On Maneuvers

Ernst Jünger - On The Marble Cliffs

César Aira - Fulgentius

Maylis de Kerangal - Eastbound

Bret Easton Ellis - The Shards

The New Criterion, May 1 2023

Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), the German writer, war hero, man of the Right, and sphinx, claimed that On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939) came to him in a dream. It may have. Jünger was a devotee and a hoarder of dreams, and this story reads as if it were one of them. Now available in a new, and significantly improved, translation for New York Review Books Classics by Tess Lewis, the book is a tale of mounting horror, in which its two principal protagonists (the unnamed narrator and his brother, Otho, are proxies for Jünger and his younger brother, Friedrich Georg) are participants and yet, in a sense, spectators, as in a dream: “While evil spread across the land like fungus on a rotten log, we delved ever deeper into the mystery of flowers.”

The pair, men from a northern country, are former soldiers who now spend their days engaged in botanical studies, an interest, not so coincidentally, of Ernst’s, surrounded by books and herbarium sheets, cataloguing their discoveries, reveling in the beauty and order of nature, “bantering over recondite trivia,” playing philosophical games, and indulging in a little magic. Regardless of the quality of the Jünger brothers’ banter, this is obviously an idealized representation of their inner emigration in pre-war Nazi Germany. The duo live “in great seclusion” in an old house built on and into the Marble Cliffs overlooking one of the “beautiful, ancient” towns that “wreath” a large lake—the Grand Marina—towns not in any of our atlases but with a flavor of southern France about them. There are vineyards, cicadas, and traces of Rome and the Merovingians.

But for all the narrator’s detail—the mountainous region to the south, a plain called the Campagna (a borrowed name to emphasize a borrowed geography) to the north, and beyond that, the “marshes and gloomy lowlands” that mark the approach to a vast forest—quite where On the Marble Cliffs is based remains elusive, as does the period in which it is set. There are hints of the High Renaissance, but one in which Christianity coexists with magic and a belief in older gods, and in which the supernatural is no superstition. The nobility (a preoccupation of Jünger, no aristocrat, to, I suspect, his regret) counts. There’s mention of a Provençal knight who had been a friend; guilds flourish; peasants work the fields; cavalry do battle. Weapons of choice include swords, halberds, maces, axes, crossbows, and pikes. But there are shotguns and rifles too. At one point an automobile arrives, “powerful . . . humming softly like the almost imperceptible whirring of an insect.”

The more this fable—widely read as an attack on Nazi rule, for reasons that will become evident later on—could be seen as a universal allegory, the safer its author, a German writer publishing in the Third Reich on the eve of the Second World War, might have hoped to remain, although we cannot know how much these considerations influenced Jünger, who regularly played host to both fearlessness and caution. What seemed like camouflage may also have been a sign of greater artistic ambition. In 1972, Jünger wrote that “although this assault from the realm of dreams reflects and captures the nightmarish political situation, it also transcends—in time and space—the scope of the actual and episodic.”

But if Jünger’s often richly colored, sometimes gorgeous language has, for good and ill, clear echoes of Huysmans, it also helps transport the story line still deeper into the safety or, perhaps, profundity of a dreamworld, if at the risk, periodically, of saturating it in an overripe mix of kitsch and pretension:

On those days darkened by ill humor, we closed the doors that opened onto the garden because we found the flowers’ fresh scent too caustic. In the evening we would send Erio to the cliff kitchen to have Lampusa fill a pitcher with wine pressed in the year of the comet.

Meanwhile, the last battle to defend the towns of the Grand Marina is no Cambrai, but instead a fantastical, nightmarish affair, one dominated by a fight between the packs of dogs fielded by the combatants, Arabian and Molossian hounds on one side, Cuban mastiffs on the other: “Here there was no mercy, as in hell.”

Consider Jünger in a previous mode, writing in Copse 125 (Das Wäldchen 125, 1925):

Dull reverberations announce that bursting charges are being thrown down the dug-out shafts that we could not bother with, so that any living being that may have escaped may be annihilated.

The fact that Jünger—who had been awarded Germany’s highest military honor, the Pour le Mérite, as well as numerous other decorations, for his service in World War I—now had to tread so carefully with the Nazis would have taken aback Germans who had lived through the Weimar years. With his medals—above all, that medal—and his first, startling memoir, Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern, 1920), about the Western Front, “a war gospel” that had enthused Goebbels, Jünger emerged as a prominent figure among Germany’s Far Right.

But whatever the precise nature of Jünger’s complicated, and not always coherent, politics, they did not allow him to submit to the Nazis’ overtures. Impressed, at least for a while, by the Bolsheviks’ attempt to create a totally mobilized society, though not one on the heroic, militarized model he favored, he took the unusual position that the Nazis were insufficiently radical. They were too close to the bourgeoisie that—both as a snob and (under the Weimar Republic, anyway) some kind of revolutionary—he disdained, just as he, being who he was, despised the “mob” (Pöbel) that Hitler also attracted.

While Jünger did not share the Nazis’ obsessive anti-Semitism, that was not why he kept his distance, a distance he maintained with a discretion that may help explain why he benefited from a certain immunity. Goebbels may have disliked the aestheticized turn Jünger’s writing took in the 1930s, but when On the Marble Cliffs raised eyebrows in Nazi circles, Hitler, a long-term admirer of its author’s Westfront record and of the way that he had articulated it, ordered that “nothing’s to happen to Jünger.” The book was never (quite) banned, and Jünger notes in an afterword from 1972 that the Wehrmacht even published it in a couple of editions, once in Riga and once in Paris.

What raised those eyebrows was the account of the downfall of the towns that wreathed the lake and what had preceded it. These events have been orchestrated by the Head Forester, a former chieftain in the order for which the brothers once fought who has since taken over his homeland. Both imposing “and considered slightly ridiculous,” the Head Forester is fond of feasting and of gold, and known for his exotic uniform. His eyes “had a glint of terrifying joviality . . . [and] bore an expression of cunning and indomitable strength.”

Few of Jünger’s readers would have been unaware that, among his many titles, Hermann Göring was the Reichsforstmeister, the supervisor of the nation’s forests. Nor would they have overlooked the resemblance between another character (“a short, dark, gaunt fellow,” who “was of that breed of men who dream concretely, a very dangerous sort”) and Goebbels.

The Head Forester advances southwards, ravaging the Campagna, setting off the disorder that seeps into and, as he intends, undermines the civilization of the Grand Marina, for which he has in mind only ruin followed by the establishment of a primitive tyranny. He foments turmoil and then poses as the solution to it: “terror established its reign behind a mask of order.” People start disappearing “under cover of darkness and fog” (or, in Jünger’s original, Nacht und Nebel, a phrase that was to assume a terrible meaning in occupied Europe). But rather than fight back—the Head Forester is still not yet in total control—the two brothers, military veterans both, opt “to resist solely through the power of the spirit,” a nod, again, to inner emigration.

What finally persuades them to take action is the discovery of an old barn, a place of severed hands and flayed skin, standing next to trees festooned with skulls, more evidence of the new order’s depravity and in all probability Jünger’s warning that his own era’s descent into the abyss had further down to go. Years later, he recalled that when writing this book, he had “the impression [he] was seeing a future fire.”

And so, the towns of the Grand Marina succumb to the flames, “but only the golden shimmer of all that horrible destruction rose to the Marble Cliffs. So distant worlds aflame delight our eyes with the beauty of their destruction.” These are words that come close to presaging a passage in Jünger’s War Journals, 1941–1945 (a fascinating work I reviewed in these pages in December 2019) in which he describes watching (in reality, he was probably conflating some of what he had seen on different evenings), wine glass in hand, a sunset air raid over Paris: “The city, with its red towers and domes, was a place of stupendous beauty.” Not for nothing did an acquaintance refer to Jünger, a man who cultivated the detachment that already came naturally to him, as a “statue of ice.”

The narrator of On the Marble Cliffs tells us that the “human order resembles the cosmos—from time to time it must be engulfed in flame in order to be born anew.”

As Otho and the narrator escape from the Marina unscathed, so Jünger survived his second war, evolving into a grand old man of letters in the new Germany he never truly accepted. He died, laden with honors, at 102. He refused to go through denazification on the grounds that he had never been a Nazi. And, while he was undeniably capable of editing his past, he rejected the easier route to rehabilitation that claiming On the Marble Cliffs as an unambiguously anti-Nazi work might have helped pave. On the contrary, he maintained that “this shoe fit several feet,” including, he wrote in his diaries, those of Göring, Stalin, and Bismarck.

His elder son, Ernstel, however, never lived to enjoy the return of peace. Briefly jailed for some indiscreet remarks he had made about Hitler, he was shot either in battle or by the SS, not far from Carrara’s marble cliffs.

Jünger, I reckon, would have enjoyed meeting Fulgentius, the astute, thoughtful, and, in one very specific respect, eccentric Roman general who is the hero of the eponymous novel from 2020 by the astonishingly prolific (more than a hundred books, albeit short ones) Argentinian writer César Aira, now available in English translation by Chris Andrews.

“At sixty-seven,” writes Aira,

Fabius Exelsus Fulgentius was one of Rome’s most illustrious and experienced generals. With his record of long and distinguished service, he was an indispensable element in any expansionist plans requiring the participation of the armed forces, as they all did, inevitably.

Fulgentius has been given the mission to pacify Pannonia, a large, mostly wild province that was the gateway to today’s Balkans, and which, should anyone actually want to go through it, extended quite some way beyond. It began, roughly speaking, in modern-day Austria and stretched down into what we know as Serbia. “Illyrian guerilla groups,” a Shakespeare-shattering notion, are of concern to the local authorities and are demoralizing the troops garrisoned there. A sterner grip is needed, and Fulgentius is just the man to apply it.

Despite the best efforts of his friends and family, some of whom stoop so low as to ask whether “he had laid in sufficient supplies of the herb that he used to manage his ‘urinary issues’ (minima mingendi difficultas),” Fulgentius has agreed to sort out Pannonia. Needless to say, he made a show of reluctance—his “beloved family” and all that—but he was pleased to go. He was bored by the daily routines of civilian life, and the danger of being dragged into Rome’s constant palace intrigues meant that he couldn’t even enjoy any real peace and quiet. By contrast, going off to war was something of a relief: “the concrete and visible presence of an opponent bent on killing . . . simplified the game; you knew where you stood.”

But Aira has not written a conventional tale of a formidable soldier’s last hurrah, although its narrative finishes up where readers might have guessed, with (spoiler, I suppose) the old warrior returning to Rome, in poor spirits even after a successful campaign and “all the honors he had received from the Pannonian sycophants.” The twist comes from the source of his sadness, the realization that he no longer has the years left to take on a grand new challenge, far from any battlefield, which has caught his attention (to disclose what it is would be too much of a spoiler). But, as Fulgentius rides back to Rome, that sadness comes with an advantage, that “of quenching the desire to think, leaving him free to contemplate the landscape,” the line that concludes this exuberant, drily and darkly funny, beautifully written, beautifully strange, and sporadically horrifying book, leaving it in an unexpectedly melancholy place where twilight is not so very far off.

A clue, albeit one very tangential, to the nature of Fulgentius’s jettisoned dream turns up early in the book when Aira explains that Fulgentius, unlike most Roman generals, is a playwright—well, of sorts: “He wasn’t a professional dramatist; he had written a single tragedy, and it had completely exhausted his fund of inspiration.”

In fact, for a long time he had forgotten that he had written it. As a boy of twelve, he had come to loathe the “indigestible tragedies that he was obliged to read and learn by heart.” Their dreariness leads him to parody as revenge: his aim

was to show how silly the genre was, applying the rules with ludicrous rigidity, turning the mortal seriousness of the tragic into one more joke.

The most interesting transformation was the one that converted the boredom of reading into the euphoria of writing. He let the meter guide him; it gathered in all sorts of unexpected words. Once he realized that the meaning was developing on its own, he gave it little thought. The general idea was to trace a heroic destiny, with all the standard clichés exaggerated for comic effect. The protagonist was a general whose chronic incompetence led to his demise at the hands of shadowy foreigners. Fulgentius gave the character his own name, as a kind of signature.

He presents the results to his preceptor “as a lost tragedy by Livius Andronicus, recently discovered in a Sicilian library. The fraud could not be sustained beyond the second guffaw. The preceptor went on reading it aloud . . . choking with laughter,” hugely entertained by such an accomplished pastiche. It becomes a family joke. Fulgentius’s uncles borrow the scrolls, which are presumed lost. Decades later, a friend tells him of a tragedy he has just seen that bears Fulgentius’s (unusual) name, “a tragedy according to the rules of the genre, but the content was completely wild.” A Scythian king was involved. That rings “a faint bell.”

Tantalized, he goes to see a performance. It is, indeed, his play. He repossesses his lines “like lost and precious property. He had come to be the general he imagined as a boy, by divine intervention, it seemed.” It doesn’t matter that the audience is cracking up:

he saw himself facing the inexorable destiny conferred on him by Poetry. Everything took on meaning. Everything was illuminated. . . . From that moment on, Fulgentius could not rest until he saw the play again.

This revives his military career, because he realizes it would be easier to stage the play in the provinces than in snooty Rome, filled with “theatrical know-it-alls.” And where goes Fulgentius, the general, so go his scrolls, and with them, Fulgentius the play, “to five Gallic cities . . . then Hispania, then Alexandria, Anglia, [and] Germania.” He watches every performance, “mutely mouthing each syllable of each hexameter,” always weeping at the depiction of his own death. Now it is Pannonia’s turn. First stop, Vindobona (Vienna), a sophisticated city where he could assemble a decent cast. It does not let him down. After that loom the depths of a far from fully civilized province, but Fulgentius is confident “he would find human material well suited to the theater” there too, a side project to his mission with just a touch of Fitzcarraldo about it. “By profession,” Fulgentius declares to a theater director in Carnuntum, “I am a soldier,” but as a playwright, “I think of myself as a sublime amateur.”

Aira vividly recounts the progress of the legion—the elite Legion of the Wolf—selected to subdue the rebellious Illyrians. It penetrates deeper into Pannonia. Massacre follows massacre, lands are laid waste, towns destroyed. On occasion,

enemy soldiers had to be drawn out onto the plain by burning their villages, raping their women, and crucifying their progeny on little child-size crosses. If that didn’t bring them down from the mountains, it was proof of their heartlessness.

Other operations include a monk hunt (a monk hunt: pagan monks, but still). There are times, clearly, when Aira, his translator, or both had much too much fun with this book.

There are gentler interludes: “sexual mores were remarkably relaxed in Pannonia,” to the satisfaction of legionaries “long tried by the hysterical demands of Roman women.” And then there’s the play. Stuck in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter, the general decides to give directing a try, a liberating experience, if not for the Sarmatian slave girl in the sole (but vital) female role in a cast otherwise to be made up of legionaries. She doesn’t speak Latin and wouldn’t understand what’s going on. Not to worry: “it would make the plot more ambiguous and mysterious.”

And we learn more of Fulgentius, as he ponders matters great, small, and absurd (why do trees have so many leaves? Just showing off?) along the route. He has no great faith in philosophy and regards the “Graeco-Roman cults [as] an elegant literary system of practices, which [speak] to the intellect, and [are] primarily a provider of content for art and ceremony.” If he believes in anything it is in reason, which leaves him resistant to superstition, although not so resistant that he won’t summon the haruspices to interpret the pattern of some spilled liquid. “Churlishly” they refuse and then—they are dwarfs—rush “away on their bandy little legs muttering insults.”

The surprising fact that a young Ernst Jünger tried to desert from the French Foreign Legion he had no less surprisingly joined on a lark (his father extricated him) might have given him some sympathy for Aliocha, the would-be Russian deserter who is one of the two central figures in Maylis de Kerangal’s Eastbound. Then again, Jünger agreed to preside over the execution of a deserter in occupied Paris in a spirit of “exaggerated curiosity”: “I have seen many people die,” he wrote in his diary, “but never at a predetermined moment.”

Initially published in France as Tangente vers l’est in 2012, and now translated into English by Jessica Moore, Eastbound, a tense, poetic novella, derives additional power from a war that began ten years later. When written, Aliocha (this edition retains the French spelling of Alyosha), a reluctant conscript, was heading for a period of military service that was bound to be, in the Russian tradition, brutish, unpleasant, and scarred by vicious bullying. But it is hard to read Eastbound now without moving it into 2023 and imagining that Aliocha’s ultimate destination will be the killing fields of Ukraine and death in the pursuit of a tyrant’s atavistic dream.

I won’t reveal how Eastbound ends, if that’s the word, but much of its story is set in confined places—train compartments, corridors, even a washroom—within an immense space. The train is the Trans-Siberian:

Still the same slow and massive unfurling of the countryside, still the same quiet stride of the train, sixty kilometers an hour is an ideal speed to watch the mountains rise, those mountains that disturb the landscape now, decisive slopes lined with dark conifers that hurtle towards the rails, the realm of bears.

Trapped on the train taking him to a barracks somewhere in Siberia, Aliocha decides to “run away, get out as fast as possible, defect, jump,” to leave his fellow recruits and their watchful, sadistic sergeant behind. But how? And what then? He meets Hélène, a French passenger on the train, and manages to explain his predicament. She agrees to take him into her compartment, where he can hide. She has just abandoned her Russian lover:

He’s no beggar, no victim, he’s just like her, he’s running away, that’s all. The woman looks the boy straight in the eye—a clearing opens, very green, in the dirty dawn—and bites her lip. Follow me.

Where would fiction be without the implausible? Two strangers on a train collude to keep one of them undiscovered, the other thrown off balance by what she’s taken on, but “what’s done is done.” Somehow she copes, often uneasily—and they cope—without any obvious plan, as the train rolls on east. He botches an escape through a railway station. “This total loser,” she thinks, “this unpleasant surprise.” There are searches—“heavy, sharp steps . . . cavalcades of big boots,”—someone notices a bit too much, an attendant connives in their secret, there is no rote romance, and there are close calls. Not so long after the most nerve-racking of them all, they step off the train, pause for a while in open countryside, and run up a hill. Hélène starts to sing a song learned from her Russian lover, and Aliocha joins in:

to see them from the train . . . you’d think they were burning up with joy—like torches, the great drunkenness that comes after the danger.

In The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis returns to the early 1980s Los Angeles of his Less Than Zero in a story told through and about a close (or not) group of, to use an overused adjective, “privileged” high-school students. Finding a vague connection—as is, in this article, obligatory—to Ernst Jünger is easier than might be imagined. In this case, it’s drugs. The characters in The Shards take a lot of drugs, and so did Jünger (such as, startlingly, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, opium, and cocaine). But he took his, mostly, in the spirit of transcendental adventure and generally tried not to overdo it, attitudes not common among Ellis’s spoiled, jaded jeunesse dorée:

Cocaine was being openly passed around in small packets. A phone call had been made and someone met a dealer in front of the house on Canon around midnight and stronger margaritas were blended to go with the coke . . . and after my third margarita I was drunk enough and decided to do a couple of bumps and kept a small packet Debbie handed me so I could sustain my high uninterrupted—the supply was seemingly endless.

The novel is told in the first person, and, no stranger to playing around with his own past, Ellis has given his narrator his first name, his high school (Buckley in Los Angeles), and even the novel that made him—Ellis, that is—famous:

I began writing my own novel in the summer of 1978, which I was still working on in the late spring of 1980, though about to abandon it in favor of what ultimately became Less Than Zero.

Well, that’s metafiction, but what such games achieve other than to signal the unreliability of the narrator is unclear. The Shards may contain autobiographical elements, but it is no memoir.

What to believe then, and what not? A key presence in the book is a serial killer, which is credible enough in a time when, as Bret (the narrator) recalls, they “were roaming the [Southern Californian] landscape throughout the seventies and into the eighties, crisscrossing each other on the freeways and through the canyons and boulevards.” A 2022 article in the Los Angeles Times refers to reports of more than twenty of them “operating” in L.A. in that era, including the Skid Row Stabber, the Sunset Strip Killer, the Toolbox Killers, the Grim Sleeper, the Freeway Killer, the Night Stalker, and the Hillside Strangler. But none of them bore the name of The Shards’s “Trawler” or the repulsive decorative touches that are his calling card.

The Shards is, in part, the tale of a seventeen-year-old who has, it seems, everything (other than much parental involvement in his life, a gap which appears to be common enough in Bret’s circle). There’s the Mercedes 450SL, a beautiful, enthusiastic girlfriend, and a secure place in the school hierarchy as a member of the leading senior clique. At the same time, he is dealing with questions about his sexuality, questions that, judging by a busy erotic life, he has answered, even if in that era, and at that age, it is not an answer that he can share. This pretense reinforces his conviction, not exactly unknown among alienated teenagers, that he is acting, performing a role, “following a script.”

What balance there is in Bret’s life is upset by the arrival of a newcomer with, it emerges, a disturbing past, who is accepted into their group. He eventually overturns its dynamics, and for Bret becomes an object of desire and, with the Trawler apparently drawing closer, infinitely darker obsession.

Meanwhile, narration by listing—whether clothes, restaurants, movies, or songs—as a device to depict a time or a place, something of an Ellis trademark, is briefly effective. It then palls. The same, or maybe not even that, is true of Bret’s, uh, mechanical portrayals of sex, real or imagined, even if it is (probably) intended to reflect the preoccupations of the adolescent mind. The Shards is not without its moments of brutal violence but falls far short—not a difficult task—of the metronomic savagery running through Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). This time around, the grotesque treatment of the Trawler’s victims, to the extent that it is disclosed, is only revealed after the event, although the discovery of the ruined remnants of their pets implies additional unmentioned horrors about which we can, if we are so inclined, only speculate.

The Shards is too long, crying out for editorial rather than homicidal knife-work. Nevertheless, as I turned its roughly six hundred pages, I was drawn in by the tensions, of all sorts, growing within a tale that is simultaneously a look back to a lost age, a horror story, and a far from conclusive Bildungsroman:

I made a decision to leave through the front door because I didn’t want to . . . walk down the lawn and pass the stoned woman sitting alone in the gazebo, or the covered column where the cat had been hung, or the empty pool where a boy had supposedly drowned during a psychotic episode, my friend, who I look back on while I write this as my first love though I didn’t fully realize it then, in 1981. I walked across the brick driveway to Haskell Avenue, where my car was parked, and drove away from Matt Kellner’s house for the last time.