Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“MANIFESTO AOTEAROA – 101 Political Poems” edited by Philip Temple and Emma Neale (Otago University Press, $NZ 35)

What is a manifesto?

As usually understood, it is a declared position, a call to arms, a plan of action, a public statement promoting a particular political party, ideology or world view.

And what is a political poem?

Once upon a time, a political poem was expected to be a poem about ideologies or political parties; or vigorous topical satire and the lampooning of specific politicians.

There are some examples of these things in Manifesto Aotearoa – 101 Political Poems, but they are not the norm of the collection. The two editors tell us that they put out a call for political poems, published or unpublished. They received over 500 poems submitted by over 200 poets, and whittled them down to the chosen 101. Only three poets are represented by more than one poem, so here are the works of 98 poets. From this scupulous mathematics, what I am saying is that this inevitably makes for a collection with a great diversity of viewpoints and “political” perspectives – not by any means a manifesto, except in the sense that it manifests the democratic process.

There are no poems of the call-to-arms variety, and few of the demotic type that would once have dominated a collection of political verse. I rate the merry ironic jingle of Kevin Ireland’s “A song for happy voters” as the most old-fashioned poem in terms of style, and Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s “Check Inspector 29” (a protest at the lack of safety standards that allowed the Pike River Mine disaster to happen) as the poem most like a traditional folk ballad. But the majority of poets represented here write with the more ubiquitous current brand of cool, and sometimes sardonic, irony. It goes without saying that, where specific political issues are engaged with, the poets’ views are of the liberal-left. Given what the poetic community is, you wouldn’t seriously expect poems in favour of neo-liberalism or racism or environmental irresponsibility, would you?

There is a joint introduction by the two editors, but each writes a separate introduction as well. Philip Temple’s introduction embraces enthusiastically Shelley’s familiar line that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. According to Temple, political poetry arouses us, makes us more aware of the world we live in, and changes our attitudes. Emma Neale’s introduction is rather more nuanced. She notices that politicians and poets are both “sweet-talkers”, but that they use language in different ways, the poet by making us more reflective. Her text is Auden’s equally familiar line that “poetry makes nothing happen”, but she parses this to mean that poetry makes nothing impulsive and foolish happen, unlike the utterances of politicians. Poetry, she says, makes us more empathetic with our fellow human beings and so in that sense it does make much happen.

After these preliminaries come the poems themselves, which have been arranged into four very broad sections.

First there is Politics itself. This section includes poems on, among other things, the loss of state houses; the unlovely social habits of New Zealand  politicians in general; the unaffordability of real-estate; and student debt (the poem “Enlightenment” by Beverly Martens). David Eggleton’s poem “The (Andrew) Little Things”, being a jeremiad against named politicians, is the most “political” poem in the book in the old partisan sense of that term. David Howard’s impressive “A Display Case in the Museum of Communism” is a surreal version of its collapse. There are a surprising number of poems with a desolate Eastern European ambience (Chris Else, Ian Wedde, Koenraad Kuiper, Stephen Oliver); and Liang Yujing attacks the “great firewall of China” – the Chinese regime’s system of internet censorship.

The second section Rights deals, more or less, with specific groups in society. So there are poems advocating for mine workers and factory toilers; for people who have to work during holidays (Peter Olds); for women selling cheap veges on the roadside (Series Barford); for equal pay for women (Benita H. Kape); about trying to keep the kids warm when you’re poor (Nell Barnard); about lesbians (Heather Avis McPherson); about rape (Ruth Hanover); about the Treaty of Waitangi seen as an imperialst trick (Kani Te Manukura’s “tricks of a treaty”); about Pakeha and Palagi horning in on Pasfika and Maori culture (Mere Taito; Anahera Gildea); and quite a few bilingual poems drawing on Maori discontents.

In Environment, the third section, come laments at the colonisation and anglicisation of Maori animal names (Bridget Auchmuty); the homogenisation of landscape by New Zealand farming practice (Gail Ingram); the quality of water (Anthonie Tonnon); a post-earthquake Christchurch poem (Doc Drumheller); and the global climate crisis which could lead to the melting of the poles (Harvey Molloy)

When it comes to Conflict, the final section, the focus is much broader than New Zealand. Thus there is a reflection on the hoplessness of writing about Gaza (Tusiata Avia); there are two very different takes on the Middle East (Elizabeth Brooke-Carr and Peter Bland); there are many poems on refugees (Louise Wallace, Mercedes Webb-Pullman, Sarah Paterson, Victor Billot, Majella Cullinane); a few on war in general and disarmament (Catherine Amey, Emma Neale); and one on gang violence (Michael Steven).

In rushing superficially through the contents like this, I have of course name-checked only some of the poets in this book and only some of the themes taken up. I enjoyed the week I spent sauntering through Manifesto Aotearoa and found only one or two cases (which I will not shame the poets by naming) of soap-box rant. This is a good and wide sampling of current concerned opinions, in poetic form, on matters of moment.

Inevitably, though, an anthology tempts me to play favourites and name the selections I found really striking.

Let me begin with Helen Watson White’s apocalyptic poem “Water” (p.128), which I quote here in full. Deceptively simple, it works so well because of its device of ambiguity in a lack of conventional punctuation:

For want of a few

nails the proclamation

was not raised

on a dry post in

a desert where

sheep once safely

roamed nibbling

green food fattening

themselves for soup

and the dead left no

article of faith in the

future just excrement

and frozen soup they

died as it were leaving

no political will.

Should I be surprised that Vincent O’Sullivan delves deeper into what ails New Zealand than most poets do? His “To miss the point entirely” (p.24), begins “It isn’t good for a writer to live in a country / where a cut-price banker with his next-door smile / is all we have to throw stones at.” It concludes that in New Zealand we die “of being ourselves.” There is an implicit warning here that it is too easy in a political poem to blame others for the state we are in, rather than to examine our own failures or question the culture to which we contribute.

Should I be surprised that Richard Reeve (in his poem “Boom” (p.33 ) has the wit to see how High Culture can be suborned to the wealthy? Liberal mouthings are not necessarily accompanied by a hand-over of cash to those who really need it.

It was really to my surprise, however, that Diane Brown cut deepest into the assumptions of the liberal readership of this book. Her poem “Every Day My Name is Out There” (p.117) basically says that there are many good causes that should be supported, but that it’s too easy to turn support into mere perfunctory virtue-signalling.

A poem that really shook me was Ivy Alvarez’s “Manufacture” (p.65) about the crushing and wearing nature of working on the factory floor ; and close to it was the raw anger of  Nigel Brown’s “Abrasion” (p.66), which opens “The crude process of grinding down / invented by clever dicks / where you work longer hours for less / in the damp and fetid room / of inequality…” Them’s fighting words, thank goodness.

The most self-effacing poem in the book is Alison Denham’s “Occupy Dunedin”(p.113), about the small-scale of a political event, and its probable lack of impact. Nicola Thorstensen’s “Protection Order” (p.166), about violence both domestic and on the street, creates a remarkable sense of dread, yet ends with another line that will chasten those who overrate poetry’s reach: “This poem cannot save you.”

Another good poem that manages a major shift of tone is Carolyn McCurdie’s “Ends” (p.139) which is, quite credibly, at once horrified about major climate change, and optimistic about the human qualities that can confront it.

Finally the poem that I found myself reading and re-reading - Janis Freegard’s “Arohata” (p.87). It is a tough and unvarnished poem about the real physical experience of visiting a friend in prison. The first reading said this was simply reportage. The re-readings said it was much more – a work of compassion held together by its choice of detail.

Other readers will of course come up with other favourites. I hope all will find this as good a sampling of what upsets and moves poets in the public sphere as I did.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“LE FEU FOLLET” by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (first published in 1931; two English translations in the 1960s, one called The Fire Within, the other called Will o’ the Wisp)

            Last December, when I was visiting Paris, I indulged my usual habit of trawling second-hand bookshops, including the lockable book booths found on both sides of the Seine. It was in a Right Bank booth that I found a copy of a novel I had been wanting to read for some years, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s Le Feu Follet.  What’s more it was a first edition – an NRF (Nouvelle Revue Francaise) paperback published by Gallimard in 1931. But, costing me only a couple of euros, it certainly was not a copy of any great monetary value. It was simply a mass-produced paperback, with its rough 86-year-old pages turning brown with age, of which there are doubtless hundreds of identical copies still in circulation.

Pierre Eugene Drieu La Rochelle (1893-1945) is such a controversial writer, and so despised in many quarters, that, in case you know nothing about him, I will save comment on him until later in this notice.

Let’s begin by concentrating on this extraordinary novel itself.

First, an explanation of its title.

“Le feu follet” is the French term for the ignis fatuus – the drifting “false fire” that sometimes hangs over swamps, caused by rotting vegetation giving off methane gas. Apparently there were two rival English translations of this novel in the 1960s, neither of which I have seen. One translated the title robustly but inaccurately as The Fire Within. The other translated the title as Will o’ the Wisp. But unfortunately Will o’ the Wisp, while an accurate literal rendering of “le feu follet”, sounds rather silly and frivolous in English. Drieu La Rochelle gave the novel its title because he wanted to evoke the idea of moral and intellectual rot, like the fumes from a swamp.

Le Feu Follet is a novel about decadence, about drug addiction, about cultural anomie and finally about suicide. Specifically, it is about the last days in Paris of a drug-addict before he commits suicide. The novel is structured as a series of encounters the drug-addict has with other people, none of whom provide him with a convincing reason to live. Drieu La Rochelle was not himself a drug-addict or alcoholic. It is often pointed out that external details of the suicide of his protagonist, Alain Leroy, were based on the suicide of the surrealist poet Jacques Rigaut in 1929, who had often talked and written of suicide.

Alain Leroy is aged 30. He was in a teenage soldier in the First World War, but for the last ten years or so he has been living by sponging off wealthy American women as he feeds his drug habit. At the time the novel takes place, he is making his third attempt to detoxify. He was married to an American called Dorothy, with whom he lounged about the Cote d’Azur. In fact he is still officially married to Dorothy and is half hoping she will send him some money. But the novel opens with him sharing a bed in a seedy hotel with another American, Lydia, who has already been married and divorced twice. She clearly thinks of Alain as her piece of rough, her French gigolo. She declares on Page 17 (given that the novel is not divided into numbered chapters, I refer to the page numbers of the first edition):

 “J’aime bien ces sales hotels… ce sont les seuls endroits que je trouve intime dans le monde, parce que je n’y suis jamais qu’avec vous.”

“I love these dirty hotels… they’re the only places on earth that I find intimate, because I’m never in them unless I’m with you.” (Pardon my clumsy translations in this notice.)

Lydia gives Alain a generous sum of money on condition that he dries out, joins her in New York, and marries her. Alain is non-committal. But he takes the money, knowing full well that he will eventually spend it on drugs.

Alain returns to the residential sanatorium outside Paris where Doctor Barbinais is attempting to dry him out. Alain is disgusted at other residents, whom he sees as being all neurotics, fanatics and monomaniacs, including the doctor’s wife. He is equally unimpressed, in a long conversation, by Doctor Barbinais’s attempts to reason him out of his addiction. He sees Doctor Barbinais as having interested motives in retaining him as paying patient and he tells the doctor frankly that he will probably return to taking heroin.

He goes back to Paris and the rest of novel is a series of conversational episodes as he visits various friends in the course of a long November evening.

Dubourg, an antiquarian married with two children, tries to persuade Alain that his life is worth living and that he is talented. But Alain is alienated from Dubourg’s comfy bourgeois life.

Leaving Dubourg he walks through the cold, wintry Paris night and hooks up with the old gang who supply him with drugs. As he watches a fashionable and foolish Englishman smoking opium with his old pals, Alain shoots up on heroin.

He moves on to the louche salon of a woman called Praline and drinks alcohol while Praline and her friends smoke opium and hashish. This group are completely into drugs as a recreational culture. They wax sardonic over Alain’s attempts to get himself clean. One of the group, Urcel, is a dandyish opium-smoker and aesthete, who claims that his habit is an enlightening mystical experience. (At this point I wonder if Drieu La Rochelle isn’t taking a smack at the dandyish Jean Cocteau, whose book Opium, Diary of a Cure was published in 1930, the year before Le Feu Follet.) Alain is unimpressed. He knows drug-taking is a physical dependence with diminishing returns in terms of the kick it gives.

Alain’s last social call is a dinner-date where very wealthy hedonists, Cyrille and Solange Lavaux, are hosting a party for a celebrated he-man explorer. Once again, Alain is uncomfortable among them, makes a remark that annoys the guest of honour, and departs. These fashionable people disgust him as much as the others he has met. He sees them as artificial poseurs. In a long conversation he admits that (much as he understands the physical beauty of the hostess Solange), he no longer takes real delight in women.

He stumbles back into the night streets, trolling through the shabby bars around Montmartre, pouring out his self-pity to Milou, a rough customer he has known through his drug connections. He has never been successful with women, he has never retained friends, people desert him….

This self-pity is all we are left with after all the ratiocination the novel has given us. Progressively, we have seen Alain’s mind reject the arguments of medicine (Doctor Barbinais), the lure of bourgeois comfort (Dubourg), the self-justifications of drug-taking aesthetes (Urcel and Praline), and the hedonism of the wealthy (the Lavaux couple and their guests).

Throughout the novel Alain has promised friends that he will see them the following day. Instead he goes back to his hotel room, sleeps, wakes in the morning, looks in the mirror, realises his life is one big nothingness and shoots himself.

On the most obvious level, Le Feu Follet is a novel about the pathology of drug addiction. In the section where Alain is interviewed by Dr Barbinais, there is a long, vivid account of Alain’s history of drug-taking, beginning when a few intoxicating sniffs of cocaine when he was a teenager; moving into habitual heavy drinking; then settling on heroin. Two previous attempts at detoxification are chronicled, with their awful withdrawal symptoms. Outside drugs, there is addictive, compulsive behaviour in other aspects of Alain’s life. He smokes three packets of cigarettes a day. He has so little control over the larger aspects of his life, that he is reduced to making order out of the smaller and more trivial aspects of life. For me, one of the saddest evidences of this pathetic compulsion to make order is the description of how he has set out hotel room:

“Les choses sur la table et la cheminee etaient parfaitement ranges. Dans le cercle de plus en plus restraint ou il vivait, tout comptait. Sur la table il y avait des lettres, des factures classes en deux paquets. Puis, une pile de boites de cigarettes, une pile de boites d’allumettes. Un stylo. Un grand portefeuille a serrures. Sur la table de nuit, des romans policiers ou pornographiques, des illustres americains et des revues d’avant-garde. Sur la cheminee, deux objects: l’un, une mecanique tres subtile, un chronometre de platine partfaitement plat, l’autre, une affreuse petite statuette de platre coloree, d’une vulgarite atroce, achetee dans une foire, qu’il transpotrtait partout, et qui representait une femme nue. Il la disait jolie, mais il etait content qu’elle enlaidit sa vie.” (p.35)

“The things on the table and mantelpiece were set out in a perfectly orderly fashion. Everything counted in the circle, closing more and more tightly, in which he lived. On the table there were letters, with bills organised into two bundles. Then a pile of cigarette packets and a pile of matchboxes. A pen. A big lockable briefcase. On the night table, detective novels and pornographic novels, American illustrated magazines and avant-garde reviews. On the mantelpiece, two things: one, a very subtle mechanism, a plate chronometer which was perfectly flat; the other, a ghastly little coloured-plaster statuette, of disgusting vulgarity, which he had bought at a flea-market and which he took with him wherever he went. It was of a naked woman. He said it was pretty, but he was happy that it made his life uglier.”

As drugs make Alain’s world more and more restricted, that world diminishes to the drug itself. As he finally rejects detoxification and goes back on the stuff, Alain reflects:

“Il n’avait que la drogue, il n’y avait pas a essayer d’en sortir, le monde etait le drogue meme… Il remplit la seringue d’heroine, retroussa sa manche et se piqua.” (p.131)

“He had only the drug. He didn’t have to try to free himself from it. The world was the drug itself… He filled the syringe with heroin, rolled back his sleeve and injected himself.”

There is clear evidence of the physical toll that drug abuse has taken on Alain. At the age of thirty, he every so often ruminates on how he is no longer the handsome young man, attractive to women, that he was just a few years before. His looks are going. Frequently he feels tiredness, lassitude, a loss of will. The reader often infers that he is prematurely losing sexual potency. He has difficulty rousing himself to make love to Lydia in the novel’s opening section. In talking to Dubourg he admits “je fais mal l’amour”. Visiting a bar he looks at the faces of bohemians he used to know and sees that, like him, they are suddenly all old and weary. He admits his dependency on women, not just in terms of money, but in emotional terms, like a little child who is not yet sexually active. At the Lavaux household, speaking to a third-person of the society beauty Solange Lavaux, he admits:

“Je ne peux pas vouloir, je ne peux pas meme desirer. Par exemple, toutes les femmes qui sont ici, je ne peux pas les desirer, ells me font peur, peur. J’ai aussi peur devant les femmes qu’au front pendant la guerre. Par exemple, Solange, si je restais seul cinq minutes avec elle, eh bien, je me ferait rat, je disparaitrais dans le mur.” (p.186)

            “I not able to wish for anything, I not able even to desire anything. Look, for example, at all the women who are here. I am not able to desire them. I’m scared of them. Scared. I’m as scared when I face women as I was when I was at the front in the war. Take Solange. If I was with her for just five minutes I’d shrivel up like a little rat and disappear into the woodwork.”

            But is reproducing the pathology of drug-taking Drieu La Rochelle’s main purpose in this novel? Le Feu Follet represents, after all, a sick and decadent society as much as a sick and decadent Alain. This society and this individual are going nowhere – except to death. The novel never presents, as positive things, religious, philosophical or political alternatives to Alain’s self-destructiveness. It is, in effect, a nihilistic and decadent novel – and as perfect an expression of nihilism, or belief in absolutely nothing, as I have read.

Is Drieu La Rochelle endorsing this nihilism? I think not. I think he is simply analysing it, and seeing that it leaves no firm ground on which to stand.

So where can you positively go when you have seen your society and culture as decadent, and representative figures in your society as embracing nothingness?

To explain where Pierre Drieu La Rochelle himself went in the years after he wrote this novel will help to explain why he is so controversial a figure who is still loathed by many.

Like his fictional Alain Leroy, Drieu La Rochelle fought in the First World War and was three times seriously wounded. The war had a strong effect on him, leading him to distrust the delusions of military leadership and the officer class, while still seeing heroism in the soldier’s trade. I first encountered his writing when I read an English translation of his collection The Comedy of Charleroi (first published in French in 1934). It is a series of ironical short stories, based on Drieu La Rochelle’s own experiences, in which the French army at the front is depicted as playing a great, monstrous game, but a game in which men can become ennobled by their actions.

In the 1920s, as he wrote poems and novellas and political commentaries, Drieu La Rochelle did the things that would stereotypically be expected of a French intellectual of his generation. He mixed with Dadaists and Surrealists and Communists. Along with Andre Breton, he was one of the first to sign the Surrealist Manifesto. The Communist poet Louis Aragon was a pal. So was the left-wing novelist Andre Malraux. Like so many intellectuals of that era, Drieu La Rochelle saw parliamentary democracy as weak, corrupt, divided and incapable of providing good leadership. (The “revolving door” governments of the French Republic between the wars would have reinforced this view.) Politically, Drieu La Rochelle could have jumped either way, as both the extreme left (Communists) and the extreme right (Fascists) made the same criticisms of “bourgeois” democracy.

In the early 1930s, he was still writing articles decrying Hitler. But after the big Paris riots of February 1934 (when right-wing soldiers’ leagues took on the police and called for a Fascist-style government), Drieu La Rochelle turned right. In 1936 he joined Jacques Doriot’s militant French Fascist party the PPI. (Point of interest - Jacques Doriot had formerly been a rising star in the French Communist Party, a Communist mayor of the working-class Parisian suburb St Denis, and a Communist member of parliament – which shows how easily one extremism can become another.) Drieu La Rochelle spent some years editing Doriot’s Fascist magazine. During the German Occupation (1940-44), Drieu La Rochelle was an enthusiastic intellectual collaborator, writing articles in praise of Hitler. When Jean Paulhan, the left-wing editor of the prestigious literary magazine, the Nouvelle Revue Francaise (NRF), was unacceptable to the Nazi occupiers, Drieu La Rochelle took the magazine over and ensured that nothing appeared in it that would offend the German authorities.

Came the Liberation in 1944, and obviously Drieu La Rochelle was now a marked man. His protectors were gone, resisters were now routing out collaborators, and retribution was on the way. Aged 52, Drieu La Rochelle committed suicide early in 1945.

The situation was a little more complex than I have presented it here. Twice, Drieu La Rochelle protected Jean Paulhan, the displaced editor of the NRF, from arrest by the Gestapo. Paulhan survived the war, resumed editorship of the NRF and lived to a ripe old age. After the Liberation, Andre Malraux, now a Gaullist who had borne arms against the Nazis, sought to protect Drieu La Rochelle from arrest and possible execution. Thus do writers often look after one another, despite great political differences.

Even so, it should now be easy for you to see why Drieu La Rochelle, Fascist, collaborator and sometime admirer of Hitler, now has such a negative reputation.

How do I relate all this to the excellent analysis of nihilism that is Le Feu Follet? Simply thus. People who gaze into the deep well of nihilism often react by looking for something solid to cling to. I can imagine Drieu La Rochelle, after having depicted Alain Leroy and his world, seeking that something. Another person might have turned to religion or a programme of social justice. Drieu La Rochelle, being a materialist and an atheist, turned to the worship of power as an organizing force. He had not embraced nihilism  - as I said, he analysed it rather than celebrated it – but he looked at it long enough to himself be morally destroyed by it.

Curious footnote: Despite the opprobrium his life earned him, Drieu La Rochelle’s reputation revived a little some years after the Second World War. In 1963 Louis Malle, then one of the young nouvelle vague directors, made a well-received film version of Le Feu Follet (updated to the Paris of 1963), starring Maurice Ronet as Alain. Among other things, the film changes Alain’s addiction to alcoholism rather than heroin. Having now seen this film in a sparkling new print on Youtube, I would also have to say that the milieu Alain inhabits is more chic and less seedy than the milieu of much of the novel - but the nihilist angst is conveyed faithfully. Apparently the novel has also been adapted into other film versions. It has continued to be republished frequently. Some guides say Drieu La Rochelle’s best novel is Gilles (first published in 1938), also still in print, which I have not read. It is an account of how a young man learns to love the political Right, fights for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and embraces Fascism. The fact that these two titles still get praise must say something for Drieu La Rochelle’s literary skill. Subsequent to writing this notice, I was able to find on Youtube a very good French documentary comparing the three writers Drieu La Rochelle, Aragon, Malraux: D’une guerre a l’autre. I must warn you, however, that it has no English subtitles.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

 

AN OLD TRUTH RE-TOLD

This blog is now nearly six years old, and as, most years, I produce about 42 weeks’ worth of postings, that means that about 252 times I have racked my brains to come up with something interesting to say in this “Something Thoughtful” slot.

So forgive me if sometimes I blatantly repeat myself, as I am about to do here.

I have just been considering Le Feu Follet, a novel written by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. As I have been at pains to explain (a.) it is a very good novel; and (b.) there are very good reasons to regard the author himself with suspicion, or even contempt.

Which brings me to blatantly repeating myself.

Back in 2011, I wrote a think piece on this blog called The Song Not the Singer, in which I argued that when we judge the worth of books, we should be judging the book itself, and not how we respond to the biography of the author.

Three years later, in 2014,  I wrote on this blog an extensive critique of Henry de Montherlant’s tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles/ Pitie Pour Les Femmes. This time I argued that in judging the book itself, we should be able to judge both its ideas and how well it is written.

If we judge the ideas alone, and how favourably we respond to them, then we will be tempted into a propagandist approach, in which we praise (or condemn) books that endorse (or challenge) our worldview, while ignoring their literary qualities. If we judge their literary qualities alone, and ignore their explicit or implicit ideas, then we will move towards a sterile aestheticism and ignore the connection between any book and the world in which it exists.

I declared that a real reviewer should be able to approve of a book’s worldview while recognising (and truthfully commenting on the fact) that it is poorly written. Conversely, a real reviewer should be able to praise a book’s literary qualities while offering a frank (and therefore sometimes negative) account of the book’s values and worldview.

De Montherlant was a convenient vehicle for me to express these ideas because the Les Jeunes Filles/ Pitie Pour Les Femmes tetralogy is notoriously a profoundly misogynist work – in a way, a long howl of contempt at women for either dragging men into domesticity or trying to encroach on men’s intellectual territory. Not only feminists could tear shreds off its ideas, but also men with a more balanced view of the relationship of the sexes. BUT Les Jeunes Filles/ Pitie Pour Les Femmes is not only extremely well-written, and the work of somebody working within  classical French prose tradition; it also offers some real insights into the “battle of the sexes” and presents a real and credible world. As it should have, it has earned praise as the important literary work it is.

As for the matter of the author’s autobiography: yes, there was much that was worthy of negative comment in Henry de Montherlant’s private ife – not the fact that he was essentially homosexual, but the fact that he appears to have been an active paedophile. Doubtless his alienation from women fed into his contemptuous view of women in his novels; but it is still my contention that when we judge his work, we are judging the work – “the words on the page” – and not his private life.

I apply the same critical principles to Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and his novel Le Feu Follet. The novel is an examination of nihilism – a worldview I do not endorse – but it is an extremely well-written and organised examination of this worldview. The author (years after he wrote this novel) became a convinced Fascist, an apologist for Hitler and an intellectual collaborator in the Gernan occupation of France. But when I write about Le Feu Follet, I am judging the man’s novel, not the man’s life.

In spelling out this approach, I am taking my stand against the mass of newspaper and magazine book-reviews I see each week, which do little more than pounce on a book’s ideas, wildly praise those of which the reviewers approve, condemn those of which the reviewers disapprove,  and never stop to ask if the book in hand is of any literary merit at all.

Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“DEFIANT EARTH – The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene” by Clive Hamilton (Allen and Unwin, $NZ 32:99)

            Defiant Earth is a polemic. Experience tells me that polemics come in two varieties. First, there are the polemics that argue passionately for something. Then there are the polemics that spend most of their time demolishing other people’s arguments.

            Clive Hamilton, says the blurb, is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Australia. As a seasoned controversialist, he has written three previous books about the dangers of unfettered humam freedom (The Freedom Paradox), the potential sefl-destructiveness of the human species (Requiem for a Species) and the folly of worshipping economic growth as an end in itself (Growth Fetish).

            In Defiant Earth he defends the concept of the Anthropocene and argues that human beings must take on the responsibility for dealing with it or coping with it. But how we are to do this is left vague. Most of Hamilton’s polemic is taken up with countering arguments against the concept of the Anthropocene, and demolishing the logic and philosophic premises of their proponents. In other words, this is a “clearing-away-the-rubbish” polemic. It is not a polemic that details a spcific plan of action.

So what is the Anthropocene?

Says Hamilton:

“…the Anthropocene concept would not have been possible without the emergence of Earth System science in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of understanding the novel role of humankind in the Earth System…” (Chapter 1 p.17)

The term refers to the unique, lasting and specifically human impact on the natural structures and systems of the Earth. It was first devised in 2000 by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. He proposed that  “Anthropocene” be added to the official  Geological Time Scale, coming after the Holocene (the last 10,000-or-so years of more-or-less stable climate). The term, as Hamilton makes clear, does not refer to a superficial human impact on the Earth’s surface alone, but on the whole Earth System. With carbon emissions, and the residue of nuclear explosions now imprinted in the geological record, the Earth’s oceans are more acidic and anthropogenic global warming is underway. Hamilton’s purpose in this book is to take issue with those who do not realise the totality of this human distortion of nature, or who put their trust in arguments that will have no real impact on the situation.

In his introduction, he makes clear his scepticism of social sciences, which now have a tendency to talk about human perceptions rather than dealing with objective physical realities:

“The ‘humans only’ orientation of the social sciences and humanities is reinforced in ‘mediatized’ societies where total absorption in representations of reality derived from various forms of media encourages us to view the ecological crisis as a spectacle that takes place outsdie the bubble of our existence.” (Introduction p.viii)

He also sets himself up as an opponent of Enlightenment thinking and what has traditionally been regarded as humanism:

“…the forces we hoped would make the world a more civilized place – personal freedoms, democracy, material advance, technological progress – are in truth paving the way to destruction.” (Introduction p.xi)

Hamilton’s first major axiom is that human beings do indeed have to be seen as unique, and it is only when our uniqueness is recognised that we can accept our responsibility for doing something about the global damage our species has done. We are now part of the fabric of the Earth and its functioning, and human history can no longer be separated from natural history. We are part of the nature we have defiled, and its reaction to us is as an equal. We are no longer the Cartesian subject with nature as the object. Our conceptions of free will break down in the face of the necessity imposed on us by nature. To some people, this concept is daunting or heretical:

 “An understanding of an independent human history became the foundation of all modern social sciences, so the convergence – or better the collision – of human and Earth histories in the Anthropocene kindles the suspicion that all social sciences and their philosophical foundations have been built on an understanding of the historical process that is no longer defensible.” (Chapter 1 p.8)

Hamilton is making it absolutely clear that the sort of anthropocentrism he is advocating in not the sort that makes us “masters” of nature, or assumes that other species are simply there for our use and exploitation. He notes the repeated attempts among many more sentimental ecologists to see human beings as simply one species among others, as when we are told that we share 98.8 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees. But, he remarks:

“Although these attempts to cut humans down to size are well motivated, aimed as they often have been at countering the unending violence committed  against other creatures by humans inured to the suffering of others or possessed by a sense of species entitlement, there is always something desperate about arguments that equate human beings with chimps, dolphins and dogs when on any measure the unbridgeable gulf between humans and the rest of creation is blindingly obvious.” (Chapter 2 p.40)

What human beings have uniquely is intentionality and conscious responsibility for the physical condition of the Earth which we have helped to create:

“The philosophical anthropocentrism I develop diverges from the anthropo-supremacism that brought us the ecological crisis; yet it also runs contrary to virtually all philosophical understandings of modern environmentalism and post-humanism.” (Chapter 2 p.49)

Furthermore:

“…against all ethics from Kant onwards, morality is not to be found in the realm of freedom but is rooted in the realm of necessity because our duty to care for the Earth must precede all others. It belongs to us alone. We look across the unbridgeable gulf that separates us from all other beings; it is a gulf of responsibility. We have it; they don’t.” (Chapter 2 pp.52-53)

Hamilton’s next axiom is that the onset of the Anthropocene cannot be reduced to arguments about the responsibilty of one set of humanity, as opposed to another, for the permanent damage that has been done to the Earth System. Much green thought fetishises primitve societies (rainforest-dwellers etc.), as if their way of living will somehow provide a model for avoiding ecological crisis – but this ignores the fact that such people constitute at most about 0.5% per cent of humanity, and their cultures are not transportable. The Marxist argument fingers economic globalism, consumerism, Western capitalism and money-making corporations as responsible for the crisis. [See on this blog my review of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything for an articulate, very informative, version of this argument.] Hamilton in no way absolves these things of blame. But he points out that Western-style indistrialisation and consumerism have been embraced enthusiastically by the “South”, as much as by the “North”, even in countries that are offically not part of the capitalist world. Globalism has not led to universal brotherhood but to universal consumerism.

“ China is now the world’s leading carbon-emitting country by a long way, and the average Chinese person is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the average European. Emissions from the South will soon exceed those from the North and it is likely that in a couple of decades the total historical emissions of the South will exceed those of the North.” (Chapter 3 p.80)

While “grand narratives” are anathema to historians and social scientists, Hamilton believes it is legitimate to see a “grand narrative” in the shared human responsibility for the Anthropocene.

Hamilton next attacks the “post-humanism” of many postmodernists. Cultural studies set out to cut Eurocentrism down to size. Feminism set out to cut men down to size. Queer theory set out to cut heteromormativity down to size. Now posthumanism sets out to cut humanity down to size by saying that we are merely one species among others, and that we are no more important than other species in bringing about change to our environment. Says Hamilton:

“… anti-anthopocentrism has the pervese effect of denying our responsibility for the damage we have caused…. If the Anthropocene brings a message, it is that’s its time to accept the obvious: humans stand out from nature as a whole. When Homo sapiens appeared there was within it some latent property that, when manifested, caused humans to separate from nature, while always remaining dependent on it. This natural-unnatural creature, the networked super-agent who straddles the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, can exert enormous influence on nature, even if it cannot control it.” (Chapter 3 pp.98-99)

Next is Hamilton’s axiom that nature cannot heal itself of the damage the human species has done. In putting forward this argument, Hamilton is at odds with the Nietzschean proposition (taken up by popularisers like Will Self) that humanity is, after all, just a blip on the scale of geological time; and that were humanity to disappear, nature would simply resume its course, gradually cleanse the air of pollution and settle back into its regular rhythms. But such arguments (a.) ignore the indelible damage that humanity has already done; and (b.) are irresponsible, in that they not only belittle human uniqueness, but they assume that ultimately no human action need be taken.

As I read it, the book’s most essential message is found when Hamilton writes:

“Earth and humans are still in the process of creation and our pre-eminent task is to achieve a reconciliation with the Earth at a time when we have an advanced understanding of its workings and, for good or ill, the power to change its course.” (Chapter 4 p. 124).

And:

“The struggle to learn how to live collectively on the Earth and within its limits is the way, the opportunity for humankind to find its place in the cosmos.” (Chapter 4 p. 125)

Hamilton’s last axoim is that human freedom is now constrained by the necessity of our equal partner, the nature with which we still strive. The Enlightenment myth was that freedom and reason, released from superstition, would enable us to reshape the world according to our needs. But the onset of the Anthropocene makes our rational and free choices more limited. We are not free masters of the universe. It is at this point that Hamilton takes aim at so-called “eco-engineering”, which is the belief that all our ecological and environmental problems may be solved by the application of new and improved technology. In response to suggestion that global warming could be “fixed” by treating chemically the Earth’s atmosphere, he notes the real tendency of such thought:

“Rather than slashing the asset value of some of the globe’s biggest corporations, asking consumers to change their habits, or imposing unpopular taxes on petrol and coal, this form of solar geoengineering carries the implicit promise that it will protect the prevailing politico-economic system, which is why certain conservative American think tanks that for years have attacked climate science as fraudulent have endorsed geoengineering as a promising response to global warming.”  (Chapter 5, p.14)

Such thought is no way out of the crisis, and more than are daydreams about sending lucky people off in spacecraft to other worlds once the Earth no longer tolerates our species.

As a philosophical examination of the environmental crisis,  Defiant Earth is a stimulating read. But, as I said at the beginning of this notice, Hamilton provides no blueprint for our terrestrial salvation. He does establish the uniqueness of human beings, and the importance of human responsibility in the face of the Anthropocene. But the future morality he offers is simply an acceptance of “care" rather than “neglect” when it come to the fate of the Earth. For a plan of action, look elsewhere.