Political scenes from old novels* that I think about often

The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust

The narrator visits his friend Saint-Loup at his military barracks, where he discourses on the art of war

This scene, written after World War I but set in the 1890s, reads now as ironic, although I find Proust’s values difficult to interpret here. The young narrator visits his friend, the charismatic aristocrat Saint-Loup, at his military barracks in Doncieres and spends an evening with him and his military friends. Saint-Loup has an extended monologue during which he tries to argue on aesthetic grounds that war is an art, like painting, rather than a game. He argues for a kind of literary canon of battles on which all others are modeled, saying that the tactics of Frederic the Great “are no more obsolete than the Iliad” and that the classic maneuvers of the great generals of the past will find new expression in future conflicts.

So that, if you know how to interpret military history, what is a jumbled account for the ordinary reader becomes a logical sequence, which is as rational as a painting is for a lover of pictures who knows how to look at what a person is wearing in a portrait, what he is holding in his hands, whereas the ordinary visitor to an art gallery is bewildered and develops a headache amid the dizzying blur of color. But just as with certain paintings in which it isn’t enough to notice that the figure is holding a chalice, and you need to know why the painter put a chalice in his hands, what it’s meant to symbolize, it’s the same with these military operations; quite apart from their immediate objective, they’re habitually modeled, in the mind of the general who is directing the campaign, on earlier battles, which constitute, if I can put it like this, the past, the library holdings, the learning, the etymology, the aristocracy of the battles that are to come.

At the end of Saint-Loup’s discourse — which lasts for seven pages — he concludes that the art of war, being a rational art, will improve and progress through iterative improvements until it reaches a state of aesthetic perfection. That is, unless new technology makes war’s “artists” obsolete: “With the amazing advances in artillery, the wars of the future, if there are any, will be so short that peace will have been declared before there is time to put our lessons into practice.”

Of course, we as readers know that this idea of war as a scientific-aesthetic pursuit would be snuffed out by the bloody, miserable, destructive war of attrition that came two decades after this scene was set. We also know that advances in artillery did not have the effect of shortening the length of wars. It seems to me to illustrate a few common assumptions that smart people make when they try to predict the future: the assumption that current trends will intensify rather than reverse; that if socio-political processes can be understood “scientifically,” then they can be controlled and continuously improved upon; that our underlying values will either stay the same or develop toward some fixed ideal.

Also, this one: that new technologies make humans (rather than other technologies) obsolete.

Sodom and Gomorrah, Marcel Proust

An aristocrat changes his position on the Dreyfus Affair

Humming in the background of the inner novels of In Search of Lost Time are the politics of the Dreyfus Affair, the scandal that profoundly divided French society and emboldened its reactionary, anti-Semetic elements (Unpopular Front has an excellent series on the subject).

The Duc de Guermantes, being an aristocrat, naturally aligns himself with his class peers on the anti-Dreyfusard side but changes his mind after an encounter with some other aristocrats at a spa resort:

Now, in the interim, the Duc de Guermantes had got to know three charming ladies at the spa (an Italian princess and two sisters-in-law). Upon hearing them comment briefly on the books they were reading and on a play being performed at the casino, the Duc had at once realized that he was dealing with women of superior intellect, and with whom, as he put it, he could not keep up. He had been all the happier to be invited to play bridge by the Princess. But, hard on his arrival there, as he was saying, with all the fervour of his unqualified anti-Dreyfusism, “Well, there’s no more talk of the famous Dreyfus getting his review,” great had been his stupefaction to hear the Princess and her sister-in-law say: “We’ve never been so close to it. You can’t keep someone in the penal colony who hasn’t done anything.” “Oh, ah, what?” the Duc had stammered to begin with, as if on discovering some bizarre nickname employed in this household in order to make someone he had hitherto thought intelligent appear ridiculous. But after a few days … the Duc was nevertheless saying, “Indeed, if there’s nothing against him!” The three charming ladies considered he was not moving fast enough and were quite hard on him: “But, basically, no one of intelligence can have believed there was anything.” Each time a “crushing” fact was produced against Dreyfus, and the Duc, believing that this was going to convert the three charming ladies, came to announce it, they laughed uproariously and had no difficulty in demonstrating to him, with great dialectical subtlety, that the argument was without value and altogether ridiculous. The Duc had returned to Paris a rabid Dreyfusard.

I think there’s so much in this anecdote — the Duc, assuming that Dreyfus is guilty mainly because that’s what all his friends think, is flabbergasted when he steps outside his social circle and finds that the things “everyone knows” are not taken for granted everywhere. The Duc would likely never have been convinced by a newspaper editorial, but finds himself quickly shedding his beliefs when they aren’t shared by these new women he admires, the women of his own social class who charm and impress him. Proust notes how fickle we are with our convictions once they lose social support:

But it should be remarked that every ten years, when you have left a man filled with a real conviction, it happens that an intelligent couple, or simply one charming lady, enter his society, and that after a few months he has been led to hold opposite opinions. And in this regard, there are many countries that behave like the man of sincerity, many countries that have been left filled with hatred for a people and that, six months later, have changed their views and reversed their alliances.

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

The arrival of Mynheer Peeperkorn

In the allegory that forms the plot of The Magic Mountain, a mountain sanitorium stands in for late-19th-century Europe, and various forces compete for the soul of the protagonist, an impressionable and ordinary young man Hans Castorp, who is staying there as a patient. Much of the book is given over to debates between two intellectuals residing in or near the resort: Settembrini, an advocate for humanism, progress, and democracy, and Naphta, a religious reactionary.

However, both of them are rendered nearly irrelevant to Hans when a new person arrives at the sanitorium: a large Dutch man named, somewhat ridiculously, Mynheer Peeperkorn. Peeperkorn is loud, grandiose, prone to speechifying (although he can never quite complete a thought), and sometimes violent. He immediately dominates the social life of the sanitorium, and Hans develops something of a man crush on him. Both philosophers are annoyed — the man is clearly not serious, not an intellectual! — but Hans is eager to let himself be won over.

“Fine, a freak of nature,” Hans Castorp said. “And yet not just a freak, not just something to taunt us. For people to be actors, they must have talent, and talent is something that goes beyond stupidity and cleverness, it is itself a value for life. Mynheer Peeperkorn has talent, too, no matter what you may say, and he uses it to put us in his pocket. Set Herr Naphta in the corner of a room and have him deliver a lecture on Gregory the Great and the City of God, something well worth listening to — and in the other corner have Peeperkorn stand there with his strange mouth and a brow raised in great creases and say nothing except ‘By all means! Permit me to say — settled!’ And you will see people gather around Peeperkorn, down to the last man, and Naphta will be left sitting there alone with his cleverness and his City of God, although he can express himself so clearly that it makes your blood and spit run cold, to use one of Behrens’s phrases.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself, worshipping success like that,” Herr Settembrini chided him. “Mundus vult decipi¹. I do not demand that people flick around Herr Naphta. He is a dreadful obstructionist. But I would be inclined to stand at his side in the imaginary sceen you have just painted with such reprehensible relish. Go ahead and despise distinctions, precision, logic, the coherence of the human word. Go ahead and despise it in favor of some sort of hocus-pocus of insinuation and emotional charlatanry — and the Devil will definitely hae you in his —"

Mann’s choice to set up an ongoing chess match between the worldviews of Naphta and Settembrini, and then late in the novel have a ridiculous but powerful man arrive to, with his force of personality, knock over the chessboard, is something I think about a lot. After the man’s arrival, the two intellectuals continue to debate, but have lost their spark: “Nothing crackled between the antagonists now, no lightning flashed, no current surged. The presence that intellect thought to neutralize, neutralized intellect instead.”

It’s very difficult for me not to read Peeperkorn as a Trumpian figure (much is made of the character’s wild hair, and they even share some patterns of speech), although Peeperkorn is not malevolent, per se. He acts instead as a society-dissolving force: in his thrall, people behave badly and allow their worldviews to melt into his personality. “The Marketplace of Ideas” doesn’t stand a chance against him. The society on the mountain never quite recovers. (I wrote at length about The Magic Mountain in this piece)

A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The narrator meets the communist-turned-Nazi

A Time of Gifts is not a novel, but it’s a wonderful read: it’s a memoir narrated by Patrick Leigh Fermor of his journeying on foot across the European continent, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople (Istanbul). The book was published in 1977, but his walk took place in 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany, and so it serves as a record of a place and time about to experience horror and upheaval, landscapes and societies that were about to become irrevocably changed.

Of Germany, he records his sense of the public feeling at the time: “In the country the prevailing mood was a bewildered acquiescence. Occasionally it rose to fanaticism. Often when nobody was in earshot, it found utterance in pessimism, distrust, and foreboding, and sometimes in shame and fear but only in private.”

In one town, a young workman offers him a bed for the night, which he accepts. When he sees the man’s room, he is shocked to discover “a shrine of Hitleriana” — flags, posters, and so on.

When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on his bed, and said: “Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite! I used to punch the heads of anyone singing the Horst Wessel Lied! It was all the Red Flag and the International then! I wasn’t only a Sozi, but a Kommi, ein echter Bolschewik!” He gave a clenched fist salute. “You should have seen me! Street fights! We used to beat the hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us. We laughed ourselves silly—Man hat sich totgelacht.² Then suddenly, when Hitler came to power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!” He snapped his fingers in the air. “And here I am!” What about all his old pals, I asked. “They changed too! — all those chaps in the bar. Every single one! They’re all in the S. A. now.” Had a lot of people done the same, then? A lot? His eyes opened wide. “Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!” He shook his head dubiously for a moment. Then a wide, untroubled smile divided his face, as he spilled the bullets like rosary beads through the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other. “Sakra Haxen noch amal! We’ve scarcely got any Sozis or Kommis left to pitch into!”

This is the terrifying, dark version of the story above, where the Duc de Guermantes changes his mind about Dreyfus after encountering the Italian Princess. Allegiances are malleable, and this young man appears to have thrown in his hat with whatever party gives him the most opportunity to beat people up.

1. “The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.”

2. You laughed yourself to death.