Alice Yaeger Kaplan: Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, May 27, 1987.
Neo-Marxism means Marxism plus whatever’s trendy. It has colonized many university departments in the United States—mostly in the social sciences but increasingly in the humanities, as well. Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s study of fascism among French intellectuals before the Second World War excels many products of this ideology. She writes what she calls “progressive” literary criticism, trying to nudge fascism into refuting itself. But her lively mind is so honest, it allows readers to nudge neo-Marxism into refuting itself, too.
Almost every extended act of literary criticism today begins with a discussion of ‘theory,’ the scholar’s beliefs about language and ‘texts.’ Because almost no literary scholar today has any real knowledge of philosophy, these exercises incline toward confusion. Kaplan burns the obligatory incense before such idols as psychoanalysis, feminism, the Frankfurt School, and ‘deconstructionism.’ She is best when her intelligence ascends from the cave of academic fashion and sees for itself.
She notices the many contradictory elements in fascism: elitism and populism, modernism and primitivism, paternalism and “mother-bound feelings,” ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’ But she also wants to show how fascism—the world derived from the Latin fasces, the axe with rods bundled around its handle, symbol of authority in ancient Rome—could bind together disparate ideas and sentiments, make them into a usable instrument of political power—the ‘totality’ of totalitarianism, that word Mussolini invented to name a new form of tyranny. She patiently looks for coherence beneath the apparent contradictions, eschewing the partisan histrionics that mar so much Marxist writing.
She does find several coherent patterns, but presents them in a way that reveals her ideology’s defects. Following the neo-Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin, she accurately observes that many fascist intellectuals veil economic and political reality with esthetic categories. Such men can even “describe objects that are used to kill as if they are purely creative.” She concedes that this strategy “is not necessarily fascist; we have seen it since.” She does not say where. She might be thinking of the less extreme ‘New Left’ rhetoric of the 1960s and early ’70s. (“Small is beautiful,” they claimed.) If so, estheticism does not distinguish fascism from other ideologies, including at least some variants of neo-Marxism.
The same criticism weighs against many other insights Kaplan offers. Yes, as the fascist state establishes itself, “the populist ideal” of revolutionary fascism “mutates toward an elitist one”—but the same is true under communism and even, to a much lesser degree, in republics. True, the lack of a strong middle class made Italy and Germany more vulnerable to fascism than was France—but the same held true for the conditions of Marxist victories in Russia and China. Granted, fascism used intellectuals, then swept them aside after gaining power—as did Marxists, who used ‘fellow travelers’ in exactly the same way (and this doesn’t make the latter Marxists, or even proto-Marxists). Unquestionably, fascists use language to subvert truth—as do totalitarians of the ‘Left’ and, more moderately, almost all rhetoricians. Fascists did indeed “place invective on the side of science” (or maybe vice-versa), but in this they could teach nothing to Stalin and his Lysenko.
I do not suggest that Kaplan should have written as extensively about communists, or French communists; authors need not be taxed for the books they choose not to write. But by almost entirely omitting any reference to communism, she goes too easy on her own Marxism and fails properly to ‘frame’ her picture of French fascism. She sees that fascism “was conceived by its enthusiasts as a new form of revolt, competitive with Marxism,” but she neglects to show concretely how this—so to speak—dialectic worked.
The neo-Marxist emphasis on political economy, psychology, and esthetics neglects the moral dimension of politics. Her dismissal of “moralism” serves Kaplan fairly well in her chapters on Marinetti and Céline, but it spoils her chapters on Sorel and Drieu la Rochelle, and weakens those on fascist broadcasters and film critics. Sorel’s notion of the general strike, for example, appeals less to estheticism than to a kind of morality: to heroism, and particularly to the refusal of vengefulness even within a violent revolution. Drieu la Rochelle’s anti-feminism, along with his admiration for ‘masculine’ warrior virtues, likewise comes from a moral impulse; he does not so much celebrate killing (as Kaplan would have it), but risk, self-sacrifice.
Kaplan makes much of the “banality” of French fascist writing, by which she means its apparently “unserious” character, the unthreatening frivolity that makes it easy to ignore but also easy to disseminate among the unwary. This is oversophisticated. Not “banality” but fascism’s undeniable appeal to the spirited virtues neglected in modern democratic life—courage, honor, manliness—makes it dangerous. Without that, and left with only the likes of Céline, fascism would have little or no attractive force, even among intellectuals.
And even insofar as fascist writers were “banal” or unserious, does that really set them apart from much of the inter-war Parisian literary scene generally? Only racism and economic conservatism appear to distinguish fascism from communism. On economics, Kaplan asserts that fascism subordinates it to “ideology.” This is true, but not in the way she means it: in Germany and Italy, “the economic structures of the fascist state are basically unchanged from those of the capitalist one.” Obviously, no major aggrandizement of the state can leave an economy “basically unchanged,” a fact embarrassing to Marxists, whose states never get around to withering away (as promised by Lenin) precisely because they too put ideology above economics.
This leaves racism, or at least nationalism. Because Kaplan’s neo-Marxism prevents sympathy for nationalism, she cannot begin to account for its appeal to French intellectuals. Without that account, she cannot adequately explain the virulently racist nationalism of the worst fascists.
“Fascism seems to be about making life into art—a transformation that promises to give artists an enormous role.” This appearance pleases certain notable inclinations both intellectual and French. Yet Marxism in its own way also wants to transform life into art. So, in a different way, does capitalism. And what of ‘post-modernism itself? Does it not attempt to The whole modern enterprise, beginning with Machiavelli, is ‘about’ using human art to conquer nature. If this is a problem, and I think it is, then neo-Marxism cannot solve it. Neo-Marxism cannot get past its own deeply modern presumptions.
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