Under the Sign of Saturn

Under the Si
g
n
of Saturn
Susan Sonta
g
VINTAGE BOOKS
A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE
NEW YORK
First Vintage Books Edition, October 1981
Copyright 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1980 by Susan Sonla
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random
House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, New York, in 1980, and simultaneously in Canada
by McGraw-1/ill, Ryerson Ltd., Toronto.
The New York Review of Books frst published, in a somewhat diferent or
abridged form, "On Paul Gooaman" in Vol. XIX, No. 4 (Sept. 21, 1972);
"Fascinating Fascism" in Vol. XXIJ, No.I (Feb. 6,1975);
"Under the Sign of Saturn" in Vol. XXV, No.15 (0ct.l2,1978);
"Syberberg's litler" in Vol. XXVll, No. 2 (Feb. 21,1980);
"Remembering Barthes'' in Vol. XXVIJ, No. 8 (May 15,1980);
and "Mind as Passion" in Vol. XXVIJ, No.14 (Sept. 25,1980).
"Approaching Artaud," written to introduce the Selected
Writings of Antonin Artaud (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1976)
which 1 edited, frst appeared in The New Yorker, May 19,1973.
I am grateful, as always, to Robert Silves for encouragement and
advice; and to Sharon DeLano for generous help in getting
several of the essays into fnal form.
s..
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publicaton Data
Sontag, Susan, 1933-
Under the sign of Saturn.
Reprint. Originally published: New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux,J980.
Contents: On Paul Goodman-Approaching Artaud
-Fascinating Fascism-( etc.}
1. Arts, Modern-20th century. I. Title.
NX456.S58 1981 700'.9'04 814073
ISBN 0-394-74742-9 AACR2
Manufactured in the United States of America
F O R JO S E PH BR O D S KY
ON PAUL GOODMAN
APPROACHING ARTAUD
FASCINATING FASCISM
UNDER THE SIGN OF SATVRN
SYBERBERG
'
S HITLER
RE:IElIBERING BARTHES
lIIND AS PASSION
Contents
3
13
73
109
137
169
181
Hamm: I love the old questions.
( With fervour. )
Ah the old questions, the old answers,
there's nothi ng li ke them!
Endgame
On Paul Goodman
I am wri t i ng thi s i n a ti ny room i n Paris, sitting on a
wicker chai r at a typing table in front of a wi ndow whi ch
looks onto a garden ; at my back is a cot and a night table;
on the foor and under the table are manuscri pts, notebooks,
and two or three paperback books. That I have been living
and worki ng for more than a year in such small bare quar
ters, though not at the begi nni ng planned or thought out,
undoubtedl y answers to some need to strip down, to close
of for a whi le, to make a new start with as l i ttle as possible
to fall back on. In thi s Pari s i n which I l ive now, which has
as l ittle to do with the Paris of today as the Paris of today
has to do with the great Paris, capital of the ni neteenth cen
tury and seedbed of art and i deas unti l the late 1960s,
America is the closest of all the faraway places. Even dur
i ng periods when I don't go out at all-and in the l ast
months there have been many blessed days and nights when
/3
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
I have no desi re to leave the typewriter except to sleep
each morning someone bri ngs me the Pari s Herald Tribune
wi th i ts monstrous collage of "news" of America, encapsu
lated, di storted, stranger than ever from thi s di stance : the
B-52s rai ni ng ecodeath on Vietnam, the repulsive martyr
dom of Thomas Eagleton, the paranoia of Bobby Fi scher,
the i rresi stible ascensi on of Woody Allen, excerpts from the
di ary of Arthur Bremer-and, last week, the death of Paul
Goodman.
I fnd that I can' t write just hi s frst name. Of course, we
called each other Paul and Susan whenever we met, but
both in my head and in conversati on with other people he
was never Paul or ever Goodman but always Paul Good
man-the whole name, wi t h all the ambi gui ty of feel i ng
and fami l i arity whi ch that usage i mplies.
The grief I feel at Paul Goodman' s death i s sharper be
cause we were not friends, though we co-inhabited several
of the same worlds. We frst met eighteen years ago. I was
twenty-one, a graduate student at Harvard, dreami ng of
li ving i n New York, and on a weekend trip to the ci ty
someone I knew who was a fri end of hi s brought me to the
loft on Twenty-third Street where Paul Goodman and hi s
wi fe were celebrating hi s bi rthday. He was drunk, he
boasted raucously to everyone about his sexual exploi ts, he
talked to me just long enough to be mi ldly rude. The second
ti me we met was four years later at a party on Ri verside
Drive, where he seemed more subdued but j ust as cold and
self-absorbed.
I n 1 959 I moved to New York, and from then on
through the late 1960s we met often, though always in
public-at parti es given by mutual friends, at panel di scus-
/
4
On Paul Goodman
sions and Vietnam teach-ins, on marches, in demonstra
tions. I usually made a shy efort to talk to him each time
we met, hoping to be able to tell him, directly or i ndi
rectly, how much hi s books mattered to me and how much
I had learned from him. Each time he rebufed me and I
retreated. I was told by mutual friends that he didn' t really
l i ke women as peoplethough he made an exception for a
few particular women, of course. I resisted that hypothesis
as long as I could ( it seemed to me cheap) , then fnally
gave i n. After all, I had sensed j ust that i n his writings : for
instance, the major defect of Growing Up Absurd, which
purports to treat the problems of American youth, is that it
talks about youth as if it consists onl y of adolescent boys
and young men. My attitude when we met ceased being
open.
Last year another mutual friend, Ivan Ill ich, i nvited me
to Cuernavaca at the same time that Paul Goodman was
there giving a seminar, and I told Ivan that I preferred to
come after Paul Goodman had left. Ivan knew, through
many conversations, how much I admi red Paul Goodman's
work. But the intense pleasure I felt each time at the
thought that he was alive and well and writing i n the
United States of America made an ordeal out of every si tu
ation in whi ch I actual ly found myself i n the same room
with him and sensed my i nabi l ity to make the slightest con
tact with him. In that qui te l i teral sense, then, not only
were Paul Goodman and I not friends, but I disl iked him
the reason being, as I often explai ned plai ntively duri ng hi s
l i fetime, that I felt he di dn't l ike me. How pathetic and
merely formal that di sli ke was I always knew. It is not Paul
Goodman's death that has suddenly brought thi s home to
me.
/
5
U N D E R Til E S I G N O F S A T U R N
He had been a hero of mi ne for so long that I was not i n
the l east surprised when he became famous and always a
l i ttle surprised that people seemed to take hi m for granted.
The frst book of hi s I ever read-I was seventeen-was a
collect i on of stories called The Break-up of Our Camp,
publ i shed by New Directi ons. Withi n a year I had read
everythi ng he'd publ i shed, and from then on started keep
i ng up. There i s no l ivi ng Ameri can wri ter for whom I
have felt the same si mple curiosity to read as qui ckly as
possi bl e anything he wrote, on any subject. That I mostly
agreed with what he thought was not the mai n reason;
there are other wri ters I agree with to whom I am not so
loyal . It was that voi ce of hi s that seduced me-that di rect,
cranky, egot i st i cal, generous American voice. If Norman
lai ler i s the most bri l l i ant writer of hi s generat i on, i t i s
surely by reason of t he authori ty and eccent ri ci ty of hi s
voi ce; and yet I for one have always found t hat voi ce too
baroque, somehow fabri cated. I admi re Mai ler as a writer,
but I don' t real l y bel i eve i n his voice. Paul Goodman' s voice
i s the real thing. There has not been such a convincing, genu
i ne, si ngul ar voice i n our language si nce D. H. Lawrence.
Paul Goodman' s voi ce touched everythi ng he wrote about
wi t h i ntensi ty, i nterest, and hi s own terri bly appeal i ng sure
ness and awkwardness. What he wrote was a nervy mixt ure
of syntacti cal st i fness and verbal feli ci t y ; he was capable of
wri ti ng sentences of a wonderful puri ty of style and vi vac
i ty of language, and also capable of wri t i ng so sloppi l y and
clumsi ly that one i magi ned he must be doi ng i t on purpose.
But it never mattered. It was hi s voice, that is to say, hi s
i ntell igence and the poetry of hi s i ntell i gence i ncarnated,
which kept me a loyal and passi onate addict. Though he
/
6
On Paul Goodman
was not often graceful as a writer, hi s writing and his mi nd
were touched with grace.
There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward
a writer who tries to do many things. The fact that Paul
Goodman wrote poetry and plays and novels as well as so
ci al cri ticism, that he wrote books on i ntellectual speci al
ti es guarded by academi c and professional dragons, such as
ci t y planni ng, education, l i terary criticism, psychi atry, was
held agai nst hi m. Hi s being an academi c freeloader and an
outlaw psychi atri st, whi l e al so bei ng so smart about uni
versities and human nat ure, outraged many peop1e. That
i ngratitude i s and always was astonishing to me. I know
that Paul Goodman often complai ned of it. Perhaps the
most poi gnant expression was i n the journal he "kept be
tween 1955 and 1960, publi shed as Five Years, in whi ch he
laments the fact that he i s not famous, not recognized and
rewarded for what he is.
That journal was wri tten at the end of hi s long obscur
i ty, for with the publ ication of Growing Up Absurd i n
1960 he di d become famous, and from then on hi s books
had a wi de ci rculation and, one i magi nes, were even widely
read-i f the extent to which Paul Goodman's i deas were
repeated ( wi thout hi s being gi ven credi t ) is any proof of
being wi dely read. From 1960 on, he started maki ng
money as he was taken more seri ously-and he was l i stened
t o by the young. All that seems to have pleased hi m,
tough he st i ll complained t hat he was not famous enough,
not read enough, not appreciated enough.
Far from being an egomani ac who could never get
enough, Paul Goodman was qui te right in thinki ng that he
never had te attenti on he desered. That comes out
/
7
U N D E R T H E S I GN O F S A T U R N
clearly enough i n the obi tuaries I have read si nce hi s death
in the half-dozen Ameri can newspapers and magazi nes that
I get here i n Pari s. In t hese obituaries he i s no more than
that maverick i nteresti ng wri ter who spread hi mself too
thi n, who publi shed Growing Up Absurd, who i nfuenced
the rebelli ous American youth of the 1960s, who was i n
di screet about hi s sexual l i fe. Ned Rorem's touchi ng obi t
uary, the only one I have read that gi ves any sense of Paul
Goodman's i mportance, appeared i n The Village Voice, a
paper read by a l arge part of Paul Goodman' s consti tu
ency, only on page 1 7. As the assessment s come in now that
he i s dead, he i s bei ng t reated as a margi nal fgure.
I would hardly have wi shed for Paul Goodman the ki nd
of medi a st ardom awarded to McLuhan or even Marcuse
which has l i ttle to do wi th actual i nfuence and doesn't tell
one anything about how much a wri ter is bei ng read. What
I am compl ai ni ng about i s that Paul Goodman was often
t aken for granted even by his admi rers. It has never been
clear to most people, I thi nk, what an extraordi nary fgure
he was. He could do al most anyt hi ng, and tri ed to do al most
everythi ng a wri ter can do. Though his fction became i n
creasi ngl y didact i c and unpoetic, he continued to grow as a
poet of consi derable and enti rel y unfashionable sensi bi l i t y ;
one day people wi l l di scover what good poetry he wrote.
Most of what he said in his essays about people, ci ties, and
the feel of l i fe i s true. His so-called amateuri sm is i dent ical
wi t h hi s geni us : that amat euri sm enabled hi m to bri ng to
the quest i ons of school i ng, psychi atry, and ci tizenshi p an
extraordi nary, cur mudgeonly accuracy of i nsi ght and free
dom to envi sage practi cal change.
It is difcult to name all t he ways i n which I feel i n
debted to him. For twenty years he has been to me qui te
/
8
On Paul Goodman
si mply the most i mportant American wri ter. He was our
Sartre, our Cocteau. He di d not have the frst-class theoret
ical i ntelligence of Sartre ; he never touched the mad,
opaque source of genuine fantasy that Cocteau had at hi s
di sposal i n practicing so many arts. But he had gi fts that
neither Sartre nor Cocteau ever had : an i ntrepid feel i ng
for what human l i fe is about, a fasti di ousness and breadth
of moral passion. His voice on the pri nted page is real to
me as the voices of few writers have ever been-fami li ar,
endearing, exasperati ng. I suspect there was a nobler
human being in his books than i n his li fe, somethi ng that
happens often i n "l i terature." ( Sometimes it is the other
way around, and the person in real l i fe i s nobler than the
person in the books. Someti mes there i s hardly any relati on
ship between the person in the books and the person in real
li fe. )
I gained energy from readi ng Paul Goodman. He was
one of that small company of writers, l iving and dead,
who establi shed for me the value of being a writer and
from whose work I drew the standards by which I measured
my own. There have been some li vi ng European wri ters in
that di verse and very personal pantheon, but no li vi ng
American writer apart from hi m. Everyt hing he di d on
paper pleased me. I li ked it when he was pi gheaded, awk
ward, wistful, even wrong. Hi s egotism touched me rather
than put me of ( as Mai ler's often does when I read hi m) .
I admi red hi s di li gence, hi s willingness to serve. I admired
hi s courage, which showed i tself in so many ways-ne of
the most admirable being hi s honesty
a
bout hi s homosex
uality in Five Years, for which he was much criticized by
hi s straight friends in the New York intellectual world ;
that was six years ago, before the advent of Gay Liberation
made coming out of the cl oset chic. I li ked i t when he
/
9
U NDE R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
talked about hi mself and when he mi ngled hi s own sad
sexual desi res wi t h hi s desire for the pol i ty. Like Andre
Breton, to whom he could be compared in many ways,
Paul Goodman was a connoi sseur of freedom, joy, plea
sure. I learned a great deal about those three things from
readi ng hi m.
Thi s morning, start ing t o write this, I reached under the
table by the wi ndow to get some paper for the typewri ter
and saw that one of the three paperback books buried
under the manuscripts i s New Reformation. Although I
am trying to l ive for a year wi thout books, a few manage to
creep i n somehow. It seems ftting that even here, i n thi s
t i ny room where books are forbi dden, where I t ry better to
hear my own voice and di scover what I really thi nk and
really feel, there i s still at least one book by Paul Goodman
around, for there has not been an apartment i n which I
have lived for the last twenty-two years that has not con
tai ned most of his books.
With or wi thout his books, I shall go on being marked
by hi m. I shall go on grieving that he i s no longer alive to
talk i n new books, and that now we all have to go on i n our
fumbl i ng attempts to help each other and to say what i s
true and to release what poetry we have and to respect each
other's madness and right to be wrong and to cultivate our
sense of ci t izenli ness wi thout Paul's hectoring, without
Paul's patient meandering explanations of everythi ng,
wi thout the grace of Paul' s example.
( 1
97
2)
/ 10
Approaching Artaud
The movement to di sestablish the "author" has been at
work for over a hundred years. From the start, the i mpetus
was-as it still i s..apocalyptic : vivid with complai nt and
j ubi l ation at the convulsive decay of old soci al orders,
borne up by that worldwide sense of living through a
revoluti onary moment which continues to ani mate most
moral and i ntellectual excel lence. The attack on the
"author" persists i n full vi gor, though the revol ution ei
ther has not taken place or, wherever i t di d, has quickly
stifed l i terary moderni sm. Gradually becoming, i n those
countries not recast by a revolution, the domi nant tradi
ti on of high l i terary culture i nstead " of i ts subversion,
moderism continues to evolve codes for preservi ng the
new moral energies while temporizing wi th them. That the
hi stori cal i mperative which appears to discredi t the very
I 1
3
UN D E R T H E S I G N OF S AT U R N
practice of l i terature has lasted so long-a span covering
numerous l iterary generations-does not mean that i t was
incorrectly understood. Nor does i t mean that the mal ai se
of the "author" has now become outmoded or i nappropri
ate, as is sometimes suggested. ( People tend to become
cynical about even the most appalli ng cri si s if i t seems to
be dragging on, fai l i ng to come to term. ) But the longevity
of moderni sm does show what happens when the prophe
sied resolution of drasti c social and psychologi cal anxiety i s
postponed-what unsuspected capacities for i ngenuity and
agony, and the domestication of agony, may fouri sh i n the
i nteri m.
I n the establ i shed concepti on under chronic challenge,
li terature i s fashioned out of a rational-that i s, soci ally
accepted-language i nto a variety of i nternally consi stent
types of di scourse ( e. g. , poem, play, epic, treati se, essay,
novel ) in the form of individual "works" that are judged
by such norms as veraci ty, emotional power, subtlety, and
relevance. But more than a century of l i terary modernism
has made clear the conti ngency of once stable genres and
undermined the very notion of an autonomous work. The
standards used to appraise l i terary works now seem by no
means self-evi dent, and a good deal l ess t han universal .
They are a parti cul ar culture's confrmations of i ts notions
of rati onali ty: that i s, of mind and of communi ty.
Bei ng an "author" has been unmasked as a role that,
whether conformist or not, remai ns i nescapably respon
si ble to a given soci al order. Certai nly not all pre-moder
authors fattered the societies in whi ch they l i ved. One of
the author' s most ancient roles is to call the communi ty to
account for i ts hypocrisies and bad fai th, as Juvenal in the
Satires scored the foll ies of the Roman aristocracy, and
Ri chardson i n Clarissa denounced the bourgeoi s i nst itu-
/ 14
Approaching Artaud
tion of property-marri age. But the range of al ienation
avai lable to the pre-modern authors was still l i mi ted
whether they knew it or not-to castigating the val ues of
one class or mi li eu on behal f of the values of another class
or mi lieu. The modern authors are those who, seeki ng to
escape this l i mi tati on, have j oi ned in the grandiose task set
forth by Nietzsche a century ago as the transvaluation of al l
values, and redefned by Antonio Artaud i n t he twenti eth
century as the "general deval uation of values." Quixotic as
thi s t ask may be, i t outli nes t he powerful strategy by which
the modern authors declare themselves to be no longer
responsi bleresponsible in the sense that authors who
celebrate thei r age and authors who criti cize it are equally
ci t i zens i n good standi ng of the society i n whi ch they func
tion. The modern authors can be recognized by their efort
to di sestablish themselves, by thei r wi l l not to be moral l y
useful to the communi ty, by thei r i ncli nati on to present
themselves not as social cri ti cs but as seers, spi ri t ual adven
turers, and soci al pari ahs.
Inevi tably, di sestablishing the "author" brings about a
redefni t ion of "wri ting. " Once wri ti ng no l onger defnes
i tself as responsible, the seemingly common-sense di stinc
tion between the work and the person who produced i t,
between publi c and private utterance, becomes void. All
pre-modern l i terature evolves from the classical concepti on
of wri ti ng as an i mpersonal, sel f-sufcient, freestanding
achievement. Moder l i terature projects a qui te di ferent.
idea : the romanti c concepti on of wri ti ng as a medi um in
which a si ngular personal i ty heroi cally exposes i tself. Thi s
ult i mately pri vate reference of public, l i terary di scourse
does not requi re that the reader actually know a great deal
about the author. Al though ample bi ographical i nforma-
/
15
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T URN
ti on i s avai lable about Baudel ai re and next to nothing i s
known about the l i fe of Lautreamont, The Flowers of Evil
and Maldoror are equally dependent as l i terary works
upon the i dea of the author as a tormented self rapi ng i ts
own uni que subjecti vi ty.
In the view i ni ti ated by the romanti c sensi bi li ty, what is
produced by the artist ( or the phi l osopher) contains as a
regulating i nternal structure an account of the labors of
subjectivi ty. Work derives i ts credenti als from its place i n a
singular l ived experience ; it assumes an inexhausti ble per
sonal total i ty of which "the work" i s a by-product, and
i nadequately expressive of that total i ty. Art becomes a
statement of sel f-awareness-an awareness that presup
poses a di sharmony between the self of the artist and the
communi ty. Indeed, the arti st's efort is measured by the
si ze of i ts rupture wi th the collective voi ce ( of "reason" ) .
The arti st i s a consciousness trying to be. "I am he who,
i n order to be, must whi p hi s i nnateness," writes Artaud
rodern l i terature's most di dactic and most uncompromis
i ng hero of sel f-exacerbation.
In pri nciple, the project cannot succeed. Consciousness
as given can never whol l y constitute i tself in art but must
strai n to transform its own boundaries and to alter the
boundaries of art. Thus, any si ngle "work" has a dual
status. It i s both a uni que and speci fc and al ready enacted
l i terary gesture, and a meta-l iterary decl arati on ( often
strident, sometimes i roni c) about the i nsufciency of l i ter
ature wi t h respect to an ideal condi ti on of consciousness
and art. Consciousness conceived of as a project creates a
standard that i nevi tably condemns the "work" to be i n
complete. On the model of t he heroic consciousness that
aims at nothi ng less than total self-appropri ation, l i terature
/
16
Approaching Artaud
will aim at the "total book." Measured agai nst the idea of
the total book, all writing, i n practice, consi sts of frag
ments. The standard of beginnings, mi ddles, and ends no
longer appli es. Incompleteness becomes the reigning
modality of art and thought, giving rise to anti-genres
work that is deli berately fragmentary or self-canceli ng,
thought that undoes itself. But the successful overthrow of
old standards does not require denyi ng the fai lure of such
art. As Cocteau says, "the only work which succeeds i s that
which fails."
The career of Antoni n Artaud, one of the last great
exemplars of the heroic period of l iterary modernism,
starkly sums up these revaluations. Both i n hi s work and i n
hi s l i fe, Artaud failed. Hi s work i ncludes verse ; prose
poems ; flm scri pts ; writi ngs on cinema, pai nting, and l it
erature ; essays, diatribes, and polemics on the theater ;
several plays, and note& for many unreali zed theater
projects, among them an opera ; a hi storical novel ; a four
part dramatic monologue wri tten for radi o ; essays on the
peyote cult of the Tarahumara Indi ans ; radi ant appear
ances i n two great flms ( Gance's Napoleon and Dreyer's
The Passion of Joan of Arc) and many mi nor ones ; and
hundreds of letters, hi s most accompli shed "dramat i c"
form-al l of whi ch amount to a broken, sel-multilated
corpus, a vast collection of fragments. What he bequeathed
was not achieved works of art but a si ngular presence, a
poetics, an aesthetics of thought, a theology of culture, and
a phenomenology of sufering.
In Artaud, the artist as seer crystalli zes, for the frst ti me,
into the fgure of the artist as pure victim of his conscious
ness. What i s prefgured i n Baudelaire's prose poetry of
/
17
UNDER THE S I GN O F SA TURN
spleen and Ri mbaud's record o f a season i n hell becomes
Artaud's st at ement of hi s unremi tti ng, agoni zi ng awareness
of the i nadequacy of hi s own consci ousness t o i tsel f-the
torment s of a sensi bi l i ty that j udges i tself to be i rreparably
estranged from thought. Thinking and using language be
come a perpet ual calvary.
The met aphors t hat Artaud uses to describe hi s i ntel
l ect ual di stress treat the mi nd ei t her as a property to which
one never holds clear t i tl e ( or whose t i tle one has lost ) or
as a physi cal substance that i s i nt ransi gent, fugi t i ve, un
stable, obscenel y mutable. As early as 1921, at the age of
twenty-fve, he st at es hi s problem as that of never managi ng
to possess hi s mi nd "in i ts entirety.
"
Throughout the ni ne
teen-twent i es, he l ament s that hi s i deas "abandon" hi m,
that he i s unable to "di scover" his ideas, t hat he cannot
"at t ai n" hi s mi nd, that he has "lost" hi s understanding of
words and "forgotten" the forms of thought. In more di
rect metaphors, he rages agai nst the chroni c erosi on of hi s
ideas, the way his thought crumbles beneath hi m or leaks
away ; he descri bes his mi nd as fssured, deteri orati ng, pet
ri fying, l i quefyi ng, coagul at i ng, empty, i mpenetrably
dense : words rot . Artaud sufers not from doubt as to
whether hi s
"
I" thi nks hut from a conviction that he does
not possess hi s own thought. He does not say that he i s
unable t o t hi nk ; he says t hat he does not "have" thought
which he takes to be much more than havi ng correct i deas
or judgment s. "Havi ng thought" means that process by
whi ch thought sust ai ns i tself, mani fests itself to i tself, and
i s answerable "to all t he ci rcumstances of feel i ng and of
l i fe." It i s i n this sense of thought, whi ch treats thought as
both subject and object of i tsel f, that Art aud clai ms not to
"have" i t. Artaud shows how the Hegel i an, dramati stic, self-
/ 1
8
Approaching Artaud
regardi ng consciousness can reach the state of total alien
ation ( i nstead of detached, comprehensive wi sdom)
because the mind remai ns a n object.
The language that Artaud uses is profoundly contradic
tory. His i magery is materi ali sti c ( making the mi nd into a
thing or object ) , but hi s demand on the mi nd amounts to
the purest philosophi cal ideal i sm. He refuses t o consider
consciousness except as a process. Yet i t i s the process char
acter of consciousness-its unseizabili ty and fux-that he
experiences as hell . "The real pain," says Artaud, "is to
feel one' s thought shi ft wi thi n onesel f." The cogito, whose
all too evident exi stence seems hardly i n need of proof,
goes in desperate, i nconsolable search of an ars cogitandi.
Intelligence, Artaud observes with horror, i s the. purest
cont i ngency. At the anti podes of what Descartes and Val
ery relate in their great opt i misti c epics about the quest
for clear and di st i nct i deas, a Di vine Comedy of thought,
Artaud reports the unending mi sery and bafement of con
sciousness seeki ng i tsel f : "thi s i ntellectual t ragedy i n which
I am always vanqui shed," the Di vi ne Tragedy of thought.
He describes hi mself as "i n constant pursui t of my i ntel
lectual being. "
The consequence of Artaud's verdict upon himsel f-hi s
conviction of hi s chronic al i enation from hi s own con
sciousness-is that hi s mental defcit becomes, di rectly or
i ndi rectly, the domi nant, inexhaust ible subject of hi s writ
i ngs. Some of Artaud' s accounts of hi s Passion of thought
are al most too pai nful to read. He elaborates l i ttle on hi s
emotions-panic, confusion, rage, dread. Hi s gi ft was not
for psychological understandi ng ( whi ch, not bei ng good at
i t , he dismi ssed as trivial ) but for a more origi nal mode of
description, a ki nd of physiological phenomenology of
/
19
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U RN
hi s unendi ng desolati on. Artaud's clai m i n The Nerve
Meter that no one has ever so accurately charted hi s "i nti
mat e" self i s not an exaggerat i on. Nowhere in the enti re
hi story of wri t i ng in the frst person is there as t i reless and
detai led a record of the mi crostructure of mental pai n.
Artaud does not si mply record hi s psychi c angui sh, how
ever. It const i tutes his work, for whi l e the act of wri t ing
to give form to i ntel l i gence-is an agony, that agony also
suppli es the energy for the act of wri t i ng. Al though Artaud
was fercely di sappoi nted when the relat i vely shapely
poems he submitted t o the Nouelle Revue Fram;aise in
1923 were rej ected by its edi tor, Jacques Ri viere, as lack
i ng in coherence and harmony, Riviere's stri ctures proved
to be liberating. From then on, Artaud deni ed that he was
si mpl y creat i ng more art, addi ng to the storehouse of "l i t
erat ure." The contempt for l i terat urea t heme of moder
ist li terat ure frst l oudl y sounded by Ri mbaud-has a
di ferent i nfect i on as Artaud expresses i t i n the era when
the Fut ur ists, Dadai sts, and Surreal i sts had made it a com
monplace. Art aud' s contempt for l iterature has less to do
wi th a di fuse ni hi l i sm about cult ure than wi th a speci fc
experience of suferi ng. For Artaud, the extreme mental
-and al so physical-pai n that feeds ( and authenti cates )
the act of wri ti ng i s necessari ly falsi fed when that energy i s
transformed i nto artistry : when i t attai ns the beni gn status
of a fni shed, l i terary product. The verbal humi l i at i on of
l i terature ( "All wri t i ng i s garbage," Artaud declares in
The Nerve Meter) safeguards the dangerous, quasi
magical status of wri ti ng as a vessel wort hy of beari ng the
author's pai n. Insulti ng art ( l i ke i nsulti ng the audi ence ) i s
an attempt t o head of the corrupti on of art, the banali za
t i on of suferi ng.
/ 20
Approaching Artaud
The link between sufering and writing is one of
Artaud' s leadi ng themes : one ears the right to speak
through having sufered, but the necessity of using l an
guage i s i t sel f the central occasion for sufering. He de
scribes hi mself as ravaged by a "stupefying confusi on" of
hi s "language i n i ts rel ations with thought. " Artaud' s al i en
at ion from language presents the dark side of modern
poetry's successful verbal al ienations-of i ts creative use of
language's purely formal possi bi li t ies and of the ambi guity
of words and the art i fcial ity of fxed meanings. Artaud's
problem i s not what l anguage is i n i tsel f but the relation
language has to what he calls "the i ntellectual apprehen
sions of the fesh." He can barely aford the t.aditional com
plaint of al l the great mystics that words tend to petri fy
li vi ng thought and to turn the i mmediate, organic, sensory
stuf of experience into something i nert, merely verbal.
Artaud' s fght i s only secondari ly wi th the deadness of
language ; it is mai nly wi th the refractori ness of hi s own
inner l i fe. Employed by a consci ousness that defnes i tself
as paroxysmic, words become kni ves. Artaud appears to
have been aficted wi th an extraordi nary inner l i fe, in
which the intricacy and clamorous pi tch of his physical
sensations and the convulsive i ntuitions of his nervous sys
tem seemed permanently at odds wi th hi s abi l i ty to give
them verbal form. Thi s clash between faci l i ty and impo
tence, between extravagant verbal gi fts and a sense of
intellectual paralysis, i s the psychodramat ic plot of every
thi ng Artaud wrote ; and to keep that contest dramatically
val i d calls for the repeated exorci sing of the respectabi l ity
attached to writing.
Thus, Artaud does not so much free writing as place i t
under permanent suspicion by t reating i t as the mi rror of
/ 21
UN D ER T H E S I G N O F S A TURN
consci ousness-so that the range of what can be written i s
made coextensive wi t h consci ousness i tself, and the truth
of any statement i s made to depend on the vi tal ity and
wholeness of the consciousness i n which i t ori gi nates.
Agai nst all hi erarchi cal , or Platoni zi ng, theories of mi nd,
whi ch make one part of consciousness superior to another
part, Artaud upholds the democracy of mental claims, the
right of every level, tendency, and quali ty of the mi nd to
be heard: "We can do anythi ng i n the mi nd, we can speak
in any tone of voice, even one that is unsuitable." Artaud
refuses to exclude any perception as too tri vi al or crude.
Art should be able to report from anywhere, he thinks
although not for the reasons that just i fy Whitmanesque
openness or Joycean l i cense. For Artaud, to bar any of the
possible transactions between diferent levels of the mi nd
and t he fesh amounts t o a di spossession of thought, a loss
of vi tali ty in the purest sense. That narrow tonal range
whi ch makes up "the socalled l i terary tone"-l iterature i n
i t s tradi t i onal l y acceptable forms-becomes worse than a
fraud and an i nstrument of i ntel lectual repressi on. It is a
sentence of mental death. Artaud' s notion of truth st i pu
l ates an exact and del i cate concordance between t he mi nd' s
"animal" i mpulses and the hi ghest operati ons of the i ntel
lect. It is thi s swi ft, wholly uni fed consci ousness that
Artaud i nvokes i n the obsessive accounts of hi s own ment al
insufci ency and i n hi s di smissal of "l iterature."
The qual i ty of one's consciousness is Artaud' s fnal stan
dard. He unfai l i ngly attaches hi s utopi ani sm of consci ous
ness to a psychol ogi cal materi al i sm: the absol ute mi nd i s
also absolutely carnal . Thus, hi s i ntellectual di stress i s at
the same ti me the most acute physi cal di stress, and each
statement he makes about hi s consciousness i s al so a state-
/22
Approaching Artaud
ment about hi s body. Indeed, what causes Artaud' s i n
curable pai n of consciousness i s precisely hi s refusal t o
consider t he mi nd apart from t he si tuation of t he fesh. Far
from being di sembodied, his consciousness i s one whose
martyrdom results from i ts seamless relation to the body.
In his struggle against all hi erarchical or merely dual istic
not i ons of consciousness, Artaud constantly treats hi s
mi nd as i f i t were a ki nd of body-a body t hat he coul d
not "possess," because i t was ei ther t oo vi rginal or t oo de
fled, and also a mystical body by whose disorder he was
"possessed. "
It would be a mi stake, of course, to take Artaud's state
ment of mental i mpotence at face val ue. The i ntellectual
incapaci ty he describes hardly i ndicates the li mi ts of hi s
work ( Artaud displays no i nferiori ty i n hi s powers of rea
soning) but does expl ai n hi s project : mi nutely to retrace
the heavy, tangled fbers of his body-mi nd. The premi se of
Artaud's writing i s hi
s
profound di fculty i n matching
"bei ng" with hyperl uci di ty, fesh wi th words. St ruggl i ng
to embody live thought, Artaud composed i n feverish, i r
regular blocks ; writing abruptly breaks of and then start
agai n. Any single "work" has a mixed form; for i nstance,
between an expository text and an oneiric descri pti on he
frequently i nserts a letter-a letter to an i maginary cor
respondent or a real letter that omi ts the name of the ad
dressee. Changing forms, he changes breath. Wri t i ng i s
conceived of as unleashing an unpredictable fow of sear
ing energy ; knowledge must expl ode i n the reader' s
nerves. The detai l s of Artaud's stylistics follow di rectly
from hi s noti on of consciousness as a morass of di fculty
and sufering. His determi nat i on to crack the carapace of
"l i terature"-at least, t o violate te self-protective distance
/
2
3
U N D E R T H E S I G N OF S A T U R N
between reader and text-i s scarcely a new ambi ti on i n the
hi story of l i terary moderni sm. But Artaud may have come
closer than any other author to actually doing i t-by the
vi olent discont i nui ty of his di scourse, by the extremi ty of
hi s emot i on, by the puri ty of hi s moral purpose, by the
excruci ati ng carnal i ty of the account he gi ves of hi s mental
l i fe, by the genui neness and grandeur of the ordeal he en
dured i n order to use l anguage at all.
The di fcul ties that Art aud l aments persi st because he i s
thi nki ng about the unt hi nkable-about how body i s mi nd
and how mi nd i s al so a body. Thi s i nexhaust i ble paradox is
mi rrored i n Artaud' s wi sh to produce art that i s at the
same time ant i -art. The latter paradox: however, is more
hypothetical than real. Ig
n
ori ng Artaud' s di scl ai mers,
readers wi l l inevi tably assi mi late hi s strategies of di scourse
to art whenever those strategies reach ( as they often do) a
certai n t ri umphant pi tch of incandescence. And three
small books publi shed between 1925 and 1929-The Um
bilicus of Limbo, The Nerve Meter, and Art and Death
whi ch may he read as prose poems, more splendi d than
anythi ng that Artaud di d formal l y as a poet, show hi m t o
he t he greatest prose poet i n t he French language si nce the
Ri mbaud of Illuminat ions and A Season in Hell. Yet i t
would he i ncorrect to separate what i s most accomplished
as li terat ure from his other wri ti ngs.
Artaud' s work denies that there i s any di ference be
tween art and thought, between poetry and truth. Despite
the breaks in exposi ti on and the varyi ng of "forms" wi thi n
each work, everythi ng he wrote advances a l i ne of argu
ment. Artaud i s always di dact i c. He never ceased i nsulting,
compl ai ni ng, exhorting, denounci ng-even in the poetry
/
2
4
Approaching Artaud
wri t ten after he emerged from the insane asylum in Rodez,
i n 1946, in whi ch language becomes partly uni ntel li gi ble ;
that is, an unmedi ated physical presence. All hi s writing i s
i n the frst person, and i s a mode of address i n the mi xed
voices of i ncantation and di scursive explanati on. His activ
i t i es are si multaneously art and refections on art. In an
early essay on pai nti ng, Artaud decl ares that works of art
"are worth only as much as the conceptions on which they
are founded, whose value is exactly what we are cal li ng
i nto quest i on anew." Just as Artaud's work amounts to an
ars poetica ( of which hi s work i s no more than a frag
mentary exposi ti on) , so he takes art -maki ng to be a trope
for the funct ioni ng of all consci ousness-f l i fe i tsel f.
Thi s trope was the basi s of Artaud's afli ati on wi th the
Surreali st movement, between 1924 and 1926. As Artaud
understood Surreali sm, i t was a "revoluti on" applicable to
"all states of mi nd, to all types of human activi ty," i ts status
as a tendency wi thin the arts being secondary and merely
strategi c. He welcomed Surrealism-"above all, a state of
mind"-as both a critique of mind and a techni que for
i mprovi ng the range and quali ty of the mi nd. Sensitive as
he was in his own l i fe to the repressive workings of the
bourgeoi s i dea of day-to-ay real i ty ( "We are born, we
live, we die i n an environment of li es," he wrote in 1923),
he was naturally drawn to Surreal i sm by i ts advocacy of a
more subtle, imagi native, and rebel li ous consciousness.
But he soon found the Surrealist formulas to be another
kind of confnement. He got hi mself expelled when the
majori ty of the Surreali st brotherhood were about to j oi n
the French Communi st Party-a step t hat Artaud de
nounced as a sellout. An actual social revoluti on changes
nothing, he i nsists scornfully in the polemi c he wrote
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25
U N D ER T HE S I GN O F S A TURN
against "the Surreal i st bl uf" i n 1927. The Surreal i st ad
herence to the Thi rd Internati onal, though i t was to he
onl y of short durati on, was a pl ausi bl e provocati on for hi s
qui t t i ng t he movement, but hi s di ssatisfaction went deeper
than a di sagreement about what ki nd of revolut i on is de
si rable and relevant. ( The Surreal i st s were hardly more
Communi st than Artaud was. Andre Breton had not so
much a pol i t i cs as a set of ext remely at tractive moral sym
pathi es, which in another peri od would have brought hi m
to anarchi sm, and which, quite logi cally for hi s own pe
riod, led hi m in the ni neteen-thi rties to become a parti san
and fri end of Trotsky. ) What real l y antagoni zed Artaud
was a fundamental di ference of temperament.
It was on the basi s of a mi sunderstandi ng that Artaud
had fervently subscribed to the Surreal i st chal lenge to t he
l i mits that "reason" sets upon consci ousness, and to the
Surreali sts' fai t h in the access to a wider consciousness
aforded by dreams, drugs, i nsolent art, and asoci al be
havior. The Surreal i st, he thought , was someone who
"despai rs of at tai ni ng hi s own mi nd. " He meant hi mself, of
course. Despai r i s entirely absent from the mai nstream of
Surreal i st atti tudes. The Surreal i sts heralded the benefts
that would accrue from unlocki ng the gates of reason, and
i gnored the abomi nati ons. Artaud, as extravagantly heavy
hearted as the Surreal ists were opt i mi sti c, could, at most,
apprehensively concede legi t i macy to the i rrational . Whi le
the Surreal ists proposed exqui si te games wi t h conscious
ness which no one could l ose, Art aud was engaged i n a
mortal struggle to "restore" hi mself. Breton sancti oned the
i rrati onal as a useful route toward a new mental conti nent .
For Artaud, bereft of the hope that he was travel i ng any
where, it was the terrai n of his martyrdom.
/26
Approaching Artaud
By extendi ng the frontiers of consciousness, the Sur
real i sts expected not only to refne the rule of reason but t o
enlarge t he yi el d of physical pleasure. Artaud was incapa
ble of expecti ng any pleasure from the coloni zat i on of new
real ms of consci ousness. In contrast to the Surreali sts'
euphori c afrmation of both physical passion and romantic
love, Artaud regarded erot i ci sm as somethi ng threateni ng,
demoni c. In Art and Death he describes "thi s preoccupa
tion with sex which petri fes me and ri ps out my blood. "
Sexual organs multi ply on a monstrous, Brobdingnagian
scale and in menaci ngly hermaphrodite shapes i n many of
his wri tings ; vi rgi nity is t reated as a state of grace, and
i mpotence or castration i s presented-for example, in the
i magery generated by the fgure of Abel ard in Ar and
Death-as more of a deliverance than a puni shment. The
Surreal i st s appeared to love l i fe, Artaud notes haught i ly.
He felt "contempt" for i t . Expl ai ni ng the program of the
Surreal i st Research Bureau i n 1925, he had favorably de
scri bed Surreal ism as "a certai n order of repulsi ons, " only
to conclude the fol lowing year that these repulsions were
quite shallow. As Marcel Duchamp said i n a movi ng
eulogy of hi s fri end Breton i n 1966, when Breton died,
"the great source of Surreal i st i nspi ration i s l ove: the exal
t at i on of elective love." Surreali sm i s a spi ritual pol itics of
joy.
Despi te Art aud's passi onate rej ection of Surreal i sm, hi s
taste was Surreal i st-and remai ned so. Hi s di sdai n for
"real i sm" as a collection of bourgeoi s banali t ies is Sur
real i st, and so are hi s enthusi asms for the art of the mad
and the non-professional, for that which comes from the
Orient, for whatever i s ext reme, fantastic, gothi c. Artaud' s
contempt for t he dramati c repertory of hi s t i me, for the
/
27
U N D ER T HE S I G N O F S A TU RN
pl ay devoted t o explori ng the psychology of indi vi dual
characters-a contempt basi c to the argument of t he mani
festos i n The Theater and Its Double, wri tten between
1931 and 1936-start
s from a posi ti on identical wi th the
one from which Breton di smisses the novel in the frst
"Mani festo of Surreal i sm" ( 1924) . But Artaud makes a
wholly di ferent use of the enthusi asms and the aesthetic
prejudi ces he shares wi th Breton. The Surreali sts are con
noisseurs of j oy, freedom, pleasure. Artaud i s a connoisseur
of despai r and moral struggle. Whi le the Surreal ists ex
plicitly refused to accord art an autonomous value, they
percei ved no confict between moral longi ngs and aesthetic
ones, and in that sense Artaud is qui te right in sayi ng that
thei r program is "aesthetic"-merely aestheti c, he means.
Artaud does perceive such a confict, and demands that art
j ust i fy i tself by the standards of moral seri ousness.
From Surreal ism, Artaud derives the perspective that
li nks hi s own perenni al psychological cri si s wi th what
Breton calls ( i n t he "Second Mani festo of Surreal i sm," of
1930) "a general cri si s of consciousness"-a perspective
that Artaud kept throughout his wri ti ngs. But no sense of
cri si s i n the Surreal i st canon i s as bleak as Artaud' s. Set
alongsi de Artaud's lacerated perceptions, both cosmic and
i nt i mately physiological, the Surreal i st jeremiads seem
toni c rather than al armi ng. ( They are not in fact address
i ng the same cri ses. Artaud undoubtedly knew more than
Breton about sufering, as Breton knew more than Artaud
about freedom. ) A related legacy from Surreal i sm gave
Artaud the possi bi l i ty of cont i nui ng throughout his work
to take it for granted that art has a "revoluti onary" mis
si on. But Artaud's idea of revol ut ion di verges as far from
that of the Surreal i sts as his devastated sensibil i ty does
from Breton's essenti ally wholesome one.
/28
Approaching Artaud
Artaud also retai ned from the Surreal i sts the romantic
i mperative to close the gap between art ( and thought ) and
l i fe. He begins The Umbilicus of Limbo, wri tten i n 1925,
by declaring hi mself unable to concei ve of "work that is
detached from l i fe," of "detached creation." But Artaud
i nsists, more aggressively than the Surrealists ever di d, on
that devaluation of the separate work of art which results
from attaching art to l i fe. Li ke the Surreali sts, Artaud re
gards art as a function of consciousness, each work
representing only a fract ion of the whole of the arti st's con
sciousness. But by i dent i fying consciousness chiefy wi th its
obscure, hidden, excruci ati ng aspects he makes the di s
memberi ng of the total i ty of consciousness i nto separate
"works" not merely an arbi trary procedure ( which is what
fasci nated the Surreal i sts ) but one that i s self-defeati ng.
Artaud' s narrowi ng of the Surrealist vi ew makes a work of
art l iterally useless i n i tself; insofar as i t i s considered as a
thi ng, it is dead. In The Nerve Meter, also from 1925,
Artaud l ikens hi s works to l i feless "waste product," mere
"scrapings of the soul. " These di smembered bits of con
sciousness acqui re value and vi tal i ty only as metaphors for
works of art; that is, metaphors for consciousness.
Disdai ni ng any detached view of art, any versi on of that
view which regards works of art as objects ( to be contem
plated, to enchant the senses, to edi fy, to di stract ) , Artaud
assi mi l ates all art to dramatic performance. In Artaud's
poetics, art ( and thought ) is an action-and one that, to be
authentic, must be brutal-and also an experi ence suf
fered, and charged wi th extreme emotions. Being both ac
tion and passi on of thi s sort, iconoclasti c as well as evangel
ical in i ts fervor, art seems to requi re a more daring scene,
outside the museums and legiti mate showplaces, and a
new, ruder form of confrontati on wi th i ts audience. The
/
2
9
U N D E R T H E S I GN O F S A T U RN
rhetori c of i nner movement which susta ins Artaud' s not i on
of art is i mpressive, but i t does not change the way he act u
al l y manages to rej ect the tradi t ional role of t he work of art
as an obj ect-by an analysis and an experience of t he work
of art which are an i mmense tautology. He sees art as an
action, and therefore a passion, of the mi nd. The mi nd
produces art . And the space i n whi ch art i s consumed is
al so the mi nd-viewed as the organic totali ty of feel ing,
physical sensat i on, and t he abil i t y to attribute meani ng.
Artaud's poetics is a ki nd of ultimate, mani c Hegel i ani sm
in which art i s the compendi um of consci ousness, the re
fection by consci ousness on itsel f, and t he empty space in
whi ch consciousness takes its peri lous leap of sel f-t ranscen
dence.
Closing the gap between art and l i fe destroys art and, at
the same t i me, uni versal i zes i t. In the mani festo that Ar
taud wrote for t he Al fred Jarry Theater, which he founded
in 1926, he welcomes "the di srepute into which all forms of
art are successively fal l i ng." Hi s del ight may be a posture,
but it would be inconsi stent for him t o regret that state of
afairs. Once the leading criterion for an a11 becomes i t s
merger wi th l i fe ( t hat i s, everythi ng, i ncl udi ng other arts ) ,
the exi stence of separate art forms ceases t o be defensible.
Furthermore, Artaud assumes that one of the existing arts
must soon recover from its fai l ure of nerve and become the
total art form, which wi ll absorb all the others. Artaud's
l i feti me of work may be descri bed as the sequence of hi s
eforts t o formulate and i nhabi t t hi s master art, heroically
followi ng out hi s convi ct i on that the art he sought could
hardly be the one-i nvolving language alone-i n whi ch
hi s geni us was pri nci pally confned.
/
30
Approaching Artaud
The parameters of Artaud' s work in al l the arts are i den
ti cal wi th the di ferent cri t i cal di stances he mai nt ai ns from
the i dea of an art that is language only-wi t h the diverse
forms of his l i felong "revolt agai nst poetry" ( the t i t l e of a
prose text he wrote in Rodez i n 1944) . Poetry was, chrono
logically, the frst of the many arts he practi ced. There are
extant poems from as early as 1913, when he was seventeen
and sti l l a student in hi s native larsei l les ; hi s frst book,
publ i shed in 1923, three years after he moved to Paris, was
a collecti on of poems ; and i t was the unsuccessful submi s
si on of some new poems to the Nouvelle Revue Fran{aise
that same year whi ch gave ri se to hi s celebrated correspon
dence wi th Ri vi ere. But Artaud soon began sl i ghti ng po
et ry i n favor of ot her arts. The di mensi ons of the poetry he
was capable of wri t i ng i n the twenti es were t oo smal l for
what Artaud i nt ui ted to be the scale of a master art. In the
early poems, his breath i s short ; the compact lyric form he
employs provi des no outlet for his di scursive and narrative
i magi nati on. Not until the great outburst of writing i n the
period between 1945 and 1 948, in t he last three years of hi s
l i fe, di d Artaud, by then i ndi ferent to t he i dea of poetry as
a closed l yri c statement, fnd a long-breathed voi ce t hat was
adequate to the range of hi s imagi nat ive needs-a voice
that was free of establ i shed forms and open-ended, li ke the
poetry of Pound. Poetry as Artaud conceived i t i n the
twenties had none of these possi bi l i ties or adequaci es. I t
was smal l , and a tot al art had t o be, to feel , large ; i t had t o
he a mul t i -voi ced performance, not a si ngul ar l yrical ob
ject.
All ventures i nspi red hy the i deal of a total art form
whether in music, pai nti ng, scul pture, archi tect ure, or
l i teraturemanage i n one way to another to theat rical i ze.
/
3
1
UNDER T H E SI GN O F SA T U RN
Though Artaud need not have been so l i teral, i t makes
sense that at an earl y age he moved into the expl i ci tly dra
mat i c a rts. Between 1922 and 1924, he acted i n plays di
rected Ly Charles Dul l i n and the Pi toefs and i n 1 924 he
also began a career as a fl m actor. That i s to say, by the
mi d-ni net een-twenti es Artaud had two plausi ble candi dates
for the role of tot al art : ci nema and theater. However,
because it was not as an actor but as a di rector that he
hoped to advance the candi dacy of these arts, he soon had
to renounce one of them-ci nema. Art aud was never gi ven
the means to di rect a flm of his own, and he saw hi s i nt en
ti ons betrayed i n a flm of 1928 that was made hy another
di rector from one of hi s screenplays, The Seashell and the
Clergyman. Hi s sense of defeat was rei nforced i n 1929 by
the arrival of sound, a t urni ng point i n the hi story of flm
aesthet i cs whi ch Artaud wrongly prophesi ed-as did most
of the small number of moviegoers ho had taken flms
seriously throughout the nineteen-twent i es-would termi
nate ci nema's greatness as an art form. He conti nued act
i ng i n fl ms unti l 1 935, but wi th l i ttle hope of getting a
chance to di rect hi s own flms and wi th no further refec
tion upon the possi bi l i t i es of ci nema ( whi ch, regardless of
Artaud' s di scouragement, remai ns the century's likeliest
candi date for the t i tle of master art ) .
From late 1926 on, Artaud' s search for a total art form
cent ered upon the theater. Unl ike poetry, an art made out
of one materi al ( words ) , theater uses a pl ural i t y of materi
als : words, l i ght, musi c, hodi es, furni ture, clothes. Unli ke
ci nema, an art usi ng only a pl ural i ty of languages ( i mages,
words, musi c ) , theater i s caral , corporeal . Thea ter bri ngs
together the most d iverse means-gest ure and verbal Ian
guage, stati c objects and movement i n three-di mensi onal
/3
2
Approaching Artaud
space. But theater does not become a master art merely
by the abundance of its means, however. The prevai l i ng
tyranny of some means over others has to be creati vely
subverted. As Wagner challenged the conventi on of al
ternati ng aria and recitative, which i mpl ies a hierarchical
relation of speech, song, and orchestral musi c, Artaud de
nounced the practice of making every element of the stag
i ng serve i n some way te words that the actors speak to
each other. Assai ling as false the priorities of di alogue
theater which have subordinated theater to "l i terature,"
Artaud i mplicitly upgrades the means that characterize
such other forms of dramati c performance as dance, ora
torio, ci rcus, cabaret, church, gymnasi um, hospital operat
ing room, courtroom. But annexing these resources from
other arts and from quasi -theatrical forms will not make
theater a total art form. A master art cannot be constructed
by a series of additi ons ; Artaud is not urgi ng mai nl y that
the theater add to i ts means. I nstead, he seeks to purge te
theater of what i s extraneous or easy. In calli ng for a the
ater in which the verbally ori ented actor of Europe woul d
be retrained as an "athlete" of t he heart, Artaud shows hi s
i nveterate taste for spiri tual and physi cal efort-for art as
an ordeal.
Artaud's theater i s a strenuous machi ne for transformi ng
the mi nd's concepti ons i nto ent i rely "materi al" events,
among which are the passions themselves. Against the
centuri es-old priority that the European theater has given
to words as the means for conveying emotions and ideas,
Artaud wants to show the organi c basi s of emoti ons and the
physi cal i ty of ideas-in the bodies of the actors. Artaud's
theater is a reaction against the state of underdevel opment
i n which the bodi es ( and the voi ces, apart from talki ng) of
/ 33
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
Western actors have remai ned for generations, as have the
arts of spectacle. To redress the i mbalance that so favors
verbal l anguage, Artaud proposes to bring the training of
actors close to the training of dancers, athletes, mi mes, and
singers, and "t o base the theater on spectacle before every
thing else, " as he says i n his "Second Mani festo of the
Theater of Cruelty," published i n 1933. He i s not ofering
to replace the charms of language wi th spectacular sets,
costumes, musi c, lighti ng, and stage efects. Artaud's cri
terion of spectacle i s sensory violence, not sensory en
chantment ; beauty i s a noti on he never entertains. Far from
consi deri ng the spectacul ar to be in i tsel f desi rable, Artaud
would commi t the stage to an extreme austerity-to the
point of excl uding anythi ng that stands for somet hi ng else.
"Objects, accessories, sets on the stage must be appre
hended directl y . . . not for what they represent but for
what they are," he wri tes in a mani festo of 1926. Later, in
The Theater and Its Double, he suggests el i mi nating sets
al together. He calls for a "pure" theater, domi nated by the
"physics of the absol ute gesture, which is itself idea."
If Art aud's language sounds vaguely Platonic, it i s wi th
good reason, for. l i ke Plato, Artaud approaches art from
the morali st's poi nt of view. He does not real ly li ke the
theater-at least, the theater as it i s conceived throughout
the West, which he accuses of bei ng i nsufciently serious.
His theater would have nothing to do wi t h the ai m of pro
vi di ng "pointless, artifcial di versi on," mere entert ai n
ment . The contrast at the heart of Artaud' s pol emi cs i s not
between a merel y l i terary theater and a theater of strong
sensati ons but between a hedonistic theater and a theater
that is morally rigorous. What Artaud proposes i s a theater
that Savona rola or Cromwell mi ght well have approved of.
/ 34
Approaching Artaud
Indeed, The Theater and Its Double may be read as an
indignant attack on the theater, wi t h an ani mus remi
ni scent of te Letter to d Alembert in whi ch Rousseau,
enraged by the character of Alceste in The .Misanthrope
by what he took to be Moli ere's sophi st icated ridi cul ing of
si nceri ty and moral puri ty as clumsy fanatici sm-ended by
argui ng that i t lay i n the nature of theater to be morally
superfci al. Like Rousseau, Artaud revolted agai nst the
moral cheapness of most art. Like Plato, Artaud felt that
art generally l i es. Artaud will not bani sh arti sts from hi s
Republic, but he wi l l countenance art only i nsofar as i t i s a
"true acti on. " Art must be cogni t ive. "No i mage sati sfes
me unless it i s at the same t i me knowledge," he writes. Art
must have a benefcial spi ri tual efect on i ts audience-an
efect whose power depends, i n Artaud' s view, on a di s
avowal of all forms of medi at i on.
It i s the morali st i n Artaud that makes hi m urge t hat t he
theater be pared down, be kept as free from medi at i ng
elements as possible-i ncl udi ng the medi at i on of t he wri t
ten text. Plays tell l i es. Even i f a play doesn't tell a li e, by
achievi ng the status of a "masterpiece" i t becomes a l i e.
Artaud announces in 1926 that he does not want to create
a theater to present plays and so perpetuate or add to
culture' s list of consecrated masterpieces. He judges the
heritage of written plays to he a usel ess obstacle and the
playwright an unnecessary i ntermedi ary between the audi
ence and the t ruth that can be present ed, naked, on a stage.
Here, though, Artaud's moral i sm takes a di st i nctly anti
Platoni c t urn : the naked truth i s a truth that i s wholly
materi al . Artaud defnes the theater as a place where the
obscure facets of "the spi ri t" are revealed i n "a real, ma
terial projection. "
/3
5
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
To i ncarnate thought, a stri ct ly concei ved theater must
di spense with the medi ation of an al ready wri tten scri pt,
thereby endi ng the separation of author from actor. ( Thi s
removes the most anci ent objection t o the actor's profes
si on-that it i s a form of psychological debauchery, i n
which people say words that are not t hei r own and pretend
to feel emotions that are functionally i nsi ncere. ) The sep
arati on between act or and audi ence must be reduced ( but
not ended ) , by vi olati ng the boundary between the stage
area and the audi tori um' s fxed rows of seats. Artaud, with
his hi erat i c sensi bi l i ty, never envi sages a form of theater in
whi ch the audi ence actively part i ci pates in the perfor
mance, but he wants to do away wi th the rules of t
h
eatrical
decorum whi ch permi t the audi ence to di ssoci ate i tself
from i ts own experience. Impli ci t l y answering the moral
i st' s charge that the theater di stracts people from their
authentic selfhood by leadi ng them to concer themselves
with i magi nary problems, Art aud wants the theater to ad
dress itself neither to t he spectators' mi nds nor to thei r
senses but to thei r "total exi stence. " Only t he most pas
si onate of moral i sts would have wanted peopl e to attend
the theater as they vi si t the surgeon or the denti st. Though
guaranteed not to be fatal ( unlike the vi si t to the sur
geon ) , the operation upon t he audi ence i s "seri ous," and
the audi ence should not leave t he theater "i ntact" morally
or emoti onally. In another medi cal i mage, Art aud com
pares t he theater to t he plague. To show the truth means to
show archetypes rather than i ndi vi dual psychology ; thi s
makes the theater a place of ri sk, for the "archetypal real
i ty" is "dangerous. " Members of the audi ence are not sup
posed to i denti fy themselves wi th what happens on the
stage. For Artaud, the "true" theater i s a dangerous, i n-
/36
Approaching Artau
t i midating experience-ne that excludes placid emotions,
playfulness, reassuring i nti macy.
The value of emotional violence i n art has long been a
mai n tenet of the moderni st sensibi l i ty. Before Artaud,
however, cruelty was exercised mai nly in a di si nterested
spi ri t, for i ts aesthet i c efcacy. When Baudelai re placed
"the shock experience" ( to borrow Walter Benj ami n' s
phrase) at the center of hi s verse and hi s prose poems, i t
was hardly to improve or edi fy hi s readers. But exactly thi s
was t he poi nt of Artaud's devotion to t he aesthetics of
shock. Through the exclusiveness of hi s commi tment to
paroxysmi c art, Artaud shows hi msel f to be as much of a
morali st about art as Plato-but a morali st whose hopes for
art deny j ust those di sti nctions in whi ch Plato's view i s
grounded. As Artaud opposes the separation between art
and l i fe, he opposes al l theatrical forms that i mply a di fer
ence between reali ty and representation. He does not deny
the exi stence of such a di ference. But this di ference can
be vaulted, Artaud i mpl ies, if the spectacle i s sufciently
that is, excessively-violent. The "cruelty" of the work of
art has not only a di rectly moral function but a cognitive
one. Accordi ng to Artaud's moralisti c criterion for knowl
edge, an i mage is true i nsofar as i t is vi olent.
Plato's view depends on assumi ng the unbridgeable
di ference between l i fe and art, real i ty and representati on.
In t he famous i magery i n Book VII of t he Republic, Plato
l i kens ignorance to l i vi ng i n an i ngeniously l i t cave, for
whose inhabi tants l i fe i s a spectaclea spectacle that con
sists of only the shadows of real events. The cave i s a the
ater. And truth ( real i t y) l ies outside i t, in the sun. In the
Platoni c i magery of The Theater and lts Double, Artaud
takes a more lenient view of shadows and spectacles. He
/37
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
assumes that there are true as wel l as false shadows ( and
spectacles) , and that one can learn to di stinguish between
them. Far from i denti fyi ng wi sdom with an emergence
from the cave to gaze at a hi gh noon of real ity, Artaud
thi nks that modern consciousness sufers from a lack of
shadows. The remedy i s to remai n i n the cave but devi se
better spectacles. The theater that Artaud proposes will
serve consci ousness by "nami ng and di recti ng shadows"
and destroyi ng "fal se shadows" to "prepare the way for a
new generati on of shadows," around which will assemble
"the true spectacle of l i fe. "
Not holdi ng a hi erarchical vi ew of the mi nd, Artaud
overri des the superfci al di stinction, cheri shed by the Sur
reali sts, between the rational and the i rrational . Artaud
does not speak for the fami l i ar vi ew that prai ses passi on at
the expense of reason, the fesh over the mi nd, the mi nd
exal ted by drugs over t he prosaic mi nd, the l i fe of the i n
sti ncts over deadly cerebrat i on. What he advocates is an
al ternative rel ation t o t he mi nd. Thi s was the well-adver
ti sed attract ion that non-Occidental cultures held for
Art aud, hut i t was not what brought hi m to drugs. ( It was
to calm the mi grai nes and other neurological pain he suf
fered from all his l i fe, not to expand his consci ousness,
that Artaud used opi ates, and got addicted. )
For a brief ti me, Artaud took the Surreal i st st ate of mi nd
as a model for the uni fed, non-duali st i c consciousness he
sought. Aft er rej ect i ng Surreali sm in 1926, he reproposed
art-speci fcally, theater-as a more ri gorous model. The
function that Artaud gives the theater is to heal the split
bet ween language and fesh. It i s the theme of his ideas for
trai ni ng actors : a trai ni ng antithetical to the fami l i ar one
that teaches actors neither how to move nor what to do
/
38
Approaching Artaud
with their voices apart from talk. ( They can scream, growl,
sing, chant. ) It is also the subject of hi s ideal dramaturgy.
Far from espousing a facile irrationalism that polarizes rea
son and feeling, Artaud imagines the theater as the place
where the body would be reborn in thought and thought
would be reborn i n the body. He diagnoses his own di sease
as a spl i t within his mind ( "My conscious aggregate is
broken," he wri tes) that internal izes the spl i t between
mi nd and body. Artaud' s writi ngs on the theater may be
read as a psychological manual on the reuni fcati on of
mi nd and body. Theater became hi s supreme metaphor for
the self-correcting, spontaneous, carnal, intelligent l ife of
the mi nd.
Indeed, Artaud' s i magery for the theater i n The The
ater and Its Double, wri tten in the ni neteen-thi rt ies,
echoes i mages he uses in writings of the early and mi d
nineteen-twenties-such as The Nerve Meter, l etters t o
Rene and Yvonne Allendy, and Fragments of a Diary from
Hell-to describe hi s own mental pai n. Artaud complai ns
that hi s consciousness i s without boundaries and fxed posi
ti on ; bereft of or i n a conti nual struggle wi th language ;
fractured-i ndeed, plagued-by disconti nui t ies ; either
wi thout physical location or constantly shifting in location
(and extension in time and space) ; sexually obsessed ; i n a
state of vi olent infestation. Artaud's theater is character
ized by an absence of any fxed spatial positioning of the
actors vi s-a-vis each other and of the actors i n relation to
the audi ence ; by a fui di ty of motion . and soul ; by the
mut ilation of language and the t ranscendence of language
in the actor's scream; by the carnal ity of the spectacle ; by
i ts obsessively violent tone. Araud was, of course, not si m
ply reproducing hi s inner agony. Rather, he was giving a
/3
9
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
systemati zed, posi tive version of i t . Theater is a projected
i mage ( necessari ly an ideal dramati zation) of the danger
ous, "i nhuman" i nner li fe that possessed hi m, that he
struggled so heroically to transcend and to afrm. It is also
a homeopathic technique for t reating that mangled, pas
sionate inner l i fe. Being a kind of emoti onal and moral
surgery upon consci ousness, i t must of necessity, according
to Artaud, be "cruel. "
When Hume expressly l i kens consciousness to a theater,
the image i s morally neutral and enti rely ahi storical ; he is
not thinki ng of any particular ki nd of theater, Western or
other, and woul d have considered i rrelevant any remi nder
that theater evolves. For Artaud, the deci si ve part of the
analogy is that theater-and consciousness-can change.
For not only does consci ousness resemble a theater but, as
Artaud constructs i t, theater resembles consciousness, and
therefore lends i tsel f to being t urned into a theater-labora
tory i n which to conduct research i n changing consci ous
ness.
Artaud's wri tings on the theater are t ransformati ons of
his aspi rati ons for his own mi nd. He wants theater ( l ike
the mi nd ) to be released from confnement "in language
and i n forms. " A li berated theater l i berates, he assumes. By
giving vent to extreme passions and cultural nightmares,
theater exorci ses them. But Artaud' s theater is by no means
simply cathartic. At least i n its i ntention ( Artaud's practice
in the ni neteen-twenti es and thi rt i es is another matter ) , hi s
theater has l i ttle i n common with t he anti-theater of play
ful, sadistic assault on the audi ence which was concei ved
by Mari netti and the Dada arti sts j ust before and after
Worl d War I . The aggressiveness that Artaud proposes is
controlled and int ricately orchestrated, for he assumes that
/
4
0
Approaching Artaud
sensory violence can be a form of embodied i ntell igence.
By insisting on theater's cognitive function ( drama, he
wri tes i n 1923, i n an essay on Maeterl i nck, i s "t he hi ghest
form of mental activity") , he rules out randomness. ( Even
in his Surreal ist days, he did not j oi n i n the practice of
automati c writing. ) Theater, he remarks occasionally,
must be "scienti fc," by whi ch he means that i t must not be
random, not be merely expressive or spontaneous or per
sonal or entertai ni ng, but must embrace a wholly serious,
ulti mately rel igi ous purpose.
Artaud's i nsi stence on the seriousness of the theatrical
si tuation also marks hi s di ference from the Surreal ists,
who thought of art and its therapeut i c and "revol utionary"
mi ssion with a good deal less than preci sion. The Sur
real i sts, whose moralizing impulses were considerably less
i ntransigent than Artaud's, and who brought no sense of
moral urgency at all to bear on artmaki ng, were not
moved to search out the l i mi ts of any si ngle art form. They
tended to be tourists, often of genius, in as many of the arts
as possi ble, bel ievi ng that the art i mpulse remai ns the same
wherever i t t urns up. ( Thus, Cocteau, who had the i deal
Surreal ist career, called everythi ng he di d "poetry. " ) Ar
taud's greater daring and authori t y as an aestheti ci an re
sult partly from the fact that although he, too, practiced
several arts, refusing, l ike the Surreal ists, to be i nhi bited.
by the di stribution of art i nto di ferent medi a, he did not
regard the various arts as equi valent forms of the same
protean i mpulse. Hi s own activi ties, however di spersed
they may have been, always refect Artaud's quest for a
total art form, i nto whi ch the others would mergeas art
i tself would merge i nt o l i fe.
Paradoxically, i t was this very denial of i ndependence to
/ 4
1
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
the di ferent territories of art which brought Artaud to do
what none of the Surreal i sts had even attempted : com
pletely rethi nk one art form. Upon that art, theater, he has
had an i mpact so profound that the course of al l recent
serious theater i n Western Europe and the Ameri cas can
be sai d to divi de into two peri ods-before Artaud and
after Artaud. No one who works i n t he theater now i s un
touched by the i mpact of Artaud's speci fc ideas about the
actor's body and voice, the use of musi c, the role of the
written text, the i nterplay between the space occupi ed by
the spectacle and the audi ence' s space. Artaud changed the
understandi ng of what was serious, what was worth doi ng.
Brecht i s the century's onl y other wri ter on the theater
whose i mportance and profundity conceivabl y ri val Ar
taud' s. But Artaud di d not succeed i n afect i ng the con
sci ence of the modern theater by hi mself being, as Brecht
was, a great di rector. His i nfuence deri ves no support
from the evidence of hi s own productions. Hi s practical
work i n the theater between 1926 a nd 1935 was apparently
so unseductive that i t has left vi rtual l y no trace, whereas
the idea of theater on behal f of which he urged his produc
tions upon an unreceptive public has become ever more
potent .
From t he mid- ni neteen-twenties on, Artaud's work i s
ani mated by t he i dea of a radi cal change i n culture. Hi s
i magery i mpl i es a medi cal rather than a hi storical vi ew of
culture : society i s ai l i ng. Li ke Nietzsche, Artaud conceived
of hi mself as a physici an to cul ture-as well as i ts most
pai nful l y ill pati ent . The theater he planned i s a com
mando acti on agai nst the establ ished cul ture, an assaul t on
t he bourgeoi s publi c ; i t woul d both show people that they
/ 42
Approaching Artau
are dead and wake them up from thei r stupor. The man
who was to be devastated by repeated electric-shock treat
ments duri ng the last three of ni ne consecut i ve years in
mental hospitals proposed that theater admi ni ster to cul
t ure a ki nd of shock therapy. Artaud, who often com
plai ned of feel i ng paralyzed, wanted theater t o renew "the
sense of l i fe. "
Up to a poi nt, Artaud's prescriptions resemble many
programs of cultural renovati on that have appeared peri
odi cally during the last two centuries of Western culture
i n the name of si mpli ci ty, elan vital, natural ness, freedom
from arti fce. Hi s di agnosi s that we l ive in an i norgani c,
"pet ri fed culture"-whose l i felessness he associ ates wi th
the domi nance of the wri tten word-was hardly a fresh
i dea when he stated it ; yet, many decades later, i t has not
exhausted i t s authority. Artaud' s argument in The The
ater ad Its Double is closely related to that of the
Ni etzsche who in The Birth of Tragedy lament ed the
shri vel ing of the ful l-blooded archai c theater of Athens by
Socrati c philosophy-by the i nt roduction of characters
who reason. ( Another paral lel with Artaud : what made
the young Ni etzsche an ardent Wagneri an was Wagner' s
concept i on of opera as the Gesamtkunst werk-the fullest
statement, before Artaud, of the i dea of total theater. )
Just as Ni etzsche harked hack to the Di onysi ac cere
moni es that preceded the secul ari zed, rational i zed, verbal
dramaturgy of Athens, Artaud found his model s i n non
Wester rel i gi ous or magical theater. Artaud does not pro
pose the l1eater of Cruel t y as a new i dea wi t hi n Western
theater. I t "assumed . . . another form of ci vi l i zati on. " He
i s referring not to any speci fc civi l i zat i on, however, but to
an i dea of ci vi l izati on that has numerous bases i n hi story-
/
43
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
a synthesi s of elements from past societies and from non
Western and pri mi t ive societi es of the present. The prefer
ence for "another form of ci vi l i zati on" is essenti ally eclec
ti c. ( That is to say, i t i s a myth generated by certai n moral
needs. ) The i nspiration for Artaud' s ideas about theater
came from Southeast Asi a : from seei ng the Cambodi an
theater in Marseilles i n 1922 and the Bal i nese theater i n
Pari s i n 1 931 . But t he sti mul us could j ust as well have
come from observi ng the theater of a Dahomey tribe or the
shamani st i c ceremonies of the Patagoni an Indi ans. Wat
counts i s that the other culture be genui nely other ; that i s,
non-Western and non-contemporary.
At di ferent ti mes Artaud fol lowed all three of the most
frequently traveled i maginative routes from Western hi gh
culture to "another form of civi l i zati on. " Fi rst came what
was known just after Worl d War I, i n the writi ngs of
Hesse, Rene Daumal, and the Surreali sts, as the Tur t o
the East . Second came t he i nterest i n a suppressed part of
t he Western past-heterodox spiritual or outright magical
t radi tions. Thi rd came the di scovery of the l i fe of so-called
pri mi t i ve peoples. What uni tes the East, the ancient an
t i nomi an and occul t traditions i n the West, and the exot ic
communi t ari anism of pre- l i terate tri bes i s that they are
elsewhere, not only in space but in ti me. Al l three embody
the values of the past. Though the Tarahumara Indi ans in
Mexi co still exist, thei r survi val in 1936, when Artaud vi s
ited them, was al ready anachroni stic ; the values that the
Tarahumara represent belong as much to the past as do
those of the ancient Near Eastern mystery rel igions that
Artaud studied while wri ti ng his hi storical novel Helio
gabalus, in 1933. The three versi ons of "another form of
ci vi lization" bear wi tness to the same search for a society
/ 44
Approaching Artaud
i ntegrated around overtl y rel i gi ous themes, and fi ght from
the secul ar. What i nterests Artaud i s the Orient of
Buddhi sm ( see his "Letter to the Buddhi st Schools," wri t
ten i n 1 925 ) and of Yoga ; i t woul d never be the Ori ent of
lao Tsetung, however much Art aud talked up revol u
t i on. ( The Long :March was t aki ng place at the very t i me
t hat Art aud was st ruggl i ng to mount t he product i ons of hi s
Theater of Cruel t y i n Pa ri s. )
Thi s nostal gi a for a past often so ecl ecti c as to he qui te
unlocat abl e hi storical l y is a facet of the moderi st sensi
bi l i ty whi ch has seemed i ncreasi ngl y suspect i n recent
decades. I 1 is an ul t i mate refnement of the coloni al i st out
look : an i magi nat ive expl oi t at i on of non-white cul tures,
whose moral l i fe it drast i cal l y oversi mpl i fes, whose wi s
dom i t pl unders and parodi es. To t hat cri t i cism t here i s no
convi nci ng reply. But to the cri t i ci sm that the quest for
"another form of ci vi l i zat i on" .refuses to submi t t o the di s
i l l usi onment of accurate hi storical knowledge, one can
make an answer. I t never sought such knowledge. The
other ci vi l i zat i ons are being used as model s and are avai l
abl e as sti mul ant s to t he i magi nat i on preci sel y because
they a re not accessi ble. They are Loth model s and mys
teries. Nor can this quest he di smi ssed as fraudul ent on the
ground that it i s i nsensi t i ve to the poli tical forces that
cause human suferi ng. I t consciously opposes such sensi
t i vi ty. Thi s nostal gi a forms part of a vi ew t hat i s del iber
ately not pol i t i cal-however frequently i t brandi shes the
word "revol ut i on. "
One resul t of the aspi rat i on to a total art whi ch fol lows
from denyi ng the gap between art and l i fe has been to
encourage the noti on of a rt as an i nstrument of revol ut i on.
The ot her result has been the i dent i fcati on of bot h art and
/ 45
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
l i fe wi t h di si nterested, pure pl ayfulness. For every Verov
or Breton, there is a Cage or a Duchamp or a Rauschen
berg. Al though Artaud i s close to Vertov and Breton i n that
he consi ders hi s acti vi ties to be part of a larger revoluti on,
as a self-procl ai med revol uti onary i n the arts he actually
stands between two camps-not i nterested i n sati sfyi ng
either the pol i t i cal or the l udi c i mpul se. Di smayed when
Breton attempted t o l i nk the Surreal i st program wi th Marx
ism, Artaud broke wi t h the Surreal i sts for what he con
s idered to be their betrayal , i nto the hands of pol it ics, of an
essenti al l y "spi ri tual " revol ut ion. He was ant i-bourgeoi s
almost by refex ( l i ke nearl y al l a11 ists i n the moderi st
tradi tion ) , but the prospect of transferring power from the
bourgeoi si e to the proletari at never tempted hi m. From his
avowedly "absol ute" vi ewpoint, a change in soci al structure
would not change anythi ng. The revoluti on to whi ch Artaud
subscri bes has not hi ng to do wi th pol i ti cs but i s concei ved
expl i ci t l y as an efort to redi rect culture. Not only does
Artaud share the wi despread ( and mi staken) bel ief in the
possi bi l i ty of a cul t ural revol ut i on unconnected with pol it
ical change but he i mpl ies that the only genui ne cul tural
revol ut i on i s one havi ng nothi ng to do with pol i ti cs.
Artaud' s cal l to cul tural revol ut i on suggests a program
of heroic regressi on si mi l ar to that formul ated by every
great anti-pol i t i cal moral i st of our t i me. The banner of
cul t ural revol ut i on is hardly a monopoly of the Marxi st or
Maoist l eft . On t he cont rary, i t appeal s part i cul arl y to
apol i t i cal t hi nkers and art i sts ( l i ke Ni etzsche, Spengler,
Pi randello, Mari nel l i , D. H. Lawrence, Pound ) who more
commonl y become ri ght- wi ng enthusi asts. On the pol i t i cal
left, there are few advocates of cultural revol ut i on. ( Tat
li n, Gramsci , and Godard are among those who come t o
/
4
6
Approaching Artaud
mi nd. ) A radi cali !m that i s purely "cultural" i s ei ther i l
lusory or, fnal l y, conservati ve i n i ts i mpli cations. Artaud's
plans for subvert i ng and revi tal i zi ng culture, his longing
for a new type of human personali ty i l l ustrate the l i mi ts of
all thi nki ng about revolution which i s ant i -pol i t i cal.
Cultural revol uti on t hat refuses t o be pol i ti cal has no
where to go but toward a theology of cultureand a
soteriology. "I aspi re to another l i fe," Artaud declares i n
1927. Al l Artauds work i s about salvati on, theater being
the means of savi ng souls which he medi t ated upon most
deepl y. Spi ri tual transformati on i s a goal on whose behalf
t heater has often been enli sted i n this century, at least
si nce Isadora Duncan. In the most recent and solemn ex
ample, the Laborat ory Theater of Jerzy Grotowski , the
whole activi ty of bui l di ng a company and rehearsing and
putt i ng on plays serves the spi ri tual reeducati on of the
actors ; the presence of an audi ence is requi red only to wi t
ness t he feats of sel f-transcendence t hat the actors perform.
In Artaud's Theater of Cruel ty, i t i s the audi ence that will
be t wice-born-an untesd cl ai m, since Artaud never made
hi s theater work ( as Grotowski di d throughout the ni neteen
si xti es i n Pol and ) . As a goal , it seems a good deal less
feasi ble than the di sci pl ine for which Grotowski ai ms. Sensi
t ive as Artaud i s to the emoti onal and physi cal armori ng of
t he convent i onal l y trai ned actor, he never exami nes closely
how the radi cal retrai ni ng he proposes will afect the actor
as a human being. His thought i s all for the audi ence.
As mi ght have been expected, the audi ence proved to be
a di sappoi ntment. Artaud s product i ons i n the two theaters
he founded, the Al fred Jarry Theater and the Theater of
Cruelty, created li ttle i nvolvement. Yet, although ent i rely
di ssatisfed with the quali ty of his publi c, Attaud com
/
47
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
pl ai ned much more about the token support he got from
the seri ous Pari s theater establ i shment ( he had a long,
desperate correspondence wi th Loui s Jouvet ) , about the
di fcul t y of gett i ng hi s proj ects produced at all, about the
pal t ri ness of thei r success when t hey were put on. Artaud
was understandably embi ttered because, despi t e a number
of t i tled patrons, and fri ends who were emi nent wri ters,
pai nters, edi tors, di rectors-al l of whom he constantly
badgered
.
for moral support and money-hi s work, when i t
was act ually produced, enj oyed only a small port i on of the
accl ai m convent i onal l y reserved for properly sponsored,
di fcult events at tended by the regulars of hi gh-cult ure
consumpt i on. Art aud' s most ambi t i ous, ful l y art i cul ated
product i on of the Theat er of Cruel t y, hi s own The Cenci,
l asted for seventeen days in the spring of 1935. But had i t
run for a year he would probably have been equally con
vi nced that he had fai led.
I n moder cul t ure, powerful machi nery has been set up
whereby di ssi dent work, after gai ni ng an i ni t i al semi - of
ci a] st at us as "avant garde," i s gradual l y absorbed and ren
dered acceptable. But Artaud' s practi cal act i vi t ies i n the
theater barely qual i fed for thi s ki nd of cooptati on. The
Cenci i s not a very good play, even by the st andards of
convuls ive dramat urgy whi ch Art aud sponsored, and the
i nterest of hi s product i on of The Cenci, by al l accounts, lay
i n i deas i t suggested but di d not act ually embody. What
Art aud di d on the stage as a di rect or and as a leadi ng actor
in his product ions was too i di osyncratic, narrow, and hys
teri cal to persuade. He has exerted i nfuence through hi s
i deas about the theater, a const i tuent part of the authori ty
of these i deas being precisely hi s i nabi l i t y t o put them i nto
pract i ce.
/ 4
8
Approaching Artaud
Forti fed by its i nsati able appeti te for novel commodi
ti es, t he educated publi c of great ci ti es has become habi tu
ated to the moderist agony and well skilled in outwitting
i t : any negative can eventually be t urned i nto a posi t ive.
Thus Artaud, who urged that the repertory of master
pieces be thrown on the j unk pi le, has been extremely i n
fuential as t he creator of an alterative repertory, an
adversary tradi t i on of plays. Artaud' s stern cry "No more
masterpi eces ! " has been heard as the more concil iatory "No
more of those masterpieces ! " But this posi ti ve recasti ng of
his attack on the tradi t i onal repertory has not taken place
wi thout help from Artaud's practi ce ( as di stinct from hi s
rhetori c) . Despi te hi s repeated i nsi stence t hat t he theater
should di spense with plays, hi s own work i n the theater was
far from playless. He named hi s frst company after the
author of King Ubu. Apart from hi s own proj ects-The
Conquest of Mexico and The Capture of Jerusalem ( un
produced ) an
a
The Cenci-there were a number of then
unfashionable or obscure masterpieces that Artaud wanted
to revive. He did get to stage the two great "dream plays"
by Calderon and Strindberg ( Life Is a Dream and A
Dream Play) , and over the years he hoped also to di rect
productions of Euripides ( The Bacchae) , Seneca ( Thyes
tes ) , Arden of
f
eversham, Shakespeare ( Macbeth, Richard
II, Tit us Andronicus ) , Tourneur ( The Revenger' s Trag
edy) , Webster ( The White Devil, The Duchess of Jlalf) ,
Sade ( an adaptation of Eugenie de Fran val ) , Bichner
( Woyzeck) , and Holder lin ( The Death of Empedocles) .
This selection of plays deli neates a now famili ar sensi bi li ty.
Along with the Dadai sts, Artaud formulated the taste that
was eventually to become standard serious tasteOf.
Broadway, Of-Of-Broadway, i n university theaters. In
/ 49
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
terms of the past, i t meant dethroni ng Sophocles and
Corei lle and Raci ne i n favor of Euri pi des and the dark
El i zabethans ; the onl y dead French wri ter on Artaud' s l i st
i s Sade. I n t he l ast ffteen years, that t ast e has been repre
sented i n the Happeni ngs and the Theater of the Ri dicu
lous ; the plays of Genet, Jean Vauthi er, Arrabal , Carmelo
Bene, and Sam Shepard ; and such celebrated productions
as the Li ving Theater's Frankenstein, Eduardo Manet's
The Nuns ( di rected by Roger Bl i n} , Mi chael McClure' s
The Beard, Robert Wilson' s Deafman Glance, and Heath
cote Wi l l i ams' s acl de. Whatever Artaud di d to subvert the
theater, and to segregate his own work from other, merel y
aesthet i c currents i n the i nterests of establ i shi ng i ts spi ri tual
hegemony, could st i l l be assi mi lated as a new theatri cal
tradi ti on, and mostly has been.
I f Art aud' s project does not act ual ly transcend art, i t
presupposes a goal t hat art can sustain onl y temporari ly.
Each use of art i n a secul ar society for the purposes of
spi ri tual transformati on, i nsofar as it i s made public, i s in
evi tably robbed of its true adversary power. Stated in di
rectl y, or even i ndi rectl y, rel i gi ous language, the project i s
notably vulnerable. But athei st projects for spi ri tual trans
format i on, such as the pol i t i cal art of Brecht, have proved
to be equally cooptable. Onl y a few si tuati ons in modern
secul ar society seem sufciently extreme and uncommuni
cative to have a chance of evadi ng cooptat i on. Madness i s
one. Sufering that surpasses the i magi nable ( l ike the Holo
caust ) i s another. A thi rd i s, of course, si lence. One way to
stop thi s i nexorable process of i ngestion i s to break of
communi cati on ( even ant i-communi cati on) . An exhaus
t i on of the i mpulse to use art as a medi um of spi ri tual
t ransformat ion i s al most i nevi tabl e-as i n the temptat i on
fel t by every modern author when confronted with the i n
/
50
Approaching Artaud
di ference or medi ocri ty of the publi c, on the one hand, or
the ease of success, on the other, to stop writing altogether.
Thus, i t was not j ust for lack of money or support withi n
the professi on t hat, after put t i ng on The Cenci, i n 1935,
Artaud abandoned the theater. The project of creati ng in a
secul ar culture an i nstitution that can mani fest a dark,
hi dden real ity is a cont radicti on i n terms. Artaud was
never able to found hi s Bayreuth-though he would have
l i ked to- -for hi s i deas are the ki nd that cannot be i nstitu
ti onal i zed.
The year after the fai l ure of The Cenci, Artaud em
barked on a trip to Mexico to wi tness that demonic real i ty
i n a still existing "pri mi ti ve" culture. Unsuccessful at em
bodyi ng thi s reali ty i n a spectacle to i mpose on others, he
became a spectator of i t hi mself. From 1935 onward, Ar
taud lost touch with the promi se of an ideal art form. Hi s
wri ti ngs, always di dactic, now took on a prophetic t one and
referred frequently to esoteric magi cal systems, l ike the
Cabala and t arot. Apparently, Artaud came to beli eve that
he could exerci se di rectly, i n his own person, the emotional
power ( and achieve the spi ri tual efcacy) he had wanted
for the theater.In the mi ddl e of 1 937, he t raveled to the
Aran Islands, with an obscure plan for expl oring or con
frmi ng hi s magi c powers. The wall between art and l i fe
was sti ll down. But i nstead of everythi ng being assi mi lated
i nto art, the movement swung the other way ; and Artaud
moved wi thout medi at ion into hi s li fe-a dangerous,
careering ohject, the vessel of a raging hunger for total
transformation which could never fnd it s appropri ate
nourishment.
Ni etzsche cool ly assumed an athei st theology of the
spi ri t, a negat ive theology, a mysticism without God. Ar-
/ 51
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
taud wandered i n the labyri nth of a speci fc type of rel i
gious sensi bi li ty, the Gnostic one. ( Central t o Mithraism,
Mani chaei sm, Zoroastri ani sm, and Tantri c Buddhi sm, but
pushed to the heret i cal margi ns of Judaism, Christi anity,
and Islam, the perenni al Gnosti c themati cs appear in the
di ferent reli gi ons i n di ferent terminologies but with cer
t ai n common l i nes. ) The leadi ng energies of Gnosti ci sm
come from met aphysi cal anxiety
'
and acute psychological
di stress-the sense of being abandoned, of bei ng an ali en,
of bei ng possessed by demonic powers whi ch prey on the
human spi ri t i n a cosmos vacated by the di vi ne. The cos
mos i s i tself a battlefeld, and each human l i fe exhi bi ts the
confi ct between the repressive, persecuti ng forces from
without and the feverish, afi cted i ndi vi dual spi ri t seeki ng
redempti on. The demonic forces of the cosmos exist as
physical matter. They also exi st as "law," taboos, prohi bi
t i ons. Thus, i n t he Gnostic metaphors the spi ri t i s aban
doned, fallen, trapped i n a body, and the i ndi vi dual is
repressed, trapped by being i n "the world"-what we
would call "society. " ( It i s a mark of all Gnostic t hinking
to polari ze i nner space, the psyche, and a vague outer
space, "the world" or "society," which i s identi fed with
repressi on-maki ng l i ttle or no acknowledgment of the
i mportance of the medi ati ng levels of the vari ous social
spheres and i nstitutions. ) The self, or spirit, di scovers i t
sel f i n t he break wi t h "the worl d. " The onl y freedom pos
sible i s an i nhuman, desperate freedom. To be saved, the
spi ri t must be taken out of i ts body, out of its personal ity,
out of "the worl d. " And freedom requi res an arduous
preparati on. Whoever seeks i t must both accept extreme
humi l i ati on and exhi bi t the greatest spi ri tual pri de. In one
version, freedom entai ls total asceti ci sm. In another ver-
/ 5
2
Approaching Artaud
si on, i t entai l s l i bertini sm-practicing the art of transgres
sion. To be free of "the world," one must break the moral
(or soci al ) law. To transcend the body, one must pass
through a period of physical debauchery and verbal blas
phemy, on the principle that only when moral i ty has been
deliberately fouted is the i ndivi dual capable of a radical
transformation: entering into a state of grace that leaves all
moral categories behi nd. In both versions of the exemplar
Gnosti c drama, someone who is saved is beyond good and
evi l . Founded on an exacerbation of dualisms ( body-mi nd,
matter-spi ri t, evi l-good, dark-l i ght ) , Gnosti ci sm promises
the abol i t i on of all dualisms.
Artaud's thought reproduces most of the Gnostic
themes. For example, hi s attack on Surreali sm in the po
lemi c wri tten in 1927 is couched i n a language of cosmic
drama, in which he refers to the necessi ty of a "di splace
ment of the spiritual center of the world" and to the origi n
of all matter i n "a spiri tual deviation." Throughout hi s
wri tings, Artaud speaks of bei ng persecuted, i nvaded, and
defled by ali en powers ; hi s work focuses on the vi cissitudes
of the spi ri t as i t constantly di scovers its lack of l i berty i n
i t s very condition of bei ng "matter." Artaud i s obsessed
wi th physical matter. From The Nerve Meter and Ar and
Death, written in te nineteen-twenties, to Here Lies and
the radi o play To Have Done with the Judgmnt of God,
wri tten i n 1947-8, Artaud's prose and poetry depict a
world clogged with matter ( shi t, blood, sperm) , a defled
world. The demonic powers that rule the world are i n
carnated i n matter, and matter i s "dark." Essential t o the
theater that Artaud conceives-a theater devoted to myth
and magic-is hi s bel i ef that all the great myths are "dark"
and tat all magic is black magi c. Even when l i fe is en-
/
53
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
crusted by petri fed, degenerate, merel y verbal language,
Artaud i nsi sts, the real i ty l i es just underneath-or some
where else. Art can tap these powers, for they seethe in
every psyche. It was i n search of these dark powers that
Artaud went to Mexico i n 1936 to wi t ness the Tarahumara
peyote ri tes. The i ndividual's salvati on requi res maki ng
contact wi th the malevolent powers, submi tti ng to them,
and suferi ng at their hands in order to tri umph over them.
What Artaud admi res in the Bal i nese theater, he writes
in 1 931 , i s that i t has nothing to do wi th "entertainment"
but, rather, has "somethi ng of the ceremoni al qual i ty of a
rel igious ri te. " Art aud i s one of many di rectors in this cen
tury who have sought to re-create theater as ritual, to give
theat ri cal performances the solemni ty of rel igious t ransac
ti ons, but usually one fnds only the vaguest, most promis
cuous idea of rel i gion and ri te, which i mputes to a Cathol ic
mass and a Hopi rai n dance the same arti sti c value. Ar
t aud' s vi si on, whi le perhaps not any more feasible i n mod
ern secul ar society than the others, i s at least more speci fc
as to t he ki nd of ri te i nvolved. The theater Art aud want s t o
create enacts a seculari zed Gnost i c ri t e. I t i s not an expia
ti on. I t i s not a sacri fce, or, if i t i s, the sacri fces are all
metaphors. I t i s a rite of transformati on-the communal
performance of a violent act of spi ri tual alchemy. Artaud
summons the theater to renounce "psychological man,
wi t h hi s wel l -di ssected character and feel ings, and soci al
man, submi ssive to laws and mi sshapen by rel igions and
precepts," and to address itself only "to total man"-a
thoroughly Gnostic noti on.
Whatever Artaud' s wi shes for "culture," hi s thi nki ng ul
ti mately shuts out al l but the private self. Li ke the Gnos
tics, he is a radical i ndi vi dual i st. From his earl iest wri ti ngs,
/ 54
Approaching Artaud
his concern i s with a metamorphosis of the "inner" state of
te soul. ( The self i s, by defnition, an "i nner sel f. ")
Mundane relations, he assumes, do not touch the kerel of
the i ndividual ; the search for redemption undercuts all so
cial solutions.
The one i nstrument of redemption of a possibly social
character whi ch Artaud considers i s art. The reason he i s
not i nterested i n a humani stic theater, a theater about i n
dividuals, i s that he beli eves tat such a teater can never
efect any radical transformation. To be spiritually l iberat
i ng, Artaud thinks, theater has to express impulses that are
larger than l i fe. But tis only shows that Artaud's i dea of
freedom i s itself a Gnostic one. Theater serves an "in
human" i ndivi duali ty, an "inhuman" freedom, as Artaud
calls it i n The Theater and Its Double-the very opposite
of the li beral, sociable idea of freedom. ( That Artaud
found Breton's ti nki ng shallow-that i s, optimi sti c,
aesthetic-follows from the fact that Breton di d not have
a Gnostic style or sensi bi l i ty. Breton was attracted by
te hope of reconcili ng the demands of i ndividual free
dom with the need to expand and balance the personality
trough generous, corporate emotions ; the anarchist vi ew,
formulated in thi s century with the greatest subtlety and
authority by Breton and Paul Goodman, i s a form of con
serative, humanistic thinking-doggedly sensitive to
everything repressive and mean while remai ni ng loyal to
the l i mits that protect human growth and pleasure. The
mark of Gnostic thinking is that it is enraged by all l i mits,
even tose that save. ) "All true freedom i s dark," Artaud
says in The Theater and Its Double, "and is i nfalli bly
i dentifed with sexual freedom, which i s also dark, al
though we do not know precisely why."
/55
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
Both the obstacle to and the locus of freedom, for Artaud,
li e i n the body. His attitude covers the fami l i ar Gnos
tic themati c range : the afrmation of the body, the revul
sion from the body, the wi sh to transcend the body, the
quest for the redeemed body. "Nothing touches me, noth
ing interests me," he wri tes, "except what addresses i tsel f
directly to my fesh. " But the body is always a problem.
Artaud never defnes the body i n terms of i ts capaci ty for
sensuous pleasure but al ways i n terms of its electri c capac
i ty for i ntell igence and for pai n. As Artaud laments, i n Art
and Death, that hi s mi nd is i gnorant of hi body, that he
lacks i deas that conform to hi s "condi ti on as a physical an
i mal," so he compl ai ns that his body i s i gnorant of hi s
mi nd. In Artaud' s i magery of di stress, body and spi ri t pre
vent each other from bei ng i ntelli gent. He speaks of the
"i ntellectual cries" that come from hi s fesh, source of the
only knowledge he trusts. Body has a mi nd. "There i s a
mi nd in the fesh, " he wri tes, "a mi nd qui ck as l i ghtning. "
I t i s what Artaud expects i ntel lectually from the body
that leads to hi s recoil from the body-the ignorant body.
Indeed, each attitude i mpli es the other. Many of the poems
express a profound revul si on from the body, and accumu
late loathsome evocations of sex. "A true man has no sex,"
Artaud writes in a text publ i shed i n December 1947. "He
i gnores this hi deousness, this stupefying si n. " Art and
Death i s perhaps the most sex-obsessed of all his works, but
Artaud demonized sexual i ty i n everythi ng he wrote. The
most common presence i s a monstrous, obscene body
"thi s unusable body made out of meat and crazy sperm,"
he calls i t i n Here Lies. Against t hi s fallen body, defled by
matter, he sets the fantasi ed attainment of a pure body
di vested of organs and vert igi nous lusts. Even whi le i nsist
/
56
Approaching Artaud
ing that he is nothi ng but hi s body, Artaud expresses a
fervent longing to transcend i t altogether, to abandon hi s
sexuali ty. In other i magery, t he body must be made i ntel
ligent, respi ri tuali zed. Recoi l i ng from the defled body, he
appeals to the redeemed body in whi ch thought and fesh
will be uni fed : "It i s through the skin that metaphysics
will be made to reenter our mi nds" ; only the fesh can
supply "a defni t i ve understanding of Li fe. " The Gnostic
task of the theater that Artaud i magines is nothing less
than to create this redeemed body-a mythi c project that
he explai ns by referring t o that last great Gnosti c system
atics, Renai ssance alchemy. As the alchemi sts, obsessed
with the problem of matter i n classically Gnosti c terms,
sought methods of changing one ki nd of matter i nto an
other ( higher, spiritual ized) kind of matter, so Artaud
sought to create an alchemi cal arena that operates on the
fesh as much as on the spi rit. Theater i s the exercise of a
"terrible and dangerous act," he says in "Theater and Sci
ence"-"THE REAL ORGANIC AND PHYSI CAL TRANSFOR:IA
TIOX OF THE HUMAN BODY.
"
Artaud's principal metaphors are classically Gnosti c.
Body i s mi nd turned i nto "matter." As t he body weighs
down and deforms the soul, so does l anguage, for language
i s thought turned into "matter. " The problem of language,
as Artaud poses i t to hi mself, i s i dentical wi th the problem
of matter. The di sgust for the body and the revulsion
against words are two forms of the same feel ing. In the
equivalences establ ished by Artaud's i magery, sexual ity is
the corrupt, fallen acti vi ty of the body, and "l iterature" i s
the corrupt, fallen activity of words. Al though Artaud
never enti rel y stopped hoping to use activi ties i n the arts as
a means of spiri tual li beration, art was always suspect-
/
57
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
li ke the body. And Artaud' s hope for art i s also Gnost ic,
li ke his hope for the body. The vi sion of a total art has
the same form as the vi si on of the redempti on of the
body. ( "The body i s the body/i t is alone/i t has no need of
organs," Artaud wri tes i n one of hi s l ast poems . ) Art wi l l
be redemptive when, l i ke t he redeemed body, i t transcends
itsel f-when i t has no organs ( genres ) , no di ferent parts.
In the redeemed art that Artaud i magi nes, there are no
separate works of art-onl y a total art envi ronment, whi ch
is magi cal , paroxysmic, purgat i ve, and, fna11y, opaque.
Gnosti ci sm, a sensi bi l i t y organi zed around the i dea of
knowi ng ( gnosi s ) rather than around faith, sharply di s
ti ngui shes between exoteri c and esoteri c knowledge. The
adept must pass through vari ous levels of i nstruction to be
worthy of bei ng i ni ti ated into the true doct ri ne. Knowl
edge, whi ch i s i denti fed wi t h the capacity for self-trans
format i on, is reserved for the few. It is natural that Artaud,
wi th hi s Gnostic sensi bi l i ty, should have been attracted to
numerous secret doctri nes, as both an al ternat i ve to and a
model for art. Duri ng the ni neteen-t hi rt i es, Artaud, an
amateur polymath of great energy, read more and more
about esoteric systems-al chemy, tarot, the Cabala, ast rol
ogy, Rosicruci ani sm. What these doctri nes have in common
i s that they are a1 1 rel ati vely late, decadent transfor
mations of the Gnostic themat i cs. From Renai ssance
alchemy Artaud drew a model for hi s theater : li ke the
symbols of alchemy, theat er describes "phi l osophi cal states
of matter" and attempts to t ransform them. Tarot, to give
another example, suppli ed the basis of The New Revela
tions of Being, wri tten in 1937, j ust before his seven-week
tri p to I reland ; it was the last work he wrote before the
mental breakdown that resulted in hi s confnement when
/ .8
Approaching Artaud
he was returned to France. But none of these al ready
formulated, schemati c, historically fossi l i zed secret doc
tri nes could contai n the convulsions of the l ivi ng Gnostic
i magi nation i n Artaud's head.
Only the exhausti ng i s truly interest ing. Artaud's basic
ideas are crude ; what gives them thei r power i s the i nt ri
cacy and eloquence of hi s self-analysis, unequaled i n the
hi story of the Gnostic i magi nation. And, for the frst t i me,
the Gnostic themes can be seen i n evol uti on. Artaud' s
work is parti cularly preci ous as the frst complete docu
mentation of someone living through t he trajectory of
Gnostic thought. The resul t , of course, i s a terrible smash.
The last refuge ( historical ly, psychologi cal l y) of Gnos
tic thought i s i n the constructions of schizophreni a. With
Artaud's ret urn from Ireland to France began nine years of
i mpri sonment i n mental hospi tals. Evi dence, mai nly from
letters he wrote to his two pri ncipal psychiatrists at Rodez,
Dr. Gaston Ferdiere and Dr. Jacques Latremoli ere, shows
how l iteral l y his thought fol lowed the Gnost i c formul as. I n
t he ecstatic fantasies of t hi s peri od, the world i s a mael
strom of magical substances and forces ; his consciousness
becomes a theater of screami ng struggle between angels
and demons, vi rgi ns and whores. His horror of the body
now unmodulated, Artaud expl i ci tly i denti fes salvation
wi t h vi rgi ni t y, si n with sex. As Artaud's elaborate rel i gi ous
speculati ons duri ng the Rodez peri od may be read as
metaphors for paranoi a, so paranoi a may be read as a
metaphor for an exacerbated rel igious sensi bi li ty of the
Gnostic type. The l i terature of t he crazy i n this century is a
rich reli gi ous l i terat ureperhaps the last ori gi nal zone of
genui ne Gnostic speculati on.
When Artaud was let out of the asyl um, i n 1946, he sti 1l
/ 59
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
considered hi mself the victim of a conspi racy of demoni c
powers, t he obj ect of an extravagant act of persecuti on by
"society." Al though t he wave of schizophreni a had receded
to the poi nt of no longer swampi ng hi m, his basi c meta
phors were st i ll i ntact. In the two years of l i fe that remai ned
to hi m, Artaud forced them to thei r logical conclusi on.
I n 1944, sti ll i n Rodez, Artaud had recapi tulated hi s
Gnostic complai nt agai nst language in a short text, "Revol t
Agai nst Poetry. " Returni ng to Pari s i n 1946, he longed to
work again i n the theater, to recover the vocabulary of
gesture and spectacle ; but i n the short ti me left to hi m he
had to resi gn hi mself to speaki ng wi th l anguage only. Ar
laud' s wri ti ngs of t hi s last peri od-vi rtually unclassifable
as to genre: there are "letters" that are "poems" that are
"essays" that are "dramati c monologues"-give the i m
pression of a man attempting to st ep out of hi s own ski n.
Passages of clear, if hecti c, argument alternate wi th pas
sages i n which words are treated pri mari ly as material
( sound) : they have a magical value. ( Attenti on to the
sound and shape of words, as di sti nct from their meani ng,
i s an element of the Cabali st i c teachi ng of the Zohar, whi ch
Artaud had studied i n the ni neteen-thirti es. ) Artaud's
commi tment to the magical value of words explai ns hi s
refusal of metaphor as t he pri nci pal mode of conveyi ng
meani ng in his late poems. He demands that language di
rectly express the physical human bei ng. The person of the
poet appears i n a state beyond nakedness : fayed.
As Artaud reaches toward the unspeakable, hi s i magi na
ti on coarsens. Yet hi s last works, i n thei r mount i ng obses
sian wi th the body and thei r ever more expli ci t loathing of
sex, st i l l stand i n a di rect line wi th the early wri ti ngs, in
whi ch there is, parallel to the mentalizati on of the body, a
/
60
Approaching Artaud
correspondi ng sexualization of consciousness. What Ar
laud wrote between 1946 and 1948 only extends metaphors
he used throughout the ni neteen- twenti es-f mind as a
body that never al lows i tsel f to be "possessed," and of the
body as a kind of demonic, writhing, bri lli ant mi nd. I n
Artaud's ferce battle to transcend the body, everything i s
eventually tured i nto the body. In hi s ferce battle t o
transcend language, everythi ng i s eventually turned i nto
language. Artaud, describing the l i fe of the Tarahumara
Indi an!, translates nature i tsel f i nto a language. In the last
writings, the obscene i denti ty of the fesh and the _ word
reaches an extremi ty of loathi ng-notably i n the play
commissioned by French radio, To Have Done with the
Judgment of God, which was then banned on the eve of
i t s projected broadcast i n February 1948. ( Artaud was still
revisi ng i t a month later, when he di ed. ) Talki ng, talking,
talking, Artaud expresses the most ardent revulsion against
talk-and the body.
The Gnostic passage through the stages of transcendence
i mpl ies a move from the conventionally intell igible to
what is convntionally uni ntelligible. Gnostic thi nki ng
characteristically reaches for an ecstat i c speech that di s
penses wi th di sti nguishable words. ( I t was t he adoption by
t he Chri st i an church i n Corinth of a Gnostic form of
preaching-"speaking in tongues"-that provoked Paul's
remonstrati ons i n the First Epistle to the Corinthi ans. )
The language Artaud used at the end of hi s l i fe, in passages
i n Artaud le Momo, Here Lies, and To Have Done with
the Judgment of God, verges on an i ncandescent declama
tory speech beyond sense. "Al l true language i s i ncompre
hensible," Artaud says in Here Lies. He is not seeking a
universal language, as Joyce di d. Joyce' s view of language
/ 61
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
was hi stori cal, i roni c, whereas Artaud's vi ew i s medi cal,
tragi c. The uni ntel li gi ble i n Finnegans Wake not only i s
decipherable, with efort, but i s meant to be deciphered.
The uni ntel l i gi ble parts of Artaud' s late wri t ings are sup
posed to remai n obscure-to be di rectl y apprehended as
sound.
The Gnostic project is a search for wi sdom, but a wi s
dom that cancels i tself out in uni ntell i gi bi l i ty, loquaci ty,
and si lence. As Artaud' s l i fe suggests, all schemes for end
i ng dual i sm, for a uni fed consci ousness at the Gnosti c
l evel of i ntensi ty, are eventually hound to fai l-that i s,
thei r practi ti oners collapse i nto what soci ety call s madness
or i nto si lence or sui ci de. ( Another example : the vi si on of
a totally uni fed consci ousness expressed in the gnomi c
messages Ni etzsche sent to fri ends i n t he weeks. before hi s
complete mental collapse i n Turi n i n 1889. ) The project
t ranscends the l i mi ts of the mi nd. Thus, whi l e Artaud sti ll
desperatel y reafrms hi s efort to uni fy hi s fesh and hi s
mi nd, t he terms of hi s t hi nki ng i mply the anni hi l at i on of
consci ousness. In t he wri t i ngs of thi s l ast peri od, t he cries
from hi s fractured consci ousness and hi s martyred body
reach a pi tch of i nhuman i ntensi ty and rage.
Artaud ofers the greatest quantity of suferi ng i n the
hi story of l i terature. So drasti c and pi t i able are the nu
merous descri pt i ons he gi ves of hi s pai n that readers,
overwhelmed, may be tempted to di stance themselves by re
memberi ng that Artaud was crazy.
In whatever sense he ended up bei ng mad, Artaud had
been mad al l hi s l i fe. He had a hi story of i nternment i n
mental hospi tals from mi d-adolescence on-well before he
arri ved i n Pari s from Marsei l l es, i n 1920, at t he age of
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62
Approaching Artaud
twenty-four, to begi n his career i n the arts ; hi s li felong
addi cti on to opiates, which may have aggravated his mental
di sorder, had probably begun before thi s date. Lacki ng the
saving knowledge that al lows most people to be conscious
with relatively little pai n-the knowledge of what Ri vi ere
calls "the blessed opaci ty of experience" and "the inno
cence of facts"-Artaud at no t i me i n his l i fe wholly got
out from under the l ash of madness. But si mply to judge
Artaud mad-rei nst ati ng the reductive psychi atri c wi sdom
-means to reject Artaud's argument.
Psychi at ry draws a clear l i ne between art (a "normal"
psychological phenomenon, mani fest i ng objective aestheti c
l i mi ts) and symptomatology: the very boundary that Ar
taud contests. Wri ti ng to Ri viere i n 1923, Artaud insi sts on
rai si ng the questi on of the autonomy of hi s art-f
whether, despite hi s avowed mental deterioration, despite
that "fundamental faw" i n his own psyche whi ch sets hi m
apart from other people, hi s poems do nevertheless exi st as
poems, not j ust
-
as psychological documents. Riviere repl ies
by expressi ng confdence that Artaud, despi te hi s mental
di stress, wi ll one day become a good poet. Artaud answers
i mpat iently, changi ng his ground : he wants to close the
gap between li fe and art impl i ci t in his ori gi nal questi on
and i n Riviere's well- i ntenti oned but obtuse encourage
ment. He deci des to defend hi s poems as they arefor the
merit they possess j ust because they don't qui t e make i t as
art.
The task of the reader of Artaud i s not to react wi th the
di stance of Ri viere-as i f madness and sanity could com
muni cate wi th each other only on sanity's own ground, in
the language of reason. The values of sani ty are not eternal
or "natural, " any more than there i s a sel f-evident,
/
6
3
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
common-sense meani ng to the condi ti on of being insane.
The perception that some people are crazy i s part of the
hi story of thought, and madness re
q
ui res a hi storical def
ni t i on. Madness means not maki ng sensemeans sayi ng
what doesn' t have to be taken seriously. But thi s depends
enti rely on how a given cul t ure defnes sense and serious
ness ; the defni ti ons have varied wi dely through hi story.
Wat is cal led i nsane denotes that which i n the determi na
tion of a parti cular society must not be thought. Madness i s
a concept that fxes l i mi ts ; the frontiers of madness defne
what i s "other. " A mad person is someone whose voice so
ciety doesn't want to li sten to; whose behavi or i s i ntoler
able, who ought to be suppressed. Di ferent societies use
di ferent defni t i ons of what consti tutes madness ( that i s,
of what does not make sense) . But no defnition is less
provi nci al than any other. Part of the outrage over the cur
rent practice i n the Soviet Uni on of locking up pol i tical
di ssenters in insane asylums i s mi splaced, in that i t holds
not only that doing so i s wi cked ( whi ch i s true) but that
doi ng so i s a fraudulent use of the concept of mental i ll
ness ; it is assumed that there is a uni versal , correct,
sci enti fc standard of sanity ( the one enforced in the mental
health poli ci es of, say, the Uni t ed States, England, and
Sweden, rather than the one enforced i n those of a country
li ke Morocco) . Thi s is si mply not true. In every society, the
defni ti ons of sani ty and madness are arbi trary-are, in the
largest sense, pol i t i cal.
Artaud was extremely sensi t ive to the repressive func
tion of the concept of madness. He saw the i nsane as the
heroes and martyrs of thought, stranded at the vantage
poi nt of extreme soci al ( rather than merel y psychological )
ali enati on, vol unteeri ng for madness-as those who,
/
6
4
Approaching Artaud
through a superi or concepti on of honor, prefer to go mad
rather than forfeit a certai n lucidity, an extreme passion
ateness in presenting thei r convictions. I n a letter to J ac
quel i ne Breton from the hospital i n Ville-Evrard i n April
1939, after a year and a half of what was to be nine years
of confnement, he wrote, "I am a fanatic, I am not a mad
man. " But any fanati cism t hat i s not a group fanati cism i s
preci sel y what society understands as madness.
Madness is the logical conclusion of the commitment to
i ndividual i ty when that commi tment is pushed far enough.
As Artaud puts it in the "Letter to the Medical Di rectors
of Lunatic Asylums" in 1925, "all i ndi vi dual acts are anti
soci al. " It is an unpalatable truth, perhaps qui te i rrecon
ci lable with the humanist i deology of capital ist democracy
or of soci al democracy or of l i beral socialism-hut Artaud
i s right. Whenever behavi or becomes sufciently i ndi vi d
ual, i t will become objectivel y anti-social and wi ll seem, to
other people, mad. Al l human societies agree on this poi nt.
They di fer only on how the standard of madness is ap
plied, and on who are protected or partly exempted ( for
reasons of economic, social, sexual, or cultural privi lege)
from the penalty of i mpri sonment meted out to those
whose basic ant i -soci al act consists i n not maki ng sense.
The insane person has a dual identity i n Artaud's works :
the ulti mate victi m, and the bearer of a subversive wi sdom.
In hi s preface, wri tten in 194, to the proposed Galli mard
collected edition of his wri t i ngs, he describes hi msel f as one
of the mentally underprivi leged, grouping lunatics with
aphasiacs and i l l i terates. Elsewhere i n the wri tings of hi s
l ast two years, he repeatedly situates hi msel f i n the com
pany of the mental ly hyper-endowed who have gone mad
-Holderl in, _ Nerval, Nietzsche, and van Gogh. Insofar as
/
65
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
the geni us i s si mply an extension, and i ntensi fcat i on, of
the i ndi vi dual, Artaud suggests the exi stnce of a natural
afni ty between geni us and madness i n a far more precise
sense than the romanti cs di d. But while denounci ng the
society that i mpri sons the mad, and afrmi ng madness as
the out ward sign of a profound spi ri t ual exile, he never
suggests that there i s anythi ng li berating i n losing one's
mi nd.
Some of hi s wri t ings, part i cul arly t he early Surreal i st
texts, take a more posi tive at t i t ude toward madness. In
"General Security : The Li qui dation of Opi um," for i n
stance, he seems to be defendi ng t he pract i ce of a del i ber
ate derangement of the mi nd and senses (as Ri m baud once
defned the poet's vocation ) . But he never stops sayi ng-i n
the letters to Ri vi ere, to Dr. Al lendy, and to George Soul i e
de Morant i n t he ni neteen-twenti es and ni neteen-thirties,
in the letters wri tten between 1943 and 1945 from Rodez,
and in the essay on van Gogh written in 1947, some months
aft er hi s release from Rodez-that madness i s confni ng,
destroyi ng. Mad people may know the truth-so much
truth that society takes its revenge on these unhappy seers
by outlawi ng them. But bei ng mad i s al so unendi ng pai n, a
state to be transcended-and it i s that pai n whi ch Artaud
renders, i mposi ng i t on hi s readers.
To read Artaud through is nothi ng less than an ordeal .
Understandably, readers seek to protect themselves wi th
reductions and appli cati ons of hi s work. I t demands a spe
ci a) stami na, a speci al sensitivi ty, and a speci al tact to read
Art aud properl y. I t is not a question of gi vi ng one's assent
to Artaud-thi s woul d be shall ow-or even of neutrally
"understandi ng" him and hi s relevance. What i s there to
assent to? How could anyone assent to Artaud's i deas un
/
66
Approaching Artaud
less one was already in the demonic state of s iege that he
was in? Those ideas were emi tted under the intolerable
pressure of his own situation. Not only i s Artaud' s posi ti on
not tenable ; it is not a "positi on" at al l .
Artaud's thought i s organical ly part of hi s si ngular,
haunted, i mpotent, savagely intelli gent consciousness. Ar
taud i s one of the great, daring mapmakers of conscious
ness in extremis. To read hi m properly does not requi re
bel ieving that the only truth that art can supply is one that
i s singular and i s authenticated by extreme sufering. Of
art that describes other states of consci ousness-less i di o
syncratic, less exalted, perhaps no less profound-it i s cor
rect to ask that i t yield general truths. But the exceptional
cases at the limit of "wri ti ng"-Sade is one, Artaud is
another-demand a di ferent approach. What Artaud has
left behind i s work that cancels i tself, thought that outbids
thought, recommendations that cannot be enacted. Where
does that leave the reader? Still with a body of work, e\en
though te character of Artaud's writi ngs forbids tei r
being treated si mply as "literature." Sti ll with a body of
thought, evn though Artaud's tought forbi ds assent-as
hi s aggressively self-immolati ng personality forbi ds i denti
fcati on. Artaud shocks, and, unlike the Surreal ists, he re
mai ns shocking. ( Far from being subversive, the spi ri t of
the Surreali sts i s ulti mately constructive and falls well
wi thi n the humanist tradi ti on, and their stagy violations of
bourgeoi s propriet ies were not dangerous, trul y asocial
acts. Compare the behavior of Artaud, who really was i m
possible socially. ) To detach hi s thought as a portable in
tellectual commodi ty is j ust what that thought explici tly
prohi bi ts. It i s an e\ent, rather than an object.
Forbi dden assent or identi fcation or appropriati on or
/
67
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
i mitation, the reader can only fal l back on the category of
inspirati on.
"
INSPIRATION CERTAI NLY EXISTS,
"
as Artaud
afrms i n capital letters i n The Nerve Meter. One can be
i nspi red by Artaud. One can be scorched, changed by Ar
taud. But there i s no way of applying Artaud.
Even i n t he domai n of t he theater, where Artaud's pres
ence can be decanted into a program and a theory, the
work of those di rectors who have most benefted from hi s
i deas shows there i s no way to use Artaud t hat stays t rue to
him. Not even Artaud hi mself found the way ; by all ac
counts, hi s own stage productions were far from bei ng up
to the level of hi s ideas. And for the many people not con
nected with the theater-mainly the anarchist- mi nded, for
whom Artaud has been especially i mportant-the experi
ence of hi s work remai ns profoundly private. Artaud i s
someone who has made a spi ri tual t ri p for us-a shaman.
It would be presumptuous to reduce t he geography of Ar
taud's trip to what can be coloni zed. Its authority l ies i n
the parts that yield not hing for the reader except i ntense
di scomfort of the i maginati on.
Artaud's work becomes usable according to our needs,
but the work vanishes behi nd our use of it. When we ti re
of using Artaud, we can return to hi s writings. "lnspi ra
ti on i n stages," he says. "One mustn't let i n too much li ter
at ure. "
All art that expresses a radical di scontent and ai ms at
shatteri ng complacencies of feel ing ri sks being disarmed,
neutral ized, drai ned of its power to di sturb-by being ad
mi red, by bei ng ( or seeming to be) too well understood,
by becomi ng relevant. Most of the once exot i c themes of
Artaud's work have wi t hi n the last decade become loudly
topical : the wisdom ( or lack of it ) to be found i n drugs,
/ 68
Approaching Artaud
Oriental rel igions, magic, the life of North American Indi
ans, body language, the i nsanity trip ; the revolt agai nst
"li terature," and the belligerent prestige of non-verbal
arts ; the appreciation of schi zophreni a ; the use of art as
violence against t he audi ence ; t he necessity for obscenity.
Artaud i n the nineteen-twenties had j ust about every taste
( except enthusiasms for comic books, science fction, and
Marxism) that was to become prominent in the American
counterculture of the ni neteen-sixties, and what he was
readi ng i n that decadthe Tibetan Book of the Dead,
books on mysti ci sm, psychiatry, anthropology, tarot, as
trology, Yoga, acupuncturi s like a prophetic anthology
of the l i terature that has recently surfaced as popular read
ing among t he advanced young. But t he current relevance
of Artaud may be as mi sleadi ng as the obscuri ty in whi ch
hi s work Jay until now.
Unknown outside a small ci rcle of admi rers ten years
ago, Artaud i s a classic today. He is an example of a wi l led
classic-an author whom the culture attempts to assi mi l ate
but who remai ns profoundly i ndi gesti ble. One use of li ter
ary respectabi l i ty i n our t i mand an important part of
the complex career of l i terary moderni sm-i s to make ac
ceptable an outrageous, essentially forbi ddi ng author, who
becomes a classic on the basis of the many i nteresti ng
thi ngs to be sai d about the work that scarcely convey ( per
haps even conceal ) the real nature of the work itsel f, which
may be, among other thi ngs, extremely boring or morally
monstrous or terribly pai nful to read. Certai n authors be
come l i terary or intellectual classics because they are not
read, being in some intrinsic way unreadable. Sade, Ar
taud, and Wil hel m Rei ch belong i n thi s company: authors
who were jai led or locked up i n insane asylums because
/
69
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
they were screami ng, because they were out of control ;
immoderate, obsessed, strident authors who repeat them
selves endlessly, who are rewarding to quote and read bi t
of, but who overpower and exhaust i f read i n large quanti
ties.
Like Sade and Reich, Artaud i s relevant and under
standable, a cultural monument, as long as one mai nl y
refers to hi s i deas wi thout readi ng much of hi s work. For
anyone who reads Artaud through, he remai ns fercely out
of reach, an unassi mi l able voice and presence.
( 1973)
/ 7
0
Fascinating Fascism
I
Fi rst Exhi bi t . Here is a book of 126 splendi d color pho
tographs by Leni Ri efenstahl , certai nly the most ravi shi ng
book of photographs publ i shed anywhere i n recent years.
I n the i nt ractable mountains of the southern Sudan l i ve
about ei ght thousand aloof, godl ike Nuba, emblems of
physical perfection, wi th l arge, wel l-shaped, partly shaven
heads, expressive faces, and muscular bodies that are depi
lated and decorated wi th scars ; smeared wi t h sacred gray
whi te ash, the men prance, squat, brood, wrestle on the
ari d slopes. And here is a fasci nati ng layout of twel ve black
and-whi te photographs of Ri efenstahl on the back cover of
The Last of the Nuba, also ravi shi ng, a chronological
sequence of expressions ( from sultry i nwardness to the grin
of a Texas matron on safari ) vanqui shi ng the i ntractable
/ 73
U N D E R T il E S I G N O F S A T U R N
march of agi ng. The frst photograph was taken i n 1927
when she was twentyfve and al ready a movi e star, the
most recent are dated 1 969 ( she i s cuddl i ng a naked Afri
can baby ) and 1972 ( she i s hol di ng a camera ) , and each of
them shows some version of an i deal presence, a ki nd of
i mperi shable beauty, li ke El i sabeth Schwarzkopf's, that
only gets gayer and more metal l i c and healthier-l ooki ng
wi t h old age. And here i s a bi ographi cal sketch of Riefen
stahl on the dust jacket, and an introducti on ( unsi gned)
enti tled "How Leni Ri efenstahl came to study the Mesakin
Nuba of Kordofan"-ful l of di squieting l i es.
The i ntroducti on, whi ch gives a detai led account of
Ri efenst ahl ' s pi l gri mage to the Sudan ( i nspi red, we are
told, by readi ng Hemi ngway's The Green Hills of Africa
"one sleepless ni ght in the mi d- 1950s" ) , laconi cally i denti
fes the photographer as "somethi ng of a mythi cal fgure as
a fl m-maker before the war, hal f-forgotten by a nat i on
whi ch chose to wi pe from i ts memory an era of its hi story. "
Who ( one hopes ) but Ri efenstahl hersel f could have
thought up this fable about what is mi st i l y referred to as "a
nat i on" which for some unnamed reason "chose" to per
form the deplorable act of cowardice of forgetti ng "an
era"-tactfully left unspeci fed-"of its hi story"? Pre
sumably, at least some readers wi l l be startled by thi s coy
al l usi on to Germany and the Thi rd Reich.
Compared wi th the i ntroduction, the jacket of the book
is posi ti vely expansive on the subject of the photographer' s
career, parroting mi si nformati on that Ri efenstahl has been
di spensi ng for the last twent y years.

It was duri ng Germany's bl i ghted and momen
tous 1 930s that Leni Ri efenstahl sprang to i nt erna-
/ 7
4
Fascinat ing Fascism
ti ona( fame as a fl m di rector. She was born in
1902, and her frst devotion was to creative danci ng.
Thi s l ed t o her parti ci pati on i n si lent fl ms, and soon
she was hersel f maki ng-and starri ng i n-her own
talki es, such as The Mountain ( 1929) .
These tensel y romanti c producti ons were widely
admi red, not least by Adolf Hi t ler who, having
at tai ned power i n 1933, commi ssioned Ri efenstahl
t o make a document ary on the Nuremberg Rally
i n 1934.
It takes a cert ai n ori gi nali ty to describe the Nazi era as
"Germany's bli ghted and momentous 1930s," t o sum
marize t he events of 1933 as Hi tler's "havi ng at t ai ned
power," and to assert that Ri efenstahl, most of whose work
was i n i ts own decade correctl y i denti fed as Nazi propa
ganda, enj oyed "i nt ernati onal fame as a fl m di rector,"
ost ensibly l i ke her contemporaries Renoi r, Lubi t sch, and
Flaherty. ( Coul d the publi shers have let LR write the
j acket copy hersel f? One hesi t ates to ent ertai n so unki nd a
thought, al t hough "her frst devoti on was t o creati ve dane
i ng" i s a phrase few nat i ve speakers of Engl i sh would be
capable of. )
The facts are, of course, i naccurate or i nvent ed. Not
only di d Ri efenstahl not maker star i n-a talki e called
The Mountain ( 1929) . No such fl m exi st s. More gener
al l y : Ri efenst ahl di d not frst si mpl y part i ci pate i n si lent
fl ms and t hen, when sound came in, begi n di rect i ng and
starri ng i n her own flms. I n all ni ne fl ms she ever acted
i n, Ri efenst ahl was t he sta r ; and seven of these she di d not
di rect . These seven fl ms were : The Holy Mountain ( Der
heilige Berg, 1926) , The Big Jump ( Der grosse Sprung,
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U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
1927) , The Fate of the House of Habsburg ( Das Schicksal
derer von Habsburg, 1929) , The White Hell of Pitz Pali
( Die weisse Holle von Piz Pali, 1929) -al l si lents
followed by Avalanche ( Stirme iber dem Montblanc,
1930) , White Frenzy ( Der weisse Rausch, 193 1 ) , and
S. O.S. Iceberg ( S. O. S. Eisberg, 1932-1933) . Al l but one
were di rected by Arnol d Fanck, auteur of hugely success
ful Alpi ne epics since 1919, who made only two more flms,
both fops, after Ri efenstahl left him to strike out on her
own as a di rector i n 1 932. ( The flm not di rected by Fanck
is The Fate of the House of Habsburg, a royal i st weepi e
made i n Aust ri a i n whi ch Ri efenstahl pl ayed Mari e Vet
sera, Crown Prince Rudolf' s compani on at Mayerl i ng. No
pri nt seems to have survived. )
Fanck's pop-Wagneri an vehicles for Ri efenstahl were
not j ust "tensel y romanti c." No doubt thought of as
apoli t i cal when they were made, these fl ms now seem i n
retrospect, as Si egfried Kracauer has poi nted out, to be an
anthology of proto-Nazi sentiments. Mount ai n cl i mbi ng i n
Fanck's flms was a vi sually i rresist i ble metaphor for unl i m
i ted aspi rat i on toward t he hi gh mystic goal , both beaut i ful
and terrifying, which was l ater to become concrete in
Fuhrer-worshi p. The character that Ri efenstahl generally
played was that of a wi ld gi rl who dares to scal e the peak
that others, the "valley pi gs," shri nk from. In her frst role,
in the si lent The Holy Mountain ( 1926) , that of a young
dancer named Di oti ma, she i s wooed by an ardent climber
who converts her to the heal thy ecstasies of Al pinism. This
character underwent a steady aggrandi zement. In her frst
sound fl m, Avalanche ( 1930) , Ri efenstahl i s a mount ai n
possessed gi rl i n l ove wi th a young meteorologist, whom
she rescues when a storm strands him i n his observatory on
Mont Blanc.
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76
Fascinating Fascism
Ri efenstahl herself di rected six flms, te frst of which,
The Blue Light ( Das blaue Licht, 1932) , was another
mountai n flm. Starring in i t as wel l , Ri efenstahl played a
role si mi l ar to the ones in Fanck's flms for which she had
been so "wi dely admi red, not least by Adolf Hi tler," but
al legorizing the dark themes of longing, puri ty, and death
that Fanck had treated rather scouti shly. As usual , the
mountai n i s represented as both supremely beautiful and
dangerous, t hat majestic force whi ch i nvi tes t he ulti mate
afrmat i on of and escape from the self-i nto the brother
hood of courage and i nto death. The role Riefenstahl de
vi sed for hersel f i s that of a pri mi t i ve creature who has a
unique relat i on to a destructive power : only Junta, the rag
clad outcast gi rl of t he vi llage, i s able to reach the myste
ri ous bl ue light radi ati ng from the peak of Mount Cristallo,
whi l e other young vi llagers, l ured by the l i ght , try to cl i mb
the mount ai n and fall to thei r deat hs. What eventually
causes the gi rl's death i s not the i mpossi bi l i ty of the goal
symbol i zed by the mountai n but the materi al ist, prosai c
spi ri t of em i ous vi ll agers and the bl i nd rational i sm of her
lover, a well meani ng vi si tor from the ci ty.
The next flm Riefenstahl di rected after The Blue Light
was not "a documentary on the Nuremberg Rally in 1934"
-Ri efenstahl made four nonfction flms, not two, as she
has clai med since the 1950s and as most current whi te
washi ng accounts of her repeat-but Victory of the Faith
(Sieg des Glaubens, 1933 ) , celebrating the frst National
Soci al i st Party Congress held after Hi tler seized power.
Then came the frst of t wo works which di d i ndeed make
her i nternat i onally famous, the flm on the next Nati onal
Soci al ist Party Congress, Triumph of the Will ( Triumph
des Willens, 1935 ) -whose ti t le is never ment i oned on the
jacket of The Last of the Nuba-after which she made a
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77
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
short flm ( ei ghteen mi nutes ) for the army, Day of Free
dom: Our Army ( Tag der Freiheit: Unsere Wehrmach,
1935) , that depicts the beauty of soldiers and soldiering for
the Fihrer. ( It is not surprising to fnd no mention of thi s
flm, a pri nt of whi ch was found i n 1971 ; duri ng the 1950s
and 1 96s, when Ri efenstahl and everyone else believed
Day of Freedom to have been lost, she had it dropped from
her flmography and refused to di scuss i t with i nterview
ers. )
The j acket copy conti nues :
Ri efenstahl's refusal to submit to Goebbels' at
tempt to subject her vi sual isation to hi s strictly pro
pagandi stic requi rements led to a battle of wills
which came to a head when Ri efenstahl made her
fl m of the 1936 Olympi c Games, Olympi a. This,
Goebbels attempted to destroy ; and i t was only
saved by the personal intervention of Hitler.
With two of the most remarkable documentaries
of the 1930s to her credi t, Ri efenstahl cont inued
making flms of her devisi ng, unconnected with the
rise of Nazi Germany, until 1941, when war con
ditions made it i mpossible to continue.
Her acquai ntance with the Nazi leadershi p led to
her arrest at the end of the Second World War : she
was tri ed twice, and acqui t ted twice. Her reputati on
was in ecli pse, and she was half forgotten-although
to a whole generation of Germans her name had
been a household word.
Except for the bi t about her havi ng once been a household
word in Nazi Germany, not one part of the above i s true.
/ 7
8
Fascinating Fascism
To cast Ri efenstahl in the role of the i ndi vi duali st-artist,
defyi ng phi l i stine bureaucrats and censorshi p by the
patron state ( " 'Goebbels' attempt to subject her visualisa
tion to hi s strictly propagandistic requi rements") should
seem like nonsense to anyone who has seen Triumph of the
Will-a flm whose very conception negates the possi bi l ity
of the flmmaker's having an aesthet i c conception inde
pendent of propaganda. The facts, denied by Riefenstahl
since t he war, are that she made Triumph of the Will with
unl i mited facilities and unstinting ofcial cooperat ion
(t here was never any struggle between the fl mmaker and
the German mi nister of propaganda ) . Indeed, Ri efenstahl
was, as she relates i n t he short book about t he making of
Triumph of the Will, i n on the planni ng of the rally
which was from the start conceived as the set of a fl m
spectacle. * Olympia-a three-and- a-half-hour flm i n two
parts, Festival of the People ( Fest der Volker) and Festival
of Beauty ( Fest der SchOnheit ) -was no less an ofci al pro
ducti on. Riefenstahl has mai ntained in i ntervi ews si nce the
1950s that Olympia was commi ssioned by the International
* Leni Ri efenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichparteitag-Fims
( llunich, 1 935 ) . A photograph on page 3 1 shows Hi tler and
Riefenstahl bendi ng over some plans, with the caption : "The prepa
rations for the Party Congress were made hand i n hand with the
preparations for the camera work." The rall y was held on September
410 ; Riefenstahl relates that she began work i n .ay, planni ng the
fl m sequence by sequence, and supervising the construction of
elaborate bridges, towers, and t racks for the cameras. In late
August, Hitler came to Nuremberg with Viktor Lutze, head of the
SA, "for an inspection and to gi ve fnal instructions. " Her thirty-two
cameramen were dressed in SA uni forms throughout the shooting,
"a suggestion of the Chief of Staf [ Lutze] , so that no one will
disturb the solemnity of the image with hi s civilian clothing." The
SS supplied a team of guards.
/ 7
9
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
Olympi c Commi ttee, produced by her own company, and
made over GoebLels's protests. The truth i s that Olympia
was commi ssioned and enti rely fnanced by the Nazi gov
erment (a dummy company was set up in Riefenstahl's
name because i t was thought unwi se for the government to
appear as the producer) and faci l i tated Ly Goebbels's mi n
istry at every stage of the shooting* ; even the plausible
sounding legend of GoebLels objecting to her footage of
the tri umphs of the black Ameri can track star Jesse Owens
is untrue. Ri efenstahl worked for eighteen months on the
edi t ing, fni shi ng in ti me so that the flm could have i ts
world premi ere on April 29, 1938, i n Berl i n, as part of the
festi vi ti es for Hi t ler's forty-ni nth bi rthday ; later that year
Olympia was the principal German entry at the Venice Film
Festival, where i t won the Gold Medal.
More l i es : to say t hat Ri efenstahl "conti nued making
flms of her devising, unconnected wi th the rise of Nazi
Germany, until 1941 . " In 1939 ( after returning from a
vi si t to Hollywood, the guest of Wal t Di sney) , she accom
pani ed the i nvadi ng Wehrmacht into Pol and as a uni
formed army war correspondent wi th her own camera
team; but there i s no record of any of thi s material surviv
ing the war. After Olympia Ri efenstahl made exactl y one
more flm, Tiefand ( Lowland) , which she began i n 1941
-and, after an interruption, resumed in 1944 ( i n the
Barrandov Fi l m Studi os i n Nazi-occupied Prague} , and
fnished in 1954. Like The Blue Light, Tiefand opposes
lowland or valley corruption to mountai n puri ty, and once
* See Hans Barkhausen, "Footnot e to the History of Riefenstahl's
'Olympia,' " Film Quarterly, Fall 1 974a rare act of i nformed
dissent amid the large number of tributes to Ri efenstahl that have
appeared in American and Western European flm magazines duri ng
the last few years.
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Fascinating Fascism
again the protagonist ( played by Ri efenstahl ) is a beauti
ful outcast. Riefenstahl prefers to give the i mpression that
there were only two documentaries i n a long career as a
di rector of fction flms, but the truth is that four of the six
flms she di rected were documentaries made for and f.
nanced by the Nazi government.
It i s hardl y accurate to describe Ri efenstahl' s profes
sional relationshi p to and intimacy with Hi tler and Goeb
bels as "her acquai ntance wi th the Nazi leadershi p."
Riefenstahl was a close friend and companion of Hitler' s
well before 1932 ; she was a friend of Goebbels, too: no
evidence supports Riefenstahl's persistent clai m since the
1950s that Goebbels hated her, or even that he had the
power to interfere with her work. Because of her unli mited
personal access to Hi tler, Ri efenstahl was precisely the
only German flmmaker who was not responsible to the
Film Ofce ( Reichsflmkammer) of Goebbels' s mi nistry of
propaganda. Last, it is misleadi ng to say th

t Ri efenstahl
was "tri ed twi ce, and acqui tted twice" after the war. What
happened is that she was bri efy arrested by the Alli es i n
1945 and two of her houses ( i n Berl i n and Munich) were
seized. Exami nations and court appearances started i n
1948, continuing i ntermittently unti l 1952, when she was
fnally "de-Nazifed" with the verdict : "No political activity
in support of the Nazi regime which would warrant puni sh
ment. " More imporant : whether or not Riefenstahl de
served a prison sentence, it was not her "acquai ntance"
with the Nazi leadership but her act ivi ti es as a leading
propagandist for the Thi rd Reich that were at i ssue.
The jacket copy of The Last of the Nuba summarizes
faithfully the mai n li ne of the self-vi ndication which
Riefenstahl fabricated i n the 1950s and which is most fully
spelled out i n the i nteriew she gave to Cahiers du Cinema
/
81
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
i n Septemher 1965. There she deni ed that any of her work
was propaganda-cal l i ng it ci nema veri te. "Not a si ngle
scene i s staged," Riefenstahl says of Triumph of the Will.
"Everythi ng i s genui ne. And there i s no tendent i ous com
mentary for the si mple reason that there is no commentary
at al l . I t i s history-pure history." We are a l ong way from
that vehement di sdai n for "the chroni cle- flm," mere "re
portage" or "flmed facts," as being unworthy of the
event's "heroi c style" whi ch is expressed i n her book on the
maki ng of the fl m. *
.
* I f another source is wanted-since Ri efenstahl now claims ( i n an
i nt erview in the German magazi ne Filmkritik, August 1972 ) that
she di dn"t write a si ngle word of Hinter den Kulisen des Reich
parteitag-Films, or even read i t at the t i me-there is an inteniew
i n t he Volkischer Beobacht er, August 26, 1 933, about her flmi ng
of t he 1 933 Nuremberg rally, where she makes similar declarati ons.
Ri efenst ahl and her apologists always talk about Triumph of the
I ill as i f i t were an i ndependent "documentary," often ci t i ng
t echni cal problems encountered whi l e fl mi ng t o prove she had
enemies among t he party l eadershi p ( Goebbels's hat red ) , as i f such
di fcul t ies were not a normal part of flmmaking. One of the more
dut i ful reruns of the myth of Ri efenstahl as mere documentarist
and pol i t ical i nnocent-is the Filmguide to "Triumph of the l1il"
published i n the Indi ana University Press Fil mguide Series, whos
e
aut hor, Ri chard :feram Barsam, concludes hi s preface by expressing
hi s "grat i t ude t o Leni Riefenstahl hersel f, who cooperated i n many
hours of i nt erviews, opened her archive t o my research, and t ook
a genui ne i nterest in this book. " Well mi ght she take an i nterest
i n a book whose openi ng chapter is "Leni Ri efenstahl and the Burden
of Independence," and whose theme i s "Ri cfenstahl's bel ief that the
art i st must, at all costs, remai n independent of the material world.
In her own l i fe, she has achieved artistic freedom, but at a great
cost. ' " Et c.
As an anti dote, let me quote an uni mpeachabl e source ( at least
he's not here to say he di dn't write i t ) -Adol f Hitler. In his brief
preface to Hinter den Kulissen, Hi t ler describes Triumph of the Will
as "a t ot al l y uni que and incomparable glorifcat ion of the power
and beaut y of our :lovement." And i t is.
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82
Fascinating Fascism
Although Triumph of the Will has no narrative voice, i t
does open with a written text heralding the rally as the
redemptive culmi nation of German history. But this open
ing statement is the least original of the ways in which
the flm is tendentious. It has no commentary because i t
doesn't need one, for Triumph of the Will represents an
al ready achieved and radical transformation of real ity: hi s
tory become theater. How the 1934 Party convention was
staged was partly determi ned by the deci sion to produce
Triumph of the Will-the hi storic event servi ng as the set
of a flm which was then to assume the character of an
authentic documentary. Indeed, when some of the footage
of Party leaders at the speakers' rostrum was spoiled, Hi t
ler gave orders for the shots to be reflmed ; and Streicher,
Rosenberg, Hess, and Frank hi stri onically repledged their
fealty to the Fuhrer weeks later, wi thout Hi tler and with
out an audience, on a studio set built by Speer. ( It is alto
gether correct that Speer, who bui l t the gigantic site of the
rally on the outski rts of Nuremberg, i s l i sted in the credits
of Triumph of the Will as architect of the flm. ) Anyone
who defends Riefenstahl's flms as documentaries, i f doc
umentary i s to be distinguished from propaganda, i s bei ng
i ngenuous. In Triumph of the Will, the document ( the
i mage) not only i s the record of real i ty but i s one reason
for which the real i ty has been constructed, and must even
tually supersede it.
The rehabili tation of proscribed fgures i n l i beral soci
eties does not happen with the sweeping bureaucratic fnal
i ty of the Soviet Encyclopedia, each new edition of which
bri ngs fonvard some hitherto unmentionable fgures and
lowers an equal or greater number through the trap door
of nonexistence. Our rehabilitations are smoother, more
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83
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
insinuative. It is not that Riefenstahl's Nazi past has sud
denly become acceptable. I t i s si mply that, wi th the t urn of
t he cultural

heel, i t no l onger mat ters. Instead of di spens

i ng a freeze-dried version of hi story from above, a l i beral
society settles such questi ons by waiting for cycles of taste
to di sti ll out the controversy.
The puri fcation of Leni Ri efenstahl's reputati on of i ts
Nazi dross has been gatheri ng momentum for some time,
but i t has reached some kind of cli max t hi s year, wi th
Ri efenstahl the guest of honor at a new ci nephi le
controlled flm festi val held in the summer in Colorado
and the subject of a stream of respectful articles and inter
views in newspapers and on TV, and now with the publ ica
t i on of The Last of the Nuba. Part of the i mpetus behi nd
Ri efenstahl's recent promoti on to the status of a cultural
monument surely owes to the fact that she i s a woman. The
1973 New York Fi lm Fest ival poster, made by a well
known art i st who i s also a femi ni st, showed a blond dol l
woman whose right breast i s enci rcled by t hree names :
Agnes Leni Shi rley. ( That is, Varda, Riefenstahl, Clarke. )
Femi ni sts would feel a pang at having to sacri fce the one
woman who made flms that everybody acknowledges to be
frst-rate. But the strongest impetus behi nd the change in
attitude toward Ri efenstahl lies in the new, ampler for
tunes of the idea of the beaut i ful.
The li ne taken by Ri efenstahl's defenders, who now in
clude the most i nfuent i al voices in the avant-garde flm
establi shment, i s that she was always concerned wi th
beauty. This, of course, has been Ri efenstahl's own conten
tion for some years. Thus t he Cahiers du Cinema i nter
viewer set Ri efenstahl up by observi ng fatuously that what
Triumph of the Will and Olympia "have i n common is
/
8
4
Fascinating Fascism
that they both give form to a certai n real i ty, i tself based on
a certai n i dea of form. Do you see anything peculiarly
German about this concern for form?" To this, Riefenstahl
answered :
I can si mply say that I feel spontaneously at
tracted by everything that i s beautiful. Yes : beauty,
harmony. And perhaps this care for composi tion,
this aspiration to form is i n efect something very
German. But I don't know these things myself,
exactly. It comes from the unconscious and not
from my knowledge . . . . What do you want me to
add? Whatever is purely realistic, slice-of-l ife,
which i s average, quoti dian, doesn't i nterest me . . . .
I am fascinated by what i s beautiful, strong, healthy,
what is l iving. I seek har!ony. When harmony is
produced I am happy. I 'eli eve, with this, that I
have answered you.
That is why The Last of the Nuba is the l ast, necessary step
in Ri efenstahl's rehabilitati on. It is the fnal rewrite of the
past ; or, for her parti sans, the defni tive confrmation that
she was always a beauty freak rather than a horrid propa
gandist.* Inside the beautifully produced book, photo-
* This is how Jonas Mekas ( The VU/age Voice, October 31, 1974)
salutes the publication of The Last of the Nuba: "Riefenstahl
continues her celebration-or is i t a search?-f the classical beauty
of te human body, the search which she began i n her flms. She is
interested i n the ideal, i n the monumental . " Mekas in the same paper
on November 7, 1 974 : "And here is my own fnal statement on
Riefenstahl's flms : I f you are an idealist, you'll see idealism i n her
flms ; i f you are a classicist, you'll see in her flms an ode to classicism;
if you are a Nazi, you'll see in her flms Nazism."
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85
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
graphs of the perfect, noble tri be. And on the j acket, pho
tographs of "my perfect German woman" ( as Hi tler called
Ri efenstahl ) , vanqui shi ng the sl i ght s of hi story, all smi les.
Admi ttedl y, i f t he book were not si gned by Ri efenstahl
one would not necessari l y suspect that these photographs
had been taken by the most i nteresti ng, talented, and efec
tive artist of the Nazi era. Most people who leaf through
The Last of the Nuba wi ll probably see i t as one more
lament for vani shi ng pri mi t ives-the greatest example
remai ns Levi -Strauss i n Tristes Tropiques on the Bororo
Indi ans i n Brazi l-but i f the photographs are exami ned
carefully, i n conj uncti on wi th the lengthy text wri tten by
Riefenstahl, i t becomes clear that they are conti nuous wi th
her Nazi work. Ri efenstahl's parti cul ar slant i s revealed by
her choi ce of thi s tri be and not another : a people she de
scri bes as acutely arti sti c ( everyone owns a lyre) and
beaut i ful ( Nuba men, Ri efenstahl notes, "have an athletic
build rare i n any other Afri can tri be" ) ; endowed as they
are wi th "a much stronger sense of spi ritual and rel i gi ous
relati ons than of worldly and material matters," thei r pri n
ci pal acti vi ty, she i nsi sts, i s ceremoni al. The Last of the
Nuba i s about a pri mi t i vi st i deal : a portrait of a people
subsi sti ng i n a pure harmony wi th thei r environment, un
touched by "ci vi l izat i on. "
Al l four of Ri efenstahl's commissioned Nazi flms
whether about Party congresses, the Wehrmacht, or ath
letes-celehrat e the rebi rth of the body and of commu
ni ty, medi ated through the worshi p of an i rresi stible
leader. They follow di rectly from the flms of Fanck in
whi ch she starred and her own The Blue Light. The Al
pi ne fcti ons are tales of longi ng for high places, of the
challenge and ordeal of the elemental, the pri mi ti ve ; they
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86
Fascinating Fascism
are about the vertigo before power, symbolized by the
majesty and beauty of mountains. Te Nazi flms are epi cs
of achi eved communi ty, i n which everyday real i ty i s
transcended through ecstatic self -ontrol and submission ;
they are about the triumph of power. And The Last of the
Nuba, an elegy for the soon-to-be exti ngui shed beauty and
mystic powers of pri mi tives whom Ri efenstahl cal l s "her
adopted people," is the thi rd in her triptych of fascist vis
uals.
In the frst panel, the mountai n flms, heavily dressed
people strai n upward to prove themselves in the puri ty of
the cold ; vitality is i denti fed wi th physical ordeal. For the
mi ddle panel, the flms made for the Nazi government :
Triumph of the Will uses overpopulated wide shots of
massed fgures alternati ng wi th close-ups that i solate a si n
gle passion, a si ngle perfect submission : i n a temperate
zone clean-ut people in uni forms group and regroup, as if
they were seeki ng the perfect choreography to express their
fealty. In Olympia, the richest vi sually of all her flms ( i t
uses both the verticals of the mountai n flms and the hori
zontal movements characteri stic of Triumph of the Will) ,
one strai ni ng, scant i l y clad fgure after another seeks the
ecstasy of victory, cheered on by ranks of compatriots i
the stands, al l under the still gaze of the benign Super
Spectator, Hi tler, whose presence in the stadium conse
crates this efort. ( Olympia, which could as well have been
cal led Triumph of the Will, emphasizes that there are no
easy victori es. ) I n te thi rd panel, The Last of the Nuba,
the almost naked primitives, awai ti ng te fnal ordeal of
their proud heroic communi ty, their i mmi nent ext i nction,
froli c and pose under the scorching sun.
It is Gotterdammerung time. The central events m
/
8
7
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
Nuba society are wrestli ng matches and funerals : vi vi d
encounters of beaut i ful mal e bodi es and death. The Nuba,
as Ri efenstahl i nterprets them, are a tribe of aesthetes.
Like the henna- daubed Masai and the so-alled Mudmen
of New Gui nea, the Nuba pai nt themselves for all i mpor
tant social and rel i gi ous occasi ons, smeari ng on a whi te
gray ash which unmistakably suggests death. Ri efenstahl
clai ms to have arri ved "j ust in t i me," for in the few years
si nce these photographs were taken the glorious Nuba have
been corrupted by money, j obs, clothes. ( And, probably,
by war-which Ri efenstahl never mentions, si nce what she
cares about i s myth not hi story. The ci vi l war that has been
teari ng up that part of the Sudan for a dozen years must
have scattered new technology and a lot of detri tus. )
Although the Nuha are bl ack, not Aryan, Ri efenstahl's
portrai t of them evokes some of the l arger themes of Nazi
i deology : the contrast between the clean and the i mpure,
the i ncormpti ble and the defled, the physi cal and the
mental, the joyful and the cri ti cal. A pri nci pal accusat i on
against t he Jews wi t hi n Nazi Germany was t hat t hey were
urban, i ntellectual, bearers of a destructive corrupti ng
"cri t i cal spi ri t." The book bonfre of M
a
y 1933 was
launched wi th Goebbels's cry: "The age of extreme Jewi sh
i ntellectual i sm has now ended, and the success of the Ger
man revol uti on has agai n given the right of way to the
German spi ri t. " And when Goebbels ofci al l y forbade art
cri tici sm i n November 1936, it was for havi ng "typi cal l y
Jewish t rai ts of character" : put t i ng t he head over the
heart, the i ndi vi dual over the communi ty, intellect over
feel i ng. In the transformed thematics of latter-day fasci sm,
t he Jews no longer pl ay the rol e of defler. It i s "civi l iza
ti on" i tself.
/ 88
Fascinating Fascism
What i s di st i nctive about the fasci st version of the ol d
i dea of the Noble Savage is i t s contempt for all that is re
fective, critical, and plurali sti c. In Ri efenstahl's casebook
of primi tive vi rtue, i t is hardly-as in Levi -Strauss-the
i ntricacy and subtlety of pri mi tive myth, social organiza
tion, or thinking that i s being extolled. Ri efenstahl
strongly recalls fascist rhetoric when she celebrates te
ways the Nuba are exalted and uni fed by the physi cal or
deals of thei r wrestli ng matches, in which the "heaving and
strai ning" Nuba men, "huge muscles bulging," throw one
another to the ground-fghting not for materi al prizes but
"for the renewal of the sacred vi tali ty of the tribe. "
Wrestli ng and the ri tuals that go wi th i t, in Riefenstahl's
account, bind the Nuba together. Wrestl i ng
i s the expression of all that di st i nguishes the Nuba
way of l i fe . . . . Wrestl i ng generates the most pas
si onate loyalty and emotional parti ci pati on i n the
team's supporters, who are, i n fact, the entire "non
playi ng" population of the vi llage . . . . I ts i mpor
tance as the expression of the total outlook of the
Mesaki u and Korongo cannot be exaggerated ; it is
the expression in the visible and social world of the
i nvisible world of the mi nd and of the spi rit.
In celebrating a society where the exhi bition of physi cal
skill and courage and the vi ctory of the stronger man over
the weaker are, as she sees it, the uni fyi ng symbols of the
communal culturewhere success in fghti ng is the "mai n
aspi rati on of a man' s l i fe"-Ri efenstahl seems hardly to
have modi fed the i deas of her Nazi flms. And her portrai t
of the Nuba goes further than her flms i n evoki ng one as
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8
9
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
peel of the fasci st i deal : a society in whi ch women are
merely breeders and helpers, excl uded from al l ceremoni al
functi ons, and represent a threat to t he i ntegri t y and st rength
of men. From the "spi ri t ual " Nuba point of view ( by the
Nuha Riefenstahl means, of course, males ) , contact wi t h
women i s profane ; but, i deal society that this i s supposed to
be, the women know thei r place.
The fancees or wives of the wrestl ers are as con
cerned as the men to avoi d any i nt i mate contact . . .
thei r pri de at bei ng the hri de or wi fe of a strong
wrestler supersedes thei r amorousness.
Lastly, Ri efenstahl i s right on t arget with her choi ce as a
photographi c subject of a people who "look upon death as
simply a matter of fate-whi ch they do not resist or strug
gle agai nst," of a society whose most ent husi asti c and lavi sh
ceremoni al i s the funeral . Vi va la muerte.
It may seem ungrateful and rancorous to refuse to cut
loose The Last of the Nuba from Ri efenst ahl' s past, but
there are sal utary lessons to be learned from the cont i nui ty
of her work as well as from that curi ous and i mplacable
recent event-her rehabi l i tati on. The careers of other art
ists who became fascists, such as Celi ne and Benn and
Mari nelli and Pound ( not to menti on those, l i ke Pabst
and Pi randello and Hamsun, who embraced fasci sm in the
decl i ne of thei r powers ) , are not i nstructive i n a compara
ble way. For Ri efenstahl i s the only major art i st who was
completely i denti fed wi th the Nazi era and whose work,
not onl y duri ng the Third Reich but t hi rt y years after i ts
fall, has consistently i l l ustrated many themes of fasci st
aesthetics.
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90
Fascinating Fascism
Fascist aesthet i cs i nclude but go far beyond the rather
speci al celebration of the pri mi t ive t o be found i n The
Last of the Nuba. More generally, they fow from ( and
j usti fy) a preoccupation wi th si tuati ons of control, sub
mi ssive behavior, ext ravagant efort, and the endurance of
pai n ; they endorse t wo seemingly opposite states, egomani a
and servi tude. The relati ons of domi nati on and enslave
ment take the form of a characteri sti c pageantry : the mass
i ng of groups of people ; t he t uri ng of people i nto thi ngs ;
the mult i pl i cat i on or repl ication of thi ngs ; and the group
i ng of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic
leader-fgure or force. The fasci st dramat urgy centers on
t he orgiast i c transactions between mi ghty forces and thei r
puppets, uni formly garbed and shown i n ever swelli ng
numbers. Its choreography al ternates between ceaseless
motion and a congealed, static, "vi rile" posi ng. Fascist art
glori fes surrender, it exalts mi ndlessness, it glamorizes
death.
Such art i s hardly confned to works labeled as fasci st or
produced under fascist governments. ( To ci te flms only :
Walt Di sney's Fantasia, Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All
Here, and Kubri ck's 2001 also strikingly exempli fy cert ai n
formal structures and themes of fascist art. ) And, of
course, features of fascist art prol i ferate i n the ofci al art of
communi st count ri es-whi ch al ways presents i tsel f under
t he banner of real ism, whi le fasci st art scors real i sm i n t he
name of "i deal i sm. " The tastes for the monumental and
for mass obeisance to t he hero are common to both fasci s
t
and communi st art, refect ing the view of all totali t ari an
regimes that art has t he function of "i mmortal i zi ng" i ts
leaders and doctrines. The rendering of movement i n
grandi ose and ri gi d patterns is another element i n com
mon, for such choreography rehearses the very uni ty of the
/9
1
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
poli ty. The masses are made to take form, be design. Hence
mass athleti c demonstrat i ons, a choreographed di splay of
bodi es, are a valued acti vi ty in all total i tari an countries ;
and the art of the gymnast, so popular now in Eastern Eu
rope, also evokes recurrent features of fasci st aestheti cs ; the
holdi ng in or confni ng of force ; mi l itary preci si on.
In both fasci st and communi st poli t i cs, the wi ll i s staged
publi cly, i n the drama of the leader and the chorus. What
i s i nteresting about t he relati on between poli tics and art
under Nati onal Soci ali sm i s not that art was subordi nated
to poli ti cal needs, for t hi s is true of dictatorships both of
the right and of the left, but that poli ti cs appropri ated the
rhetori c of art-art in i ts late romanti c phase. ( Pol i ti cs i s
"the hi ghest and most comprehensive art there i s," Goeb
bels sai d in 1933, "and we who shape modern German pol
i cy feel ourselves to be arti sts . . . the task of art and the
artist [bei ng] to form, to give shape, to remove the di s
eased and create freedom for the healthy. " ) What is in
teresting about art under National Social ism are those
features which make i t a speci al vari ant of total i tari an art.
The ofci al art of countries l ike the Soviet Uni on and
China ai ms to expound and reinforce a utopian moral i ty.
Fasci st art di splays a utopi an aestheti cs-that of physical
perfecti on. Pai nters and sculptors under the Nazis often
depi cted the nude, but they were forbi dden to show any
bodi ly i mperfecti ons. Thei r nudes look l ike pi ctures in
physique magazines : pi nups which are both sanct i moni
ously asexual and ( i n a techni cal sense) pornographic, for
they have the perfect i on of a fantasy. Ri efenstahl' s promo
tion of the beaut i ful and the healthy, i t must be sai d, is
much more sophi sti cated than thi s ; and never wi tless, as it
i s in other Nazi visual art. She appreci ates a range of bodi ly
/ 9
2
Fascinating Fascism
types-in matters of beauty she i s not raci st-and in
Olympia she does show some efort and strai n, wi th i ts at
tendant i mperfections, as well as styl ized, seemi ngly ef
fortless exert ions ( such as divi ng, in the most admi red
sequence of the flm) .
I n contrast to the asexual chasteness of ofcial communist
art, Nazi art is both prurient and i dealizi ng. A utopi an
aesthetics ( physical perfection ; i dentity as a bi ological
gi ven) i mplies an ideal eroticism: sexual i ty converted i nto
the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The
fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spi ri tual "
force, for the beneft of the communi t y. The erotic ( that is,
women ) is always present as a temptation, wi th the most
admi rable response bei ng a heroi c repressi on of the sexual
i mpulse. Thus Riefenstahl explai ns why Nuba marri ages,
i n contrast to thei r splendid funerals, i nvolve no cere
moni es or feasts.
A Nuba man's greatest desi re i s not union wi th a
woman but to be a good wrestler, thereby afrmi ng
the pri nci ple of abstemiousness. The Nuba dance
ceremoni es are not sensual occasions but rather
"festivals of chasti ty"-of contai nment of the l i fe
force.
Fasci st aesthetics is based on the contai nment of vital
forces ; movements are confned, held tight, held in.
Nazi art i s reactionary, defantly outside the century's
mai nstream of achi evement i n the arts. But j ust for this
reason i t has been gai ni ng a place i n contemporary taste.
The left-wing organi zers of a current exhibi tion of Nazi
pai nt i ng and sculpture ( the frst si nce the war) in Frank-
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U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
furt have found, to their di smay, the attendance excessively
l arge and hardly as serious- mi nded as they had hoped.
Even when fanked by di dacti c admonitions from Brecht
and by concentrat i on-camp photographs, what Nazi art
remi nds these crowds of i s-other art of the 1930s, notably
Art Deco. {Art Nouveau could never be a fascist style ; i t is,
rather, the prototype of that art which fascism defnes as
decadent ; the fasci st style at its best i s Art Deco, wi th i ts
sharp l i nes and blunt massing of materi al , i ts petri fed
eroti cism. ) The same aesthetic responsible for the bronze
colossi of Arno Breker-Hitler's ( and, briefy, Cocteau's )
favori te sculptor-and of Josef Thorak also produced the
muscle-bound Atlas i n front of Manhattan's Rockefel ler
Center and the fai ntly lewd monument to the fallen
doughboys of World War I i n Phi l adelphi a' s Thirtieth
St reet rai lroad station.
To an unsophisti cated public i n Germany, the appeal of
Nazi art may have been that i t was si mple, fgurative,
emotional ; not i ntellectual ; a rel ief from the demandi ng
complexi ti es of modernist art . To a more sophi sticated
public, the appeal i s partly to that avidity which i s now bent
' on retrievi ng all the styles of the past, especi ally the most
pi lloried. But a revival of Nazi art, following the revival s of
Art Nouveau, Pre-Raphaelite pai nt ing, and Art Deco, is
most unl ikely. The pai nt i ng and sculpture are not j ust
sententious ; they are astoni shi ngly meager as art. But
precisely these quali ties i nvi te people to l ook at Nazi art
wi th knowing and sni ggering detachment, as a form of Pop
Art.
Ri efenstahl's work i s free of the amateurism and naivete
one fnds in other art produced in the Nazi era, but it st i l l
promotes many of the same val ues. And the same very
/ 94
Fascinating Fascism
modern sensi bi l i ty can appreciate her as wel l . The ironies
of pop sophi stication make for a way of looki ng at
Ri efenstahl' s work i n which not onl y i ts formal beauty but
its pol itical fervor are vi ewed as a form of aestheti c excess.
And alongside this detached appreci ati on of Ri efenstahl i s
a response, whether conscious or unconscious, to te
subject i tsel f, which gives her work its power.
Triumph of the Will and Olympia are undoubtedly
superb flms { they may be the two greatest documentaries
ever made) , but they are not reai l y i mportant i n the hi story
of cinema as an art form. Nobody maki ng flms today
ail udes to Riefenstahl, while many flmmakers ( i ncluding
myself) regard Dzi ga Vertov as an i nexhaustible provoca
tion and source of ideas about flm language. Yet i t i s
arguable that Vertov-the most i mportant fgure i n docu
mentary flms-never made a flm as purely efective and
thri ili ng as Triumph of the Will or Olympia. ( Of course,
Vertov never had the means at hi s di sposal that Ri efen
stahl had. The Soviet government's budget for propaganda
flms i n the 1920s and earl y 1930s was less than lavish. )
I n deal i ng with propagandi st i c art on the left and on the
right, a double standard prevails. Few people would admi t
t hat t he mani pulati on of emoti on i n Vertov' s l at er flms and
i n Ri efenstahl ' s provides si mi lar ki nds of exhi l aration.
When explai ni ng why they are moved, most people are
senti mental in the case of Vertov and di shonest i n the case
of Ri efenstahl . Thus Vertov's work evokes a good deal of
moral sympathy on t he part of hi s ci nephi le audiences all
over the worl d ; people consent to be moved. With Ri efen
stahl' s work, the trick is to flter out the noxi ous pol i ti cal
i deology of her flms, leavi ng only thei r "aesthet i c" merits.
Prai se of Vertov's flms always presupposes the knowledge
/9
5
U N D E R T H E S I G N 0 F S A T U R N
that he was al attractive person and an i ntel l i gent and
ori gi nal arti st-thi nker, eventually crushed by the dictator
shi p which he served. And most of the contemporary
audience for Vertov ( as for Ei senstei n and Pudovki n )
assumes that the flm propagandi sts i n the early years of the
Soviet Union were i l l ustrat i ng a noble i deal, however much
i t was betrayed i n practice. But prai se of Riefenstahl has no
such recourse, si nce nobody, not even her rehabi li tators,
has managed to make Riefenstahl seem even l ikable ; and
she i s no thi nker at all.
More i mportant, i t i s generally thought t hat National
Soci al i sm stands only for brut ishness and terror. But t hi s i s
not true. Nati onal Social ism-more broadly, fasci sm-also
stands for an i deal or rather ideals that are persi stent
today under the other banners : the i deal of l i fe as art, the
cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the di ssol ut i on of
al i enati on i n ecstati c feel i ngs of communi ty ; the repudi a
t i on of the i ntellect ; the family of man ( under the parent
hood of leaders ) . These i deal s are vi vi
d
and moving to
many people, and it is di shonest as well as tautological to
say that one i s afected by Trium
p
h of the Will and Olym
p
ia
only because they were made by a flmmaker of geni us.
Ri efenstahl's flms are st i l l efecti ve because, among other
reasons, thei r longi ngs are still felt, because thei r content is
a romanti c ideal to which many cont i nue to be attached and
which i s expressed in such di verse modes of cultural di s
si dence and propaganda for new forms of community as
the youth/rock culture, pri mal therapy, ant i -psychiatry,
Thi rd World camp-fol l owi ng, and belief in the occul t . The
exaltati on of communi ty does not precl ude the search for
absolute leadershi p ; on the contrary, it may i nevitably lead
to it. ( Not surpri si ngl y, a fai r number of the young people
/
9
6
Fascinating Fascism
now prostrating themselves before gurus and submitting to
the most grotesquely autocratic discipline are former anti
authoritarians and anti-eli t ists of the 1960s. )
Riefenstahl's current de-Nazi fcation and vi ndi cation as
indomitable pri estess of the beautiful-as a flmmaker and,
now, as a photographer-o not augur well for the keen
ness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings i n our
mi dst. Riefenstahl i s hardly the usual sort of aesthete or
anthropological romantic. The force of her work being
precisely i n the continuity of i ts pol itical and aesthetic
ideas, what i s i nteresti ng i s that this was once seen so much
more clearly than it seems to be now, when people claim to
be drawn to Ri efenstahl's images for their beauty of com
position. Without a historical perspective, such connois
seurship prepares the way for a curiously absentmi nded
acceptance of propaganda for all sorts of destructive feel
i ngs-feeli ngs whose i mpl ications people are refusing to
take seri ously. Somewhere, of course, everyone knows that
more than beauty is at stake i n art like Riefenstahl's. And
so people hedge thei r bets-admi ring this ki nd of art, for
its undoubted beaut y, and patronizing it, for its sanctimo
nious promotion of the beautiful. Backing up the solemn
choosy formali st appreci ations l ies a larger reserve of ap
predation, the sensi bi lity of camp, which i s unfettered by
the scruples of high seriousness : and the modern sensibil ity
relies on conti nuing trade-ofs between the formalist ap
proach and camp taste.
Art which evokes the themes of fascist aesthetic i s popu
lar now, and for most people i t i s probably no more than a
variant of camp. Fasci sm may be merely fashionable, and
perhaps fashion with its irrepressible promiscuity of taste
will save us. But the j udgments of taste themselves seem
/
9
7
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
less i nnocent. Art that seemed eminently worth defendi ng
ten years ago, as a mi nori ty or adversary taste, no longer
seems defensi ble today, because the ethical and cul tural i s
sues it rai ses have become seri ous, even dangerous, i n a way
they were not then. The hard truth i s that what may be ac
ceptable in el i te culture may not be acceptable in mass
culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues
as the property of a mi nority become corrupt i ng when they
become more establ i shed. Taste i s context, and the context
has changed.
II
Second Exhi bi t . Here i s a book to be purchased at
ai rport magazi ne stands and i n "adult" bookstores, a rela
tively cheap paperback, not an expensive cofee-table i tem
appeali ng to art l overs and the bien-pensant l ike The Last
of the Nuba. Yet both books share a certai n communi ty of
moral ori gi n, a root preoccupation : the same preoccupa
ti on at di ferent stages of evoluti on-the i deas that animate
The Last of the Nuba being less out of the moral closet
than the cruder, more efcient i dea that l i es behi nd SS
Regalia. Though SS Regalia is a respectable Bri ti sh-made
compi lati on ( wi th a three-page hi storical preface and not es
i n the back) , one knows that its appeal is not scholarly but
sexual. The cover already makes that clear. Across the
l arge black swastika of an SS armband is a di agonal yellow
stripe whi ch reads "Over 1 00 Bri l l i ant Four-Color Photo
graphs Only S2.95," exactly as a sti cker wi th the pri ce on i t
used to be afxed-part tease, part deference to censorshi p
-on the cover of pornographi c magazi nes, over the
model' s geni t al i a.
/9
8
Facinating F ascisr
There i s a general fantasy about uni forms. They suggest
community, order, identity ( through ranks, badges, medals,
things which declare who the wearer i s and what he has
done: his worth is recogni zed ) , competence, legitimate
authori ty, the legi t i mate exercise of vi olence. But uni forms
are not the same thi ng as photographs of uni forms-whi ch
are erotic materials and photographs of SS uni forms are the
uni ts of a part i cularly powerful and wi despread sexual fan
tasy. Why t he SS? Because t he SS was t he ideal i ncarnation
of fascism's overt assertion of the righteousness of vi olence,
the right to have total power over others and to treat them
as absoh 1tely i nferior. It was i n the SS that thi s assertion
seemed most complete, because they acted i t out i n a singu
larly brutal and efcient manner ; and because they drama
t ized i t by l i nki ng themselves to certai n aesthet i c standards.
The SS was desi gned as an eli te mi l i tary communi ty that
would be not only supremely vi olent but also supremely
beauti ful. ( One i s not likel y to come across a book called
"SA Regal i a. " The SA, whom the SS replaced, were not
known for being any less brutal than their successors, but
they have gone down in hi stor as befy, squat, berhall
typs ; mere hrownshirts. )
SS uni forms were styl i sh, well -ut, wi th a touch ( hut not
too much ) of eccent ri ci ty. Compare the rather boring and
not very well cut American army uni form: jacket, shi rt, t i e,
pants, socks, and lace-up shoes-essent i ally ci vi li an clothes
no matter how bedecked wi th medals and badges. SS uni
forms were tight, heavy, sti f and included gloves to confne
the hands and boots that made legs and feet feel heavy, en
cased, obl i gi ng thei r wearer to stand up straight. As the
back cover of SS Regalia explains :
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U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
The uni form was black, a colour which had i m
portant overtones i n Germany. On that, the SS wore
a vast variety of decorations, symbols, badges to dis
t i ngui sh rank, from the collar runes to the death's
head. The appearance was both dramati c and men
acing.
The cover's almost wi stful come-on does not qui te prepare
one for the banali ty of most of the photographs. Along wi th
those celebrated black uni forms, SS troopers were i ssued
almost American-army-looking khaki uni forms and camou
fage ponchos and j ackets. And besi des the photographs of
uni forms, there are pages of collar patches, cuf bands,
chevrons, belt buckles, commemorative badges, regimental
standards, trumpet banners, feld caps, service medals,
shoulder fashes, permi ts, passes-few of which bear ei ther
the notorious runes or the death' s-head ; all met iculously
i denti fed by rank, uni t, and year and season of issue. Pre
ci sely the i nnocuousness of practically all of the photo
graphs test ifes to the power of the i mage : one i s handl ing
the breviary of a sexual fantasy. For fantasy to have depth,
i t must have detai l . What, for example, was the color of the
travel permi t an SS sergeant would have needed to get from
Trier to Lubeck in the spring of 194? One needs all the
documentary evidence.
If the message of fasci sm has been neutral ized by an
aesthetic view of l i fe, i ts trappings have been sexuali zed.
Thi s eroticization of fascism can be remarked i n such en
thralli ng and devout manifestati ons as Mi shi ma' s Con
fessions of a Mask and Sun and Steel, and in flms l ike
Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising and, more recentl y and far
less interesti ngly, i n Visconti's The Damned and Cavani' s
I 100
Fascinating Fascism
The Night Porter. The solemn eroti cizing of fascism must be
distinguished from a sophisti cated playing with cultural
horror, where there is an element of the put-on. The poster
Robert Morris made for his recent show at the Castell i
Gallery i s a photograph of the artist, naked to the waist,
wearing dark glasses, what appears to be a Nazi helmet,
and a spiked steel collar, attached t o which is a stout chain
which he holds i n his manacled, upl ifted hands. Morri s is
said to have considered this to be the only i mage that still
has any power to shock : a singular vi rtue to those who take
for granted that art i s a sequence of ever-fresh gestures of
provocation. But the poi nt of the poster i s its own negat ion.
Shocking people in the context also means inuring them, as
Nazi material enters t he vast repertory of poular i conogra
phy usable for the ironic commentaries of Pop Art. Still,
Nazism fascinates in a way oter i conography staked out by
the pop sensibility ( from Mao Tse-tung to Marilyn Mon
roe) does not. No doubt, some part of the general rise of
i nterest i n fascism can be set down as a product of curios
i ty. For those born after the early 1 940s, bludgeoned by a
lifetime' s palaver, pro and con, about communism, it i s
fasci sm-the great conversation piece of thei r parents' gen
eration-which represents the exotic, the unknown. Then
there is a general fascination among the young with horror,
with the i rrational . Courses deali ng wi th the hi story of fas
cism are, along with those on the occult ( i ncluding vam
pi rism) , among the best attended these days on college
campuses. And beyond this the defni tely sexual l ure of
fascism, which SS Regalia test ifes to wi th unabashed plai n
ness, seems i mpervious to defation by i rony or over
fami li arity.
In pornographic li terature, flms, and gadgetry through-
I 101
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R li
out the world, especi ally i n the Uni ted States, England,
France, Japan, Scandi navi a, Holl and, and Germany, the SS
has become a referent of sexual adventurism. Much of the
i magery of far-out sex has been pl aced under the si gn of
Nazi sm. Boots, leather, chains, Iron Crosses on gleami ng
torsos, swasti kas, along wi th meat hooks and heavy motor
cycles, have become the secret and most l ucrative para
phernali a of erot i ci sm. I n the sex shops, t he baths, the
leather bars, the brothels, people are draggi ng out thei r
gear. But why? Why has Nazi Germany, whi ch was a sex
ual ly repressive society, become erot i c? How coul d a re
gi me whi ch persecuted homosexuals become a gay t ur-on?
A clue l ies i n t he predi lecti ons of the fasci st leaders
themselves for sexual metaphors. Like Ni etzsche and Wag
ner, Hi tler regarded leadershi p as sexual mastery of the
"femi ni ne" masses, as rape. ( The expression of the crowds
in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy ; the leader makes
the crowd come. ) Left-wi ng movements have tended to be
uni sex, and asexual i n thei r i magery. Ri ght-wi ng move
ments, however puri t anical and repressive the reali t ies they
usher in, have an erotic surface. Certai nly Nazism is "sex
ier" than communi sm ( which is not to the Nazis' credi t ,
but rather shows somethi ng of t he nat ure and l i mits of the
sexual i magi nat i on ) .
Of course, most people who are t ured on hy SS uni
forms are not si gni fyi ng approval of what t he Nazis di d, i f
indeed they have more t han t he sketchiest i dea of what that
mi ght be. Nevertheless, there are powerful and growing
currents of sexual feel i ng, those that generally go by the
name of sadomasochi sm, which make playi ng at Nazism
seem erot i c. These sadomasochi st i c fantasies and practices
are to be found among heterosexuals as wel l as homosex-
I 102
Fascinating Fascism
uals, although it is among male homosexuals that the eroti
cizing of Nazism is most visible. S-m, not swi nging, is the
big sexual secret of the last few years.
Between sadomasochi sm and fascism there is a natural
li nk. "Fascism i s theater," as Genet said. * As i s sadomas
ochi stic sexuali ty: to be i nvolved in sadomasochi sm is t o
take part i n a sexual theater, a staging of sexual ity. Regu
lars of sadomasochi stic sex are expert costumers and
choreographers as well as performers, i n a drama t hat i s all
the more exci ting because i t is forbi dden to ordi nary peo
ple. Sadomasochism i s to sex what war i s to ci vi l l i fe :
the magni fcent experience. ( Ri efenstahl put i t : "What i s
purely reali stic, sli ce of l i fe, what is average, quoti di an,
doesn' t i nterest me. " As the social contract seems tame i n
comparison with war, so fucki ng and sucki ng come to seem
* It was Genet, in his novel Funeral Ries, who provided one of
the frst texts that showed the erotic all ure fascism exercised on
someone who was not a fascist. Another description i s by Sartre,
an unlikely candidate for the!e feeli ngs himsel f, who may have heard
about them from Genet. In La Mort dans /'tme ( 1 949) , the third
novel in his four-part Les Chemins de la liberte, Sartre describes one
of his protagonists experiencing the entry of the German army i nto
Paris in 1 940 : "[ Daniel ] was not afraid, he yiel ded trustingly to
those thousands of eyes, he thought ' Our conquerors ! ' and he was
supremely happy. He looked them in the eye, he feasted on their
fair hair, their sunburned faces with eyes which l ooked like l akes
of ice, their slim bodies, their incredibly long and muscular hips.
He murmured : ' How handsome they are ! ' . . Somethi ng had fallen
from the sky : i t was te ancient l aw. The society of judges had
collapsed, the sentence had been obliterated ; those ghostly little
khaki soldiers, the defenders of the rights of man, had been routed .
. An unbearable, delicious sensation spread through hi s body ; he
could hardly see properly ; he repeated, gasping, ' As i f i t were
butter-they' re entering Paris as if i t were butter.' He would
like to have been a woman to throw them fowers."
I 10
3
U N D E R T H E S I G N OF S A T U R N
merely ni ce, and therefore unexci ti ng. The end to whi ch all
sexual experience tends, as Bataille i nsisted i n a l i fetime of
writing, i s deflement, blasphemy. To be "ni ce," as to be
ci vi lized, means bei ng al i enated from thi s savage experi
ence-which i s enti rely staged.
Sadomasochi sm, of course, does not j ust mean people
hurti ng their sexual partners, which has always occurred
and generally means men beati ng up women. The perenni al
drunken Russian peasant thrashi ng hi s wi fe i s j ust doi ng
something he feels l i ke doi ng ( because he i s unhappy, op
pressed, stupefed ; and because women are handy victims ) .
But the perenni al Engl i shman i n a brothel bei ng whipped i s
re-creat i ng an experi ence. He i s payi ng a whore to act out a
pi ece of theater wi th hi m, to reenact or reevoke the past
experiences of hi s schooldays or nursery whi ch now hold
for hi m a huge reserve of sexual energy. Today i t may be
the Nazi past that people i nvoke, in the theatrical izati on of
sexuali ty, because it i s those i mages ( rather than mem
ories ) from which they hope a reserve of sexual energy can
be tapped. What the French call "the Engl i sh vi ce" could,
however, be sai d to be somethi ng of an artful afrmati on of
i ndi vi dual i ty ; the playlet referred, after all, to the subj ect' s
own case hi story. The fad for Nazi regal i a i ndi cates some
thi ng quite di ferent : a response to an oppressive freedom
of choice in sex ( and in other matters ) , to an unbearable
degree of i ndi vi dual i ty ; the rehearsal of ensl avement rather
than i ts reenactment.
The rituals of domi nati on and enslavement being more
and more practiced, the art that i s more and more devoted
to renderi ng thei r themes, are perhaps only a logical exten
si on of an afuent society's tendency to t urn every part of
people's lives i nt o a taste, a choice ; to i nvi te them to regard
I 104
Fascinating Fascism
their very l ives as a ( li fe) style. In all soci eties up to now,
sex has mostly been an activity ( somethi ng to do, wi thout
thinking about i t ) . But once sex becomes a taste, it i s per
haps already on i ts way to becomi ng a self-conscious form
of theater, which i s what sadomasochism i s about : a form
of gratifcation that is both violent and i ndi rect, very
mental.
Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the
sexual experience : when sex becomes most purely sexual,
that is, severed from personhood, from relationshi ps, from
love. It should not be surprising that i t has become attached
to Nazi symbol i sm in recent years. Never before was the
relati on of masters and slaves so consciously aesthet icized.
Sade had to make up hi s theater of punishment and delight
from scratch, i mprovi sing the decor and costumes and
blasphemous ri tes. Now there i s a master scenario available
to everyone. The color i s black, the material is leather, the
seduction i s beauty, the j ustifcation i s honesty, the ai m i s
ecstasy, t he fantasy i s death.
( 1974)
I 10s
Under the Sign
of Saturn
In most of the portrai t photographs he is looking down,
hi s right hand to hi s face. The earl iest one I know shows
him i n 1927-he i s thi rty-fvewi th dark curly hair over a
hi gh forehead, mustache above a full lower l i p : youthful,
almost handsome. With hi s hed lowered, hi s jacketed
shoulders seem to start behi nd hi s ears ; his thumb leans
agai nst hi s j aw; the rest of the hand, ci garette between bent
index and thi rd fngers, covers his chin ; the downward look
through his glasses-the soft, daydreamer's gaze of the
myopic-seems to foat of to the lower left of the photo
graph.
I n a pi cture from the late 1930s, the curly hair has
hardly receded, but there i s no trace of youth or hand
someness ; the face has widened and the upper torso seems
not j ust hi gh but bl ocky, huge. The thicker mustache and
I 1
09
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
the pudgy folded hand with thumb tucked under cover hi s
mouth. The look is opaque, or j ust more i nward : he could
be thi nki ng-or l i stening. ( "He who l istens hard doesn't
see," Benj ami n wrote in his essay on Kafka. ) There are
books behi nd hi s head.
In a photograph taken in the summer of 1938, on the
l ast of several visits he made to Brecht in exile i n Denmark
after 1933, he is standi ng in front of Brecht's house, an old
man at forty-six, in white shi rt, tie, t rousers with watch
chai n : a slack, corpulent fgure, looking truculently at the
camera.
Another pi cture, from 1937, shows Benj ami n i n the
Bi bl iotheque Nationale in Paris. Two men, nei ther of
whose face can be seen, share a table some di stance behi nd
hi m. Benj ami n si t s i n t he right foreground, probably taking
notes for the book on Baudel ai re and ni neteenth-century
Paris he had been writing for a decade. He i s consul ti ng a
vol ume he holds open on the table with hi s left hand-hi s
eyes can't be seen-looki ng, as it were, i nto the lower right
edge of the photograph.
His close friend Gershom Scholem has described hi s frst
gl i mpse of Benj ami n i n Berl i n i n 1913, at a joi nt meeting
of a Zionist youth group and Jewish members of the Free
German Student Associ ati on, of which the twenty-one-year
old Benj ami n was a leader. He spoke "extempore wi thout so
much as a gl ance at his audience, staring wi th a fxed gaze
at a remote corner of t he cei li ng whi ch he harangued wi th
much i ntensity, in a style i nci dentally that was, as far as I
remember, ready for pri nt. "
He was what the French call un triste. In hi s youth he
seemed marked by "a profound sadness," Scholem wrote.
I no
Under the Sign of Satur
He thought of hi mself as a melanchol ic, di sdai ni ng modern
psychological labels and i nvoki ng the t radi t i onal astrologi
cal one : "I came i nto the world under the sign of Saturn
the star of the slowest revoluti on, the planet of detours and
delays . . . . " Hi s major projects, the book publ i shed in 1928
on the German baroque drama ( the Trauerspiel ; l i terally,
sorrow-play) and his never completed Paris, Capital of the
Nineteenth Century, cannot be ful l y understood unless one
grasps how much they rely on a theory of melancholy.
Benj ami n projected hi mself, his temperament, i nto all hi s
major subjects, and hi s temperament determi ned what he
chose t o wri te about. It was what he saw i n subj ects, such as
the se,enteenth-ent ury baroque plays ( whi ch dramati ze
di ferent facets of "Saturi ne acedia") and the wri ters
about whose work he wrote most bri l l i antl y-Baudel ai re,
Proust, Kafka, Karl Kraus. He even found the Saturni ne
element i n Goethe. For, despi te the pol emi c i n hi s great
( sti ll untranslated ) essay on Goethe' s Elect ive Afnities
agai nst i nterpreting a wri ter's work by hi s l i fe, he di d make
selecti ve use of the l i fe i n hi s deepest medi tati ons on texts :
i nformat i on that di sclosed the melancholi c, the sol i t ary.
( Thus, he describes Proust's "lonel i ness whi ch pulls the
world down into i ts vortex" ; expl ai ns how Kafka, li ke Klee,
was "essent i al l y solitary" ; ci tes Robert Walser' s "horror of
success i n l i fe.") One cannot use the l i fe t o i nterpret the
work. But one can use the work to i nterpret the l i fe.
Two short books of remi ni scences of hi s Berl i n child
hood and student years, wri tten in the early 1 930s and
unpublished i n hi s l i feti me, contai n Benj ami n's most ex
pli ci t sel f-portrait. To the nascent melanchol ic, i n school
and on walks wi th hi s mother, "soli tude appeared to me as
the onl y ft state of man." Benj ami n does not mean sol i tude
I 1 1 1
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
i n a room-he was often sick as a chi ld-but solitude i n
t he great metropol i s, t he busyness of t he i dl e stroller, free to
daydream, observe, ponder, crui se. The mi nd who was to
attach much of the ni neteenth century's sensi bi li ty to the
fgure of the faneur, personi fed by that superbly sel f-aware
melanchol ic Baudelai re, spun much of hi s own sensi bi li ty
out of hi s phantasmagorical, shrewd, subtle relati on to ci t
ies. The street, the passage, the arcade, the labyrinth are
recurrent themes i n hi s l i terary essays and, notably, i n the
projected book on ni neteenth-century Paris, as well as i n
hi s travel pi eces and remi niscences. ( Robert Wal ser, for
whom walki ng was the center of his recl usive l i fe and mar
velous Looks, is a writer to whom one particularly wishes
Benj ami n had devoted a l onger essay. ) The onl y book of a
di screetly autobiographical nature publ i shed in hi s li fet i me
was t i t l ed One- Way Street. Reminiscences of sel f are remi
ni scences of a place, and how he posi ti ons hi mself i n it,
navigates around i t .
"Not to fnd one' s way about i n a city i s of l i ttle i nterest,"
begi ns his st i l l untranslated A Berlin Childhood Around the
Turn of the Century. "But to lose one's way i n a city, as
one loses one' s way i n a forest, requi res practice . . . . I
learned this art l ate i n l i fe : i t ful flled the dreams whose
frst traces were the labyri nths on the blotters of my exer
ci se Looks." This passage also occurs i n A Berlin Chronicle,
after Benj ami n suggests how much practice it took to get
lost, given an origi nal sense of "i mpotence before the
ci ty. " Hi s goal is to Le a competent street-map reader who
knows how to stray. And to locate hi mself, wi th i magi nary
maps. El sewhere in Berlin Chronicle Benj ami n relates that
for years he had played with the idea of mapping hi s l i fe.
For thi s map, which he i magi ned as gray, he had devi sed a
I
1
1
2
Under the Sign of Saturn
colorful system of signs that "clearly marked i n the houses
of my fri ends and girl friends, the assembly halls of various
collectives, from the 'debating chambers' of the Youth
Movement to the gathering places of te Communist youth,
the hotel and brotel rooms that I knew for one ni ght, the
decisive benches in the Tiergarten, the ways to di ferent
schools and the graves that I saw flled, the si tes of presti
gious cafes whose long-forgotten names dai l y crossed our
l ips." Once, wai ti ng for someone i n the Cafe des Deux
Magots in Paris, he relates, he managed to draw a di agram
of his l i fe : it was like a labyrinth, i n which each i mportant
rel ationship fgures as "an entrance to the maze. "
The recurrent metaphors of maps and di agrams, mem
ories and dreams, labyrinths and arcades, vistas and pan
OIamas, evoke a certai n vi si on of ci t i es as wel l as a certai n
kind of l i fe. Pari s, Benj ami n writes, "taught me the art of
straying." The revelation of te city's true nature came not
i n Berli n but in Paris, where he stayed frequently through
out the Wei mar years, and l i ved as a refugee from 1933
until hi s suicide while tryi ng to escape from France in 1940
-more exactly, the Paris reimagined in the Surrealist nar
ratives ( Breton's Nadja, Aragon's Le Pay san de Paris ) .
With tese metaphors, he i s i ndicating a general problem
about ori entati on, and erecting a standard of di fculty and
complexity. ( A labyrinth i s a place where one gets lost. )
He is also suggesting a notion about the forbi dden, and how
to gai n access to i t : through an act of the mind that is the
same as a physical act. "Whole networks of streets were
opened up under te auspices of prosti tution," he writes i n
Berlin Chronicle, which begins by i nvoking an Ari adne, the
whore who leads this son of rich parents for the frst ti me
across "te threshold of class." The metaphor of the
I 11
3
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
labyri nth also suggests Benj ami n' s idea of obstacles thrown
up by hi s own temperament.
The i nfuence of Saturn makes people "apathetic, i ndeci
sive, slow," he wri tes i n The Origin of German Trauerspiel
( 1928) . Slowness is one characteristic of the melancholic
temperament. Blundering is another, from noticing too
many possi bi li ties, from not noticing one' s lack of practical
sense. And stubbornness, from the longing to be superior
on one' s own terms. Benj ami n recalls hi s stubbornness dur
ing chi ldhood walks wi th hi s mother, who would turn insig
ni fcant i tems of conduct into tests of his aptitude for prac
tical l i fe, thereby rei nforcing what was i nept ( "my i nabi li ty
even today to make a cup of cofee") and dreami ly recalci
trant i n his nature. "My habit of seeming slower, more
maladroi t , more stupid than I am, had its ori gin in such
walks, and has the great attendant danger of making me
t hi nk myself quicker, more dexterous, and shrewder than I
am. " And from this stubbornness comes, "above all, a gaze
that appears to see not a t hi rd of what i t takes i n. "
One- Way Street distills the experiences of the wri ter and
lover (i t i s dedicated to Asj a Lacis, who "cut i t through the
author" ) , * experiences that can be guessed at in the open
i ng words on the wri ter's s i tuation, which sound the theme
of revol uti onary moral i sm, and the fnal "To the Plane
* Asj a Lacis and Benj ami n met in Capri in the summer of 1924. She
was a Latvi an Communi st revol ut i onary and theater di rector, assistant
to Brecht and to Piscator, wi th whom Benjami n wrote "Naples" in
1925 and for whom he wrote "Program for a Proletarian Chi ldren's
Theater" i n 1928. It was Lacis who got Benjami n an invitation to
Moscow in the winter of 1 92627 and who introduced hi m to Brecht
i n 1929. Benjami n hoped to marry her when he and his wi fe were
fnally divorced i n 1930. But she returned to Riga and later spent
ten years i n a Soviet camp.
I 114
Under the Sign of Saturn
tari um, " a paean to the technological wooing of nature and
t o sexual ecstasy. Benj ami n coul d wri te about hi mself more
di rect ly when he started from memories, not contemporary
experiences ; when he writes about hi mself as a chi l d. At
that di stance, chi ldhood, he can survey hi s l i fe as a space
that can be mapped. The candor and the surge of pai nful
feelings in Berlin Childhood and Berlin Chronicle become
possible precisely because Benj ami n has adopted a com
pletely di gested, analytical way of relati ng t he past. I t
evokes events for the reactions t o the events, places for the
emotions one has deposited i n the places, other people for
the encounter wi th onesel f, feel i ngs and behavi or for i nt i
mati ons of future passions and fai l ures contai ned i n them.
Fantasies of monsters loose i n the large apartment whi l e hi s
parents entertai n thei r friends prefgure hi s revul si on
agai nst hi s class ; the dream of bei ng all owed to sleep as
long as he wants, instead of havi ng to get up early to go to
school, will be ful flled when-after hi s book on the
Trauerspiel failed to qual i fy hi m for a university lecture
shi p-he realizes that "his hopes of a posi t i on and a secure
li veli hood had always been in vai n" ; his way of walki ng
wi th hi s mot her, "with pedant i c care" keepi ng one step be
hi nd her, prefgures hi s "sabotage of real soci al exi stence."
Benj ami n regards everythi ng he chooses t o recall in hi s
past as propheti c of the future, because the work of mem
ory ( readi ng onesel f backward, he called i t ) col l apses t i me.
There i s no chronologi cal ordering of hi s remi ni scences, for
whi ch he di savows the name of autobiography, because
time i s i rrel evant . ( "Autobi ography has t o do with t i me,
wi th sequence and what makes up the conti nuous fow of
l i fe," he wri tes i n Berlin Chronicle. "Here, I am t al ki ng of a
space, of moments and di sconti nui ties. ") Benjami n, the
I ns
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
translator of Proust, wrote fragments of an opus that could
be called A [a recherche des espaces perdus. Memory, the
staging of the past, turs the fow of events into tableaux.
Benj ami n i s not tryi ng to recover hi s past but to understand
i t : to condense i t i nto i ts spatial forms, i ts premoni tory
structures.
For the baroque dramat ists, he wri tes i n The Origin of
German Trauerspiel, "chronological movement i s grasped
and analyzed i n a spati al i mage. " The book on the Trauer
spiel is not onl y Benj ami n' s frst account of what it means
to convert t i me i nto space ; it i s where he explai ns most
clearly what feeli ng underlies thi s move. Awash i n mel an
chol i c awareness of "t he di sconsolate chronicle of world
hi story," a process of i ncessant decay, the baroque drama
tists seek to escape from history and restore the "time
lessness" of paradi se. The seventeenth-century baroque
sensi bi l i ty had a "panoramati c" conception of hi story:
"history merges i nt o the sett ing. " In Berlin Childhood and
Berlin Chronicle, Benj ami n merges hi s l i fe i nto a setti ng.
The successor to the baroque stage set i s t he Surreali st ci ty :
the metaphysical landscape in whose dreaml i ke spaces
people have "a brief, shadowy exi stence," l i ke the ni neteen
year-old poet whose suicide, the great sorrow of Benjami n' s
student years, is condensed i n the memory of rooms t hat t he
dead friend i nhabi ted.
Benj amin's recurrent themes are, characteri sti cally,
means of spati ali zi ng the world : for example, hi s notion of
i deas and experiences as rui ns. To understand somethi ng i s
to understand i ts topography, to know how to chart i t . And
to know how to get lost.
For the character born under the si gn of Satur, t i me i s
the medi um of constrai nt, i nadequacy, repeti t ion, mere ful
fllment. I n ti me, one i s onl y what one i s: what one has
/ 1 16
Under the Sign of Satur
always been. In space, one can be another person. Ben
jamin's poor sense of di rection and i nabi li ty to read a street
map become hi s love of t ravel and hi s mastery of the art of
strayi ng. Time does not give one much leeway : it thrusts us
forward from behi nd, blows us through t he narrow funnel
of the present i nto the future. But space is broad, teeming
with possi bi li ti es, positions, i ntersections, passages, detours,
U-turns, dead ends, one-way streets. Too many possibi li ties,
indeed. Since te Saturnine temperament i s slow, prone to
indecisiveness, sometimes one has to cut one's way through
wi th a kni fe. Sometimes one ends by turning the knife
against oneself.
The mark of the Saturnine temperament i s the self
conscious and unforgiving relation to the sel f, which can
never be taken for granted. The self i s a text-it has to be
deciphered. ( Hence, this i s an apt temperament for i ntel
lectuals. ) The self i s a project, something to be built.
( Hence, thi s i s an apt temperament for arti sts and martyrs,
those who court "the purity and beauty of a fai l ure," as
Benjami n says of Kafka. ) And the process of building a self
and it works is always too slow. One i s always i n arrears to
oneself.
Things appear at a di stance, come forward slowly. In
Berlin Childhood, he speaks of hi s "propensity for seei ng
everything I care about approach me from far away"-the
way, often ill as a child, he i magi ned the hours approachi ng
hi s sickbed. "Thi s is perhaps the origin of what others call
pati ence i n me, but which i n t ruth does not resemble any
vi rtue." ( Of course, others di d experience i t as patience, as
a vi rtue. Scholem has descri bed hi m as "the most patient
human being I ever came to know.")
But something l ike patience is needed for the melan-
/ 1 1 7
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
::hol ic's labors of decipherment. Proust, as Benj ami n notes,
was exci ted by "the secret language of the salons" ; Ben
j ami n was drawn to more compact codes. He collected
emblem books, liked to make up anagrams, played wi th
pseudonyms. His taste for pseudonyms well antedates hi s
need as a German-Jewi sh refugee, who from 1933 to 1936
conti nued to publi sh reviews in German magazines under
the name of Detlev Holz, the name he used to sign the last
book to appear i n his l i fetime, Deutsche Menschen, pub
l i shed i n Swi tzerland i n 1936. In the amazi ng text written
in lbiza i n 1933, "Agesi laus Santander," Benj ami n speaks
of his fantasy of having a secret name ; the name of thi s
text-which turns on the fgure i n the Klee drawing he
owned, "Angel us Novus"-is, as Scholem has pointed out,
an anagram of Der Angelus Santanas. He was an "un
canny" graphologist, Scholem reports, though "later on he
tended t o conceal hi s gi ft. "
Di ssi mulati on, secretiveness appear a necessity to the
mel ancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations wi th
others. These feel i ngs of superiority, of i nadequacy, of
bafed feeli ng, of not being abl e to get what one wants, or
even name i t properly ( or consistently) to onesel f-these
can be, it i s felt they ought to be, masked by friendli ness, or
the most scrupulous mani pulati on. Usi ng a word that was
also appli ed to Kafka by those who knew hi m, Scholem
speaks of "the almost Chi nese courtesy" that characteri zed
Benj amin's rel ati ons wi th people. But one i s not surprised
to learn, of the man who could j ust i fy Proust's "i nvectives
agai nst friendship," that Benj ami n could also drop fri ends
brutally, as he did his comrades from the Youth Move
ment, when they no longer i nterested hi m. Nor is one sur
prised to learn that thi s fast i di ous, intransi gent, fercely
I 1 18
Under the Sign of Saturn
serious man could also fatter people he probabl y di d not
thi nk his equals, that he could let hi mself be "bai ted" ( hi s
own word) and condescended to by Brecht on hi s vi si ts t o
Denmark. Thi s pri nce of t he i ntellectual l i fe could also be
a courtier.
Benjami n analyzed both roles in The Origin of German
Trauerspiel by the theory of melancholy. One characteri s
tic of the Saturni ne temperament i s slowness : "The tyrant
falls on account of the sluggishness of his emotions. " "An
other trai t of the predominance of Saturn," says Benj ami n,
i s "faithlessness. " This is represented by t he character of
the courtier i n baroque drama, whose mi nd i s "fuctuation
i tself." The mani pulativeness of the courtier i s partly a
"lack of character" ; partly i t "refects an i nconsolable,
despondent surrender to an i mpenetrable conjunction of
baleful constel lations [that ] seem to have taken on a mas
si ve, almost thing- li ke cast." Only someone i denti fyi ng
wi th this sense of hi storical catastrophe, thi s degree of
despondency, would have explained why the courtier i s
not t o be despised. Hi s fai thlessness t o hi s fellow men, Ben
j ami n says, corresponds to the "deeper, more contempla
tive fai th" he keeps with materi al emblems.
What Benj ami n describes could be understood as si mpl e
pathology: t he tendency of the melanchol i c temperament
to project its inner torpor outward, as the i mmut abi li ty of
mi sfortune, which is experienced as "massive, almost thi ng
l ike." But hi s argument is more dari ng: he perceives that
the deep transactions between the melancholi c and the
world always take place with things ( rather than with peo
ple) ; and that these are genui ne transactions, which reveal
meaning. Preci sely because the melancholy character i s
haunted by death, it is melancholies who best know how to
/
1 19
U N D E R T il E S I G N O F S A T U R N
read the worl d. Or, rather, i t i s the world which yi elds
itself to the melanchol i c' s scrutiny, as it does to no one
else' s. The more l i feless thi ngs are, the more potent and
i ngeni ous can be the mind whi ch contemplates them.
I f this melancholy temperament i s faithless to people, i t
has good reason to be fai thful to things. Fidel i ty l ies i n
accumulati ng thi ngs-which appear, mostly, i n t he form of
fragments or ruins. ( "I t is common practice i n baroque
l i terature to pi le up fragments incessantly," Benj ami n
writes. ) Both t he baroque and Surreali sm, sensi bi l i t ies wi th
which Benj ami n felt a strong afni ty, see reali ty as thi ngs.
Benj ami n describes the baroque as a worl d of thi ngs ( em
blems, rui ns) and spatial i zed i deas ( "Allegories are, i n the
realm of thought, what ruins are i n the realm of thi ngs" ) .
The geni us of Surreal i sm was to general ize wi th ebullient
candor the baroque cult of rui ns ; to perceive that the
ni hi li st i c energies of the modern era make everythi ng a
rui n or fragment-and therefore collectible. A world
whose past has become ( by defni t ion } obsolete, and whose
present churns out i nstant anti ques, invi tes custodi ans, de
coders, and collectors.
As one kind of collector hi mself, Benj ami n remai ned
fai thful to t hi ngs-as thi ngs. Accordi ng to Scholem, bui ld
ing hi s l i brary, which included many frst edi ti ons and rare
books, was "hi s most enduring personal passi on. " Inert i n
t he face of thing-li ke di saster, t he melancholy temperament
is galvanized by the passions aroused by pri vi leged obj ects.
Benj ami n' s books were not only for use, professional tools ;
they were contemplati ve objects, st i mul i for reverie. Hi s
l i brary evokes "memories of t he ci t i es i n which I found so
many t hi ngs : Ri ga, Naples, Muni ch, Danzi g, Moscow,
Florence, Basel, Pari s . . . memories of the rooms where
I 120
Under the Sign of Saturn
these books had been housed . . . . " Bookhunting, l ike the
sexual hunt, adds t o the geography of pleasure-another
reason for strolling about in the world. In collecting, Ben
j ami n experienced what i n himself was clever, successful,
shrewd, unabashedly passionate. "Collectors are people
with a tactical insti nct" -like court iers.
Apart from frst edi t ions and baroque emblem books,
Benjami n speci alized in children's books and books writ
ten by the mad. "The great works which meant so much to
hi m," reports Scholem, "were placed in bizarre patterns
next to the most out-of-the-way wri t ings and oddi ties. "
The odd arrangement of the l i brary i s li ke the st rategy of
Benj ami n's work, i n which a Surrealist-inspi red eye for the
.reasures of meani ng i n the ephemeral, di scredited, and
neglected worked in t andem wi t h hi s loyalty to the tradi
t ional canon of learned taste.
He liked fndi ng t hi ngs where nobody was looki ng. He
drew from the obscure, di sdai ned German baroque drama
elements of t he modern ( that i s to say, hi s own) sensibil
i ty : the taste for allegory, Surrealist shock efects, di scon
t inuous utterance, the sense of hi storical catastrophe.
"These stones were the bread of my i magi nation," he
wrote about Marseilles-the most recalcitrant of ci t ies to
that i magination, even when helped by a dose of hashish.
Many expected references are absent i n Benjamin's work
-he di dn't like to read what everybody was readi ng. He
preferred the doctrine of the four temperaments as a psy
chological theory t o Freud. He preferred being a com
munist, or trying to be one, without reading Marx. This
man who read vi rtually everythi ng, and had spent ffteen
years sympathizing with revoluti onary communi sm, had
barely looked i nto Marx unt i l t he late 1930s. ( He was
I 121
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
readi ng The Eighteenth Brumaire on hi s vi si t to Brecht in
Denmark in the summer of 1938. )
Hi s sense of strategy was one of hi s poi nts of identi fca
tion wi th Kafka, a ki ndred would-be tacti ci an, who "took
precaut i ons agai nst the i nterpretati on of hi s wri t i ng. " The
whole poi nt of the Kafka stori es, Benj ami n argues, is that
they have no defni te, symbol i c meani ng. And he was fas
ci nated by the very di ferent, un-Jewi sh sense of ruse
practiced by Brecht , the ant i - Kafka of his i magi nat ion.
( Predi ct ably, Brecht di sli ked Benj ami n' s great essay on
Kafka i nt ensely. ) Brecht, wi t h the l i t t le wooden donkey
near his desk from whose neck hung the sign "1 , too, must
understand i t, " represented for Benj ami n, an admi rer of
esoteric rel i gi ous texts, t he possi bly more potent ruse of re
duci ng complexi ty, of maki ng everythi ng clear. Benj ami n' s
"masochi st i c" ( the word i s Si egfri ed Kracauer' s) rel at i on
to Brecht, whi ch most of hi s friends deplored, shows the
extent to whi ch he was fasci nated by this possi bi li ty.
Benj ami n' s propensi ty i s to go agai nst the usual i nt er
pretat i on. "All the deci si ve blows are struck left-handed, "
as he says i n One- Way Street. Preci sely because he saw t hat
"al l human knowledge takes t he form of i nterpretat i on,"
he understood the i mportance of being agai nst i nterpret a
t i on wherever i t i s obvi ous. Hi s most common strategy i s t o
drai n symboli sm out of some t hi ngs, l i ke the Kafka stories
or Goethe's Elect ive Afnities ( texts where everybody
agrees i t i s there) , and pour i t i nto others, where nobody
suspects i t s exi stence ( such as the German baroque plays,
which he reads as al l egories of hi stori cal pessi mi sm) .
"Each book i s a tact i c," he wrote. I n a letter to a fri end, he
clai med for hi s writi ngs, only partly faceti ously, forty-ni ne
l evels of meani ng. For moderns as much as for cabal i sts,
/ 122
Under the Sign of Saturn
nothi ng i s straightforward. Everythi ng i s-at the least
di fcult. "Ambi gui ty displaces authenti ci ty i n all thi ngs,"
he wrote i n One- Way Street. What is most forei gn to Ben
j ami n is anything l ike i ngenuousness : "the 'unclouded,'
'innocent' eye has become a li e. "
Much of the ori gi nali ty of Benj ami n's arguments owes
to his microscopic gaze ( as hi s friend and di sciple Theodor
Adorno called i t ) , combi ned with his i ndefatigable com
mand over theoretical perspectives. "It was the small
thi ngs that attracted hi m most," writes Scholem. He loved
old toys, postage stamps, pi cture postcards, and such pl ay
ful mi ni at urizations of real i ty as the wi nter world i nsi de a
glass globe that snows when it is shaken. Hi s own hand
wri ti ng was almost mi croscopi c, and hi s never real i zed
ambi ti on, Scholem reports, was to get a hundred l i nes on a
sheet of paper. ( The ambi t i on was real i zed by Robert
Walser, who used to transcribe the manuscripts of his sto
ries and novels as mi crograms, in a truly mi croscopic
scri pt. ) Scholem relates that when he vi si ted Benjami n in
Paris i n August 1927 ( the frst t i me the two friends had
seen each other si nce Scholem emi grated t o Palesti ne i n
1923 ) , Benjami n dragged hi m to an exhi bi t of Jewi sh ri t
ual objects at the Musee Cluny to show hi m "two grai ns of
wheat on which a ki ndred soul had i nscri bed the complete
Shema Israel. "*
* Scholem argues that Benj ami n's love for the miniature underlies
hi s taste for brief literary ut t erances, evident i n One- Way Street.
Perhaps ; but books of this sort were common i n the 1920s, and it was
i n a specifcally Surrealist montage style that these short independent
texts were presented. One- I/ ay Street was published by Ernst Rowohlt
i n Berlin, in booklet form with typography intended to evoke ad
, ertising shock efects ; the cover was a photographic montage of
aggressive phrases i n capital letters from newspaper announcements,
I 123
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
To mi ni aturize i s to make portable-the ideal form of
possessi ng things for a wanderer, or a refugee. Benj ami n,
of course, was bot h a wanderer, on t he move, and a collec
tor, weighed down by things ; that i s, passions. To mi ni
aturize i s t o conceal . Benj ami n was drawn t o the extremely
small as he was to whatever had to be deciphered : em
blems, anagrams, handwriting. To mi ni aturize means to
make useless. For what i s so grotesquely reduced is, in a
sense, l iberated from i ts meani ng-i ts ti ni ness being the
outstandi ng thing about it. It i s both a whole ( that is,
complete) and a fragment ( so ti ny, the wrong scale) . It
becomes an object of di si nterested contemplation or rev
eri e. Love of the small is a chi ld' s emotion, one colonized
by Surreal i sm. The Paris of the Surreal ists is "a li ttle
world," Benj ami n observes ; so i s the photograph, which
Surreal i st taste di scovered as an eni gmati c, even perverse,
rather than a merely intelligible or beautiful, object, and
about whi ch Benj ami n wrote wi t h such ori gi nal ity. The
melancholi c always feels threatened by the domi ni on of the
thing-l ike, but Surreali st taste nocks these terrors. Sur
reali sm' s great gi ft to sensi bi li ty was to make melancholy
cheerful .
"The only pleasure the melancholi c permits hi mself,
and i t is a powerful one, i s allegory," Benj ami n wrote i n
The Origin of German Trauerspiel. Indeed, he asserted,
allegory is he way of readi ng the world typical of melan
chol i es, and quoted Baudelai re : "Everythi ng for me be
comes Allegory. " The process which extracts meani ng
ads, ofcial and odd signs. The openi ng passage, in which Benjami n
hai ls "prompt language" and denounces "the pretentious, universal
gest ure of the book," does not make much sense unless one knows
what kind of book One- Way Street was designed to he.
I 124
Under the Sig of Satur
from the petrifed and i nsignifcant, allegory, is te char
acteristic method of the German baroque drama and of
Baudelai re, Benj ami n's major subjects ; and, transmuted
i nto phi losophical argument and the mi crological analysis
of t hi ngs, the method Benj ami n pract iced hi mself.
The melanchol ic sees the world i tself become a thi ng:
refuge, solace, enchantment. Shortly before hi s death, Ben
jamin was planning an essay about miniaturization as a
device of fantasy. I t seems to have been a continuation of
an old plan to write on Goethe's "The New Melusina" ( i n
Wilhelm Meister) , which is about a man who falls in love
with a woman who i s actually a t i ny person, temporarily
granted normal size, and unknowingly carries around wit
him a box contai ning the mi ni ature kingdom of which she
is the pri ncess. In Goethe' s tale, the world is reduced to a
collectible thing, an object, i n the most li teral sense.
Like the box in Goethe's tale, a book i s not only a frag
ment of the world but i tself a l i ttle world. The book is a
mi ni aturization of the world, which the reader i nhabits. In
Berlin Chronicle, Benj ami n evokes hi s chi ldhood rapture:
"You di d not read books through ; you dwelt, abided be
tween thei r l i nes. " To readi ng, the deli rium of the chi ld,
was eventually added writi ng, t he obsession of the adult.
The most prai seworthy way of acqui ri ng books i s by wri t
ing them, Benj ami n remarks in an essay called "Unpacki ng
ly Library." And t he best way to understand t hem i s also
to enter thei r space : one never really understands a book
unless one copies i t, he says i n One- Way Street, as one
never understands a landscape from an ai rplane but only
by walking t hrough it.
"The amount of meaning i s i n exact proportion to the
presence of death and the power of decay," Benj ami n
I 12
5
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
writes i n the Trauerspiel book. Thi s is what makes i t pos
sible to fnd meaning in one's own l i fe, in "the dead oc
currences of the past which are euphemistically known as
experience. " Only because the past i s dead i s one able to
read i t. Only because hi story is fetishized in physical ob
jects can one understand i t. Only because the book i s a
world can one enter it. The book for hi m was another
space in which to stroll . For the character born under the
sign of Saturn, the true i mpulse when one i s being looked
at is to cast down one's eyes, look in a corner. Better, one
can lower one's head to one's notebook. Or put one's head
behi nd the wall of a book.
It i s characteristic of the Saturni ne temperament to
blame its undertow of inwardness on the will. Convinced
that the will i s weak, the melanchol i c may make extravagant
eforts to develop it. If these eforts are successful, the re
suiting hypertrophy of wi ll usually takes the form of a com
pulsive devotion to work. Thus Baudelai re, who sufered
constantly from "acedi a, the malady of monks," ended
many letters and his Intimate Journals with the most i mpas
sioned pledges to work more, to work uni nterruptedly, to
do nothi ng but work. ( Despair over "every defeat of the
will"-Baudel ai re's phrase again-i s a characteristi c com
plai nt of modern artists and i ntellectuals, particularly of
those who are both. ) One is condemned to work ; other
wise, one might not do anything at all. Even the dreami
ness of t he melanchol i c temperament i s harnessed t o work,
and the melancholic may try to cultivate phantasmagorical
states, like dreams, or seek the access to concentrated states
of attention ofered by drugs. Surreali sm simply puts a pos
itive accent on what Baudelaire experienced so negatively:
it does not deplore the guttering of vol ition but rai ses it to
I 126
Under the Sign of Satur
an i deal, proposi ng that dream states may he rel ied on to
furni sh al l the material needed for work.
Benjami n, always working, always trying to work more,
speculated a good deal on the wri ter' s dai ly exi stence. One
Way Street has several sections which ofer reci pes for
work: the best condi ti ons, t i mi ng, utensils. Part of the i m
petus for t he large correspondence he conducted was to
chronicle, report on, confrm t he exi stence of work. Hi s
i nstincts as a collector served hi m wel l . Learni ng was a
form of collecting, as in the quotations and excerpts from
daily readi ng whi ch Benjamin accumulated in notebooks
that he carried everywhere and from whi ch he would read
aloud to fri ends. Thinking was also a form of collecting, at
least i n its prel i mi nary stages. He consci entiously l ogged
stray i deas ; developed mi ni -essays in letters t o friends ; re
wrote plans for future proj ects ; noted his dreams ( several
are recounted in One-Way Street ) ; kept numbered l i sts of
all the hooks he read. ( Scholem recall s seeing, on his sec
ond and last vi si t to Benj ami n i n Paris, i n 1938, a notebook
of current readi ng in which Mar's Eighteenth Brumaire
is l i sted as No. 1649. )
How does the melanchol i c become a hero of wi ll ?
Through the fact that work can become l i ke a drug, a
compulsi on. ( "Thi nki ng which is an emi nent narcoti c," he
wrote i n the essay on Surreal i sm. ) In fact, melanchol i es
make the best addicts, for the true addictive experience i s
always a sol i tary one. The hashish sessi ons of the late
1920s, supervi sed by a doctor fri end, were prudent stunts,
not acts of self-surrender ; material for the writer, not escape
from the exactions of the wi ll. ( Benj ami n considered the
book he wanted to write on hashish one of his most i mpor
tant projects. )
The need to be sol itary-along with bi tterness over
I 12
7
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
one's loneli ness-is characteristic of the melanchol i c. To
get work done, one must be solitary-or, at least, not
bound to any permanent relationshi p. Benj ami n's negative
feel ings about marri age are clear in the essay on Goethe's
Elective Afnities. His heroes-Ki erkegaard, Baudel ai re,
Proust, Kafka, Kraus-never married ; and Scholem re
ports that Benj ami n came to regard hi s own marri age ( he
was married i n 1917, estranged from hi s wife after 1921,
and di vorced i n 1930) "as fatal to hi mself. " The world of
nature, and of natural relationships, is perceived by the
melancholic temperament as less than seductive. The self
portrai t i n Berlin Childhood and Berlin Chronicle i s of a
wholly al i enated son ; as husband and father ( he had a son,
born i n 1918, who emi grated to England wi t h Benj ami n' s
exwi fe i n t he mi d- 1930s ) , he appears to have si mpl y not
known what t o do wi t h these relationshi ps. For t he mel
anchol i c, the natural, i n the form of fami l y ties, i ntroduces
the falsely subjective, the sentimental ; it is a drai n on the
will, on one's i ndependence ; on one's freedom to concen
trate on work. It also presents a challenge to one's human
i ty to which the melancholi c knows, i n advance, he wi ll be
i nadequate.
The style of work of the melanchol i c i s i mmersi on, total
concentration. Ei ther one i s i mmersed, or at tention foats
away. As a wri ter, Benj ami n was capable of extraordi nary
concentrat i on. He was able to research and write The Ori
gin of German Trauerspiel in two years ; some of i t, he
boasts in Berlin Chronicle, was wri tten in
i
ong eveni ngs at
a cafe, sitting close to a jazz band. But al though Benjami n
wrote prol i fcally-i n some peri ods t urni ng out work every
week for the German l i terary papers and magazines-i t
proved i mpossible for hi m to wri te a normal -sized book
I 1
28
Under the Sign of Satur
agai n. In a letter i n 1935, Benj ami n speaks of "the
Saturni ne pace" of writing Paris, Capital of the Nine
teenth Cenury, which he had begun i n 1927 and thought
could be fnished in two years. His characteri stic form re
mained the essay. The melancholic's intensi ty and ex
haustiveness of attention set natural l i mi ts to the length at
which Benj ami n could develop his ideas. His major essays
seem to end j ust i n time, before they self-destruct.
Hi s sentences do not seem to be generated i n the usual
way; they do not entai l. Each sentence i s written as i f i t
were t he frst, or t he last . ( "A writer must stop and restart
with every new sentence," he says in the Prologue to The
Origin of German Trauerspiel. ) Mental and hi storical
processes are rendered as conceptual tableaux ; i deas are
transcribed in extremis and the i ntellectual perspectives
are verti gi nous. His style of thi nki ng and writi ng, i ncor
rectly called aphoristic, might better be called freeze-frame
baroque. Thi s style was torture to execute. It was as i f each
sentence had to say everythi ng, before the i nward gaze of
total concentrati on di ssolved the subj ect before his eyes.
Benjami n was probably not exaggerating when he tol d
Adoro that each i dea in his book on Baudelai re and ni ne
teenth-century Paris "had to be wrested away from a realm
i n which madness l ies. "*
Somethi ng l i ke the dread of being stopped prematurely
lies behi nd these sentences as saturated with ideas as the
surface of a baroque painting i s j ammed wi th movement.
* In a letter from Adorno to Benjamin, wri tten from New York on
November 10, 1938. Benjamin and Adorno met i n 1923 ( Adorno was
twenty) , and i n 1935 Benjamin started to receive a small sti pend
from Max Horkheimer's Institut fir Sozial forschung, of which Adorno
was a member.
I 129
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
I n a letter to Adorno i n 1935, Benj ami n describes hi s
transports when he frst read Aragon's Le Pay$an de Pari$,
the book that i nspi red Pari$, Capital of the Nineteenth
Century: "I would never read more than two or three
pages i n bed of an eveni ng because the poundi ng of my
heart was so loud that I had to let the book fall from my
hands. What a warni ng! " Cardi ac fai l ure i s the metaphoric
l i mit of Benj ami n's exertions and passions. ( He sufered
from a heart ai l ment . ) And cardi ac sufciency is a meta
phor he ofers for the wri ter's achi evement. In the essay in
praise of Karl Kraus, Benj ami n wri tes :
I f style is the power to move freely i n the length
and breadth of l i ngui sti c thi nki ng without fal l i ng
i nt o banal i ty, i t i s attai ned chi efy by t he cardi ac
strength of great thoughts, which dri ves the blood
of language through the capi llari es of syntax i nto
the remotest l i mbs.
Thi nki ng, wri ti ng are ult i mately questions of stamina.
The melancholi c, who feels he lacks wi ll, may feel that h
needs all the destructi ve energies he can muster.
"Truth resi sts being projected i nto the realm of knowl
edge," Benj amin wri tes i n The Origin of German
Trauer$piel. His dense prose regi sters that resi stance, and
leaves no space for attacki ng those who di st ri bute l i es. Ben
jami n consi dered polemi c beneath the di gnity of a truly
phi l osophi cal style, and sought i nstead what he called "tht
fullness of concent rated posi ti vi ty"-the essay on Goethe'
Elective Afnitie$, wi th its devastat i ng refutat i on of tht
cri t i c and Goethe bi ographer Fri edri ch Gundolf, being th{
one excepti on to t hi s rule among his major wri t i ngs. Bu1
/ 130
Under the Sign of Saturn
his awareness of the ethical uti li ty of polemi c made hi m
appreci ate that one-man Viennese publi c i nstitution, Karl
Kraus, a writer whose faci lity, stridency, love of the a
phori stic, and i ndefatigable polemic energies make him
so unlike Benj ami n.
The essay on Kraus i s Benj ami n' s most passionate and
penerse defense of the l i fe of the mind. "The perfdi ous
reproach of being ' too i ntelligent' haunted hi m through
out hi s l i fe," Adorno has wri tten. Benjami n defended hi m
self against t hi s phi l i stine defamation by bravely rai si ng
the standard of the "i nhumani ty" of the i ntellect, when i t
i s properl y-that i s, ethically-mployed. "The l i fe of let
ters is exi stence under the aegis of mere mi nd as prosti tu
tion i s exi stence under the aegi s of mere sexuali ty," he
wrote. Thi s i s to celebrate both prosti tution ( as Kraus di d,
because mere sexuali ty was sexual i ty in a pure state) and
the li fe of letters, as Benj ami n di d, using the unli kely fg
ure of Kraus, because of "the genui ne and demoni c func
tion of mere mi nd, to be a di sturber of the peace." The
ethical task of the modern wri ter i s to be not a creator but
a destroyer-a destroyer of shallow inwardness, t he consol
ing notion of the uni versally human, di lettanti sh creativ
i ty, and empty phrases.
The wri ter as scourge and destroyer, portrayed in the
fgure of Kraus, he sketched wi th conci si on and even
greater boldness in the al legorical "The Destructive Char
acter," also written i n 1 931 . Scholem has wri tten that the
frst of several ti mes Benjami n contemplated suici de was in
the summer of 1931 . The second time was the following
summer, when he wrote "Agesi laus Santander." The Apol
lonian scourge whom Benj ami n calls the destructive char
acter
I 1
3
1
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
i s always bl i thely at work . . . has few needs . . . has
no interest i n being understood . . . i s young and
cheerful . . . and feels not that l i fe i s wort h l ivi ng
but t hat suicide i s not worth the trouble.
It i s a ki nd of conjuration, an attempt by Benj ami n to
draw the destructive elements of his Saturnine character
outward-so that they are not self-destructive.
Benj ami n i s not referring just to his own destructive
ness. He thought that there was a pecul i arly modern
temptation to sui ci de. In "The Paris of the Second Empi re
in Baudel ai re," he wrote :
The resistance whi ch modernity ofers to the
natural product i ve elan of a person i s out of propor
tion to his st rength. It i s understandable i f a person
grows ti red and takes refuge i n death. Moderni ty
must be under the sign of sui cide, an act whi ch
seals a heroi c will. . . . I t is the achievement of
modernity i n the realm of passions . . . .
Sui ci de i s understood as a response of the heroi c wi ll to the
defeat of the will. The only way to avoi d sui ci de, Benj ami n
suggests, i s to he beyond heroi sm, beyond eforts of the
will. The destructive character cannot feel trapped, he
cause "he sees ways everywhere." Cheerfully engaged in
reducing what exists to rubble, he "posi t i ons hi mself at the
crossroads. "
Benj ami n's portrai t of the destru ct ive character would
evoke a ki nd of Si egfried of the mi nd-a hi gh-spi ri ted,
chi ldli ke brute under the protection of the gods-had thi s
apocalyptic pessi mi sm not been quali fed by the i rony al -
I
132
Under the Sign of Saturn
ways withi n the range of the Saturnine temperament.
Irony is the posi t ive name which the melancholic gi ves to
hi s sol i tude, his asocial choices. In One- Way Street Ben
jami n hailed the i rony that allows i ndi vi duals to assert the
right to lead l ives i ndependent of the communi ty as "the
most European of all accompli shments," and observed that
i t had completely deserted Germany. Benjamin's taste for
the i ronic and te self-aware put hi m of most of recent
German culture : he detested Wagner, despi sed Heidegger,
and scorned the freneti c vanguard movements of Wei mar
Germany such as Expressionism.
Passionately, but also i ronically, Benjami n placed him
self at the crossroads. It was i mportant for hi m to keep hi s
many "positi ons" open : t he theol ogical, the Surrealist/
aesthetic, the communist. One position corrects another ;
he needed them all. Deci si ons, of course, tended to spoi l
the balance of these positions, vacillation kept everything
i n place. The reason he gave for his delay i n leaving
France, when he last saw Adorno i n early 198, was tat
"there are sti ll positions here to defend."
Benjami n thought the freel ance i ntellectual was a dying
species anyway, made no less obsolete by capitalist society
than by revolutionary communism; i ndeed, he felt that he
was li vi ng i n a t i me i n which everything valuable was te
last of i ts ki nd. He thought Surreal i sm was the last i ntel l i
gent moment of t he European i ntelligentsi a, an appropri
ately destructi ve, ni hi l istic kind of i ntel l igence. In his essay
on Kraus, Benj ami n asks rhetorically: Does Kraus stand on
the fronti er o
f
a new age? "Alas, by no means. For he
stands on the threshold of the Last Judgment. " Benjami n
is thinking of hi mself. At t he Last Judgment, t he Last In
tellectual-that Saturnine hero of modern culture, with
/ 1
3
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
hi s rui ns, hi s defant vi si ons, his reveri es, hi s unquenchable
gloom, his downcast eyes-wi ll expl ai n that he took many
"posi tions" and defended the l i fe of the mi nd to the end, as
righteously and i nhumanl y as he coul d.
( 1978)
I 134
Syberberg' Hitler
Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren
Sich weiss Rechenschaft zu geben
Bleib im Dunkeln, unerfahren,
.ag von Tag zu Tage Ieben.
-OETHE
[Anyone who cannot give an account
to oneself of the past three thousand
years remains in darkness, without
experience, Jiving from day to day.]
The Romantics thought of great art as a species of hero
ism, a breaking through or going beyond. Followi ng them,
adepts of the modern demanded of masterpieces that they
be, i n each case, an extreme case-terminal or prophetic,
or both. Walter Benj ami n was making a characteristic
modernist j udgment when he observed ( writing about
Proust ) : "All great works of l i terature found a genre or
di ssolve one. " However rich i n precursors, the truly great
work must seem to break with an old order and really is a
devastating i f salutary move. Such a work extends the
reach of art but also complicates and burdens the enter
prise of art with new, self-onscious standards. It both ex
cites and paralyzes the imagination.
Lately, te appetite for the truly great work has become
less robust. Thus Hans-Jirgen Syberberg' s Hitler, a Film
I 13
7
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
from Germany i s not onl y daunt i ng because of the ex
t remi t y of its achi evement, but di scomfti ng, l ike an un
wanted baby i n the era of zero popul at i on growth. The
modernism that reckoned achi evement by the Romant i cs'
grandi ose ai ms for art ( as wi sdom/ as sal vati on/ as cultural
subversion or revol ut i on) has been overtaken by an i m
pudent versi on of i tsel f whi ch has enabled modernist t astes
to be di fused on an undreamed-of scale. Stri pped of i t s
heroi c stature, of i t s cl ai ms as an adversary sensi bi l i ty,
moderni sm has proved acutel y compati ble wi t h the ethos
of an advanced consumer society. Art i s now the name of a
huge vari et y of sati sfact i ons-of the unl i mi ted prol i fera
ti on, and devaluat i on, of satisfaction i tself. Where so many
bl andi shments fouri sh, bri ngi ng of a masterpiece seems a
rerograde feat, a naive form of accomplishment. Always
i mplausi ble ( as i mpl ausi ble as j usti fed megalomani a ) , the
Great Work i s now truly odd. It proposes sati sfacti ons that
are i mmense, solemn, and restri cti ng. It i nsists that art
must be true, not just i nterest i ng ; a necessi t y, not just an
experiment. It dwarfs other work, challenges the faci le
eclect i ci sm of contemporary t ast e. I t throws the admi rer
i nto a state of cri si.s.
Syberberg assumes i mportance both for his art ( the art
of the twenti eth century : flm) and for hi s subject ( the
subject of the twentieth century : Hi tler) . The assump
ti ons are fami l i ar, crude, plausi ble. But they hardly pre
pare us for the scale and vi rtuosi ty wi t h whi ch he conj ures
up the ul t i mate subjects : hel l , paradi se lost, the apoca
lypse, the l ast days of manki nd. Leaveni ng romanti c grandi
osi ty wi th modernist i roni es, Syberberg ofers a spectacl e
about spectacle : evoki ng "the bi g show" called hi story i n a
I 138
S yberberg' s Hitler
variety of dramat i c modes-fairy t ale, ci rcus, morali ty
play, allegorical pageant , magi c ceremony, philosophical
di alogue, Totentanz-with an i magi nary cast of tens of
mi l l i ons and, as protagoni st , the Devi l hi mself.
The Romant i c not i ons of the maxi mal so congeni al to
Syberberg such as the boundless talent, the ult i mat e sub
ject, and the most i nclusive art-these not i ons confer an
excruci at i ng sense of possi bi l i ty. Syberberg' s confdence
that hi s art i s adequate to his great subject deri ves from hi s
i dea of ci nema as a way of knowi ng t hat i nci tes speculat i on
to take a self-refexive t urn. Hitler i s depi ct ed through
exami ni ng our relat i on to Hi tler ( the theme is "our Hi t
ler" and "Hi tler-i n-us" ) , as the rightly unassi mi lable
horrors of the Nazi era are represented i n Syberberg' s flm
as i mages or si gns. ( I ts t i t l e isn' t Hitler but, precisely, Hit
ler, a Film . . . )
To si mulat e at rocit y convi nci ngly is to ri sk maki ng the
audience passive, rei nforci ng wi tless stereotypes, confrm
i ng distance and creat i ng fasci nat i on. Convi nced t hat there
i s a morally ( and aesthet ically) correct way for a flm
maker t o confront Nazism, Syberberg can make no use of
any of t he styl i t i c convent i ons of fction that pass for re
ali sm. Nei ther can he rely on documents t o show how i t
"really" was. Like i ts si mulation as fct ion, the di splay of
atrocity i n the form of photographic evidence ri sks bei ng
tacitly pornographi c. Further, the trut hs i t conveys, un
medi ated, about t he past are sli ght . Fi l m cl i ps of the Nazi
period cannot speak for themselves ; they requi re a voi ce-
explai ni ng, comment i ng, i nterpret i ng. But t he rel at i on of
the voice-over to a flm document, like that of t he capt i on
to a st i ll photograph, i s merely adhesi ve. In contrast to the
pseudo-bj ect i ve st yle of narrati on i n most documentaries,
/ 1
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U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
the two ruminating voi ces which sufuse Syherherg' s flm
constantly express pai n, grief, di smay.
Rather than devi se a spectacle in the past tense, ei ther by
attempting to si mulate "unrepealable reali ty" ( Syber
herg's phrase) or by showing it i n photographic document,
he proposes a spectacle in the present tense-"adventures
in the head. " Of course, for such a devoutly anti -reali st
aestheti cian hi storical reality i s, by defni ti on, unrepeat
able. Reali ty can only he grasped i ndi rectly-seen refected
i n a mi rror, staged in the theater of the mi nd. Syberherg' s
synoptic drama i s radically subjective, without being solip
sistic. I t i s a ghostly flm-haunted by his great cinematic
models ( MeWs, Ei senstei n) and anti -models ( Ri efenstahl,
Hollywood ) ; by German Romanticism; and, above all, by
the musi c of Wagner and the case of Wagner. A post
humous flm, i n the era of ci nema's unprecedented me
di ocri ty-full of cinephile myt hs, about cinema as the
ideal space of the i maginat ion and ci nema history as an
exemplary hi story of the twentieth century ( the mar
tyrdom of Ei senstein by Stali n, the excommunication of
von Stroheim by Hollywood) ; and of ci nephile hyper
holes : he designates Ri efenstahl's Triumph of the Will as
Hi tler's "only l asting monument, apart from the newsreels
of his war." One of the flm's conceits is that Hitler, who
never vi si ted the front and watched the war every ni ght
through newsreels, was a kind of moviemaker. Germany, a
Fi lm by Hitler.
Syherberg has cast his flm as a phantasmagori a : the
meditati ve-sensuous form favored by Wagner which di s
tends ti me and results i n works that the unpassionate fnd
overlong. Its length i s sui tably exhaustive-seven hours ;
I
140
Syberberis Hitler
and, l i ke the Ring, it is a tetralogy. The t i tles of i ts four
parts are : Hitler, a Film from Germany; A German
Dream; The End of a Winter's Tale; We, Children of
Hell. A flm, a dream, a tale. Hell .
I n contrast to the lavi sh de Mi lle-like decors that Wag
ner projected for hi s tetralogy, Syberberg's flm is a cheap
fantasy. The large sound studio i n Muni ch where the flm
was shot i n 1977 ( i n twenty days-after four years of prep
aration ) is furni shed as a surreal landscape. The wi de shot
of the set at the begi nni ng of the flm di splays many of the
modest props that will recur in di ferent sequences, and
suggests t he mult i ple uses Syberberg wi ll make of thi s
space : as a space of rumination ( the wicker chai r, t he plai n
table, t he candelabra ) ; a space of theatrical assertion ( the
canvas di rector's chai r, the giant black megaphone, the up
turned masks ) ; a space of emblems ( models of the poly
hedron i n Durer's Melencolia I, and of the ash tree from
the set of the frst production of Die W alkire) ; a space of
moral j udgment (a large globe, a l i fe-si ze rubber sex-doll ) ;
a space of melancholy ( the dead leaves strewn on the foor) .
Thi s allegory-li ttered wasteland ( as l i mbo, as the moon)
i s designed to hold multi tudes, in thei r contemporary, tat
is posthumous, form. It is really the land of the dead, a
ci nematic Valhal l a. Si nce all the characters of the Nazi
catastrophe-melodrama are dead, what we see are thei r
ghosts-as puppets, as spi ri ts, as caricatures of themselves.
Cari valesque skits al ternate wi th arias and sol i loqui es,
narrat i ves, reveries. The two rumi nati ng presences ( Andre
Heller, Harry Baer) keep up, on screen and of, an endless
intellectual melody-lists, judgments, questions, hi stori
cal anecdotes, as well as multiple characteri zations of the
flm and the consciousness behi nd i t .
I 1
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1
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
The muse of Syberberg's hi storic epic i s cinema i tself
( "te world of our i nner proj ections") , represented on the
wasteland set by Black Mari a, the tarpaper shack bui lt for
Thomas Edi son in 1893 as the frst flm studi o. By i nvoki ng
ci nema as Black Mari a, that is, recalli ng the artisanal
simplicity of ts ori gi ns, Syberberg also points to hi s own
achi evement. Using a small crew, wi th ti me for only one
take of many long and complex shots, thi s techni cally i n
geni ous i nventor of fantasy managed to flm vi rtually all of
what he i ntended as he had envi saged i t ; and all of it i s on
the screen. ( Perhaps only a spectacle as underbudgeted as
thi s one-i t cost $500,00:an remai n wholly responsive
to the i ntentions and i mprovisations of a si ngle creator. )
Out of t hi s ascetic way of flmmaki ng, with i ts codes of
del i berate naivete, Syberberg has made a flm that is both
stri pped-down and lush, di scursive and spectacular.
Syberberg provi des spectacl e out of hi s modest means by
replicating and reusing the key elements as many t i mes as
possible. Havi ng each actor play several roles, the com en
tion i nspired by Brecht, i s an aspect of this aesthet ics of
multiple use. Many thi ngs appear at least twice i n the flm,
once full-sized and once mi ni aturi zed-for example, a
thi ng and i ts photograph ; and all the Nazi notables appear
played by actors and as puppets. Edi son's Black Mari a,
the pri mal flm studi o, is presented i n four ways : as a large
structure, i ndeed the pri nci pal item of the master set, from
which actors appear and i nto which they di sappear ; as toy
structures in two sizes, the ti ni er on a snowy landscape i n
si de a glass globe, whi ch can be held i n an actor's hand,
shaken, rumi nated upon ; and i n a photographi c blowup of
the globe.
Syberberg uses multiple approaches, multiple voices.
I 1
4
2
Syberberg' s Hiler
The li bretto i s a medley of i magi nary di scourse and the
i psi ssi ma verba of Hi tler, Hi mmler, Goebbels, Speer, and
such backstage characters as Hi mmler's Finnish masseur
Feli x Kersten and Hi tler' s valet Karl -Wilhelm Krause.
The complex sound track often provides two texts at once.
Interspersed between and i ntermi ttently overlai d on the
speeches of actors-a kind of audi tory back-projection
are hi storical sound documents, such as snatches from
speeches by Hi tler and Goehbel s, from wartime news
broadcasts by German radi o and te BBC. The stream of
words also includes cul tural references i n the form of
quotations ( often left unattributed) , such as Ei nstein on
war and peace, a passage from Mari netti's Futurist Mani
festo-and the whole verbal polyphony swelled by excerpts
from the pantheon of German music, mostly Wagner. A
passage from, say, Tristan und Isolde or the chorus of
Beethoven's Ninth i s used as another ki nd of hi storical
quotation which complements or comments on what i s
bei ng sai d, si multaneously, by an actor.
On the screen, a varying stock of emblemati c props and
i mages supplies more associ ations. Don engravings for
the Inferno and the Bible, Graf' s portrai t of Frederick
the Great, the signature still from Melis's A Trip to the
Moon, Runge's Morning, Caspar David Friedrich's The
Frozen Ocean are among the visual references that appear
( by a canny technique of slide projection) behi nd the ac
t ors. The i mage i s constructed on the same assemblage prin
ciple as the sound track except that, while we hear many
hi storical sound documents, Syberberg makes sparing use
of visual documents from the Nazi era.
MeWs i n the foreground, Lumi ere very much i n the
background. Syberberg's meta-spectacle vi rtually swallows
I
1
4
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
up the photographi c document : when we see the Nazi re
al i t y on fl m, it i s as fl m. Behi nd a seated, rumi nati ng actor
( Heller ) appears some private 8 and 16 mm. footage of
Hi tler-i ndi st i nct, rat her unreal . Such bi t s of flm are not
used to show how anyt hi ng "real ly" was : fl m clips, slides
of pai nt i ngs, movi e stills all have the same status. Actors
play in front of photographi c blowups that show legendary
places wi t hout people : these empty, almost abstract, oddly
scaled views of Ludwig I I' s Venus Grotto at Li nderhof,
Wagner's vi lla i n Bayreuth, the conference room i n the
Reich Chancellery in Berl i n, the terrace of Hi tler's vi l l a
i n Berchtesgaden, the ovens at Auschwi tz are a more sty
li zed ki nd of allusi on. They are also a ghostly decor rather
than a "real " set, wi th which Syberberg can play i llusi oni st
t ri cks remi ni scent of Mel i es : havi ng the actor appear to be
wal ki ng wi t hi n a deep-focus photograph, endi ng a scene
wit h the actor turni ng and vani shi ng i nto a backdrop that
had appeared to be seamless.
Nazism i s known by allusi on, through fantasy, i n quo
tati on. Quotati ons are both l i teral, l ike an Auschwi tz's
survivor's testimony, and, more commonly, fanci ful cross
references-as when the hysterical SS man recites the chi ld
murderer's plea from Lang' s M; or Hi tler, i n a ti rade of
sel f-exculpati on, ri si ng i n a cobwebby toga from t he grave
of Ri chard Wagner, quotes Shylock's "I f you pri ck us, do
we not bleed?" Li ke t he photographi c i mages and the
props, the actors are also stand-ins for the real . Most speech
is monologue or monodrama, whether by a si ngle actor
talki ng di rect l y to the camera, that i s, t he audi ence, or by
actors half t alking to themselves ( as i n the scene of
Himml er and hi s masseur) or decl ai mi ng i n a row ( the
rotting puppets in hell ) . As i n a Surreali st tableau, the
I 1
44
Syberberg's Hitler
presence of the i nani mate makes i ts i roni c comment on
t he supposedly alive. Actors t alk to, or on behal f of, pup
pets of Hi tler, Goebbels, Goering, Ri mmler, Eva Braun,
Speer. Several scenes set actors among department-store
mannequi ns, or among the li fe-size photographic cutouts
of legendary ghouls from the German silent ci nema
( Mabuse, Alraune, Caligari, Nosferatu) and of the arche
typal Germans photographed by August Sander. Hi tler is a
recurrent mul t i form presence, depicted i n memory,
through burlesque, in hi storical t ravesty.
Quotations in the flm; the flm as a mosai c of styl i sti c
quotations. To present Hi tler in multi ple gui ses and from
many perspectives, Syberberg draws on disparate styl i st i c
sources : Wagner, Melies, Brechti an distancing techni ques,
homosexual baroque, puppet theater. Thi s eclecticism i s
the mark of an extremely self-onsci ous, erudi te, avi d art
ist, whose choice of styli sti c materi als ( blendi ng hi gh art
and ki tsch) is not as arbi trary as it mi ght seem. Syberberg's
flm is, precisely, Surreali st in i ts eclecticism. Surrealism is
a late variant of Romanti c taste, a Romanti ci sm that as
sumes a broken or posthumous worl d. It is Romant i c taste
with a leani qg toward pasti che. Surreali st works proceed
by conventions of di smemberment and reaggregati on, i n
the spi ri t of pathos and i rony; these conventions include
the i nventory ( or open-ended l i st ) ; the techni que of dup
lication by mi niaturizati on ; the hyper-development of the
art of quotation. By means of these conventions, particu
larly the ci rculation and recycl i ng of vi sual and aural
quotations, Syberberg's flm si multaneously i nhabits many
places, many ti mes-hi s principal device of dramat ic and
vi sual i rony.
Hi s broadest i rony i s to mock all thi s complexity by pre
I
145
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
senti ng hi s medi tat i on on Hi tler as somethi ng si mple : a
tale told i n the presence of a chi l d. Hi s ni ne-year-old
daughter i s the mute somnambuli st i c wi tness, crowned by
loops of celluloi d, who wanders t hrough the steam- flled
landscape of hell ; who begi ns and closes each of the flm' s
four parts. Al ice i n Wonderl and, the spi ri t of ci nema-she
is surely meant as these. And Syberberg also evokes the
symbol i sm of melancholy, ident i fying the child wi th
Durer's Melencolia : at the flm's end she i s posed inside a
pl ump tear, gazing i n front of the stars. Whatever the at
tri buti ons, the i mage owes much t o Surreal i st taste. The
condi ti on of the somnambul i st is a convent i on of Surrea1 ist
narrative. The person who moves through a Surreali st
landscape is typically i n a dreamy, becalmed state. The en
terpri se that takes one through a Surreali st l andscape i s
always qui xoti c-hopeless, obsessi onal ; and, fnally, sel f
regardi ng. An emblemati c i mage in the flm, one much
admi red by the Surreal i sts, is Ledoux's "Eye Refecting the
Interi or of the Theater of Besanon" ( 1804) . Ledoux's eye
frst appears on the set as a two-di mensional pi ct ure. Later
it i s a three-di mensional const ruction, an eye-as-theater i n
whi ch one of the narrators ( Baer) sees, projected at the
rear, hi msel f-i n an earlier flm by Syberberg, Ludwig,
Requiem for a Virgin King, in whi ch he played the lead.
As Ledoux locates hi s theater in the eye, Syberberg locates
hi s ci nema i nsi de the mi nd, where all associ at i ons are pos
si ble.
Syberberg' s repertory of theatri cal devi ces and i mages
seems inconcei vabl e wi thout the freedoms and ironies i ntro
duced by Surreal i st taste, and refects many of its dist i nc
ti ve afect i ons. Grand Guignol , puppet theater, the ci rcus.
and t he fl ms of lelies were Surreal i st passions. The
taste for na"ve theater and pri mi t i ve ci nema as well as for
/ 146
Syberberg' s Hitler
objects which mini aturize reality, for the art of Northern
Romanti ci sm ( Direr, Blake, Friedrich, Runge) , for archi
tecture as utopi an fantasy ( Ledoux) and as private de
l i ri um ( Ludwi g 1 1 ) -the sensi bi l i ty that encompasses all
these i s Surreali sm. But there i s an aspect of Sureal i st t aste
that is ali en to Syberberg-the surrender to chance, to the
arbi trary; the fasci nation wi th the opaque, the meaning
less, the mute. There i s nothing arbi trary or aleatoric
about hi s decor, no throwaway i mages or objects without
emotional weight ; i ndeed, certai n reli cs and images i n
Syberberg's fl m have the force of personal tali smans.
Everythi ng means, everything speaks. One mute presence,
Syberberg's chi l d, only sets of the flm's unrelenting ver
bosity and i ntensity. Everythi ng i n the flm is presented as
havi ng been al ready consumed by a mi nd.
When hi story takes place i nsi de t he head, publ i c and
private mythologies gai n equal status. Unlike the other
mega-flms with whose epic ambi t i ons it mi ght be com
pared-Intolerance, Napoleon, Ivan the Terrible I & II,
2001-Syberberg's flm is open to personal references as
well as publi c ones. Publi c myths of evi l are framed by the
private mythologies of i nnocence, developed i n two earlier
flms, Ludwig ( 1 972, two hours twenty mi nutes ) and Karl
May-In Search of Paradise Lost ( 1974, three hours ) ,
whi ch Syberberg treats a s the frst two parts o f a tri logy on
Germany that concludes wi th Hitler, a Film from Ger
many. Wagner's patron and vi cti m, Ludwi g I I , i s a recur
rent fgure of i nnocence. One of Syberberg' s talismanic
i mages-it ends Ludwig and i s reused i n Hitler, a Film . .
-shows Ludwi g as a bearded, weeping chi ld. The i mage
that opens the Hi tler flm is of Ludwig's Winter Garden i n
1Iuni ch-a paradi si acal landscape of Alps, pal m trees,
lake, tent, gondola, which fgures throughout Ludwig.
/ 147
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
Each of the three flms stands on i ts own, but so far as
they are regarded as compri si ng a trilogy, i t i s worth noting
that Luwig feeds more i mages to Hitler, a Film from Ger
many than does the second flm, Karl May. Parts of Karl
May, with its "real" sets and actors, come closer to l inear,
mi metic dramaturgy than anythi ng i n Ludwig or i n the in
comparably more ambiti ous and profound flm on Hi tler.
But, l ike all arti sts wi th a taste for pastiche, Syberberg has
only a l i mited feel i ng for what i s understood as real i sm.
The pasticheur's style i s essentially a style of fantasy.
Syberberg has devised a particularly German variety of
spectacle: the morali zed horror show. In the excruciating
banali ties of the valet's narrative, i n a burlesque of Chap
l in's i mpersonation of Hi tler in The Great Dictator, in a
Grand Gui gnol ski t about Hi tler's sperm-the Devil is a
fami l i ar spirit. Hi tler is even allowed to share in the pathos
of mi niaturization : the Hi tler-puppet ( dressed, undressed,
reasoned wi th ) held on a ventriloqui st's knees, the cloth
dog wi th the Hitler face, carried mournfully by the chi ld.
The spectacle assumes fami l i ari ty wi th the i nci dents and
personages of German hi story and culture, the Nazi re
gi me, World War I I ; alludes freely to events i n the three
decades si nce Hitler's death. While the present is reduced
to being the legacy of the past, the past i s embelli shed wi th
knowledge of i t s future. In Ludwig, thi s open-ended hi s
torical i t i nerary seems l i ke cool ( Brechti an ? ) i rony-as
when Ludwig I ci tes Brecht . In Hitler, a Film from Ger
many the irony of anachronism is weightier. Syberberg
denies t hat the events of Nazism were part of the ordinary
gai t and demeanor of hi story. ( "They sai d it was the end of
t he world," muses one of t he puppet- masters. "And it
I 148
Syberbergs Hitler
was.") Hi s flm takes Nazism at its {Hi tler's, Goebbels' )
word, as a venture in apocalypse, as a cosmology of a New
Ice Age, in other words as an eschatology of evil ; and i tsel f
takes place at a kind of end-f-ti me, a Messianic ti me { to
use Benj ami n' s term) which i mposes the duty of trying to
do j ustice to the dead. Hence, the long sol
e
mn roll call of
the accompli ces of Nazism ( "Those whom we must not
forget") , then of some exemplary victims-ne of te sev
eral points at which the flm seems to end.
Syberberg has cast his flm i n the frst per
s
on : as the
action of one artist assumi ng the German duty to confront
fully the horror of Nazism. Like many German i ntel
lectuals of the past, Syberberg treats hi s Germanness as a
moral vocation and regards Germany as the cockpi t of
European conficts. ( "The twentieth century . . . a flm
from Germany," says one of the ruminators . ) Syberberg
was born i n 1935 i n what was to become East Germany and
left in 1953 for West Germany, where he has lived ever
since ; but the true provenance of his flm i s the extrater
ritorial Germany of the spirit whose frst great ci ti zen was
that self-styled romantique de/roque Heine, and whose l ast
great citizen was Thomas Mann. "To be the spiritual
battlefeld of European antagoni sms-that's what i t means
to be German," Mann declared i n his Refections of an
Unpolitical Man, written during World War I, senti ments
that had not changed when he wrote Doctor Faustus as an
old man in exile i n the late 1940s. Syberberg's vi ew of
Nazism as the explosion of the German demonic recalls
:ann, as does hi s unfashionable insistence on Germany's
collective guilt ( the theme of "Hi tler-i n-us" ) . The narra
tors' repeated challenge, "Who would Hi tler be without
us?," also echoes 1ann, who wrote an essay i n 1939 called
I 149
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
"Brother Hitler" i n which he argues that "the whole thi ng
i s a di storted phase of Wagnerism." Like Mann, Syberberg
regards Nazism as the grotesque ful fllment-and betrayal
-of German Romanti ci sm. It may seem odd that Syber
berg, who was a chi l d during the Nazi era, shares so many
themes wi th someone so ancien-regi me. But there i s much
that is old- fashioned about Syberberg' s sensibi l ity ( one
consequence, perhaps, of bei ng educated in a Communist
country ) -i ncl udi ng the vi vi dness wi th which he i dentifes
with t hat Germany whose greatest ci tizens have gone i nto
exile.
Al though it draws on i nnumerable versi ons and i mpres
sions of Hi tler, the flm ofers very few ideas about Hi tler.
For the most part they are the theses formulated i n the
rui ns : the thesi s that "Hi tler's work" was "the eruption of
the satani c pri nci ple in world hi story" ( Mei necke's The
German Catastrophe, wri tten two years before Doctor
Faustus ) ; the thesis, expressed by Horkhei mer in The
Eclipse of Reason, that Auschwi tz was the logical culmi na
ti on of Western progress. Starting i n t he 1950s, when t he
rui ns of Europe were rebui lt, more complex theses-pol it
ical, soci ological, economi c-prevai led about Nazi sm.
( Horkhei mer event ually repudi ated hi s argument of
1946. ) In revi vi ng those unmodulated views of thi rty years
ago, thei r i ndi gnati on, thei r pessi mi sm, Syberberg' s flm
makes a strong case for thei r moral appropriateness.
Syberberg proposes that we real ly l isten to what Hi tler
sai d-to the ki nd of cul t ural revol ut i on Nazism was, or
clai med to be ; to t he spi ri t ual catast rophe i t was, and st i l l
i s. By Hi tler Syberberg does not mean only the real histori
cal monster, responsi ble for t he deaths of tens of mi ll ions.
He evokes a ki nd of Hi tl er-substance that out l i ves Hi tler, a
I
1so
Syberberjs Hitler
phantom presence i n modern culture, a protean pri nci ple
of evil that saturates the present and remakes the past.
Syberberg's flm alludes to fami l i ar genealogies, real and
symbol i c : from Romanticism to Hit ler, from Wagner to
Hitler, from Cal i gari to Hi tler, from ki tsch to Hitler.
And, i n the hyperbole of woe, he insi sts on some new fl i a
t i ons : from Hi tler to pornography, from Hi tler to t he soul
less consumer soci ety of t he Federal Republi c, from Hi tler
to the rude coercions of the DDR. I n usi ng Hi tler thus,
there is some truth, some unconvi nci ng attributions. I t i s
t rue that Hi tler has contami nated Romanti ci sm and Wag
ner, tat much of ni neteenth-entury German culture is,
retroactively, haunted by Hi tler. ( As, say, ni neteenth
century Russian culture i s not haunted by Stal i n. ) But it is
not true that Hi tler engendered te modern, post-Hitler
i an plastic consumer society. That was al ready well on the
way when te Nazis took power. I ndeed, i t coul d be argued
--ontra Syberberg-that Hi tler was i n the long run an
i rrelevance, an attempt to hal t the hi storical clock ; and
t hat communi sm i s what ulti mately mattered i n Europe,
not fasci sm. Syberberg i s more plausible when he asserts
that the DDR resembles the Nazi state, a vi ew for whi ch he
has been denounced by the l eft in West Germany ; l i ke
most i ntel lectuals who grew up under a communi st regi me
and moved to a bourgeoi s-democratic one, he i s si ngularl y
free of left -wi ng pieties. It could al so be argued that Syber
berg has undul y si mpli fed hi s moral ist's tsk by the extent
to which, li ke Mann, he identi fes the i nner hi story of
Germany with the hi story of Romanti cism.
Syberberg's noti on of hi story as catastrophe recalls the
long German tradi t i on of regardi ng hi story eschatologi
cally, as t he histor of t he spirit. Comparable vi ews today
I 151
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
are more l i kely to be entertai ned i n Eastern Europe than
i n Germany. Syberberg has the moral i ntransigence, the
l ack of respect for l i teral hi story, the heartbreaki ng seri
ousness of the great ill iberal art ists from the Russian
empi re-with thei r ferce convictions about the pri macy of
spiritual over materi al ( economic, poli ti cal ) causati on, the
irrelevance of the categories "left" and "ri ght," the exis
tence of absolute evi l . Appalled by the extensiveness of
German support for Hi tler, Syberberg calls the Germans
"a Satani c people."
The devil story that Mann devi sed to sum up the Nazi
demoni c was narrated by someone who does not under
stand. Thereby Mann suggested that evi l so absolute may
be, fnally, beyond comprehensi on or the grasp of art. But
the obtuseness of the narrator of Doctor Faustus i s too
much i nsi sted on. Mann's i rony backfres : Serenus Zei t
blom's fatuous modesty of understandi ng seems l i ke
Mann's confession of i nadequacy, hi s i nabi lity to give full
voi ce to gri ef. Syberberg's flm about the devi l , though
sheathed i n i roni es, afrms our abi li ty to understand and
our obli gation t o gri eve. Dedi cated, as i t were, to grief, t he
fl m begins and ends wi t h Hei ne's lacerating words : "I
thi nk of Germany i n the ni ght and sleep leaves me, I can
no longer close my eyes, I weep hot tears." Grief is the
burden of the calm, rueful, musical sol i loqui es of Baer and
Heller ; neither reci t i ng nor decl ai mi ng, they are si mply
speaking out, and l i stening to these grave, i ntell igenl
voices seethi ng wi t h grief i s i tself a ci vi li zi ng experience.
The flm carri es wi thout any condescensi on a vast legacy
of i nformati on about the Nazi peri od. But information i .
assumed. The fl m i s not designed t o meet a standard oJ :
informati on but clai ms to address a ( hypotheti cal ) thera
I 1s2
Syberbergs Hitler
peutic ideal. Syberberg repeatedly says that hi s flm is
addressed to the German "inability to mourn," that it un
dertakes "the work of mourni ng" ( Trauerarbeit ) . These
phrases recall the famous essay Freud wrote deep in World
War I , "M!urning and Melanchol i a," which connects
melancholy with the i nabi l ity to work through grief ; and
the application of thi s formula i n an infuenti al psycho
analytic study of postwar Germany by Alexander and
Margarete Mi tscherli ch, The Inability to Mourn, pub
li shed i n Germany in 1967, whi ch di agnoses the Germans
as aficted by mass melancholi a, the resul t of the continu
ing denial of their collective responsibi l i ty for the Nazi
past and thei r persistent refusal to mourn. Syberberg has
appropri ated t he well -known Mi tscherl ich thesi s (wi thout
ever mentioni ng their book) , but one mi ght doubt that his
flm was inspi red by i t . It seems more l i kely that Syberberg
found i n the notion of Trauerarbeit a psychological and
moral just ifcation for his aesthetics of repet i t i on and re
cycl ing. It t akes timeand much hyperboleto work
through grief.
So far as the flm can be considered as an act of mourn
ing, what i s interesti ng i s that i t i s conducted i n the style of
mourning-by exaggeration, repeti ti on. It provi des an
overfow of i nformation : the method of saturation. Syber
berg i s an arti st of excess : thought i s a kind of excess, the
surpl us production of ruminati ons, i mages, associations,
emotions connected with, evoked by, Hi tler. Hence the
flm's length, i ts ci rcular arguments, i ts several begi nnings,
its four or fve endings, i ts many titles, i ts plural i ty of
styles, its verti ginous shifts of perspective on Hi tler, from
below or beyond. The most wonderful shift occurs in Part
II, when the valet's forty-minute monologue with its mes
I 153
U N D E R T il E S I G N O F S A T U R N
meri zi ng trivia about Hi tler' s taste i n underwear and shav
i ng cream and breakfast food i s followed by Heller's
musi ngs on the unreali t y of the i dea of the gal axi es. ( It i s
the verbal equi valent of the cut i n 2001 from t he hone
thrown i n the air by a pri mate to the space shi p-surely
the most spectacular cut in the hi story of ci nema. ) Syber
berg' s i dea i s to exhaust, to empty hi s subject.
Syherberg measures his ambitions by the standards of
Wagner, alt hough l ivi ng up to the legendary attri butes of a
German geni us i s no easy task in the consumer soci ety of
the Federal Republ ic. He consi ders t hat Hitler, a Film
fro
'
Germany i s not j ust a flm, as Wagner di d not want
the Ring and Parsifal t o be consi dered operas or to be part
of the normal repertory of opera houses. I ts defant, seduc
ti ve length, which prevents the flm from being di stri buted
conventi onally, i s very Wagneri an, as i s Syberherg' s re
l uctance ( until recentl y) to let it he shown except in
speci al ci rcumstances, encouraging seri ousness. Also Wag
neri an are Syberberg's i deal of exhaustiveness and pro
fundi ty ; his sense of mi ssi on ; hi s belief i n art as a radi cal
act ; his t aste for scandal ; hi s polemical energies ( he i s i n
capable of wri ti ng an essay that i s not a mani festo) ; hi s
taste for t he grandi ose. Grandi osi ty i s, preci sel y, Syber
berg' s great subj ect . The protagonists of his trilogy about
Germany-Ludwig II, Karl May, Hi tler-are all megalo
mani acs, l i ars, reckless dreamers, vi rtuosi of the grandi ose.
( Very di ferent sorts of documentaries Syberberg made for
German televi si on between 1967 and 1975 also express hi s
fasci nati on wi t h the self-assured and sel f-obsessed : Die
Grafen Pocci, about an ari stocrat i c German fami l y ; por
trai ts of German fl m stars ; and the fve-hour interview-
I 1
5
4
Syberberg's Hitler
flm on Wagner's daughter-i n-law and Hi tler's friend, The
Confessions of Winifred Wagner. )
Syberberg is a great Wagnerian, the greatest since
Thomas 1:ann, but his atti tude to Wagner and the trea
sures of German Romanticism i s not only pious. It con
tains more than a bi t of mal ice, the touch of the cultural
vandal. To evoke the grandeur and the fai l ure of Wag
neri ani sm, Hitler, a Film from Germany uses, recycles,
parodi es elements of Wagner. Syberberg means hi s flm to
be an anti-Parsifal, and hosti li ty to Wagner is one of it
leitmot i fs : the spi ritual fliation of Wagner and Hitler.
The whole flm could be considered a profani ng of Wag
ner, undertaken with a full sense of the gesture's ambigu
i ty, for Syberberg is attempting to he both inside and
outside hi s. own deepest sources as an artist. ( The graves of
Wagner and Cosi ma behi nd Vi lla Wahnfried recur as an
i mage ; and one scene sati rizes that most i nefectual of pro
fanations, when black American Gls j i tterbugged on the
graves after the war. ) For i t i s from Wagner that Syber
berg's flm gets its biggest boost-its i mmedi ate intrinsic
claim on the sublime. As the flm opens, we hear the be
gi nni ng of the prelude to Parsifal and see the word
GRAIL in fractured blocky letters. Syberberg claims that
his aesthetic i s Wagnerian, that is, musi cal . But it might be
more correct to say that hi s flm i s i n a mi metic relati on t o
Wagner, and i n part a parasi ti c onas Ulysses is i n a
parasi t ic relation to the hi story of English li terature.
Syberberg takes very li terally, more li terally than Ei sen
stei n ever di d, the promi se of flm as a synthesis of the
plastic arts, music, l i terature, and theater-the modern ful
fllment of Wagner's i dea of the total work of art. ( It has
often been sai d that Wagner, had he lived i n the twentieth
I Iss
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
century, would have been a flmmaker. ) But the modem
Gesamtkunstwerk tends to be an aggregation of seemingly
di sparate elements instead of a synthesis. For Syberberg
there is always something more, and di ferent, to say-as
the two flms on Ludwig he made i n 1972 attest. Lldwig,
Requiem for a Virgin King, which became the frst flm i n
hi s trilogy about Germany, pays delirious homage to the
ironic teatricality and overripe patos of such flmmakers
as Cocteau, Carmelo Bene, and Werner Schroeter. The
odor Hirnei, the oter flm, i s an austere Brechtian
monodrama of ni nety minutes wi th Ludwig's cook as its
one character-it anticipates the valet's narrative i n Hitler,
a Film from Germany-and was inspi red by Brecht' s un
fnished novel on the l i fe of Julius Caesar narrated by hi s
slave. Syberberg considers that he began as a di sciple of
Brecht, and in 1952 and 1953 flmed several of Brecht' s
productions in East Berli n.
Accordi ng to Syberberg, hi s work comes from "the dual
i ty Brecht/Wagner" ; that i s the "aesthetic scandal" he
clai ms to have "sought." In i nterviews he i nvariably cites
both as hi s artistic fathers, partly ( i t may be supposed) to
neutralize the politics of one by the politics of the other and
place himself beyond issues of left and right ; partly to ap
pear more evenhanded than he i s. But he i s i nevitably
more of a Wagneri an than a Brechtian, because of the way
the i nclusive Wagnerian aesthetic accommodates con
traries of feel ing ( including ethical feeling and political
bi as) . Baudel ai re heard i n Wagner's music "the ultimate
scream of a soul dri ven to its utmost l i mits," while
Ni etzsche, even after giving up on Wagner, st ill prai sed
him as a great "miniaturi st" and "our greatest melan
chol i ac i n music"-and both were right. Wagner' s con
traries reappear in Syberberg : the radi cal democrat and
I 156
Syberbergs Hitler
the right-wing elitist, the aesthete and te moralist, rant
and rue.
Syberberg's polemi cal genealogy, Brecht/Wagner, ob
scures other infuences on the flm; i n parti cular, what he
owes to Surrealist i ronies and i mages. But even the role of
Wagner seems a more complex afai r than Syberberg's en
thrallment wi th the art and l i fe of Wager would i ndi cate.
Apart from the Wagner that Syberberg has appropri ated,
one i s tempted to say expropriated, tis Wagnerianism i s,
properly, an attenuated afai r-a fascinatingly belated ex
ample of the art whi ch grew out of the Wagnerian aes
theti c : Symbolism. ( Both Symbol ism and Surreal ism could
be considered as late developments of the Romantic sensi
bi li ty. ) Symbolism was the Wagnerian aesthetic turned
into a procedure of creati on for all the arts ; further sub
jectivized, pulled toward abstraction. What Wagner
wanted was an ideal theater, a theater of maximal emotions
purged of di stractions and i rrelevancies. Thus Wagner
chose to conceal the orchestra of the Bayreuth Festspiel
haus under a black wooden shell, and once quipped that,
having i nvented the invisible orchestra, he wished he could
invent the invisible stage. The Symbol ists found the i n
vi sible stage. Events were to be withdrawn from reali ty, so
to speak, and restaged in te i deal theater of the mi nd. *
And Wagner's fantasy of the invisible ltage was fulflled
more literally i n that i mmaterial stage, cinema.
* "Instead of tring to produce the largest possible reality outside
himsel f, " Jacques Riviere has written, the Symbolist artist "tries to
consume as much as possible within himself . . . he ofers his mind
as a kind of ideal theater where [ events] can be acted out without
becoming visible. " Rh iere's essay on Symbolism, "Le Roman d'Aven
ture'' ( 1913 ) , i s the best account of it I know.
/ 1
57
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
Syberberg's flm i s a magi stral rendering of the Sym
bol i st potenti al i t ies of cinema and probably the most
ambi t ious Symbol i st work of thi s cent ur. He construes ci n
ema as a ki nd of ideal mental acti vi ty, being both sensuous
and refective, which takes up where real ity leaves of:
ci nema not as the fabrication of reali t y but as "a conti nua
ti on of real i ty by ot her means. " I n Syherberg's medi tati on
on hi story i n a sound studio, events are visuali zed ( with
the aid of Surreal i st conventi ons ) whi le remai ning i n a
deeper sense i nvi si ble ( the Symbol i st i deal ) . But because i t
lacks t he styl i sti c homogeneity that was typical of Symbol i st
works, Hitler, a Film from Germany has a vigor that
Symbol i sts would forgo as vulgar. It s i mpuri ti es rescue the
flm from what was most rarefed about Symbol i sm wi thout
maki ng i ts reach any l ess i ndetermi nate and comprehen
sive.
The Symbol i st art i st i s above all a mi nd, a creator-mi nd
that ( di st i l l i ng the Wagneri an grandiosity and i ntensi ty)
sees everythi ng, that i s able t o permeate i t s subject ; and
ecl i pses i t . Syberberg's medi tati on on Hitler has the cus
tomary overbeari ngness of this mi nd, and the characteri st i c
porousness of the overextended Symbol i st mental struc
tures : soft-edge arguments that begi n "I thi nk of . . . ,"
verbless sentences that evoke rather than explai n. Con
clusions are everywhere but nothi ng concl udes. All the
parts of a Smbolist narrat i ve are si multaneous ; that i s, all
coexi st si mul taneousl y in thi s superior, overbeari ng mi nd.
The functi on of thi s mi nd i s not to tel l a story ( at the
start the story i s behi nd it, as Rivi ere poi nted out ) hut to
confer meani ng i n unli mi ted amounts. Actions, fgures,
i ndivi dual bi as of decor can have, i deally do have, multi ple
I 158
Syberberg's Hitler
mean i ngs-for example, the charge of meani ngs Syber
berg attaches to the fgure of the chi ld. He appears to be
seeki ng, from a more subj ective standpoi nt, what Ei senstein
prescri bes with his theory of "overtonal montage. " ( Eisen
stein, who saw hi msel f in the tradi t ion of Wagner and the
Gesamtkunstwerk and i n hi s writings quotes copiously
from the French Symbol i sts, was the greatest exponent of
Symbol i st aestheti cs in ci nema. ) The flm overfows wi th
meanings of varyi ng accessi bi li ty, and there are further
meanings from rel ics and tal i smans on the set which the
audience can't possibly know about. * The Symbol i st arti st
i s not pri mari ly i nterested i n exposition, expl anati on,
communi cati on. It seems ft t i ng that Syberberg' s drama
turgy consi st s i n talk addressed to those who cannot talk
back : to the dead ( one can put words i n thei r mouths ) and
to one' s own daughter ( who has no l i nes ) . The Symbolist
narrati ve i s always a posthumous afai r ; its subject is pre
ci sely somet hi ng that i s assumed. Hence, Symbolist art i s
characteristically dense, di fcult . Syberberg i s appeal i ng
( intermittently) to another process of knowing, as i s i ndi
cated by one of t he flm's principal emblems, Ledoux's
ideal theater i n the form of an eye-the Masonic eye ; the
eye of intel l i gence, of esoteric knowledge. But Syberherg
* For example, on Baer's t able Syberberg put a piece of wood from
Ludwi g's Hundi nghitte, the playhouse at Li nderhof ( i t burned down
in 1 945 ) i nspi red by the designs for Act I of Die Walkire in the frst
t wo productions ; el sewhere on the set are a stone from Bayreuth,
a rel ic from Hi tler' s villa at Berchtegaden, and other t reasures. In
one i nstance, tali smans were furni shed
b
y the actor : Syberberg asked
Heller to bri ng some obj ect s that were preci ous t o him, and Heller's
photograph of Joseph Roth and a 8mall Buddha ran j ust be made out
( i f one knows they're t here ) on hi s tabl e whi le he delivers the cosmos
monologue at the end of Part I I and t he long monologue of Part I V.
I
15
9
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
wants, passionately wants hi s flm to be understood ; and i n
some parts it i s as overexpl ici t as i n other parts i t i s en
coded.
The Symboli st relati on of a mi nd to i ts subject is con
summated when the subject i s vanqui shed, undone, used
up. Thus Syberberg' s grandest concei t i s that wi th his flm
he may have "defeated" Hi tler-exorci sed him. Thi s
splendi dly outrageous hyperbole caps Syberberg's pro
found understandi ng of Hi tler as an i mage. ( I f from The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Hi tler, ten why not from Hi t
ler to Hit ler, a Film from Germny? The end. ) It also
fol lows from Syberberg's Romantic views of the sov
erei gnt y of the i magi nati on, and his fi rtati on with esoteri c
i deas of knowing, wi t h noti ons of art as magic or spi ritual
alchemy, and of the i magi nati on as a purveyor of the pow
ers of bl ackness.
Heller's monologue i n Part IV leads toward a roll call of
myths that can be regarded as metaphors for the esoteric
powers of cinema-starti ng wi th Edi son's Black Mari a
( "the black studi o of our i magi nation" ) ; evoki ng black
stones ( of the Kaaba ; of Durer's Melencolia, the presi di ng
i mage of the flm' s complex i conography) ; and endi ng
wi th a modern i mage : ci nema as the i magi nat ion's black
hole. Like a black hole, or our fantasy about i t, ci nema
col lapses space and ti me. The i mage perfectly descri bes the
excruci ati ng fuency of Syberberg' s flm: i t s i nsi stence on
occupyi ng di ferent spaces and t i mes si multaneously. It
seems apt that Syberberg' s private mythology of subject i ve
ci nema concl udes wi th an i mage drawn from science fc
tion. A subject i ve ci nema of these ambi t ions and moral
energy logically mutates into science fction. Thus Syber
berg's flm begi ns with the stars and ends, li ke 2001 , wi th
the stars and a star-chi ld.
I
1
60
Syberberg s Hitler
Evoking Hi tler by means of myth and t ravesty, fai ry
tales and science fcti ons, Syberberg conducts hi s own ri tes
of deconsecration : the Grai l has been destroyed ( Syber
berg' s anti -Parsifal opens and closes with the word GRAIL
-the flm's true ti t le) ; i t i s no l onger permissible to dream
of redemption. Syberberg defends his mythologizing of hi s
tory as a skeptic's enterprise: myt h as "the mother of i rony
and pathos," not myths which stimulate new systems of
bel ief. But someone who bel i eves that Hi tler was Ger
many's "fate" i s hardly a skeptic. Syberberg i s the sort of
artist who wants to have it both-all-ways. The method
of his flm i s contradi ction, i rony. And, exercisi ng his i n
genious talent for naivete, he also clai ms to transcend this
complexity. He rel ishes notions of innocence and pathos
-the traditi ons of Romantic i deali sm ; some nonsense
around the fgure of a child ( hi s daughter, the i nfant i n
Runge' s Morning, Ludwig as a bearded, weepi ng chi ld ) ;
dreams of an ideal world puri fed of i ts complexity and
mediocrity.
The earlier parts of Syberberg's tri logy are elegaic por
traits of last- di tch dreamers of paradi se : Ludwig II, who
bui l t castles which were stage sets and paid for Wagner' s
dream factory at Bayreuth ; Karl llay, who romanticized
American Indians, Arabs, and other exotics in his i m
mensely popular novels, the most famous of which, Winne
tou, chroni cles the destruction of beauty and bravery by
the coming of modern technological ci vi l izati on. Ludwig
and Karl :May attract Syberberg as gallant, doomed practi
tioners of the Great Refusal, the refusal of modern i ndus
tri al civilization. What Syberberg loathes most, such as
pornography and the commercial ization of cul t ure, he
identi fes wi th t he modern. ( I n t hi s stance of utter su
peri ori ty to the modern, Syberberg recalls the author of
/ 161
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
Art and Crisis, Hans Sedl mayr, wi t h whom he studied art
hi story at the Uni versi t y of :M unich in the ffties. ) The fl m
i s a work of mouri ng for t he modern and what precedes i t ,
and opposes i t . I f Hi t ler i s al so a "utopi an," as Syberberg
cal l s hi m, then SyberLerg is condemned to be a post
ut opi an, a ut opi an who acknowledges that ut opi an feel i ngs
have been hopelessl y defled. Syberberg does not bel i eve i n
a "new human bei ng"-that perenni al theme of cul t ural
revol ut i on on both the l eft and the right. For all his attrac
tion to the credo of romant i c geni us, what he real l y bel i eves
in is Goethe and a thorough Gymnasi um educat i on.
Of course, one can fnd t he usual contradi cti ons i n Syber
berg's flm-the poetry of utopi a, the fut i l i ty of utopi a ;
rat i onal i sm and magi c. And that only confrms what ki nd
of fl m Hitler, a Film from Germany real l y i s. Science fc.
t i on i s preci sel y t he genre whi ch dramat i zes t he mix of nos
talgi a for ut opi a with d ystopian fantasies and dread ; the
dual convicti on that the worl d is endi ng and that it i s on
the verge of a new begi nni ng. Syberberg's flm about hi s
tory is also a moral and cul tural science fction. Starshi p
Goethe-Haus.
SyLerberg manages to perpetuate i n a mel ancholy, at
tenuated form somethi ng of Wagner's not i ons of art as
therapy, as redempti on, and as catharsi s. He calls ci nema
"t he most beaut i ful compensati on" for the ravages of
moder hi story, a ki nd of "redempt i on" to "our senses op
pressed by progress. " That art does i n sort s redeem re
al i ty, by bei ng better than real i t y-that is the ul t i mate
Symboli st bel ief. Syberberg makes of cinema the last, most
inclusive, most ghostly paradi se. It i s a view that remi nds
one of Godard. Syberberg' s ci nephi l i a i s another part of
the i mmense pathos of his fl m; perhaps its only invol un
I 162
Syberbergs Hitler
tary pathos. For whatever Syberberg says, ci nema is now
another lost paradi se. I n the era of ci nema's unprecedented
mediocrity, his masterpi ece has something of the character
of a posthumous event.
Spurni ng natural ism, the Romantics developed a melan
cholic style: i ntensely personal, the outreach of its tortured
"I," centered on the agon of the artist and society. Mann
gave the last profound expressi on to t hi s romanti c noti on
of the sel fs di lemma. Post-Romantics li ke Syberberg wo'rk
in an i mpersonal melancholic style. What is central now i s
the relati on between memory and the past : the clash be
tween the possi bi li ty of remembering, of going on, and the
lure of oblivion. Beckett gi ves one ahi storical version of
this agon. Another version, obsessed with hi story, i s Syber
berg's.
To understand the past, and thereby to exorcise i t, is
Syberherg's largest moral ambi tion. Hi s problem i s that he
cannot give anything up. So large i s hi s subject-and
everything Syberberg does makes i t even larger-that he
has to take many posi ti ons beyond i t . One can fnd almost
anythi ng i n Syberberg's passi onately voluble flm ( short of
a Marist analysis or a shred of femi ni st awareness ) .
Though he tries to be silent ( the chi ld, the stars ) , he can't
stop talki ng ; he's so i mmensely ardent, avid. As the flm is
endi ng, Syberberg wants to produce yet another ravishi ng
i mage. Even when t he flm is fnally over, he st i ll want s to
say more, and adds postscripts : the Heine epi graph, the
ci tation of Mogadishu-Stammhei m, a fnal oracular
Syberberg-sentence, one last evocation of the Grai l . The
flm i s i tself the creation of a world, from which ( one feels )
its creator has the greatest di fculty i n extricati ng hi mself
I 163
U N D E T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
-as does the admi ri ng spectator ; thi s exercise in the art
of
empathy produces a voluptuous anguish, an anxiety about
concludi ng. Lost i n the black hole of the i magi nation, the
fl mmaker has to make everythi ng pass before hi m ; iden
ti fes wi t h each, and none.
Benj ami n suggests that melancholy i s the origin of true
-that i s, j ust-hi storical understandi ng. The true under
standi ng of hi story, he sai d in the l ast text he wrote, is "a
process of empathy whose ori gi n is i ndolence of the heart,
acedi a. " Syberberg shares somethi ng of Benj ami n' s posi
tive, i nstrumental view of melancholy, and uses symbols of
melancholy to punctuate his flm. But Syberberg does not
have the ambivalence, the slowness, the complexity, the
tension of the Saturi an temperament . Syberberg i s not a
true melancholic but an exalte. But he uses the di st i nctive
tools of the melancholi c-the al l egorical props, the tal i s
mans, t he secret sel f-references ; and wi th hi s i rrepressi ble
talent for i ndi gnati on and enthusi asm, he i s doi ng "the
work of mouring. " The word frst appears at the end of
the flm he made on Wi ni fred Wagner i n 1 975, where we
read : "Thi s flm i s part of Hans-J irgen Syberberg's
Trauerarbeit. " What we see i s Syberberg smi li ng.
Syberberg i s a genui ne elegai st. But hi s fl m i s toni c. The
poetic, husky-voiced, di fdent logorrhea of Godard's late
fl ms diseloses a morose convi ct i on that speaki ng wi l l never
exorci se anythi ng ; in contrast to Godard' s of-camera mus
i ngs, t he musings of Syberberg' s personae ( Heller and
Baer) teem wi th cal m assurance. Syberberg, whose tem
perament seems the opposi te of Godard' s, has a supreme
confdence i n language, in di scourse, i n eloquence i tself.
The flm tries to say everythi ng. Syberberg belongs to the
race of creators like Wagner, Artaud, Cel i ne, the late
I 16
4
Syberberg' s Hitler
Joyce, whose work anni hi lates other work. All are artists of
endless speaking, endless melody-a voice that goes on and
on. Beckett would belong to this race, too, were i t not for
some i nhi bi tory forcesani ty? elegance? good manners?
less energy? deeper despai r? So might Godard, were it not
for the doubts he evidences about speaking, and the i nhi bi
tion of feeli ng ( both of sympathy and repulsi on) that re
sults from thi s sense of the i mpotence of speaki ng. Syber
berg has managed to stay free of the standard doubts
doubts whose mai n function, now, seems to be to i nhi bi t.
The result i s a flm altogether exceptional i n i ts emotional
expressiveness, its great vi sual beauty, its si nceri ty, i ts
moral passion, i ts concern wi th contemplative values.
The flm tries to be everything. Syberberg' s unprece
dented ambi ti on in Hitler, a Film from Germany is on
another scale from anythi ng one has seen on flm. It is work
that demands a special kind of attent ion and part i sanshi p ;
and invi tes being refected upon, reseen. The more one
recogni zes of i ts styl isti c references and lore, the more the
flm vi brates. ( Great art i n the mode of pastiche i nvari ably
rewards study, as Joyce afrmed by dari ng to observe that
the i deal reader o
f
hi s work would be someone who could
devote hi s l i fe to i t. ) Syberberg' s flm belongs i n the cate
gory of noble masterpi eces which ask for fealty and can
compel i t . After seei ng Hitler, a Film from Germany, there
is Syberberg's flm-and then there are the other flms one
admi res. ( Not too many these days, alas. ) As was sai d rue
fully of Wagner, he spoi ls our tolerance for the others.
( 1979)
/ 165
Remembering Barthes
Roland Barthes was sixty-four when he died last week,
but the career was younger than that age suggests, for he
was thi rty-seven when he publi shed hi s frst book. After te
tardy start there were many books, many subjects. One felt
that he could generate ideas about anything. Put hi m in
front of a cigar box and he would have one, two, many
ideas-a little essay. It was not a question of knowledge
( he couldn't have known much about some of the subjects
he wrote about ) but of alertness, a fasti di ous transcription
of what could be thought about something, once it swam
into te stream of attention. There was always some fne
net of classi fcati on into which the phenomenon could be
tipped.
In his youth he founded a university theater group, re
viewed plays. And something of the theater, a profound
I 169
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
l ove of appearances, colors hi s work when he began to
exercise, at full strength, his vocat i on as a wri ter. His sense
of i deas was dramat urgi cal : an i dea was always in com
pet i t i on wi t h another i dea. Launchi ng hi msel f onto the
i nbred French i ntellectual stage, he took up arms agai nst
the t radi t i onal enemy : what Fl aubert called "received
ideas," and came to be known as the "bourgeoi s" mental
i ty ; what Marxists excori ated with the not i on of fal se con
sciousness and Sartrei ans with bad faith ; what Barthes,
who had a degree in classi cs, was t o l abel doxa ( current
opi nion ) .
He started of in the postwar years, i n the shadow of
Sart re's moral i stic questi ons, wi th mani festos about what
l i terature i s ( Writing Degree Zero ) and wi tty port rai t s of
the i dols of the bourgeoi s tribe ( the art icles col lected i n
Mythologies ) . Al l hi s wri t i ngs are polemical . But the deep
est i mpulse of his temperament was not combati ve. It was
celebratory. Hi s debunki ng forays, which presumed the
readi ness to be made i ndi gnant by i nani ty, obtuseness,
hypocri sy-these gradual l y subsi ded. He was more i nter
ested in bestowi ng prai se, sharing hi s passi ons. He was a
taxonomi st of j ubi l at i on, and of the mi nd' s earest play.
What fasci nated hi m were mental classi fcat i ons. Hence,
his out rageous book Sade, Fourier, Loyola, which, j uxta
posi ng the t hree as i nt repi d champi ons of fantasy, obsessed
classi fers of thei r own obsessi ons, obl i terates all the i ssues
of substance whi ch make them not comparable. He was not
a moderni st i n hi s tastes ( despite hi s tendent i ous sponsor
shi p of such avatars of l i terary moderi sm i n Pari s as
Robbe-Gril let and Phi l i ppe Sollers ) , but he was a mod
erni st in his practice. That is, he was i rresponsi ble, play
ful, formal i st-maki ng l i terature in the act of talki ng
I 1
70
Remembering Barthes
about i t. What sti mul ated hi m i n a work was what it de
fended, and its systems of outrage. He was conscienti ously
interested i n the perverse ( he held the old- fashi oned vi ew
that it was l i berati ng) .
Everythi ng he wrote was interesting-vivacious, rapi d,
dense, pointed. lost of hi s books are collect ions of essays.
( Among the exceptions i s an early polemical book on
Raci ne. A book of uncharacteri sti c length and expl icitness
on the semi ology of fashion adverti si ng, which he wrote to
pay hi s academi c dues, had the st uf of several vi rtuoso
essays. ) He produced nothi ng that could be called juven
i l i a ; the elegant, exacting voice was there from the begi n
ni ng. But the rhythm accelerated i n the last decade, with a
new book appeari ng every year or two. The thought had
greater vel ocity. In hi s recent books, the essay form i tsel f
had spl i ntered-perforat i ng the essayist's reticence about
the "I." The writing t ook on the freedoms and ri sks of the
notebook. In S/Z, he rei nvented a Balzac novel la i n the
form of a doggedly ingeni ous textual gloss. There were the
dazzl ing Borgesi an appendi ces to Sade, Fourier, Loyola ;
the para- fctional pyrotechnics of the exchanges between
text and photographs, between text and semi -obscured refer.
ences i n hi s autobiographical writi ngs ; the celebrati ons of
i llus ion i n hi s last book, on photography, publ i shed two
months ago.
He was especi ally sensi ti ve to the fasci nati on exerted hy
that poignant notati on, the photograph. Of the photo
graphs he chose for Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes,
perhaps the most movi ng shows an oversized chi ld, Barthes
at ten, being carried by, cli ngi ng to, hi s young mother ( he
t i tled i t "asking for love" ) . He had an amorous relati on to
real i ty-and to wri ti ng, which for hi m were t he same. He
I
1 71
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
wrote about everything ; besi eged wi th requests to write
occasional pi eces, he accepted as many as he could ; he
wanted to be, and was often, seduced by a subject. ( His
subj ect became, more and more, seduction. ) Like all writ
ers, he complai ned of being overworked, of accedi ng to too
many requests, of falli ng behi nd-but he was in fact one of
the most di scipli ned, surest, most appetitive wri ters I've
known. He found the ti me to give many eloquent, itel
lectually i nventive i nterviews.
As a reader he was meticulous but not voraci ous. Al most
everythi ng he read he wrote about, so one could surmise
that i f he di dn' t wri te about i t, he probably hadn't read i t.
He was as uncosmopolitan as most French i ntellectuals
have been ( an exception was his beloved Gi de) . He knew
no foreign language well and had read li ttle foreign liter
ature, even i n translat ion. The only foreign l i terature that
seems to have touched him was German : Brecht was an
early, potent enthusiasm; recently the sorrow discreetl y re
counted i n A Lover's Discourse had led him to The Sorrows
of Young Werther and to l i eder. He was not curious enough
to let his readi ng interfere wi th his writing.
He enj oyed being famous, wi th an i ngenuous ever
renewed pleasure : i n France one saw hi m often on tele
vi si on i n recent years, and A Lover's Discourse was a best
seller. And yet he spoke of how eeri e it was to fnd his name
every ti me he l eafed through a magazine or newspaper. Hi s
sense of privacy was expressed exhi bi t i oni stically. Wri t i ng
about hi msel f, he often used t he thi rd person, as i f he
t reated hi msel f as a fction. The later work contai ns much
fast i di ous self-revelation, but always in a speculative form
( no anecdote about the sel f which does not come bearing :
an i dea between i t s teeth ) , and dai nty medi tation on th '
I 1 72
Remembering Barthes
personal ; the last article he publ ished was about keeping a
journal. All hi s work is an i mmensely complex enterprise
of sel f-escri pti on.
Nothi ng escaped the attention of thi s devout, ingenious
student of hi msel f: the food, colors, odors he fancied ; how
he read. Studious readers, he once observed i n a lecture in
Paris, fall into two groups : those who underl ine thei r
books and those who don't. He sai d that he belonged to the
second group: he never made a mark i n the book about
which he planned to write but transcribed key excerpts
onto cards. I have forgotten the theory he then confected
about this preference, so I shall i mprovise my own. I con
nect hi s aversion to marki ng up books wi th the fact that he
drew, and that thi s drawi ng, which he pursued seriously,
was a kind of writing. The visual art that att racted hi m
came from language, was i ndeed a vari ant of writing ; he
wrote essays on Erte's alphabet formed wi th human fgures,
on the calli graphi c pai nting of Requi chot, of Twombly.
Hi s preference recalls that dead metaphor, a "body" of
work-ne does not usually write on a body one loves.
Hi s temperamental dislike for te morali st i c became
more overt i n recent years. After several decades' worth of
dutiful adherence to right-mi nded ( that i s, left-wing)
stands, t he aesthete came out of the closet i n 1974 when
with some close friends and l iterary all ies, Maoist s of
the moment, he went to Chi na ; i n the scant three pages he
wrote on hi s return, he sai d that he had been uni mpressed
by the morali zi ng and bored by the asexual i t y and the cul
tural uni formi ty. Barthes' s work, along wi th t hat of Wilde
and Valery, gives being an aesthete a good name. Much of
his recent wri ti ng i s a celebration of the i ntelli gence of
the senses, and of the texts of sensati on. Defendi ng the
I
1
73
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
senses, he never betrayed the mi nd. Barthes di d not enter
tain any Romantic cl iches about the opposition between
sensual and mental alertness.
The work is about sadness overcome or denied. He had
deci ded that everythi ng could be treated as a system-a
di scourse, a set of classifcations. Si nce everything was a
system, everything could be overcome. But eventually he
wearied of systems. Hi s mi nd was too ni mble, too ambi
tious, too drawn to risk. He seemed more anxi ous and vul
nerable i n re.cent years, as he became more productive than
ever. He had always, as he observed about hi mself,
"worked successively under the aegis of a great system
( Marx, Sartre, Brecht, semi ology, the Text ) . Today it
seems to him that he
w
ri tes more openly, more unprotect
edly . . " He purged hi mself of the masters and master
ideas from which he drew sustenance ( "I n order to speak
one must seek support from other texts," he explai ned) ,
only to stand i n the shadow of hi mself. He became hi s own
Great Writer. He was in assiduous attendance at the ses
sions of a seven-day conference devoted to his work i n 1977
-commenting, mi ldly i nterj ecting, enjoying hi mself. He
publ ished a review of hi s speculative book on hi mself
( Barthes on Barthes on Barthes ) . He becam
e
the shep
herd of the fock of hi msel f.
Vague torments, a feel i ng of i nsecurity, were ac
knowledged-with the consoli ng i mplication that he was
on
t
he edge of f great adventure. When he was i n New
York a year and a half ago he avowed in public, wi th al
most tremulous bravery, his i ntent ion to wri t e a novel. Not
the novel one might expect from the critic who made
Robbe-Grillet seem for a whi le a central fgure i n con
temporary l etters ; from the writer whose most wonderful
/
1 7
4
Remembering Barthes
hooks-Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and A Lover's
Discourse-are themselves t ri umphs of moderni 5t fcti on
i n that tradi t i on i naugurated by Ri lke's The Notebooks of
Jalte Laurids Brigge, whi ch crossbreeds fct i on, essayi sti c
specul at i on, and autobi ography, in a l i near-notebook
rather than a l i near- narrative form. No, not a moderni st
novel, but a "real" one, he sai d. Li ke Proust.
Pri vately he spoke of his longing to cl i mb down from the
academi c summi t-he'd held a chai r at the College de
France si nce 1977-i n order to devote hi mself to this
novel, and of his anxiety ( on the face of it, unwarranted )
about material securi ty should he resi gn hi s teachi ng posi
t i on. The death of hi s mother two years ago was a great
blow. He recalled that i t was only after Proust's mother
di ed that Proust was able to begi n A fa Recherche du
temps perdu. It was characteri st i c that he hoped to fnd a
source of st rength i n hi s devastati ng grief.
As 50metimes he wrote about hi mself in the t hi rd person
he usually spoke of hi msel f as wi thout age, and all uded to
his future as if he were a much younger man, which i n a
way he was. He yearned for greatne5s, yet fel t hi msel f to be
( as he says i n Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes ) always
i n danger of "recession toward the minor thi ng, the old
thing he i s when 'left to hi mself. ' " There was somethi ng
remi ni scent of Henry James about hi s temperament and
the i ndefati gable subtlety of hi s mi nd. The dramat urgy of
i deas yi elded to t he dramat urgy of feel i ng ; hi s deepest i n
terests were in t hi ngs almost i nefable. Hi s ambi t i on had
somethi ng of the Jamesi an pathos, as di d hi s self-doubt5. If
he could have written a great novel, one i magi nes i t more
l i ke late James than l i ke Proust .
It was hard to tell hi s age. Rather, he 5eemed t o have no
I 1 7
5
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
age-appropriately, hi s l i fe's chronology being askew.
Though he spent much ti me with young people, he never
afected anythi ng of youth or i ts contemporary i nformal i
ti es. But he di dn' t seem t o be old, though hi s movements
were slow, his dress professori al . I t was a body that knew
how to rest : as Garci a Marquez has observed, a writer must
know how to rest . He was very i ndustrious, yet al so syb
ari t i c. He had an i ntense but busi nessl ike concern that he
receive a regul ar ration of pleasure. He had been ill ( tu
bercul ar) for many years when he was young, and one had
the i mpression that he came into hi s body rel at ively late
as he di d hi s mi nd, hi s producti vi ty. He had sensual revela
t i ons abroad ( Morocco, Japan ) ; gradually, somewhat
t ardi l y he assumed the consi derable sexual pri vi l eges that a
man of hi s sexual tastes and great celebri ty can command.
There was somethi ng chi l dl ike about hi m, i n t he wi stful
ness, in the pl ump body and soft voice and beaut i ful ski n,
i n t he self-absorpti on. He liked to l i nger i n cafes with stu
dents ; he wanted to be taken to bars and di scos-but, sex
ual transacti ons asi de, his interest in you tended to be your
i nterest i n hi m. ( "Ah, Susan. Touj ours fdele," were the
words wi th which he greeted me, afect i onately, when we
last saw each ot her. I was, I am. )
He afrmed somethi ng chi l dl ike in hi s i nsi stence, which
he shared wi th Borges, that readi ng i s a form of happi ness,
a form of joy. There was al so something less than i nnocent
about the cl ai m, the hard edge of adult sexual clamorous
ness. Wi t h his boundless capaci ty for self-referri ng, he en
rolled the i nventi on of sense in the search for pleasure.
The two were i denti fed : readi ng as jouissance ( the
French word for joy that also means comi ng) ; the pleasure
of the text. Thi s too was typical . He was, as a voluptuary of
I 1 76
Remembering Barthes
the mind, a great reconci ler. He had l i ttle feel ing for the
tragic. He was always fnding the advantage of a di sadvan
tage. Though he sounds many of the perenni al themes of
the modern cul ture critic, he was anythi ng but catastrophe
minded. His work ofers no visions of last j udgments, civ
il izati on's doom, the inevitabi l i ty of barbarism. It i s not
even elegiac. Old-fashi oned i n many of his tastes, he felt
nostalgi c for the decorum and the l i teracy of an older
bourgeoi s order. But he found much that reconciled hi m
t o the modern.
He was extremely courteous, a bit unworldly, resi l ient
he detested vi olence. He had beautiful eyes, which are al
ways sad eyes. There was somethi ng sad i n all thi s talk
about pleasure ; A Lover's Discourse i s a very sad book. But
he had known ecstasy and wanted to celebrate i t . He was a
great l over of l i fe ( and denier of death) ; the purpose of hi s
unwri tten novel, he sai d, was t o prai se l i fe, to express grat i
t ude for bei ng al i ve. In the serious busi ness of pleasure, i n
the splendi d pl ay of hi s mind, there was always that under
current of pathos-now made more acute by hi s pre
mature, morti fying death.
( 1980)
I 1 77
Mind as Passion
I cannot become modest ; too many
things burn i n me ; the old solu
tions are fal l i ng apart ; nothing has
been done yet with the new ones.
So I begin, everywhere at once, as
i f I had a century ahead of me.
-CANETTI, 1943
The speech that Eli as Canetti delivered in Vienna on
the occasion of Hermann Broch's fftieth bi rthday, in No
vember 1936, intrepidly sets out some of Canetti's charac
teri stic themes and is one of the handsomest tributes one
writer has ever paid to another. Such a trjbute creates the
terms of a successi on. When Canetti fnds i n Broch the
necessary attributes of a great writer-he i s ori gi nal ; he
sums up his age ; he opposes his age-he is del ineating the
standards to whi ch he has pledged hi mself. When he hai ls
Broch for reachi ng ffty ( Canetti was t hen t hi rty-one) and
calls thi s j ust half of what a human l i fe should be, he avows
that hatred of death and yearni ng for longevi ty that is the
signature of his work. When he extols Broch's i ntellectual
insat i abi li ty, evoking his vision of some unfettered state of
the mi nd, Canetti attests to equally fervent appeti tes of hi s
I 181
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
own. And by the magnani mi ty of hi s homage Canetti adds
one more element to thi s portrai t of the wri ter as hi s age's
noble adversary : the wri ter as noble admi rer.
His prai se of Broch di scloses much about the purity of
moral posi t i on and i ntransigence Canetti aspi res to, and
hi s desi re for strong, even overpowering models. Wri t i ng
i n 1965, Canet t i evokes the paroxysms of admi ration he
fel t for Karl Kraus i n the twent ies while a student i n Vi
enna, i n order to defend the value for a seri ous writer of
being, at least for a whi le, i n thrall to another's authori t y:
the essay on Kraus i s really about the ethics of admi ra
tion. He welcomes bei ng challenged by worthy enemies
( Canetti counts some "enemies"-Hobbes and Mai stre
among hi s favorite wri ters) ; bei ng strengthened by an un
attai nable, humbli ng standard. About Kafka, t he most i n
si stent of hi s admi rations, he observes : "One turns good
when reading him but without being proud of i t . "
So wholehearted i s Canetti's relati on to t he duty and
pleasure of admi ri ng others, so fasti di ous i s hi s sense of the
wri ter's vocation, that humi li ty-and pri de-make hi m
extremely self-i nvolved i n a characteri stical l y i mpersonal
way. He i s preoccupi ed wi th being someone he can admi re.
Thi s i s a leadi ng concern i n The Human Province, Canet
ti's selection from the notebooks he kept between 1942 and
1972, duri ng most of whi ch t i me he was prepari ng and wri t
i ng hi s great book Crowds and Power ( 1960) . In these
jott i ngs Canetti is constantly proddi ng hi mself with the
example of the great dead, i dent i fyi ng the i ntellectual neces
sity of what he undertakes, checki ng hi s mental temper
at ure, shuddering wi t h terror as the calendar sheds i ts
leaves.
Other trai ts go wi th being a sel f-confdent, generous ad-
I 182
Mind a Passion
mi rer : fear of not being i nsolent or ambitious enough,
i mpatience wi th the merely personal ( one sign of a strong
personality, as Canetti says, is the love of the i mpersonal ) ,
and aversion to self-pity. I n the frst volume of hi s autobi
ography, The Tongue Set Free ( 1977) , what Canetti
chooses to tell about hi s li fe features those whom he ad
mi red, whom he has learned from. Canetti relates wi th
ardor how things worked for, not agai nst, hi m; hi s is the
story of a l i beration : a mi nd-a language-a tongue "set
free" to roam the world.
That world has a complex mental geography. Born in
1905 i nto a far-fung Sephardi c family then quartered in
Bulgari a (his father and hi s pateral grandparents came
from Turkey) , Canetti had a childhood rich i n displace
ments. Vienna, where both hi s parents had gone to school,
was the mental capital of all the other places, which in
cluded England, where hi s fami ly moved when Canetti was
si x; Lausanne and Zurich, where he had some of hi s school
ing ; and soj ourns in Berl i n in the late twenties. It was to
Vienna that his moter brought Canetti and his two
younger brothers after his father di ed i n Manchester in
1912, and from there that Canetti emigrated in 1938,
spending a year i n Pari s and then moving to Lndon,
where he has l ived ever since. Only i n exile, he has noted,
does one realize how much "the world has always been a
world of exi les"-a characteristic observation, in that i t
deprives his plight of some of i ts particularity.
He has, almost by bi rthright, the exile wri ter's easily gen
eral ized relation to place: a place is a language. And know
ing many languages i s a way of clai mi ng many places as
one's territory. Fami ly example ( hi s paternal grandfather
I 1
8
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
boasted of knowing seventeen l anguages ) , the local medley
( i n the Danube port ci ty where he was born, Canetti says,
one could hear seven or eight languages spoken every day) ,
and the veloci ty of hi s chi ldhood all faci l i tated an avi d re
lation to l anguage. To live was to acqui re l anguages-his
were Ladi no, Bulgarian, German ( the language his par
ents spoke to each other ) , Engl i sh, French-and be "every
where."
That German became the language of his mi nd confrms
Canett i 's pl acelessness. Pi ous tri butes to Goethe's i nspi ra
ti on written i n hi s notebook whi le the Luftwafe's bombs
fell on London ( "I f, despite everything, I should survi ve,
then I owe it to Goethe" ) attest to that loyalty to German
culture whi ch would keep hi m always a foreigner i n
England-he has now spent well over half his l i fe there
and whi ch Canetti has the pri vi lege and the burden of
understandi ng, Jew that he i s, as the hi gher cosmopol i tan
i sm. He wi ll conti nue to wri te i n German-"because I am
Jewish, " he noted in 1944. Wi th thi s deci si on, not t he one
made by most Jewi sh i ntellectuals who were refugees from
Hi tler, Canetti chose to remai n unsull i ed by hatred, a
grateful son of German cul t ure who wants to help make i t
what one can cont i nue t o admi re. And he has.
Canetti i s reputed to be the model for the phi losopher
fgure in several of Iri s Murdoch's early novels, such as
Mi scha Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter ( dedicated
to Canett i ) , a fgure whose audacity and efortless superi
ority are an eni gma to hi s i nt i mi dated friends. * Drawn from
* "What's odd about hi m?" he asked.
"Oh, I don't know," said Annette. "He's s<er-"
"I don't fnd hi m odd;' said Rai nborough, after wai ti ng in vai n for
the epithet. "There "s only one thi ng that's except ional about Mi scha,
I 184
Mind as Passin
the outside, thi s portrai t suggests how exoti c Canetti must
seem to hi s Engl i sh admi rers. The artist who is also a
polymath ( or vice versa) , and whose vocation i s wisdom, i s
not a tradi tion which has a home i n Engl ish, for al l the
numbers of booki sh exiles fro
m
thi s century's more i m
placable tyrannies who have lugged thei r peerless learni ng,
thei r unabashed projects of greatness, to the more modestly
nouri shed English-speaking islands, large and small, of
shore of the European catastrophe.
Portrai ts drawn from the inside, with or wi thout te
poignant i nfections of exile, have made fami li ar the model
i ti nerant i ntellectual. He ( for the type is male, of course)
i s a Jew, or like a Jew; polycultural, restless, mi sogynisti c ;
a collector ; dedicated to self-transcendence, despising the
instincts ; weighed down by books and buoyed up by the
euphoria of knowledge. His real task is not to exerci se hi s
talent for explanation but , by being wi tness t o the age, t o
set the largest, most edifying standards of despair. As a re
clusive eccentric, he is one of te great achi evements in l i fe
and l etters of the twenti eth century' s imagination, a gen
uine hero, in the guise of a martyr. Although portraits of
thi s fgure have appeared in every European literature,
some of the German ones have notable authority-Step
penwl/, certai n essays by Walter Benj ami n ; or a notable
apart from his eyes, and that's his patience. He always has a hundred
schemes on hand, and he's the only man I know who will wait literally
for years for even a trivial plan to mature." Rainborough looked at
Annette with hostil i ty.
"Is i t true that he cries over things he reads in the newspapers ?"
asked Annette.
"I should think it's most improbable ! " said Rai nborough. Annette's
eyes were very wide .
The Flight from the Enchanter ( Viking Press, 1956, p. l34)
I 18
5
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
bleakness-Canetti ' s one novel , Auto-da-Fe, and, recently,
the novels of Thomas Bernhard, Korrektur [ Correction]
and Der Weltverbesserer [ The World Improver] .
Auto-da-Fe-the ti tle i n German is Die Blendung [ The
Blinding ] -depi cts the recluse as a hook-besotted na"f who
must undergo an epi c of humi l i at i on. The tranqui l l y celi
bate Professor Ki en, a renowned Si nologi st, i s ensconced i n
his top-foor apartment wi th hi s twenty-fve thousand books
-books on al l subj ects, feedi ng a mi nd of unrelent i ng
avi di t y. He does not know how horri bl e l i fe i s ; wi l l not
know unt i l he i s separated from his books. Phi l i st i ni sm and
mendaci ty appear in the form of a woman, ever the pri n
ci ple of ant i - mi nd i n thi s mythology of t he i ntellectual : the
reclusi ve scholar in the sky marri es his housekeeper. a char
acter as monst rous as any i n the pai nt i ngs of George Grosz
or Otto Di x-and is pi tched i nto the worl d.
Canet t i relates t hat he frst conceived Auto-da-F e-he was
twenty-four-as one of ei ght books, the mai n character of
each to be a monomani ac and the whole cycle to be cal led
"The Human Comedy of Madmen. " But only the novel
about "the book man" ( as Kien was called i n early drafts ) .
and not, say, the novel s about the rel i gi ous fanati c, the
collector, or t he technological vi si onary, got wri tten. In the
gui se of a book about a l unat i c-that i s, as hyperbole
Auto-da-Fe purveys fami l i ar cl i ches about unworl dl y, eas
ily duped i ntel lectual s -nd is ani mated by an except i onal l y
i nventi ve hat red for women. It i s i mpossi ble not to regard
Ki en's derangement as vari at i ons on hi s author's most
cheri shed exaggerat i ons. "The l i mi tat i on to a part i cul ar, as
t hough it were everyt hi ng, is too despi cable," Canet t i
noted-The Human Province i s ful l of such Ki en-l i ke
avowals. The author of the condescendi ng remarks about
, 186
Mind as Passion
women preserved in these notebooks mi ght have enjoyed
fabulating the detai ls of Ki en's del i rious mi sogyny. And
one can't help supposing t hat some of Canetti's work prac
ti ces are evoked i n the novel's account of a prodi gi ous
scholar plying hi s obsessional trade, afoat i n a sea of
mani as and schemes of orderli ness. Indeed, one would be
surpri sed to learn that Canetti doesn't have a large, schol
arly, but unspeci ali zed l ibrary with the range of Kien's.
Thi s sort of li brary building has nothing to do with the book
collect i ng that Benj ami n memorably described, which i s a
passion for books as material objects ( rare books, frst edi
tions ) . It i s , rather, t he materi al ization of an obsession
whose ideal i s to put the books i nsi de one's head ; the real
li brary i s only a mnemoni c system. Thus Canetti has Ki en
sitting at hi s desk and composing a learned article without
turning a single page of his books, except i n hi s head.
Auto-da-Fe depicts t he stages of Kien's madness as three
rel ations of "head" and "world"-Ki en secluded wi th hi s
books as "a head wi thout a worl d" ; adri ft i n t he besti al
ci ty, "a world without a head" ; dri ven to sui ci de by "the
world i n the head. " And this was not language sui table
only for the mad bookman ; Canetti l ater used i t i n his note
books to describe hi mself, as when he called hi s l i fe nothi ng
but a desperate attempt to thi nk about everythi ng "so that
i t comes together in a head and thus becomes one agai n,"
afrmi ng the very fantasy he had pi ll oried in Auto-da-F e.
The heroic avidity tus described in his notebooks i s the
same goal Canetti had procl ai med at sixteen-"to learn
everythi ng"-for which, he rel ates i n The Tongue Set
Free, hi s mother denounced hi m as sel fsh and i rrespon
sible. To covet, to thi rst, to long for-these are passionate
but also acqui si tive relations to knowledge and truth ;
I
18
7
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
Canetti recalls a time when, never without scruples, he
"even i nvented elaborate excuses and rationales for hav
ing books. " The more i mmature t he avidity, the more rad
ical t he fantasies of throwing of t he burden of books and
learning. Auto-da-Fe, whi ch ends wi t h t he bookman im
molating hi mself wi th his books, is the earliest and crudest
of these fantasies. Canetti ' s later writings project more wist
ful, prudent fantasies of di sburdenment . A note from 1951 :
"His dream: to know everythi ng he knows and yet not
know it. "
Publi shed in 1935 to prai se from Broch, Thomas Mann,
and others, Auto-da-Fe was Canetti' s frst book ( i f one does
not count a play he wrote i n 1932) and only novel , the
product of an enduring taste for hyperbole and a fascina
tion with the grotesque that became i n l ater works more
static, consi derably less apocalyptic. Earwitness ( 1974)
i s like an abstract distillation of the novel-cycle about luna
tics Canetti conceived when he was i n hi s twenties. This
short book consi sts of rapid sketches of ffty forms of mono
mania, of "characters" such as the Corpse-Skulker, the Fun
Runner, the Narrow-Smeller, the Mi sspeaker, the Woe Ad
mi nistrator ; ffty characters and no plot. The ungai nly
names suggest an i nordi nate degree of self-consciousness
about l i terary invention-for Canetti i s a wri ter who end
lessly questions, from the vantage of the morali st, the very
possi bi l ity of making art. "If one knows a lot of people,"
he had noted years earlier, "it seems almost blasphemous
to i nvent more."
A year after the publication of Auto-da-Fe, in hi s hom
age to Broch, Canetti ci tes Broch's stern formula : "Li tera
ture i s always an i mpatience on the part of knowledge."
I 188
Mind as Passion
But Broch' s gi fts for patience were rich enough to produce
those great, patient novels The Death of Virgil and The
Sleepwalkers, and to i nform a grandly specul ative i ntelli
gence. Canetti worried about what could be done wi t h the
novel , which i ndicates the quali ty of his own i mpat ience.
For Canetti, to think i s to i nsist ; he i s always ofering hi m
self choi ces, asserting and reasserting hi s right t o do what
he does. He chose to embark on what he calls a "li fe work,"
and di sappeared for twenty-fve years to hatch that work,
publishi ng nothing after 1938, when he left Vienna ( except
for a second play) , until 1960, when Crowds and Power
appeared. "Everything," he says, went into thi s book.
Canetti's i deals of patience and hi s i rrepressible feel i ng
for the grotesque are united i n hi s i mpressions of a trip to
Morocco, The Voices of Marrakesh ( 1967) . The book's
vignettes of mi ni mal survival present the grotesque as a
form of heroi sm: a pathetic skeletal donkey wi th a huge
erecti on ; and the most wretched of beggars, blind chi ldren
begging and, atrocious to i magine, a brow bundle emi tting
a si ngle sound ( e-e-e-e-e-e) which i s brought every day to
a square i n Marrakesh to collect alms and to which Canetti
pays a moving, characteri stic tri bute : "I was proud of the
bundle because it was al ive."
Humi li ty i s the theme of another work of thi s peri od,
"Kafka's Other Trial," wri tten i n 1969, which treats
Kafka's l i fe as an exemplary fction and ofers a com
mentary on it. Canetti relates the drawn-out calamity of
Kafka's engagement to Fel ice Bauer ( Kafka's letters to
Fel ice had just been publ ished ) as a parable about the se
cret vi ctory of the one who chooses failure, who "with
draws from power i n whatever form i t mi ght appear." He
notes with admi rati on that Kafka often i denti fes with
I 189
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
weak small ani mals, fndi ng i n Kafka hi s own feeli ngs
about the renunci ation of power. In fact, i n the force of hi s
testi mony to t he ethical i mperative of si di ng with the
humi l i ated and the powerless, he seems closer to Si mone
Wei l, another great expert on power, whom he never men
tions. Canetti ' s identifcation with the powerless li es out
si de hi story, however ; the epi tome of powerlessness for
Canetti is not, say, oppressed people but animals. Canetti,
who i s not a Christian, does not conceive of any i nterven
tion or act ive partisanshi p. Neither i s he resigned. In
capable of i nsi pi di t y or satiety, Canetti advances the model
of a mi nd always reacti ng, registering shocks and trying to
outwit them.
The aphoristic writi ng of hi s notebooks i s fast knowl
edgein contrast to the slow knowledge di st i lled i n
Crowds and Power. "My task," he wrote i n 1949, a year
after he began writ ing i t, "i s to show how complex selfsh
ness is." For such a long book, i t i s very tense. His rapi dity
wars wi th hi s tenacity. The somewhat laborious, assert ive
writer who set out to write a tome that will "grab thi s cen
tury by the throat" interferes wi th, and i s interfered with
by, a concise writer who i s more playful, more i nsolent,
more puzzled, more scornful.
The notebook i s the perfect l i terary form for an eternal
student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose sub
ject i s "everyt hi ng. " I t allows entries of all lengths and
shapes and degrees of i mpatience and roughness, but i ts
ideal entry i s the aphorism. Most of Canetti ' s entri es take
up the aphori st' s t radi ti onal themes : the hypocri sies of so
ciety, the vanity of human wi shes, the sham of love, the i ron
ies of death, the pleasure and necessity of sol itude, and the
i nt ricacies of one's own thought processes. Most of the great
I 190
Mind as Passion
aphori sts have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for
human fol ly. ( "The great wri ters of aphorisms read as i f
they had al l known each other well," Canetti has noted. )
Aphori sti c thi nki ng i s i nformal, unsoci able, adversari al,
proudly sel fsh. "One needs fri ends mai nly i n order to be
come i mpudent-that i s, more onesel f," Canetti wri tes :
there is the authenti c tone of the aphori st. The notebook
holds that i deally i mpudent, efci ent sel f t hat one con
structs to deal with the worl d. By the di sjuncti on of i deas
and observations, by the brevity of thei r expression, by the
absence of helpful i llustrati on, the notebook makes of
thinking something l i ght .
Despite havi ng much of t he aphori st's temperament, Ca
netti i s anythi ng but an intellectual dandy. ( He is the op
posi te of, say, Gottfried Benn. ) Indeed, the great l i mi t of
Canetti ' s sensi bi l i ty is the absence of the sl i ghtest trace of
the aesthete. Canetti shows no love of art as such. He has hi s
roster of Great Wri ters, but no pai nt i ng, t heater, flm,
dance, or the other fami l i ars of humani st cul t ure fgure in
hi s work. Canetti appears to stand rather grandly above the
i mpacted i deas of "culture" or "art. " He does not love any
t hi ng the mi nd fabricates for i ts own sake. Hi s wri ti ng,
therefore, has l i ttle i rony. No one touched by the aesthet i c
sensibi l i ty would have noted, severely, "What often both
ers me about Montai gne i s the fat on the quotations. "
There is nothi ng i n Canett i ' s temperament that could
respond to Surreali sm, to speak only of the most persuasi ve
moder option for the aesthete. Nor, i t would seem, was he
ever touched by the temptat i on of the left.
A dedi cated enl ightener, he descri bes the object of hi s
struggle as t he one fai th left i ntact by t he Enli ghtenment,
"the most preposterous of all, the rel i gi on of power." Here
I
191
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
is the side of Canetti that reminds one of Karl Kraus, for
whom the ethical vocation is endless protest . But no writer
is less a j ournalist than Canetti . To protest against power,
power as such ; to protest against death ( he is one of the
great deathhaters of li terature) -these are broad targets,
rather invincible enemi es. Canetti describes Kafka's wo
r
k
as a "refutation" of power, and this is Canetti's aim in
Crowds and Power. All of hi s work, however, aims at a
refutat i on of death. A refutation seems to mean for Canetti
an inordinate insisting. Canetti i nsists that death i s really
unacceptable ; unassi mi lable, because it is what is outside
l i fe ; unj ust, because it l i mits ambi t ion and insults i t. He
refuses to understand death, as Hegel suggested, as some
thing wi thi n l i fe-as the consciousness of death, fni tude,
mortal i ty. In matters of death Canetti i s an unregenerate,
appal led materiali st, and unrelenti ngly quixotic. "I still
haven't succeeded i n doi ng anything against death," he
wrot e i n 1960.
I n The Tongue Set Free Canetti i s eager to do justice to
ach of his admi rat i ons, which is a way of keeping someone
al ive. Typical ly, Canetti also means thi s li terally. Di splay
i ng hi s usual unwill ingness to be reconciled to extinction,
Canetti recalls a teacher i n boarding school and concludes :
"In case he is still in the world today, at ni nety or one
hundred, I would l i ke him to know I bow t o hi m. "
Thi s frst vol ume of hi s autobiography is domi nated by
t he hi story of a profound admi rati on : t hat of Canetti for hi s
mother. It is the portrait of one of the great teacher
parents, a zealot of European high culture sel f-confdentl y
at work before the ti me that turned such a parent i nto a
selfsh tyrant and such a child i nto an "overachi ever," to
I
19
2
Mind as Passion
use the phi l istine label which conveys the contemporar
di sdai n for precocity and i ntellectual ardor.
"Mother, whose hi ghest veneration was for great writ
ers," was the primal admi rer ; and a passionate, merciless
promoter of her admi rations. Canetti 's education consi sted
of immersion in books and their ampli fcation i n talk.
There were eveni ng readings aloud, tempestuous conver
sations about everything they read, about the wri ters tey
agreed to revere. Many discoveries were made separately,
but they had to admi re in uni son, and a di vergence was
fought out i n lacerating debates until one or the other
yielded. Hi s mother' s policies of admi rat i on created a tense
world, defned by loyalties and betrayals. Each new ad
mi ration could t hrow one's l i fe i nto questi on. Canetti de
scri bes hi s mother being di stracted and exal ted for a week
after hearing the St. Matthew Passion, fnally weepi ng be
cause she fears that Bach has made her want only to l i sten
to musi c and that "it's all over wi th books." Canett i , age
thi rteen, comforts her and reassures her that she will st i l l
want to read.
Witnessing hi s mother's leaps and ragi ng contradictions
of character "wi th amazement and admi ration," Canetti
does not underest i mate her cruelty. Omi nously enough,
her favori te modern writer for a long time was Strindberg ;
in another generati on it would probably have been D. H.
Lawrence. Her emphasi s on "character bui ldi ng" often led
thi s fercest of readers to berate her studious chi ld for pur
suing "dead knowledge," avoidi ng "hard" real ity, lett i ng
books and conversat ion make hi m "unmanly. " ( She de
spised women, Canetti reports. ) Canetti relates how an
nihilated by her he someti mes felt and then t urns thi s into
a liberati on. As he afrmed i n hi mself hi s mother's capacity
I 19
3
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
for passionate commitment, he chose to revolt agai nst the
febri l i ty of her enthusi asms, the overexclusiveness of her
avi di ty. Pati ence ( "monumental patience") , steadfastness,
and uni versal i ty of concern became hi s goals. Hi s mother's
world has no ani mals-nly great men ; Canetti will have
both. She cares only about l i terature and hates science;
starting i n 1924 he wi ll study chemist ry at the Universi ty
of Vi enna, t aki ng hi s Ph. D. in 1929. She scofs at hi s i nter
est in pri mi ti ve peoples ; Canetti wi ll avow, as he prepares
to write Crowds and Power : "It is a serious goal of my life
to get to know al l myths of all peopl es. "
Canet t i refuses the vict i m' s part. There is much chivalry
in his portrai t of his mother. It also refects something l ike
a pol icy of tri umphali sm-a steadfast refusal of tragedy, of
i rremediable sufering, that seems related to hi s refusal of
fni tude, of death, and from which comes much of Canetti's
energy: hi s staunchl ess capacity for admi ration and en
husi asm, and his ci vi l ized contempt for compl ai ni ng.
Canett i ' s mot her was undemonstrativethe sl i ghtest
caress was an event. But her talk-debat i ng, hectori ng,
musi ng, recounting her l i fe-was lavish, torrential. Lan
guage was the medi um of thei r passion : words and more
words. With l anguage Canet t i made hi s "frst i ndependent
move" from his mother : l eari ng Swiss German ( she hated
"vulgar" di alects) when he went away to boardi ng school
at fourteen. And wi th l anguage he remai ned connected to
her : wri t i ng a fve-act verse tragedy in Latin ( with an i nter
l i near German transl at i on for her beneft, it flled 121
pages ) , whi ch he dedi cated t o her and sent, request i ng from
her a detai led commentary.
Canetti seems eager to enumerate the many ski l l s whi ch
he owes to hi s mother's example and teachi ng-i ncludi n
/ 194
Mind as Passion
those whi ch he developed to oppose her, also generously
counted as her gifts : obstinacy, i ntellectual i ndependence,
rapi di ty of thought . He also speculates that the livel i ness of
Ladi no, which he'd spoken as a chi l d, helped hi m to thi nk
fast. ( For the precocious, thi nki ng i s a ki nd of speed. )
Canetti gives a complex account of that extraordi nary pro
cess which learni ng is for an i ntellectually precoci ous chi l d
-ful ler and more i nstructive than the accounts i n, say,
Mi l l' s Autobiography or Sartre' s The Words. For Canetti 's
capacities as an admi rer refect t i reless ski l l s as a learner ;
the frst cannot be deep wi thout the second. As an exceptional
learner, Canetti has an i rrepressible loyal ty to teachers, to
what they do well even ( or especi ally when ) they do i t i n
advertently. The teacher at hi s boarding school to whom
he now "bows" won his fealty by being brutal duri ng a class
visit to a slaughterhouse. Forced by him to confront a par
ti cularly gruesome si ght, Canetti learned that the murder
of ani mals was somethi ng "I wasn't meant t o get over. " Hi s
mother, even when she was brutal, was always feedi ng hi s
fagrant alertness wi th her words. Canetti says proudly, "I
fnd mute knowledge dangerous. "
Canetti clai ms to be a "hear-er" rather than a "see-er."
In Auto-da-Fe, Kien pract ices bei ng bl i nd, for he has di s
covered that "bli ndness is a weapon agai nst ti me and space ;
our bei ng is one vast bl i ndness." Part i cul arly in hi s work
since Crowds and Power-such as the didacti cally t i tled
The Voices of Marrakesh, Earwitness, The Tongue Set Free
-Canetti st resses the moral i st' s organ, the ear, and sl ights
the eye ( conti nui ng to ri ng changes on the theme of bli nd
ness ) . Heari ng, speaki ng, and breat hi ng are praised when
ever something i mportant is at stake, i f only in the form of
/ 195
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
ear, mouth ( or tongue) , and throat metaphors. When Ca
netti observes that "the loudest passage in Kafka' s work
tells of this gui l t with respect to the ani mals," the adjective
i s i tsel f a form of i nsi stence.
What is heard i s voices-to which the ear i s a wi tness.
( Canetti does not talk about music, nor indeed about any
art that is non-verbal . ) The ear is the attentive sense,
humbler, more passive, more i mmediate, J ess di scri minat
ing than the eye. Canetti' s di savowal of the eye i s an aspect
of his remoteness from the aesthete's sensibi l i ty, which typi
ca1ly afrms the pleasures and the wisdom of the visual ;
that is, of surfaces. To give soverei gnty to the ear is an
obt rusive, consciousl y archaizing theme i n Canetti s later
work. Impli ci tly he i s restating the archaic gap between
Hebrew as opposed to Greek culture, ear cul ture as op
posed to eye culture, and the moral versus the aesthet i c.
Canetti equates knowing' wi th heari ng, and hearing wi th
heari ng everything and still being able to respond. The
exot i c i mpressions garnered duri ng his stay i n Marrakesh
are uni fed by the quali ty of attenti veness to "voi ces" that
Canet ti tri es to summon i n hi mself. Attentiveness i s the
formal subject of the book. Encounteri ng poverty, mi sery,
and deformity, Canetti undertakes to hear, that is, rea1ly to
pay attenti on to words, cries, and i narti culate sounds "on
the edge of the li vi ng. " His essay on Kraus portrays some
one whom Canetti consi ders i deal both as hearer and as
voi ce. Canetti says that Kraus was haunted by voices ; t hat
hi s ear was constantly open ; that "the rea] Karl Kraus was
the speaker. " Describing a wri ter as a voi ce has become
such a cl i che that it i s possible to mi ss the force-and the
characteri sti c li teralness-of what Canetti means. The voice
for Canetti stands for i rrefutable presence. To treat some
I 196
Mind as Pasion
one as a voice i s to grant authority to that person ; to afrm
that one hears means that one hears what must be heard.
Like a scholar in a Borges story tat mixes real and
i maginary erudi tion, Canetti has a tste for fanci ful blends
of knowledge, eccentri c classifcations, and spi ri ted shifts of
tone. Thus Crowds and Power-in Geran, Masse und
Macht-fers analogies from physi ology and zoology to
explain command and obedi ence ; and is perhaps most ori g
inal when it extends the notion of the crowd to include col
lective uni ts, not composed of human beings, whi ch "recall"
the crowd, are "felt to be a crowd," which "stand as a sym
bol for i t in myth, dream, speech, and song." ( Among such
units-in Canetti's i ngenious catalogue-are fre, rain, the
fngers of the hand, the bee swarm, teeth, the forest, the
snakes of deli ri um tremens. ) Much of Crowds and Power
depends on latent or inadvertent science-fction imagery of
thi ngs, or parts of thi ngs, that become eeri ly autonomous ;
of unpredictable movements, tempos, volumes. Canetti turns
time ( history) into space, in which a wei rd array of bi o
morphic ent i ti es-the various forms of the Great Beast,
the Crowd-disport themselves. The crowd moves, emi ts,
grows, expands, contracts. It s options come in pai rs : crowds
are said by Canetti to be quick and slow, rhythmi c and stag
nant, closed and open. The pack ( another version of the
crowd ) laments, i t preys, i t i s tranqui l, i t i s outward or
inward.
As an account of the psychology and structure of au
thority, Crowds and Power harks back to ni neteent
century t al k about crowds and masses in order to expound
its poetics of poli t i cal ni ghtmare. Condemnation of the
French Revolution, and later of the Commune, was te
/ 197
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
message of the ni neteenth-century books on crowds ( they
were as common then as they are unfashionable now) ,
from Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions
and the Madness of Crowds ( 1841 ) to Le Bon's The
Crowd ( 1895) , a hook Freud admi red, and The Psychol
ogy of Revolution ( 1912 ) . But whereas earlier wri ters had
been content to assert t he crowd's pathology and moral ize
about it, Canetti means to expl ai n, expl ai n exhaustively,
for example, the crowd's destruct iveness ( "often ment ioned
as i ts most conspicuous qual i ty," he says) with his biomor
phi c paradi gms. And unl ike Le Bon, who was making a
case agai nst revol ution and for the status quo ( consi dered
by Le Bon the less oppressive di ctatorship ) , Canetti ofers
a brief agai nst power i tself.
To understand power by considering the crowd, to the
detriment of notions like "cl ass" or "nati on," is precisel y to
insist on an ahistorical understanding. Hegel and Marx are
not mentioned, not because Canetti is so sel f-confdent that
he won't deign to drop the usual names, but because the i m
plications of Canetti's argument are sharply anti -Hegel i an
and anti -Marxi st. Hi s ahistorical method and conserva
tive poli tical temper bri ng Canetti rather close to Freud
-though he i s in no sense a Freudi an. Canetti is what
Freud mi ght have been were he not a psychologist : usi ng
many sources that were i mportant to Freud-the autobiog
raphy of the psychotic Judge Schreber, materi al on anthro
pology and the hi story of ancient rel i gi ons, Le Bon's crowd
theory-he comes to qui te di ferent conclusions about group
psychology and the shaping of the ego. Like Freud, Canetti
tends to fnd the prototype of crowd ( that i s, i rrational )
behavi or i n rel igion, and much of Crowds and Power is
real l y a rati onali st' s di scourse about rel igion. For example,
/
198
Mind as Passin
what Canetti calls te lamenting pack i s j ust another name
for religions of lament, of which he gi ves a dazzling analy
sis, contrast ing the slow tempos of Cathol i c piety and ritual
( expressing the Church's perenni al fear of the open crowd)
with the frenzied mourning in the Shi' ite branch of Islam.
Like Freud, too, Canetti dissolves politics i nto pathol
ogy, treating society as a mental activity-a barbaric one,
of coursethat must be decoded. Thus he moves, without
breaking stride, from the notion of the crowd to te
"crowd symbol," and analyzes social grouping and the
forms of community as transactions of crowd symbols.
Some fnal turn of the crowd argument seems to have been
reached when Canetti puts the French Revolution in i t
place, fndin
g
the Revolution less interesting as an eruption
of the destructive than as a "national crowd symbol" for the
French.
For Hegel and hi s successors, the hi storical ( the home of
i rony) and the natural are two radically di ferent pro
cesses. In Crowds and Power, hi story i s "natural." Canetti
argues to history, not from it. Fi rst comes the account of
the crowd ; then, as i llustrati on, the section called "The
Crowd in Hi story." Hi story is used only to furni sh examples
-a rapid use. Canetti is partial to the evidence of hi story
less ( i n the Hegel ian sense) peoples, treating anthropologi
cal anecdotes as having the same i llustrative value as an
event taking place i n an advanced hi storical society.
Crowds and Power i s an eccentric bookmade li terally
eccentri c by i ts i deal of "universality," which leads Canetti
to avoid makin
g
the obvious reference : Hi tler. He ap
pears i ndi rectly, in the central importance Canetti gives to
te case of Judge Schreber. ( Here i s Canetti's only refer
ence to Freud-in one discreet footnote, where Canetti says
/ 199
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
that had Freud lived a bi t longer he might have seen Schre
her's paranoid delusions i n a more pertinent way: as a
prototype of the political, specifcally Nazi , mental ity. ) But
Canetti i s genuinely not Eurocentric-one of hi s large
achievements as a mi nd. Conversant wi th Chi nese as well
as European thought, with Buddhi sm and Islam as wel l as
Christianity, Canetti enjoys a remarkable freedom from
reductive habits of thi nking. He seems i ncapable of using
psychological knowledge i n a reductive way ; the author of
the homage to Broch could not have been thinking about
anything as ordinary as personal motives. And he fghts the
more plausible reduction to the hi storical . "I woul d give a
great deal to get rid of my habit of seei ng the world hi s
torically," he wrote i n 1950, t wo years after he started writ
ing Crowds and Power.
Hi s protest against seeing hi storically is di rected not j ust
against that most plausible of reductioni sms. It is also a
protest against death. To think about hi story is to think
about the dead ; and to be i ncessantly remi nded that one i s
mortal. Canetti ' s thought i s conservative i n t he most l i teral
sense. I t-he-does not want to die.
"I want to feel everythi ng i n me before I think i t,"
Canetti wrote i n 1943, and for this, he says, he needs a long
l i fe. To di e prematurely means having not fully engorged
hi mself and, therefore, having not used hi s mi nd as he
could. It i s almost as if Canetti had to keep his conscious
ness in a permanent state of avi di ty, to remain unreconci led
to death. "It i s wonderful that nothing i s lost i n a mi nd,"
he also wrote i n his notebook, i n what must have been a not
i nfrequent moment of euphori a, "and would not this alone
/ 200
Mind as Pasion
be reason enough to l ive very long or even forever?" Recur
rent images of needing to feel everything inside hi mself, of
uni fying everything i n one head, i llustrate Canetti ' s at
tempts through magical thinking and moral clamorousness
to "refute" death.
Canetti ofers to strike a bargain with death. "A century?
A paltry hundred years ! Is that too much for an earnest
i ntention ! " But why one hundred years ? Why not three
hundred?-l ike the 337-yeer-old heroine of Karel
C
apek' s
The Makropulos Afair ( 1922 ) . In the pl ay, one character
(a soci al i st "progressive") describes the di sadvantages of a
normal l i fe span.
What can a man do duri ng hi s sixty years of l i fe?
What enjoyment has he? 'hat can he learn ? You
don't l ive to get the frui t of the tree you have
planted ; you' ll never learn all the things that man
kind has discovered before you ; you won't com
plete your work or leave your example behi nd you ;
you'll die wi thout having even lived. A l i fe of three
hundred years on the other hand would allow ffty
years to be a child and a pupil ; ffty years to get to
know the world and see all that exi sts in i t ; one hun
dred years to work for the beneft of all ; and then,
when he has achieved al l human experience, another
hundred years to l ive i n wisdom, to rule, to teach,
and to set an example. Oh, how valuable human l i fe
would be i f i t lasted three hundred years.
/ 201
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
He sounds like Canetti-except that Canetti does not jus
ti fy hi s yeari ng for longevity wi t h any appeal to i ts greater
scope for good works. So l arge i s the value of the mi nd that
i t alone i s used to oppose death. Because the mi nd i s so real
to him Canetti dares to chal lenge death, and because the
body i s so unreal he percei ves nothi ng di smaying about
extreme longevi ty. Canetti is more than wi lli ng to l i ve as a
centenari an ; he does not, whi le he i s fantasizi ng, ask for
what Faust demanded, the ret urn of youth, or for what
Emi li a Makropulos was gi ven by her alchemi st father, i ts
magical prolongat i on. Youth has no part in Canetti's fan
tasy of i mmortali ty. I t i s pure longevi ty, the longevi t y of
the mi nd. I t i s si mpl y assumed that character has the same
stake as mi nd i n longevi ty : Canetti thought "the brevi ty of
l i fe makes us bad. " Emi l i a Makropulos suggests i ts lon
gevity would make us worse :
You cannot go on loving for t hree hundred years.
And you cannot go on hoping, creat i ng, gazi ng at
thi ngs for three hundred years. You can' t stand i t.
Everythi ng becomes bori ng. I t' s bori ng to be good
and boring to be bad . . . And then you realize that
not hi ng actually exists . . . You are so close to every
thi ng. You can see some poi nt in everythi ng. For
you everything has some value because those few
years of yours won't be enough to sati sfy your en
j oyment . . . . I t's di sgust i ng to thi nk how happy you
are. And i t' s s i mply due to the ri di culous coi nci
dence that you're going to die soon. You take an
ape-l ike i nterest in everythi ng . . . .
/
202
Mind as Passion
But t hi s plausi ble doom i s j ust what Canet t i cannot admi t.
He is unperturbed by the possi bi l i ty of the faggi ng of ap
petite, the satiation of desi re, the devaluat i on of passion.
Canetti gives no thought to the decomposi ti on of the feel i ngs
any more than of the body, only to the persi stence of the
mi nd. Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mi nd,
wi t h so l i ttle ambi valence.
Canetti i s someone who has felt in a profound way the
responsi bi l i ty of words, and much of hi s work makes the
efort t o communi cat e somethi ng of what he has learned
about how to pay attent ion to the world. There is no doc
tri ne, but there is a great deal of scorn, urgency, gri ef, and
euphori a. The message of the mi nd's passions is passi on.
"I try to i magi ne someone saying to Shakespeare, ' Relax ! ' "
says Canet t i . Hi s work eloquently defends tensi on, exer
ti on, moral and amoral seri ousness.
But Canetti is not j ust another hero of the wi l l . Hence
the unexpected l ast attri bute of a great wri ter that he fnds
i n Broch : such a wri ter, he says, teaches us how to breathe.
Canetti commends Broch's wri t i ngs for thei r "rich store of
breat hi ng experi ence. " It was Canetti ' s deepest, oddest
compl i ment, and therefore one he also pai d to Goethe ( the
most predictable of his admi rat ions ) : Canetti also reads
Goethe as sayi ng, "Breathe! " Breathi ng may be the most
radi cal of occupati ons, when construed as a l i berati on from
other needs such as havi ng a career, bui l di ng a reputati on,
accumul at i ng knowledge. What Canetti says at the end of
thi s progress of admi rat i on, his homage to Broch, suggests
what there i s most to admi re. The l ast achievement of the
seri ous admi rer is to stop i mmedi atel y put t i ng to work the
/
20
3
U N D E R T H E S I G N O F S A T U R N
energies aroused by, flling up the space opened by, what is
admi red. Thereby talented admi rers give themselves per
mi ssi on to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But for that i t is
necessary to go beyond avi di ty ; to identify wi th something
beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power.
( 1980)
A B O U T T H E A U T H O R
SusAx SoxTAG is the author of two no\els, The
Benefactor and Death Kit, and a colletion of shor
stories, I, etcetera. Her other books include Against
Interpretation, Tnp to Hanoi, Styles of Radical Wil,
On Photography ( winner of the National Book
Critics Ci rcle Award for Criticism) and
Illness a. Metaphor.
BELI. ES l . ElTRES
"[O]ne of the fnest most rigorously
intellectal witers at work today;'
-Boston Sunday Globe
In her fst collection of essays since Styls of
Radicl Wil ( 1969), Susan Sontag brings together
her critical writing of the past decade-her studies of
Paul Goodman, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin,
Roland Barthes, and her thee famous analyses of
fascist aesthetics: her evaluations of the works of Leni
Riefenstah and Elias Caneni, and her brilliant dis
section of Hans-Jirgen Syberberg's Hitl
"My own feeling is tat Miss Sontag is more
interesting on Syberberg than Syberberg was on
Htler?'-John Leonard, T Ne Yrk T
"I this new collection of essays . . . Sontag masters
all she chooses. to survey?'-T Chiago Sun-Tes
Design by Paul Gamarello/ Eyetoth Design Inc.
I llustrtion by Jim Harter