I am eagerly
awaiting Wu Ming’s latest novel L’Armata
dei Sonnambuli (“The Army of Sleepwalkers”) a historical romp of the French
Revolution, to be released on April 8 2014. In anticipation, and to save some time, I have
written a “pre-review” below, containing an analysis of the group’s previous
historical collaborations. It’s pretty fair to say along with Pierre Bayard
that one hardly needs to know a book in order to review it – I would add that
one can certainly review most of it beforehand, even if one intends to insert
some actual details from it later on. I will
simply paste in the appropriate comments about L’Armata itself when I finally get the chance to read it.
The English-speaking
world needs to read Wu Ming. Their works, like the activist Ismail, float like vapor
above History, to rain life on ancient rebellions. They are the Altai falcon,
scanning the earth, reading its true connections, aware of signs us bloodhounds
with our noses are not equipped to pick-up. Signs that are only understandable from
the perspective of a raptor on the hunt. Of the tenets of their school the
supreme one is deep subjectivization. They demand before all else eschewal of
the distant “post-modern” ironic narrator, to put in his place the absolute necessity
of personal commitment. Wu Ming’s stories are martyr’s tales, a Golden Legend,
allegories for all the converts in the highways and the hedges.
It is “The Author of
Waverley” who proves to be a curious antecedent for Wu Ming. The man himself
may have been the tory Sir Walter Scott, but he too preferred to write his
popular works in Anonymity. His novels, like those of Wu Ming, insist on
drawing and intensifying lines of tension wherever and whenever they occur - from his initial interest in re-fanning the
flames of the Jacobite rebellion “sixty years since”, to his brutally executed
exploration of Presbyterian radicalism in the masterwork Old Mortality.
The Author, much like Wu Ming, draws lines in the sand, sets left hand against right and then lets force prevail. He cranks up the tension between class and region, perhaps even beyond historical actuality, and has no qualms about it, no matter if he is writing about the Scotland he knew, or the distant past. His insistence on using figures of Ivanhoe and Robin Hood as bearers of the more significant class conflict between aristocratic Norman and oppressed peasant Saxon strikes a pretty Wu-Mingish tone.
The Author, much like Wu Ming, draws lines in the sand, sets left hand against right and then lets force prevail. He cranks up the tension between class and region, perhaps even beyond historical actuality, and has no qualms about it, no matter if he is writing about the Scotland he knew, or the distant past. His insistence on using figures of Ivanhoe and Robin Hood as bearers of the more significant class conflict between aristocratic Norman and oppressed peasant Saxon strikes a pretty Wu-Mingish tone.
Where Wu Ming has
refined the art from The Waverley novels is part political consciousness and
part narrative innovation. The gaze in a Waverley novel is still that of a
middleman. The Waverley character par excellence is the Enlightened young
gentleman of means who is sympathetic to both sides of an extremist conflict – one who refuses
to take absolute sides, who comes out with the girl in the end and the respect
of both parties, and who in a Wu Ming story would most certainly have had his
throat cut before chapter 3.
A Wu Ming novel
drops the necessity for this convention. No patronizing charitable gaze is
needed for the portrayal of the radical left and right – we get the “skewed
perspective” rugged and raw, the first person present of a "chaotic good" Anabaptist madman named Gert
o’ the Well and the epistolary and journalistic past of a “lawful evil”
catholic spy named Q.
Nonetheless The
Author of Waverley, like the workers of the New Italian Epic, does not engage
in an ironical or distant tone - his is often the sympathetic third person, and
occasionally the first. There is a frisson
in depicting the “devil’s own party” that stretches back to Milton and
beyond. But in his novels we see the joy of the revolutionary subject, the
ecstasy of what is inevitably always in the end an extremist martyrdom and a
narrative time, even if only for a few chapters, of the satisfying side of
Terror.
One can see in The Tales of My Landlord, and particularly the introduction of Old Mortality for a chapter that deals with the revolutionary father figure or "the old man". It might have come straight out of an unwritten bridge piece between Q and Manituana:
One can see in The Tales of My Landlord, and particularly the introduction of Old Mortality for a chapter that deals with the revolutionary father figure or "the old man". It might have come straight out of an unwritten bridge piece between Q and Manituana:
…As I approached, I was agreeably undeceived. An old man was seated upon the monument of the slaughtered presbyterians, and busily employed in deepening, with his chisel, the letters of the inscription, which, announcing, in scriptural language, the promised blessings of futurity to be the lot of the slain, anathematized the murderers with corresponding violence.
Although I had never seen the old man before, yet from the singularity of his employment, and the style of his equipage, I had no difficulty in recognising a religious itinerant whom I had often heard talked of, and who was known in various parts of Scotland by the title of Old Mortality…
During this long pilgrimage, the pious enthusiast regulated his circuit so as annually to visit the graves of the unfortunate Covenanters, who suffered by the sword, or by the executioner, during the reigns of the two last monarchs of the Stewart line. These are most numerous in the western districts of Ayr, Galloway, and Dumfries; but they are also to be found in other parts of Scotland, wherever the fugitives had fought, or fallen, or suffered by military or civil execution. Their tombs are often apart from all human habitation, in the remote moors and wilds to which the wanderers had fled for concealment. But wherever they existed, Old Mortality was sure to visit them when his annual round brought them within his reach. In the most lonely recesses of the mountains, the moor-fowl shooter has been often surprised to find him busied in cleaning the moss from the grey stones, renewing with his chisel the half-defaced inscriptions, and repairing the emblems of death with which these simple monuments are usually adorned. Motives of the most sincere, though fanciful devotion, induced the old man to dedicate so many years of existence to perform this tribute to the memory of the deceased warriors of the church. He considered himself as fulfilling a sacred duty, while renewing to the eyes of posterity the decaying emblems of the zeal and sufferings of their forefathers, and thereby trimming, as it were, the beacon-light, which was to warn future generations to defend their religion even unto blood.
This trope is one that has already been acknowledged as a key theme in the New Italian Epic:
This figure of Old
Mortality, of the rebel Ismail, Gert of the Well, Thomas Müntzer’s disciple,
the Party members of The Measures Taken,
the Good Soldier Svejk - all of them
hidden, anonymous, members 1 to 5, fighting the same battle. Each one
premature, each one too late, each one kicking the epoch in the ass for the
sake of “the promised blessings of Futurity” – as Brecht says, “All begin
together. Every man must be the first man! Sink down in the filth. Embrace the
butcher. But change the world: it needs it!”
...The ‘death of the founder’: many books in the ‘nebula’ describe the consequences of the passing of a clan leader or founding father, a figure who represented a world that is now in crisis, or has actually constructed a world but has not prepared his descendants to manage the crisis it falls into. By coincidence, in various books this character was identified with the simple antonomasia ‘the old man’. According to Wu Ming 1, upon this mythologeme NIE constructs a great allegory of the current historical phase.
It was Lukács who
first re-claimed Sir Walter, along with his equally conservative contemporary
Balzac, for the radical left, as proto-workers in the field of socialist
realism. If this is the case and there is a comradeship between the two, then
there is still a distinction to be made between the theoretical, Althusserian fascination
of a work by Balzac, by and large in the same vein as Capital, that is, spinning out endless analytical classifications and
truths, the lesson of the superstructures as they relate to the theoretical
infrastructure, and the more evental works
of The Author, Maoist-Leninist works, to
which school I also append Stendhal and Wu Ming. If the work of Balzac or Zola,
like the “theoretical” Marx of Capital,
are more concerned with the precise structural depiction of the system, the
works of Wu Ming fall on the other hand into those which work to some extent
within the frames of “ideology”, designed to motivate the animal spirits and incite
revolutionary fervour – the Marx of the Manifesto.
This is the literary language of the revolutionary internationalist who insists
on the revolutionary event as a
subjective experience in the sense of Alain Badiou. It is Badiou who defines the “subject
language” of the prophets of the Event – madness to outsiders, but honeyed
truth to initiates.
Often these
subject-language novels go through the cycles of the event and its response as
outlined by Badiou. Badiou’s is an archetypal sequence of responses to his
mighty “events”: The responses to the Marxism-Event are: (1) fidelity
(Communism, Leninism); (2) reactive re-integration (Social Democracy); (3)
outright denial of the evental status (liberalism, Furet); (4) catastrophic
total counter-attack in the guise of a pseudo-Event (Fascism); (5) total
enforcing of the Event, which ends up in an "obscure disaster"
(Stalinism, Khmer Rouge); (6) renewal of Marxism (Lenin, Mao...)
In Old Mortality, likewise, the responses
to the Covenanter Event are: (1) fidelity (Covenanters, Presbyterians); (2) reactive
re-integration (Henry Morton, Lord Evendale); (3) outright denial of the
evental status (Bellenden); (4) catastrophic total counter-attack in the guise
of a pseudo-Event (Bothwell, Claversee); (5) total enforcing of the Event,
which ends up in an "obscure disaster" (Cameronians); (6) renewal of
the event (1689 Rebellions etc…French Revolution…The “idea” of Communism).
A similar pattern of
evental fidelity and the chain-reactions it sets off can be felt in all the historical works of
Wu Ming. In Q, the event of the
Peasant Rebellion and its total enforcement in Münster. In 54, the aspirations of the partisans lost in the post-war
complicity of a world where Cary Grant and Tito are comrades and the truly
faithful have to raise sheep and sell drugs. In Manituana, the piecemeal betrayal and dissolution of the event of
the Six Nations and the Great Longhouse of Sir William. And in Altai, the pseudo-Event of the Ottoman
conquest of Cyprus, the lesson of the means that effect the ends beyond
recognition. Every Wu Ming novel, no matter how baroque in plot nor how many
characters, always revolves around a vortex, a zero point that structures the
universe with its reactions – the Event.
There is a point at
which one must recognize the work of Wu Ming to be intentionally pulpy,
populist, and pathetic in the classical sense. They do very much depend on the
relation between the reader and the main heroes, and they emphatically toss out
the Narrator. Is this a negation of the Brechtian principle, the intention “to
create a new relation between the audience and the play performed: a critical
and active relation”?
But I think it is
in the over-identification with our heroes in the novels that we achieve the
true core of what Brecht also strove for.
Althusser points to the true greatness of Brecht’s plays; their ultimate
depiction of:
the coexistence without any explicit relation of a dialectical temporality and a non-dialectical temporality, is the basis for a true critique of the illusions of consciousness (which always believes itself to be dialectical and treats itself as dialectical), the basis for a true critique of the false dialectic (conflict, tragedy, etc.) by the disconcerting reality which is its basis and which is waiting for recognition.
That is to say, in a
Wu Ming novel, when the hero loses, it is
tragic, yes, but it is always still tragic in opposition to “the
disconcerting reality”. The character does not swallow the narrative into
himself. His fall does not become the fall of the story or of the universe – he
is always merely one of many – “The individual has two eyes. The Party has a
thousand eyes.”
In Manituana, for instance, history makes
tragic heroes left and right – but those heroes are only minutely tragic, to
themselves. Our pity for them does not take over the show. Joseph Brant becomes
a monster, but his transformation is never a purely moral mistake – we are far
too informed about the colonial process, the historical tensions long since put
in place, to chastise his failing as the cause of the downfall of the Iroquoian
Thebes.
Wu Ming do not solve anything with their novels – history is never wrapped up in a package to be delivered after the death of its heroes. Tensions are drawn, contradictions remain immanent, and we leave it at that. Precisely because the resolution is avoided, and the tension is, after the story arc is well over, still left in the lap of the reader, I consider the work of Wu Ming to be orthodox to Brechtian innovation – they deviate only in means after all, the measures taken, but the ends are the same. The last moment still leaves the reader with the burden of the struggle.
Wu Ming do not solve anything with their novels – history is never wrapped up in a package to be delivered after the death of its heroes. Tensions are drawn, contradictions remain immanent, and we leave it at that. Precisely because the resolution is avoided, and the tension is, after the story arc is well over, still left in the lap of the reader, I consider the work of Wu Ming to be orthodox to Brechtian innovation – they deviate only in means after all, the measures taken, but the ends are the same. The last moment still leaves the reader with the burden of the struggle.
In this way Wu Ming
and the tendencies of the New Italian Epic are re-arming the once dangerous but
now tamed genre historical fiction, and its transmorgified cousin, the fantasy novel.
The historical novel has always been an outsider in the Western Canon precisely
due to the ideological trauma points it tends to touch – it is interesting to
note that American ideologists as opposed as Gore Vidal and Newt Gingrich have both
written historical novels, though largely on the fringes of the literary
establishment. Among professors it seems the bias usually slants towards accounts
“contemporary” authenticity – Sir Walter is overtaken by Jane Austen etc.
That historical
fiction is a less recognized genre than even Fantasy is largely a result of the
deterritorialization of historical personality from the realm of Great Man
History into an “imaginary” pseudo-reality that can accept it. In some ways we
cannot allow for history to enter into the “reality” of our fiction. Most historical fiction, such as the Sharpe novels of Bernard Cornwell,
follow far more fantastical conventions than contemporary fantasy – A Song of Ice and Fire contains the
sequencing of historical development in a way that Sharpe’s Eagle with all of its mythological tropes does not. In the
vein of Fantasy, Wu Ming will speak often of their tendency towards “world
building” in their novels – a conceit usually saved for describing the value of
Tolkien’s writing. It is not incidental that Wu Ming 4 has recently published a
book on Tolkien called Difendere la
Terra di Mezza.
Wu Ming bring the dynamic
propagandism of a Jacobin printing press, the unresolvable, tension-snapping
suspense of a Sir Walter Scott novel, an insider perspective of the Badiouian
event, the Brechtian relation between “true” and “false” dialectics, and the
historical conception of reality characteristic of “world building” fantasy. They
re-introduce the ego and the subject into revolutionary story-telling in a way
that is neither humanistic nor condescendingly moderate. They bring theory and
excitement together; a week spent reading a Wu Ming novel is a kind of literary
baptism of fire and at the same time an adventure of the highest order – one is
given the opportunity to join a militia, to see what it means to fight (and
probably lose), not for the cheap post-ideological idea of “a cause” or “your
cause”, but for the totalitarian notion of “the cause” – and the accompanying frisson of the revolutionary carnival.