Speaking of Kevin Costner playing dead, I also failed to point out that Costner made his big screen debut playing a corpse. This was in The Big Chill, where the opening credits play over a body being dressed for viewing. According to the commentary track by the writer-director, Lawrence Kasdan,234 Costner was to portray Alex, the erstwhile leader of the gang back at the U. of M. whose suicide brings them back together for the funeral. These flashbacks were the first scenes shot—the whole film was made in chronological order for effect—but Kasdan decided to scrap them and only deal with present time. As a sop, Costner was given the unaccredited role of Alex’s corpse.
Kasdan’ commentary goes on to state that audiences were supposed to be fooled, thinking that a woman was dressing a man for a formal event, perhaps Glenn Close and Kevin Kline, as just seen in the previous sequence, and then the last shot was a “reveal” of the sutured wrist of the corpse. Perhaps I had seen a review beforehand, but I don’t recall ever being fooled that way, always taking it to be Alex’s corpse. On Kasdan’s interpretation, though, we have another layer: not only is (real) Costner playing a (fake) corpse, but the (fake) corpse is playing a (fake) Costner.
Readers will also recall that I previously discussed, briefly, The Big Chill in “The Gilmore Girls Occupy Wall Street” but only in the context of what might be called Liberal Psycho-Geography, their strange preference for living in small towns, even rural communities, once they have been cleansed of those dirty White Others who actually created the towns and communities.
In the case of the sad sacks gathered at Alex’s funeral, they were only happy living together back in Ann Arbor, under the charismatic leadership of Alex, some kind of sophomore Tim Leary or Mark Rudd (these would have been the deleted Costner scenes). Now, his suicide has brought them back together in a similar locus, the conveniently large house of the most adult couple among them, now living in conveniently rural but Yuppie-friendly South Carolina.235
The gang is clearly some kind of Männerbund, now bereft of their spiritual leader. But it’s an unusual one: multi-sexual and multi-ethnic,236 and above all, characterized by fakery and failure. The complete failure of their lives, most dramatically Alex himself, might lead one to question his bona fides as a guru, but like most Liberals, what they’ve learned is mostly an intense self-regard, which makes it impossible to “check their premises,” as Ayn Rand used to say.237
Nick: Wise up, folks. We’re all alone out there and tomorrow we’re going out there again.
Rather than the more obviously Männerbund-ish features, I’d like to focus on something at first glance entirely different: Sarah has the bright idea to solve Meg’s worries about never finding a man to have a child with, by loaning her husband, Harold.
In my previous essay, I passed this off as an ostentatious, Bloomsbury-like nose-thumbing of “bourgeois morality.” Oddly enough, Hans Blüher, the theorist of the Männerbund, provides a more interesting perspective.
Through Wulf Grimsson, whose work we drew on for our Untouchables essay, I’ve obtained one of the few English translations of one of Blüher’s public lectures, in which he lays out his theory of sexuality, the family, and the Männerbund.
In “Family and Male Fraternity,” he discusses at one point the role of creativity in responding to the demands of new situations. Traditions, to be vital, must respond to new conditions, and in the process, what once were sins may become moral, as they facilitate the creation of a new tradition. (One thinks perhaps of Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of the Exception.) In considering the modern problems besetting the tradition of monogamy, Blüher spurns the advocates of “free love” as not having thought out and found a creative solution to the practical problems, such as jealousy. Here he writes:
Jealousy is the will to have an exclusive right on the sexual partner and illustrates all over again the myth of the human being cut in two and deprived of his other half. Because after all there can only be one other half! Jealousy is really the destructive element within a polygamous marriage. Jealousy can never be eliminated by affectionate persuasions, by calming appeasements or any kind of rational arrangement, but only by a great creative act of the Eros itself. Let me give a comparison from German philosophy. Arthur Schopenhauer speaks at several points in his work of so-called “conversions.” A criminal, who is just going to the scaffold and who until recently has had no remorse for his crime, is suddenly enlightened. . . .
A man is not purified through a gradual diminution of sin—to believe this would just be muddled ignorance and rationalism—but through a sudden change of his whole nature. The bigger his sin was, the more he is purified. The same thing can happen with jealousy.
Jealousy is the real sin against the creative Eros. In the case of exceptional women, there are rare moments where this usually destructive passion can turn around, can place itself into the service of the former rival and can increase the love of two women for the man whom they both love. On such a basis the will of the man is creating the sacrament of polygamy. Without this sacrament, which the Greeks called mysterion, all polygamous relationships are doomed to end in the most distressful disaster. Something permanent can only come about where a sacrament (a mystery in the Greek sense) stands between people, where devotion, sacrifice and service are involved. Polygamy needs a state of grace and cannot be “made.”
Are Meg and Sarah such exceptional women? (Note Blüher’s use of the Schmittian term.) Sarah, despite her marriage, children, and homemaking, and her general “earth mother” portrayal,238 and Meg, despite her distinctly non-hip obsession with finding a man to have a child with (which would be mocked as ’60s stupidity on Mad Men today), are both played by decidedly “mannish” actresses. Glenn Close, who received her first Oscar nomination for this role, received her most recent this year for a role in which she portrays a woman living as a man, while Mary Kay Place eventually “came out” as a lesbian.
When she first arrives, Meg wears neither the ’80s shoulder-padded woman’s “power suit” nor the later Hilary-style “pants suit” but what looks like a boy’s suit, complete with white shirt, striped tie, and attache case—in the contemporaneous Official Preppy Handbook, women were advised to check out the boy’s department at Brooks Brothers for appropriate attire.
She and Richard are the only ones dressed like real grown up men, and both have thought a lot about what a man should be. Like Richard’s late night speech, she provides a surprisingly contemporary meditation on modern manhood:
Meg: They’re either married or gay. And if they’re not gay, they’ve just broken up with the most wonderful woman in the world, or they’ve just broken up with a bitch who looks exactly like me. They’re in transition from a monogamous relationship, and they need more space. Or they’re tired of space, but they just can’t commit. Or they want to commit, but they’re afraid to get close. They want to get close, you don’t want to get near them.
Finding no acceptable men, Meg has had to become a man, or a facsimile thereof, just as Costner’s Ness had to learn how to become a man by creating his own double, the wise and honest Malone.
Meg: It’s a cold world out there. Sometimes I feel like I’m getting a little frosty myself.
As Capone says, “If you were a man, you’d have done it.” And we know what “doing it” means. As Blüher says, “Where is the important man who would be content with just one woman?”239
Meg accepts Sarah’s offer of Harold only as last resort, having considered and dismissed all the inadequate man-children available that weekend (including a “return engagement” with the Jew, Michael). Her choice, adultery if not quite a ménage à trois, is made to further a higher tradition, motherhood.
It’s even possible, though it passes as a joke, that Meg’s wisdom was what killed Alex:
Meg: The last time I spoke with Alex, we had a fight. I yelled at him.
Nick: That’s probably why he killed himself. . . . What was the argument about?
Meg: I told him he was wasting his
life.
In The Untouchables, Costner’s Ness conjures up an authentic teacher of manhood and then kills him off when no longer needed for the task of re-establishing the ideal of justice. In The Big Chill, Costner plays a fake guru—or perhaps, a Guru of Fakeness—who is killed off by Meg, in order for her to set up the funeral weekend where she will finally conceive a child. Meg is the authentic Shaman, who can shape-shift across gender lines and break traditional vows—monogamy—in order to pursue a higher calling: motherhood.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
May 22, 2012
THE BAKER STREET MÄNNERBUND:
SOME THOUGHTS ON HOLMES,
WATSON, BOND, & BONDING
“These,” he pointed around, “are my other guns. The parallel is exact!”
—Sherlock Holmes, “The Empty House.”240
Having devoted considerable time and attention to the genres of weird fiction and science fiction,241 it is perhaps long overdue that I should spend some time considering the remaining one of the Three Disreputable Genres,242 detective fiction.
The transition is made easier by the fact that the inventor of the detective tale, by most accounts, is that master of the weird tale, Edgar A. Poe, who in turn Lovecraft considered his own master.243
I suspect that, as with weird fiction and science fiction, the persistent popularity of this looked-down-upon genre—one often considered no more than a mere personal quirk or obsession—lies in its ability to present Traditional metaphysical themes no longer countenanced by mainstream fiction, or culture in general. Let’s see!
In dealing with detective fiction, one must, of course, deal with the epoch-making figure of Sherlock Holmes.
The first thing writers on Sherlock Holmes feel the need to tackle is the question of the overwhelming cultural impact of these tales of a late Victorian/early Edwardian private (or “consulting”) detective. The only rival, though still subject to far less fan obsession, is that other British chap, James Bond, secret agent, of whom more anon.
As usual, Colin Wilson has an interesting and useful theory about this.244 He attributes the overwhelming and continued fascination with Holmes to Doyle having, quite inadvertently, solved an important problem in spiritual evolution:
Holmes was more than a fictional character: he was a response to a deep-rooted psychological need of the late Victorians, a need for reassurance, for belief in the efficacy of reason and for man’s power to overcome the chaos produced by this new disease of alienation.245
The rise of literacy among the populace led to an obsession with the realistic novel (itself an innovation of Cervantes, Richardson, Defoe and others).
You would have to imagine that Sir Walter Raleigh brought back marijuana from the New World, and all Europe became pot smokers. This taste for escaping into worlds of fantasy swept across Europe, and literature gained an important that it had never possessed in any previous age.246
A point often missed, especially by literary critics of the Realist camp,247 is that this involves more than the accumulation of precise detail, important though that is.248 Among realists, Dumas would always be more popular than Balzac, and even within Dickens, Pickwick Papers would be more popular than “better” novels like Hard Times. “They are too ‘real,’” says Wilson, “and they lack the element of the wish-fulfillment fantasy.”
The point is, to get the two together, in the right proportion: the wish-fulfillment fantasy, with enough realistic detail to assure us that this, unlike a child’s fairy-tale, is real.
Consider Manhunter, Michael Mann’s 1986 film based on Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon. In pursuing the Tooth Fairy, FBI “manhunter” Will Graham knows that he can’t be caught unless Graham can figure out what his fantasy is: to find his motive, he must find out what he kills “to fuel his fantasy.” By the end,
The psychological paths of Graham and Dollarhyde finally converge. Graham tells Crawford how he understands the Tooth Fairy. “He dreams about being wanted and desired. So he changes people into beings who will want and desire him . . . Killing and arranging the people to imitate it . . . You put it together, you get, if our boy imitates being wanted and desired enough times, he believes he will become one who is wanted and desired and accepted. It will all come true.”
There is an uneasy parallel and confluence in the modern mode of genre fiction, one of fantasy/reality, child/adult:
“Are you sympathizing with this guy, Will?” Crawford asks offscreen. Mann keeps the camera on Graham’s face. “Absolutely,” he answers. “My heart bleeds for him as a child. . . . As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks. Do you think that’s a contradiction, Jack? Does this kind of understanding make you uncomfortable?”249
But then, around the turn of the 19th century, a problem developed; people began to live too much, perhaps entirely, in their imaginations. Enter the literary figure of the aesthete—Axel, Dorian Gray, and most notably Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Huysmans’ À rebours (Against the Grain)—all living apart from, and hostile to, the outside world, constructing their own, superior counter-world at home.250 Unfortunately, as Wilson points out, the world always wins; Des Esseintes ultimately sickens and must return to the hated Paris for treatment.251
Holmes was at first a similar figure, holed up in his rooms at 221b Baker Street, taking cocaine and Turkish coffee, gesturing “languidly.” As Wilson notes, Doyle was commissioned to write the second Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four, by the same publisher, at the same dinner party, that produced The Picture of Dorian Gray, just two years after À rebours.
But unlike either character, Holmes evolves a solution to the problem: crime; or rather, the solution of crimes, the pursuit of justice: “He has not turned his back on the world; on the contrary, he regards himself as a last court of appeal.”
Quite unconsciously, certainly unaware of what he was doing, Conan Doyle had solved the problem that had tormented and frustrated the novelist since Richardson. He had created a romantic hero, a man whose life is entirely the life of the mind (“I cannot live without brainwork), yet succeeded in steering him out of the cul-de-sac of despair and defeat that destroyed so many of the best minds of the fin-de-siècle period.
This has a sound basis in Tradition. From Plato (The Myth of the Cave) to Emericus Durden,252 the path of the Realized Man involves not only rising to the heights but also a return to live among us. 253
As Krishna explains his role as avatar:
Whenever there is a decline of righteousness,
and the rise of unrighteousness,
then I re-incarnate myself
to teach dharma.254
Indeed, soon an even more fascinating development occurred. Fired by his interests in detection, Holmes acquires more and more knowledge and skill, until, no longer a languid aesthete who claimed to not know, or have an interest in, whether the Earth revolved around the Sun or vice versa, to a polymath, a universal genius—a superman, or, as Wilson add, “a true magician.” He becomes that figure we have frequently cited, the Chakravartin, the Unmoved Mover turning things from the Center of the World; as Wilson quotes Watson on Holmes: “He loved to lie in the very center of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumor or suspicion of unsolved crime.”255
Wilson thinks Doyle’s writer’s instinct was right to try to kill off Holmes, because he was unable to find a way to develop the character further.256 He sounds a bit like a Liberal Goodthinker when he suggests that “a man like Holmes” should have naturally become interested in the socio-economic causes of crimes, not just solving them, but this was too mundane to interest Doyle.
What interested Doyle was spiritualism, séances, and such like, and “it’s hard to imagine Holmes at a séance.” True, but I find it hard to imagine Holmes campaigning for slum clearance, hot school lunches, or midnight basketball, either.
The real problem is that Doyle’s interests were not in re
al Tradition but in the modern, deviant areas of “spiritualism” or what Guénon disparaged as “Spiritism,”257 an interest Wilson shares 258 and to which we will be returning.
Wilson gives us a compelling portrait of Holmes and the reasons for the Holmes phenomenon. Still, it might be useful to see what the “professional” literary critics have to say about it.
There are, of course, gazillions of editions of the Holmes novels and tales, ranging from expensive “limited edition” volumes to pricy, vastly annotated slipcovered editions259 to free Kindle versions from Amazon sellers.
The Oxford volume I will employ, whose second edition recently appeared, collects most of the famous tales as well as the short, early novel The Sign of the Four, all gently annotated, and with a useful introduction by Barry McCrea.260 Prof. McCrea reminds me of what my mentor, Plotinus scholar Dr. John N. Deck, once said about Walter Kaufmann and his attempts to popularize Nietzsche and Hegel: He’s seldom wrong but never profound. As such, he provides a useful framework which we can, as Dr. Deck would also say, aprofondise with our own expansions of his comments.
McCrea and Wilson agree, and it is good that they agree, that “There is simply no other fictional character who comes close to having the cultural influence of Holmes,” and that he is “clearly a product of his times.” However, since Doyle fails to give Holmes any PC speeches about racism, sexism, etc., Prof. McCrea has to exercise a bit of academic legerdemain to get his quota of goodthinking in: “The mechanism of the stories is to focus our attention entirely on the mystery while imperceptibly exposing us to social, economic, psychological and historical realities.”
The Homo and the Negro Page 14