In the first post of this series, I discussed the demographic collapse in Russia and wondered if it was a response to the collapse of meaning in Russia; once Communism, the official state religion, was found to be a false idol, the regime collapsed and thus far, no new Russia ethos has yet replaced it. Predatory, crony capitalism hardly suffices to offer a meaningful life to the unfortunate inhabitants of the Russian kleptocracy.
In the second post, I digressed and discussed the situation in Turkey, in which a once modernizing, secular Muslim nation has taken what may well be irrevocable steps on a regressive path to political Islam. This may be understood as an attempt to regain a simpler meaning from the threats and aridity of the modern state.
Europe is currently on its own inexorable slide into demographic collapse. Through the lens of three European novels, Adam Kirsch attempts ot understand the enervated zeitgeist of modern Europe, a place of great wealth and comfort as well as great lassitude.
Life On Venus: Europe’s Last Man
Is it true that Western Europeans, after half a century of peace and prosperity, suffer from the kind of moral malaise that Nietzsche warned about, and that Fukuyama and Kagan diagnosed? One way to answer this question is to listen, not to American pundits, but to Europeans themselves—in particular, to their novelists. In the nineteenth century, a reader of Dostoevsky and Flaubert could have gained insights into the state of Europe that a reader of newspapers would have missed. In the twenty-first, it is at least possible that the most significant European novelists can give us similar insights. Precisely because novels are not, and should not be, political documents, they offer a less guarded, more intuitive report on the inner life of a society. And when novelists from different European countries, writing in different languages and very different styles, all seem to corroborate one another’s intuitions, it is at least fair to wonder whether a real cultural shift is under way.
The article is long but fascinating. I have not read the books he reviews and my comments can only be considered as second order derivatives of the material, yet I found the depiction of the European zeitgeist deeply troubling and thought provoking.
Kirsch first discusses The Elementary Particles:
The Elementary Particles(1998) is the book that comes closest to confirming Nietzsche’s vision of the Last Man. Indeed, the novel opens with a portentous preface, written as though in the distant future, informing us that the character we are about to meet—Michel Djerzinski, “a first-rate biologist and a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize,” who is also an emotionally autistic, sexually stunted wreck of a human being—literally brought about the end of the human race in the late twentieth century. For his discoveries in genetics allowed humanity to replace itself with a new species that is not dependent on sexual reproduction, and is therefore free from suffering and death. Houellebecq gives us a glimpse of that future felicity in a poem: “We live today under a new world order . . . / What men considered a dream, perfect but remote, / We take for granted as the simplest of things.”
The novel, then, is Houellebecq’s portrait of a society—contemporary European society, French division—so incurably miserable that it deserves, and needs, to be made extinct. Yet the ironic message of The Elementary Particles is that it is precisely the plenty and safety of French society that make it intolerable to inhabit. All the qualities that European social democracy prides itself on—its sexual liberation, political tolerance, and economic equality, free health care and the long paid vacations—become instruments of torture to Michel and his half brother, Bruno, the novel’s unlovable heroes.
He then turns his attention to The Rings of Saturn:
To turn from The Elementary Particles to The Rings of Saturn(1995) is to exchange the passionate complaints of an outraged teenager for the quiet, hypnotic monologue of an old man. For while Sebald was only 51 years old when the book appeared, his writerly persona seems as old as the Ancient Mariner. The narrator we meet in the book’s first pages—he shares a name and a history with the author, though the identification is never totally secure—has just suffered a complete nervous breakdown: “I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility,” he confides matter-of-factly. Unlike Houellebecq’s avatars, however, Sebald has not suffered from any calamity in his personal life, about which we never hear a word. His is a strictly philosophical crisis, brought on by “the paralyzing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past,” which Sebald sees everywhere he goes.
The third book, Saturday, is by far the most interesting and complex:
Saturday ... published in 2005, at the height of the “war on terror,” when the West once more felt itself under threat, this time from Islamic fundamentalism. Ian McEwan plunges his novel into this particular historical moment by dramatizing the conflict between a privileged, guilt-ridden, indecisive civilization and an angry, jealous barbarism. He asks in the form of a parable the same question Kagan asked in Of Paradise and Power: can Europe defend its values from its enemies, when those values include a principled aversion to violence?
The whole action of the novel takes place on one particular Saturday: February 15, 2003, the day of the worldwide protests against the impending Iraq War. Henry Perowne, the middle-aged neurosurgeon and paterfamilias who is McEwan’s protagonist, finds his day of errands—a squash game, a visit to his Alzheimer’s-stricken mother, grocery shopping for a dinner party—disrupted by the protest: “It’s a surprise, the number of children there are, and babies in pushchairs. Despite his skepticism, Perowne in white-soled trainers, gripping his racket tighter, feels the seduction and excitement peculiar to such events; a crowd possessing the streets, tens of thousands of strangers converging with a single purpose conveying an intimation of revolutionary joy.”
The conclusion of the novel, as described by Kirsch, can only be thought of as a triumph of a particular, pervasive fantasy:
The trouble begins when Perowne gets into a fender bender with Baxter, a young thug who quickly grows violent. Based on his behavior and certain subtle symptoms, Perowne is able to deduce that the impetuous Baxter is suffering from an incipient neurological disease: “This is how the brilliant machinery of being is undone by the tiniest of faulty cogs, the insidious whisper of ruin, a single bad idea lodged in every cell. . . .” When Perowne shows Baxter that he knows about his condition—it is inherited, and Baxter knows full well what’s in store for him—the thug loses his nerve, much like the Arthurian knights overawed by the Connecticut Yankee who can predict an eclipse.
But later that day, as Perowne’s family gathers for dinner, Baxter barges into his expensive home and holds the whole group hostage. With the exquisite narrative cruelty of which he is a master, McEwan makes us watch as Baxter forces Perowne’s grown daughter, Daisy, to strip naked, by holding a knife at her mother’s neck. That Daisy is a poet, who has come home bearing the galleys of her first book, only makes the symbolic dimension of the standoff more unmistakable: here is passive, feminine culture victimized by blind masculine violence.
For Perowne, despite all his surgical skills, is unable to overcome the intruder, thanks to a fatal deficit of thymos: “Never in his life has he hit someone in the face, even as a child. He’s only ever taken a knife to anesthetised skin in a controlled and sterile environment. He simply doesn’t know how to be reckless.” Perowne can understand the evil he is facing, but his understanding of evil’s causes does not help him to defeat it. Indeed, McEwan suggests, the opposite may be true: he may understand Baxter so well that he is too ambivalent to fight him, just as he has been ambivalent about the justice of the Iraq War. He has been plagued all day by second thoughts about his initial conflict with the criminal: “His attitude was wrong from the start, insufficiently defensive; his manner may have seemed pompous, or disdainful. Provocative perhaps.” If he could only have appeased Baxter’s crazy, touchy pride, he might have been left alone in the cocoon of his culture and wealth: just the same calculation that, Kagan suggests, Europe as a whole made after September 11.
It is the way McEwan resolves this deadly standoff that makes Saturdaysuch an ambiguous and troubling book. At the last moment, just before Baxter is about to rape Daisy, he notices her book of poems and commands her to read one out loud. Instead, she recites “Dover Beach”—Matthew Arnold’s great meditation on the uncertainty and loss of confidence of modern European man: “And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” And Baxter is so overwhelmed by the beauty of the verse, by the high culture he has never known, that he lets Daisy go and drops his guard, allowing Perowne to tackle him.
It is a totally fantastic resolution to a horribly credible dilemma; it has something of the willed unreality of Shakespeare’s late romances, like The Winter’s Tale, where the dead magically come back to life. Civilization does not have to fight barbarism, McEwan’s parable suggests. It only has to display its charms, and barbarism will disarm itself. Things only get more self-flattering in the coda to this episode, when Perowne volunteers to perform the brain surgery needed to save Baxter’s life after he hits his head on the stairs during their struggle. Any stain of aggression is therefore wiped away; Perowne, and the civilization he incarnates, emerges both unharmed and innocent. It is such a complete example of wish fulfillment as to make the reader suspect that McEwan is being deliberately, teasingly perverse.
Reading this evoked nothing so much as the image of a superannuated Michael Dukakis answering the hypothetical question of whether or not he would want the death penalty for a thug who raped and murdered his wife. His answer was so bloodless that it served to forever define him as incapable of passion. At that time, America was loathe to elect a President who appeared to lack the passion to defend it from its enemies. Europe gives every appearance of having a dearth of men who contain the requisite passion to defend their nation, their values, and their women and increasingly rare children. Even to write the sentence risks being attacked as a hopelessly sexist troglodyte. No one in the West speaks of the "manly virtues" anymore without cringing. Yet it is precisely the quintessential masculine qualities (though not restricted to men) of courage, tenacity, and "the willingness to do violence on our behalf" that is so sorely lacking in much of the West.
Europe has recoiled in horror from the violence of the last century. Just as the Jews vowed "Never Again", so too did Europe declaim, "never again." Yet Europe took the absolute wrong message from their 20thcentury blood letting; they eschew all violence when in reality, violence is often necessary to protect the weak from the strong, the prey from the predator, the civilized from the barbarian.
Note that a theme that runs through the reviews of all three books is the combination of a lack of meaning in the lives of the protagonists and a lack of passionate aggression. I will return to this tomorrow.
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