Fortunately, the same Zeitgeist was expressing itself by the slow development of The Game; conveniently indescribable, it seems to be a system, akin to music or mathematics,176 by which the content of any science can be stated, developed, and, most importantly, interwoven with any other, in a kind of scientific or cultural or spiritual counterpoint. The result is a spiritual exercise, akin to meditation but often performed publicly and ceremonially, “an act of mental synthesis through which the spiritual values of all ages are seen as simultaneously present and vitally alive.” The celibate scholars of the province of Castalia are the secular monks of this new quasi-religious order that orders society as Catholicism did mediaeval Europe.
While there is a certain intellectual thrill in contemplating this picture (perhaps a clue as to whether the reader would be a suitable candidate for the Order) the dramatic heart of the work is the Bildungsroman in the center, in which Joseph Knecht is initiated into the game and the Order, rises to the very highest position, only to abdicate and return to the world when he begins to sense that the Game itself has become arrogant, sterile, and alien to human society, which may someday decide they no longer need to support it; and as Marx would say, the same shit would start all over again.
What does this have to do with The Elementary Particles? Houellebecq has essentially inverted Hesse’s novel, both structurally and thematically.
Structurally, he has placed at the beginning an unattributed poem that strikes the same themes as Hesse’s work, resembling one of Knecht’s final poems of contentment with the Game, “Stages.”
We live today under a new world order
The web which weaves together all things envelops our bodies
Bathes our limbs,
In a halo of joy.
A state to which men of old sometimes acceded through music
Greets us each morning as a commonplace.
What men considered a dream, perfect but remote,
We take for granted as the simplest of things.
But we are not contemptuous of these men,
We know how much we owe to their dreaming,
We know that without the web of suffering and joy which was their history, we would be nothing.
Now, rather than Hesse’s long, clear, conveniently labeled Introduction to the Game and our history we have the unexpected and puzzling epilogue, which details Michel’s self-exile to Ireland (land of monks where “most of them around here are Catholics”) and his breakthrough in genetics that results in the replacement of sexual reproduction with perfect, immortal clones. The bulk of the novel shows us the modern, secular society that Michel comes to doubt and reject.
Genetics, of course, easily lends itself to metaphors of weaving, but Michel’s breakthrough, which somehow bases itself on quantum mechanics, seems especially Game-like: “Any genetic code, however complex, could be noted in a standard, structurally stable form, isolated form disturbances and mutation . . . every animal species could be transformed into a similar species . . .”
Moreover, the descriptions of his thought processes and inspirations constantly recur to similar tropes; he takes inspiration from the Book of Kells and writes works like “Meditations on Interweaving”—“Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal”—while his protégé’s article “Michel Djerzinki and the Copenhagen Interpretation” is in fact a “long meditation on a quotation from Parmenides” while another attempts “a curious synthesis of the Vienna Circle and the religious positivism of Comte.”
Meanwhile, the popularizing of Michel’s ideas adds to the popular ferment. We live in “the age of materialism (defined as the centuries between the decline of medieval Christianity and the publication of Djerzinki’s work)” whose “confused and arbitrary” ideas have led to a 20th century “characterized by progressive decline and disintegration.” But now, “There had been an acceptance of the idea that a fundamental shift was indispensable if society was to survive—a shift which would credibly restore a sense of community, of permanence and of the sacred.”
The key to this is “the global ridicule in which the works of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Deleuze had suddenly foundered, after decades of inane reverence,” which “heaped contempt on all those intellectuals active in the ‘human sciences.’” Now “they believed only in science; science was to them the arbiter of unique, irrefutable truth.”
What we have, then, is in effect a re-write of Hesse’s novel, but now centered on the (in Hesse’s work, anonymous by choice177) inventor of the Game, rather than his later descendant; the celibate monks of Castalia, selected in childhood and separated forever from their mundane families, have now been generalized to the entire population of the Earth: “Having broken the filial chain that linked us to humanity, we live on. We have succeeded in overcoming the forces of egotism, cruelty and anger which they [us!] could not.”178
While it’s pretty cool and all, one can’t help but think, especially if one has already read Hesse’s novel, that Houellebecq has simply passed the buck. Remember that whole middle section about Joseph Knecht? Hesse had played around with the idea of a utopian society devoted to intellectual contemplation for years; who hasn’t, from Leibniz all the way back to Plato? And he, like Plato, had seen, living through the Century of Wars himself, that it was the only hope for mankind, or at least for culture.
The problem was, however, less one of how to do it—Step One, invent cloning—than Step Two, how would it work; or rather, how would it be maintained? Houellebecq’s narrator speaks with the same placid self-satisfaction as the narrator of Hesse’s introduction: “Science and art are still a part of our society; but without the stimulus of personal vanity, the pursuit of Truth and Beauty has taken on a less urgent aspect.” Indeed. What Joseph Knecht realizes is that dealing with the “less urgent aspect” (his scholars can, if they choose, while away whole careers freely pursuing research so inane that even our Federally-funded researchers would be embarrassed) may be the key to avoiding sterility (admitted, not a problem perhaps with cloning) and self-defeating social irrelevance.
Simultaneously and synchronistically, while Hesse was writing away in Switzerland Thomas Mann was comfortably ensconced in LA, writing his own very similar book, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told by a Friend
.179 Given its resemblances to Hesse’s novel, it’s not surprising to find similarities to Houellebecq’s. Mann’s narrator is contemporary with us, not a few decades in advance, but also writing about our own (then) recent times—Germany from Bismarck to Hitler. His subject, Adrian Leverkühn, is, like Houellebecq’s Bruno, an artist, though also, like Michel, a whiz at mathematics, at least of the cabalistic kind (thus relating him to Hesse’s Castalians). Like Bruno, he is sexually twisted, though in a Wilhelmine German way—like Nietzsche, he has sexual contact once, with a prostitute, in order to deliberately infect himself, like Nietzsche, with syphilis. Like both Bruno and Michel, his one, last object of love, his nephew, is torn away from him through an agonizing, grotesque death.
But most significantly, after that last catastrophe, he conceived his ultimate work, before sinking, again like Nietzsche and Bruno, into madness—The Lamentations of Dr. Faustus, a blasphemous atonal work by which he intends “to take back the Ninth.” I think Houellebecq’s novel can be seen as performing a similar function—taking back The Glass Bead Game, or at least its dramatic sections, where the personal and historical conflicts are lived through and at least somewhat resolved; instead settling comfortably in with the rather pompous narrator of the Introduction, refusing to face the task of working out the problems of the interactions of the human particles and simply saying, “Oh, sure, the modern world sure sucks so let’s just let Science clone us and be done with it!”
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
June 11, 2014
THE FRAUD OF
MISS JEAN BRODIE
Muriel Spark
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: A Novel
London: Penguin Books, 1965 (1st ed. 1961)
“Brodie, of course, is a follower of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini. . . . In that context it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see the elite ‘crème de la crème’ as an SS in miniature with Miss Brodie as its Duce or Führer.”
—Alan Taylor, “Little Miss Imperfect”180
This is a book whose title has been rattling around in my head for decades, mainly due to the popular movie
, for which Maggie Smith won the Oscar for 1969 (and which I haven’t seen). So I was happy to find an old but solid Delta paperback (the old upscale line from Dell) from 1962 for a buck, and read it over two afternoons (it’s a short novel, really one of James’ dear nouvelles).
For those of you not up on the book, here’s a recap of the film (whose ending is slightly different, though not in any way relevant to us here):
One thing I recalled from references to the movie over the years is that Miss Brodie is supposed to be an Evil Person, as shown by her so inspiring a student to live dangerously that she gets killed in the Spanish Civil War. Since “fighting the fascists” is supposed to be a Good Thing by our Elite, I had always supposed it was the girl’s youth that was the problem. On reading the book, however, it is revealed that Miss Brodie is a Bad because she is herself a Fascist (that is, her ‘elitism’ leads her to approve of Fascism) and persuaded the girl to switch sides to the Bad Guys; the girl’s death (not even in combat) is only the last straw, leading another of Her Girls to “betray” her to the administration.
Constant Readers will know that I continue to be amazed at how not only are mass murderers of the Left still presented as heroes (Mao) or sexy icons (Che) or at least sadly mistaken (Stalin), but even such a minor figure of the Right as Franco is still regarded with the same dread and loathing one might be expected to feel for Cthulhu. As I said here:
You would think that on points, Franco would come out pretty good; Spain liberated from a murderous terrorist government, Europe avoids eventual encirclement by Stalinist puppets, thousands of Jews not rounded up and sent East, Spain kept out of the war and avoids the fate of Eastern Europe; eventually, prosperous and free, joins the EU. Of course, as soon as the “social democrats” got their hands on it, the country was run straight into the gutter, as we can see today.181
But as we know, the Left will tolerate not one minute deviation from its doctrines or its whims, and so Franco must be a monster of horror.
So I expected to have my usual counter-culture experience of reading about some “horrible” person and actually admiring them. And indeed, I found it hard to not admire Miss Brodie, an experience apparently quite common among readers, as well as filmgoers, who not only adored Maggie Smith’s character but even have the double-exposure effect of her role in the Harry Potter films, which she has described as “Miss Jean Brodie in a wizard’s hat.”
There is indeed something odd and contradictory about Miss Brodie, and it’s not the “fascist” sympathies or her being, as one of the girls realizes, “an unconscious Lesbian” (p. 120). She doesn’t resemble any “fascist” character I’ve run into, or even much of a stereotype of one.
Miss Brodie preaches free thought and individualism, and scorns “team spirit”: “Phrases like ‘the team spirit’ are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties” (p. 79).
Yet is not “fascism” supposed to privilege the mass over the individual? Of course, while praising “free thought,” Miss Brodie is quite prepared to ram her own ideas down their willing throats:
“Who is the greatest Italian painter?”
“Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie.”
“That is incorrect. The answer is Giotto, he is my favourite.” (p. 11)
In line with this “free thought” and “individualism,” and her Calvinist upbringing, she is a fervent anti-Catholic: “Her [Brodie’s] disapproval of the Church of Rome was based on her assertions that it was a church of superstition, and that only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholic” (p. 85).
And yet, were not the classic ’30s Fascists, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, all Catholics of one kind or another?
Far from being easily imagined as a miniature SS elite, the “Brodie Girls” are a rag-tag assortment of misfits and fuck-ups. One will later die while panicking in a hotel fire, another will be blown up on a train before reaching the battlefield in Spain.
Rather than merit, or blood, her selection process emphasized different qualities:
Miss Brodie had already selected her favourites, or rather those whom she could trust; or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy, these parents being either too enlightened to complain or too unenlightened, […] or too trusting to question the value of what their daughters were learning at this school of sound reputation. (p. 26)
We’re getting warmer. We’ll have reason to come back to those parents, drawn from either the Lumpenproletariat or the “enlightened” elite.
As for her “educational policy” which might be “questioned,” Miss Brodie refuses to move to a more progressive school, preferring a “school of sound reputation” to a “crank school.” Her questionable methods and results include these:
At that time they [the girls] had been immediately recognizable as Miss Brodie’s pupils, being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorized curriculum, as the headmistress said, and useless to the school as a school. . . . These girls were discovered to have heard of . . . the love lives of Charlotte Brontë and of Miss Brodie herself. . . . They knew the rudiments of astrology but not the date of the Battle of Flodden or the capital of Finland. All of the Brodie set, save one, counted on its fingers, as had Miss Brodie, with accurate results more or less. (pp. 5-6)
She turned to the blackboard and rubbed out with her duster the long division sum she always kept on the blackboard in case of intrusions from the outside during any arithmetic periods when Miss Brodie should happen not to be teaching arithmetic. (p. 45)
Are not “fascists,” or at least their near-cousins, “conservatives,” constantly denouncing “progressive” education and demanding that students learn “the 3 Rs”?
Most bizarrely of all, Miss Brodie, a spinster and anti-Catholic, falls in love with the married Catholic art teacher (male), and then schemes to have one of her “suitable” girls have the affair for her, while she arranges equally secret “booty calls” with another unmarried, non-Catholic male instructor.
I’m not sure what disorder this falls under, but again, isn’t the classic “fascist” either sexually rigid or else sadistically debauched (the W. Reich-Visconti pendulum)?
After a little meditation, I think I’ve figured it out, and I submit my hypothesis for general discussion.
Spark, like most Good Thinkers, doesn’t know anything about any real “fascism” or know any of those dirty fascists herself (so infra-dig, after all; when Sandy, she of the “unconscious Lesbian” insight, becomes a Catholic “she found quite a number of fascists less agreeable than Miss Brodie”). How then, to construct her “fascist” character?
Obviously, Miss Brodie must be based on herself, or some other Good Thinkers, and her doctrines and methods accordingly are merely some kind of extreme Good Thinking; hence the notion of “that’s why they’re so damned attractive at first” central to the paranoid “anti-fascist” genre.
The double exposure arises from the fact that Miss Brodie’s “fascism” is actually an extreme form of Liberalism, which today we now know as PC or, as Keith Preston has analyzed it, “Totalitarian Humanitarianism.”
For Spark and her kind, “fascism” is a strawman of ignorance, a mere “boo-word” for anything they dislike. In this case, it’s been applied to what we now can see is the most recent and logical development of
Liberalism itself.
Perhaps, to inject some element of rigor, we might line up Miss Brodie to the schema of “Modernity,” the enemy of the Right, provided at the outset of “The French New Right in The Year 2000” by Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier (reprinted as “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” in Appendix III of new edition of Tomislav Sunić’s Against Democracy and Equality: “Modernity . . . is characterized primarily by five converging processes.”182
1. “[I]ndividualization, through the destruction of old forms of communal life”: Miss Brodie scorns “team spirit” and preaches her own form of individualism: agreeing with her.
2. “[M]assification, through the adoption of standardized behavior and lifestyles”: “You are all Brodie girls!” “Miss Brodie would prefer it.”
3. “[D]esacralization, through the displacement of the great religious narratives by a scientific interpretation of the world.” Miss Brodie is fervently anti-Catholic, rejecting the great religious narrative of European Man for a narrow, presumptuous Calvinism that has been secularized to the extent of her assuming the determining role of the Calvinist God herself, as Sandy correctly intuits: “‘She thinks she is Providence’, thought Sandy, ‘she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end’” (p. 120) just as secularism has replaced God with Man himself.
4. “[R]ationalization, through the domination of instrumental reason, the free market, and technical efficiency.” Not so much; Miss Brodie scorns science, economics, and efficiency, and has her girls rely on their fingers to count, as does she; however, this is really in the service of ensuring that science will not intrude on her dogmas, à la PC taboos on racial science or questioning the dogmas of natural selection and global warming.
Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture Page 7