Fanged Noumena: To Learn from Trakl is to Howl at the Moon

Messrs. Land & Trakl

 

'Two wolves in the sinister Wood / We mixed our blood in a stony embrace  

And the stars of our race fell upon us.' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

I once published some notes on the case of the Aquarian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl in which I praised his love of silence and admired the blueness of his twilight [2]. No one can deny that there are many arresting - and disturbing - images in his work, as he sets about exploiting the often uncanny ambiguity of the German language. 

 

Wittgenstein was an admirer; Heidegger was an admirer; and Nick Land is also a fan, although he responds in very much his own manner to Trakl whom he regards as an archetypal poète maudit - one who embraced his own lycanthropic nature and thus made a radical break from humanity and its ovine idealism. 

 

 

II. 

 

In his essay 'Spirit and Teeth', Land celebrates the fact that Trakl offers no hope of redemption - neither in his writings nor in his actual life, which is short and not particularly pleasant, involving incest, depression, and a fatal drug-overdose aged 27. 

 

He condemns Heidegger (and Derrida) for trying to spiritualise Trakl and ignore the libidinal tension in his work; the fact that to write as Trakl writes is to write in blood and with rabid impatience: "Trakl took very little time over anything." [3]      

 

Like Rimbaud, Trakl belongs to an inferior race outside of civilisation; a race that is "irresponsible and nomadic" [4], but which possesses sharp teeth with which to bite. 

 

 

III. 

 

Land also wrote an earlier text on Trakl, based on his PhD work at Essex [5]. Titled 'Narcissism and Dispersion', it's a reading of Heidegger's 1953 interpretation of Trakl and it arguably provides justification for Land's war against Heidegger's circular hermeneutics and his "repugnant obstinacy and piety" [6].  

 

I mentioned that in 'Spirit and Teeth' Land rejects Heidegger's efforts to spiritualise and pacify Trakl. Well, in 'Narcissism and Dispersion' we witness how Heidegger attempts this by treating language like a closed (narcissistic and masturbatory) loop; something that only ever concerns itself with itself. 

 

Land counters this with an idea of dispersion [Zerstreuung], insisting that what's important about Trakl's poetry is that it allows language to unravel or decompose and leak into a material Outside.  

 

Whilst Heidegger desperately tries to defend Trakl's verse from being read as a symptom of a degenerating, fragmented ego so as to relocate Trakl back into a grand gathering of Geist, Land is having none of this. 

 

For Land, Trakl is not the poet of home sweet home, but of nomadic wandering and his language does not reflect upon itself in quiet isolation; it rapidly spreads like a rash or buzzes like a mad swarm of flies. 

 

For Heidegger, the blueness of twilight indicates a time of peace when the beast has been tamed; for Land, the latter is forever untameable and wild blueness is akin to what, as a Lawrentian, I would term chaos (the desire for which forms the very essence of poetry) [7].

 

 

IV.

 

So, on the one hand, we have Heidegger's reading of Trakl ... one that sanitises the latter by downplaying the drug-induced mania and seeks to pass off the work as a (mystical) affirmation of Being in order to reinforce his own philosophy.   

 

On the other hand, we have Land's reading of Trakl ... one that celebrates the latter by emphasising its feral character and seeks to pass off the work as a (filthy and furious) affirmation of base materialism in order to reinforce his own philosophy. 

 

Heidegger suggests that Trakl’s language is essentially singing the song of a homecoming - the movement of humanity away from its current alienated, fallen state and toward a primordial beginning.

 

Land says it's a werewolf's howling.

 

The question is: Would Trakl have preferred Heidegger's reading of his work, or Nick Land's?   

 

Obviously, we can never know the answer for sure - and it's highly probable he would have disliked both - but I like to believe that, if forced to choose, Trakl would prefer the latter and recognise himself a little better in Land's reading which, whilst highly theoretical, nevertheless contains something of the ecstatic nihilism that characterised his writing.

 

Having said that, Trakl scholars almost universally prefer Heidegger's reading over Land's and Heidegger's work is treated as foundational (even if problematic and at times deeply flawed). Land remains seen (at best) as an eccentric, peripheral figure by the Academy. 

 

The fact that his interpretation of Trakl is highly regarded within certain marginalised circles and subcultures (and on blogs like this) only confirms their idea of Land as someone who arouses fellow lunatics but has very little to offer serious scholars within the field of German literary studies who, much like Heidegger, after reading Trakl's poems are able to simply lay down their books, close their eyes, and enjoy a good night's sleep [8].  

 

 

   

Notes

 

[1] Georg Trakl, 'Passion', in Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Alexander Stillmark (Northwestern University Press, 2005), p. 302. 

      These lines are quoted by Land in his essay 'Spirit and Teeth' (1993), see note 3 below. 

 

[2] See the post 'Drinking the Silence: Notes on the Case of Georg Trakl' (17 Dec 2018): click here.  

 

[3] Nick Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 175-201. The line quoted is on p. 181.

      This essay was originally published in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. David Wood (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.  

 

[4] Nick Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 183. 

 

[5] Land received his PhD in 1987 from the University of Essex under the supervision of David Farrell Krell. His thesis focused on Martin Heidegger's 1953 essay 'Language in the Poem' [Die Sprache im Gedicht] and its interpretation of the poetry of Georg Trakl.

 

[6] Nick Land, 'Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger's 1953 Trakl Interpretation', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 118. This essay first appeared in Philosophers' Poets, ed. David Wood (Routledge, 1990), pp. 72-90.  

 

[7] I'm thinking here of Lawrence's essay 'Chaos in Poetry' - much loved by Deleuze and Guattari - which served as an introduction to Harry Crosby's poetry collection Chariot of the Sun (Black Sun Press, 1931).

      The essay can be found in D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116.

 

[8] I'm paraphrasing Land's ending to 'Narcissism and Dispersion'. Land regarded Heidegger as an exhausted and ageing philosopher with Platonic instincts who "felt nauseous at the thought of losing control, and perhaps still believed in God". Fanged Noumena, p. 121. 

 

 

On Why Lawrentian Werewolves Are Not Vegans 2: A Reply to Catherine Brown

Benicio del Toro in The Wolfman (2010) 
Does he look like he enjoys lentils?

Interestingly, the attempt to not merely anticipate but invoke and affirm a vegan world in relation to the work of D. H. Lawrence is also now being made by the much admired literary scholar Catherine Brown, herself a recent convert to this militant form of ascetic idealism. 

Brown argues that although Lawrence wasn't a vegan - nor even a mild-mannered vegetarian - his thought contains much that resonates with veganism as it is understood and practiced today. This is perhaps true, but, having said that, I don't think we can simply equate Lawrence's work with veganism, nor allow his thinking to be co-opted by any single cause or crusade. 

For whilst I'm sure Lawrence would have despised factory farming as much as Heidegger - the latter notoriously suggesting metaphysical equivalence between mechanized food production and the Nazi death camps long before Morrissey came up with the slogan meat is murder - he remained, as Brown admits, "comfortable within the omnivorism and speciesism that was dominant in his as in our culture".  

Indeed, whilst the tiger and the wolf present terrible problems to those idealists who want to think life exclusively in terms of the lamb, Lawrence invariably sides with those beasts of prey - including man - that feast on the flesh of other creatures in good conscience. What's more, he makes no secret of his contempt for those domestic farm animals - pigs, sheep, and cattle - that fail to attain purity of being and lapse into nullity:

"They grow fat; their only raison d'être is to provide food for a really living organism. [...] It is given us to devour them." [RDP 41]  

You can try and get around this by adopting the trust the tale, not the teller defence, and find fictional passages in which a character might turn their nose up at a plate of beef, or, like Ursula Brangwen, thoroughly enjoy a tasty vegetarian hot-pot, but, still the stubborn fact remains that Lawrence's carnivorous vitalism ultimately trumps any nascent veganism.    

And if, as we have noted, Lawrence despises those creatures that lack creative impulse, so too does he abhor human beings who have become docile grazing animals, subscribing to what Nietzsche calls a herd morality - cry-bullies forever bleating about rights and bloated on their own sense of righteousness. Such people are, he says, "the enemy and the abomination" and he is grateful for the "tigers and butchers that will free us from the abominable tyranny of sheep" [RDP 42].

Ultimately, Lawrence wants men and women with large mouths, big teeth and sharp claws and we can even locate within his work something that might be termed a werewolf manifesto - cf. the vegan manifesto that Dr. Brown finds within his writing. This werewolf manifesto openly sets itself against the Green Age - i.e., the utopia imagined by cabbage-hearted vegans, environmentalists, cows, Christians, and social justice warriors in which the lion lies down with the lamb and "no mouse shall be caught by a cat" [RDP 275].

Lawrence writes:

"This is the [...] golden age that is to be, when all shall be domesticated, and the lion and the leopard and the hawk shall  come to our door to lap [soy] milk and to peck the crumbs, and no sound shall be heard but the lowing of fat cows and the baa-ing of fat sheep. This is the Green Age that is to be, the age of the perfect cabbage." [RDP 275-76]

Of course, Catherine is perfectly at liberty to read Lawrence however she wishes: as am I. And, as a matter of fact, I'm very sympathetic to her idea that if we conceive of veganism "not as a dogma, identity, or state of putative purity, but as a queer nexus of perceptions and affects, then Lawrence can, at moments, be described as vegan".

Although, of course, we could easily replace the word veganism here with any other -ism - including fascism or feminism - and this sentence would still make perfect sense: that's the beauty (and the danger) of Lawrence's text; it invites anyone and everyone to play within the space that it opens up and to invest it with their own forces.  

See:

Catherine Brown, 'D. H. Lawrence and the Anticipation of a Vegan World'. This paper was originally given at the 33rd annual international D. H. Lawrence conference held at the University of Nanterre, Paris (3-7 April 2019). It can be read on the author's website: click here. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace' and 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Readers interested in part one of this post - in which I address the comments made by another vegan Lawrentian (David Brock) on an earlier post to do with dental morphology - should click here.

On Why Lawrentian Werewolves Are Not Vegans 1: A Reply to David Brock

Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man (1941) 
Does he look as if wants a veggie burger?

There are many ways of responding to D. H. Lawrence's lycanthropic longing for individuals in joyful possession of the sharp and vivid teeth of wolves with which to defend themselves and devour their prey.

One might, for example, smile and dismiss the whole thing as an absurd fantasy. Or one could seriously explore the possibility of human-animal hybrids and discuss developments in trans-species science, including xenotransplantation; who knows what dentists will be able to offer in the future?

But what one can't do is pretend that Lawrence's werewolfism as a vital expression of sensual, savage being, can be squared with the moral philosophy of veganism which abhors animal cruelty and exploitation and promotes a plant-based diet that is totally free from all forms of meat (including fish, shellfish and insects), dairy products, eggs, and even honey.

To do that is, at best, disingenuous - and David Brock's suggestion that vegans lustfully savour and even savage their food ... tearing at the flesh and seeds of a pomegranite, is, frankly, even more ludicrous than the thought of a Lawrentian lycanthrope prowling around Eastwood with 2" fangs and looking for a kiss.

Finally, it might be noted that wolves, unlike domestic dogs that have co-evolved alongside humans, cannot survive on a plant-based diet, as they don't possess the genes necessary to break down starches.

In other words, they need red meat and one would imagine that this would also be true of a werewolf, which, if I remember my European folklore and cinematic fiction correctly, is driven by an irresistible urge to kill and never howls beneath the full moon in want of a salad.    

Notes 

This post is written in response to a series of comments made by the former editor of the D. H. Lawrence Society Newsletter, David Brock (aka Badger), that he kindly shared at the end of an earlier piece on Lawrence and dental morphology: click here.   

A sister post to this one, in which I discuss the work of literary scholar Catherine Brown on Lawrence and veganism, can be read by clicking here.