Abstract
Taking Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden as the point of departure, I analyze how the October Revolution fails to consolidate in the discourses of history and philosophy. Instead, its intellectual consolidation seems to hinge on narrative theory—a proposition implicit to Maugham’s account of the October Revolution, but also to Carl Schmitt, who suggests in Hamlet or Hecuba that explaining political modernity may be premised on a relation forged between narration and revolution. Tellingly, Walter Benjamin identifies a similar configuration in Maugham and Ashenden, with a tacit invitation to examine it against his own narrative theory (of modernity), in The Storyteller. Rather than revealing the October Revolution to be a somewhat disappointing heiress to The French Revolution and to its dazzling effect on modern history and philosophy, this examination shows that the October Revolution confronts twentieth-century modernity with the prerogatives of the English Revolution, as expounded by Schmitt, and possibly exhausts the logic of modernity and of revolution.
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Notes
- 1.
In the words of Christoph Menke, “what the revolution primarily transforms […] is how historical transformation is enforced. The revolution transforms transformation” (2017: 321).
- 2.
Schmitt focuses on the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, with the ambition of completing Benjamin’s early argument about the birth of modernity out of the spirit of Protestantism (from The Origin of the German Mourning Play) by demonstrating that a structural link persists between the Reformation and the English Revolution. According to Miriam Leonard, what Schmitt describes as an intrusion of history and hard historical actuality is comparable to “the Lacanian concept of ‘the real’” (2015: 2003).
- 3.
Schmitt privileges Shakespeare’s Hamlet as one such intellectual situation and contends that Hamlet “coincides with the first stage of the English revolution” (54). Again, Schmitt is in agreement with Benjamin here. According to Rebecca Comay (2014: 266–267), Hamlet “has a status of an exception” in Benjamin’s The Origin, because “it both exceeds and confirms the basic parameters” of the mourning play as a genre that is decisive in articulating the birth of modernity.
- 4.
Arendt contends that solidarity should replace pity and compassion in this position, citing the American Revolution as an example. See Arendt (1990: 80–90).
- 5.
In contrast, the narrative style of the Old Testament is dominated by hypotaxis, which means that “the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized.” As a result, the hypotactic grammar is determined by causality, or at least by temporality, and also by subordination. See Auerbach (2003: 11–12) and Said (2003: x).
- 6.
See Maugham (1965: 204).
- 7.
Incidentally, Ashenden’s 1917 journey from Switzerland to Russia reciprocates Lenin’s 1917 journey from Switzerland to Russia, with a hint, unwitting or not, that Ashenden’s revolutionary geography—or Maugham’s for that matter—partakes of Lenin’s. Maugham, however, insists on having taken a worldwide route to cover the distance, as if to imply that there may be a deficiency in Lenin’s understanding of the modern world, and consequently of the revolution, because Lenin failed to appreciate their paratactic character. (I am alluding to the allegation, frequently laid at Lenin’s door, that he was a German agent because he was granted easy access to Russia, via Sweden, by the German authorities. In contrast, Ashenden is identified as a British agent.).
- 8.
Auerbach (13) argues that parataxis, unlike hypotaxis, can be analyzed but not interpreted. There may also be philosophy to Maugham’s narrative theory. When Maugham distinguishes between truth and intelligence and then relates intelligence to success, to which truth is secondary, his proposition is reminiscent of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory. It may be no coincidence that Austin, professor of philosophy at Oxford, served as an intelligence officer in the British Army in the Second World War. Equally, it may be no coincidence that Austin launched speech act theory with an essay on excuses, similarly to how Maugham grounds his narrative theory in excuse, alibi and recompense. Ultimately, this may be a conduit for analyzing speech act theory in terms of parataxis, to which truth has a hypotactic value.
- 9.
See Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 104–106).
- 10.
Maugham carefully distinguishes between the melancholia of the song and the trauma of the singer, suggesting that the two do not belong to the same pathological order; there is a hint that melancholia pertains to psychopolitics, whereas trauma pertains to subjectivation.
- 11.
See Jukić (2011: 42).
- 12.
The reference here is to Jacques Derrida and the messianic register that he assigns to Marx’s philosophy. In Specters of Marx, Derrida identifies mourning as an intellectual situation proper to all (psycho)politics, only to associate it with the spectral future implicit in messianism. While critical, the spectral future of messianism is always also functional and ultimately stabilizing, just as Freud describes mourning as critical but ultimately normal, even normalizing (in the opening paragraphs of “Mourning and Melancholia”). Derrida is careful not to relate any such messianic futures to melancholia, just as he is careful not to associate melancholia with Marx, with the implication that melancholia fails to cohere around messianism, in contrast to mourning, which does. While the resulting configuration is meant as a comment on Marx, it is also a comment on Freud, with the implication that Freud’s perspective on mourning (and, consequently, Freud’s perspective on a functional subject of psychoanalysis) entails a messianic aspect, divorced from religion though it may be, and that Freud’s perspective on melancholia does not. Moreover, Derrida points to a hypotactic prerogative in Marx, and by implication in Freud, when he attributes to Marx the secularizing aspect “of Abrahamic messianism” (1994: 210): Abraham’s being the story that Auerbach identifies as exemplary of hypotaxis. This may explain Derrida’s deconstruction of the idea of the world, in his final seminars, when he contests “any individual human being’s access to any world other than his or her own, a thesis that will come to ruin […] the very meaning of the word world” (Naas 2015: 47).
- 13.
Eric Hobsbawm finds it important that Marx, “at the end of his life, had hoped that a Russian revolution might act as a sort of detonator, setting off the proletarian revolution in the industrially more developed Western countries, where the conditions for a proletarian socialist revolution were present” (1995: 57–58).
- 14.
See Adorno’s letter of 10 November 1938 in Benjamin (1994: 582).
- 15.
Benjamin points out that he also read Maugham’s “autobiographical retrospective” and that “the retrospective sounds very melancholy” (1994: 436), which is how Benjamin plays melancholia back into Maugham and grants it additional emphasis.
- 16.
Symptomatically, when Benjamin dismisses melancholia as profitless with regard to genuine, critical history in fragment VII of Theses on the Philosophy of History, he rejects it as acedia, not as melancholia, and relates it to the understanding of sadness (Traurigkeit) in medieval theology, with its hypotactic genealogy. See Benjamin (1991: 696).
- 17.
“Already it is getting a little difficult to care much what middle-class Russians were like fifty years ago, and the anecdote in Chekov’s stories is not as a rule absorbing enough […] to hold your attention apart from your interest in the people,” says Maugham (1965: ix). Maugham steadily relates Russian literature to the Russian Revolution and mobilizes the two as an assemblage. The penultimate story in Ashenden is entitled “Love and Russian Literature”; it sketches the psychopolitical coordinates of the revolution as it is breaking out and identifies Russian literature as a revolutionary apparatus. The same applies to the entries in Maugham’s notebook during his stay in Russia in 1917.
- 18.
When Benjamin points out that storytelling to Leskov was “no liberal art, but a craft”—as if echoing Maugham’s distinction between truth and intelligence—he illustrates his point with a detail from Leskov’s “The Steel Flea”: “the Russians [craftsmen] need not be ashamed before the English” (2007: 92).
- 19.
As if echoing Maugham’s prefatory comment on the melancholy song of the blind Russian soldier, Benjamin focuses on how Herodotus narrates mourning, only to cancel it and claim the subject of mourning for a messianic history. Mourning is thereby handled as a vehicle for Aufhebung, which is how both mourning and the messianic history are targeted for hypotaxis.
- 20.
This explains the residual Englishness in Schmitt’s argument about political modernity and its revolutionary character: it is not an essentializing Englishness, but one that heralds a universalism whose rationale is in the philosophy of empiricism. Consequently, when Schmitt privileges Shakespeare’s Hamlet over philosophy and theology, he also suggests that the narrative potential relates to empiricism differently than it does to philosophical traditions defined around metaphysics. In Deleuze’s words, “empiricism is like the English novel. It is a case of philosophizing as a novelist, of being a novelist in philosophy” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 40–41). Also, the very constitution of empiricism is paratactic: “Thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret” (43).
- 21.
See Deleuze (1991: 9, 38, 47, 80, 93) on masochism and revolution, and 22–23, 35, 128, 134 on masochism as dialectics. What Deleuze pins down as dialectics could well be the function of masochism to contain hypotaxis.
- 22.
See Deleuze (1991: 14, 74).
- 23.
See Jeffreys-Jones (1976) for a detailed account of Maugham’s political activities in Russia, especially (1976: 98) for Maugham’s contacts with “the Slav nationalist groups forming among Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war in Russia.” See Neilson (1981) for a comprehensive record of British intelligence activities in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Russia.
- 24.
See Deleuze (1991: 92) about the chthonic aspect of the masochist’s world. Still, Deleuze emphasizes that “[w]ith Sade and Masoch the function of literature is not to describe the world […], but to define the counterpart of the world capable of containing its violence and excesses” (37).
- 25.
See Maclean (1949: 306).
- 26.
See Jeffreys-Jones (1976: 97) for Maugham on film, especially in Russia.
- 27.
Research for this essay was supported by the Croatian Science Foundation funding of the project HRZZ-1543.
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Jukić, T. (2020). A Narrative Theory for the October Revolution (From Maugham to Benjamin and Back). In: Telios, T., Thomä, D., Schmid, U. (eds) The Russian Revolution as Ideal and Practice. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14237-7_9
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