On Fiction & the Death of a National Spirit
I’ve realised recently that much of the work I enjoy (not all of it) rests upon the appearance of an element of nationalism and/or national character. The clearest example of this is in Yukio Mishima’s Runaway Horses and the character Isao Iinuma, so obsessed with the death of the samurai spirit in modern Japan — where nationalism plays an active role in the content of the story. But even other novels and stories which I have enjoyed immensely and felt inspired by that are not so distinctly about nationalism per se, have included a strong sense of national character, something like a vivid milieu of a people that constitutes the form of the work. Henry Miller’s America in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy seems to inform everything that happens — the sense of being overworked, exhausted, driven on from all sides but surrounded by a convivial and gregarious people, the vigor and force of life, being lost in the machine but enjoying it (strains of Libidinal Economy) — stems as much from his country as it does Miller himself. In War and Peace, being Russian is by contrast not something so active, but a passive hum which binds all the threads of life together, materialised in the quiet tears Rostov cries upon seeing the Tsar, and the tacit abandonment of Moscow to the French by its residents.
There is, of course, something dangerous and illusory about this desire for a national myth, something fascising (as attested to in Iinuma and Mishima’s coup attempts). Yet I cannot help being fascinated by these themes, even when they are tragic, as when Iinuma and Mishima’s deaths prove ultimately futile — they still present as romantic, perhaps more so given each’s foreknowledge of this fact. Perhaps it is not the content of the national myth that entices, but the fact that it represents something to believe in, a ground, an object of faith — because where is that today? It appeals, but we know it cannot be recapitulated. The national myth as an article of faith is, like Nietzsche’s God before it, undead. The future is cosmopolitan. To recapture it in the 21st century is an impossible task.
To be a great author one needs be either timely or untimely, but it is bad taste to be untimely in the wrong direction, that is, backward. One must either capture the spirit of an age, or herald the next, because, as Mark Fisher writes, “[h]ands up who wants to give up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the organic mud of the peasantry. Hands up, that is to say, all those who really want to return to pre-capitalist territorialities, families and villages.” Here, Fisher is talking about Hollywood depictions of indigeneity, but the sentiment is equally applicable to the national spirit of late modernity. There is something insincere and a little guilty about what remains of national character in the 21st century, as if it knows it is already dead. It would make no sense to write War and Peace today.
What, then, is the style of the postmodern author? In Crash, J. G. Ballard writes an England which feels like Hollywood, which, in the end, feels like a non-place, an anonymous city which could be found anywhere in the world. To compare two Japanese authors, the work of Haruki Murakami could also be set anywhere in the world — amidst the jazz and talking cats and incarnations of American brands, one finds it hard to see the vigorous national spirit that Mishima tried so hard to stir. Tao Lin’s characters likewise myopically wander anonymous cities that, although American, lack the liveliness of Miller’s New York. It is a style of nothingness, an empty milieu full of drifting people. It is the style of postmodern life.
Where does the disappearance of the national idea leave us? Is it still possible to write without God, without a nation, without something to believe in and to feel oneself surrounded by? Is it possible to write something noble? That seems to be what I am trying to get at — a sense of a noble writing, something that is empty of guilt and introspection and second guessing, something that has faith in itself (it is interesting that I can ignore the perspective of Shigekuni Honda in Mishima’s tetralogy — or perhaps that is why Runaway Horses stands out so much).
Nietzsche’s dead God had festered and something else grew up (whether out of the corpse or not is open to debate) to take its place; but it seems seriously deranged to believe anything else is growing up from the remains of the 20th century, not when capital is so busy melting things into air/PR. Everything is timely, far too timely, these days, and it’s hard to see where the untimely future might come from. It’s disappointing that contemporary literature, the mixed up worlds of William Burroughs, Ballard, and Lin, don’t bring with them any faith.
Perhaps that’s why Nick Land’s earlier writings, before his descent into bare parochialism, have such an appeal. Paradoxically, the idea of accelerationism, the idea that things are not yet being melted quickly enough, is the only ‘solid’ left. In the absence of everything else, the force which has killed God and the nation suddenly seems like the only thing with any true subjectivity — so why don’t we all switch sides and start worshiping that? And it’s true that capital’s mad whirl has an intoxicating character unique to itself, just as the nation once did. The question, remains, however, whether anyone besides the billionaire class really believes in capital as they did the previous two ‘solids’. Does anyone feel the surrounding context of unrestricted capitalist growth as a comfort? The strength of capital seems to belong to a realm alien to us, alien to the humanist strength nationalism provided.
So what, then? Timely writing today is a catechism which Lin’s floating characters and situations capture perfectly: when everything’s new, nothing is, and it grows boring quickly. It’s distasteful and parochial by now for untimely writing to look backward and dredge up new-old nationalisms — when Mishima did it the corpse was still fresh, at least in Japan, but there would be nothing ‘great’ in such writing today. It’s equally distasteful when untimely writing writes the only solid left (capital) in a way that appeals, because that kind of strength means nothing to a human being. The question of where to find a ‘great’ writing, a writing that inspires and appeals in the way that the national writing of modernity once did, seems foreclosed in all directions.
But perhaps the question is not well-formed in the first place. More on this topic will come later.
