308
THEODORE SOLOTAROFF
out one of the artificial ears to examine and admire. But in horror,
then, he realizes the ear for what it is and the purpose it is in–
tended to serve:
In this place . . . a mind was at work to negate the image
of a free and intact man. The same mind had devised this insult;
it intended to rely on man power in the same way that it had
relied on horsepower.
It
wanted units to be equal and divisible, and
for that purpose man had to be destroyed as the horse had already
been destroyed.
The fable is interspersed with Richard's comments on the
decline of manliness and virtue and on other changes for the
worse during his career, which dates from the period when wars
were still fought by light cavalry with "decent weapons" to the
time when "the abominable war-mongers contrived their murder–
ous incendiaries." Students of Juenger's own career will find a
good deal of thinly disguised autobiography in
The Glass Bees,
and in any case, there are allusions here and there (to "twice-de–
stroyed cities," Panzer divisions, the intervention in the Spanish
Civil War, and so forth), which make it clear that the fable
is
intended to refer to modern Germany. However, it is difficult to
pin down Juenger's attitudes to any specific context and one ends
up wondering which Germany he is, after all, writing about.
Is
Zapparoni's garden with its pool of severed ears the nightmare of
the '30's, with its systematic denigration and degradation of the
human, or is Richard, watching Zapparoni's robots on television,
instead in the post-war world of the
Wirtschaftswunder?
The sum effect is that
The Glass Bees
puzzles by its technique
of steadily delimiting and generalizing its particulars, to the point
of turning them into abstractions that could mean this or could
mean that and producing eventually a type of moral sensationalism
and sentimentalism. Once again there is the problem of the incom–
plete and essentially insubstantial context of the fantasy, in which
the details fail to support the meanivg being assigned to them. But
in Juenger's case, this seems to be less a failure of technique, which
is
otherwise brilliant, than a failure of historical and moral response
to the issues he is raising.
Theodore Solotaroff
