French Literary Fascism by David Carroll

Author:David Carroll [Carroll, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691058467
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Fascist Aesthetics of the Body

It would be impossible to deny that there is an important gender component in fascist imaginary constructs in general and in the construction of the figure of the fascist type in particular. But as much as we can learn from Sartre, Adorno, and Theweleit about pitfalls inherent in all attempts to determine the gender of fascism, it will take a more critical and less normative approach to the problem than theirs to deal with the question of "the gender(s) of fascism" in its contradictory complexity. It will take an approach that does not pretend to know what or how men and women (either heterosexual or gay and lesbian men and women) desire, one that does not know what authentic desire is or should be and that does not have as its ultimate goal the imposition of either a norm for desire or of desire itself as the ultimate norm.

Alice Kaplan has indicated some of the problems inherent in the determination of fascism as an essentially or exclusively masculine ideology.6 Unlike Theweleit, she insists on the radical ambivalence of fascist writers toward both the masculine and the feminine and the paternal and the maternal components of fascism, because, she argues, "sexism is highly interactive," and the various masculine and feminine categories are "so unstable" (Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 11). This leads her to conclude that "one can't 'decide' between the mother-bound and father-bound elements in fascism. They get bundled up in fascism's totalizing machinery and offered up in fascist language to appeal at different emotional registers at different moments of fascism's history" (24). Her own references in this context are primarily to Brasillach, but in much the same spirit I would argue that Drieu la Rochelle's writings constitute an even more complex, contradictory example of the instability and ambivalence of masculine/feminine, paternal/maternal distinctions within the "virile ideology" constituted by fascism. Just as his aesthetics contain both modernist and antimodernist elements—as Robert Soucy has argued in "Drieu la Rochelle and Modernist Anti-Modernism in French Fascism," Modern Language Notes, v. 95, no. 4 (1980)—and his politics both nationalist and antinationalist principles, an argument could be made that his fascism was as much if not more rooted in the ambivalence of gender as in dominant masculinist, homophobic values alone. His fascism thus consisted of a fusion (or confusion) of genders as much as it did of a fusion of different and even opposing ideologies and aesthetics.

This in no way denies that Drieu la Rochelle's aesthetics of politics were sexually charged, but it seems legitimate to ask with which sex(es) his politics were "charged," how they were "charged," and what relation they had to sexual difference(s) in general? It is not that masculinist values, including antifeminine and violently homophobic statements, are missing from his literary and political writings or his journal; it is just that an approach which focuses exclusively on the strictly masculinist side of his form of

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