Interbellum Literature : Writing in a Season of Nihilism

In Interbellum Literature Cor Hermans offers an overview of modernist writing in the interwar years. The ideas embodied in the personalities and works of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, Beckett, Céline and others are captured in a new synthesis. Interbellum Literature: Writing in a Season of Nihilism 4 Copyright 5 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 12 Prologue: Imagine Sisyphus 14 Part 1: Lost Worlds 22 1 The Algerian 24 The Grave of the Unknown Father 24 The Algerian Childhood of Camus 26 The Other, the Arab 29 Gide and Immorality 31 The First Man (Why We All Are Settlers) 37 The Footsteps of the One Next Door 40 2 A Salesman Called Schoenzeit 42 Arthur Miller Overlooking Central Park 42 The Jazz Age According to F. Scott Fitzgerald 43 The Triumph of the Miltex Company 48 Crash and Guilt 49 A Dejected Soul 51 Forever Writing Plays on Family Relations 54 The Sirens of Success 55 3 Becoming Böll 57 Nazi School Years in Cologne 57 Göring Comes to Town, Casting a Shadow 59 The Secret of Immunity, Part 1 61 Analysing Weimar at the Kitchen Table 64 Hesse and Demian: Uplifted by ‘The Stream of the World’ 65 Sleepwalking 68 Céline, Hero in Decline of the Previous War 70 Unheroic Normality 73 The Secret of Immunity, Part 2 75 4 Beckett Climbs the Mount of Joy 78 The Philosophy of Suffering 78 A Chest Full of Incoherent Thoughts 79 Behold Belacqua 80 A Guilty State of Mind 82 Poetry and Verticality 84 Dante and Dada 85 The Starfield of Modernity 87 Three Capital Divas 88 Beatrice and a Black Diamond 91 Vie de Bohème and Uncontrolled Thought 93 The Bridge to Redemption 95 5 A Farewell to Vienna 98 The Omnipresent 98 The Spartans of the Danube 100 Freud Puts European Civilisation on His Sofa 106 Disintegrating Values and Vienna’s Merry Apocalypse 110 The Vacuum Surrounding Von Hofmannsthal 116 Hermann Broch’s Dream of a New Unifying Culture 118 Zweig’s Impatient Heart 124 The Dangers of Pity and the Meaning of Nostalgia 128 6 A Thin Slice of Bois de Boulogne 135 How Pinter Tried to Capture Proust ... 135 ... and Found the Golden Glow of Delft 138 Birth of a Writer 139 Spheres (Mental, Geographical, Musical) 141 Beckett and the Horror of the Proustian Prison of Time 145 Giving Up Habit 148 Revelation Through Involuntary Memory 150 Putting Time in Place 154 The Surrealist Proust 159 A Celtic Belief and the Mystery of Trees and Steeples 161 Living by the Laws of Imagination 164 Man Ray and the Dimensions of Sleep 166 Part 2: Models of Daring 168 7 Caligula and the Moon 170 The Chair of Count Ciano 170 A Tuscan Desert 173 The Aesthetics of Ruins: Tipasa and Djémila 178 Caligula’s Disillusion 182 Absolute Freedom to Reach for the Impossible 183 Dictatorship Taking Over the Role of Divine Fatality 184 How Camus Came to be Possessed by Dostoyevsky 186 Living Underground or in a House above the World 195 Helen’s Measure 199 8 On Meeting Joyce 202 The Assignment 202 Talking to the Hero of Triviality 204 The Uncharted Orbit of a Cruel Playful Mind 207 Homeric Cycles, or the Everyday Odyssey of Our Bodies 215 Walking with Beckett, Following the Vico Road 223 The Interior Monologue of the Zeitgeist 229 The New Medievalism: Announcing Another Age of Extremes 231 9 Musil Traverses “Park Nietzsche” 239 Bonfire in the Hills of Genoa 239 The World Hides in the Mountains 240 Decadent Kakania 243 Pseudoreality and the Sense of Possibility 252 Fragments of Science and the Mystic Whole 256 Why We Should be without Qualities 261 The Ecstatic Millennium, Never to End 266 10 Sartre in Berlin and Bouville 274 History’s Invisibility 274 The Little Platonist 275 Passing Hysteria? 278 The Philosophy of Things 282 The Varnishes Melt, Nausea Takes Over 286 11 Norwegian Light 296 The Disappearance of Henrik Ibsen 296 ‘Your Inward Heroism’ 299 The Temple Portico and Other Masks 309 The Michigan Take-Off 316 The Mongrel and the Poodle 322 Part 3: Land, Stock, and Fringe 330 12 Bohemian and Bauer 332 La Bohème, or Moral Independence 332 A Dangerous Code to Live By 337 Catching the Last Colours under a Darkening Sky 341 Paris nor Pamplona: The Expat on Tour 343 Dada Intermezzo at the Cabaret Voltaire 347 Virginia’s Bloomsbury: ‘Why Is There Not a Discovery in Life?’ 352 Orwell, Down and Out 360 The Bauer Perspective 365 13 The Grimace of Céline 373 The Patient and the Enlightened Doctor 373 Life and Work 380 Racial Hygiene to Counter the Fear of Nihilism 387 The Trial as an Act of Forgiveness 396 Montmartre Skies, or the Athenian Who Loved the Purity of Dance 402 “I’ve Always Got My Cyanide on Me!” 406 14 Simone Weil and Franz Kafka: A Forceful Parallel 413 Martian Lady in Black 413 The Iliad All Over Again 419 Gravity, Grace, and Resistance 424 The Cruel Machines of Bureaucracy 426 The Philosophy of Waiting 434 How to Mend the Uprooted Soul 438 The Ascetic Art of Hunger 445 15 Ernst Jünger’s World of Fire 450 Occident and Exaltation 450 The Shattered Brain 458 The Grail of the Purest Nationalism 464 The Face of Pain 468 After the Fire 475 An Unfortunate Combination of Names 482 16 Thomas Mann and Some Afterthoughts 490 The Enchanted Sanatorium 490 The Priority of Wartime Thoughts 493 Two Rival Pedagogues 495 Snow and Blood 501 Literary Strategies to Retrieve the Sense of Being 502 Modernity and the Return of Sisyphus 515 Bibliography 524 Index 540 In 'interbellum Literature' Historian Cor Hermans Presents A Panorama Of Modernist Writing In The Ominous Period 1918-1940. The Book Offers, In Full Scope, An Engaging Synthesis Of The Most Stimulating Ideas And Tendencies In The Novels And Plays Of A Wide Circle Of Writers From France (proust, Gide, Camus, Céline, Tzara, Aragon, Simone Weil), England And Ireland (virginia Woolf, Orwell, Joyce, Beckett), The Usa (scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, O?neill, Hemingway), Austria-hungary (musil, Broch, Kafka, Zweig, Roth), And Germany (hesse, Jünger, Böll, Thomas Mann). Caught Between World Wars, They Nevertheless Succeeded In Creating Some Of The Best Literature Ever. They Created A Philosophy As Well, Rejecting Bourgeois ?mechanical? Society, Designing Escape Routes From The Nihilism Of The Times. Lost Worlds. The Algerian -- A Salesman Called Schoenzeit -- Becoming Boll -- Beckett Climbs The Mount Of Joy -- A Farewell To Vienna -- A Thin Slice Of Bois De Boulogne -- Models Of Daring. Caligula And The Moon -- On Meeting Joyce -- Musil Traverses Park Nietzsche -- Sartre In Berlin And Bouville -- Norwegian Light -- Land, Stock, And Fringe. Bohemian And Bauer -- The Grimace Of Celine -- Simone Weil And Franz Kafka: A Forceful Parallel -- Ernst Junger's World Of Fire. By Cor Hermans. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. In Interbellum Literature Cor Hermans offers an overview of modernist writing in the interwar years. The ideas embodied in the personalities and works of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, Beckett, Celine and others are captured in a new synthesis.