Some people live more history than others: born in Heidelberg in 1895, the German literary giant Ernst Jünger survived a stint in the French Foreign Legion, the rise of the Third Reich, two world wars, fourteen flesh wounds, the death of his son (likely executed for treason by the SS), the partition of Germany, and its reunification, before his death at the remarkable age of 102. Perhaps no historical rupture had a greater influence on his thinking, however, than the rise of industrialized warfare across both world wars. A soldier as much as a writer, Jünger memorably declared in his diaries in 1943 that “ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians.” Articulating the consequences of this transformation became the central obsession of his work.
Jünger’s fascination with the ways in which technologically driven projections of power would reshape traditional civilian life and geopolitics has secured his legacy as an unignorable diagnostician of the modern epoch. He is today to industrialized warfare what his contemporaries Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer were to the rise of mass-produced culture: all three drew connections between technology’s assault on the inner life of the individual and fascism’s weaponization of the mob. Yet while Kracauer and Benjamin, prominent voices of the Weimar socialist left, denounced fascism from the start, Jünger was very much a man of the right. Though he continues to be widely read, his significant literary achievements can be contemplated only with ambivalence. He remains one of Germany’s most celebrated and controversial writers—by far the most interesting ever to have emerged from the interwar right.
A few weeks ago, at a high school in Westchester County, New York, five Latinx members of the staff, including me, were planning a staff Christmas potluck feast in the faculty lounge.
Everyone shouted out dish suggestions as the group’s youngest teacher, Emily Fernandez, a Dominican woman, scratched them down on a sheet of paper: pernil, tamales, buñuelos. Flor Ruiz, a teacher from Colombia, added excitedly, “Yo voy a hacer arroz con Coca-Cola.” Emily stopped writing and looked up. “It is rice cooked in Coke with raisins,” said Ruiz. “It is served in Colombia, especially around the holidays and on Nochebuena.” Jimmy Calero, the school’s vending machine stocker who grew up in the city of Cali, chimed in to back her up. “Claro que sí! They do that all over the coast,” he said.
By stretching the comprehensibility of language, playing with surrealist imagery, and experimenting with formal conceits, Ma’s collection explores how fiction might respond to pressing questions of contemporary politics. As Namwali Serpell reminds us, “the novel does not guide or imitate readers’ moral values; it unsettles them.” Bliss Montage invites us to consider that fiction could be less invested in solutions and more curious about unmooring. When I finished reading Bliss Montage, I felt disoriented, adrift in a sea of indeterminacy — which is exactly why I wanted to turn back to the first page and read the collection all over again.
A century ago, a man with a double life published one of the most celebrated, anthologised and dissected poems in English literature. TS Eliot spent six days a week at the offices of Lloyds bank and crammed the business of poetry and literary criticism into the evenings and Sundays. This allowed him to write The Waste Land, a densely allusive work that drew on Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Jacobean tragedy, tarot and the Upanishads to create a dazzling portrait of both the ruins of postwar Europe and the inner alienation of modernity. But it was not, as Matthew Hollis’s captivatingly exhaustive “biography of a poem” demonstrates, a work conceived or executed in isolation; and chief among Eliot’s enablers were his wife, Vivien, and his fellow poet and indefatigable literary fixer, Ezra Pound, who looms almost as large in the book as does Eliot himself.
It’s waiting on the bureau, as if you’ll come
and nose into the desiccated smell
of your old age and unwashed hair that leaked
into your cabled cap and headphone cuffs,