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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Sexuality and Literature

Posted in Aesthetics, Alienation, Literature, Sexuality on November 19th, 2006 by Richard

This article by Alan Hollinghurst on Ronald Firbank does rather make me want to reread both writers:

“By making the novel a structure of bright fragments, Firbank had aestheticized it, and in the aesthetic realm the normative claims of morality are relaxed. Firbank’s difficult inconsequential manner is part of a bigger subversion of the novel, and what is in many ways a homosexualization of the novel. Characteristically, he didn’t do this by writing a “gay novel” of the kind that E. M. Forster had struggled with in Maurice, or of the kind that James Baldwin or Gore Vidal would later write in Giovanni’s Room and The City and the Pillar – novels in which the homosexual condition is itself the subject, with an unusual dominance of maleness. For Forster, the crisis which led him to abandon the novel form altogether was the impossibility of writing about the one thing which most determined his view of life. “

Although one of the striking facts about the novel in the twentieth century is that it easily adapted to producing gay novels like a A Boy’s Own Story as readily as it had adapted to women’s writing in the previous century, the notion of fragments as a gay aesthetic is interesting idea, particularly when one considers parallels between the fragmentary approach described here and the Burroughsian cut-up technique (or Gertrude Stein’s verbal collage). EM Forster’s dictum, only connect, may have largely been applied to a conventional interpretation of the novel but it was nonetheless applied to a context of alienation as much as Genet’s novels or John Rechy’s City of the Night (and goes some way to explain why modernism, with its emphasis on epiphany and fragment proved a fertile ground for gay writers like Proust and Gide). With that said, the most interesting example in this regard is Hollinghurst himself, given the influence of the Victorian novel on The Line of Beauty (the first post-gay novel, as Edmund White called it and very far from being concerned with outcasts and outsiders in the way Rechy, Baldwin or Vidal were), where the main character certainly does allude to Trollope’s The Way We Live Now and the novel depicts a broad swathe of nineteen eighties society and depicts the transition of conservatism from being a party of the landed gentry to being a party of upstart magnates. Where a Victorian social novel would have shown how different parts of society were inextricably joined, Hollinghurst deliberately emphasises the divisions of an increasingly atomised society, as the main character’s homosexuality clashes with both his middle-class background and the upper-class milieu he has become accustomed to.

Political Religion

Posted in Religion on November 5th, 2006 by Richard

I must admit to finding it difficult not to want to quote all of this article from John Gray:

“The secular ideologies that had such power during the last century were deeply shaped by Christianity… Michael Burleigh argued that, from the Jacobins in the French Revolution to the anarchists of late 19th-century Russia, Europe produced a succession of political religions that had many of the features of the faith they aimed to replace. In imagining a perfected world at the end of history, Marx and Bakunin reproduced Christian eschatology: the belief that human life can be transformed in a vast revolutionary conflagration was apocalyptic myth rendered into secular terms. Christian concepts and values permeated many lesser-known ideologies such as positivism and the many varieties of utopianism… In a horrible way Nazism was a messianic movement, which offered the promise of a new life in a transfigured world to those who were allowed to survive the cataclysm that was to come.

Downplaying the role of the church in the crimes of the last century is part of a larger default in Burleigh’s analysis. Medieval Christendom was hardly an oasis of peace. It was racked with savage wars and campaigns of systematic extermination that prefigure those of modern times. The crusade against the Cathars launched by Pope Innocent III at the start of the 13th century led to the deaths of around half a million people, many by mass hanging, drowning or torture. Violent millenarian movements repeatedly convulsed late-medieval and early-modern Europe. In the early 16th century, a communist New Jerusalem was established in the city of Munster in northwest Germany that had many of the features of later secular regimes, including the methodical use of terror. The extraordinary savagery of modern political religion does not come from giving up Christianity. It is a secular version of the faith-based violence that has been an integral part of Christianity throughout its history.”

I’ve long taken the view that both fascism (or at least Nazism) and communism can be understood as sublimated christian sects as much as responses to economic conditions in the manner Polanyi suggested. In all cases, the principle of noncontradiction is regarded as sound. Induction is useless; the basic premise must be believed in, rather than known, and in either case, conclusions must follow by means of deduction from the basic premise, not induction from empirically obtained data. In both cases, the vision of the new realm is all that is of import, rather than considerations of individual autonomy and rights.