The third is from a letter written in December. “Everything is a symbol, even the most piercing pain. We are dreamers who shout in our sleep. We do not know whether the things afflicting us are the secret beginning of our ulterior happiness or not. We now see, St. Paul maintains, per speculum in aenigmate, literally: ‘in an enigma by means of a mirror’ and we shall not see in any other way until the coming of the One who is all in flames and who must teach us all things.”
The fourth is from May 1904. ”Per speculum in aenigmate, says St. Paul. We see everything backwards. When we believe we give, we receive, etc. Then (a beloved, anguished soul tells me) we are in Heaven and God suffers on earth.”
The fifth is from May 1908. “A terrifying idea of Jeanne’s, about the text Per speculum. The pleasures of this world would be the torments of Hell, seen backwards, in a mirror.”
The sixth is from 1912. It is each of the pages of L’me de Napoléon, a book whose purpose is to decipher the symbol Napoleon, considered as the precursor of another hero ― man and symbol as well ― who is hidden in the future. It is sufficient for me to cite two passages. One: “Every man is on earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of and to realize a particle or a mountain of the invisible materials that will serve to build the City of God.” The other: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light. . . History is an immense liturgical text where the iotas and the dots are worth no less than the entire verses or chapters, but the importance of one and the other is indeterminable and profoundly hidden.”
The foregoing paragraphs will perhaps seem to the reader mere gratuities by Bloy. So far as I know, he never took care to reason them out. I venture to judge them verisimilar and perhaps inevitable within the Christian doctrine. Bloy (I repeat) did no more than apply to the whole of Creation the method which the Jewish Cabalists applied to the Scriptures. They thought that a work dictated by the Holy Spirit was an absolute text: in other words, a text in which the collaboration of chance was calculable as zero. This portentous premise of a book impenetrable to contingency, of a book which is a mechanism of infinite purposes, moved them to permute the scriptural words, add up the numerical value of the letters, consider their form, observe the small letters and capitals, seek acrostics and anagrams and perform other exegetical rigors which it is not difficult to ridicule. Their excuse is that nothing can be contingent in the work of an infinite mind.45 Léon Bloy postulates this hieroglyphical character ― this character of a divine writing, of an angelic cryptography ― at all moments and in all beings on earth. The superstitious person believes he can decipher this organic writing: thirteen guests form the symbol of death; a yellow opal, that of misfortune.
It is doubtful that the world has a meaning; it is even more doubtful that it has a double or triple meaning, the unbeliever will observe. I understand that this is so; but I understand that the hieroglyphical world postulated by Bloy is the one which best befits the dignity of the theologian’s intellectual God.
No man knows who he is, affirmed Léon Bloy. No one could illustrate that intimate ignorance better than he. He believed himself a rigorous Catholic and he was a continuer of the Cabalists, a secret brother of Swedenborg and Blake: heresiarchs.
—Translated by James E. Irby
Two Books
Wells’ latest book—Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution—runs the risk of seeming, at first glance, like a mere encyclopedia of insults. His extremely readable pages denounce the Führer, who squeals “like a gripped rabbit”; Goring, who “ ‘destroys’ towns overnight and they resume work and sweep up their broken glass in the morning”; Eden, who, “having wedded himself to the poor dead League of Nations, still cannot believe it dead”; Joseph Stalin, who, in an unreal dialect, continues to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat, although “no body knows really what and where this ‘proletariat’ is, still less do they know how and where it dictates”; “the absurd Ironside”; the generals of the French army, “beaten by a sudden realization of their own unpreparedness and incompetence, by tanks that had been made in Czechoslovakia, by radio voices around them, and behind them, messenger boys on motor bicycles who told them to surrender”; the “positive will for defeat” of the British aristocracy; the “spite slum,” southern Ireland; the British Foreign Office, which, although “the Germans have already lost it, seem to be doing their utmost to throw it back to them”; Sir Samuel Hoare, “not only silly mentally but morally silly”; the Americans and English who “betrayed the liberal cause in Spain”; those who believe that this war is “a war of ideologies” and not a criminal formula “of the current disorder”; the naifs who imagine that merely exorcising or destroying the demons Goring and Hitler will make the world a paradise.
I have gathered some of Wells’ invectives: they are literarily memorable; some strike me as unjust, but they demonstrate the impartiality of his hatred or his indignation. They also demonstrate the freedom enjoyed by writers in England, even in the crucial hours of the battle. More important than his epigrammatic ill-humor (the few examples I have given could easily be tripled or quadrupled) is the doctrine of this revolutionary manual. That doctrine may be summarized as a specific alternative: either Britain identifies her cause with that of a general revolution (with that of a federated world), or victory is unattainable and worthless. Chapter XII (pp. 48-54) establishes the basic principles of the new world. The three final chapters discuss some lesser problems.
Wells, incredibly, is not a Nazi. Incredibly, because nearly all my contemporaries are, although they either deny it or don’t know it. Since 1925, no writer has failed to claim that the inevitable and trivial fact of having been born in a certain country and of belonging to a certain race (or certain mixture of races) is a singular privilege and an effective talisman. Defenders of democracy, who believe themselves to be quite different from Goebbels, urge their readers, in the same language as the enemy, to listen to the beating of a heart that answers the call of the blood and the land. I remember, during the Spanish Civil War, certain impenetrable discussions. Some declared themselves Republicans; others, Nationalists; others, Marxists; yet all, in a lexicon of a Gauleiter, spoke of the Race and of the People. Even the men of the hammer and the sickle turned out to be racists. . . . I also remember with some amazement a certain assembly that was convoked to condemn anti-Semitism. For various reasons, I am not an anti-Semite; the principal one is that I find the difference between Jews and non-Jews generally insignificant, and sometimes illusory or imperceptible. No one, that day, wanted to share my opinion; they all swore that a German Jew was vastly different from a German. In vain I reminded them that Adolf Hitler said the same thing; in vain I suggested that an assembly against racism should not tolerate the doctrine of a Chosen People; in vain I quoted the wise words of Mark Twain: “I have no race prejudices. . . . All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.” (The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, 204).
In this book, as in others—The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939), The Common Sense of War and Peace (1940)—Wells exhorts us to remember our essential humanity and to suppress our miserable differential traits, no matter how poignant or picturesque. In fact, that suppression is not exorbitant: it merely demands of states, for a better coexistence, what an elementary courtesy demands of individuals. “No one in his right mind,” says Wells, “thinks the British are a chosen people, a more noble species of Nazis, who are disputing the hegemony of the world with the Germans. They are the battle front of humanity. If they are not that front, they are nothing. That duty is a privilege.”
Let the People Think is the title of a selection of essays by Bertrand Russell. Wells, in the book I outlined above, urges us to rethink the history of the world without geographical
, economic, or ethnic preferences; Russell also advises universality. In the third article, “Free Thought and Official Propaganda,” he proposes that elementary schools teach the art of reading the newspaper with incredulity. I believe that this Socratic discipline would not be useless. Of the people I know, very few practice it at all. They let themselves be deceived by typographical or syntactical devices; they think that an event has occurred because it is printed in large black letters; they don’t want to know that the statement “All the aggressor’s attempts to advance beyond B have failed miserably” is merely a euphemism for admitting the loss of B. Even worse: they practice a kind of magic, and think that to express any fear is to collaborate with the enemy. . . . Russell proposes that the State attempt to immunize people against such deceptions and sophistries. For example, he suggests that students should study Napoleon’s final defeats through the ostensibly triumphant bulletins in Moniteur. A typical assignment would be to read the history of the wars with France in English textbooks, and then to rewrite that history from the French point of view. Our own “nationalists” have already adopted that paradoxical method: they teach Argentine history from a Spanish viewpoint, if not Quechua or Querandi.
Of the other articles, among the most accurate is the one entitled “Genealogy of Fascism.” The author begins by observing that political events derive from much older theories, and that often a great deal of time may elapse between the formulation of a doctrine and its application. This is so: the “burning reality;’ which exasperates or exalts us and frequently annihilates us, is nothing but an imperfect reverberation of former discussions. Hitler, so horrendous with his public armies and secret spies, is a pleonasm of Carlyle (1795-1881) and even of J. G. Fichte (1762-1814); Lenin, a transcription of Karl Marx. That is why the true intellectual refuses to take part in contemporary debates: reality is always anachronous.
Russell ascribes the theory of fascism to Fichte and to Carlyle. The former, in the fourth and fifth of the famous Reden an die deutsche Nation, attributes the superiority of the Germans to their uninterrupted possession of a pure language. Such reasoning is almost inexhaustibly fallacious; we can hypothesize that there is no pure language on earth (even if the words were, the representations would not be; although Spanish-language purists say deporte, they write sport); we can recall that German is less “pure” than Basque or Hottentot; we can ask why an unmixed language should be preferable. . . . Carlyle’s contribution is more complex and more eloquent. In 1843, he wrote that democracy was the despair of not finding heroes to lead us. In 1870, he hailed the victory of “noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany” over “vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulatory, quarrelsome, restless and oversensitive France” (Miscellanies VII, 251). He praised the Middle Ages, condemned the windbags of Parliament, defended the memory of the god Thor, William the Bastard, Knox, Cromwell, Frederick II, the taciturn Dr. Francia, and Napoleon; longed for a world that was not “chaos equipped with ballot urns”; deplored the abolition of slavery; proposed that statues, “horrible bronze solecisms,” be converted into bronze bathtubs; praised the death penalty; rejoiced that every town had a barracks; adulated and invented the Teutonic Race. Those who yearn for further imprecations or apotheoses may consult Past and Present (1843) and the Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850).
Bertrand Russell concludes: “In a certain sense, it is legitimate to state that the atmosphere at the beginning of the eighteenth century was rational, and that of our time is antirational.” I would omit the timid adverbial phrase with which the sentence begins.
[1941] —Translated by Eliot Weinberger
A Comment on August 23, 1944
That crowded day gave me three distinct surprises: the physical degree of joy I felt when they told me that Paris had been liberated; the discovery that a collective emotion can be noble; the puzzling and flagrant enthusiasm of many who were supporters of Hitler. I know that if I question that enthusiasm, I may easily resemble those futile hydrographers who asked why a single ruby was enough to arrest the course of a river; many will accuse me of trying to explain a fantastic event. Still, it happened, and thousands of per sons in Buenos Aires can bear witness.
I realized immediately that it was useless to ask those people themselves. They are fickle, and by behaving incoherently they are no longer aware that incoherence need be justified. They adore the German race, but they abhor “Saxon” America; they condemn the articles of Versailles, but they applaud the wonders of the Blitzkrieg; they are anti-Semitic, but they profess a religion of Hebrew origin; they celebrate submarine warfare, but they vigorously condemn British acts of piracy; they denounce imperialism, but they defend and proclaim the theory of Lebensraum; they idolize San Martin, but they regard the independence of America as a mistake; they apply the canon of Jesus to the actions of England, but the canon of Zarathustra to those of Germany.
I also reflected that any other uncertainty was preferable to the uncertainty of a dialogue with these siblings of chaos, exonerated from honor and piety by the infinite repetition of the interesting formula I am Argentine. Furthermore, did Freud not argue and Walt Whitman not foresee that men have very little knowledge of the real motives for their conduct? Perhaps, I said to myself, the magic of the symbols Paris and liberation is so powerful that Hitler’s partisans have forgotten that the defeat of his forces is the meaning of those symbols. Wearily, I chose to imagine that the probable ex planation for this conundrum was their fear, their inconstancy, and their mere adherence to reality.
Several nights later, I was enlightened by a book and a memory. The book was Shaw’s Man and Superman; the passage in question was John Tanner’s metaphysical dream, where he affirms that the horror of Hell is its unreality. This conviction can be compared with the doctrine of another Irishman, John Scotus Erigena, who denied the substantive existence of sin and evil, and declared that all creatures, including the Devil, will return to God. The memory was the day that had been the exact and hateful opposite of August 23, 1944: June 14, 1940. A certain Germanophile, whose name I do not wish to remember, came to my house that day. Standing in the doorway, he announced the dreadful news: the Nazi armies had occupied Paris. I felt a confusion of sadness, disgust, malaise. Then it occurred to me that his insolent joy did not explain the stentorian voice or the abrupt proclamation. He added that the German troops would soon be in London. Any opposition was useless, nothing could prevent their victory. That was when I knew that he, too, was terrified.
I do not know whether the facts I have related require clarification. I believe I can interpret them like this: for Europeans and Americans, one order and only one is possible; it used to be called Rome, and now it is called Western Culture. To be a Nazi (to play the energetic barbarian, Viking, Tartar, sixteenth-century conquistador, gaucho, or Indian) is, after all, mentally and morally impossible. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have known that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.
[1944] —Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
On William Beckford’s Vathek
Wilde attributes this joke to Carlyle: a biography of Michelangelo that would make no mention of the works of Michelangelo. So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasizing different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realized that the protagonist was the same. Let us greatly simplify, and imagine that a life consists of 13,000 facts. One of the hypothetical biographies would record the series n, 22, 33 . . .; another, the series 9, 13, 17, 21 . . . ; another, the series 3, 12, 21, 30, 39 . . . . A history of a man?
??s dreams is not inconceivable; another, of the organs of his body; another, of the mistakes he made; another, of all the moments when he thought about the Pyramids; another, of his dealings with the night and with the dawn. The above may seem merely fanciful, but unfortunately it is not. No one today resigns himself to writing the literary biography of an author or the military biography of a soldier; everyone prefers the genealogical biography, the economic biography, the psychiatric biography, the surgical biography, the typographical biography. One life of Poe consists of seven hundred octavo pages; the author, fascinated by changes of residence, barely manages one parenthesis for the Maelstrom or the cosmogony of “Eureka.” Another example: this curious revelation in the prologue to a biography of Bolivar: “As in the author’s book on Napoleon, the battles are scarcely discussed.” Carlyle’s joke predicted our contemporary literature: in 1943, the paradox would be a biography of Michelangelo that allowed for some mention of the works of Michelangelo.
The examination of a recent biography of William Beckford (1760-1844) has provoked the above observations. William Beckford of Fonthill was the embodiment of a rather trivial type of millionaire: distinguished gentleman, traveler, bibliophile, builder of palaces, and libertine. Chapman, his biographer, unravels (or tries to unravel) his labyrinthine life, but omits an analysis of Vathek, the novel whose final ten pages have brought William Beckford his fame.
I have compared various critical works on Vathek. The prologue that Mallarmé wrote for the 1876 edition abounds in felicitous observations (for example: he points out that the novel begins atop a tower from which the heavens may be read in order to end in an enchanted subterranean vault), but it is written in an etymological dialect of French that is difficult or impossible to read. Belloc (A Conversation with an Angel, 1928), opines on Beckford without condescending to explanations; he compares the prose to that of Voltaire and judges him to be “one of the vilest men of his time.” Perhaps the most lucid evaluation is that of Saintsbury in the eleventh volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature.