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Middle Earth various issues, 1967-1968
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Oglesby; Contemporary Defeat of Fiction cont. change it that he does so, or to provide it with a new purpose or even to defend an old meaning, but almost, rather, as if he aimed to resist events in themselves, to repulse History's impudent incursion upon his own private moral space, that inner sanctum in which the unsuspenseful but elegant struggle with the Absurd was to be resumed onc the impostor had been banished again. Camus is rebellious only toward that perfectly innocuous Nothingness which indeed is so radically passive as to comply immediately with all his stage and hostile Nothingness as soon as he so regards it. Toward History, the collisions of men in their pursuit of objectives Camus undertakes no more than the provisional, temporary role of the resistant. If only History would not interfere, if only there were no Nazi soldier and no revolutionaries, if only men undertook no more objectives, then he could perhaps have time enough for his real life -- a life, that is, in which victory is no doubt unthinkable, but in which the varieties of defeat rank themselves from the noble to the wretched and serve in any case to make a man's carrer conclusive, to relieve it of that disorder and incompleteness which no merely historical existence can ever escape. In trying thus to improve upon Napoleon, Camus has changed the meaning of Elba: insteag of exile, it now means reunion. Escape from the contingent and the changing becomes the overriding purpose of political action: such escape alone restores the possibility of the encounter with silence. The despair that goes with this encouter becomes nothing else than the most glamorous mood of the most glamorous man, the ghostly Don Quixote whise eyes were opened, and whose self-dramatization is only the more poignant because he calls our attention to it in terms so unstintingly self-deprecatory. 'Covered with ashes,' says the judge-penitent Clarence toward the end of The Fall, 'tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing, but with piercing eyes, I stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing and saying: 'I was the lowest of the low.' This is the pose which classical and conservative thought is apparently required to assume in our time. Camus is important precisely because, in refusing historical rebellion -- in refusing, that is, to accept the concreteness, the continuation, and thus the impurities of the revolutionist's life -- he presents us with the best of cases against revolution, the most humane and compassionate case, 'Passionately longing,' as he put it, 'f or solitude and silence,' he is important because he has renovated with exceptional power if not lucidity that idea of exile as self-reunion which reapears in our time as the one alternative to an always terrifying political violence, the one sanctuary for that Western and highly individualistic innocence which chooses above all its own self-preservation. His work embodies the nearest resolution of a predicament which in the end seems to remain quite intact, namely: If you choose to answer injustice by standing with historical revolution, you become the forced confederate of an evidently automatic terror. If you choose on such grounds to answer terror by siding with the regime, becoming first and foremost the partisan of traditions and institutions and continuity rather than suffering men, you become the forced confederate of the old privilege and its injustices. If foreknowledge of both disasters persuades you to answer terror and injustice by standing critically above the battle, confronting each historical mode with its opposition's ideal, condemning terror in the name of order and oppression in the name of justice, then you become forced again, at least the practical confederate of the moral sycophant for you accusations, however sincerely moved, will always be most overheard and exploited by incumbent aythority. A France busy making the most ruthless war against Algerian rebels, a France about to produce the infamous OAS conspiracy, scarcely hears when Camus -- rather softly, to be sure--reprimands the colonialist for his outrages; but this same France is suddenly all ears when he denounces with his severest passion the Soviet Union's slave-labor camps, giving us a sorry spectacle indeed as the counterrevolutionaries try to conceal their ecstasy with a few crocodile tears; it was not for the Turkestani victims that France shared Camus's angry grief, it was rather at the expense of a chronically malformed revolution, which remains nevertheless the only hope of the wretched, that this France celebrated, behind its tears, another victory for reaction. The function of Camus's metaphysical priorities of his setting Man against Absurd, of his concommitant suggestion that to fight within history for historical objectives amounts to being waylaid, ambushed on the road to the only really important encounter--the practical function of this is a politics of disengagement which pretends to be the opposite. This is Camus's one really important shame; and it is at last the one which, for all his candor, he never confesses.He does not rebel whithin history, but against it. He does not rebel in the name of what man's world might become, but rather in the name of what it never can become, a world in which men have no objectives. He thereby guarantees his permanent disappointment with men, guarantees moreover that men's historical failures will always have all the features of a personal betrayal. In effect, he has written into his contract with men an escape clause which will never [insert] LI'L BILL'S PREFERRED STOCK MONDAY AND TUESDAY fail to become operative: a remarkable strategy which allows him at one and the same time to seem both engaged and innocent. His definition of rebellion, in fact, requires him only to reveal for us again and again his moral superiority to both combatants, to the permanent crisis of Western history. That the West widely considers him to be both engaged and lucid only reveals the extent to which his partisanship is rootedly Western--conservative, sometimes all but royalist: the new Edmund Burke disguised as Humphrey Bogart; and reveals further the extent to which his obscurities, his intellectual and moral failures, exactly coincide with what an illiberal Western liberalism prefers left in shadow. There was always, and there remains, quite another way of visualizing our experience, another way of drawing up the cast of characters: the historical way. In place of the exquisite and subtle struggle of Man against the Absurd, a struggle which is in fact not turbulent at all but perfectly still, consisting mainly of a certain mood, a certain gaze, a metaphysics, the historical imagination gives us instead something a good bit uglier and more lethal, a struggle of men against men pursuing their different historical purposes. Camus always had wanted the cosmos to offer him a meaning, or at least an explanation; perhaps an apology. He never seems to have recognized that this cosmic silence--absurdity--was in fact the very ground of freedom, the indispensable precondition of the morality which he so passionately desired. If the cosmos has no meaning, if it is in itself absurd, then men are at liberty to produce meaning: to assemble alternatives, to make choices, and to act creatively. As for this history, as Sartre observes, 'the problem is not to know its objective, but to give it one.' But to say as much, obviously, is to reconstitute, beneath the dainty dancer's feet of the ideal, the rough and most uncertain ground of the practical. One might even become--who knows?--a murderer, like everyone else. Appalled, Camus decided to forego, even to denounce, the battle of men against men. He devoted all his considerable skill to the task of proving that the real battle lay elsewhere and was to be fought in solitude. In redefining rebellion in this was, in providing it with a radically metaphysical and antipolitical meaning, he concludes with a silent subversion of his own moral thrust; his choice of political silence, in the end, amounts to a vote for oppression. And it makes it only all the sadder that this vote is cast in the name of those human values which otherwise require exactly the creation of a new society. It seems to me that something like this happens in Catch-22, and that the moral and historical categoriesby which it is brought off in that novel correspond to those I have claimed to see in Camus. Except for Moby Dick, which will remain the supreme critique of America until America redefines and surpasses itself, I can think of no important American novel whose primary conflicts is more deeply class-structured than Catch 22. Heller could hardly have made thing cleater: the Second World War, at one level the clash of rival nationalisms, of vertically unified class societies, at anoter and apparently more important level was an intra-societal clash of rival class's--the men against the officers, the young against the old, the people against the ruling establishment, neither one sharing or even recognizing the other's aims, the one aiming consciously to extend and consolidate its power, the other aiming fitfully and in semi-darkness to break free of the hold and to redefine social value in its own terms. By the time Milo Minderbinder, that gargoyle entrepreneur, has contracted with the Germans to defend the same bridge which he has ocntracted with the Americans to destroy, this central point has been made brutally clear. But it was there all along. Fairly early, for example, when Cadet Clevinger, 'one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains,' is sent up for trial before the Auction Board for stumbling while marching to class, he finds that his accuser, and one of his prosecutor, his accuser, and one of his judges are one and the same man. Towards the end of this trial, Clevinger is militantly idealist' enough to point out that the court cannot find him guilty and still remain faithful to what he calls 'the cause of justice.' This provokes the following outburst from the bench: 'That's not what justice is,' the colonel jeered, and began pounding the table with his big fat hand. 'That's what Karl Marx is, I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That's what justice is when we've all agot to be tough enough and rough enoughto fight Billy Petrolle. From the hip. Get it? Cadet Clevinger does not get it: 'It was all very confusing to Clevinger. There were many strange things taking place, but the strangest of all, to Clevinger, was the hatred, the brutal, ucloaked, inexorable hatred of the member of the Action Board... 'Clevinger recoiled from their hatred as tough from a blinding light. These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their lovelesl faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Anti-aircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more. Clevinger approaches but does not capture the central, organizing insight of the novel, namely, that this entire little world on Pianosa is crazy—‘ something was terribly wrong,’ writes Heller, ‘if everything was all right’--and that its craziness Cont. p. 11
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Oglesby; Contemporary Defeat of Fiction cont. change it that he does so, or to provide it with a new purpose or even to defend an old meaning, but almost, rather, as if he aimed to resist events in themselves, to repulse History's impudent incursion upon his own private moral space, that inner sanctum in which the unsuspenseful but elegant struggle with the Absurd was to be resumed onc the impostor had been banished again. Camus is rebellious only toward that perfectly innocuous Nothingness which indeed is so radically passive as to comply immediately with all his stage and hostile Nothingness as soon as he so regards it. Toward History, the collisions of men in their pursuit of objectives Camus undertakes no more than the provisional, temporary role of the resistant. If only History would not interfere, if only there were no Nazi soldier and no revolutionaries, if only men undertook no more objectives, then he could perhaps have time enough for his real life -- a life, that is, in which victory is no doubt unthinkable, but in which the varieties of defeat rank themselves from the noble to the wretched and serve in any case to make a man's carrer conclusive, to relieve it of that disorder and incompleteness which no merely historical existence can ever escape. In trying thus to improve upon Napoleon, Camus has changed the meaning of Elba: insteag of exile, it now means reunion. Escape from the contingent and the changing becomes the overriding purpose of political action: such escape alone restores the possibility of the encounter with silence. The despair that goes with this encouter becomes nothing else than the most glamorous mood of the most glamorous man, the ghostly Don Quixote whise eyes were opened, and whose self-dramatization is only the more poignant because he calls our attention to it in terms so unstintingly self-deprecatory. 'Covered with ashes,' says the judge-penitent Clarence toward the end of The Fall, 'tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing, but with piercing eyes, I stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing and saying: 'I was the lowest of the low.' This is the pose which classical and conservative thought is apparently required to assume in our time. Camus is important precisely because, in refusing historical rebellion -- in refusing, that is, to accept the concreteness, the continuation, and thus the impurities of the revolutionist's life -- he presents us with the best of cases against revolution, the most humane and compassionate case, 'Passionately longing,' as he put it, 'f or solitude and silence,' he is important because he has renovated with exceptional power if not lucidity that idea of exile as self-reunion which reapears in our time as the one alternative to an always terrifying political violence, the one sanctuary for that Western and highly individualistic innocence which chooses above all its own self-preservation. His work embodies the nearest resolution of a predicament which in the end seems to remain quite intact, namely: If you choose to answer injustice by standing with historical revolution, you become the forced confederate of an evidently automatic terror. If you choose on such grounds to answer terror by siding with the regime, becoming first and foremost the partisan of traditions and institutions and continuity rather than suffering men, you become the forced confederate of the old privilege and its injustices. If foreknowledge of both disasters persuades you to answer terror and injustice by standing critically above the battle, confronting each historical mode with its opposition's ideal, condemning terror in the name of order and oppression in the name of justice, then you become forced again, at least the practical confederate of the moral sycophant for you accusations, however sincerely moved, will always be most overheard and exploited by incumbent aythority. A France busy making the most ruthless war against Algerian rebels, a France about to produce the infamous OAS conspiracy, scarcely hears when Camus -- rather softly, to be sure--reprimands the colonialist for his outrages; but this same France is suddenly all ears when he denounces with his severest passion the Soviet Union's slave-labor camps, giving us a sorry spectacle indeed as the counterrevolutionaries try to conceal their ecstasy with a few crocodile tears; it was not for the Turkestani victims that France shared Camus's angry grief, it was rather at the expense of a chronically malformed revolution, which remains nevertheless the only hope of the wretched, that this France celebrated, behind its tears, another victory for reaction. The function of Camus's metaphysical priorities of his setting Man against Absurd, of his concommitant suggestion that to fight within history for historical objectives amounts to being waylaid, ambushed on the road to the only really important encounter--the practical function of this is a politics of disengagement which pretends to be the opposite. This is Camus's one really important shame; and it is at last the one which, for all his candor, he never confesses.He does not rebel whithin history, but against it. He does not rebel in the name of what man's world might become, but rather in the name of what it never can become, a world in which men have no objectives. He thereby guarantees his permanent disappointment with men, guarantees moreover that men's historical failures will always have all the features of a personal betrayal. In effect, he has written into his contract with men an escape clause which will never [insert] LI'L BILL'S PREFERRED STOCK MONDAY AND TUESDAY fail to become operative: a remarkable strategy which allows him at one and the same time to seem both engaged and innocent. His definition of rebellion, in fact, requires him only to reveal for us again and again his moral superiority to both combatants, to the permanent crisis of Western history. That the West widely considers him to be both engaged and lucid only reveals the extent to which his partisanship is rootedly Western--conservative, sometimes all but royalist: the new Edmund Burke disguised as Humphrey Bogart; and reveals further the extent to which his obscurities, his intellectual and moral failures, exactly coincide with what an illiberal Western liberalism prefers left in shadow. There was always, and there remains, quite another way of visualizing our experience, another way of drawing up the cast of characters: the historical way. In place of the exquisite and subtle struggle of Man against the Absurd, a struggle which is in fact not turbulent at all but perfectly still, consisting mainly of a certain mood, a certain gaze, a metaphysics, the historical imagination gives us instead something a good bit uglier and more lethal, a struggle of men against men pursuing their different historical purposes. Camus always had wanted the cosmos to offer him a meaning, or at least an explanation; perhaps an apology. He never seems to have recognized that this cosmic silence--absurdity--was in fact the very ground of freedom, the indispensable precondition of the morality which he so passionately desired. If the cosmos has no meaning, if it is in itself absurd, then men are at liberty to produce meaning: to assemble alternatives, to make choices, and to act creatively. As for this history, as Sartre observes, 'the problem is not to know its objective, but to give it one.' But to say as much, obviously, is to reconstitute, beneath the dainty dancer's feet of the ideal, the rough and most uncertain ground of the practical. One might even become--who knows?--a murderer, like everyone else. Appalled, Camus decided to forego, even to denounce, the battle of men against men. He devoted all his considerable skill to the task of proving that the real battle lay elsewhere and was to be fought in solitude. In redefining rebellion in this was, in providing it with a radically metaphysical and antipolitical meaning, he concludes with a silent subversion of his own moral thrust; his choice of political silence, in the end, amounts to a vote for oppression. And it makes it only all the sadder that this vote is cast in the name of those human values which otherwise require exactly the creation of a new society. It seems to me that something like this happens in Catch-22, and that the moral and historical categoriesby which it is brought off in that novel correspond to those I have claimed to see in Camus. Except for Moby Dick, which will remain the supreme critique of America until America redefines and surpasses itself, I can think of no important American novel whose primary conflicts is more deeply class-structured than Catch 22. Heller could hardly have made thing cleater: the Second World War, at one level the clash of rival nationalisms, of vertically unified class societies, at anoter and apparently more important level was an intra-societal clash of rival class's--the men against the officers, the young against the old, the people against the ruling establishment, neither one sharing or even recognizing the other's aims, the one aiming consciously to extend and consolidate its power, the other aiming fitfully and in semi-darkness to break free of the hold and to redefine social value in its own terms. By the time Milo Minderbinder, that gargoyle entrepreneur, has contracted with the Germans to defend the same bridge which he has ocntracted with the Americans to destroy, this central point has been made brutally clear. But it was there all along. Fairly early, for example, when Cadet Clevinger, 'one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains,' is sent up for trial before the Auction Board for stumbling while marching to class, he finds that his accuser, and one of his prosecutor, his accuser, and one of his judges are one and the same man. Towards the end of this trial, Clevinger is militantly idealist' enough to point out that the court cannot find him guilty and still remain faithful to what he calls 'the cause of justice.' This provokes the following outburst from the bench: 'That's not what justice is,' the colonel jeered, and began pounding the table with his big fat hand. 'That's what Karl Marx is, I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That's what justice is when we've all agot to be tough enough and rough enoughto fight Billy Petrolle. From the hip. Get it? Cadet Clevinger does not get it: 'It was all very confusing to Clevinger. There were many strange things taking place, but the strangest of all, to Clevinger, was the hatred, the brutal, ucloaked, inexorable hatred of the member of the Action Board... 'Clevinger recoiled from their hatred as tough from a blinding light. These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their lovelesl faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Anti-aircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more. Clevinger approaches but does not capture the central, organizing insight of the novel, namely, that this entire little world on Pianosa is crazy—‘ something was terribly wrong,’ writes Heller, ‘if everything was all right’--and that its craziness Cont. p. 11
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