VV(13): Vheissu

[Dave Monroe]

   Godolphin laughed at her.  "There's been a war, Fraulein.  Vheissu was a 
luxury, an indulgence.  We can no longer afford the likes of Vheissu."
   "But the need," she protested, "its void.  What can fill that?"
   He cocked his head and grinned at her.  "What is already filling
it. The real thing.  Unfortunately.  Take your friend D'Annunzio.  Whether 
we like it or not that war destroyed a kind of privacy, perhaps the privacy 
of dream.  Committed us like him to work out three o'clock anxieties, 
excesses of character, political hallucinations on a live mass, a real human 
population.  The discretion, the sense of comedy about the Vheissu affair 
are with us no more, our Vheissus are no longer our own, or even confined to 
a circle of friends; they're public property.  God knows how much of it the 
world will see, or what lengths it will be taken to.  It's a pity; and I'm 
only glad I don't have to live in it too much longer." (V., Ch. 9, Sec. ii, 
p. 242)

Now this is interesting.  Vheissu "a luxury, an indulgence" (with echoes of 
the medieval liturgical commodity? a paying of one's way out of purgatory? 
hm ...).  And note the movement (trope?).  Either going from ("our Vheissus 
are no longer our own" suggests continuity) or in its (their? "our 
Vheissus") disappearance yielding to "the real thing" vs. the (presumably) 
unreal (?), "public property" vs. private ("our own").  The key here seems 
to be Vera's "friend," Gabriele D'Annunzio,  who indeed "work[ed] out three 
o'clock anxieties, excesses of character, political hallucinations on a live 
mass, a real human population," in, indeed, taking a step from aesthetics 
into politics.  And note that "unfortunately" ...

J. Kerry Grant here resorts to pretty much the same resources I have at hand 
here, so these can be found in his A Companion to V. (Athens: U of Georgia 
P, 2001) as well (pp. 123-4, 128-30).  On D'Annunzio, not to mention 
Mussolini, Fiume, Italia irredenta, fascisti ("'Ever hear of D'Annunzio?' 
Then: Mussolini? Fiume? Italia irredenta? fascisti?" [V., p. 242]) from the 
Encyclopedia Brittanica Online ...

"In 1919 D'Annunzio and about 300 supporters, in defiance of the Treaty of 
Versailles, occupied the Dalmatian port of Fiume (Rijeka in present-day 
Croatia), which the Italian government and the Allies were proposing to 
incorporate into the new Yugoslav state but which D'Annunzio believed 
rightly belonged to Italy.  D'Annunzio ruled Fiume as dictator until 
December 1920, at which time Italian military forces  compelled him to 
abdicate his rule.  Nevertheless, by his bold action he had established 
Italy's interest in Fiume, and the port became Italian in 1924.  D'Annunzio 
subsequently became an ardent Fascist and was rewarded by Benito Mussolini 
with a title and a national edition of his works, but he exercised no 
further influence on Italian politics."

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=29187&tocid=0

Apparently, however, it's not quite right to say that D'Annunzio "exercised 
no further influence on Italian politics," for, as John Dugdale (Thomas 
Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power [London: Macmillan, 1990; New York: St 
Martins, 1990]) notes ...

"The unsuccessful occupation was the direct inspiration for Mussolini's 
so-called 'March on Rome' in 1922 [!].  D'Annunzio has the unique 
distinction among the artists of the period of having acted as a catalyst to 
a revolution.  His abortive intervention in politics enabled his writing to 
have effects in the real world."  (Dugdale, pp. 110-1; Grant, p. 129)

... so even if D'Annunzio did not actively "exercise" any "further 
influence" ... but to continue from Dugdale, as cited in Grant, on the 
passage from V. above ...

"Overtly, the passage explains the attraction to political activism for 
D'Annunzio, or Pound, or Yeats.  Reacting to the expropriation of art and 
fantasy by the new mass society, they seek to reverse the process by 
entering the public world.  However, the terms of the passage lend 
themselves to conversion into a description of a process with which the text 
is also concerned, in which the dream is followed by the real thing, but the 
dreamer is not the agent of its realization.  Instead of the artist 'working 
out' his hallucinations on a real human population (as at Fiume) they work 
out, become political fact (as in Mussolini's coup) as if through magical 
causation.  This is the closest that V. comes to a formulation of the manner 
in which art is transformed into political reality."  (Dugdale, p. 111; 
Grant, p. 129)

... not sure about that "magical causation" there, but ... but reminds me, 
anyone here familiar with Gottfried Benn?  Any comments?  Any echoes to be 
found in Ch. 9, a la those of Pound, Yeats, Wm. Joyce?  Let me know.  Which 
in turn  reminds me, "Gottfried" is, quite literally, "that final delta-t" 
from "got fried," but that's another novel, so ...

In the meantime, reading further in Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: 
Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1993), 
Ch. 6, "Fascist Modernism and the Theater of Power," pp. 161-195 ...

"Fascist theatricality--and, I would contend, the performative shift in the 
avant-garde toward the aesthetics and politics of the manifest--might, 
indeed, be taken as an attack on the bourgeois system of mediated 
representation.  Its particular form of totalitarianism might be understood 
as an immanentism, an absolutism, in which the conflation of signifier and 
signified, the conflation of power and its representation has been 
completed.... it should not be forgotten that the bourgeois representational 
semiotic is itself oriented--putatively, at least--toward an unrealized and 
unrealizable project of absolute mimesis.  'Repraesentation' [here, the 
German, I'm subbing an 'ae' for an umlauted 'a']--the immanence of fascist 
representation--marks the virtual point at which the semiotic project both 
fulfills and annuls itself.  This collapsing of the distinction of power and 
its representation is, in fact, a charismatic phantom of democracy--of the 
people, for the people, by the people.  The fascist mutation of this 
ideology into the dogma of Volk offers a literalistic and impossible 
realization of that idea.  It should be stresses that to make such an 
assertion is not, of course, to collapse the distinction between fascism and 
democracy in any way ..." (Hewitt, p. 181)

... "an immanentism, an absolutism, in which the conflation of signifier and 
signified, the conflation of power and its representation has been 
completed," "the immanence of fascist representation ... marks the virtual 
point at which the semiotic project both fulfills and annuls itself,"  "a 
literalistic and impossible realization," "the need," "its void," "the real 
thing," "a kind of privacy, perhaps the privacy of dream," "excesses of 
character, political hallucinations," "public property," Vheissu, V. ...

There's a nifty discussion of the theatricalization of the public sphere in 
Benjamin, Brecht ("It is not, for Brecht, a problem of specularity as 
distantiation .... Implicitly, he reads distantiation as an empowering 
critical distance, whereas in [Benjamin's] interpretive model it was 
understood as a disempowerment"[p. 175]) and Habermas ("the Enlightenment 
model of the public sphere has depended all along upon a certain 
theatricality" [p. 181]) along the way as well.  Much of interest therein, 
and I will return to Hewitt's text here ...



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