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved…never done anything but wait outside a closed door’, Cixous wrote ‘One writes in. Penetration. Door. Knock before you enter. Absolutely forbidden’ (1977).57 Cixous and others brought women’s experience, whether erotic or everyday, to the centre; enabling Duras to write in The Lover, astonishingly, The sons knew it already. But not the daughter, yet. They’d never talk about the mother among themselves, about the knowledge of her which they both shared… Their mother never knew pleasure (p 58). The girl’s à trois fantasies about her classmate Hélène Lagonelle and the Chinese resemble Bataille’s in ‘My Mother’, and relate to incidental remarks about the brothers and sisters at times sharing their mother’s bed. But the real taboo emerges; that the slight figure of the Chinese man conceals that of the younger brother, who both in the text and – between the lines – in life was the real ‘crossing of the river’. There was a man who exchanged Marguerite’s favours for money: an ‘ugly’ Annamese with pockmarked skin (the erotic must avert its eyes), this only

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once. The writing of the man from Cholon, with his skin like gold tussore and his delicacy who loved the girl ‘unto death’ is ‘a vanity and a void’. In the words of Serge July, whose article accompanied Duras’s in Libération about the alleged killer, Christine Villemin, Duras’s writing is ‘transgression of writing’. 58 If her use/misuse of truth becomes a Nietzschean super-law, Duras is always honest enough to show how close to madness she would come without it. ‘I have a vague desire to die. From now on I treat that word and my life as inseparable’(p. 109). Laure Adler claims that for Duras true pleasure could be achieved only against a background of crime, and indeed Bataille too talks of ‘sharing the crime’.59 Duras seems to have a phrase for this: ‘the infamy of the pleasure unto death’, and she links it with collaboration and her older brother. In a long ambiguous sentence she speaks of the ‘intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child’s body, the body of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin’ (p. 67). Waiting at the closed door. Is the evil the coercion by the stronger, or the submission by the weaker? Leo, the ‘original’ of the man from Cholon, was Vietnamese, one of the conquered, very much ‘at my mercy’. The same preoccupation with collaboration, of sleeping with the enemy, led to Hiroshima Mon Amour. There the Frenchwoman from Nevers, humiliated after sleeping with an occupying German, is truly liberated only after an affair with a (conquered) Japanese. The body is a place where – if there is an erotics of abandonment – the occupied can have as much pleasure as the occupier. Duras’s transgression in writing is the opposite of Camus’s ‘I rebel, therefore we exist’, a triumph over the absurd. Duras’ work makes that seem a masculine posturing, a delusion. Much of her Resistance work during the Occupation was selfabnegating and vigorous. But there is the question mark over ‘Rabier’ (Delval), the collaborator whom Duras cultivated under the sceptical supervision of François Mitterand, each seeking privileged information from the other. ‘Rabier’ was in love with her, and she was not without response; on one occasion, shaken, she confessed to a friend that she had ‘nearly crossed the Rubicon’. Or the Mekong. There are several people who think, according to Laure Adler, that she not only did sleep with

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‘Rabier’, but initiated it against instructions. ‘The more anti you are, the more you live’. In violence as well as in sex the instincts of the Indochina family are imprinted for eternal return. La Douleur describes Duras’s insistence, after the Liberation, on torture of alleged collaborators, but rather underrepresents the disapproval of her superiors. This is indeed writing that approaches ‘vanity and void’. Duras has however, acquired the status of a theoretical icon, founder of a literature of silence, justified in all her impulses. There is one more thing to say about nihilism in The Lover. What is the novel’s true relation to God? He is much mentioned. ‘Never expect anything from anyone else or any government or any God!’ cries the girl, in a normal enough reaction to such a family, such a setting, such a time (p. 49). But in her university years and thereafter, Duras was very interested in Spinoza, Pascal and various mystics. In novels such as Moderato Cantabile there are Spinoza-like events of immutable natural law. The need for God, coupled with his absence – deus absconditus – was a direct problem for her. ‘God is absent but his empty chair is there,’ she said in 1990. 60 More philosophically she says, ‘I don’t believe in God, it’s an infirmity, but not to believe in God is a belief.’61 She talked of God constantly, especially with regard to alcohol. We may recall the Kirilov syllogism of so much fascination to Camus: ‘If God does not exist, Kirilov is God. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself in order to become God’. Duras ‘trangresses’ thus: ‘No-one can replace God. Nothing can replace alcohol. So God is irreplaceable.’62 This is infirm logic. She seems to belong in the camp of wistful non-believers, familiar to Kierkegaard’s Protestant existentialism of doubt, and would be aware with Pascal that ‘the heart has its reasons that reason does not know’. Which may justify that creaturely need for faith which she did not dispense with – taking up at times the famous ‘wager’ on God’s existence which Pascal claimed costs us nothing. As for Spinoza, she claimed to find no comfort or sub rosa metaphysical evidence in his view of God as immutable natural law, saying in Practicalities: ‘Alcohol was invented to help us tolerate the void that is the universe, the swaying of the planets, their untroubled rotation in space, and their silent indifference to the site of your

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pain’.63 Spinozan determinism does not discuss suffering. So God and alcohol are inseparable. If philosophy fails to make her a believer, she quotes lavishly from Ecclesiastes as mental and physical solace for the psyche formed in the knowledge that killing is love of the other. There is grace. She finds it in her mother’s confrontation of injustice, and her husband Robert Antelme’s survival of the camps: partially a secular, Hemingwayan style, but partially something beyond the human. The Lover is Biblical. Aversion, abandonment – these events and emotions are so grim, huge, ecstatic, that only metaphysics can convey the affective scale. ‘There are orders from God whose meaning was inscrutable.’ The girl goes to Cholon every night ‘to increase my knowledge of God’. ‘One of the beautiful things given by God is this body.’ The Chinese man loves the girl ‘unto death’ (in the Barbara Bray translation.) And the infamy unto death is the unexpiated crime – of being as hateful as her family, of wishing her older brother dead, of indifference to the feelings of the Chinese man when the parting comes. But the real crime of which the writing speaks is perhaps the writing itself: the vanity and void of, rather than in, the writing. It is the writing’s aversion from the truth – in La Douleur, possibly sleeping with a collaborator when this was not required; in The Lover, the invention of a love through which she could describe the sexual relation with a younger brother, ignoring the cynicism of a short encounter with a pockmarked Annamese for hard cash. The shoe-horning of romanticised fiction into texts presented as difficult human testimony does not detract from literary achievement. But it is deeply cynical literature. Post-structuralism endorses productions which disturb the mystique of fact. ‘The pristine object and the undivided origin come forth necessarily as fictions.’ This literature is compelled, in terror and shame, to call on God – partly, of course, to appropriate the power of the dread name so voluptuously transgressed. This is the complicit revolt of Georges Bataille, sanctioning jouissance – pleasure – as forbidden impulse. Jouissance, in our time, is dependent on a master text, whether Bataille or the Bible. And ‘dreadful love’ is a crisis of value through which Duras conceals as much as she reveals.

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Anything can happen in life, especially nothing: Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised In October 2002 a very ugly bomb blew up a nightclub and leisure centre in Bali, Indonesia, killing nearly two hundred people, mostly Australians. The event may have hastened the translation into English of Platform, Michel Houellebecq’s third novel (1999), about a Frenchman who goes to Thailand, partially to sample the bargirl trade. With Valérie, a travel agent; he plans sex-holiday-clubs in various parts of the world. In the end, their successful Thai club is blown up by an incendiary device full of nails and bolts. Hundreds are killed. Islamic extremists are defying the spread of Western decadence. Michel Houellebecq, like Nietzsche, had his finger on the global pulse. Those who revile Platform as glorification of closelydescribed and unsympathetic sex are silenced when the European characters get their come-uppance, when the sex and violence are not all – as it were – one way. But the pornography remains, and there is much more in Atomised (Les Particules élémentaires), also 1999. Atomised is, however, a work of a different order. Surface character and event conceal, till the end, a prophecy of scientific reach and philosophical solemnity. Pornography still occupies much space – perhaps so that the writer can inscribe himself formally, perhaps, in the lineage of Bataille, Genêt, Céline, Lautréamont and Sade, adopting the tradition of ‘transgression’. But that is now an empty convention – even when the sex-and-violence now runs to fellatios accompanied by snuff films of chainsawed penises spurting blood, and babies’ bones being crushed and consumed. In terms of taste, it is the French American Psycho (1991). What Houellebecq is showing is the banalisation of sex and violence, and the way behaviour in the screen age has become a mimesis of what is on screens rather than the source – a resigned, commonplace nihilism which smiles. Since the 1960s – for Houellebecq, the emergence of evil – there is no transgression to be had through sex and violence: only compensation. Compensation for what? Michel and Bruno are half-brothers, their mother a doctor who fell into sexual liberation in the 1960s and was barely seen again: ‘The burden of caring for a small child is incompatible with personal freedom’ (p. 28). Michel grows up in the French

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provinces with his grandmother; and becomes a brilliant lone scientist, now on temporary leave from his laboratory. Bruno, however, fell like Lautréamont and Gracq into a grim boarding school, and was bullied; he is now useless, hopeless and as sexually addicted as Michel is frigid. They are frenzy and stupor, impulse and theory, two half-persons. Michel, a physicist researcher applying his skills to biology, cannot respond to the enduring love of his beautiful schoolmate Annabelle. Bruno, a teacher, drifts from hippie commune scenes to exhibitionism and quasi-rape, usually failing in his only aim: to score. (Anita Brookner says that Houellebecq has no sense of humour. Yet the commune scenes are meant to be funny in a Philip Roth-ish way).64 Bruno and Michel seek compensation for a horror-at-existence recalling Sartre and Bataille. But the brothers do not fight their nausea: it has been incorporated. The result is a cynicism, mark of the failed idealist, which leaves the reader in a kind of bystander-abjection – shocked, but going on looking/reading with nausea, as does contemporary society. A number of extremely cynical progressions, usually near the outset of the two novels, directly confront the reader. A woman colleague, after leaving Michel’s farewell party, does not drive away at once. ‘What was she doing? Masturbating to Brahms?’(p. 13). She might, of course, have been reflecting sadly on Michel’s departure. In Platform, on the death of his father, ‘I refused to see the corpse – I avoid corpses – this has dissuaded me from getting a pet’ (p. 255). Human experience of simple and significant connection is trampled by the trivial. The highest values devalue themselves. Bruno, unable to talk to his son about inadequacy, fear and aggression, leaves him to watch violent TV games, and later leaves him for good. The screen is an icon of cynical displacement; the advance of Eurodisney into France is noted, and a travel brochure boasts that from the atrium of their cruise ship you can see the ocean spread out ‘as if on a gigantic screen’. Michel reflects that as a teenager he thought suffering conferred dignity on a person. ‘He had been wrong. What conferred dignity on a person was television’ (p. 140). This is a view that would be supported by both Updike’s Janice and deLillo’s Jack. There are two faces to cynicism. The first is in the individual who, not owning

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his being hurt – like the brothers’ abandonment by their parents – displaces that hurt on to the world, turning denial of the good into general disvalue. The second is public; agencies of all kinds spread falsehood and disvalue (the ocean aspiring to the condition of television) making negation self-perpetuating, even an article of faith. Until all questions about value become rhetorical: ‘What can you expect?’ (Of government, of the church, of the media, of people). And ‘They’re all the same, aren’t they?’ What these two aspects have in common is the nihilistic gutting of not only principles, but finally all principle. And a necessary component of the cynical compact is all the more essential for its catalytic inertia. Just as the bystander who observes bullying and does nothing constitutes the bullying triangle, so the abject bystander who does not contest cynicism replicates it. Houellebecq is provoking us, the abject bystanders. His pessimism about human beings (‘ingenious mammals’, he calls them, recalling Bertrand Russell’s comments in Chapter 1) outrageously exaggerates human failings in order to interrogate, to force a confirmation or denial of, this cynicism. There is, he says, no love or tenderness in Western society: only our ‘compulsive and fetishistic desires for prepacked pleasure’ (p. 26). Was this last hectic century so bad? Is the misanthropic Houellebecq simply pandering to the ‘declinology’ much discussed in France which asserts that we are all doomed, in spite of the excellent spirits and personal circumstances in which each doomsayer finds himself? The narrative of the brothers’ family in Atomised is the biography of the telescreen age, and Houellebecq recounts its logic like a prosecuting counsel. ‘The decline in Western civilisation since 1945 was simply a return to the cult of power, rejection of the secular rules slowly built up in the name of justice and morality’ (p. 253). The late 1950s and early 1960s saw also all Judaeo-Christian mores thrown out with the rise of the youth culture and the licensing of sex and violence. From now on, youth is superior to adulthood. So Bruno and his lover Christiane have to tiptoe in and out of her wrecked apartment: she is ‘terrified’ of her teenage son. This same late 1950s to early 1960s period is, paradoxically, for girls the golden age of romantic love; all vestiges of arranged marriage are at an end in France, and girls are free to

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choose Mr Right. But the choice is limitless, and the only guidance is from the unreliable and unethical plethora of magazines. The right man? The Journal de Mickey Mouse advises ‘Don’t worry, Coralie, when you meet him you’ll know’ (p. 57). Abortion, divorce and the pill are legalised, emphasising the illusion of free choice. The hippie culture arrives – ‘a new movement [boasting] Watts, Tillich, Castaneda, Maslow, Rogers. You smoke marijuana cigarettes with very young girls attracted by the spiritual aura of the movement and then fuck them among the mandalas and the incense’ (p. 94). The sexual revolution is no socialist utopia, just the rise of the individual. Rebellion? ‘Though richer than bankers and company presidents, rock stars still maintain their rebel image. What the masses adored was the image of evil unpunished’ (p 97). The writer courts libel suits, claiming that Mick Jagger pushed Brian Jones into the pool (p. 248). The world, by the 1980s, is wanting more and more, and becoming devoured by what it wants. The fundamentalisms of the New Age, its roots in the 1960s, are secured by business interests selling chakras, crystals, reiki, astrology and other nebulous mysticisms – excluding Christianity. Houellebecq’s attitude to Christianity resembles that of Nietzsche and Duras; it is dead, but society cannot live without religion. Freedom, claimed by the young and middle-aged, is hardly guaranteed at each end of the lifespan: Christian doctrine, long the dominant force in the West, accorded unconditional importance to every life from conception to death, the premise being the immortal soul. The foetus now is no longer viable but by consensus, and the elderly have the right to live only if they continue to function physically (p. 80). No-one in Houellebecq, or in deLillo’s White Noise, can bear the thought of physical decline. Houellebecq cites particularly the case of suiciding French philosophers. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World leads him to conclude that that society is not dystopia but our idea of heaven: ‘genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against age, the leisure society’ (p. 187). Huxley’s behaviourist/determinist world is no longer much different, or any more superficial, than Western society now. Only the idea of improving the species clashes, largely

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because improvement relates to ideas of the good which we no longer entertain. What is lost is a sense of cause and effect, of continuity, paradigm, history itself. For ‘if man accepts that everything must change, then his life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experiences – past and future generations mean nothing to him’ (p. 201). Especially when children are not seen as a nurtured gift to the future. ‘They are a trap, the enemy – and they outlive you’ (p. 201). But Michel’s withdrawal from life was not for nothing: it will enable him to complete his application of quantum mechanics to genetic theory. Unlike other researchers, ‘trapped in a senseless empiricism’, he demands a new paradigm. Now comes Houellebecq’s surenchère. The high-flown prologue and ecstatic poem at the start of the book prefigured a Nietzschean ‘metaphysical mutation’, but in the excess of phenomena that followed – wet pussies, sucked cocks, rage and despair – the higher purpose was forgotten. Michel will abolish the human race. Huxley and Orwell did not go far enough. Genetics is now capable of dispensing with sexual reproduction. ‘Random mutation is more efficient than natural selection’. This radical trumping of Darwin seems to negate progress and finally vindicate Turgenev’s Bazarov – but only if the profound stasis will be viewed as a blessed relief. No religion goes as far as Buddhism in acknowledging that desire brings suffering and a longing for extinction. But our fear of decline and death is so great that it damages our living. The new race, in their ‘halo of joy’, are immortal, imbued with the ‘mysterious bonding’ experienced till now only by identical twins, and bearing in their entire epidermis the Krause corpuscles currently found only in human sexual organs. This would require a politics as well as a genetics. Michel’s scientific disciple, Hubczejak, becomes both the populariser of his theory and the leader of a new social movement which will put it into action. Materiality is surmounted without sacrificing pleasure; theory and impulse are now ethically joined. In 2029 the first cloning takes place: at last the earth will be run by adults. No more suffering, no more cynicism. Is this Nietzschean? Houellebecq in interviews has denounced Nietzsche except for Beyond Good and Evil – only to add recently that because of his hatred

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he has begun to feel sympathy for him.65 Of course it is Nietzschean: ‘Man is what must be overcome’. Houellebecq’s disavowals are disingenuous, as are those of Camus and others. Man is indeed facing a crisis of value, meaning and desirability which will lead him either to death or something higher. But what must be said first is that Houellebecq is more a disciple of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s immediate predecessor. In his philosophy will, though metaphysically fundamental, is ethically evil. The body is the appearance of which will is the reality. Time and space are sources of plurality, or ‘individuation’, but separateness is an illusion. Cosmic will is the source of our endless suffering; it has no fixed end to bring contentment. Unfulfilled wishes lead to pain, and fulfilled, and those fulfilled offer only brief satiety. Instinct leads to procreation, which brings into existence a new occasion for suffering and death – hence the shame of the sexual act. 66 Atomised dramatises this world view: An American study had detected signs of fossil life on Mars. There had been no unique, wondrous act of creation; no chosen people; no chosen species, or planet; simply an endless series of tentative essays, flawed for the most part, scattered over the universe. It was all so distressingly banal. Humanity would [soon] have complete control over its own evolution. When that happened, sexuality would be seen for what it is, a useless, dangerous and regressive function (p.144). In Atomised, ‘personal freedom’, ‘human dignity’, and ‘progress’ are mere fantasies of the Age of Materialism (the centuries between the end of the medieval period and the publication of Djerzinski’s theories – that is, the Enlightenment) and characterised by decline and destruction. Schopenhauerian pessimism ends in sfumato. We will pass away, out of our own will-to-negation, but the new race in its glory will live by the ‘new law’, the absolute affirmation that Nietzsche craved. The new race are supermen. But they are all supermen. The new metaphysical mutation, a nirvana, a heaven and a Brave New World combined, appears not to distinguish between strong and weak, noble and vulgar. As in White Noise, we are only elemental particles. Houellebecq’s ambivalence towards Nietzsche is clear. It is a bipolar book, matching Schopenhauer’s melancholia with Nietzsche’s manic reaction.

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Houellebecq is thus, in his obsessive, reclusive and bitter way – the way of ressentiment – an intellectuel engagé. Like Zola, he accuses the blind majority. It is less swayed now by the church and the military than authoritarian celebrities, media, and the glossy industries that peddle New Age nonsense, magazines, leisure activities, video games and sex. Of course, mockery in the late twentieth century is not what it was. Like Rushdie’s in The Satanic Verses, Houellebecq’s irony – in most of the narrative – is compromised. (Coincidentally, both writers have confronted Islam, which Houellebecq called ‘that stupid and murderous religion’ two days before September 11, 2001).67 Mockery by its very nature could, of course, be called nihilistic. Bruno of Atomised is like Bernard in Brave New World – all too human, a loser through and through, too sophisticated for a Candide, too base for a standard hero. He also resembles Gibreel in Satanic Verses, irredeemably aggrieved, his sexual shenanigans tedious, the author squandering, to the bemusement of the reader, his moral advantage. The truth is that in these works irony, which relies on an element of innocence, cannot survive the cynicism which their authors ‘deplore’ but cannot resist. Did the last century deserve a metaphysical mutation into something angelic, eternal and sterile? Like Debord, Houellebecq sees that because of the detachment of images from reality the former unity of life has been lost forever. (Michel never thought of elections as anything more than excellent TV.) The sex-and-violence repeats because we seem unable to turn it off. Narcissism is implicated: the Age of Materialism fostered ‘individualism, desire, malice and narcissism’, what Diken calls ‘the society of spite’.68 For Schopenhauer and Houllebecq individuality is an illusion: ‘free will is a rare, random molecular movement’ (p. 108).69 As Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and Huxley’s Controller would agree, things go better without doubt. For Nietzsche the vulgar are indistinguishable, but the noble have the will, the right and indeed the duty of endless self-affirmation. In this atomised society, Michel sometimes seems an ascetic Zarathustra bestriding the nihilistic crisis which crushes his spineless brother; but he is also a fanatical escapist, consumed by a fanatical willto-truth which is a negation. We however have the power to reject cynicism by discerning, choosing and defending the good. Houellebecq’s prophecy of a terrorist

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attack is one thing: prophesying the end of the human race is another. But the idea of utopia/dystopia is so familiar now that we almost accept irrevocable change as our Life After Death. Beckett famously said that the postwar period is marked by ‘the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.’ French literature in particular represents this attenuated state in its almost exhausted obsession with authority and revolt. Gracq saw violence erupting in the weird surrealist atmosphere when schoolboys maltreated by reason rise up. Camus crusades against Nietzschean nihilism; no matter what, he believes in man, as Clamence the dandy clearly does not. Sarraute throws out character and identity to show how ‘empires of the mind’ form unconsciously and shift imperceptibly, creating and destroying dominance in both art and politics. Modiano like Sarraute writes from the Nazi experience. His Guy Roland is near-impossibly attenuated – no memory, no self, no collectivity; his associations – as Kristeva would say – an ‘assemblage of nihilisms’. Duras says. ‘The more anti you are, the more you live.’ But her rejection of value, meaning and desirability means also a negation of her writing. The final surenchère of Houellebecq is an extremity of impulse and theory which squeezes humanity out of existence. Only French literature has the intellectual courage to chart the general decline of both authority and revolt in the entire West.

CHAPTER 4 AUSTRALIA: NO-ONE HOME Australia has been hope and despair for many. But how, with its space and its physical riches, under the ‘purple noon’s transparent might’, could arrivals from so many origins not progress?1 Perhaps the consummation of two centuries of struggle was to be seen at the Sydney Olympics in the year 2000: a high medal tally, and an opening ceremony in which Aboriginal performance and comical versions of the settlement and migration periods were praised for their style and inventiveness. The ghosts of women athletes past handed on the torch to their indigenous daughter-figure, the outstanding sprinter in the 400 metres. But there are many who would concur even now with what Henry Lawson wrote in 1892: ‘In the land where sport is sacred, where the labourer is god/You must pander to the people, make a hero of a clod!’2 A society which holds sport as sacred is not necessarily philistine: in classical Athens the four-yearly Panathenaia festival was a happy confluence of religion, sport, poetry and drama. So how might Lawson, Australia’s late-colonial bard and prophet, regard the cultural progress of Australia today? Nihilism emerges, according to Nietzsche, when European humanity develops suspicion about itself; and Australia was born both of the brilliantly nihilist moment of the European Enlightenment and the less brilliant resolve of British justice to slough off an intractable part of itself into a colonial brutopia.3 It would not be able to contain them since, as Nietzsche further notes, ‘You put your will and your values on the river of becoming: what people call good or evil

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betrays to me an ancient will to power.’4 There is no better example of this, indeed, than the settlement of Australia, for it took place, unlike the founding of the US, in the name of nothing, except a colonization debased by the essential ambiguity of the felon in this place. The purpose of his or her transportation was subjugated deprivation, but it also carried the possibility of a new mastery beyond the dreams of any convict at home: working with others to create something out of nothing. The settlers would enter the same ethos, given the penitential nature of making a living from the land. The famous vacuum at the centre of continent and consciousness was made both more inchoate and more literal by the deaths of large numbers of indigenous people – and worse, their perennial denial. Between 1836 and 1853, for example, the circumstances of deaths by massacre of 1292 indigenous people in one part of Victoria have – unusually – been recorded.5 Both massacres and denial continued well into the twentieth century. The will to power of the white man was justification enough: racism, as Humphrey McQueen notes, has ever been the main component of Australian nationalism.6 The White Australia Policy was in force until 1972, and that major pillar of Australian political culture the Bulletin magazine carried on its masthead from 1880 till 1961 the legend ‘Australia for the White Man’. The Chinese, imagined descending in hordes as if by gravity on to Australian coasts, were particularly feared. The killing of Aborigines, their ruthless exploitation by pastoralists who knew them to be bound by tribal law to remain with their lands, their bundling on to reserves and the removal of a proportion of their children, are the most striking example of Julian Cross’s observation that the vacuum at the centre of Australia takes the life of the child.7 There are many accounts in Australian letters, both factual and fictional, of the lost child. Lawson’s story ‘A Child in the Dark’ is perhaps a founding narrative.8 The drover father returns to the bush shack after a long absence to argue with the idle, fretful wife; and as they argue the little son, unheard, stammers out his helplessness (pp 213–217). In Lawson’s most famous story, ‘The Drover’s Wife’, autobiography is transfigured into high art, the mother becoming a model of stoicism and succour; and the boy cries loyally at the end of a fearsome crisis, ‘Mother I won’t

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never go drovin’; blarst me if I do!’ (p. 79). But we know that the swagger and the swearing are imprinted on him by his need of future mates. He will go after them, and Lawson’s stories, in their bleak beauty and pathos, show that the more the young men stick to their mates – and they do – the more they are, like Lawson himself, lost boys. So hope is trammelled, and suspicion born. Lawson was himself something of a Nietzschean, like Norman Lindsay after him, despising his contemporaries for their optimistic romanticism and ‘craving for an ideal’.9 Women feature less than the ‘degenerate’ other races in Lawson – though, as with Nietzsche, Lawson was also scornful of those whites who were not strong enough – and indeed women seldom ‘won’ until very recently in Australian public life, except in sport. They were applauded, like the Drover’s Wife in Lawson’s most famous story, when they stand in for absent men in a harsh environment; but when they do so they become ‘unfeminine’.10 ‘Feminine’ women, on the other hand, traditionally lost approval once they stepped out of role. (An unforgettable English model of this is J M Barrie’s Wendy, made into a fantastically protective ‘mother’ by the Lost Boys.) Barbara Baynton in her bitter satire ‘Squeaker’s Mate’, contemporary with Lawson’s high period of 1880–1992, shows that the bush women of the colonial period (roughly the nineteenth century) could do most if not all of what a man could, and were hated for it.11 So Lawson’s ambivalence, swinging from the ‘good’, asexual and ravaged Drover’s Wife to the feminine but vain mother of ‘A Child in the Dark’, has mapped an attitude which persists.12 But Lawson’s attitude to himself, and to men in general, also swings from self-abnegation to self-aggrandisement, marking the instability of identity familiar to young countries: it is best to stick to one’s mates, for support and self-affirmation. They are like oneself, they do not make the demands that women do, and they are white. This investment in male equality built some admirable fortifications, in the late colonial period, against the vacancy at the Australian centre. The uprising at the Eureka Stockade in 1854 won valuable Chartist reforms in compensation for the lives of the 50 odd diggers – gold miners and fossickers at the Ballarat goldfields – who died.13 In belated recognition of their centrality to Victoria’s

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immense enrichment they were granted less taxation and more representation. Other industrial rights won over roughly the next half-century were the eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the secret ballot and collective wage bargaining under an independent Industrial Arbitration Commission. Votes for women came surprisingly early. By the time Lawson was at his peak and the official colonial period ended in 1900 with the Federation of the States under a Commonwealth Constitution, the ‘legend of the Nineties’ – as documented fifty years later by Vance Palmer and Russel Ward – would present the Australian as notable for his self-reliance, egalitarianism, and capacity for mateship. He was someone who would ‘have a go’; ‘near enough would be good enough’, and he would have ‘no impulse to work hard in a good cause’.14 No need in any case to work for Aboriginal rights, since the politician King O’Malley questioned in Federal Parliament in 1902 whether the Aborigine was a human being at all.15 The heart of unexplored Australia, then, was still uninhabited. Behind this swagger lies not only the unbearable solitude of man-on-his-own, but an inarticulacy and namelessness that collectivity can engender. Much of the time this means sharing, hilarity, redemption, as we see in ‘The Loaded Dog’ and other lighter Lawson stories. But ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’ is desolate. A group of mates greets a passing young stockman with noisy ‘chiacking’; they are later surprised to hear he drowned in the billabong. At the funeral, awkwardly put together, they search for his name, only to hear later it was just ‘the name he went by’. (And it seems too true, that he only went by, had no place). The story concludes ‘We did hear, later on, what that real name was; but we shall not be able to give any information to the heartbroken mother or sister or wife, for we have forgotten the name’ (p.92). In ‘The Bush Undertaker’ an old fellow, long alone, finds the nearmummified corpse of an old mate, and ruminates thus: ‘Brummy – it’s all over now. Nothin’ matters now – nothin’ ever did matter – or don’t. You useter say as how it ‘ud be all right termorrer’ (Pause); ‘termorrer’s come, Brummy – come for you – it ain’t come for me yet, but – it’s a-comin’ (p. 84). Death comes inadequately to men made anonymous by an anonymous country. Even if there

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were words and names, what could they say, when nature, that unknowable, possibly female thing, is your unfailing adversary?16 Brummy had hope, but his mate is all the more suspicious of that for not only finding Brummy long dead, but not knowing that Brummy was dead at all. You could argue that mateship cannot make up for loss – or that mateship survives loss. This is Lawson’s masterly ambiguity. Mateship is, however, a belief as fragile as any religion since, as Nietszche put it, ‘we are homeless in this fragmented broken time of transition’.17 In the next phase, the twentieth century’s first fifty years, the mortal challenges of the colonial period gave way gratefully to the elaboration of a mature society in the cities in close relation with – and emulation of – the mother country; the quest for security but also, at times, servitude. Federation in 1901 gave the illusion of independence, so republicanism waned. But the country was not truly constituted as a nation independent of Britain, either in words or in ideas. This was demonstrated by the fact that despite the lessons of the Boer War, despite the radical tradition of the nineties, the Australian bourgeois led by Henry Lawson swung swiftly behind the Great War, though there was fierce and successful opposition to conscription from the powerful Catholic quarter and assorted radicals. At around this time the two powerful cultural forces in Australian life could be distinguished as political antagonists: Catholics and Protestants, Irish and English, larrikins and wowsers, working class and middle class, the tendencies often but not always lining up with religion and social stratum. The larrikin is the fun-loving young man, the lair, fancy free, a drinker and rabble rouser, often falling foul of the law. The wowser is the God-fearer, the churchgoer, supporter of the infamous six o’clock pub closing time, the authorities and censorship. On April 25, 1915, Australian Infantry Forces were landed as part of the ANZAC assault on the beach at Gallipoli, in Turkey. The Australian national day was born, to glorify war and commemorate the loss of the 8,000 for the old country, bringing a sanctimonious pall down on Aprils for many years to come, until Alan Seymour’s bitterly anti-war, anti-machismo play The One Day of the

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Year appeared in 1962. It unmasks the baffling and entirely passive nihilism which celebrated a useless and uncomprehending defeat. More of Australia’s sons died, proportionally, than in any other English-speaking country. Manning Clark wrote about Gallipoli ‘Australians had a faith, certainly, but in what?’18 ‘Being with my mates’ is the most widely-held view – mateship often in the service of no good

cause,

a

gesture

oscillating

between

self-abnegation

and

self-

aggrandizement. This was not the strong mateship of Eureka, with all its faults; the intoxication of riot, radicalism and struggle for justice. (The women made the flag.) The phrase A A Phillips was to coin when the nation began to wake up in the late 1950s – ‘the cultural cringe’ – came forty years too late. It was a principled revolt for Prime Minister John Curtin to order back seven divisions from British command in 1942 to defend Australia, as ‘a minatory Englishman’, Phillips wrote, ‘sits inside us,’ as authority.19 Before 1915 the country moved from cringe (convicts) to strut (Eureka).20 At Gallipoli, unhappily, we see both at once. In the course of Depression and wars, including the Cold War, a dynamic nihilism – ‘that which gives spirit’ – attempted to reassert itself over Gallipoli’s submission. One sign of this was Xavier Herbert’s novel Capricornia (1938); an earthy, satirical riot of events and emotions set in the contemporary Northern Territory, revisiting Henry Lawson’s yarns of escapades on the booze, but detailing the massacres and rapes of Aborigines, and white indifference to women’s aspirations, which Lawson did not care to mention. Herbert may be the first white Australian novelist to write about Aboriginal affairs not only with an Aboriginal hero but what is worse, a ‘half-caste’, a ‘yeller-feller’, vehicle of shame and denial, being so often the product of what Kim Scott calls a ‘spree’ – a gang of white men descending on black women of any age or situation; or else a white man taking a black woman to live with him as domestic and sexual slave. As Herbert showed, however, the relations could be genuinely affectionate, which made things all the worse when the man decided to do the right thing by a white woman. Or sometimes, to his horror, found himself ‘cuckolded by blackfellows’. A white man wouldn’t take that lying down; he would hit back, ‘civilised people

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[being] too raw and greedy to be true Christians’ (p. 79). Herbert’s two Shillingsworth brothers are wowser (the white bureaucrat who reluctantly does the right thing by his brother) and larrikin (his incorrigible brother Mark). Mark’s son Norman is the ‘yeller-feller’. If Mark had not ‘made a hero of a clod’, his criminal best mate Chook, he might have stayed with his sweetheart and the boy would have had parents; but despite this Norman does not turn out too badly, neither larrikin nor wowser. Capricornia larrikins like Mark are mostly drunk, having riotous fun and outrageous to the point of criminality. The best word for all of this is rort – a word whose overtones are uniquely Australian. Listed in the OED under ‘rorty’ or ‘roughty’, meaning ‘splendid’, in the 1960s rort was the word for a good wild party. As the twentieth century went on, it narrowed to mean bending of the rules, corruption. A good rort in Herbert can involve a lot of whisky, robbing a no-good Chinaman, killing him maybe, and getting away up the coast on a pearler. But the morning after will see the essential horror, to borrow a phrase from Aldous Huxley’s late novel Island. ‘The infant sun [will] spring up and sweep the sentimental worshipping world with harsh white cynical light and bleach it, bleach it’ (p. 196).21 Rort and suspicion pursue each other throughout the course of his epic: they are the two sides of Australian cynicism. In the end the Shillingworths fall on good times; but the yeller-feller, in a poignant series of misunderstandings – but also choices – consigns his loyal mixed-blood girl friend to her death. Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children had to be reset in America, such was Australia’s obscurity in 1940 (although even then Australians bought at least as many books per head as the rest of the English speaking world). Stead was one of the rising generation of strong women writers whose concerns were in part the blunted hopes of women in Australia for a equality and a ‘fair go’. But Stead was too much of an individualist and Nietzschean to feel one of them. The tyranny she opposed was a psychological one and, like Lawson, she located it first in her own family. In the cities you could earn, in the 1930s, enough to put a continent between you and the parent who turned you into a lost

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child. For Louie in fact – daughter, in the novel, of the egomaniac Sam Pollitt and his embittered second wife Henny – the realization comes that for a young Australian woman of that period it was them or you. The parents, in this case, are visiting their lostness upon the five children whom Sam bewitches with his amalgam of games, kiddy-talk, science and self-mythologising. Only Louie, the eldest, discerns the progress of disaster; only she learns to out-mythologise the father. He enjoys the quasi-fascism of Nietzsche and of the thirties – ‘Why, we might murder thousands for the good of others – picking out the unfit and putting them into a lethal chamber. Men like gods – a writer wrote about that once’ (p. 163).22 She agrees that everything is will, having read Nietzsche too, and applies his views on murder in a pragmatic and arguably constructive way. Here is an excellent example of Nietzschean dynamic nihilism: Louie’s act is destructive, but such was the passive nihilism, the decadent life-denying of the other, that such a solution is conceivable. Liberation for many is the greater good. She quotes Nietzsche back at Sam: ‘Out of chaos you shall give birth to a dancing star’ (p. 314). This Stead did herself, launching a truly brilliant career while eerily presaging – the book was written before their appearance – the Nazi death camps of World War Two. Stead’s project seems a celebration of Nietzsche’s genuinely liberating doctrines while rejecting his eugenicist ones. (Many will claim that the latter are ‘wilful misreadings’ of his views.) ‘Nothing hurts me if I don’t want it to,’ says Louie, (p. 390), adapting Nietzsche’s famous ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger’, and laying the ground for hope and the problematic independence of young Australian women.23 She adds a telescreen-age premonition: ‘What is fun to you is death for me’ (p. 488). Australia remained with its head buried in security and servitude, despite the internationalist and invigorating efforts of Dr H V Evatt and Dr H C (Nugget) Coombs in government and the bureaucracy, through the Cold War and beyond. Under the extended reign of Sir Robert Menzies the values of work, the monarchy, family and the middle classes – wowser values – were intoned. Visiting New York Menzies refused to ride the subway, shuddering at the thought

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of the ‘Jews, Wops and mixed races’ that might be lurking there.24 Neither British enough for Menzies nor American enough for the CIA, Australia waited, content to be ordinary within its highly affordable housing and its free and abundant material life. The Australian Realist school of philosophy (‘Mind is brain and nothing more’), developed at Sydney University, refused any skerrick of dualist metaphysic.25 But the emergence of new writers like Patrick White, and the growing confrontation of generations arising from popular music, jazz and existentialism, quickened cultural life into the awakening of the 1960s. In Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year the son takes on the father accustomed to dissolving into alcohol, male pride and patriotic sentiment every April 25. ‘Why?’ slurs Alf. ‘Because I’m a bloody Australian, and I’ll always stand up for Australia’ (p. 30).26 Anzac Day is a rort. It is a drinking spree, and it is dodgy, as the son knows; a frame-up where parents embroil children in a spirit-denying illusion. It is an eternal return of the same cynical emptiness at the centre: a celebration of death, not life, a piety not to be questioned – recalling Peter Ryan’s words: ‘A corrosive envy and a black defeated nothingness lie at the heart of our natural character’.27 Harry Heseltine first noted in 1962 the nihilist tendencies in the tradition Henry Lawson fathered – ‘the façade of mateship, equality, democracy, landscape, realism, toughness, behind which looms the fundamental consciousness of the Australian literary imagination – the terror at the basis of being’.28 The chief evangelist of this terror was Patrick White’s Voss. But by now everyone was expressing it. Colin Johnson (now Mudrooroo Narogin) tells it in Wild Cat Falling (1966) from the point of view of an Aboriginal adolescent and petty criminal, just out of jail in the city, swept away by jazz and drugs and Camus and Sartre. He is looking for mates but his fixed cynicism, reinforced by the bleakness of his reading and the fact of his colour, makes him more lost than most. His meeting with an aged Aboriginal man reacquaints him with his dreaming, and hope is born. Because ‘White man got no dreaming’.29 David Tacey has, however, noted the great spirituality of Australians, but stresses that it comes from experience rather than belief.30 White man will,

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nevertheless, increasingly be charged with having no inner life as a political and cultural revolution brews. In 1964 Donald Horne tells him in The Lucky Country that Australia lacks a sense of continuity with its past, that Australia is a second rate country run mostly by second rate people, that the emptiness of Australian political life comes from its lack of intellectual strength; that journalists are ignorant and impatient with complexity. There is a conspiracy of tiredness of spirit (a Nietzschean touch).31 All Horne’s concerns are addressed explicitly to heterosexual men; he does mention Aboriginals once or twice, but women and homosexuals not at all. Horne’s analysis was followed up by Coleman, Conway, Encel, McGregor, McQueen and others. But the progress of the awakening grew from the enlargement of vision effected by post-war immigration and the outright embrace of multiculturalism by the Whitlam Labour Government in 1972. For the first time, writer David Malouf declared, he felt legitimized [as an Australian] to speak out. A more complete and complex society welcomed the work of multicultural writers. The annual gay Mardi Gras, founded in 1978, was a rort with, gloriously, no shadow of suspicion. But by the end of the extraordinarily hopeful 1970s the Whitlam Government had fallen and, even when Labour returned to government in 1983, the cultural cringe would be replaced not by local initiative but by the economic cringe, with the academic cringe hard on its heels. Most other Anglo-Saxon democracies were doing the same – but there were none so obedient as an Australian Government to the American alliance, since Australia feels such a large target, so militarily defenceless, so childishly vulnerable. As its democratic nationalist spirit began once again to sink, as the mates in government and business sought to paper over questions of national interest and sovereignty with neo-liberal theory, so humanities and social science departments divided into hostile theoretical camps, retreating like government from confidence in good social action. The two significant, but not definitive, legal victories over racism – the High Court’s Mabo judgment of 1992 and the Wik judgment of 1996 – returned to indigenous people some of their lost lands. Terra nullius, the conception of

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Australia as an empty land at settlement, there for the taking, was overturned.32 At the same time Bringing Them Home, the report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission into the policy of removing mixed-race children forcibly from their black mothers between 1910 and 1970, revealed the continuing curse of impulse and theory in Australian life.33 Tinpot theories, like that of race – ‘breeding out the colour’ – are used to justify unjustifiable impulses, as we see in the work of Herbert, an ironic exposé of suspicion and rort meeting in cynicism. The Australian novel ponders which comes first: rort or cynicism, impulse or theory. The public apology made to indigenous people on Sorry Day, February 13 2008, by not only the Rudd Government but the Federal Parliament, was the third blow to racism and an extraordinary moment in Australian history. The conservative Coalition parties never wholly accepted multiculturalism, and a rear-guard movement against indigenous rights followed Mabo and Wik. But the ‘white blindfold’ theorists denying full black participation in Australian history fail to discern that in projecting terra nullius on to the map of Australia at settlement they themselves become the ‘no-one home’.34 And it is hard to disagree with Henry Reynolds when he links the theory of terra nullius with Gallipoli. It has been said that a founding myth had to be invented to underpin the non-event of Federation, when Australia shrugged and accepted a crumb of independence. Why should there be no honour for the black man who fought so heroically and intelligently – as attested by many whites of the period – for his homeland, when every war memorial across Australia recognizes those white men who died as a tiny part of a strategy employed by a motherland half a world away?35 Land rights for Aborigines – the only black culture in the former British Empire unprotected by a treaty with the colonists – are thus a direct confrontation with white loyalties, the loyalties of lost boys looking back hopelessly to an indifferent Britain or, now, to an indifferent America. There is honour for the black person at the peak of her sporting (or artistic) career, and much talk of blacks who fail; but representation of black people in the middle ground of life is uncommon. Even today Australian advertising almost always features the blond and blue-eyed. On the screen

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Australians are Nietzschean blond beasts, unless they have won the four hundred metres or an Oscar. Dark people, immigrants from hot lands or native peoples, those most naturally ‘at home’, are least likely to be seen as such. The blond and blue-eyed who thronged with their flags and tinnies to Cronulla in the orchestrated riots – rorts – of 2007 against Lebanese Australians were much filmed and televised: as Lawson might say, making heroes out of clods. Until Australia constitutes itself as an independent nation free of a masterland, its men, and as a consequence its women and children, will be organized by a mate-mentality which is a slave-mentality and essentially cynical: ‘What’s in it for me?’ The claims of its blacks and whites must come together in words and in law for the first time. The role of fiction is to imagine the past and future which exist behind the screen, extending the reach, power and expressiveness of that constitution. You are my desert: Patrick White’s Voss Voss appeared just after the first performances of Samuel Beckett’s Godot. Drama and fiction share an empty stage – or rather, an empty stage visited at times by people who pass by, whose intentions are not understood. Both writers emerged from a comfortable but somewhat stern wowser Protestant background, at a distance from the colonial heartland. The situation of both works recalls Nietzsche’s question in Genealogy of Morals: ‘Has not man’s self-deprecation been unstoppably on the increase since Copernicus? Rolling away from the centre to nothingness?’36 That is, since Copernicus discovered that the sun does not revolve around us, the human race has declined into decadence, its spirit denied by instrumental reason and spineless Christianity. The remark is one that Johann Ulrich Voss might have made, to preface his declaration ‘I will cross the continent from one end to the other’ (p.36). And place himself at the centre. Voss’s fictional expedition is a deconstruction of Leichhardt’s first Queensland journey, and Eyre’s trek between Fowler’s Bay and King George Sound, the journals of which Patrick White read during the Blitz. What resolve,

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goodwill, trust in the Aboriginal people and survival skills emerge from those diaries of 1840 to 1841! Above all, what faith Eyre evinces in his loving Creator: That we had at least 150 miles to go before the next water I was fully assured of; I was equally assured that our horses were by no means in a condition to encounter the hardships and privations they must meet with in such a journey…Still I hoped we might be successful…the rubicon was now passed and we had nothing to rely on but our own exertions and perseverance, humbly trusting the great and merciful God who had hitherto guarded and guided us in safety would not desert us now. 37 During the years that followed these expeditions, novels appeared that reproduced these adventures of survival and male solidarity (Robbery Under Arms, For the term of his Natural Life) but for Lawson suffering overwhelmed the Divine Plan. God is dismissed by two ruminating bush philosophers with backhand gestures of impotence predictive of Beckett: ‘There’s no problem really except Creation, and that’s not our affair’. And ‘It’s all Eve’s fault – no, Adam’s, he should be master.’38 One of White’s great achievements was the reconnection of the modern Australian novel not only to the metaphysical concerns of the European novel, but also the metaphysical and nihilist streak in Australian fiction itself going back to Lawson, as distinct from the contemporary social-question novels White so famously labeled as ‘dun-coloured realism’. The real subject, for White, was the terror at the basis of being: not just the empty heart of Australia as allegory for faithlessness, but the great vastness and intractability of that heart as allegory for monstrosity. One recalls also Sartre’s ‘Nothingness lies coiled at the heart of being’39. The Monster of All Time, White called himself.40 The two images coalesce in ‘God cannot exist, for if he did how would I know I was not he?’ The deconstruction of Eyre and Leichhardt was necessary because the nation had to be reintroduced to the suffering venture of the individual alone and unsupported, to put an end to the historical phase of security and servitude, obedience to the mass, passive nihilism. The outward venture is surpassed by that within. This is the antithesis of Gallipoli’s meek and fêted sacrifice, the antithesis also of Eyre’s triumphalist humility.

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Australia: No-one Home Johann Ulrich Voss – a Prussian, like Leichhardt – is sponsored by Mr.

Bonner, haberdasher of Sydney, to undertake the great journey. His niece Laura Trevelyan, having conversed with Voss, is drawn, despite – or because – of the brevity and intensity of their talk to his ambition, his pitiableness and the ‘beautiful shape of his words’. He is generally seen as queer and rude, refusing to dine or talk sensibly. He leaves by ship from Circular Quay, his party including Palfreyman, a genuinely Christian ornithologist, the remote and fin-de-siècle Le Mesurier (decadent foil to the Nietzschean leader) and one of White’s famous naïfs. There are two Aboriginal men, young Jackie and elderly Dugald. Before striking out inland with large numbers of animals, Voss writes to Laura very formally proposing marriage. She replies, declaring herself willing to wrestle with ‘our mutual hatefulness’. But in answer to his request that she join him in thought and exercise of will; ‘daily, hourly, that I may return to you the victor,’ she replies that they should pray together for salvation (pp. 164, 199). In fact their last, strenuous conversation began with her rejection of God. And equally strange is Voss’s objection then – ‘Ah! You are not atheistich?’ But his position is perfectly Nietzschean (White admitted to having read Zarathustra at university but claimed not to remember it).41 All is a matter of will; the man of will is of God, if not God tout court, and should be worshipped. He worships, but with pride. Laura now finds a purpose for belief: ‘You are so isolated. Everything is for yourself’. But: ‘I am fascinated by you, my desert’ (p. 94). Voss’s boast ‘I am not in the habit of setting myself limits’, requires him to ‘learn to pray’ (p. 97). The expedition is not just into Australia: it is Australia. And Voss being also Patrick White, the redemption sought for Australia from the materialism of Sydney is also perhaps a personal redemption from the will to power: his (necessary) ‘monstrosity’. There are many ill-omens. Something, Voss intuits on the quay, makes him want to dispense with Palfreyman, who will be loved by and necessary to the men, while despised by Voss for his humility. As the party moves inland, it indeed puts its will and its values on the river of becoming. Their leader has not chosen his companions as wisely as Leichhardt or Eyre. Voss is, after all, there to found a

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myth rather than a consensus. Lieutenant Tom Radclyffe, intelligent pragmatist and intended of Belle Bonner, sees in Voss’s approach German ‘clouds’ of impulse and theory rather than German ‘knife-edge of practice’. The memory of recent Fascism is perhaps not absent from the picture; White spent the war in the RAF in Europe and the Middle East. ‘The German’ is many Germans. Rather than task-mates, the expedition is a collection of infinitely lost males doubting that they are led. This is what Laura Trevelyan sees. When Aborigines can no longer participate in the expedition that is Australia, it staggers. Dugald flees homeward, scattering in many pieces an unprecedentedly loving and evolved letter from Johann Ulrich to Laura. (Voss had already said to Laura that this was how he saw her prayers.) In increasingly extreme conditions, animals, supplies and vital instruments are lost. Meanwhile the heady summer days at the Bonners’ are ‘full of the clovey scent of pinks’. Laura is ‘glistening brighter’. The servant Rose Portion is pregnant and, strangely, Laura becomes ‘close to the unborn child and love of her husband’ (p. 227). The little girl Mercy becomes ‘Miss Trevelyan’s baby’. A virgin birth. The fragmented party is at the end of its resources by the time they reach the worst country: Palfreyman is cruelly taunted by Voss about the practice of Christian morality. ‘Mr Palfreyman, you are humble. I am humbled for you’ (p. 351). Voss sends Palfreyman to a new group of apparently hostile Aborigines, and they spear him fatally in the side – which was prophesied in Le Mesurier’s secret theosophical/Zarathustrian writings that report a scattering of the self. In this borderless country, indeed, this dispersed self is moving towards invisibility and infinity. The remaining handful of souls are virtually taken prisoner by the Aboriginal group; and at home, Laura falls into a desperate fever, saying to Voss, ‘I shall not fail you. Even if there are times when you would want me to’ (p. 363). And the separation between them dissolves, with space and time, in the grand image: ‘The party rode down the terrible basalt stairs of the Bonners’ house’ (p. 387). This is the sublime moment which, Longinus writes, ‘tears everything up like a whirlwind, exhibiting power at a single blow’.42 Preparing Voss for death,

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Laura Trevelyan is ‘filling him with a sheath of tender white’, recalling the ‘silky’ shape Jackie sketched in air to show the ascension of the spirits of the Aboriginal dead. The ordeal for Laura as well as Voss is over. Voss seems a process in which the Christian God and Zarathustra converge. Nietzsche dreamed of a pantheist God conceived by Spinoza as beyond good and evil: above all he believed in the power of spirit, that achieved permanence which, as Laura says at the close of the book, Voss is. ‘He is everywhere…he is not dead…the air will tell us’ (pp 471–5). An achievement through destruction, like Voss’s love letter torn up by Dugald in his flight. The Christian God in the form of Voss so loved the Aborigines, ‘my guests’, that he sent Palfreyman to the sacrifice. Or is it the other way round? ‘My guests’ is a haughty irony, since civilization is inverted in the unknown interior. The Aborigines are at home. And they spear his Christ in the side. Jackie is the Judas who will perish, mad. Only upon Palfreyman’s death, and with Laura’s sustaining force, does Voss see the suffering engendered by obdurate refusal – and is transformed into man. ‘Jesu, rette mich nur, du Lieber!’ Dear Jesus, save me (p. 415). The white witchetty grub is pressed into his mouth. Years later the sole survivor of the expedition, now an old man, no longer distinguishes between Voss and the sainted Anglican. Voss cared for them; he tended their wounds, he was ‘a Christian as I understand it’ (p. 471). This is how myths are born – especially religious ones. Will and suffering break down material fact. Meanwhile the communion between Laura and Voss – animus and anima might seem appropriate – has borne fruit through another human agency. That democratic ideal of Australians in the mid-colonial period was a living thing: the illegitimate daughter of a serving-woman can be the respectable daughter of a single gentlewoman. It would be hard to overestimate the annihilation of the Australian cult of mateship in the novel. Of the many vague and restless men in the story, the most disconnected are the two who become ‘mates’, ex-convict Turner and pastoralist Ralph Angus. They stand for the two (white) types who settled the continent. Like the AIF soldiers at Gallipoli they had no individual purpose in joining the expedition, have

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little in common as landowner and labourer, but are thrown together by shared tasks and ‘mateship’, yarn, and are the first to be disaffected. The others are single and quiet in the face of this crisis of value, meaning and desirability. At the close of the expedition, Voss is no longer lost, these two extremely so. ‘Man is something that must be overcome,’ says Nietzsche. Voss’s sentiments entirely, and Laura’s. In the final pages of the novel Laura engages in a discussion with her artistic circle: they agree about Australians’ ‘mediocrity as a people’ (p. 475): the phrase that Donald Horne would take up in The Lucky Country nearly a decade later. But the talk is exhilarated and hopeful. The land is too literal: why break yourself upon it? ‘Knowledge,’ says Laura, ‘was never a matter of geography.’ In other words, they are now Voss’s heirs: his vision was diffused in the course of his journey, to the degree that he relinquished ego. Voss is, with White’s The Aunt’s Story, the leavening moment of Australian fiction. The Aunt’s Story also allows pure consciousness to move and live in incompatible times and spaces, conferring on a single, retiring, perhaps despised woman the power to interrogate, out-imagine others and live richly. Laura Trevelyan and Theodora Goodman have the moral authority of Austen’s or the Brontës’ heroines. But Voss redefines the country. It follows Capricornia by placing blacks and whites together at the heart of the country, with the whites decentred. But Capricornia’s vision was close to hopeless. Certain gains in the capacity of Australians to relate to one another seemed strictly provisional: if the book had to go on ten pages, everything would fall apart again. Suffering would continue to be denied, rort would stand in for fulfillment. Voss however shows almost every character aware of painful destiny, if not their own – even simple Aunt Emmy Bonner who says at the outset, ‘Mr. Voss is lost’. Laura says, ‘I have the will.’ Every character makes an Australia in his own image which may not be the image he or she started out with. Who would have thought the placid Ralph Angus would ‘make a hero of a clod’ in teaming up with disreputable Turner? That young, unreflecting Belle Bonner would cry, as Voss’s ship sails, ‘Dear Laura, what is happening to us?’ That the stereotypically cheerful Jackie will make the choice that he does at the end?

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It is Laura’s will that allows Voss to triumph and her society to grow in spirit. This book is the eternal morning of an utterly new and utterly old country. Make it meat: Thomas Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes Two questions press when you finish reading this powerful novel. The first: was it really like this? Were things as bad as this in the first years of settlement of New South Wales – unrelieved brutality on the part of the English command, flogging and hanging at a whim; and unrelieved abjection and religious self-torment on the part of the mostly Irish convicts, emancipists and Marines? The second question: is the hero Halloran hanged because he is guilty or because he is innocent? The four people cruelly punished before him in the course of the novel are more innocent than guilty. But Halloran’s case is complex. In White’s Voss, a Protestant colonial world confronts an alien ontology. Here, that same world confronts a frequently rebellious Irish Catholicism. But here, as in Voss, the central problem is belief, in a pact with destiny. In these circumstances can a just and benevolent Christian God be part of a concordat between God and the State? Did Christ wonder, on the Cross, whether he had been right to uphold rendering unto Caesar? At the outset, Irish Corporal Phelim Halloran is not at all lost. He is a cheerful man, although serving in a place of death – where, putting shingle on the roof of Government House, ‘transports moved in and out and about the hole with the effective indolence of maggots in a skull’ (p. 48). Halloran reconciles the unblessed sexual union with Ann Rush, servant of the Blythes, with his Catholic orthodoxy by means of a theological text he read in Wexford. It claims that where there is genuine love and desire for marriage, and no priest is available for the ceremony, the two are lawfully wedded in the sight of God and the Church. Yet Halloran suffers. ‘A long acrid pity for an Ann who would weep, bleed and perish in season possessed him most of his days’ (p. 9). A sequence of crucial events tries even Halloran’s secure faith: the savage flogging and hanging of innocent men, and the flogging of a guiltless convict called Quinn on behalf of whom Halloran wrote a letter to the Governor. Tending to his near-

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fatal wounds is Hearn, a charismatic convict working in the Governor’s office, who reproves Halloran for holding to his oath before God as a Marine to serve the King, an oppressor. Halloran, whose own position is not especially safe, is genuinely taken aback by the criticism. He was wrongly charged in Ireland and in gaol conscripted by the Royal Marines. Like the other convicts he is working in some way for the King. Hearn’s taunts about his conformity, his being ‘conscience-bound’, finally get to Halloran, and he exclaims ‘Damn conscience!’ (p. 94). This crisis will make or break him: it is dynamic nihilism, the will-to-negate, overthrowing passive nihilism, the negation of will. Quinn the petitioner, refused by the Governor, blames Halloran: ‘Christ damn you!’– because the letter was somehow ‘too lovely’ (p. 113). Halloran’s faith in the power of an honorable oath – a recurrent theme in the novel – is shaken by Quinn’s words. After an Irish uprising involving Hearn, Halloran persuades Colonel Allen to swear that in quelling it he will save as many lives as possible. Many are killed, and Hearn is lashed. Stripped, cowled in a blanket, he ‘no longer had that Satanic look’, seeming more like a friar. What about Allen’s oath, Hearn says; and again, what about Halloran’s own? Hearn’s principles are guided by a ‘rugged and monarchical will, which ruled him under God’ (p. 62). He is ‘bardic’, a Zarathustra arrived from the mountain, tending the weak around him, suffering himself, but ruled by no man, creating his own values, and increasingly without pity. Halloran by contrast sticks, and understandably, to his loved and precise text, although ‘The worm of death seemed to flourish in this obdurate land, and duty was to outstubborn this wayward earth’ (p. 21). He has happiness with Ann. Why risk it? But he is changing. ‘He wondered to what degree the true God, that transcendent God, I AM THAT I AM THAT I AM, was involved in the listless faith he kept with George the Third’ (p. 60). This is why, after much argument, Halloran breaks that oath. He falls in with Hearn’s plan to steal foodstuffs from the Colony stores for a passing American whaler in return for a passage for Hearn to Valparaiso. For Hearn was not killed – though he is in hiding – and is stronger, as in Nietzsche’s aphorism. This whaler reports that in America the rights of man are enshrined in law, and in France the King has been made

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to accept the decision of Parliament. A crowning argument from Hearn: that if you do a deal with a man for a pig, and the man doesn’t fulfil his end of the bargain, you are entitled to take back your pig. So can you not take back your oath from an unjust king? In the end, however, Hearn roars ‘Damn reasons and arguments – [the whaler’ll] do what he’s meant to. And so shall I. And so shall you’ (p. 171). He does. As in Nietzsche’s ancient law: before there was good or evil, there was the will to power. Halloran’s ‘Damn conscience!’ was a nihilistic precipice. Is he now going with flow instead of making waves – or the other way round? Hearn has become, meanwhile, Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov. If there is no virtue, how can there be law? Without law, there is no crime. Hearn’s position is Nietzsche’s ‘absolute affirmation’. There is no repudiation of ‘frightful means’ – in this case, deprivation of the entire colony of scarce remaining food. Halloran has replaced Christ with Hearn; if he was not master under George the Third, he is less so now – according to one argument. Yet Hearn’s nihilism is dynamic. Halloran, now passive nihilist, has become malnourished and ill. ‘One side of Halloran’s face subsided’ in a delirium of highs and lows: The generous morning continued to gild them with an heroic light. Halloran felt himself to be very much the centre of this world. He was the focus, he was the central screw. Feeling so sanguine, he remembered with unaccustomed pleasure Hearn’s prophecy, And a little child shall lead them (p. 143). In W B Yeats’s words, however, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. For immediately afterwards ‘the sense of mortality smote him fore and aft’. The cause of the disaster that follows is not just illness, and not just Hearn. The Colony is facing starvation, the meat ration cut to next to nothing. When Halloran is quickly betrayed, it is because of another’s haggle over meat. As in Brecht: ‘First feed the face, and then tell right from wrong.’43 When Ann trades ‘a whole pound of meat’ from a soldier in exchange for a store key, we recall other pounds of flesh. ‘Ann and he could pretend to be a universe to one another…but the monstrous world would purchase the avid heart and make it meat’ (p. 175). For Ann and he will be summarily hanged.

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The moral case against Halloran, upon first reading of the book, is weak. (Fiction being ‘a moral form’, we instinctively engage with ethics). Halloran is good, one who intervenes for justice for others, and a poet. The novel’s title is an excerpt. The radical democrat tradition in Australian history and literature stands in solidarity with him. His fall is human, all too human. So his nihilistic ‘Damn conscience!’ seems a human revaluation of all values, the wild commitment to the river of becoming. Formerly he was training as Catholic theologian. One sentence in particular stands out: ‘And the old agony returned of how, if he married Ann publicly, the Government would no doubt pardon her in time and send her home with him, free passage, when the garrison relieved’ (p. 88). Why then a secret marriage, causing constant danger to Ann? Few would be convinced by an obscure and self-justifying clause in Dean Hannon of Wexford’s little book, De vera amore discipline. Basically, Halloran was having his little joke on the authorities and protecting his conscience – but his alone. His joy was founded on not only no proper oath to have, but also to protect and cherish. Despite obeying George the Third, he could will what would unite the interest of their ‘universe’ with that of the ‘ironstone world’ by marrying before an Anglican minister, there being no priest handy. Halloran’s conscience is indeed, in this one case, the dead letter of a slave-morality, the Jansenist rigidity prevalent at the time. He has been ruined by deprivation; and his ecclesiastical legalism was a theory untenable among the ungovernable impulses of the benighted settlement. But dogmatism is not his only fault. He took an oath to Ann’s employer to respect and protect her. Halloran, like many an homme moyen sensible on Australian soil, thinks he can be both larrikin and wowser. Belief in the letter of the law, once frayed, may lead to belief in anything; and once the Christian belief in man – or in this case, woman – as absolute value is impugned, man is entirely on his own.44 Better not to swear, whether as a Christian or a Nietzschean. These are not, however, hanging offences. Halloran’s story is the story of the Cross. Man’s fall leads from the first tree to that special tree. Halloran is really special only in having to pay so horribly. In a dream one of the innocent dead men comes to him:

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Australia: No-one Home The hanged Scot took from his waistcoat a tiny egg. The thick white contained a yolk of scintillating brilliance. Halloran, blinded, groaned in joy. ‘This,’ Ewers told him, ‘is the seed of your gibbet-tree. As Christ planted his, I planted mine. Now it is your planting time’ (pp 194– 5). The dream came even before his crime was undertaken. To speak of

fantasies born of illness, alien to the normally cheerful and balanced Halloran, is to deny the road to Calvary – whose sign is the name of the Anglican minister Calverley, coming to the freezing dark hut the night before the execution, and first reacting to rage with rage. Halloran’s cry ‘You give your blessing to hangings. You call God down on the gallows’ (p. 206) is of course is why Halloran would not marry before him. Now Ann is lost. ‘Halloran. It’s been done.’ Now he believed. Almost. Calverley knelt and took the head on his knee. He held it very firmly.[…] ‘She did not find it hard. Halloran, I stood ten feet from her – these things are unmistakable. I heard the noise.’ […] Calverley suffered a thunderclap too. For he saw that here was what was called a moment of grace; that now he might be able to sell God as a cow is sold, and that, if he tried to, God would spit him out. [He was] liberated suddenly from vested interest in brotherly love. He could be kindly, just kindly, without motives, good or bad (pp 233–4). Calverley’s nihilistic crisis is engendered by Halloran’s: he overcomes it by confronting the general assault on value, meaning and desirability. From Keneally’s account of Halloran’s experience in the noose one can draw no certain conclusions, except that now Halloran understands Hearn. In the face of the reality that nobody owns God, a moment comes in which faith turns into Dostoyevskyan nihilism.45 Primo Levi said about his experiences in a Nazi death camp, ‘The fittest survived. That is, the worst’. This is in effect what Keneally is saying about the death camp that was Botany Bay. With ‘paragons’ like Halloran and

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Ann arraigned, one can well imagine Lawson’s bush undertaker saying that death ‘ain’t come yet fer me, Brummy, but it’s a-comin’.’ What led Halloran and Ann to this point, apart from material need and spiritual pride? Mates: Hearn, Miles, John McHugh and Terry Byrne. Suspicion – not only Halloran but others saw Hearn at first as Satan – and then the fall into temptation: rort. The point is not that Hearn was Satan; but that Halloran swung to believe in the other extreme, Hearn as Christ. Mates become co-disciples, whereas Ann distrusted Hearn. Retribution comes, in Australia, from the same principle as dubious prizes – the fact that only the countable counts. For, Enlightenment ideals or no, what brought the whole thing down was that Private Terry Byrne gave two ounces of the stolen meat to a whore as payment and it was not enough: she talked. ‘Homeless, in this broken time of transition’ means in early Australia no place for the Irish rebels, no place for Hearn, now missing; no place for Ann and Halloran to be together in good conscience. Aborigines are out of sight. Australians have come a long way since these beginnings. But the book’s nihilism, in its worst sense – brutality, disvalue and will-to-power from the rulers, and a destructive obsession with religion, will-to-truth, on the part of the ruled – records a continuing ontological doubt of the good in Australia. Much of the time, as Keneally shows, the flesh is dignified. The rest of the time, meat. Giving it all away: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip Voss’s Laura Trevelyan is in many ways a model for Garner’s woman: cool, yet deeply emotional, she stands alone while supporting the man she has chosen. Like many women in Garner’s urban households she mothers children not her own, and ignores judgments from those bourgeois who cannot understand her generosity. But there is little social resemblance between 1840s Sydney and 1970s Melbourne. The inner suburban shared house, compared with the class conservatism of the colonial era, is what some would call the sheerest laisseraller, or in Sol Encel’s term Australian Epicureanism. Others would call it the sheerest idealism, a passionate commitment to the view that humans should be

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able to live together without the man oppressing the woman or the woman wanting to possess the man.46 Self-actualisation at the personal level is necessary for wider social change. As Aldous Huxley put it in his essay ‘Ends and Means’: For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously a liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotical revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. 47 Here is the apotheosis, in short, of Nietzsche’s and Dostoyevsky’s ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’.48 But Garner is to be distinguished, in the screen age, from the fierce egotistical libertarianism of Burroughs and Miller. Egalitarianism, feminism and a sense of the common good are central to the world Nora shares with her little daughter Gracie, ex-husband Jack, house-mates and sleeping partners. In this brave new world everyone is friends. The adults retain their childhood, ‘clowning in the pool’ with the littlies at the municipal baths; and the children at times parent their elders – ‘You were drunk last night weren’t you? I don’t like it when you’re drunk’. For many it was not only a radiant time of self-made freedom but a bold social experiment which they brought off in the face of opposition from family, officialdom, and the church. They gave away the pieties – religion, mortgage, the nine to five job and the well-heeled and bolted mind. They rejected wowserism and celebrated larrikinism. The Fitzroy house in Garner’s fiction is Zarathustra’s forest: In the morning, light and air wake me. I go outside and see the sky a thousand miles high…My head begins to turn, it fills with unspoken words. I don’t try to seize them but let them run unchecked. They seem to slip into my veins and my limbs and the capillaries of my skin. It is just convalescence, and the summer morning. The universe resounds with the joyful cry ‘I am!’ (p 171)

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The women especially seek a mateship untainted by aggression and conformity, yet admitting a certain native irony and doubt. It is a life in four-square opposition to the ‘corrosive envy and the black defeated nothingness’ observed in Australians by Peter Ryan (not noted for his bleeding heart). One thinks of Levinas’ ethic: ‘the relationship between oneself and the other is such that should the other cease to exist, so will one cease to exist. The face-to-face relation [entails] responsibility for the other.’49 The impulse which celebrates dope and sex is underpinned by libertarian theory, that to be shocked by total freedom in these matters was to be suburbanite, repressed, wowser. The puritanical or wowser stream was until the 1970s more powerful than the larrikin, though numerically no less strong. Intellectual life was influenced from the fifties through the sixties by the Melbourne and Sydney libertarian ‘Pushes’. A strong local radical tradition blended with the imperatives of American-derived counter-culture. Yet there is pain for Nora in her relationship with the junkie Javo. ‘You’re not falling in love again are you?’ says a friend. ‘You could spend more time on your own.’ ‘I won’t – I can’t’ (p. 6). Love in those days was, after all, all you need. It was not exclusive: ‘I’m in love with the air and the city and Rita, the kids, the cat. Paddy’s black hair and Willy’s blond’ (p. 135). But Javo comes and goes, always unexpectedly, and Nora suffers. When Javo splits, she grins. ‘Neat sharp steady. Cut!’ (p. 8) We note the screen vocabulary. When the subject of smack comes up, Nora is faithful to the libertarian creed, crying to Javo: ‘I’ve never asked you to come off it!’ and accusing herself of an ineradicable wowserism: ‘I’ll love that wrecked bastard forever along with all the other people under whose influence I’ve had my hard shell cracked’ (p. 171). She shares her expiatory love around. Javo represents, however, the most ahistorical Be Here Now moment, arriving always suddenly as a dynamic nihilism. On one occasion Nora finds him in top form: brown skin hard body healthier than I’d ever seen him, his skin felt burning, a fever from this first hit of smack in six months…I came joyfully with no hesitation…

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Australia: No-one Home I crept into Gerald’s bed and hugged him and felt an enormous relief – done it! Fucked in the house with someone else, liked it, managed to get through the night, parted friends, found myself still open to being with Gerald (p 198). This is faith of youth: absolute pleasure, absolute love, absolute cool.

Revaluation of all values is to be open, honestly, like a child, without being naïve or passé, the sins of the telescreen age. But Javo is seeing other women, and not acknowledging Nora at parties. He does not talk of love. This is excused for Nora by dope. Clearly sex is better with it. Her ‘love junkie’ larrikinism is the soft underbelly of the wowser ‘hard shell’. Possessive feelings are anathema, with a Buddhist or Hindu merit acquired only from feeling ‘detached from my feelings about him’. Yet upon each ‘candid’ excuse for causing her hurt, ‘all my doubts flew away’ (p. 207). Suspicion is rorted. The ‘monkey grip’ of the title is perhaps two things: the urge to have, whether dope or a person; and also the habit of impulse, that will-to-youth which made sense, fun sense, after a century and more of repression. Huxley’s liberating meaninglessness is Nietzsche’s ‘putting yourself and your values on the river of becoming’. The paradox is that to become, to evolve – as Nora yearns to do – you must become older, and Nora still likes dancing at home to Aretha Franklin, and cycling down to the Southern Cross Hotel for a champagne cocktail. Her first denial of Javo’s habit – ‘He’s off it, he got off it in Hobart’ is past. The reader wonders if her acceptance of his habit can be totally free of the wish to get him off dope and have him love her. Further, one suspects, Nora’s acceptance of the dope is a way of rationalizing the unfulfilled and politically incorrect desire to be partnered and loved. Is her going with the flow a genuine achievement, or simply passive nihilism? The I Ching is on hand to reconcile these conflicts. So much advice sought by screen age youth has been from wholly unaccountable, since pleasantly distant, sources, owing to a blanket suspicion of the mainstream and a blanket credulity in anything else. One thinks of Scientology, which while borrowing most of its expensive therapeutic tools from conventional psychology, assures its adherents of their unique insights. Nora is however attempting to deal openly and honestly

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with nihilism, the radical rejection of conventional value, meaning and desirability. ‘What is good?’ says Nietzsche in Anti-Christ. ‘All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.’50 So smack is good? Nietzsche qualifies this, in other places, by recommending moderation. But the ethical question the twentieth century faces is the old Buddhist – and Blakeian – one, ‘How much is enough?’ Pop songs said ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ and ‘Don’t stop till you get enough’. The pushing of limits is our good. If it is the feeling of power that is good, rather than the objective exercise of it, then Nietzsche is an argument for drugs, and should be understood as such, along with Lacan’s theory ‘Never give up on your desire’. Another nostrum is Blake’s ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’, much discussed in Malcolm Bradbury’s satire of the telescreen age The History Man (1975). The point is, for the housemates, that experience should not annihilate innocence. Javo’s life is impenetrable and fragmented, always focused elsewhere. He appears on Nora’s bed, asleep, ‘in a running position’, and they make love, laugh and talk. Thus she too – admonished by others – becomes a slave to smack. Willy says jokingly, ‘I believe in TOTAL AFFIRMATION! I want a slave!’ (p. 187) Javo has both: smack and Nora. It is Javo’s wholly obscure and anonymous network of dealing mates who are Nora’s masters, especially as she gives Javo money. Javo is living for the rort that is smack, in both senses – one hell of a party, and also a con, deception, fraud. But it would be absolutely uncool to think that for all his charm Javo offers Nora only the leftovers of his life. Moreover, Nora’s scepticism and her confrontation of Javo about their relationship give a false impression that she has some control over it. Although the Zarathustrian forest of freedom imagines that dropping in, dropping out, turning on and off are magical uses of the present, real relationships are not something Nietzsche’s hero spends much time on. ‘If it hadn’t been for you I’d be dead right now.’ We laughed and talked all night. ‘Who do you fuck with, Nora?’ […] ‘I’ve got a room.’

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Australia: No-one Home Turkey. Cold turkey. ‘You don’t give a shit now you don’t need me.’ ‘But Nor! How can you say that! Our relationship is permanent!’ (pp 222, 231) It will not, however, be the relationship you think. One is reminded here of

the Chéri series of novels by the French writer Colette (Nora, who reads a novel a day, will be aware of them). Léa is glamorous, worldly-wise, much older than Chéri, a handsome youth spoiled by his wealthy society mother. They have been lovers for years: he amuses her, and she advises him. When his marriage with an eligible girl is arranged, he cannot imagine things not continuing. Similarly, Javo’s protest is disingenuous. Because she will always be there, it implies, he can sleep with others now. For it has been slipped in, casually, that Nora is 33 and Javo is 23. The shared house is Ibsen’s dolls’ house, which this namesake-Nora may have to leave by growing up. Literature, she at last remembers, is as good, as accountable, a moral guide as the I Ching. Reading in solitude at the beach, Nora is fascinated by Henry James’s novella Washington Square. Will Catherine Sloper marry Morris Townsend? Can this monied woman really catch the dashing but weak young man who may be a fortune-hunter? Nora, who at the outset would not spend time on her own, has at last withdrawn, to observe personal drama at a remove and through the novel to resist meaninglessness, which may be an axiological nihilism. ‘Well, so be it,’ she says. ‘Let it be as it is’ (p. 244). In her own story she seems to recognize that Javo was not the only lost child. Has she understood that it is perhaps the smack she loves in Javo? Perhaps in accepting the eternal return of the same she is now intent on agency: ‘I willed it thus!’51 The trouble with impulse is that it does not last. It may become a tyranny of pleasure-seeking which can overwhelm the self, build up debt, destroy good relationships or simply make the splendid banal (Fritz Perls’ famous dictum ‘I do my thing, you do your thing’). People are led into substance, or love, dependence, which is false innocence (the dope releases impulses) and also false experience

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(you think you have lived when you were tripping). These copy and stereotype the genuine energy and joy of youth, that magical outbreak of the 1970s which swept away, briefly, the ‘hard shell’ – in Nora’s words – of Western society after two World Wars, a Depression, and a Cold War. In 1975 the Australian left-wing Government of Gough Whitlam was controversially dismissed from office, partly because of giving away all its money. Some of this money came in the form of the generous Supporting Mothers’ Benefit which allowed Nora her freedom. Nora too was giving it all away, expending money and innocence on an experience vulnerable to suspicion and rort. Refusal to judge risks becoming smiling nihilism. She had been seeing Javo as he does, as the unattached Superman. Now she must become what she is: someone grown up, and someone who can be by herself. Enough to be able to say heroically and truthfully ‘I am!’ Halle-bloody-lujah: Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet Oriel and Lester Lamb answer an advertisement and come with their family, notably sons Fish and Quick, to rent a dilapidated house in Cloud Street in the Perth suburbs. Half of it, that is. The other half is occupied by the family of Sam and Dolly Pickles. The Pickleses are larrikins: Sam gambles away his pay packet; and Dolly, once a ‘looker’, has ‘been around’. They don’t care much about anything. The Lambs – ‘Lambs of God’, it is joked – are wowsers. Oriel is a hard worker, and expects the same from others. They are – or were – fiercely Protestant, do not drink, and care too much about most things. Winton’s investment of these ordinary families with valour recalls Patrick White’s – except that they are not ethereal, as in White. However the symbolism of the nation as a developing identity resembles White’s: in Voss Australia was the expedition, in Cloudstreet it is the house. In both, the original violence between blacks and whites shapes the ends of the narrative. For Winton it is not just a matter of advancing the country, but saving it. In White a heightened realism leads characters from the material to the transcendental: in Winton it is magic realism. Both include the troubled guidance of Aborigines. Both visions support the counter-cultural claim of Australian literature in the telescreen age – to oppose that materialism which,

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whether in everyday life, business or indeed philosophy, is resolutely non-dual: which says, there is nothing else. These archetypal Australians arrive at Cloudstreet, like the original convicts and settlers, through doubt and misfortune. The Lambs grieve for their bright, handsome son Fish. A strange visionary event caused him to be held down in the water, unseen, by the fishing net. Having beaten Fish’s chest back to life, Oriel feels she has condemned him to the brain damage which has left him childlike and obsessed with water. The anonymous voice-over begins: Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about in a good world in the midst of our living… Then Fish Lamb hurtles towards the river’s edge. And you can’t help but worry for them, love them, want for them – those who go down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you (p. 1). River is time and becoming: ‘There’s time – a whole riverful of time’. Opening, closing and punctuating the book are the scenes of plenty by ‘the beautiful the beautiful the river’, and old hymns and spirituals which make of the river release, baptism, food and drink, celebration, revelation. Once everyone was together and everyone believed. But then something went wrong. All the signs failed, and the favourite Lamb was lost, no longer quite alive and bitterly missing the transforming experience that was snatched from him. Sam Pickles, too, is denied the water. In losing his working (crayfishing) hand, Sam the gambler has been dealt a symbolic bad hand. Cloudstreet is a place of purgation. Grim spectres of maltreatment remain in the central windowless room. The central room is of course the buried heart of Australia, uncleansed by rivers. Both families struggle to make a go of sharing Cloudstreet. The Lambs open a shop from their front room. For Sam life (that is, money) is predetermined by the ‘shifty shadow’, the ‘hairy hand of God’, ‘Lady Luck’. Oriel Lamb feels tensely that her fate is in her hands: ‘We make war on the bad and don’t surrender’ (p. 230). Enraged by some failing of an offspring, she cries, ‘Has my life been a waste?’ But

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the Lambs no longer say grace, and instead of praying (or, as in Monkey Grip, consulting the I Ching) spin the knife. Nihilism – the crisis of value, meaning and desirability – begets fundamentalism: ‘The knife never lies’ (p. 53). The purgation continues. ‘Since Fish,’ Oriel says, ‘I’ve been losin the war. I’ve lost me bearins’ (p. 230). Despite her enthusiasm for ANZAC and Our Boys in previous wars, she loses faith in The Nation too. ‘[The country] doesn’t know what it believes in. You can’t replace mind country with the nation’ (p. 232). The Pickleses feel justified by faith – faith in the ‘shifty shadow’, the next drink, the next win, that something which will turn up. They are determinists. The Lambs feel justified by works alone, although the father Lester misbehaves by singing and joking. The Pickleses need to learn about the parable of the talents. The Lambs need to learn about grace. Gifts appear if you let them: consider the lilies of the field. Clearly the black man who so frequently appears near Cloudstreet is one of the dead who haunt the house, but out of goodwill, so that the malign spell on the house and its occupants will be broken – their sense that God is dead, as in Nietzsche’s parable about the madman in the square, and that this Fall is not yet perceived by the world. In the story of Fish’s brother Quick, the black man makes more noticeable interventions; as a mysterious hitch-hiker, for example, who – in the way of loaves and fishes – keeps the petrol tank on a quarter full as Quick’s truck speeds Perthwards. He is glimpsed walking on the water as Quick in his uncle’s dinghy draws in a miraculous, and then disastrous, draught of fishes. “A black angel,’ said Quick, ‘glowing like a lamp. Halle-bloody-lujah” (p 225). The magical realism (Quick’s lighting up like a 60-watt globe, or people flying and turning into animals in Rushdie) recalls García Márquez’s affectless proliferations and gigantisms, mutations born of a land no longer identical to itself, impounded and traded, a native land turned into the American Fruit Company. For Rushdie the collision of homeland and Empire gave birth to mutated fiction. Eclipsed homelands give birth to imaginary ones. Here, however, nothing is affectless. The authorial ‘I’ frequently breaks through, full of emotion on behalf of the families suppressing theirs. It is most like the unvanquished and prophetic spirit of Fish as yet undrowned, between his

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living and his dying, like that fleeting moment in the Ambrose Bierce story in which a reconciling future is imagined. ‘I can feel it even this side of the mirror – Quick’s calling out like a wounded bird, seeing, being, even now it makes me shiver’ (p. 209). The ‘blackfella’ is the voice of the watching, comforting and reproving spirit that includes them all. This voice abjures cynicism, expressing feelings that hardbitten, ‘chiacking’ Australians cannot express. The younger generation displays little of the stereotypical larrikin and wowser features of their parents. No longer the Pickles suspicion (‘What’s in it for you?’ was Sam’s question when Lester protected him against thugs) or the need for rort, the big spend-up at the track with ‘the light descending like a mantra’. And just as the Pickleses gradually discard impulse, the Lambs begin to pick it up. At the reception for the wedding of Rose and Quick, the severe Oriel Lamb – hitherto ‘I want an example set. I want Lamb behaviour’ – asks the disreputable Dolly to dance. Rose and Quick take up their place at the centre of Cloudstreet, marrying in a church ‘almost grand, but a good compromise, Quick thinks, between poofter High Church and shoe-box Baptist’ (p.318). Again, reconciliation. Finally, Fish is able to ‘complete the miracle’. The now-mixed family has been born into its country as the walls dividing the house in two are taken down. The old place’s ‘bulging west wall’ – is what others call Western Australia. When ‘the blackfella’ urged the wandering Quick to ‘go home’, it was because the blacks need whites who are conciliators, and because the whites also need permission to call a part of Australia home. Now with two families and one country, Quick ‘felt safe within his boundaries’. In the return to saying a form of grace before the big banquet, Lester accepts what the feckless Pickleses have always known. Cloudstreet is a Christian allegory of the first order combined with a passionate nationalism. These have won it great popularity. Winton’s characters are mostly ordinary people, fishers of men. Fish the Christ-figure observes from his Sontagesque place of undeadness, lamenting over the families like the Jesus of Matthew saying he would have gathered them under his wings like a hen her chicks if they had let him. Quick (so called because he is slow, and because Fish

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is ‘the dead’) is strengthened sufficiently by ‘thy rod and thy staff’ to come through many crises. He is the stable and resourceful Aussie from a good home: he marries the girl next door and becomes a policeman. This is not the Superman. Nietzsche denounced Christianity because the decay in Christian morality would be perceived by Christianity, and have to be taken to its logical conclusion. ‘Christian morality hypothetically offered man an absolute value: let the world have the character of perfection; made evil appear full of sense; posited a knowledge of absolute value in man; and gave him adequate knowledge of the means of protection from practical and theoretical nihilism.’52 The failure of morality would undermine its faith, and the result would be nihilism. This is what Nietzsche both laments and extols. In this novel, however, despite moral failures, everyone retains or regains faith, although not always in Christian form. Cloudstreet the place is metonym of their crisis of value, meaning, and desirability, the shaky edifice of faith. All the Lambs were swept by the tragedy of Fish into the death of their competitive wowser God. They became losers, lost children, doubters. Strong-arm Sam, with no grip, became a little man. Cloudstreet counters nihilism by outlining a path from nihilism. The families’ godliness and godlessness were untenable: one approached fundamentalism, the other the smiling nihilism of the good time. Forced to live together, they achieve something other than mateship, something other than ‘What’s in it for me?’ and are stronger for their entry into dynamic nihilism – voluntary exile, purgation and renewal. The Australian realist school of philosophy denies metaphysics. Nietzsche refused both atheism and conciliation. For him ‘although we will be homeless for a time, in this broken time of transition’, the end of the shakeout will be a new and unmistakable order of heroes and ‘men of ressentiment’, slaves. Cloudstreet’s characters come through the crisis because, thrown together in a truly Heideggerian sense, their being-unto-death takes on meaning through community, anathema to Nietzsche. Many will find this novel sentimental; its aim is to combat belief in cynicism and materialism, the Australian mix of suspicion and rort. This case for a reconstructed Christianity claims to be, at the heart of the telescreen age, a genuine

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project of dynamic nihilism. The rorting of Heaven: Carmel Bird’s Red Shoes Aldous Huxley said that the truth lies at the bottom of a very dirty well (p. 18). Wells feature in this grim fictional account of a dystopia based on fact. What is truth? Truth is a word used in the spinning of a bizarre cultic mythology. The Hill House Brethren in Bird’s novel, home to many theosophical fancies, were founded, inter alia, by Petra Penfold-Knight (Australian journalists knew her in fact by another name).53 An entrancing image in a book, of a little blonde girl seated in a wicker chair on an enormous lily pond, was a foundational experience for Petra: especially because the foundation of this child’s equilibrium was unseen, unguessed at, down there in the murk, a darkness under the smooth green overlapping surfaces. Petra, product of a teenage pregnancy and adopted out, grew up acquiescent, hiding her thoughts and emotions, allowing herself when very young to be seduced by the Reverend Somerset Jones in order to gain power. Working in a Bible shop, she drew in the power of magic, ritual and words: ‘The pages of this magical volume, those pages which whispered like silk, like water, like kisses in the dark’ (p. 7). Her beauty and detachment, she sees, will always win her converts: but she also wants the magic words. She will learn key phrases from theosophy, the Bhāgavād-gīta, alchemy, Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), and especially from the Book of Revelation: ‘And there appeared a great wonder in Heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’ (p. 8). Petra is one of those who burst from their existential vacuum into a ‘halo effect’, that charisma which requires no explanation and creates a new icon. Charles Taylor’s nova effect – the event bursting into life – is part of this. This lost child will become mistress over a whole tribe of lost children. In the course of their training she will say to them, often, ‘Without the mud and scum and darkness below the surface, there will be no lilies above the pool’ (p. 189). Dystopia is usually built upon the insatiable appetites of masters who deny all indulgence to their underlings. Whether proles, Party members, Deltas or Epsilons,

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those below who no longer believe in God will be made to believe in anything. From the late 1960s, when the Beatles went to India and studied transcendental meditation (a business, not a tradition, where westerners pay to be given the two or three words which will become their divine mantra) a cynicism evolved in which Christian apocrypha astrology, Hindu and Buddhist ideas like karma, chakra, maya, mantra, sannyasin, nirvana, popularized Jewish kabbala and other isms merged into a shimmering and unthreatening cosmos lit with colour and variety. In America and Australia this cosmos of ‘alternative’ belief is no mere alternative among the young and their baby-boomer parents. It is a sign of the ambiguous attitudes to authority held by Australians and Americans. Their open, friendly democracies do not submit, it seems, to the tyranny of establishments. But both nations, like everyone else, have their demotic tyrannies. In the US the power of the Presidency increasingly linked to evangelistic Christianity and market fundamentalism exploded in the 1980s into a mystique, driving objectors into a counter-culture with its own shibboleths. In Australia a counter-culture opposed the profound materialism that infiltrated even the idealistic young through the myth of mateship. You’ve got to go with the blokes. We were idealistic young together, bound by Eureka or Gallipoli: now we’re high up in the professions or politics – but we still have to look out for each other, mate. So it is with Bird’s Hill House Brethren. Irving Clay is a worldly, successful theologian, Master of a university college, author. (A sample: ‘The mind is a lake whereon the restless surface ripples of thought move constantly’). He is part of an old boy network of equally successful professionals, including Ambrose Goddard, who runs the Mandala private psychiatric clinic. There are also barristers, judges, and businessmen. All, motivated by ‘an inner emptiness’, seek more power. Since their mateship has already moved into a pretentious, near-cultic exclusivity, they are bowled over when, through a chance meeting, Petra Penfold-Knight walks among them. At a private meeting with Dr Clay, her cool beauty and poise lead him – upon hearing her exquisite words ‘The presence of God is around us in gentleness’ – to fall on his knees and kiss her silver sandals (p. 94). For Clay, like Petra, sort-of believes in what he says. As with Maxine, the

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New Age character in Helen Garner’s novella Cosmo Cosmolino, the question you are driven to ask them is ‘Is there anything you don’t believe in?’ (p. 9). It was the hypocritical absolutism of Christianity that led both to Nietzschian nihilism in the nineteenth century and to the playful heterodoxy of the New Age in the twentieth. But there is nothing playful about these movements’ managers. If you believe in anything, you may believe in nothing; but both the New Age and magical realism in literature believe it possible. A good example of an integrity-free zone is the fashionableness in the 1980s of angels – Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, gift cards with cherubs, little books on angels for Christmas presents. The archangel Gabriel holds a central if hysterical and disorganized place in Rushdie’s antifundamentalist Satanic Verses (1988). Angels are the topos of Garner’s Cosmo Cosmolino, in which she corrects this cute market image in her epigraph: Rilke’s ‘Every angel is terrible’. The narrator in Red Shoes is none other than Petra’s guardian angel. Like the angel in commercialized pop culture, this one is detached, freelance, more life coach or minder than messenger of God. The cool, jaunty, tone of his narration could be called ironic but is in fact cynical. When Petra as a child asked him to push a little boy into the water, and later in fact the boy fell in, it was ‘none of our concern to save him’. Further, ‘our bond was strengthened from that day’ (p. 21). ‘Morality,’ he says, ‘was not really my thing.’ He spectates and abets: a sign not of the presence of God, but of his absence. A sign, too, of the 1980s, apotheosis of Thatcherism, when the super-rich became gods. They reported to no-one higher: there was no-one higher. Like this guardian angel, they were signs with no referent. Nevertheless the angel was, in a dismaying way, a genuine sign of something. Spare, footloose, a charming cypher in the dechristianised West, he meant a good deal to the Taliban in Afghanistan beating off the Russians, the Ayatollah triumphant in Iran, and the Islamic jihadists. The main way out of nihilism is dogmatism. In the mountains behind Melbourne, Petra and Irving find the Hill House Brethren a home on a large estate they called Ararat. Here, in a heavily fortified wing, Petra raises a dozen or so little girls, fraudulently adopted as babies from a home for

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unmarried mothers run by Dr Winter’s wife. At Ambrose Goddard’s Mandala Clinic, patients are given LSD – ‘experimentally’ – at Government expense, plus deep sleep therapy, which can of course be fatal. The little girls wear black pinafores and have their hair dyed blonde; they are, after all, to be mothers of a superior race, who will rule after the new Holocaust. One remembers Nietzsche’s admiration for the ‘blond beast’ who has ravaged and prevailed over the centuries, a player perhaps in the Holocaust to come. The little girls also wear red shoes, a motif investigated further in the footnote section of the book. Red shoes are signs in children’s folklore of feminine submission, but also of feminine defiance against fierce envy on the part of a wicked Queen or stepmother. Andersen’s Little Gerda wears red shoes which she loses during her long journey to the land of the Snow Queen who had spirited away her little friend Kay. In Perrault, Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off part of their feet so as to fit into the tiny slippers which becomes red with their blood. In Andersen’s ‘Red Shoes’, the wicked woman’s feet are cut off, and she must dance on bloody stumps – a deathly compulsion echoed in the film of the same name. As ‘The Snow Queen’ shows, sex is never far from a little girl with red shoes. The abduction of Kay is a near-rape, and the Queen traps him with a puzzle in which he must put all the ice shards together to form the word ‘Eternity’. Eternal life, for a psyche with a splinter of glass in its eye so that all that is lovely looks mean, is a bitter cynicism. The splinter of ice in Kay’s heart makes him care about nothing – especially not love. The Snow Queen must have young boys, Irving Clay and Ambrose Goddard must have young girls. Despite the gushing talk of the Brethren, the girls are starved, beaten and punished with unanaesthetised ECT, or LSD (‘threshholding’). But Ambrose likes to make them fast and take LSD, shove their faces in the pillow and bugger them. Irving Clay does the same with the College maids before going into the pulpit of a Sunday. Smiles are central to the nihilism: ‘Every nurse wears a Mickey Mouse badge. No matter where you go, you will see, on a sleeve, a cap or a backpack an image of Mickey Mouse. Forget Jesus, Elvis, Diana. The Mouse rules’ (p 118). The central section of the book concerns Celeste, one of the little girls raised by the Brethren. Growing up dutifully in the Brethren fold, as a teenager she is sent away

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to write an account of her life for Petra. ‘Mama is the incarnation of the World Mind, and I am nothing (p. 118)’ she writes. When Dr Goddard has sex with her, ‘This was hell, and I was in Hell’ (p. 188). She dreams of an ice cave ‘with deadly stilettos pointing up and hanging down like teeth or glass shards’ (p. 195). She writes: ‘I am afraid of the Great Nothing. And I am afraid’ (p. 196). Angels customarily announce themselves with ‘Be not afraid’; not Celeste’s. The journal reaches Petra, who takes action, although not in this case the swift hypodermic and the bundling down the old well behind Mandala Clinic. Celeste’s struggle for value, meaning and desirability is over. No claims by outraged families get past the eminent lawyers and doctors of the Brethren network. Petra’s guardian angel seems much more alert and supportive than Celeste’s. At one stage he derides other guardian angels as withering and atrophying. Perhaps they have heard the news from The Gay Science that God is dead. They are decadents, passive nihilists, serving a system with no spirit left in it. But with Petra’s guardian angel running the narrative, Heaven itself has been rorted. Thinking about religion has, like so much else, become split between theory and impulse. The Hill House Brethren have dreamed up a crackpot theory to justify their lowest impulses – to deceive, dominate and brutalise, and have sex with little girls. Red Shoes conflates two separate real-life conspiracies: ‘The Family’s’ operations in the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne, and the ‘deep sleep therapy’ at Chelmsford Hospital in Sydney. These programs were both Huxleyite dystopias, heavily dependent on mind-altering drugs to enforce power; hubristic, rich, and secret. Like 1984, they relied on absolute submission and surveillance. The Hill House Brethren have even rorted Huxley’s sacred soma, that term borrowed from the Hindu Vedanta to mean for Huxley a ‘heavenly’ but wholly chemical pacifier. This ‘soma’ is hallucinogenic mushroom passed into the Mother’s urine, which by being drunk passes into the urine of everyone down the hierarchical chain. Our narrator’s snicker at this story reminds us of the close Australian association between suspicion and rort, generating cynicism. It reminds us that this angel is will-to-power, joined to Petra who has ‘the strongest will I’ve ever known’. Her angel helped her ‘through a near-nervous breakdown, which she came out of with a new and adamantine purpose’ (pp 65–66).

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A Nietzschean crisis: what does not kill me makes me stronger. Nietzsche was the guardian angel of the century’s notorious figures. But then, so was Christ. Fuck me white: Kim Scott’s Benang In this indigenous Australian novel the central character says, ‘It is not always so easy to speak from the heart’ (p. 145). Especially if you have been raised to be the ‘first white man’ – that is, the first-born-all-white-man in the Aboriginal family line. Speaking from the heart may help you on the way to extinction. The white grandfather who plotted this line, according to the brutal genetic ‘theory’ of the day, did not do so out of the goodness of his heart, though this was the wowserish claim. ‘Breeding out the colour’, as practised by Harley’s grandfather, Ernest Scat, a white man, was a notion that prevailed from the turn of the century, endorsed by the Western Australia Chief Protector of Aborigines, A O Neville, so as to become the policy basis for the removal of part-Aboriginal children from their parents. The notion was that the white race is ‘stronger genetically’, Aborigines being a ‘child race’, and that after three or four crossings with whites, no Aboriginal heredity would be apparent. No danger of ‘throwbacks’, ‘atavism’, Ernest is assured (pp 26, 39, 45– 49). Full-bloods, half-castes, quadroons and octroons are glib terms on the tongues of the local Protectors of Aborigines, the police, given the power to dispose of Aboriginal people locally. Under the 1905 Act, Aboriginal people could be moved anywhere, and told whom to marry and where to live; they had to get a permit to work, could not drink and could not vote (pp 149, 206). The Chief Protector, whose mission is ‘to uplift and elevate these people to our own plane’, relies on those on the ground to do the work of ‘diluting the strain’, ‘getting the dirty tributary flowing cleanly into the great river’ (pp 11, 27, 74): that is, by raping the women. These being good workers, cohabiting with them may follow. The West Australian newspaper declared ‘On the ground alone that [the halfcaste] is a nuisance to us, we should hurry on his disappearance.’54 The family that is the subject of Ernest’s ministrations has finally come racially full circle. Sandy One Mason, patriarch and first white of the line to land on these shores, married the full-

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blood Fanny Benang, and now – five mixed generations on – has in young Harley a pristine, ‘all-white’ descendant. Ernest is certain of this, having parted not only Harley’s hair and fingers for any dark residual traces, but also his rectum. Ernest is not a wowser underneath his skin or anyone else’s. Harley’s reaction when Ernest slumps to the floor with a stroke is ‘Well, fuck me white, old man!’ This cannot be: this white custodian of all power, the elder to whom as an Aboriginal I have owed respect despite his crimes, is now at my mercy (p. 27). He is saying, too, this is as unbelievable as the idea that I could be made white through fucking. The story of Harley, father Tommy, grandfathers Ern and Sandy Two, uncles Will and Jack Chatalong, great grandparents Sandy One and Fanny is a difficult and protracted one. As narrative it is abnormal, and not only because Harley is trying to piece it together in its human reality rather than Ern’s pseudo-science. It is also subject to a kind of naïve/‘native’ wandering, reflective and non-linear, and touched with magical realism, that trope symbolic of dispossession and folk fantasy. Harley at the opening of the novel is ‘literally’ floating, anchoring himself by his toes to ceiling joists so as not to bump into the ceiling. While still with the speechless and paralysed Ern, Harley meets up again with his uncles, Will and Jack Chataway, and discovers a kinder traditional approach. ‘Old Ern – he’s a bastard all right. But, you know – you’re not like him, right?’ (p. 111) Thereafter, Harley and his uncles travel the heartland region (kurt-bugjar) of the Western Australian south coast either in body or in memory, slowly establishing a real history of the entwining of black and white, to help the three enter the mystery of Harley’s floating, his absence. ‘Empty yarning – you could call it characterisation’ (p. 190). All three men are strikingly alone, cut off like the rest of their family because if you want to work and get on you must desert your kin. But Harley has an additional problem: ‘Again I digress and confuse all of us one with the other, as if we were not all individuals, as if there were not such thing as progress and development, as if this history were just one variant on the same motif’ (p. 367). It seems an unhappy eternal return of the same, decadence, slave mentality, passive nihilism. These failings arise from being constantly moved on, and constantly keeping out of sight in camps among

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the dunes, so that the ‘half-caste’ baby will not be taken away, or the woman desired by a pastoralist or policeman. The ‘spree’ is too common: ‘the squeals, the glass breaking, the silence at their backs as they staggered away. “There,’ says one prospector to Ern, ‘you’re initiated” (p 48). The story weaves between generations as one anecdote caps another. Sandy One, the fair-skinned English sealer – revered by watching blacks in strikingly Nietzschean terms, as he came ashore, as a ‘blond beast’ hero – may be confused with Sandy Two, his son by Fanny Benang. Uncles, wives, cousins have intermarried. The reader must travel through this with Harley: ‘It was never random, it was never just wandering, more like my own wondering’ (p. 471). Some elements of Benang we have met before. In Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia the hero Norman is a ‘yeller-feller’. Herbert wrote with commitment of black, white and mixed-blood lives but was not black himself. His book was a step on the way. Benang is also a response to Voss. There is an echo, too, of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 in the predicament into which many Aboriginal people fell. For Yossarian madness, danger and compulsion attended all possible choices. Benang demonstrates the incompatibility of the legal and human status of blacks, and the necessity of choice. Constable Hall classifies the mixed-blood girl Kathleen as white because she is a quiet and reliable servant and he plans to marry her to his mate Ern Scat – she being pregnant to the Constable and he already married. An Aboriginal man who writes to the Chief Protector for the right to enter a pub because ‘I don’t mix up with the Blacks and earn my living same as a white man’ is arbitrarily refused this right, by mail (p. 68). He has thus lost the support and integrity of living with his own people to no purpose. The mixed bloods who are the product of white ‘sprees’ become so numerous that they must be pushed bodily into reserves under the 1935 Act: the rate of sickness, misery and death there – one might call them concentration camps, after the laagers of the Boer War – is such that further concealment of fact becomes necessary. First of all, it is agreed that the Aboriginal people are ‘dying out’ and the role of officialdom is to ‘soothe the dying pillow’. When this is shown to be false, ‘breeding out the colour’ takes over as mythology (p. 75).

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son: you will not get a permit for them. Although you may be the widow of a white, and thus the lawful holder of a lease, this can be arbitrarily withdrawn if the official’s mates are interested in your land. The Catch 22 for Australian blacks until recently is that the whites will forcibly mix with them, but they themselves must not attempt to mix with whites, despite the demand that they work with whites and live a white life. Once forcibly mixed with, they must not mix with their mixed children. But if they do not, those children will do very badly on the reserves. If they make something of themselves and acquire a lease, they may not hold on to it if a white wants it. If they are employed by a white pastoralist, they must not expect the right to adequate water – or pay, since the pastoralists believe they should find their own sustenance, and any pay should come from the government, since the pastoralists pay their taxes. Keeping body and soul together, then, is the aim of indigenous groups. It is here that a kind of lateral eternal return helps Harley: the wondering/wandering, to find a morality and overcome doubt. ‘Speaking from the heart, I will tell you that I am part of a much older story, one of perpetual billowing from the sea, with its rhythm of return, return and remain’ (p 495). The double-bind impossibility of being Aboriginal after white settlement comes from the four lies of white Australia: the ‘theory’ of Nevillism, and the rules that you have to go with your mates, that only the countable counts, and that only the same is equal. These rules are the stuff of Australian disvalue, a nihilism that has Harley blowing in the wind, floating, because, having been ‘elevated’ and ‘uplifted’ as far as the whitening process can go, he has no grounding, no relationships, no substance. Returning to the dispersed stories may reveal a kind of foundation. Pablo Armellino writes: The wished-for Aboriginal discourse lays down its foundations on the dispersal of identity and on the common but differently endured experience of resistance to systematic annihilation. This, Deleuze and Guattari argue in One Thousand Plateaux, is the distinctive condition of the rhizome, which enhances the plasticity of Aboriginal culture [with] ‘multiple entryways and exits, and its own lines of flight’…Benang neither begins nor ends. 55 Talk must be to one another, unlike Sandy One who ‘told too much...where the

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waterholes were, all the way to the goldfields, now there is a tavern, a place for a Christmas spree’ (p. 466). These were the goldfields which Manning Clark saw as places where men robbed and violated first the earth and then one another.56 Harley becomes dematerialized into the smoke that is at once the campfires where he now sings to visitors and also his own circling narration. He is spirit, his substance – with his colour – bred out. Any presence beyond this perceived nihilism would seem ineffectual. But this spirit is what will return and remain, a transcendence Voss achieved through his experience of will, alienation, and love. Voss’s friends conclude: ‘When does present become future? Now. Every moment that we live and breathe, and love, and suffer, and die. We are not locked forever in our own bodies. Voss did not die...He is there still. As for the facts – the air will tell us’ (p 448). Throughout that novel, the curling tracery of spirit as white smoke, cloud, a letter, is as evident as in Benang: an intertextual enfolding of the white metaphysical tradition into the black. If there is a single message in Benang it is that the marriage of white and black is good for Australia. Its title is the name of Harley’s proud and resourceful ancestor Fanny, a white transcription of ‘Pinyin or Winnery or Wonyin’: all mean ‘tomorrow’. The white will die spiritually without it, of the cynicism that has rorted the blood. In the famous phrase, ‘white man got no dreaming’. Indigenous metaphysics, like the Australian literary tradition in general, exists to confront the white Australian materialism that says, like the Australian Realist philosophers, ‘The mind is the brain; nothing more’. The blacks, having been mixed, are willing in Benang to dignify that mixing within the self of family. Harriette says, ‘All of us should be here, even that Ern – if he could remember who he is, who we are’ (p. 140). Benang – tomorrow – requires this. A final essential irony emerges: that by wandering and wondering Harley and his uncles uncover a foundational error. Sandy One, the blond beast from the sea, who won the respect and liking of even the most repulsive pastoralists, was not white, but a mixed-blood. Only at the end of the wandering have we got to the beginning. How arbitrary are judgments of white and black, good and evil – like Constable Hall doing the same, judging Kathleen Mason to be white when it

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suited his purposes, though she was a mixed-blood. The Neville calculations were totally wrong, theory justifying impulse. There are no knowable origins. Harley will not need to say, in future, ‘I am a fraction of what I might have been’ (p. 26). White’s Voss is a near-perfect version of a Nietszchean hero in all his vulnerability and force of will. The expedition will fail, its members lost in the terror at the heart of Australia’s being. Yet there is triumph in the achievement of humility – impossible for Keneally’s early convicts, betrayed by oaths made by the powerful and the powerless alike, the dead letters of a slave-morality in a forsaken land. Garner’s oath is to the demands of freedom and Nietzschean lightness in 1970s Melbourne: comradeship, unpossessive love, the instincts. But the ‘feeling of power’ comes as much from drugs as from freedom – unlike the feelings of abandonment to the ‘Great Nothing’ associated with forced LSD in the secret cult of Bird’s Hill House Brethren. Winton’s Cloudstreet attempts to recuperate Christian values too long caricatured by ‘wowserism’ and ‘larrikinism’ in English and Irish affiliations. Scott’s Benang discloses the warped relation of theory and impulse in the whites’ treatment of the blacks until very recently. This is the crisis of value, meaning and desirability which Australia so often sidesteps. Enormous strides have been made in creating a strong multiracial society, but still the indigenous people are denied the treaty that offered some guarantees to the native peoples of every other former British colony, and asylum seekers are locked up indefinitely on remote islands although most are found to be genuine refugees. The ‘blond beasts’ seem to reject the ‘slave-race’. As the Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, said at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932: ‘That bridge of understanding which will unite all Australians is still to be built. But it will be built.’ To create, one hopes, an independent nation in law and respect of human rights. Till then, its novelists continue with a rare intensity of vision to deny their political class’s denial of the spirit. Until everyone is all there equally, there will be no-one home.

CHAPTER 5 FROM BIG BROTHER TO BIG BROTHER Values for sale With Endemol’s Big Brother reality show on television in twenty-one Western countries by century’s end, the age of screens reaches its nadir, and brings full circle the phenomenon of screen control depicted in 1984. Hardly reality: the participants are neither acting naturally nor are they actors. As Baudrillard would say, the participants are simulacra of themselves.1 ‘Reality TV’ is the least real TV; it means something highly constructed and formatted, a context built expressly, which is a contradiction. Rather than ‘simulacrum’ we might say celebrity, icon or persona, ‘always a construct, always a product, an artifact, functioning in a complex arena of conflicting social and economic values and relations’.2 All are terms from postmodern theory, positing a reality in which everything is pure narrative, game, appearance without ground, irony. That is how the show was supposedly contrived, as self-parody. But these abstractions really mean impulse, which is the centre of the show’s appeal. How far will they go tonight? Although within the frame of the novel the character Big Brother did not exist, he was all the more real for that to the people. Similarly in our time the unreal is the most real. Since after Nietzsche and Time Magazine of October 1965 God did not exist, it was necessary to re-invent him, as the all-seeing eye which will judge and condemn, as in Paradise Lost – Who will be expelled from the house? – or redeem and

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glorify the winner. The real frisson comes from our Assumption, through voting, into the realm of the telescreen, which is Godhead. A BBC radio discussion in September 2012 involving the producer of Endemol (the British Big Brother company) the production team and several contestants from the first series freely admitted that the programme was ‘crass, tacky’, that it was ‘elemental cruelty’, that it had ‘so much control’ over contestants, was ‘deeply stressful’, and deliberately provoked ‘class warfare’. Further, ‘the white male always came out on top’. The Prime Minister had to face accusations of racism during a tour of India because of racial insults on Big Brother. One hears little about that; or that more people voted in the first series of Big Brother than in the British general election the same year.3 What went on backstage was no more civilized: one participant was not informed of the death and funeral of her father, and there are reports of the ‘slave labour’ of stand-ins and the subjection of aspirants to unpleasant sensorydeprivation experiments during the audition process.4 The contestants may have become celebs, but they could also be called a Nietzschean slave-race, Orwellian proles, Huxleyan Deltas and Epsilons. The producer is saying, with Bazarov, with Dada, ‘Your hopes – nothing!’ The smiling nihilism of the Big Brother house conceals the power hierarchy which will leave most contestants humiliated. Shortly after this BBC analysis, the now famous Endemol producer – said by critic Victor Lewis Smith to have ‘done more to debase television over the last decade than anyone else’ – was named head of the Royal Society of Arts.5 Many ironies here. The show would claim to be an ‘ironic’ revisiting of Orwell’s panopticon. But today’s ‘irony’ only dallies with truth. Inverted commas are soon lost, as can be seen from any reading of the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the press since the end of the Bosnian War. Patrick Neate, writing on the moral relativism of Generation Y in the 1990s, says ‘We drink Starbucks, but ironically’.6 What does this mean? It means, basically, that you buy as advertising tells you: negation of will. This ‘irony’ is a mere backslide from value to disvalue, and is of a piece with the political disengagement of the times. It was the strong

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political engagement of the idealistic young in the 1970s, that brief liberation, which made Western society kinder for the average person at the level of institutions. Even at the end of the 1960s schools, hospitals and other institutions including the family were mercilessly hierarchical. The Church was God, in Simone Weil’s words a ‘social idol’, repressiveness in the name of an absolute value, courting Nietzschean derision. How so, since God was meant to be dead? It is as if, feeling the undercurrent of vast social change, churches and other institutions dug in, mercilessly coercing their adherents in their enforcement of a suffocating togetherness. The Second Vatican Council of 1965 did, however, open up Catholicism in line with the other democratizing tendencies of the time. By the 1980s, before the market takeover of political life, society was assured of the principles and progress mocked by Turgenev’s character Bazarov in Fathers and Sons. Yet his contempt for human littleness is still that of both Big Brothers. Smiling nihilism created The Mickey Mouse Club’s long sequence of chanting and soaring music during which the Mouse was borne, enthroned and adored. (The highest values devalue themselves.) He appeared too in Houellebecq’s Atomised, Bird’s dystopic Red Shoes and Updike’s sceptical Rabbit trilogy. Rabbit Angstrom himself seems the purest smiling nihilism, passive nihilist to Skeeter’s dynamic (and demoniac) one, negation-of-will to Skeeter’s will-to-negation. Why does Rabbit prevail? Because under the false innocence of smiling nihilism (Skeeter is false (fantastic) experience) there lies a genuine innocent. ‘What about the thing we talked about?’ he pleads to Eccles, the local minister. ‘The thing behind everything?’ Rabbit doesn’t care about being thought naïve or passé. Rabbit believes, and lives. The Big Brother contestants do care about seeming naïve (the pose is false experience, ‘cool’) or passé (the pose is false innocence, ‘spontaneity’). They are frozen into these poses which have been banalised throughout the telescreen age, presenting in fiction both false innocence (Ida in Another Country, Charles in The Sea, The Sea, Bruno in Atomised) and false experience (the heroine of The Lover, Harley in Benang, Jack in White Noise). Expressions of false experience were everywhere: ‘Been there, done that’.

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‘I’m so-o-o over him’. Just as in Orwell the Inner Party manipulated everything, so the inner circles of the corporate/political culture do today, making individuals feel now more, now less in the know rather than naïve or passé, setting up a Disestablishment which dispenses disvalue. Desire is created for ideas, services and products of indifferent good – guns in cities, for example, cigarettes and alcopops, porn, electronic games, the raunch culture, Big Brother itself. And if Starbuck’s coffee is not good, why ‘drink it ironically’? Why drink it at all? The revaluation of values is no guarantee of value. One can chart the passage of value in language from relatively neutral, to value-charged, and finally to devalued: indeed, to Newspeak. On an imaginary value scale of one to five, the phrase Big Brother has moved five places in order of value, from pre-1948 lower case literal to metaphorical upper case (Orwell) through an ironic phase to a privatised one (the TV show) and finally to end-of-century valueless, whose use by those promoting it is cynical and nihilist. The first three orders are positive, but irony speaks with a forked tongue, and can be exploited. With the movement from first to fifth order of disvalue, the Blakeian innocence of thought degrades into an exhausted or false experience, at best a compromise with truth. Words used in war for propaganda are a prime example: ‘pacified’ and ‘saved’ were words of no value to the Vietnamese whose villages were destroyed. The semantic value-shift resembles Nietzsche’s at times contradictory use of the term ‘nihilism’ – something ideally positive and dynamic one minute, the crisis of consciousness ‘pregnant with future’, and the next, something weak in spirit. In some of his works inspiring innocence alternates with a bitter, almost ruined experience. This is the contradiction at the heart of Alex in A Clockwork Orange – childlike in his devotion to Beethoven, but a practiced exponent of killing and maiming. Is Nietzsche’s ‘blond beast’, the heroic pillaging Viking a good nihilist gaining Lebensraum for his people, or just a brute addicted to humiliating others? Considering Nietzsche’s contempt for Jews and Christians, women and the weak, a utilitarian, pragmatic society like ours which judges

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ethical choices primarily by their consequences might consider the philosopher to bear some responsibility for Nazi and Stalinist crimes. And those of Pol Pot, who called himself Little Brother. We are all, to some extent, Big Brother contestants, as we are the Orwellian rank and file dreading Room 101, and permanently dissatisfied Bernards from Brave New World. By the turn of the century, personal ascendancy was more de rigueur than in the 1950s, yet there were no greater chances – pace Warhol – of securing it; and the security of what one owned was under threat from changes in the natural world. As Jacques Monod wrote in 1971 of modern man’s predicament, ‘The Old Covenant is in pieces, and man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged only by chance.’7 The housemates’ contracts (rather than covenants) do not protect them from the effects of a peculiarly banalised nihilism and at worst, cruelty. It is Camus’ ‘no more rules, no more fathers’. Perhaps this is the real Nietzschean (and existential) nemesis. At every second the contestants are creating themselves, becoming what they are, overcoming themselves, affirming themselves, conscious exclusively of the will to power, training to be icons. What does it matter what they are – and what the audience votes for? The whole thing has no meaning or value – except perhaps to remind us of Camus’s Clamence, going to desperate lengths to evade judgment by his peers. Signs, faiths and theories Descartes doubted everything but reason, which for him proved God. We doubt everything except impulse and theory. Scientific theory one should not object to per se (though some cultural theorists claim that the Enlightenment’s scientific revolution is responsible for the Holocaust).8 It is simply unfortunate that owing to the pressure to sell research, too many embryonic, unreplicated and contradictory scientific theories are at large. This is no ground for objecting to its empiricism, although psychology’s empiricism can be too directive. Cultural theory however derives directly from Nietzsche and is anti-empirical. It tries to outdo its founder

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with obfuscatory surenchères, always embedding the demand for impulse – drive, play, desire, jouissance – within abstraction and self-referentiality: in Stein’s phrase from the surrealist period, ‘freezing its fountain’. As far back as 1976 Daniel Bell warned of the ‘apocalyptic, hedonistic and nihilistic trend in the humanities’.9 This refers to the charming yet dissipated floating away from fact and reference. Intoxicatingly antiliteral, it played with the most dangerous aspects of Nietzsche. The following is reasonable: Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, required anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it. The next is not: But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea of a use-function; and the whole history of a ‘thing’, an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the cause of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace each other at random. 10 Here is the break with the empirical world, the turning of the critical eye inward to the continuous refinement of the dozen or so theoretical schools which conduct interpretation in the humanities and social sciences: the source of Saussure’s ‘there are only differences between signs’, deconstruction’s ‘chain of signifiers’ and post-modernism’s ‘play of surfaces’. This is what is satirized by Pynchon, DeLillo and Sarraute. Market fundamentalism’s theory of equilibrium is just as antiempirical. Its infinite ‘rationality’, which takes the form of pseudomathematics, is as indifferent to unmonied humans and the sovereignty of states as it was to the empirical reality of the 2008 financial crash. Those without the ‘right’ language are lost. But in these novelists and in real life, not having the language can mean integrity. Whenever intellectuals lament the absence of a new discourse to counter today’s conventions, they should take care. A new discourse may be a new theory that sidelines the human. What is needed is an Orwellian wager on clear, simple words. Freud’s plain-speaking interpretation of dreams

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becomes coded first in Strachey’s Latinate, abstract English, then in structuralist, then post-structuralist language. Theory, like the screen, is mediate, interposing itself between person and world to the point of mystification, judgment and control. Orwell’s reclamation of plain language to challenge power targeted Burke’s ‘Obscurity is why power is sublime’.11 Some intellectuals crave salvific abstractions: ‘nihilism’ is beefed up by Deleuze into ‘disjunctive synthesis’.12 An example, perhaps, of what Tony Judt called ‘narcissistic obscurantism’.13 Judt engages with Orwell: ‘Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion”). Rather than suffering from the onset of Newspeak, we risk the rise of “nospeak”.’14 Since Orwell’s time, his use of the word ‘decent’ to praise ‘traditional British values’ has been derided. It sounded reactionary, class-based, wishy-washy-liberal, Etonspeak, anti-intellectual, naïve and passé. Yet some form of the idea of decency must emerge, probably not in long words but through example, the public figure renouncing empty iconhood to restore authority to an idea of the good rather than of the powerful. Cultural theories claim truth, as do most beliefs. (Which is why the newer generations choose to have beliefs which they understand are not true; this will leave them freer, save them from hypocrisy. An example of nihilism as reason separated from revelation.) One may feel nostalgic for the Renaissance, when reason and faith together made a firm foundation on which to stand and on which humanists like Montaigne, Erasmus, Cervantes, Bacon and Shakespeare stood very squarely.15 The world and its inhabitants were very present in a robust, rather than attenuated, Weltanschauung. The first novel was born. Now theory obsesses over – as it were – how many angels can dance on the head of a metonym or a Jcurve. ‘Economics,’ writes Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, ‘has to become less theological’.16 Much of the faith that used to be devotional has gone into theory and impulse. But Nietzsche had no desire to kill God. And after an agnostic century,

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the British census indicated in 2001 that 70% regard themselves as Christian. In 2006 and again in 2009, only 18% of Australians declared themselves to be without faith in God or a higher power. How many are taking a Pascalian wager on God? It is a truism that Anglophone Western society has turned its back on institutions, not belief. Three things, Alister McGrath concludes, did for telescreen age atheism. One: the mass murders of Stalinism and Nazism; regimes which claimed to liberate the people from the barbarities of religion committed worse barbarities. The Polish poet Ceszlaw Milosz observes that it is not religion that is the opium of the people, but the lack of it: the conviction that there would be no judgment and no retribution.17 The totalitarians had a free hand. (Indeed, religion may not be the opium of the people – opium is, heroin, and other things, including the screen.) Two: atheism can build organisations, but not community. Religious experience works on many levels. Three: imagination, which can make an idea real to us.18 This is emphasized by Margaret Somerville in her work on the ethical imagination, which places the natural first as the centre of a non-relativist, nonreligious, shared ethics.19 Karen Armstrong argues that religion unites mythos and logos.20 Rowan Williams suggests that ‘secularism leaves us linguistically bereaved.’21 Cognitively too, perhaps: John Updike said: ‘Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position’.22 But for many it will always remain, as Eagleton puts it, ‘benighted and implausible’.23 Imagination in the telescreen age is used primarily for play or selling. In the art world these can coincide wonderfully. Nietzsche and his descendants thought that art was the great end of man. What would he think of the Ancient Chinese Warriors T shirt, the Botticelli Primavera mouse mat, the Fra Angelico Annunciation mug and address book? The category ‘postmodern’ permits all. But is this phenomenon simply a nihilism, the rejection of any value other than money? Art is brought closer to us, but what for? Denys Trussell argues, extremely provocatively, that modern art is not art, lacking a gestalt relation to the world: ‘its telling cannot release us into meaning’.24 The eminent American critic,

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professor and curator Dave Hickey has denounced the contemporary art world, calling it calcified, self-reverential and hostage to rich collectors who have no respect for what they are doing. ‘It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn’t understand, you’d have some obligation to guess. Now you wouldn’t look at it. You ask a consultant…It’s nasty and it’s stupid. I’m an intellectual and I don’t care if I’m not invited to the party. I quit.’25 Cultural theories in the arts valued above all impulse – the radical tendency, outbreak and breakthrough, the Bataille-inspired transgression, the aleatory, the angry, the playful. These led to money, and were sacred (Warhol’s ‘Good business is the best art’). Theorists – consultants – supplied the interpretation. Yet things are changing. In a passion against fashionable thinking in art and beyond, cultural commentator Clive Hamilton cried ‘Transgression is dead! Subverting the dominant paradigm is passé!’26 The leading Marxist Lacanians now talk of a life of charity and love.27 Slavoj Žižek said in an interview during the 2005 European referendum campaign ‘It is because I am an atheist, and from the left, that I say we must be clear in the Constitution about our Judaeo-Christian roots’.28 A rebuff to Nietzsche, whose argument was that since we have lost faith in Christianity we must abandon Judaeo-Christian morality: a disingenuous argument, since the major tenets of moral law are the same across religions and philosophies, cultures and epochs. Buddhism’s and Islam’s law of universal compassion, like Jesus’ ‘Do unto others’, is Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and is echoed almost word for word in Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism. The prominent school of atheist polemic led by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (coyly conflated by Terry Eagleton into ‘Ditchkins’) expressed such an atheist moral panic that at times it labelled as fundamentalist people of the most reticent religious views.29 Underestimating human reason as well as faith, they confused the hard official line – and the crimes – of the Catholic Church, rhapsodic End-Timers, creationists and jihadists with the reflective practice of ordinary people of faith (see the ‘faith paradox’, Introduction.) It almost seems as if moderate believers in religion and non-religion

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are the only reasonable people left. Nicholas Wade adds an evolutionary rejoinder to Dawkins: ‘What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religious language of their community just as they are predisposed to learn its language.’ He adds, ‘For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.’30 Peter Hitchens, brother of polemicist atheist Christopher, insists that [under market fundamentalism] religion is the sole defence against power of the poor and weak.31 One view is that the religious – like any other people – can be divided into two groups, those of good and bad faith. Of scepticism, one might say, and of cynicism. Those in the first category revalue their values with honest doubt, interrogating their faith and especially their practice, including Christianity’s (inter alia) oppressions of body and spirit. The believer is answerable. The cynical religionist is will-to-truth and will-to-power. Religious belief should be, by its very nature, wide open in its innocence and its experience. At the close of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, wowsers and larrikins come together at a wedding, a big feast in hope. Competitive Protestant individualism, moralising, denied the spirit; careless and cynical collectivity, amorality, denied meaning. Simon Critchley stresses ‘the true nature of faith: the rigorous activity of the subject that proclaims itself into being at each instant, without guarantees or security, and which seeks to abide within the infinite demand of love.’32 It would be a major irony if at the second millennium the Nietzschean wheel should come full circle and the most radical step were to embrace the moderate Christianity Nietzsche so despised. Disestablishment and refoundation Then there is literature: living the question, as Rilke said. Milan Kundera sees the novel as the precious safeguard of individuality in the twentieth century, and writes about life without the doctrine of eternal return – awareness of the ‘burden of history’ – as ‘unbearable lightness of being’, a ‘moral perversity in which

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everything is cynically pardoned in advance’.33 Susan Sontag used the novel to flesh out the clear moral lines of her essays. Novels work through a knotted density of reality to distinguish disvalue from value, and portray individuals making their hopeful, painful and separate ways. One thinks of the nomadic monastic individual who Morris Berman hopes will lead us out of decline.34 The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield speaks of the power of novels to give you an insight which the screen cannot give into how another person feels and thinks, its domain being metaphor, meaning and a sense of consequences.35 If ethics is today about not messing things up, as Somerville argues, for future generations, then Lessing’s Golden Notebook shows how grim is the experience of being the first generation with the power to destroy the secular sacred – the world. First, in the fifties, this meant the bomb; at century’s end, global warming; in between, we have deferred to the telescreen. Golding’s innocent Neanderthals have this intuition of the world as legacy. Berger’s Vico and Vica are at the end of the epochal line. Most radically, the failure of value, meaning and desirability in Atomised is such that humanity has to be recreated by science. Natural selection is just too chancy: Brave New World has come. The anti-morality of smiling nihilism said ‘Do it all. Have it all.’ In Smile or Die, Barbara Ehrenreich speaks of the mass self-delusion that left Americans unable to contemplate negative outcomes, and thus led to the crash of 2008.36 And educated people – myself included – loved theory: iconic fascination, prop for research, and competitive mind-game. But we cannot afford any more to indulge intellect with theory – theorists love Big Brother – or indulge body with a regime of impulse. Goudsblom’s view of ‘the nihilist problem’ may sum up the impulse/theory oscillation: that nihilism occurs because of the legitimacy of any number of mutually exclusive judgments.37 Thinkers may have to sign up to one theory, when many theories carry some truth; you have to put your money down for one consumer item or activity over a thousand others. Sheena Iyengar’s work on the psychology of choosing tells us that beyond six options, we are lost and full of anxiety.38 Like evolution, choosing is a gamble. In this way telescreen age

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man became economic man, the young impulsive bourse trader full of testosterone, gambling with other people’s money in accordance with Friedmanite theory. Impulse then became debt. The heights of intellectual mystification and the depths of fun excluded the thinking and imagining middle. Moreover, more people than will admit it look for a (secular) sacred, a foundation. The earth is the evident foundation. (Earth-worshipping pagans are now the fourth largest religious group in the UK.) ‘Desiring’ and ‘signifying’, we have given up on the world. The fantasy of infinite resources and infinite corporate projections has no value, meaning or desirability. Life needs co-operation, a reasonable climate, fresh air, fresh food and water; their needfulness is beyond debate. On this, without doubt, Nietzsche was right: ‘The Overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth…Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy. To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence’.39 The Enlightenment rationality which many theorists scorn for leading both to the Holocaust and other current crises may provide the only remedies against global warming. In any case, Nietzsche led to the Holocaust at least as much as Enlightenment rationality did. Restraint, not limitless self-affirmation, is the good when natural resources are to be rationed and corporate excesses confronted. The Disestablishment may be what Eisenhower called the ‘militaryindustrial complex’, more or less subsumed now into the National Security Agency. Or it may be corporate projections in general, whose power has been enhanced by their status as legal persons whose eyes are the screens in everyone’s living room or pocket. The natural was already devalued by modernity. In Of Grammatology (1957) and other writings Jacques Derrida – in asserting the ‘absent origin’ – more or less theorized that culture can precede nature.40 After the Kyoto protocol (1997) such empty mind games are impossible. Nature must always precede cultural theory. As for the ‘chain of signifiers’ – empty of determinate meaning – is that all there is to the biological web of life? Many cynical corporations and politicians still deny the global warming accepted by

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99% of scientists, but claim ‘scepticism’. Two and two need no longer add up to four – as Dostoeyevsky suggested, Nietzsche wrote in the letter to his sister, and Orwell’s O’Brien finally impressed upon Winston Smith. The twentieth century’s enchantment by will-to-power is now all too evident. The demands of nature – ‘majestic, cruel, inexorable’, as Nietzsche and Freud saw – have sidelined cultural theory; but theory did not notice, preoccupied with an art of anger which kneejerked into vacuity, a ravaging doubt which undercut faith in the possibility of good action, and a conception of transformation which only operated in one direction: dissolution. Nietzsche claimed to oppose decadence, but his own slippages on what constituted nihilism betrayed his insights and the century to come. The oppositions in his thought become, as Shane Weller says, ‘infinitely reversible’.41 Smiling nihilism booms, while the deeper negativities are denied. Big Brother as Superman At this point Nietzsche’s typologies of nihilism, redefining morality in his terms, become uninteresting. This is partly because the negativity on which they are based no longer relies, in contemporary society, on a contesting of positivity. Now, the expulsion of a Platonist good from public affairs, and the multiple failures of that weasel word ‘reform’, make people long for the reinstatement of the common good as an ethical truth, in opposition to private profit.42 The concept common good unites in its idealism such disparate Platonist thinkers as Simone Weil (Christian) and Alain Badiou (Communist). This is the idealism against which Nietzsche so ruthlessly pitted himself. Now his distinction between active and passive nihilism which had meaning for the twentieth century has less for the twenty-first. Nihilism as a ‘dynamism’ is obsolete as positive value; it now must be the object of critique, as negativity. The only revolt worth undertaking in the West is not so much a revolt as a reformation of value. The Superman of the age of screens, the purest ‘will to power’, is the man now seen as supreme ruler over business, politics, television, cable and satellite,

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film and games, sport and books in the Anglophone West for the last forty years. In the words of Alan Rusbridger, he has become over that period the nexus of all power.43 His communications empire controls – as well as big book and magazine publishing companies – key newspapers of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Pacific, and also the most powerful news and business channels, notably Fox. Cable and satellite go even further into China, Indonesia and Eastern Europe. It is his choice of national leader who will be elected in the Anglophone countries and beyond. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair flew across the world to meet him before gaining the leadership nod from the Corporation, was invited to join its board after his business apprenticeship in leading parliament was completed, and was godfather to his child. As the scandal of phone-tapping at one of his London tabloids revealed in 2011, secret surveillance on a huge scale drew together the media, the police, business and government in duplicity in the aim of profit. It began with illegal snooping into the private lives of anyone likely to be of media interest through phone-tapping, computer-hacking, shadowing and filming. Big Brother was watching you in every possible medium. (His chief British tabloid proudly declared itself ‘a Big Brother paper’.)44 Sales of gutter-press tabloids and also quality papers led to monopoly power and thus political power. This was of course true of media moghuls in the past, but in the Superman’s case, influence became much more complex – and global. The next stage was the denial of truth when surveillance was alleged, and the smearing of whistleblowers by the same media with either scandalous untruths or unmasking of private peccadilloes detected through surveillance. Stage three: the enslavement of politicians by fear of harassment, blackmail or the invention of a scandal. Stage four: in Britain, his own editor-cum-surveillance agent was employed at the heart of British government, as the Prime Minister’s director of communications. This centrality meant that the interests of the corporation’s British arm could be better impressed on the British government. A member of the Blair Government called the Superman the most important member of cabinet. He

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has been a frequent visitor to Number 10 Downing Street under many Prime Ministers – but, by his own resentful admission, always entering through the back door.45 (‘Great men’ are after all not free from ressentiment.) Stage five: in order to protect both the surveillance agents in his many media and the implantation of such agents in government, the Superman’s editors turned for support to the police. The Met has conceded that no full investigations were made in response to well-based allegations of covert operations which defamed, subverted privacy, misled public debate, exerted undue influence and undermined truth, value and desirability. Mr Justice Leveson in his inquiry into press standards stood back from the imputation of undue influence, but observed that people with such power have no need to make an explicit request. He found ‘significant and reckless disregard

for

accuracy,

frequently

relying

on

misrepresentation

and

embellishment’, and ‘unethical failure to treat individuals with appropriate dignity and respect’.

46

The Superman’s power seems to prove the cynic’s claim that

justice is the interest of the stronger. Stage six: Prime Minister Cameron announced, after the media regulator Ofcom blocked a move of the Superman’s corporation, that ‘Ofcom …will cease to exist’. 47 Stage seven: the corporation has encountered one firm obstacle in its attempt to control the media, and thus the politics, of the entire West. Political debate has been successfully managed in ‘Oceania’, but mainland Europe was still closed to the Superman’s newspapers by media monopoly laws. It was therefore arranged that the British Prime Minister would not join the expected centre-right grouping in the European Parliament, but a far-right one more likely to be anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Islam, antiEuropean and pro-free market. The ‘Washington consensus’ has not yet penetrated all of Europe, despite the imposition of International Monetary Fund rules. The ‘herald-word’ decline is heard so often in France, perhaps, because talk of decline is so effectively censored in the Anglophone countries where, as a banalised nihilism, it is most widespread. Correspondences with Orwell in the British media scandal are

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unmistakable. Evidence of irregularities goes into memory holes. Doublespeak is the political rhetoric of the regime, which rather than Ingsoc is the free market fundamentalism

promoted

by

the

Superman.

Whistleblowers

commit

thoughtcrime and are tried by media. Opposition leaders are unpersons. ‘Oceania’ is clearly the US, Britain and her colonies, but enemy ‘Eurasia’ probably now connotes a dangerous Middle East more than Russia which is also pro-business. Big Brother may be watching your e-mails if you poke your head above the parapet, and Big Brother on the telescreen will never, it seems, go away, any more than the brash popular culture which surrounds it and to which all discussion in Britain – at least – must refer. The businessman and philanthropist George Soros also notes the Orwellian theme: People like me, misguided by [the Enlightenment] fallacy, believed that the propaganda methods described by George Orwell’s 1984 could prevail only in a dictatorship. The [political operatives of the Bush era] knew better. Frank Lunz, the well-known right wing political consultant, proudly acknowledged that he used 1984 in his textbook in designing his catchy slogans. And Karl Rove reportedly claimed that he didn’t have to study reality: he could create it. The adoption of Orwellian techniques gave the Republican propaganda machine competitive advantage in electoral politics. The other side has tried to catch up but has been hampered by a lingering attachment to the pursuit of truth.48 How inhibiting it seems to be, truth, in the nihilistic Anglophone culture. No longer is it important to discern nihilism as creation-through-destruction as distinct from mere passive nihilism. (One remembers the Austrian economist Jakob Schumpeter’s mantra of ‘creative destruction’ in economics.) The Corporation’s empire has been both destructive-creative and passive-decadent. ‘Build on the slopes of Vesuvius!’ cried Zarathustra. This is what the telescreen age has been doing: risking all stability within a passive culture whose banalization of nihilism is turning into Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. Freedom is Slavery (by a nihilist dogma). Ignorance is Strength (go with the flow, don’t worry). War is Peace (the War against Terror [for oil] will never end). These appropriations of the famous 1984 aphorisms attest to moral passivity. Individuals

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see little hope of good coming from governments, banks, the stock exchanges and public institutions, much less the ‘feral élites’. The icon that is this Superman is recognizable through each of the besetting nihilisms of the four countries under study here. As the elderly man with a young Asian wife and a huge stable of glary lad and ladette magazines, he is the fossilized schoolboy of the British scene, and his journalistic word of truth is boum. In America, he is top dog of the brat pack, no mere organization man. His business gestures echo a French surenchère: no step towards European power is too far. As for his Australian origins, his empire is never far from rort. Since the first Big Brother, security agencies have developed international surveillance powers that most people would not believe: governments hack into the e-mails of competing economies, the DNA of millions of innocent people is held on police databases, the European Union’s central database on individuals will be accessible to half a million agencies. And across the Atlantic, as Glenn Greenwald observes, The United States operates a sprawling, unaccountable surveillance state that – in breach of the core guarantees of the fourth amendment – monitors and records everything even the most lawabiding citizens do. In 2010 the Washington Post reported: Every day, collections systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.49 Political will in the Anglophone nations has, since 1948, meant war as protection of corporate profit. Camus wrote: ‘We have come to put the will at the very centre of reason, which, has, as a result, become deadly.’50 The educated classes deplore the violence of their country’s wars but crave the violence and crime of screen thrillers. The Superman of the caves and mountains, full of words of wisdom, despising the flatlands and the mass of ordinary people, has become the corruptor of the herd with words of folly. Much of our daily lives, at work or at home, is taken up with entertaining the sheerest nothing, the sheerest expensive fantasy; by comparison, the literary novel is the sheerest moral fact. The telescreen age, finally, has the distinction of

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being also the age when it became possible to destroy the world altogether – first with the atomic bomb, then with carbon emissions. And all the time people everywhere were busy looking at others looking at them. Camus also said that integrity has no need of rules.51 That claim was never settled by the twentieth century, and this may be our last chance.

ENDNOTES Introduction 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans Walter Kaufmann and Richard Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968, p. 9. 2 Max Stirner (1806–1856) was the most melodramatically nihilist to say this. In The Ego and Its Own (1845) he denied all absolutes and abstractions. But Hegel was first, in Phenomenology of Spirit (1806). 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Geneaology of Morals, 111, 27, in Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large, The Nietzsche Reader. Blackwell 2006, p.434. (Hereafter AP&L.) 4 Nietzsche, ‘European Nihilism’, Kaufmann, p. 48. 5 Blaise Pascal, Pensées. London: Harvill, 1962, pp 201–207. 6 St Augustine, Tractate xxix on the First Epistle of John 7: 14–18, section 6, in St Augustine, A Select Library of the Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church Vol. V11, Ch. V11 (1888) trans Philip Schaff. Christian Classics Ethereal Library, p. 185. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf107.toc.html (accessed 13/11/12). 7 Terry Eagleton, ed. Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity, in association with Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 96. 8 In Stuart Sim, Fundamentalist World: the dark side of dogma. London: Ikon Books, 2004, p.161. 9 Jacques Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Ed Jacques-Alain Miller; trans and with notes by Dennis Potter. London: Routledge 1992, p. 314. 10 William Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Oxford: OUP 1975, plate 10. 11 Jacques-Alain Miller, ed, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1, trans and with notes by John Forester. London: CUP 1988, introduces this term within Lacan’s thought (p. 14) but in no way defines it, though there is an index entry. 12 David Levin, The Opening of Vision: nihilism and the postmodern situation. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 5.

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25

26 27 28 29

Endnotes John Burnet, Greek Philosophy from Thales to Plato (1914) p. 120, cited in Shane Weller, Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2008, p. 3. Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. xxiv, cited in Weller, p.ix. Weller, p 4. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons. Penguin, 1977, pp 55–56. Robert Dessaix ponders whether the decline in use of the word soul, dating from Turgenev’s time, is a reason why we in the twentieth century find it so hard to love. In Introduction, Twilight of Love: travels with Turgenev. Picador 2004, p. 242. Simone Weil, letter to Cahiers du Sud (1941) in David McLelland, Utopian Pessimist: the life and thought of Simone Weil. New York: Poseidon Press, 1990, p.167. Bakunin, ‘Reaction in Germany.’ (1842) Trans Maria-Barbara Zeldin. Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, ed and introd Arthur Lehring. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973, p. 58. Karen L Carr, The Banalisation of Nihilism. Albany: New York University Press, 1992, pp 17–18. Will Slocombe, Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern: the (Hi)story of a diffcult relation from romanticism to postmodernism. New York: Routledge 2006, p.7. Weller, pp. ix, 20. See his A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005) and Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity (2006). The Gay Science, AP&L, p. 224. This citation always brings to mind Hölderlin’s poem ‘Hyperion’. Thus Spake Zarathustra, 3. The Portable Nietzsche, ed and trans Walter Kaufmann. Penguin 1976, p. 126. Nietzsche, letter to his sister (1865) in Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, p.29. But it was Dostoyevsky who started this: ‘after all, twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death’. Notes from Underground (1864). Penguin 1972, p. 40. Yet the scope for contradiction here is enormous. On page 46 of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche condemns all possibility of ‘absolute knowledge’, yet on page 47 claims that certain philosophical views are ‘falsifications of the facts’. Penguin, trans R J Hollingdale, introd Michael Turner, 1990. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Les Fenêtres’. Ed and introd Anthony Hartley. Penguin Poets 1965, pp 17–19. Nietzsche, Antichrist, AP&L p 485. Anti-Christ, 24. AP&L, p.401. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality 1: 7; Human, All Too Human, 1. AP&L, pp. 398, 490.

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Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human 1, 475. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche. New York: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 289. Weaver Santaniello, Nietzsche, God and the Jews. New York: State University of New York Press, 1994, pp 139–154. On Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth’s tampering with his texts, see Christian Niemeyer’s NietzscheLexikon: Darmstadt, WBG 2009. Most scholars cite the ‘radical break’ between Nietzsche and his sister on account of her anti-Semitism, mentioned in letters to friends in April 1884, at the time of her engagement to the anti-Semitic Dr Förster. In Middleton’s Selected Letters, however (see note 37), their correspondence is seen to continue, and there is a newsy letter to his ‘Dear, dear Lama’ in April 1985. They spent October 1884 together in Zürich. Nietzsche even had some good words for Dr Förster – ‘There is something noble and affectionate about him, and he seems really made for action’ (17/10/85) – while expressing reservations about his German nationalism, and elsewhere about his anti-Semitism. Nietzsche wrote to Elisabeth announcing a ‘final break’ in December 1888, but by then, as other parts of that letter show, Nietzsche’s mental breakdown had begun. Santaniello suggests that Nietzsche’s objections to ‘anti-Semitism’ were connected with his detestation of the herd behaviour of German nationalism and also socialism. Interview, The Philosopher’s Zone. ABC Radio National, Australia, 10/1/09. Michael Duffy and Willard Mittelman, ‘Nietzsche’s attitude to the Jews’ in Journal of History of Ideas 49 (1988) pp 301–317. Cited by Santaniello, pp 166–167. Alan Bullock, Hitler: a study in tyranny. Odham’s Books: London, 1952, pp 398–399. Slocombe, p. 19. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics. Trans Chris Turner. London: Blackwell, 1990. In Slocombe, p. 19. Christopher Middleton, ed and trans, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969, p.104. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. AP & L, p. 414. The sentence continues: ‘this is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-alltoo-human proposition.’ Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, pp. xvi, xviii. ‘Jerusalem’, ch. 1, 10, line 20. In William Blake’s Writings, ed. G.E. Bentley Jr, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, p. 435. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals 3, AP &L, p. 424–435. Also commentary on p. 304. J P Stern, Nietzsche. Fontana Modern Masters, 1978, pp. 148–9; and Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche and Christianity, trans E B Ashton. Gateway, 1961, pp. 32–34. Alain Badiou, The Century. London: Polity, 2007, p. 23.

238 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

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Endnotes Carr, p. 6. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. London: Routledge, 1964, p. 321. Gary Genosco, ed. Marshall McLuhan: critical evaluations in cultural theory. Vol. 1. London: Routledge, 2005, p. xxxvi. McLuhan, p. 321. McLuhan, p. 334. McLuhan, p. 334. Genosco, p. xxxvi. Jean Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacrum. In Slocombe, p. 69. Mark I. Pinsky, ‘Do you believe in Mickey Mouse?’ International Herald Tribune, 12/11/01. In Gary Garrels (ed). The Work of Andy Warhol. Dia Art Foundation, Discussions in contemporary culture, no 3. Seattle: Bay Press, 1980, p.119. Simon Jenkins, Observer, 10/7/09. Francis Picabia, ‘Manifeste Cannibale Dada’, Dadaphone no 7, March 1920. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and back again). New York: Harcourt 1975, p. 182. Richard Rorty, ‘From Logic to Language to Play’ (1986), cited in Evan Simpson, Antifoundationalism and practical reasoning: conversations between hermeneutics and analysis. University of Michigan Press, 1987, p. 59. SBS Television, 17/2/04. Nietzsche, cited by Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans Justin O’Brien. London: Random House, 1955, p. 86. Plato, The Republic, VII. Penguin, 1955, pp 62–84. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, AP & L, p. 326. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo. AP & L, p. 511–512. Richard Davis. ABC radio, 25/2/04. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. In AP & L, p. 473. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: the idea of the tragic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p.260. The satirical magazine Private Eye wrote about Douglas Coupland’s latest novel Jpod: ‘At one level this can be funny. But after 400 pages in which every single occurrence is treated with the same ‘Oh well’, you find yourself longing for some sort of moral barometer. Coupland’s get-out clause is of course irony – the ultimate airbag for the sloth with a pen. You might call this a comment on a world so selfreferential that meaning ceases to exist. But he is merely layering irony on irony to conceal the fact that he has nothing to say.’ (23/6/06) Susan Sontag, ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, in Where the Stress Falls. London: Viking, 1997, p. 297. Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, 1/3/2004.

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Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. Trans Maxwell Staniforth. Penguin 60s, 1995, p. 51; and Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence.NY: Bantam, 1991. Bülent Diken, Nihilism. London: Routledge, 2009, p. 10. Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms. London: Verso, 2000. Arthur Halestrap in The Last Tommy: documentary, BBC television, 8/11/2005. Diken, p. 30–31. Carr, pp 17–24. Diken, p. 10. Nietzsche, Daybreak. AP&L, p.198. Richard Eckersley, Well and Good: how we feel and why it matters. Melbourne: Text, 2004. Charles Taylor, The Secular Age. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2008. Julia Kristeva, La Révolte Intime. Paris: Fayard, 1997, pp 234–6. Kristeva, ‘Logics of the Sacred and Revolt’ in John Lechte and Mary Zournazi, eds, Kristeva: After the Revolution. Woolloomooloo: Artspace, 1998. p. 29. George Ritzer, cited in ‘Awash in Too Much of Nothing’. Review of Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives, by Peter Beilharz. The Australian Higher Education Supplement, 10/3/04. Milan Kundera: In Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent. London: Verso, 2003, p. 201. Nietzsche, in Carr, p.40. Nietzsche, Antichrist: AP & L, p. 498. Nietzsche, Will to Power, p.7, cited in Weller, p.4. Slocombe, p. 86. Carr, p. 16. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils. Translated and with an introduction by David Magarshack. Penguin, 1953, p. 610. Terry Eagleton, After Theory. London: Routledge 3002, p. 290. Plato, pp 278–286. This widely quoted Nietzscheanism seems in fact apocryphal. Before the acte gratuit murder they committed, Leopold had written to Loeb ‘A Superman is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.’ This is very close to Raskolnikov’s position in Crime and Punishment.

Chapter 1 Britain: What Remains 1 Pat Barker, Regeneration. London: Penguin, 1992. 2 E M Forster, A Passage to India. London: Edward Arnold & Co., p. 150. 3 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited. London: Flamingo, pp ii-iii.

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Endnotes Huxley, Antic Hay. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923, p.4. The war is inevitably part of the failure of the equation. Mrs Viveash, a man-eating monstre sacré of the sort Waugh would make his own, has a smile continually described as ‘agonised’. This seems merely mannered, but at length it is revealed that her great love died in the war. Anthony Sampson, London Observer, 28/3/04. Simon Jenkins, Observer 10/7/09, goes on: ‘The 2008 children’s computer record is accessible to 400,000 officials, but not to parents. Some MPs may bridle at the extent of public surveillance, but parliament has shown not the slightest desire to defend personal freedom from state surveillance. The bland claim is made by home secretaries that intrusion is required for ‘national security’, the excuse for absolute power down the ages.’ Margaret Atwood interview, BBC Radio 3, 11/10/04. A D Hope, ‘Imperial Adam’. Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair. New York: 1973, p. 769. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1991, pp 658. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Penguin, p. 37. In Zarathustra there is a great deal of ‘Behold!’ and ‘O my brothers’, whose tone is perhaps parodied in Kipling’s stories for the young, like The Jungle Book, Thy Servant a Dog and Just So Stories (‘0 Best Beloved’). Nietzsche, Twilight of the Gods, Penguin, p.127. Nietzsche, ‘Drunken Song’, Zarathustra, in Kaufmann, p. 436. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pp 53, 182. I A Richards, ‘Science and Poetry’ in W. Jackson Bate, Criticism: The Major Texts. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, p. 192. Melanie Klein, in Juliet Mitchell, (ed) The Selected Works of Melanie Klein. London: Peregrine, 1986. Carr, p.2. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. Trans and with introduction by Alastair Hannay. Penguin, 1985, p. 105. Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. Trans from the Danish and with an introduction by Douglas V Steele. Harper and Row. NY: 1956, p. 166. Carr, p. 8. Nietzsche, Gay Science in AP&L, p. 271, Zarathustra, AP & L p. 291. Klein, Envy and Gratitude: a study of unconscious sources. London: Tavistock Publications, 1957. Nietzsche, Zarathustra. Carr, p. 41. Nietzsche, Zarathustra. AP &L, p 286. Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase. London: Harper Perennial, 2005, pp 307–9. Rushdie, in Libération, 23/8/05.

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Kierkegaard, in Douglas Muecke, The Compass of Irony. London: Methuen, 1969, p.120. Muecke, p. 121. Muecke, pp 148–150. Postmodernism’s irony is free-floating, like free jazz. Without foundations, classical irony has no foothold from which to kick. This is Rushdie’s point – but also his nemesis. ‘Kierkegaard saw Romantic Irony as a dissolution of objectivity in the interests of preservation of subjectivity, a process which involves in the end the reduction of all reality to the bare self-consciousness of the completely bored ironist.’ Muecke, p. 242. London Guardian, 18/9/12. James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: on laughter and the novel. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004. pp 167–183. Giambattista Vico, The New Science. (Third edition, 1774.) Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1968. For Yeats’ own discussion of his theory of gyres, see W B Yeats, A Vision (1961). Northrop Frye’s modes and phases are elaborated in his classic An Anatomy of Criticism (1957). An exposition of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return is found in Gay Science 341, in AP&L, pp 101–2. John Berger: BBC Radio 3 interview with Philip Dodd, 28/3/05. Slocombe, p. 35. Berger interview.

Chapter 2: America: Lost in the Funhouse 1 Title of the John Barth collection of experimental short fiction, Lost in the Funhouse (1968) New York: Random House, 1988. 2 London Observer Review, 17/4/05, p.3. 3 Eagleton, Figures of Dissent, London: Verso 2003, p.75. 4 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited. Flamingo Modern Classic, p. 93. 5 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief. London: Routledge 2001, p.20. 6 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: public discourse in the age of show business. NY: Viking, 1985, p.73. 7 Postman, p. 124. 8 Postman, p. 73. 9 William Whyte, The Organization Man. NY: Simon and Schuster 1956, p. 387. 10 Jeffrey Robinson, The Manipulators. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1998, p. 32. 11 Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders. Penguin, 1981. Cited in Robinson, The Manipulators, p. 21. 12 David Putnam, Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

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Endnotes Robinson, p. 21. Badiou, p. 9. Goudsblom, Johan, Nature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, p. 10. Robinson, p. 47. Thomas Friedman, in Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms. London: Verso, 2000, pp. 260–1. McLelland, pp 273–288. Sontag, Guardian G2, 24/5/04, p.3. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 24, AP & L, p. 430. Eagleton, p. 75. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals 3: 24. AP & L, p. 430. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans Hugh Tomlinson: foreword by Michael Hardt. Columbia University Press, 2006, p 111. Josephine Henden, The World of Flannery O’Connor. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1970. Slocombe, p. 32. Nietzsche, Anti-Christ. AP & L, p.493. Eagleton, Figures of Dissent, p.8. Ansell Pearson and Morgan, p. xiii. Sim, pp 230–1. Sim, p. 82. Sim, p. 20. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude: a study of unconscious sources. London: Tavistock Publications, 1957. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans by Justin O’Brien. London: Random House, 1955, p. 65. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism. Trans and with notes by Philip Mairet. London: Methuen, 1948. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, AP & L, p. 275. Jean-Paul Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge, (trans Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Manchester: MUP, 1984) reduced modern culture to a handful of ‘grand narratives’, of which psychoanalysis was one. Its founding myth was that of King Oedipus, skilled at answering riddles but not one requiring insight about himself – that he killed his father and slept with his mother. From this essential myth, Freud argued, all of Western psychology is derived. But for Lyotard it is just another story; and the self is just ‘a post through which all kinds of messages pass’. Baudrillard, in Hal Foster, Postmodern Culture. London: Verso, 1983, p. 129. Baudrillard, in Foster, p. 127. Gilles Deleuze. & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. This postmodern

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classic refuses the Freudian ‘narrative’ of ‘Mummy-Daddy-me’, seeing human identity as finally obliterated by undifferentiated flows of desire. ‘Disneyland exists to make the real world serious, and the real world exists to make Disneyland fun.’ Slocombe, p. 6. Foster, p. 129. Postman, p. 16 Postman, p.73. Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p. 50. Slocombe, p. 115. Barth, Lost in the Funhouse, p. 93. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism. London: Abacus, 1979. And Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man. NY: Knopf, 1977. Ansell Pearson and Morgan, p. xiii. Whyte, p. 364. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. In Whyte, p. 363. Ian Hovie, director of the first marketing-based blockbuster exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1963, announced ‘I am the nihilist museum director’ (Art and Money: UK Channel Four TV series of which critic Robert Hughes presented the first, 21/9/08.) Such directors have a case, of course: how are they to pay for art acquisitions at ever more astronomical prices? In Sontag, On Photography. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1977, p. 190. In Foster, p. 129. Nietzsche, Gay Science, Ansell Pearson and Morgan, p. 229.

Chapter 3: France: A Literature of Attenuation 1 Pierre Miquel, Histoire. Editions de la Cité-Bordas/SEJER. Paris 2004, p. 384. 2 Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance. Trans Richard Howard. Penguin, 1968, p.40. 3 André Lagarde and Laurent Michard, XXe Siècle: les grands auteurs français du programme. Paris: Collections textes et littérature Bordas, 2002, p. 37. 4 André Maurois, De Proust à Camus. Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1964. p.48, and Henri Bergson, L’Evolution créative. PUF, (1907) Coll Quadrige, 8th Edition, 1998, chapter 4. 5 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage to the End of the Night. Trans John H.P. Marks. Boston: Little, Brown, 1934. Cited in Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection. Trans Leon S. Roudiez. NY: Columbia University Press, 1982, pp 140, 143. 6 Céline, Ecole des Cadavres. Paris: Editions Denoël 1938, p. 271; Les Beaux Draps. Trans Leon S Roudiez. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Françaises, p. 90.

244 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Endnotes Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p 185. ‘Art [will] turn the horror and absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity.’ Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner. Trans Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967, p. 60. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 34. Sartre, pp. 29–31. George Bataille, On Nietzsche. Trans Bruce Boone, with an introduction by Sylvère Lotringer. NY: Athlone Press 1972, p.xxiv. Bataille, On Nietzsche, pp xxxi, xxxii. Bataille, On Nietzsche, pp xxx, xxxii. Georges Bataille, My Mother, Mme Edwarda, The Dead Man. Trans Austryn Wainhouse. London: Boyars, 1989. p.142. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso 2002, p. 57. But France also sent jazz to America. See Colin Nettelbeck, Dancing with De Beauvoir: the French and Jazz. Melbourne: MUP, 2003. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Trans Donald Nicholson-Smith. NY: Zone, p.12. Gilles Lipovetsky, L’Ère du Vide: essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1989, p. 298. Antoine Compagnon, Guardian Weekly, 7/12/07. ‘Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is a misfortune that whoever tries to play the angel becomes the beast.’ Pascal, Pensées, p. 173. Julien Gracq, Le Rivage des Syrtes. Paris: Corti, 1951. The Opposing Shore, trans Richard Howard. London: Random House, 1982. Quotations are directly from Le Rivage; my translation. See Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism. London: Octopus, 1981, p. 73. Idées du XXe siècle. Paris: Livre de Poche, p.36. Julien Gracq, ‘Sur Lautréamont’, in Blanchot, Gracq, Le Clézio. Paris: Jeune Parque Editions Complètes, 1949, pp 10–13. Gracq, ‘Sur Lautréamont’, p. 16. Gracq, ‘Sur Lautréamont’, pp 29–37. Gracq, ‘Sur Lautréamont’, p. 39. Andre Malraux, La Condition Humaine, in Maurois, pp 310–311. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans Justin O’Brien. London: Random House, 1955, p. 6. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, p 86. Dostoyevsky, The Devils. Translated and with an introduction by David Magarshack. Penguin 1971, p. 615. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. Trans and ed. David Magarshack. Penguin 1958, Vol. 1, pp 288–309. Camus, The Rebel. Trans Anthony Bower, introduction by Herbert Read. Penguin, 1963, p. 62.

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Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. AP & L, p. 489. Nietzsche, Zarathustra. AP&L, p. 280. Camus, The Rebel, p. 58. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, p. 95. Dante Alighieri, The Vision of Dante: Inferno. Trans Henry Francis Cary. London: Frederick Warne, 1844, pp 149–151. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, p. 49. Camus, The Rebel, p. 68. Camus, The Rebel, p. 69. Nathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion and Tropisms. Trans Maria Jolas. London: John Calder, 1963, p.8. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, p. 148. Sarraute, Age of Suspicion, p. 81. Sarraute, Age of Suspicion, p. 92. Sarraute, Age of Suspicion, p. 94. A good introduction to Jakobsonian linguistics is to be found in Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1983, pp 88–89. Colin Nettelbeck and Penelope Hueston, Patrick Modiano: Pièces d’Identité. Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1986, p.7. Eagleton, Literary Theory, pp 163–170. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. AP& L, p.329. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Trans and introd Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Rorty; see note 30, Introduction. His anti-foundationalism is widely accepted, although he has always been attacked from two sides: from religionists, who maintain that there is something true beyond appearances, whether there is consensus or not; and from cultural theorists for whom the truth about everything lies within the school to which they subscribe. Vincent Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: an advanced introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 1983, p 174. Marguerite Duras, Practicalities. Marguerite Duras speaks to Jérôme Beaujour. Trans Barbara Bray. London: Collins, 1990, p. 92. Laure Adler, Marguerite Duras: a life. Trans Anne-Marie Glasheen. London: Gollancz, 1998. Photoplate caption. Duras, Practicalities, p. 77. Hélène Cixous, ‘L’Approche de Clarice Lispector’. Paris: Poétique 1979, pp 40, 412; and La Venue à l’écriture. Paris: UGE 1977, p.21. Adler, p. 360. Bataille, The Bataille Reader, ed Fred Bolling and Scott Wilson. Blackwell, 1997, p. ix, and Marguerite Duras, La Douleur. Trans Barbara Bray. London: Fontana, 1985, p. 50. Also Adler, p. 361. Adler, p. 323. Adler, p. 323.

246 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Endnotes Adler, p. 323. Duras, Practicalities, pp 16–17. Guardian Review 5/11/05. Guardian 17/9/05. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea. Trans and with introduction by E F J Payne.Vol. 1. New York: Dover Books, 1958. Observer 6/11/05. Diken, p. 11. Schopenhauer, p. 113.

Chapter 4: Australia: No-one Home 1 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Lines written in dejection, near Naples’, used as title for a famous Australian landscape painting by Sir Arthur Streeton. 2 Xavier Pons, Out of Eden. Sydney: Sirius 1984, p.4. 3 Nietzsche, Gay Science V. AP&L, p. 346 4 Nietzsche, Zarathustra. AP&L, p. 136. 5 Brambuk Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Hall’s Gap, Victoria. Places and dates are meticulously recorded. The terms are ‘killings’, ‘shootings’ and ‘poisonings’. I have counted all these as deaths, the wording attempting more precision about the cause of death. Some victims may not have died. However, large numbers of attacks went unrecorded, and even now many people report anecdotally how their grandfather or uncles went out ‘to shoot Abos’. See also Edward John Eyre, Journals and Expeditions into Central Australia and Overland into South Australia. London: T & W Boone, 1845, vol. 2, p. 156 and passim. 6 Humphrey McQueen, in Richard Nile (ed), Australian Civilization. Sydney: OUP, 1999, p. 42. 7 Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: an Australian anxiety. Melbourne: CUP 1999, p. 91. 8 Walter Stone, ed. The World of Henry Lawson. Sydney: Paul Hamlyn 1974, pp 213–217. 9 Ken Goodwin, A History of Australian Literature. Sydney: Macmillan, 1986, pp 43. 10 Miriam Dixson, cited by Kay Shaffer, Women and the Bush: forces of desire in the Australian cultural tradition. Cambridge: CUP, 1997, p. 181. Senator Bill Heffernan called the current Prime Minister Julia Gillard ‘deliberately barren’ in his regular magazine column. 11 Barbara Baynton, ‘Squeaker’s Mate’. The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories, selected by Michael Wilding. Oxford, 1994, pp 15–26. 12 C. Manning Clark, A History of Australia, vol 1V. Melbourne: MUP, 1981. 13 Clark, vol. 1V, pp 78–87. 14 Russel Ward, The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958, p. 2.

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34

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John Barnes, in Nile, p. 4. Shaffer, pp 14–15. Nietzsche, Gay Science. AP&L, p. 379. Clark, vol VI. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987, p. 16. A A Phillips, The Australian Tradition (1954) in Nile, p.105. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, in Nile, p. 206. Aldous Huxley, Island. London:Flamingo, 1994 p. 281–286. Sam might be thinking of Nietzsche’s Antichrist: ‘The weak and illconstituted shall perish, and we shall help him to do so’. AP and L, p. 487. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. AP & L, p. 443. Clark, vol V1, p. 458. The Australian Realist School of the 1950s and 60s in Sydney, notably U T Place, Jack Smart and David Armstrong, claimed that mental states are ‘just reflex arcs’, rejecting the view that ‘there must be an inner story to the mind’. It viewed British philosophy as ‘all a fog’, on which ‘honest’ Australian thought threw a ‘harsh light’. Australian philosophy, like its inhabitants, was down to earth, and not likely to talk nonsense’. Interview with David Chalmers (Australian National University) and Gerald O’Brien (University of Adelaide), ABC Radio National, 3/2/07. See A. J. Baker, introduced by Anthony Quinton: Australian Realism: the systematic philosophy of John Anderson. Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Alan Seymour, The One Day of the Year. In Five Plays for stage, radio and television, edited and with an introduction by Alrene Sykes. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977, p. 30. Peter Ryan, in Redmond Barry, MUP 1980. Cited by Gerard Henderson, Melbourne Age, 1/4/03. Cited in Shaffer, p. 129. This is the site, perhaps, of Australia’s ‘bitter genius’, as Christina Stead saw it. See Goodwin, pp 69, 103, 112, 122. From an anonymous Aboriginal chant, cited by W E H Stanner, ‘The Dreaming’, in Australian Signpost ed T A G Hungerford. Melbourne: Cheshire, 1956, p. 51. David Tacey, Re-enchantment. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000. Donald Horne, The Lucky Country. Melbourne: Penguin, 1964, pp 199, 227, 239. Recognizing Aboriginal Title: the Mabo case and indigenous response to European settler colonialism. Peter H Russell. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. See Carmel Bird, The Stolen Children: their stories. Including extracts from the Report of the National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. Sydney: Random House, 1998. Tom Keneally takes the view that until white Australians are reconciled with blacks, they cannot feel at home. Cited by Henry Reynolds, in Nile, p. 37.

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Endnotes Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Australia. Foreword by C D Rowley. University of New South Wales Press 1981, p. 202. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals 111. AP & L, p. 432. Eyre, vol. 2, p. 395. Lawson, ‘The Mitchell, Sex and other problems’ cited by Shaffer in Nile, p. 124. Sartre, Being and Nothingness. Cited in Slocombe, p. 113. David Marr, Patrick White: a life. Sydney: Random House, 1991, epigraph. Marr, p 312. Voss’s horror of atheism has several sources. Eyre’s strong Christianity suggests that adventurers must believe in someone, if only themselves. White’s own conversion to Anglican Christianity at that time fed the religious debate between Voss and the Anglican Palfreyman, along with Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ: ‘Those pale atheists, antichrists, immoralists, nihilists, sceptics...the last idealists of knowledge, very far from being free spirits, because they still believe in truth’. Genealogy of Morals 3: 24, in AP & L, p. 424. Another Nietzschean echo, in Laura’s ‘You are my desert’, is Dionysos’s characterisation of Ariadne in Zarathustra: ‘You are my labyrinth’ (Kaufmann, p. 345). Sartre, Being and Nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology. Trans Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge, 2000, p. 15. Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (recording), translation Mark Blitzstein, 1954. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, Prologue. AP & L, p. 250. Slocombe observes: ‘While experiencing the sublime moment, man is both overcome by nature and overcomes it’ (p. 41). Nile, pp 142–144. Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism. London: Viking 2003, p. 152. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals 3: 24. AP & L, p. 430. Emmanuel Levinas. Difficult Freedom. Trans Sean Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. In Slocombe, p. 62. Nietzsche, Antichrist, AP &L, p. 485. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, AP&L p. 275. Throughout his writings Nietzsche stresses: let your Thou shalt be your I will. Nietzsche, ‘European nihilism’, AP&L, p. 385. Melbourne Age, August and September 1990, passim. West Australian, 20/2/1933. Pablo Armellino, in Sheila Collingwood-Whittick (ed) The Pain of Unbelonging: alienation and identity in Australian literature. Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2007, p. 34. Shaffer, p. 99.

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Chapter 5: From Big Brother to Big Brother 1 Baudrillard’s obituary reports that when asked what he would like said about him, he replied: ‘What I am, I don’t know. I am a simulacrum of myself.’ Guardian Weekly, 16/3/07. 2 Watney, in Garrels, p.120. 3 BBC Radio 4, ‘The Reunion’, 16/9/12. 4 London Daily Telegraph, 30/5/07. 5 ‘The Reunion’, 16/9/12. 6 Age, 24/3/07. 7 Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism. London: Vintage, 2003, p. 107. 8 Slocombe, p. 53. 9 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: a venture in social forecasting. London: Penguin 1976, p. 214. 10 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals 1, 12, AP&L, p. 416. 11 Slocombe, p. 32. 12 Diken, p. 4. 13 Tony Judt, cited by Gareth Evans, Radio National Big Ideas, 20/3/11. 14 Judt, ‘Words’. In New York Review of Books, 15/7/10. 15 John Carroll, Humanism: the Wreck of Western Culture. London: Fontana, 1993. 16 Joseph Stiglitz, in Robert H. Nelson, ‘What is economic theology?’ Global Spiral, 10/ 4/ 2003. 17 McGrath, p. 153. 18 McGrath, p. 185. 19 Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Imagination. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007, pp 59–95. 20 Karen Armstrong, The Case for God. London: Harper Perennial, 2005. 21 McGrath, p. 185. 22 McGrath, p. 272. 23 Eagleton, After Theory, p. 99. 24 Denys Trussell, Ecologist, 9.5 (1989), p. 174. In Slocombe, p. 90. 25 Observer, 28/10/12. 26 ABC1 television, Australia, 19/3/09. 27 Eagleton, p 120. ‘For the Judaeo-Christian tradition, a life of charity and love means that we become the occasion for each other’s self-creation.’ Also pp 101, 146, 154, 168, 211. 28 Slavoj Žižek, Le Monde, 2/8/05. 29 A recent Australian poll showed a similar pattern to the British: of those who believe the Bible is divinely inspired, only 25% consider it literally true. (Age, 18/12/09). But French theorist Michel Onfray, at a Melbourne seminar, claimed that all believers bar none were fundamentalists. 30 Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct: how religion evolved and why it endures. NY: The Penguin Press, 2009, discussed in New York Times, 14/11/09.

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Endnotes Peter Hitchens, in Daily Mail Review, 7/3/10. Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless. London: Verso, 2012, p. 18. Slocombe, p. 108. Morris Berman, Twilight of American Culture. NY: Norton, 2000. ABC1 television, Australia, 19/3/09. Daniel Kalder, review of Barbara Ehrenreich Smile or Die, Cambridge: Granta, 2010. In Guardian Weekly, 30/4/10. Goudsblom, Johan, Nature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, p. 10. Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing. New York: Time Warner, 2011. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, AP&L, p. 256. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1978, p. 292, and Of Grammatology, p. 49: ‘We are dealing with a system of signs. The thing itself is a sign’. In the Introduction Spivak notes: “Nature, Culture, Writing” shows how, in texts of LéviStrauss and Rousseau, ‘the opposition between nature and culture is undone by both the empirical fact and the structure of writing’. Weller, p. 34. Judt’s last books explore this magisterially. ‘Beyond Hackgate: Who should we trust now?’ BBC Radio 4, 2/8/11. ‘The Reunion’, BBC Radio 4, 16/9/12. Public hearing of the Arts, Media and Sport Committee of the British House of Commons, 19/7/11, at which Rupert Murdoch and his son James Murdoch gave evidence. First reported by the Guardian, 6/7/09. The Leveson Report, An Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/nov/29/leveson-repo. News.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8601711.stm. George Soros, ‘My Philanthropy’, New York Review of Books, 23/6/11, p. 14. Guardian, 14/11/12. Camus, Sisyphus, p. 169. Camus’s reading of Nietzsche: ‘Will to system is a lack of integrity’. AP & L, xxviii.

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INDEX 1984 (Orwell), 11, 14, 16, 42, 43, 44, 45, 53, 78, 109, 144, 210, 217, 232 Aborigines, 174, 178, 183, 188, 195, 201, 211 Aboriginal rights, 176 Aboriginality, impossible, 214 public apology to, 183 Abraham and Isaac, 37, 91 Abrahamic pact, 56, 76 Abu Ghraib, 16, 87, 119 Ascherson, Neal, 77 Adler, Laure, 162 Adorno, Theodor, 14 Afghanistan, 28, 80, 208 Age of Suspicion, The (Sarraute), 148, 152 Alain-Fournier (Henri AlbanFournier), 136 alazon (Douglas Muecke), 68–69, 112 Ali, Tariq, 27 America, nihilism in 77–120 American Psycho, 6, 83, 85, 86, 165 American Tragedy (Dreiser), 89 anarchism, 7 Anglophone nations, ix, 27, 93, 131, 145, 224, 230, 231, 232, 233 Angry Young Men, 44 angst, 8, 60, 62

Animal Farm, 24, 43 Another Country, 94, 95, 98, 99, 219 Antic Hay, 39 Anti-Christ,The, 199 anti-nihilism, 8, 126, 145 anti-Semitism, 13, 14, 121 Apollonian order, 8, 15, 84, 135, 139 Arendt, Hannah, 232 aristocratic radicalism, 13 Aristotle, catharsis in, 26 Armstrong, Karen, 65, 224 art about money, 70, 116 authoritarianism in, 134 Dada and, 18–20, 23 Dionysian, 48 disfiguring life, 62 disturbing, 18 end of all history, 54 entrée for US blacks, 120 God as, 149 irony and, 24 modernist, 78 myth of, 116 natural world as, 112 negativity and, 48 nihilist, 19, 78 nothing but art, 20, 40, 120, 124, 139, 160 pleasure and, 115

262 privileging, 123 reality and, 124, 125, 149 telescreen and, 224 theological nature, 149 twentieth-century, 9 value of, 116 See also surrealism art world, contemporary, 225 astrology, 1, 30, 31, 168. See also New Age atheism, 11, 186, 205, 224, 226 atheist polemic, 225 Australian census, 224 distinguished from nihilism, 8 Atomised, 24, 165–71, 219, 227 Augustine of Hippo, 3 Auschwitz, 14 Australia, 173–216 Australian Epicureanism, 195 Australian Realism, 181, 205, 215 authoritarianism, French, 121 aversive therapy, 52, 53 Badiou, Alain, 15, 21, 83, 128, 129, 134, 229 Bakunin, Mikhail, 7, 65 Baldwin, James, 94–99 Barker, Pat, 37, 39, 41, 45, 56, 75 Barth, John, xi, 84 Barthelme, Donald, 81, 96 Bataille, Georges, 122, 127, 128, 130, 133, 142, 147, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 225 Baudrillard, Jean, 17, 91, 100, 103, 108, 118, 128, 129, 217 Beat Generation, 97 Beckett, Samuel, xi, 6, 8, 62, 71, 72, 126, 127, 172, 184, 185 behaviourism, 29, 30, 75, 122 belief assumptions about, 1 and knowledge, 3 in order to understand, 3 alternative. See New Age Benang, 211–16, 219

Index Berger, John, xii, 65, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 104, 227 Bergson, Henri, 19, 122, 124, 125, 156 Berman, Morris, 226 Beyond Good and Evil, 2, 35, 169 Big Brother national security, 233 Orwell, in, ix, 16, 43, 217 Superman, as, 229–33 tv reality show, x, 16, 18, 42, 45, 217–34 watching you, ix, 16 Bird, Carmel, 206–11 Birth of Tragedy, The, 1, 10 Blake, William, 6, 14, 15, 33, 199 blond beast, 13, 184, 209, 212, 215, 216, 220 Boer War, 177, 213 Botany Bay, as death camp, 194 boum, 38, 42, 43, 45, 58, 68, 76, 233 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 128 Brandes, Georg, 14 brat pack, 83, 86, 88, 93, 97, 107, 113, 120, 233 Brave New World, 40, 42, 43, 45, 78, 79, 97, 108, 119, 168, 170, 171, 221, 227 Breton, André, 19, 20, 132 Bring Larks and Heroes, 190–95 Bringing Them Home Report, 183 Britain, 37–76 Brothers Karamazov, The, 35, 141 Buddhism, 61, 169, 198, 207, 225 Bunting, Madeleine, 25 Burgess, Anthony, 30, 50, 55, 76 Bush, George W., 16, 80, 87, 93, 107, 232 Cameron, David, 231 Camus, Albert absolute affirmation, 141 absurd and nihilism in, 139 absurdity in, 139 citing Nietzsche, 138

From Big Brother to Big Brother Dostoyevsky and, 140, 143 God’s existence, 163 humanism, 144, 145 man in, 137 Myth of Sisyphus, The 35, 96, 138 Nietzsche and, 14, 144 nihilism and, 139, 170 non-nihilist, 141 on will, 233 rebelling, 161 telescreen age, 144 The Fall, 121, 137–46 First Man, The 137, 143 Rebel, The, 140 Candid Camera, x, 17 Capricornia, 178–179, 189, 213 Carr, Karen L., 7, 8, 15, 27 Cartesian dualism, 33 Categorical Imperative (Kant), 225 CCT cameras. See surveillance Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 137, 150, 164 choice, psychology of, 227 Christ as sacrifice, 13 figure of power, 15 Christianity as boum, 38 as slave-morality, 2 decadent, 112, 205 evangelical, 27 evangelistic, 207 existentialism and, 11 Houellebecq and, 168 hypocritical absolutism, 208 Nietzsche and, 13 oppressive, 226 values against, 33 Cixous, Hélène 128, 161 Clark, Manning, 178, 215 Clockwork Orange, A, 6, 50–55, 83, 220 closed-circuit cameras. See surveillance

263

Cloudstreet, 201–206, 216, 226 cogito ergo sum, 3, 11 Cold War, x, 15, 54, 55, 178, 180, 201 community, 99, 224 compromised irony, 98 Conrad, Joseph, 7, 38 consumer society, 28 corporations legal persons, 86 mediatised, 28 cosmic irony, 69 Cosmo Cosmolino, 208 Critchley, Simon, 226 Crying of Lot 49, The 49, 99–104 cultural theory. See theory cynicism, 20–23 as attainment, xii Australian, 179 bad faith, 20 capitalism, 26 corporate, 22, 23 failed idealism, 166 nature of, 20, 21, 26 pursuit of pleasure, 39 scepticism and, 21 suspicion meets rort, 183, 205, 210 trust and, 21, 94 Dada, 18–20, 23, 35, 107, 130, 218 Dante (Durante degli Alighieri), 132 Darwin, Charles, 4, 49, 66, 169 Data Protection Act 1998 (UK), 18 Dawkins, Richard, 225 de Beauvoir, Simone, 123, 128 de Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, 2 de Sade, Marquis, 122, 123, 128 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 5, 128, 222 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 80, 115 death crime novels as explanation, 36 novelistic dance, 39 Debord, Guy, x, 128, 129, 171 decadence, 22 Decline and Fall, 39

264 deconstruction, 5, 184, 185, 222 Deleuze, Gilles, 11, 26, 88, 104, 128, 214, 223 DeLillo, Don, 102, 110–14, 120, 165, 168, 222 Demons, The, 139 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 127, 128, 129, 144, 156, 157, 228 Descartes, René, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 19, 21, 68, 103, 142, 221 a priorism, 122 cogito, 3, 11 contribution to novel, 36 doubt, 3–6, 36, 122 dualism, 33 source of nihilism, 123 desire desirability, challenged by Nihilism, x desiring-machines, 104 Devils, The, 34, 94, 95, 98 Diary of a Writer, 139, 144 différance, 156 Diken, Bűlent, 27, 171 Dionysos, 8, 10, 15, 19, 59, 108, 110 Disestablishment, 220, 226–29 dispensationalism, 92 disvalue conversion to value, 34 novels and, 33–36 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 7, 11, 33, 34, 35, 36, 94, 95, 96, 126, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146, 171, 192, 194, 196, 229 doublespeak, 43, 232 doubt Age of, 123 faith in, 3–6 See also Descartes Dreyfus controversy, 121, 122 Drover’s Wife, The, 174 Ducasse, Isidore-Lucien. See Lautréamont Duras, Marguerite, 157–63

Index dystopia, 42, 53, 107, 168, 172, 206, 210, 219 Eagleton, Terry, 78, 91, 224, 225 Ecce Homo, xii, 107 Eckersley, Richard, 30 economic rationalism, 28 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 227 Ellis, Bret Easton, 83, 85 End Timers, 29, 92, 225 Endemol, x, 217, 218 Enlightenment, the, 1, 3, 4, 6, 14, 19, 27, 30, 90, 130, 134, 136, 170, 173, 195, 221, 228, 232 Era of Emptiness, The, 130 European Nihilism (Nietzsche), x existentialism anti-foundational, 12 anti-idealist, 3 European, 120 humanist, 127 music and, 181 nihilism and, 11 Protestant, 163 religious, 3 Sartrean, 97 starting from doubt, 3 Existentialism and Humanism (Sartre), 11, 225 existentialists, 3, 97 faith and theories, 221–26 bad faith, 20–23 good faith, 20–23 in chance, 19–20 in doubt, 3–6 in instinct, 8–12 in nothing, 6–8 in power, 12–16 in the screen, 16–18 in theory, 29–31 in transgression, 23–29 of youth, 31–33 Fall, The 121, 137–46, 155 Fathers and Sons, 7

From Big Brother to Big Brother feminism, 5, 57, 82, 128, 150, 161, 196 Forster, E M, 38 Freud, Sigmund, xi, 5, 19, 29, 34, 37, 63, 87, 122, 128, 149, 153, 222, 229 Friedman, Thomas, 85 fundamentalism, 2629, 32, 65, 92, 203, 205 Garner, Helen, 195–201 Gay Science, The, xii, 8, 10, 15, 210 Genealogy of Morals, The, 2, 87, 184 Gillespie, Michael Allen, 6 Godhead, acceding to, 18 gods Age of, 73 becoming, 35, 36, 66, 208 Golden Fruit, The, 146–52 Golden Notebook, The, x, 55–59, 227 Golding, Willliam, 35, Inheritors 46–50, 61, 76, 227 Gorgias of Leontini, 6 Goudsblom, Johan, 84, 227 Gracq, Julien, x, 131–37, 146, 166, 172 Guattari, Félix (Pierre-Félix), 26, 104, 128, 214 Hegel, G.W.F., 7, 63 Heidegger, Martin, 6 Heller, Joseph, 213 Herbert, Xavier, 178–79, 183 Hesse, Hermann, Glass Bead Game,11, 137 Hidden Persuaders, The, 83 Hitchens, Christopher, 26, 27, 225 Hitler, Adolf, 14, 15, 27, 110, 111, 112, 113, 120, 135, 139 Hodge, Joanna, 113 Holocaust, 14, 151, 152, 209, 221, 228 Horne, Donald, 182, 189 Houellebecq, Michel, 16, 24, 25, 163–71, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 219

265

Hughes, Robert, 116 humanities, 4, 5 humans companies superior to, 86 inferior machines, 22, 86 superior humans, 86 Husserl, Edmund, 123 Huxley, Aldous, 30, 39, 40, 42, 43, 54, 76, 78, 79, 97, 107, 110, 119, 141, 168, 171, 179, 196, 198, 206, 210 icons attachment to, 18 idealism, 3, 21, 59, 195, 229 impulse, 5, 29, 32, 34, 49, 62, 68, 76, 104, 106, 115, 127, 130, 157, 163, 176, 198, 200, 204, 217, 225 impulse/theory oscillation, 85, 125, 127, 136, 150, 164, 169, 172, 183, 187, 197, 210, 216, 221, 223, 227 instinct, faith in, 8–12 intellectuels engagés, 121, 122, 123, 127, 140, 171 Iraq, 15, 28, 45, 106, 119, 151 irony, 24, 57, 68–69, 85, 100, 143, 171, 188, 197, 215, 217, 220, 226 Iyengar, Sheena, 227 Jacobi, Friedrich, 6 Jekyll and Hyde, 33 Jenkins, Simon, 18, 45 Jews, 13, 123, 125, 181, 220 Johnson, Colin (Mudrooroo Narogin), Wild Cat Falling 181 Journal de Mickey Mouse, 168 Judaeo-Christian ethic, 76, 78, 167, 225 Judaism, as slave-morality, 2 Keneally, Thomas, 190–95 Kierkegaard, Søren, 3, 8, 11, 58, 68, 91, 95, 97, 163 King: a street story, 70–76, 104 Kristeva, Julia, 5, 32, 33, 115, 125, 128, 172 Kundera, Milan, 33, 58, 226

266 La Douleur, 158, 163, 164 Lacan, Jacques, 5, 6, 29, 96, 127, 128, 129. 134, 144, 155, 199 Lautréamont, Comte de, (Isidore Ducasse) 132, 134, 135, 136, 165, 166 Lawson, Henry, 173, 174–77, 178, 179, 181, 183, 184, 185, 195 Le Rivage des Syrtes, 131 Leopold and Loeb case (Chicago), 36 Les Chants de Maldoror, 135 (see Lautréamont, Isidore Ducasse) Les Fruits d’or. See Golden Fruit Les Particules élémentaires. See Atomised Lessing, Doris, x, 55–59, 76, 227 Leveson Inquiry, 231 Levi, Primo, 46, 194 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 197 libertarianism, 196 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 130 literary theory, 128, 130, 153, 157 Literature and Evil, 128 Lolita, 24, 80, 81, 86 Look Back in Anger, 44, 57 Lost in the Funhouse, 19, 84, 111 Lover, The, 158–64, 219 Löwith, Karl, 14, 34 Lucky Country, The, 182, 189 Lyotard, Jean-Paul, 5, 128 Man Who Loved Children, The, 179 Marcuse, Herbert, 87 market fundamentalism, 63, 68, 80, 85, 114, 207, 222, 226, 232, theory 28, 222 mass media, 18, 25, 78, 79, 119 McGrath, Alister, 224 McLuhan, Marshall, 16, 17, 18, 79 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5 metaphysics, 10, 164, 205, 215 Mickey Mouse, 18, 168, 209; Club, xi, 17, 78, 105, 106, 219 Midnight’s Children, 64, 66

Index Modiano, Patrick, 152–58 Monkey Grip, 195–201, 203 Monod, Jacques, 221 morality conventional, 22 enslaving, 2 Nietzsche and, xi, 10, 12, 19, 24, 63, 87, 204, 225 Muecke, Douglas, alazon, 68–69, 112 Murdoch, Iris, 59–64, 76 Myth of Sisyphus, The, 35, 96, 138, 139, 144 Nabokov, Vladimir, 24, 25, 80 narcissism, 112 national identity register (UK), 18 national security, 18, 45, 228 Nausea, 126, 129, 133, 138 Nazis, 14, 52, 54, 139, 141 neoliberalism, 28, 182 New Age, 30, 110, 168, 170, 208, See also astrology Nietzsche and Philosophy (Deleuze), 11 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8 absolute affirmation, 192 admiration for blond beast, 209, 220 affirmation-craving, 170 anathema of community, 205 anticipating Freud, 34 anti-idealism, 3 anti-Semitism, 13 apocalyptic, 120 apostate (Christian), 15 aristocratic radicalism, 13 art, 20, 54, 116, 124, 139, 160, 225 becoming, 198 birth of tragedy imagined by, 48 Camus assessment, 145 chaos birthing star, 180 chase of signs, 151 Christ and Caesar, 145

From Big Brother to Big Brother Christianity, 2, 91, 112, 168, 205, 225 contempt for pity, 14 contradictoriness, 10, 127 creative destruction and, 14 crisis and, 33, 104 crisis of modernity, 60 crisis of value, 63 cultural theory, 221 decadence and, 229 defining nihilism, 9 definition of nihilism, 6 demands response, 11 destructive new, 10 Dionysos and Apollo, 8 Dionysos v Christ, 108 dissolution, 127 Dostoyevsky, 34 Dostoyevsky and, 11 Dr Jekyll and, 34 drugs and power, 198 dynamic nihilism, 180 Ecce Homo, xii embracing opposites, 10 eternal return theory, 71 existential absurdity, 139, 141 existentialism and, 11 faith in instinct, 8 free will, 52 future-pregnant, 114 God and, 8, 203, 217, 223 gods and, 35 Holocaust and, 228 horror of existence, 126 Houellebecq equivocal, 168, 170 idealism and, 22, 229 implacable vision, 11 instinct and , 8–12, 14 irony in, 24 Jews and, 13, 14, 220 law unto self, 141 liberationist, 180 man, overcoming, 189 manic reactiveness, 170

267

meaning of the Earth, 228 moderation in, 198 morality and, xi, 11, 18, 22, 63, 87, 205, 225 mourning God, 8 nature’s demands, 229 Nazis and, 14 new man, 74 nihilism and, 11, 34, 67, 78, 141, 142, 143, 172, 220, 229 nihilism as positive, xi, 26 nihilism defined, x opposing authority, 123 pantheistic God, 188 philosopher of evil, 127 power, 12–16 prophecy on values, 2, 30 quasi-fascist, 180 racial superiority, 13 radicality, 9 refusal of atheism, 205 refusal of conciliation, 205 relationships in, 199 scepticism, 20 self as source, 140 self-belief, 3 self-contradiction, 155 self-denial, 2 self-deprecation of man, 184 self-realisation, 12 smiling nihilism, 8 stronger not killed, 211 stronger, not killed, 180, 191 suffering, 127 surrealism, 137 transgressive theology, 128 transition state, 73 truth, 86, 87 truth and, 196 two faces, 21 two plus two, 134, 229 used for ill, 145 values devalued, 41 values prophecy, 33

268 violent emotions, 26 vulgar and noble, 171 Wagner and, 10, 15 weak will perish, 142 will to power, xi, 15, 63, 173, 192, 199 will to truth, 27, 126 writings, 1 yes to both, 145 youth-restoring, 35 Zarathustra, 12, 15, 141 nihilism, 6–8 absolute, 6 absurd distinguished, 139 adaptive, 54 alethiological, 7, 11, 27 and fundamentalism, 29 anti-foundational, 12 art as, 19 as absence of value, 19 as crisis, x as decadence, x as meaningless destructiveness, xi as negation of life, 2 as ontology, 19 as passivity, x as relativity, xi as uncanny guest, 34 atheism and, 11 axiological, 7, 27, 38, 200 banalised, 35, 59, 61, 221, 231 Camus usage, 138 categories, 7 choice as, 18 completed, 113 creative passion, 65 crisis of truth and meaning, 6 crisis of value, 42 critique, 76 culture of, 42, 92 defined, x, 26 denial of being, 6 deserved critique, xii disjunctive synthesis, 223

Index dissolution in, x dogmatism and, 208 Dostoyevskyan, 194 dramatized in novels, x dynamic, 9, 10, 13, 14, 18, 23, 24, 29, 33, 34, 36, 40, 47, 50, 54, 59, 69, 79, 91, 137, 178, 180, 191, 197, 205 epistemological, 7 equivocal, 15, 220, 229 ethics and, x, 7, 76 European, 6, 120 existentialism and, 7, 8,11 faith in nothing, 6 fundamentalism and, 26, 27 heroism and, 104 historic, defining, x Löwith’s view, 34 metaphysical, 7 morality and, xi nature of, 21 necessary impulse, 59 Nietzschean, ix, x, 9, 11, 12, 76, 97, 99, 127, 172, 180, 207 ontological, 7 passive, 8, 9, 10, 11, 23, 24, 33, 34, 42, 58, 78, 92, 130, 178, 185, 198, 212 path out from, 205, 208 philosophical roots, 123 political, 8 positive, xi, 144 price not value, 20 radical, x, 45 resigned, 106 screen image and, x semantic, 7, 82 smiling, xi, 8, 15, 16, 23, 87, 104, 106, 120, 165, 201, 205, 218, 219, 227, 229 theological, 7 typologies, 229 unresolved, 42 values denial, 2, 112

From Big Brother to Big Brother varied usage, 9 violence, xi, 7, 10 Zarathustra and, 12 Notes from Underground, 11 nova effect, 32, 206 novels Belle Époque roundness, 123 crime genre, 36 dun-coloured realism, 185 dystopic, 44 ideas, of, 39 moral form, 35 philosophical, 62 production of mind, 36 safeguard of individuality, 226 science-predictive, 40 social questions in, 185 value and disvalue, 33–36 O’Connor, Flannery, 88–94, 88, 90, 119 Of Grammatology, 228 On Human Personality (Weil), 86 On Lautréamont (Benda), 134 On Photography (Sontag), 119 One Thousand Plateaux, 214 Opposing Shore, The, x, 131–37, 146 organisation man, 22 Orwell, George, ix, 11, 14, 16, 24, 30, 42, 43, 44, 52, 53, 76, 78, 107, 109, 144, 145, 169, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223, 229, 231, 232 Osborne, John, 44 Outsider, The, 138 Packard, Vance, 83 Pascal, Blaise, 2 (wager), 6, 146, 163 Passage to India, A, 38 phenomenology, 5, 150 Plague, The, 140 Platform (Houellebecq), 165 Plato, 35, 40, 62, 76 as idealist, 60 Republic of, 21 Plato’s cave, 36

269

Platonic good, 62 Platonism, 15, 229 as idealism, 22 of professions, 22 popular culture rules of, 36 split from high culture, 9 Postman, Neil, 79, 80, 109 postmodernism, 5, 217, 222 power faith in, 12–16 power, figures as icons, 16 Proust, Marcel, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 137, 139 psychoanalysis, 5, 29, 30, 45, 54, 99, 146, 149, See also Kristeva trauma and, 78 punk rock, 10 Pynchon, Thomas, 99–104, 114, 120, 156, 222 Rabbit Redux, xi, 104–10 Rabbit trilogy, 219 Ramadan, Tariq, 14 Rand, Ayn, 22, 84 reality TV, 45 Rebel, The (Camus), 140, 142 Red Shoes, The, 206–11, 219 Regarding the Pain of Others, 119 Regeneration, 3738, 41, 42, 45, 56, 76 Republic (Plato), 21 Reynolds, Henry, 183 Ritzer, George, 33 rort, Australian usage, 179 Rorty, Richard, 19, 86 Rotten, Johnny, 23 Rushdie, Salman, 24, 25, 64–70, 73, 76, 171, 203, 208 Russell, Bertrand, 48, 49, 167 Ryan, Peter, 181, 197 Sampson, Anthony, 43, 44 Sarraute, Nathalie, 146–52 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5, 11, 12, 97, 98, 122, 125, 127, 129

270 Camus and 138 do unto others, 225 Gracq debt to, 133 nothingness in being, 185 Satanic Verses, The, 24, 6370, 72, 171, 208 Saul, John Ralston, 22 Saussure. See de Saussure scepticism, 4, 20–23, 26, 28, 199, 229 cynicism and, 21 doubt in good faith, 22 Nietzsche admiring of, 21 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 170, 171 Schumpeter, Jakob, 232 Scott, Kim, 211–16 screen faith in, 16–18 production of face, 36 Sea, the Sea, The, 5–64, 220 Secret Agent, The, 7 secularism, French, 122 Sennett, Richard, 112 Sex Pistols, 10 Seymour, Alan, 177 Shame (Rushdie), 64, 65, 66 Shaw, Bernard, 22, 40 Sim, Stuart, 93 Sisyphus, task of, 25, 35, 138, 139 slave-races, 96, 99, 216, 218 Slocombe, Will, 8, 34 Smile or Die, 227 smiles, fixed, See nihilism, smiling Snow White (Barthelme), 82, 96 society of spite, 171 Somerville, Margaret, 224, 227 Sontag, Susan, 25, 26, 28, 74, 79, 87, 109, 115–20, 227 Spinoza, Baruch, 4, 163, 164, 188 Stead, Christina, 179–80 Stern, J P, 15, 154, 155, 157 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 33, 35, 36, 116 Stirner, Max, 11

Index Strange Case of and Mr Hyde, The, 33 Street of Dark Shops, 152–58 structuralism, 5, 150, 164 suicide, 34, 40, 59, 66, 139, 140 as pure will, 34 Superman, 9, 12, 31, 54–5, 78, 84, 88, 99, 201, 205, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233 appeal to tyrants, 15 as Big Brother, 229 nexus of power, 229–31 surenchère, 124, 125,126, 127, 128, 136, 144, 149, 150, 156, 161, 169, 172, 233 surrealism, 18, 20, 23, 29, 133, 134, 137, 146 surveillance, 16, 18, 43, 53, 56, 210, 229, 230, 231, 232 CCTV cameras, ix, 45 surveillance society, 53 Tacey, David, 181 Taylor, Charles, 32, 206 telescreen as Godhead, 218 logic of, 36 telescreen age broad picture, x commencement, 18 cynicism, cruelty, terror, 26 defined, ix dystopian precursors, 71 economics and, 227 irony in, 69 Nietzsche and, 21 nihilism and, 205 reality in, 108 Superman of, 55, 229–31 terra nullius, 182, 183 terrorism, xi, 27, 171 Thatcher, Margaret, 5 theory alternating with impulse, 26, 85, 125, 128, 136, 150, 166, 169,

From Big Brother to Big Brother 172, 183, 187, 197, 210, 216, 221, 229 cultural, 5, 221, 223, 229 faith and, 29–31, 221–26, 229 freezing impulse, 20 French, postwar, 130 Friedmanite, 5 fundamentalist, 31, 67 grand theory, 109 impulse and, 75, 125, 127, 136, 150, 164, 169, 172, 183, 187, 197, 210, 216, 221 Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1, 12, 15, 24, 31, 33, 52, 63, 78, 99, 106, 136, 139, 171, 186, 196, 206, 232 Time Machine, The, 40 transgression conformist, 23 faith in, 23–26 true and false, 6, 25, 45, 59, 79, 109 Turgenev, Ivan, 7, 11, 146, 151, 169, 219 Übermensch. See Superman Updike, John, xi, 24, 25, 104–10, 120, 166, 219, 224 value beyond good and evil, x challenged by Nihilism, x indeterminacy of, 25 novels and, 33–36 reformation of, 229 value and disvalue, 25 values, freedom from, 1–3 Vichy collaboration, 123 Vico, Giambattista, 70 Vietnam, 15, 28, 80, 106, 107, 109, 120, 152 Violent Bear It Away, The, 88–94 Volcano Lover, The, 6, 115–20 Vonnegut, Kurt, xi Voss, 181, 184–190, 195, 201, 213, 215, 216 Voyage to the End of the Night, 19, 124, 138

271

Waiting for Godot, 184 Warhol, Andy, 12, 19, 221, 225 Watney, Simon, 18 Watson, John B., 29 Waugh, Evelyn, 39 Weil, Simone, 7, 15, 86, 219, 229 Weller, Shane, 8, 229 Wells, H G, 40, 42 Western decadence, 165 White Australia Policy, 174 White Noise, 110–14, 168, 170, 219 White, Patrick, 180, 181, 184–190, 201, 216 Whyte, William, 80, 84, 115 Wik judgment, 182, 183 Wild Cat Falling, 181 Wilde, Oscar, 20 will to negate, 8, 27 will to power, xi, 6, 12, 15, 20, 34, 49, 51, 63, 98, 102, 111, 174, 186, 192,194, 199, 210, 221, 222, 229 Winton, Tim, 201–206, 216, 226 wowsers, 177, 179, 180, 184, 193, 196, 197, 198, 201, 204, 205, 211, 212, 216, 226 youth, faith of, 31–33 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 42 Zarathustra, 191 bardic, 191 converging with God, 188 guru, 12 requiring acolytes, 16 See also Thus Spake Zarathustra Žižek, Slavoj, 79, 225