Ragnarök on the Seine

This is an essay I wrote for The American Reader. To read the whole piece, please go here.

What is Europe? Where are its cracks? The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben recently argued that a ‘Latin Union’ should be carved out of the crumbling EU, on the basis of shared linguistic and cultural heritage.^[1] Agamben would like to include France in this breakaway federation, yet there is in fact some ancient and medieval basis for the belief that French identity, unlike Italian, is not simply descended from the Romans, but indeed is forged out of a significant encounter with the Germanic and Celtic worlds.

For one thing, the very ethnonym, français, denotes in the first instance Frankish people, speakers of the Germanic Old Franconian language, who also left their name to a certain fort that would grow into a city later distinguished as the birthplace of Goethe and the home of the German stock exchange. Students in traditional programs of Romance philology were required to master the non-Romance languages of influential neighbors; those specializing in Spanish also took Arabic, while those focused on France had to prove mastery of German. But here in fact the neighboring relation does not do justice to the nature of the influence in question. The two cultural spheres are co-generated, and share much of the same stock of treasures. Before there was Tristan und Isolde there was Tristan et Yseult. La Fontaine and the Brothers Grimm tell many of the same tales, gathered from the French and German countrysides like mushrooms. The German word for ‘France’, Frankreich, hits us like Thor’s hammer, even as it accurately describes the thing in question. France is the Reich of the Franks.

There were also the Norman (i.e., north-man) raids, which would give us the name of Normandy and would make the French composer Erik Satie’s theory of his own Viking origins, which motivated him to change the spelling of his first name, at least plausible if not confirmed by any real evidence. And there is, finally, a very real linguistic and geographic line dividing France into roughly two halves, the so-called Midi or South of France, where the langues d’oc are spoken, which overlap considerably with other Romance languages in the Mediterranean region, some national, some regional, and some onlyvillageois; and the North, where the langues d’oïl have their home, overlapping with the worlds of the Bretons, the Flemish, and even, on the islands of La Manche, with the Anglophone cultural sphere.

This division has led many French thinkers to feel compelled to take sides, to prefer one half to the other, and to account for French identity as either fundamentally northern or, by contrast, essentially Mediterranean. The deep strain of what can rightly be called ‘Nordicism’ running through French history has its plainly harmless instances, as in Satie’s insistence on his own Viking ancestry. But there is also something serious at stake, something that has to do with generally unspoken convictions about the spiritual dimensions of civilizations in history. The protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysman’s 1884 novel, À rebours (inadequately translated as Against Nature), is the decadent Catholic medievalist Pierre Des Esseintes. He specializes in Latin texts, yet he hates the official Catholic philosophy whose appearance marks the beginning of the high Middle Ages, whose substantives “breath of incense,” whose adjectives “are coarsely carved from gold.” He prefers the Gothic, the Anglo-Saxon, the fragmentary, poetry that comes forth without specious argument; he longs to visit Holland and England, and drinks Danzig Brandwein rather than Cognac. The geography of Des Esseinte’s imagination is northern, even when the language of his revered authors is Latin.

Perhaps no French author has taken this Nordicism further than Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose most characteristic and lasting work of fiction describes nothing more than an attempt on the part of a semi-fictionalized Célinean hero to flee France for Denmark. Céline is ideologically pro-German, and his odyssey unfolds in the chaos surrounding the fall of the Third Reich. But nothing about his political orientation in itself could explain why, in his derangement, the author would have considered Denmark the most fitting place to seek sanctuary. He had sent his stash of gold there before the war, and intended to go there to recover it in the war’s final days, with his wife Lucette and his cat Bébert in tow. He was arrested by the Danish police for treason against France, on a warrant delivered from Paris. Céline would end up in a Danish prison for a year and a half, and, from 1947, would live in exile in a small home near the Baltic sea, until his pardon was arranged and he returned to France in 1951. Throughout his exile, he maintained a long correspondence with his editor, the dean of French publishing, Gaston Gallimard. His letters are a jumble of hatred, paranoia, and declarations of undying love for Lucette. Unlike the fascist Ezra Pound, who around the same time was enduring a nervous breakdown in a US army cage somewhere in Italy, there was no breakdown, no repentance, no realization akin to the American poet’s: “Tard, très tard, je t’ai connue, la Tristesse / I have been hard as youth sixty years.” Just more hardness. Just more blame for the Jews.

The publishing house founded by Gallimard in 1911, and bearing his name, is an institution that matters to French literary life in a way for which it is difficult to find equivalencies in other countries. Farrar Straus and Giroux? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt? The New Yorker? All of these together do not begin to approach the importance of Gallimard as an arbiter of literary taste, and therefore also, as the French see things, as a guardian of French culture and history. Gallimard is principally responsible for the literary careers, besides Céline, of Gide, Malraux, Queneau, Simenon, Aragon, Breton, Sartre, and Ionèsco, to mention just a few names from the canon. To be among the editors at Gallimard is thus to serve as a high priest and a kingmaker, even as a god who keeps the world going by what René Descartes (who died of pneumonia in Stockholm in 1650) called ‘continuous creation’. By ‘the world’ here, we should of course understand le monde, a fascinating French invention which reduces everything—the planets and stars, the comets, the earth with its core and mantle, and all the plant and animal and human life crawling upon its surface—to the experience of a certain class of people in a certain smallish country. Gallimard sits atop this world.

On July 22, 2011, a thirty-two-year-old man, committed, in Oslo, the worst atrocity in Western Europe since the end of World War II. He murdered seventy-seven people, most of them teenagers and young adults attending a summer camp organized by the Norwegian Labour party on the nearby island of Utøya. Anders Breivik’s goal was to initiate a war against multiculturalism in Europe, which he saw as inevitably leading to a loss of authentic European existence, a mongrelization at best, and a total Saracenization at worst. He is currently serving a twenty-one-year prison sentence, the maximum allowable under Norwegian law. This comes out to a little over three months for each person dead.

A year or so after the attack, an editor at Gallimard, the well-known French novelist and essayist Richard Millet—having been most recently in the news for his discovery of the young Francophone American author Jonathan Littel’s monde-shattering Holocaust novel, Les bienveillantes (Gallimard, 2006^[2])—would publish what he called an Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik: a literary elogy to the Norwegian murderer.^[3] The author distinguishes between the literary quality of Breivik’s mass slaughter, on the one hand, and the political and moral dimensions of it on the other. He stresses repeatedly that he has only come to praise the first of these. It is only the liberal multiculturalist herd, which for him is the same thing as the uncultured, illiterate, un-literary herd, that is incapable of making this distinction.

Millet was born in 1953 in Corrèze, in south-central France, but would spend much of his youth in Lebanon. He grew up speaking Arabic as if natively, and would later complain of not feeling entirely French upon returning to his home country. In the mid-1970s Millet would join up with the Christian Phalangists in the Lebanese civil war, a right-wing and ultranationalist organization founded by the Lebanese Maronite leader Pierre Gamayel in 1936. He would later write in his 2009 Confession négative, “I had to kill men back then, and women too, and elderly people, maybe children,”^[4] though according to the newspaper Libération he only spent a few months in the phalanges, and at most had an occasion to fire his Kalashnikov into some sacks of sand.^[5] Here, then, perhaps, we have a first glimpse of an explanation for why Millet is impressed with Breivik: the one’s tall tale is the other’s deed.

The French author, moreover, is particularly impressed with the Norwegian’s choice of targets. He bemoans the process currently taking place throughout Europe, of “the conversion of the individual into a mongrelized, globalized, uncultivated, social-democratic petit-bourgeois,” and he adds, in case it were not clear where he was going with this: “thus the sort of people Breivik killed.”^[6] But again, Millet insists that it is only in the realm of the tale, of literature, that Breivik’s act may be lauded. “I would like for it to be kept in mind,” Millet writes, “that I do not approve of the acts committed by Breivik, on July 22, 2011, in Norway.” And again, a few pages later: “I repeat, I condemn the acts.”^[7]

To the extent possible Millet would like to “separate them from their political, indeed criminal, context, through their literary dimension.” But if we suppose that the political and criminal context of these acts consists in the fact that they were carried out at all, then the same act’s literary dimension can only be supposed to reside in a parallel world in which the acts were not carried out, but only imagined (as for example Millet’s own massacre of Lebanese civilians, or a massacre described in a novel selected by Millet for publication at Gallimard). Insertion of an evil act into reality would seem to cancel whatever literary quality it may have had when it remained suspended in the imagination.

Millet believes that evil, like literature, is preoccupied with ‘perfection’, but it is not clear in what respect he believes Breivik’s deed approached perfection. Clearly, when Millet says that Breivik’s deed has a literary quality, that it is ‘perfect’ like literature, he does not mean that Breivik is himself a littéraire. In fact, Millet goes to great lengths to denigrate Breivik’s own writing ability and class-inflected habitus. For example, he describes Breivik’s 1500-page treatise on European civilization and its destiny as “a sort of manifesto, of which the naïvetés, the composite character, the ‘Wikipedia culture’, are not hard to discern.”^[8] We are told twice that Breivik is a child of divorced parents (his father Jens David Breivik, a former Norwegian diplomat, lives in retirement in the South of France), and we are treated to a mocking diatribe on the young man’s tastes and fashion sense (one that, indeed, will seem as irrelevant to any non-French reader as Pierre Bourdieu’s graphic plotting of the class determination of musical and gastronomical sensibilities in 1960s Paris):

He is heterosexual; he likes snowboarding, Budweiser, Chanel perfumes, Lacoste shirts (the company… swiftly protested against the photos in which Breivik, being arrested, sports, with a strange smile, a polo shirt featuring that horrible little crocodile, one of the emblems of contemporary infantilism).^[9]

Budweiser and Chanel belong to two different symbolic registers where I come from, but mutatis mutandis we can all understand Millet’s point: that Anders Breivik is a trashy yokel, and if he has any ‘literary’ talent this will be of the spontaneous variety, art brut, and not a cultivated skill. This trashiness seems to rank, for Millet, somewhat ahead of the seventy-seven murders as a reason for consternation.

When Millet says that there is ‘something that goes beyond what is justifiable’ in Breivik’s massacre, his understatement is meant to keep attention focused on what he takes to be Breivik’s “perfection of writing by means of an assault rifle.”^[10] Millet praises Breivik for being something more than a “Warhol of anti-multiculturalism,” who is after nothing more than his 15-minutes of glory, or notoriety, in the news cycle. No indeed, Millet insists, Breivik is something more exalted than this. “[H]e is a writer by default.”^[11]

On what grounds, now? I mean, how on earth? Could it be that I’ve mistranslated Millet’s French?

No. I go back over the syntax and vocabulary, and the meaning is as clear as day. Millet believes that literature’s principal function is to preserve language, and along with it “memory, blood, identity.” These are what pay the price when extra-European populations become “installed on our soil,” and when “multicultural nihilism” fails to react.^[12] Thus, Breivik’s work is a work of literature to the extent that it seeks to preserve the purity of language and culture.

Breivik is doing a far better job of this, Millet thinks, than the Scandinavian writers who have declined to take up arms and have determined to work instead with strings of words. The editor denounces the Norwegian crime novelist Kjell Ola Dahl, for example, who in his Kvinnen i plast of 2010 describes an Oslo policewoman who likes to wander around the immigrant neighborhood of Grobarlandslein:

Lena loved to melt into the crowd that teemed between the colorful buildings, with the borrowings of foreign architecture, like the minaret in the Akerbergersvein. The only thing that was missing, to complete this exotic touch, were the calls to prayer of the muezzin.^[13]

“In this decadence,” Millet responds, “Breivik is without a doubt what Norway deserved, and what is awaiting all our societies, which continue to blind themselves in order better to deny themselves, particularly France and England.”^[14]

He goes on to express his preference, among Norwegian authors, for a certain Gunnar Staalesen. This one is the author of a novel called At Night All Wolves Are Grey. Millet takes this title as an indication that Staalesen understands nuance, subtlety, and therefore that he is “more of a writer” than the others.^[15] It is implied that Staalesen thus has something in common with Breivik, since both are writerly, and since, when you think about it, Breivik is a sort of “lone, grey wolf.”^[16] Breivik, Millet concludes, ‘has something grey about him. It is in this sense that he could have been a writer.’ For a critic who sets himself up as a connoisseur of subtlety, Millet does not seem to be making much of an effort to deploy it here.

Most lovers of literature are willing to concede that Norway has yielded up at least one right-wing extremist who was also a great author in the traditional sense: Knut Hamsun. Yet Millet recoils from the opportunity to compare Breivik to Hamsun, the author of the epoch-defining 1890 novel, Hunger, and of the protofascist, yet lyrically beautiful 1917 Growth of the Soil, “who,” Millet tells us, “as is known, was openly a Nazi.”^[17] Rather than making the comparison himself, he lets an unnamed journalist for the Nouvel Observateur do it for him,^[18] only to pretend afterwards to refute it. These are the final sentences of his elogy, and they provide a useful clavis for understanding the whole.

In these last lines, we are presented with an ostensible plea to separate ‘literature’, understood here as nothing less than language itself in its purest expression, from fascism. The same journalist for the Nouvel Observateur, Millet writes,

goes so far as to take aim at the Edda, that is to say at the foundations of Scandinavian culture, which would make of Breivik the derisory reincarnation of the wolf Fendrir, the son of the áss god Loki and the killer of the god Odin, whom Snorri Sturluson describes as having ‘a hairy face, the lower jaw against the earth, the upper jaw against the heavens’.^[19]

Millet accuses the journalist of a delirium, one typical of the ‘New World Order’, which

tends to call ‘fascist’ any reflection on purity, identity, origins, and which, having run out of arguments, ends up challenging our very being: our culture, for example the Chanson de Roland, soon to be erased from our heritage, having been deemed politically incorrect and racist, like the Edda of the Nordic peoples, and along with it that which still makes it possible for us to name, and which the moral New Order is in the process of eradicating: literature.^[20]

‘Literature’ is the last word of the essay. It is with literature that Millet has associated the name of Anders Breivik at numerous points, while also, at numerous points, seeking to assure his reader that he disapproves of the mass murder, and, finally, again and again, seeking to deny that either the mass murder or his particular conception of literature has anything to do with fascism. Fascism is common and trashy, like snowboarding, or polo shirts by Lacoste. Millet is talking about literature here, which is not trashy, but exalted, and evidently, as the familiar phrase goes, beyond good and evil.

There is a deeply engrained idea in French intellectual culture that language can function as a weapon of structural or systematic violence. But when Michel Foucault called our attention to this, he was, however pessimistically, focused on the eventual remediation of this ‘violence’ through systematic transformations in the way we speak. Millet identifies the connection between language and violence too, but seems to suppose the former has run its course, and now gives us nothing but trashy Scandinavian pageturners about tattooed detectives (who are oblivious to the Muslim menace, etc.). He seems to think therefore that at this point real violence will do better what language has ceased to do.

I too love the Edda, and runestones, and the Chanson de Roland, and all that is as if charged with that ancient authenticity that seems so incompatible with life in the modern world; and I’ve struggled to articulate, mostly for the sake of my own conscience, how this love can coexist in a single individual with the commitment to the values of a global citizen, to equality, fraternity, and justice. But they do coexist. As the great German Romantic author Novalis wrote in his collection of aphorisms published in 1799 under the title Pollen, it is this very coexistence that grounds the lively, productive imagination. Why not move back and forth between uprooted worldliness and organic communitarianism? Why not see these as modes of engagement with the world, rather than as mutually exclusive claims about how the world must be? Millet never even considers the possibility. This is because, at bottom, he is not in possession of a particularly lively imagination (occasionally his work rises to the level of an inspired blog post, as when in the essayLangue fantôme, which accompanies the elogy to Breivik, Millet interprets the fluctuating length of Umberto Eco’s facial hair as an index of the state of European letters).

Millet is a dullard, and one who had no trouble reaching the very summit of French high-browdom. That is where he would have stayed, if he had not made one small faux pas, and admitted that the world of letters and the world of murder are all the same to him.

It is not hard to imagine what sort of scornful things Millet might have to say were he to turn his attention to the Scandinavian metal scene. Its partisans have at least this much in common with the former Gallimard editor and Phalangist, that they value raw experience, authenticity, and so on. But just look at them with their long hair and piercings and black clothes! Plainly, they come from broken homes, without bookshelves.

Yet Norwegian black metal plays a more important role in the present story than our Gallimard editor might have preferred...

To continue reading, please go here.

Giorgio Agamben, “Que l’Empire latin contre-attaque!,” Libération, 24 March, 2013.
Published in English as The Kindly Ones, New York, Harper Collins, 2009.
Richard Millet, La langue fantôme: essai sur la paupérisation de la littérature, suivi de Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, Pierre-Guillaume de Roux Éditions, 2012.
Richard Millet, La confession négative, Gallimard, 2009.
Édouard Launet, “Richard Millet. Soldat perdu,” Libération, September 5, 2012.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 109.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 109.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 107.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 107-108.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 117.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 117.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 117.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 118.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 118-19.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 119.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 119.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 119.
The article to which Millet refers is David Caviglioli, “Que nous disent les polars scandinaves sur le massacre d’Utoya?,” Nouvel Observateur, 28 July, 2011. Online at: http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/polar/20110727.OBS7708/que-nous-disent-les-polars-scandinaves-sur-le-massacre-d-utoya.html
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 120.
Millet, Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik, 120.

Comments

I clicked through and read the article at American Reader - you're digging at such essential stuff here, thank you for the clarity and humanity you bring to such a fraught discussion of deep identity. As a Canadian mutt living in the middle of the NA continent (Manitoba) I would love to know what you think of the latest moves in the identity politics in Quebec (Charte des valeurs québécoises). Reading this, it seems there's tendrils of connection and political yearning and sympathy in Quebec for these continental French identity politics? Another article?

Posted by: r murray | December 4, 2013 at 11:26 AM