Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture

by James O'Meara

There’ve been countless attempts to present Kafka as a closet socialist, a friend of Czech aspirations, and so on. The fact is that in a public proclamation of late 1916 (to raise funds for a hospital exclusively for German-speaking mentally-damaged soldiers of Kaiser Franz Josef’s multinational army), Kafka speaks explicitly as a “German-Bohemian Folk-Comrade.” His thinking vis-à-vis the Habsburg Empire seems to have been “non-political.” Not in an oppositional sense at all, simply as conformism to the state of affairs. As Reiner Stach (whom I was very sad and surprised to see rubbishing my book even while admitting he hadn’t read it) says of Kafka’s apparent views on Habsburg Foreign Policy, “the ease with which Kafka parroted the official jargon is disconcerting.”143

  Notice how Hawes tries to insinuate that even Franz Josef (with his anachronistically “multinational” army) was more “diverse” than white-bread Franz Kafka? “Disconcerting” to the Tribe, perhaps, or to those who “parrot” in their turn British War Office propaganda as history.144

  Now, if you’ve been peeking at my footnotes, you noticed the references to “pornography” and even “Kafka’s porn cache.” Yes, it all comes together in one big ball of scandal; as George Costanza once said, in a rather Kafkaesque moment, “This thing is like an onion: The more layers you peel, the more it stinks!”145

  For it turns out that Kafka liked to spend some of that salary on subscribing to an expensive, “arty” porn journal. And, as Hawes says, while puffing his book elsewhere,

  [T]he publisher of this porn in 1906 was the same man who, in 1908, was to become Kafka’s own first publisher—and the same man who would, in 1915, arrange for Kafka to very publicly receive the prize-monies from the most prestigious German literary award of the year.146

  Even for Prague at the fin de siècle, it seems a small world, after all!

  As for the porn itself, Hawes tries to make a big meal out of it, as it were; but while he’s correct that despite the literally millions of books, theses, and articles on Kafka, no one else has ever commented on it, it’s hardly as earth-shatteringly lewd as he keeps insisting; more like the censored parts of Beardsley’s drawings.147 Of course, your mileage may vary.148

  Yes, one by one, Hawes knocks the props out from under the K-Myth, until, like one of those giant papier-mâché puppet heads the anarchists wave around at their demos, it comes crashing to the ground.

  Or rather, to use a more literary metaphor, it’s like a palimpsest, and after stripping the later monkish nonsense off, a lost classic stands revealed. Kafka, as I’ve been insinuating all along, the greatest writer, certainly the greatest European writer, of the 20th century—is One of Us! A White Guy!

  But you shouldn’t let yourself think Hawes is One of Us. He hates the “real” Kafka, the rich, sexually-active, free-spending Yuppie, and above all, the German patriot.149

  He’s arguing against the K-Myth because he thinks it distorts our understanding of the writings, distracts us from the texts themselves. It does so by creating a sickly secular saint of the typically Judaic sort.

  We all love the myth of the great dead romantic outsider genius (for what dubious reasons I leave you, dear reader, to wonder yourself). But knowing who Kafka really was—and therefore who he wasn’t—is the only way we’ll ever be able to read his wonderful writings in all their true, black-comic glory.150 If it takes a bit of shock therapy to dispel the myth, so be it.

  “We”? And what “dubious reasons” are behind it?

  To combat it, he constructs his supposedly historically accurate counter-figure, not as a new idol, but to disgust us with Kafka altogether as a real, individual man, leaving us with the works alone—the things themselves, as Kafka’s contemporary tribesman Husserl would say. In fact, it would be safe to say that Hawes despises the “real” Kafka and wants to dissociate him from the Holocaust precisely because he is unworthy of being its patron saint.151

  Having supposedly liberated us from the K-Myth which distorts our reading of Kafka’s works in—as he would not say—a typically Judaic fashion as the works of a tortured, prophetic outsider, Hawes, under the pretense of giving us a reading of “the works themselves,” merely substitutes a new, equally Judaic though more secular reading, as works of “black comedy.”

  While the original British title, Excavating Kafka, reflects the first part of the agenda, the subsequent American title, Read Kafka Before You Ruin Your Life (clearly meant to capitalize on the success of such DIY culture texts as Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life), reflects the second, more insidious part of the agenda: Kafka as the prophet, not of the Holocaust, but of post-modernism. As he puts it clearly elsewhere:

  What Kafka is obsessed with is our suicidal readiness to buy into grand narratives of redemption and absolute certainty, however ramshackle and visibly corrupt they may be. The vital element in his works that the K-Myth obscures is that his heroes are utterly complicit in their own “entrapment.” These are not tales of innocent people suddenly swallowed up by miscarriages of cosmic justice. Of all the philosophical roots of Kafka’s thought, I believe that the single most important is Nietzsche’s famous and terrifying insight regarding the “nihilism” of modern, post-religious man (my translation is necessarily a free one): “mankind would rather long for nothingness than have nothing to long for.” This Nietzschean analysis of why modern people do what they do may well be very apposite to both the killers of 9/11 and the blank-eyed porn-stares of the Abu-Ghraib abusers.152

  Note the clever use of the porn trope to rope in “us” with Kafka and the Moslem extremists—moral equivalence, as the Neo-Cons would say. We’re all—except Hawes and his vaguely Marxist academic cohorts—zombies in the grip of “grand narratives,” etc.

  And why read Kafka today? Because his analysis of the way we’re so fatally, suicidally tempted by visions of a gold-lit past, complete with all its alleged certainties and securities, is more needed today than ever. His works are one great warning against swallowing the grand illusions, one great demand that if we want to really live, we have to grow up and look life in the eye.153

  Of course, one might suggest that it is the purveyors of this somehow simultaneously smug and stale po-mo cliché that needs to “grow up” or at least leave the ’60s behind, man. Still, as the reference to Nietzsche shows, there’s something to this kind of thing. But if we are to assimilate Kafka to Nietzsche as a “Good European,” we need to take our Nietzsche as Baron Evola did; useful as a solvent of bourgeois liberalism, but useless—indeed, poisonous—when taken as a guide to the way forward.154

  And speaking of academic po-moists, the reaction of the “orthodox” Kafka specialists was swift and predictable; yes, Max Brod was a mythmaker, but we’ve known this for years, blah blah blah. Hawes, himself something of a Kafka specialist, may have his own reasons for tweaking the experts. He may have simply chosen the wrong target; it may be that “Walter Benjamin exploded the Kafka myth is the ’30s” in some unreadable bit of Euro-sludge (after all, if Kafka wasn’t the biggest Judaic Genius, then Benjamin was, right?), but so what? Kafka, like Dickens and Orwell, is one of the few writers to have his own adjective, and we all know what “kafkaesque” means; that’s Hawes’ real target.

  Perhaps the silliest, but most symptomatic, response is from tribesman Sander Gilman, no doubt put out that Hawes fails to mention his own biography, modestly titled Kafka.155 Gilman (related to Lovecraft?) fouls the waters with some typical Judaic claptrap, smuggled in through Stanley Fish, that “all biographers lie,” and so he modestly, cringingly politely, can’t really complain that Hawes sees Kafka as a regular guy, rather than being “special” (i.e., a Jewish genius jewishly obsessed with his Jewish jewitude). But it sure would be good for the Jews if Hawes would just go away:

  Hawes misrepresents—but then again, as Fish believes, so do all biographers. It could be argued, for example, that I needed my Kafka to be ill and anxious and creative in order to shore up my reading of the situation of European Jews at the turn of the
century. [No! Who could doubt you, boychik?] But the major difference between this writer and James Hawes is that while we all have stories we tell about the lives we write, some of us are more concerned with the nuances of the research we do and of the world that we try to describe. [I.e., is it good for the Jews?] In the end, however, it is the believability of those lies by the widest community that defines the successful biographer. Let us see whether time is kind to Hawes’s Welsh-comic [Gilman, true tribesman, found it funny that Hawes teaches in Wales], literary intellectual Franz Kafka.

  Oh, boo-boo. If all biographers lie, then why should I believe your lies? I say phooey-kerflooey! Away with all this Judaic quatsch! Gilman is right; the “nuances” of Hawes’s portrait of Kafka are worrisome—they encourage the goyim, though surely that would be the “widest community” of all, one would think. Let us have a real Kafka, Kafka as he was, Kafka as he saw himself, Kafka as he wanted to be seen, however you want to put it: a proud member of the German literary and cultural tradition.

  Kafka: our folk-comrade!

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right

  July 3, 2014

  MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ’S

  SEXUAL ANTI-UTOPIA

  Michel Houellebecq

  The Elementary Particles

  Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

  New York: Knopf, 2000

  “I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.”156

  “The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. . . . And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles.”

  —Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft:

  Against the World, Against Life

  “Frolicking has never been so depressing.”

  —MST3k Episode 609: Coleman Francis’ Skydivers

  It really does seem odd that I have until now managed to avoid reading the novels of Michel Houellebecq. It’s especially odd I didn’t plunge right in after reading his excellent essay on Lovecraft,157 and even quoting it my very own first essay on Lovecraft, published right here on Counter-Currents.158 Why, we even share the same year of birth!159

  The appeal of Houellebecq to elements of the Right should be obvious; his enemies seem to be our enemies, from American consumer culture to modernity itself, as well as not just the French versions of PC but French culture itself, at least in its postwar state.160

  His basic notion is that, contrary to the foolish dreams of the ’68ers, and dogmatically enforced today by both academic and consumer establishments, “The ‘decentred self’ remains a selfish unit; the death of hierarchy merely nurtures the cult of the individual and an incoherent, deviant society.”161

  These fiercely individualized entities are the elementary particles left to spin aimlessly by the smashing of the bonds of traditional society.

  It is interesting to note that the “sexual revolution” was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word “household” suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day. 162

  This is pretty consistent with the model explored by Baron Evola in, for example, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul.163 Liberalism has atomized164 society by a Nietzschean smashing of all our idols. All members are now “free” to “realize themselves” and “become what they are.” The problem being, Nietzsche intended this to apply to an elite, the potential Supermen—what Evola calls “differentiated [from the social herd] men”—not society at large. Left to his own devices, the Underman resorts to what he knows best: sensation, and thus to shopping and sex.

  Houellebecq’s characters are notable for how completely they embrace the consumerist ethos: believing that youth is society’s primary index of value, that sex is the only pleasure and is eminently commodifiable, that disposability is natural, that quality is ultimately reducible to quantity [cf. Guénon], that the quest for novelty is our only genuine tradition, that secular materialism has triumphed once and for all over atavistic spirituality.

  So far, he seems to be on our team. Of course, someone who hates as much as Houellebecq is apt to be an uncomfortable ally.

  I know that Islam—by far the most stupid, false and obfuscating of all religions—currently seems to be gaining ground, but it’s a transitory and superficial phenomenon . . . [All but Guénon & Co. shout Yah!]

  . . . in the long term, Islam is even more doomed than Christianity. [Crickets]165

  And just to be clear on that: “I was talking about the stupidity of all monotheistic religions.”166

  Alrighty then, moving along . . . Besides being a fountain of opinions either bold and scintillating or mean and stupid, depending on whose ox is being gored,167 Houellebecq is a damned good, clear—lucid, the French would say, I suppose—writer; here, if anywhere, worthy of the comparisons made to Camus.

  But unlike Camus, he’s a funny guy168 (though perhaps rather like Joe Pesci is “funny” in Goodfellas):

  As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit that he had been wrong. What conferred dignity on people was television.

  Rumor had it that he was homosexual; in reality, in recent years, he was simply a garden-variety alcoholic

  The beach at Meschers was crawling with wankers in shorts and bimbos in thongs. It was reassuring.

  Whatever, in the showers at the gym I realized I had a really small dick. I measured it when I got home—it was twelve centimeters, maybe thirteen or fourteen if you measured right to the base. I’d found something new to worry about, something I couldn’t do anything about; it was a basic and permanent handicap. It was around then that I started hating blacks.

  Not that Old Grumpypuss will let you just have your fun:

  Irony won’t save you from anything; humour doesn’t do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.

  And, as in liberal society, until then, when all else fails, there’s also the sex.169 Perhaps I’ve consumed more than my share of pornography, but this did not seem as overwhelming or perverse as reviewers would have us believe. I suppose it serves the purpose of shocking the shockable, but if you find it off-putting, or just boring, go ahead and skip it, it really adds nothing to the message of the book.

  Now, at this point, fifteen years later, there’s little to be gained in adding yet another review; so with the book taken as read, I’d like to take a look at that message and try to place it in relation to some other, rather grander works.

  First off, the book has an odd structure that only becomes apparent with the Epilogue. “Despite the essentially elaborate scope of the plot revealed in the novel’s conclusion (i.e. the eventual emergence of cloning as a replacement for the sexual reproduction of the human race) . . .”170 It’s not entirely mind-shattering, but if you’ve been told that, like Joyce’s Ulysses, it’s just a book about sex, you might wonder what the point is. Even the New Yorker reviewer found himself frustrated by what he called “editorials” cropping up throughout the text, which he felt were Houellebecq putting in his two cents.171

  Actually, they are another feature of, and clue to, the structure and intent of the book. Certainly other odd features, such as the long poem that opens the book, become clearer at this point. What you have here is another one of those “future histories” that I’ve been
reviewing recently;172 a biography, from the near future (apparently around 2030) of the main protagonist, the geneticist Michel, and the effects of his work in our near future (actually, now right about today).

  In particular, though, it reminded me of a far older, and much more substantial one than those. Then it finally hit me: Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game

  .173

  Hesse’s novel takes place around 2500 and presents itself as a biography of a recently deceased and rather controversial Game Master, one Joseph Knecht. To orient the reader (both fictional and real) to both the Game and the history out of which it emerged (which is our own, of course) it opens with a long section presenting “A General Introduction” to the Game’s history “For the Layman.”174 It ends with a supposed selection of poems from Knecht’s student days documenting his struggle to assimilate the game, and to allow himself to be assimilated by it.

  The Game, we learn, arose out of the ruins of The Century of Wars, which was, not coincidentally, the “Age of the Feuilleton,” symbol of journalistic and scholarly frivolity.175 At the last moment, Europe pulled back from the brink, and initiated a movement dedicated to Truth rather than Interest, to Platonically purify and uplift society by purifying the arts and sciences of fraud, triviality, and irrelevance; above all, by demonstrating their unity and interconnection.