Langue fantôme suivi de Eloge littéraire dAnders Breivik (French Edition)
Contents:
The pattern seems to be the same among many fans throughout the world. Speaking with a couple of devoted members of the extreme left, one Italian and one Taiwanese, who are also, for reasons both aesthetic and political, serious devotees of metal, I faced what can only be described as stonewalling when I tried to address the problem of, let us say, the extra-musical awareness that necessarily accompanies any experience of a Burzum song. Then I went and got all serious. I told them I admit that the early black metal output has incredible raw power, but I find it really very implausible to suggest that a listener could isolate the intrinsic properties of the music from the inaudible background knowledge we all have about who is making the music and why.
Which means, I added, that getting into it, aesthetically, is also a weighty thing morally. Few fans, evidently, even bother with the electronic ambient output, which proves, in the opinion of many fans, the ease of separation between the music and the ideology—if it were about agreeing with Vikernes, fans would eat it all up indiscriminately. In , Vikernes, now in his late thirties, finished his sentence and was released from prison.
He promptly moved to the French countryside to join his wife of two years, the French film director Marie Cachet, whose body of artistic output gives an insight into the ideological world she inhabits with her husband, as well as a key to understanding their shared pretension to the intellectual integrity of the European white supremacy movement.
The evidence for such hybridity is indeed strong as is the evidence that in Neanderthals and modern humans we are looking at a difference only of subspecies, and thus a difference that does not really warrant talk of hybridity in cases of successful mating. The film features low-budget reenactments of what such worship rituals may have looked like, as well as a soundtrack featuring Varg Vikernes himself, growling, ursine, in Old Norse.
The apparent contrast between the two cultural spheres, the rustic French and the distant Nordic, will by now not seem nearly so discordant to those familiar with French Nordicism. Vikernes is convinced that it has been one of the great distortions of the church to portray pre-Christian paganism as if it consisted in several national traditions, with the consequence that today no pan-European awakening is able to take place, as each pagan subculture remains blindly loyal to the divisions between nation-states that indeed only date back a few centuries.
It supposes that there is a simple, one-to-one correlation between populations and territories, that these can be uncontroversially determined. If only these correlations are respected, then humanity can live in peace. Vikernes insists upon his own egalitarianism in the sense described, but does not hide his infinitely greater concern for the wellbeing of Europeans and for the future of Europe. He thus patiently and obligingly answers questions from commenters on his blog, like some advice columnist, or like some local sheikh dispensing information concerning what is clean and unclean to eat.
Thus a reader wants to know whether Spain and Portugal are to be included within the spiritual unity of Europe? Yes of course, Vikernes replies. Thus for example he supposes that, when the Romans used the names from their own national pantheon to refer to the Germanic gods, this was not an instance of translation or assimilation, but the assertion that the Roman and German deities were one and the same.
As he explains on his site: There is only one single Pagan religion in Europe! He wishes to be left alone, to collect weapons, and to live out his life as his conscience dictates. Vikernes is not only a convicted murderer and a white-supremacist neopagan in the South of France; he is also a homesteader there, bringing a mentality more commonly associated with the precarious settlement of frontierland in Idaho or Kansas, that supposedly empty space the filling of which created the American libertarian spirit, than with European rhetoric about primordial roots in the soil, about blood and belonging.
The news shot out around the world I saw it on the CNN ticker at a gym in Montreal that a Norwegian neo-Nazi had been caught in the final stages of planning for a massacre somewhere in France.
September | | meta-meta-medieval
Paris was the presumed target, and Breivik the presumed inspiration. Vikernes relates on his blog that the French police. This is a substantial cache indeed, though it is hard to imagine a serious, concerted terrorist attack being carried out with such a haphazard assemblage of arms. Valls for his part held firm in his defense of the measures taken, even using the opportunity to give an impromptu civics lesson: Now, evidently, we will have to await the results of the inquiry being carried out under the authority of the public prosecutor in Paris. It was the French website RTL. One need not be terribly interested in the microtaxonomy of right-wing extremism in order to understand what the quick-reflexed French media could not this past July: If they had been in high school together, the relevant distinction would have been between the preppy dork and the fuck-it-all rebel, and in this case, notwithstanding all that transpired and all the years that passed, the subcultural difference would have been great enough and visible enough well into adulthood as to forestall, even at a distance, any perception of likemindedness.
Another difference has to do with strategy. A real nationalist does not kill the children of his own nation, Vikernes writes on his own blog. Breivik killed more Norwegians in one day, he notes, than Muslims have managed to do in the past forty years. And there is, finally, the so-called Jewish question. For Vikernes, the great problem with Breivik is not that he is a mass murderer, but that he has moved on to a new and softer version of European fascism that has moved past the era of unfashionable Judeophobia, indeed that has discovered common cause with the Jews, and especially with Israel, to the extent that Christianity and Judaism both face an existential threat in Islam.
Christians are for him, after all, Jews too, and therefore what he sets himself up in opposition to is nothing less than the course of European history for the last few millennia. What he defends against this is a feeling that there was once something better, something more real.
things medieval, medievalism, and medievalisings
Yet it would be difficult to imagine how this something might be reestablished by the instigation of a race war. And so, unlike Breivik, Vikernes arrives, in the evening of his life, at a small bit of wisdom at least: His was an ugly mix of perverted political ends and frustrated high-schoolish explosiveness, while Vikernes sooner calls to mind a tale from the West the American West, that is: Nonetheless he aspires to a sort of integrity, and wanders, and settles, far from home, to live out his life, to be left alone.
Until the sheriff and his men come and bust down the doors. The hearing takes place at the 17th Chamber of the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, which specializes in cases of interest to the media.
The 17th Chamber deals in particular with cases pertaining to the freedom of press. Freedom of the press was enshrined in the French legal system under the Third Republic, in Such freedom is considered a core Republican value, while the actual limits French law places on what may be said publicly are rather tight relative, say, to the freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment in the United States. For one thing, defamation of a public figure remains broadly defined and easily proven, and many such figures spend their entire careers levelling defamation charges, and having them levelled back.
Moreover, in France, unlike the US, there are laws against Holocaust denial. There was one case having to do with defamation of the Quick fast-food chain, and another involving a poor, frightened soldier who had worn his uniform on an occasion when it is forbidden to do so, perhaps to impress women in a bar.
He had shown up, but his lawyer had not, and he appeared a nervous wreck. But the far right dominated the agenda, and it was for Vikernes that a large crowd had assembled today. Sixty or so people were admitted into the public seating area of Chamber 17 Vladislav and I had both squeezed through to the press box on the strength of his Tablet press pass alone.
Of these sixty, only half or so appeared plainly to be Vikernes supporters, and of these only five, perhaps, appeared like plausible recruits as shock troops for a coming race war: The rest were simply Burzum fans, most of them scrawny and awkward. They looked like fantasy role-players, or comic book collectors. And then there was Vikernes himself, who mostly stood in the back of the chamber next to his lawyer. He has a longish beard, blonde but now mostly gone white.
He is a few months younger than I am, and indeed he looks like he could be a close relative of mine. I tell Vladislav I think Vikernes looks much older than I do. No convicted murderer in the US would ever come out at the end of his sentence looking quite so fresh and whole.
Vikernes sits on a bench and waits as the other cases are handled. He perks up from time to time, has brief, smiling exchanges with the Burzum fans behind him, occasionally tries to listen in and figure out, with his limited French, what the judge and prosecutor and attorneys are talking about. She invites him to come and stand at a microphone before her podium, along with his Norwegian interpreter, a dowdy thirty-ish woman wearing a knitted black shawl and her hair in a bun. The judge asks him, in French, if he speaks French.
She asks him to state his name. The interpreter stands silently. There is muttering and confusion behind the podium. His attorney quickly interjects that he has received some important documents belatedly, and therefore that he would like to request a postponement. The judge says that this request will be considered during a break in a few moments, and she asks the interpreter whether le monsieur would like to say anything. The tribunal breaks for deliberation, and Vikernes turns to make small-talk with his fans. The five neo-Nazi toughs in the crowd outnumber the gendarmes by one, and outweigh them by much.
But everyone is on their best behavior. It is hard to square the generally convivial atmosphere in the chamber with what is in fact at stake. In the press box Vladislav wants to talk to a Norwegian journalist wearing a Ramones shirt. He tells us that many ordinary Norwegians, who have known of Vikernes since the church arsons of the early s, look at the recent events in France with perplexity. For them, the difference between Breivik, who tore a still-fresh wound into their society, and Vikernes, who committed crimes that have been dealt with according to the appropriate norms of that society, could not be clearer.
The presumption is that the French interior minister fumbled.
No one believes that Vikernes has been planning much of anything. He is being persecuted for his beliefs, and for the taint of murder that he carries with him: As Vladislav put it, reductively yet pointedly: We two Americans, the Californian of dustbowl-migrant heritage and the Soviet Uzbekistan-born child of Brighton Beach, at the tribunal together on a shared New York press pass, living in Paris for our own idiosyncratic and terribly individualistic reasons, did not even need to make explicit which side of this battle we were on.
The judge and the magistrates returned, and announced that Vikernes would be called back to the 17th Chamber on June 3, In the philosopher and critic Roland Barthes wrote sharply of the illusions at work in the encounter between state justice and the individual:. The Revolution of made all French citizens culturally French, by ukase, and aimed to iron out regional differences in the name of greater Republican unity. But the revolutionary virtue of equality can only ever be equality among equals; if an individual comes forth, before the magistrates, and is so different in the way he speaks and holds himself as to evade any high-minded expression of equality that the magistrates, as representatives of the Republic, might wish to extend, then equality evaporates into a mere ideal.
In this setting, Vikernes is a peculiar sight. When is the last time Chamber 17 had need of a Norwegian interpreter?
meta-meta-medieval
This is no Occitan peasant, but someone from altogether outside the universe of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Whatever Vikernes himself discovers, most likely on Wikipedia, about the ancient valor of the Parisii tribesmen, and thus about their primordial spiritual unity with his own tribe, he himself will never be anything more than an oddity in Paris, the blonde man with the camouflage hunting cap who had his day in the Palais de Justice. Richard Millet had no such day.
He was summarily executed by his peers, literarily speaking. The French Nobel Prize winner J. Build up to the whole phrase. Ponder the lack of verb? Leave all this stuff as open questions, repeat from time to time, and laisser mijoter on a gentle heat while stirring occasionally. Continue for 13 weeks. Keep an eye on it along the way. See what happens at the end.
I did the manifesto on why literature, reading, writing, story-telling, and poetry matters last year quite a lot: That feels like a very heavy load. Sometimes that felt a bit teary. I resisted the urge to watch Dead Poets Society again, read Baudelaire, be melancholy and splenetic insofar as females of the species can do such things: This is serious stuff. But that last term: I like it and it makes me happy.
- .
- Alpha Trio: The Complete Collection.
- THE OLYMPIANS AND THE GOD OF DARKNESS.
Even if things ballsed up along the way, as they inevitably do, and then wiggled back on course or somewhere nearby. Is having a laugh, hallucinating, delusional, or living in some other possible world. For which there is, by the bye, a time and a place. Not every day, obviously.
Teaching is important, and some research is too. Hopefully all teaching, though sometimes one does wonder: Least of all, as I was saying to a chum over email earlier today, us poor old marginalised medievalists: For reasons of evolutionary adaptation; coping with climate-change; and senescence, decrepitude, and decay. But there is ground for hope: Teaching by humans who are humanists in all senses. Who are alive and have a healthy survival instinct, and who are living rational beings and can use reason not merely to survive, but to flourish.
Not necessarily to grow: Rethinking that connection between teaching and research: The kind of teaching I do asks students to learn. The learning that the students are hopefully doing is similar to mine. This phenomenon has got something to do with being short-sighted. You are much more aware of the difference between the two and of that edge. That is true of long-sighted people too, of course.
But for the short-sighted, what you see outside framed normality is blurry and at a different focal distance. And when reconstructing, adding in hypothetical a. Best practice and prior or parallel training for this, and best accompanying background music: Best reading-material whether books, TV shows, or movies for intermissions: Twin Peaks is highly recommended.
All of which is lovely and happy and leaves me gamboling like a spring lamb in flowery meadows, and leads to the following links, which were actually what I meant to talk about when I started writing this post. This post, which has turned out to be mostly preliminary prologue; or, an introduction to literature and to literary analysis.
Consider these links, assembled, as an introduction to Early French literature and to textual analysis:. I was also amused to see another earlier one: Interest piqued or, the eye caught from a medievalist point of view and because The Mole had been working on , a year that has thus been haunting us for the last couple of years. Aside from the teaching-research-learning nexus—perhaps a Karl Uitti creative triangle—maybe these sorts of commentative literary activities and reflexions on literariness are in the air?
Style , rather than fashion. Chic , not mode.