Ernst Jünger - Eumeswil

[Icarus]

Gents,

I would like to talk about one of my favorite books, Ernst Jünger's 1977 novel Eumeswil. This book was published when Jünger was already 82 years of age, and although it is a work of fiction, it should be read as a survival guide. Jünger himself was the leader of a team of shock troops in the Imperial German Army in WWI, fought in the trenches for almost 4 years, and was wounded several times. Twenty years later, he got in trouble with the Nazis and enlisted in the Wehrmacht just before WWII to protect himself. Then, he got in trouble with the U.S. and its allies during the post-WWII occupation of Germany, due to his involvement with nationalist and conservative groups in the 1920s. In other words, the man survived two world wars and several political regimes. He is a survivor, and he wants to tell us how to survive.

Here is a brief description of the plot:

Ernst Jünger develops the anarch figure mostly through the reflections and conclusions of the protagonist of Eumeswil, Manuel (Ernst Jünger in disguise), as he pursues his historical studies and ruminates on the role and survival strategies of the individual throughout history. According to Manuel's conclusions, the anarch is the figure most suited to the survival of the individual in an ahistorical postmodern world of totalitarian states.

Manuel is a historian in the small state of Eumeswil, an imaginary country in an undefined post-apocalyptic world. (The setting is not essential to understanding the anarch). Manuel pursues his historical interests in his own time: privately with his teachers, by attending or holding an occasional seminar at the university, and above all, working at night on the Luminar, an internet-like tool by which an enormous archive of historical information can be accessed at the speed of thought. (The Luminar is incidentally an uncanny vision of the present Internet, probably the first to appear in world literature. This will be developed in future posts.)

Manuel is also employee of the ruling tyrant, the Condor, whom he serves as a bartender in the Condor's night bar. Here Manuel has an ear onto the inner workings of the state and the men and powers associated with it. Conveniently for readers, Manuel's reflections on the anarch are presented in the form of short aphorisms, even mini-essays within the text. This lends itself to a study of the anarch via a compilation and analysis of the individual aphorisms.

What is the anarch? First of all, let me clarify that it is not the same as the anarchist. The anarch is the sovereign individual. The best way to understand this idea is to include a few passages from the book.

In the following passage, Manuel Venator describes the interview process for his employment at the Condor's bar, and also explains what the anarch is:

They found no mischief in me. I remained normal, however deeply they probed. And also straight as an arrow. To be sure, normality seldom coincides with straightness. Normalcy is the human constitution; straightness is logical reasoning. With its help, I could answer satisfactorily. In contrast, the human element is at once so general and so intricately encoded that they fail to perceive it, like the air that they breathe. Thus they were unable to penetrate my fundamental structure, which is anarchic.

That sounds complicated, but it is simple, for everyone is anarchic; this is precisely what is normal about us. Of course, the anarch is hemmed in from the first day by father and mother, by state and society. Those are prunings, tappings of the primordial strength, and nobody escapes them. One has to resign oneself. But the anarchic remains, at the very bottom, as a mystery, usually unknown even to its bearer. It can erupt from him as lava, can destroy him, liberate him. Distinctions must be made here: love is anarchic, marriage is not. The warrior is anarchic, the soldier is not. Manslaughter is anarchic, murder is not. Christ is anarchic, Saint Paul is not. Since, of course, the anarchic is normal, it is also present in Saint Paul, and sometimes it erupts mightily from him. Those are not antitheses but degrees. The history of the world is moved by anarchy. In sum: the free human being is anarchic, the anarchist is not.

On the differences between the anarch and the anarchist:

If I were an anarchist and nothing further, they would have easily exposed me. They are particularly geared towards detecting anyone who tries to approach the powerful with mischievous intent, ‘with a dagger in his cloak.’ The anarch can lead a lonesome existence; the anarchist is sociable and must get together with peers.

The positive counterpart of the anarchist is the anarch. The latter is not the adversary of the monarch, but his antipode, untouched by him though also dangerous. He is not the opponent of the monarch, but his pendant.

After all, the monarch wants to rule many, nay, all people; the anarch, only himself. This gives him an attitude both objective and skeptical towards the powers that be; he has their figures go past him – and he is untouched, no doubt, yet inwardly not unmoved, not without historical passion. Every born historian is more or less an anarch; if he has greatness, then on this basis he rises without partisanship to the judge’s bench.

This concerns my profession, which I take seriously. I am also the night steward at the Casbah; now, I am not saying that I take this job less seriously. Here I am directly involved in the events, I deal with the living. My anarchic principle is not detrimental to my work. Rather it substantiates it as something I have in common with everyone else, except that I am more conscious of this. I serve the Condor, who is a tyrant – that is his function, just as mine is to be his steward; both of us can retreat to substance: to human nature in its nameless condition.

On the anarch's relationship to society and authority:

I tend to distinguish between other people’s opinions of me and my own self-assessment. Others determine my social status, which I take seriously, albeit within certain limits. Nor am I dissatisfied with it. In this respect, I differ from most Eumeswilers, who are dissatisfied with their positions or their standings.

I could just as easily say that I neither am satisfied with my position nor take it seriously. That would obtain for the overall situation of the city, the absence of any center, which puts every office under obligation and gives meaning to every action. Here, neither oath nor sacrifice counts any longer.

Nevertheless, when anything is possible, one can also take any liberty. I am an anarch – not because I despise authority, but because I need it. Likewise, I am not a nonbeliever, but a man who demands something worth believing in. On this point, I am like a bride in her chamber: she listens for the softest step.

A rather interesting and chilling view on human equality:

When in the course of my work at the Luminar, I was reviewing public law, from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond, I thought of an Anglo Saxon's axiom about human equality. He seeks it not in the ever-changing distribution of power and means, but in a constant: the fact that anyone can kill anyone else.

This is a platitude, albeit reduced to a striking formula. The possibility of killing someone else is part of the potential of the anarch whom everyone carries around inside himself, even though he is seldom aware of that possibility. It always slumbers in the underground, even when two people exchange greetings in the street or avoid each other. When one stands atop a tower or in front of an oncoming train, that possibility is already drawing closer. Aside from the technological dangers, we also register the nearness of the Other. He can even be my brother. An old poet, Edgar Allen Poe, grasped this possibility in “Descent into the Maelstrom”. In any case, we watch our backs. Then comes the thronging in the catastrophe, the raft of the Méduse, the starving in the lifeboat….

I want to indicate this only insofar as it concerns my service. In any event, I brought this knowledge into the Condor’s range, into the inner sanctum that Monseigneur described as his “Parvulo.” I can kill him, dramatically or discreetly. His beverages – he especially likes a light red wine – ultimately pass through my hands.

Now granted, it is unlikely that I would kill him, albeit not impossible. Who can tell what astrological conjunctions one may get involved in? So, for now, my knowledge is merely theoretical, though important insofar as it puts me in his level. Not only can I kill him; I can also grant him amnesty. This is in my hands.

Naturally, I would not try to strike him just because he is tyrant – I am too well versed in history, especially the model that we have attained in Eumeswil. An immoderate tyrant settles his own hash. The execution can be left to the anarchists; that is all they think about. Hence, tyranny is seldom bequeathed; unlike the monarchies, it barely endures beyond the grandson. Parmenides inherited tyranny from his father “like a disease.” According to Thales, the rarest thing he encountered in his travels was an old tyrant.

That is my basic attitude in performing my job, and perhaps I do so better than any number of others. I am his equal; the difference lies in the clothing and the ceremonies, which only blockheads despise; you doff your clothes only when things start getting serious.

My awareness of my equality is actually good for my work; I am free enough to perform it lightly and agreeably – as if dancing. Often it gets late, and if things have gone well, I pat myself on the back before closing the bar, like a performer whose act has succeeded.

I will stop now. If you want to read the book, you can find it on Scribd.

 

[WD-40]

Just thought I would link this post to the discussion here so it doesn't get lost in the sands of time:

Why Eumeswil is a difficult (but rewarding) book

 

[Icarus]

My favorite passage is the following:

It is no coincidence that precisely when things started going downhill with the gods, politics gained its bliss-making character. There would be no reason for objecting to this, since the gods, too were not exactly fair. But at least people saw temples instead of termite architecture. Bliss is drawing closer; it is no longer in the afterlife, it will come, though not momentarily, sooner or later in the here and now - in time.

The anarch thinks more primitively; he refuses to give up any of his happiness. "Make thyself happy" is his basic law. It his response to the "Know thyself" at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. These two maxims complement each other; we must know our happiness and our measure.

The first paragraph explains modern politics remarkably well. When God is dead, politics becomes a surrogate religion, and heaven becomes something to be attained in this life, not in the afterlife. This is what moves progressives, for instance. They believe that when the oppressed minorities all have PhD's and when gays can marry, we will have heaven on Earth.

In other words, if you want to have power over other people, promise them heaven.

 

[Rutting Elephant]

Damn, I read a really interesting chapter on Jünger in a book of Heidegger criticism but can't find the citation. I'll leave a couple of links here just for the hell of it. I didn't even realize Jünger wrote fiction; it must be great.

http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/junger-heidegger-nihilism/

http://www.amazon.com/review/R31ULA...annel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

The second one came up in a google search and doesn't even have Jünger in it, but it's interesting nonetheless.

 

[WD-40]

I wanted to share a beautiful little vignette from Eumeswil that has been opening many doors for me lately:

Cited under fair use for discussion:

Thus I take my duties seriously within an overall context that I reject for its mediocrity. The important thing is that my rejection actually refers to the totality and does not take up within it a stance that can be defined as conservative, reactionary, liberal, ironic or in any way social.[…] On this premise, I can, to be sure, take seriously what I do here. I know that the subsoil moves, perhaps like a landslide or an avalanche – and that is precisely why relationships remain undisturbed in their details. I lie aslant on a slanting plane. The distances between people do not change. I actually see them more sharply against the deceptive background. Their standing so close to the abyss also arouses my sympathy.

At times I see them as if I were walking through the streets of Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius. This is one of the historian’s delights and, even more, his sorrow. If we see someone doing something for the last time, even just eating a piece of bread, this activity becomes wondrously profound. We participate in the transmutation of the ephemeral into the sacramental. We have inklings of eras during which such a sight was an everyday occurrence.

Thus I am present as if Eumeswil were a dream, a game, or even an experiment. This does not rule out personal sympathy, which, after all, we do feel when we are moved by a play at the theater.

Given my brand of observation, I would rather associate with Vigo and Bruno than with my genitor and my dear brother. Were I to behave like them, I would be rooted in an agitation that does not appeal to me in any way, whether I view it from above, from below, from the right, or from the left.

The Condor would then be “the tyrant” for me, not just factually, but also morally. Tyrants must be hated, so I would hate him. Or else: he embodies the will to power as extolled by Boutefeu; a great navigator, he steers us through the waves and storms of the struggle for life, I then model myself after him, I follow him without giving it a second thought, I idolize him. Be as it may, these are feelings I ward off.

When I, as a historian, view us en familie, it strikes me that I dwell one story higher than my father and my brother: in rooms where one lives more unabashedly. I could come down at any time. That would be the historian’s descent into politics – a change that might have good and even noble reasons, yet would in any case entail a loss of freedom.

Thus is the role of the anarch, who remains free of all commitments yet can turn in any direction. A customer sits outside of one of the famous cafés whose names have gone down in literary history. I picture him as, say, Manet, one of the old artists, might have painted him: with a short, dark beard, a round hat, a cigar in his hand, his features both relaxed and concentrated – that is, silently yet attentively at ease with himself and the world.

In those days, great personal freedom must have been possible. The café is near the Chambre des Députés; well-known contemporaries pass by – ministers, deputies, officers, artists, attorneys. The waiter are starting to reset the indoor tables for the evening customers; the écailler comes with the oyster baskets, the first streetwalkers show up.

Ambiance: around this time, the big cities begin dreaming, the night casts out its veil. The customer sees familiar and unfamiliar people, who try to involve him in a conversation, a business deal, a pleasure. But no matter how many people go by, he ignores their overtures. Otherwise the treasure accumulating in him would be frittered away in small change. Their images move him more profoundly than their fleeting presences. If he were a painter, he would store their images in his mind and liberate them in masterpieces. If he were a poet, he would revive the mood for himself and for many others: the harmony of the people and the houses, the paling of the colors and the awakening of tones with the thickening night. Everything flows into everything else and melds.

All things, and even memories, flee out of sight,
And you’re alone with Paris, and the wave and the night.

Like any pleasure, this one, too, is whetted by abstinence. Sensibility and with it, the sensations, are heightened into an incredibly keen scent. Invisible harmony flows more and more intensely into visible harmony until it dazzles. The café customer could enter reality at any time. If he withholds himself and lingers in non-desire, then this means that the offer is as yet inadequate for the hypersensitive suitor.

Now the figures writhe in more and more violent throes; they want to be recognized.

The rock awaits Moses, whose staff is about to touch it.

My comments and meditations on Jünger's "Nocturne Parisien of the Anarch" are to follow in a separate post...

 

[Icarus]

A passage on the human condition, the ephemeral nature of life, death, the pain that comes with the realization of one's mortality, and how historians are born:

The emir had the poet Thalib read aloud the inscription on the monuments and on the walls of the deserted palaces:

Ah, where are they whose strength has built all these
With unbelievably lofty balconies?
Where are the Persian shahs in castles tall?
They left their land--it did forget them all!
Where are the men who ruled the vast countries,
Sind and Hind, the proud hosts of dynasties?
To whom Sendge and Habesh did bend their will
And Nubia when it was rebellious still?
Await no tiding now from any tomb,
No knowledge is forthcoming from its womb.
The times changed, weaving death from every loom;
The citadels they built brought naught but doom.

These verses filled Musa with such profound sorrow that life became a burden for him. As they wandered through the rooms, they came to a table carved out of yellow marble, or according to other reports, cast in Chinese steel. There, the following words were notched in Arabic letters:

"At this table, a thousand kings have dined whose right eyes were blind and a thousand other whose left eyes were blind: they have all passed on and now they populate the graves and the catacombs."

When Thalib read these words aloud to him, everything went dark before Musa's eyes; he shrieked and rent his garment. Then he had the verses and inscriptions copied down.

Seldom has the historian's pain been captured so vehemently. It is the human pain that was felt long before any scholarship, accompanying man ever since he dug the first graves. Anyone who writes history would like to preserve the names and their meanings, indeed rediscover the names of cities and nations that are long forgotten. It is like placing flowers on a grave:

"Ye dead and also ye nameless--princes and warriors, slaves and evildoers, saints and whores, do not be mournful: ye are remembered lovingly."

But this thinking, too, is limited by time, to which it succumbs; every monument weathers away, and the wreath is cremated along with the corpse. Why is that we nevertheless refuse to give up this ritual? We could make do with Omar the Tent Maker, join him in drinking the wine of Shiraz down to the dregs and then tossing away the earthen beaker: dust to dust.

Will ever any custodian open their graves, any cockcrow wake them to the light? It must be thus, and the historian's sorrow, his torment are among the indications. He sits in judgement over the dead when the merrymaking that roared around the powerful has long since hushed, when their triumphs and their victims, their grandeur and their infamy are forgotten.

I think I need a drink...

 

[Icarus]

A passage on anarchists and anarchism:

Like any other place, Eumeswil has its share of anarchists. They are divided into two sects: the good-natured and the ill-natured. The good-natured are not dangerous: they dream of Golden Ages; Rousseau is their patron saint. The others have pledged allegiance to Brutus: they convene in basements and garrets, and also in a back room of the Calamaretto. They huddle together like philistines drinking their beer while nurturing an indecent secrecy that is revealed by a giggle. They are listed in the police registers; when cells start forming and chemists get to work, they are watched more sharply. "The boil will soon burst." Those words are by the majordomo, nicknamed "Domo" by the Condor; I retain the abbreviation. Before an assassination can take place, either arrests are made or the conspiracy is steered. Against an opposition that is gaining a foothold no weapon is more potent than blaming the group for an assassination attempt.

The anarchist's hazy idealism, his goodness without sympathy or else his sympathy without goodness, makes him serviceable in many ways and also useful for the police. He does sense a secret, but he can do no more than sense it: the tremendous strength of the individual. It intoxicates him; he spends himself like a moth burning up in a flame. The absurdity of the assassination attempt lies not in the doer and his self-assurance, but in the deed and its link with the fleeting situation. The doer has sold himself too cheaply. That is why he usually achieves the opposite of what he intends.

The anarchist is dependent—both on his unclear desires and on the powers that be. He trails the powerful man as his shadow; the ruler is always on his guard against him. As Charles V stood on a tower with his retinue, a captain began to laugh; when interrogated, he admitted thinking that if he embraced the emperor and plunged down with him, his name would be forever recorded in history.

The anarchist is the antagonist of the monarch, whom he dreams of wiping out. He gets the man and consolidates the succession. The -ism suffix has a restrictive meaning; it emphasizes the will at the expense of the substance. I owe this note to Thofern, the grammarian, a hairsplitter par excellence.

 

[Quintus Curtius]

Based on Icarus's enthusiam for Juenger, I plan to read this. The RVF here led me to Juenger, via the World War I appreciation thread. Never would have known about him otherwise.

Good recommendation, Icarus.

 

[Comte De St. Germain]

Definitely on my reading list now. This reminds me of a quote I remember from somewhere. "Those who claim to control the Gods are in fact controlled by them."- Alexander Irvine.

 

[Icarus]

Yet another great passage:

It is not that I as an anarch reject authority à tout prix. On the contrary, I seek it, and that is precisely why I reserve the right to examine it.

I come from a family of historians. A man without history is someone who has lost his shadow. At the same time, he becomes repulsively flexible. I can observe this only too well in the Eumeswil professors. One half are crooks, the other eunuchs, barring very few. These exceptions are outdated men like Bruno and Vigo, or, like Rosner, solid artisans.

I can count my dear dad among the eunuchs, the speechifiers. It is impossible for us to have a conversation about facts without his puffing it up with social and economic platitudes and spicing it up with moralisms he derives from them. Saying what everyone else says is a delight for him. He comes out with things like, "I am simply expressing the public opinion." And he actually prides himself on such things. A journalist, even though he disagrees with the current editorials. "He is controversial" – for him, as for all eunuchs, that is a put-down. The exact opposite of an anarch; God bless him – but why is he a historian?

 

[Icarus]

Another passage on the anarch versus the eunuchs, and how anarchists deal with powerlessness:

The anarch knows the fundamental law. He also knows its falsifications. He realizes that atonement is his due for misdeeds against it. The state has tricked him out of the right to pass this judgment; it is obligated to carry it out on his behalf.

Instead, one sees eunuchs convening in order to disempower the populace in whose name they presume to speak. This is logical, since the eunuch's most heartfelt goal is to castrate the free man. What ensues are laws demanding that "you should run to the district attorney while your mother is being raped."

They cheat a man out of the blood that expiates murder, just as they rob him of the gold attesting to his share of the sun, and spoil the salt that, as the spirit of the earth, unites all free men.

Against this background, the nihilism of a Dalin is understandable, even when he employs abstruse methods. He feels an urge to blow up something; these are the beacons of the impotent.

 

[Icarus]

An interesting passage:

The born commander requires neither an office nor a diploma; he is recognized by his gaze and his voice. And the man predestined to create is recognized by the dreamlike mood he emanates.