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PARTISAN REVIEW
systems, concepts-is an index of the height our faculty of abstraction
has reached.
(Essay on Ernst Junger)
That 'fission' of objects we notice in Junger's prose should not
alarm us: it is no more strange, or complex, than the general state of
the world around us.
If
Husserl's dictum,
Every logic is a logic for an
imagined real world,
is true, then it is also true that every prose must
be viewed as a prose for an imagined real world- though artistry may
be pushed to a point where it issues in a purely
formal
prose, a prose
of epic 'stencils' to be filled in by the exacerbated reader. . . . Think
of Kafka and his "animal," which, though suggested, is never named;
or of the same author's
Trial,
with its named culprit and nameless
crime: epic dies or stencils, both of them, challenging the reader, like
variables in mathematics, to 'interpret' them by inserting determinate
values.... In a case of this kind, the reader assumes quite legitimately
the role of co-author.
(Essay on Ernst Junger)
It should be kept in mind that Gottfried Benn, by his conscious
use of technological prose, helps to destroy the commodity or fetish
character of literature, while Ernst Junger seems to abet that character,
by means of his sociological naivete, his decorative mythology, and his
riddling, 'coded' style ... Here we have the two poles of that "rhyth–
mical creation of beauty," which Poe discussed as early as 1849: a tech–
nological progression sharply set over against a retrograde symbolism.
Junger wants to go back, beyond 'commodity' even, in order to explore
the delicious possibilities of language as 'fetish.' Benn, on the other hand,
refuses all compromise: he cultivates his prose the way Schoenberg
cultivates his music, that is to say by taxing his materials to the utmost.
(Essay on Ernst Junger)
I spoke earlier of the purely assocIatlve character of expressionist
prose. This is to say that we are dealing here with a genre of prose
whose principle is neither inductive nor deductive. Transitions from
sentence to sentence can no longer be
deduced;
and the same thing often
holds for the relation between members of a single sentence as well.
Such prose draws no conclusions, yields no corollaries, carries no impli–
cations. Sometimes its syntax dispenses altogether with the usual sub–
ject/predicate model. There is every reason for speaking of expressionist
prose as non-Aristotelian.
(Essay on Ernst Junger)
