What does Maurizio Serra mean by “weaponized aesthetics”? What about the intellectuals who follow an original interpretation of their being, who are fundamentally free spirits, but who are not devoid of their weaknesses and who have the ability to foresee them, even if they are overwhelmed by the changeable temperament of their poetry or overwhelmed by the writing itself, starting from basic affinities. and even love turmoil. In the insidious passage of generations and the delicate transitions between parents and children, the demon of absoluteness and renunciation, the powerful specter of uncertainty between passionate individualities and collective identifications, takes shape and develops. In this magma, aggravated by the most turbulent conditions, Europe in the last century found its warlike writers, among whom they succumbed to Marxist or fascist temptation, took up arms or came under fire, but were free or knew how to extricate themselves from this situation. ideological ties that will not dissuade them from becoming individual members of their own rebellion. Possessing energy, intelligence and elegance, Serra is an Italian writer and diplomat, born in London in 1955, who occupied chair number 13 of the French Academy from Simone Veil until that year in 2020.
We are faced with a history lesson from one of the most distinguished and best essayists, and before, I believe, a wonderful text on European culture: a terrific vision of the characters and interpreters of the myth of the condottiero poet; or the same, of the generation of the thirties of the last century, marked by the existence of an intellectual society of action and thought. The payroll here is long. From Stefan George to Ernst Gundolf to Von Hofmannsthal, from D’Annunzio to Montherlant, from the Mann brothers to Erika and Klaus, from Josef Weinheber to René Gerhard Podbielski, from Ernst Robert Curtius to Lauro De Bosis. e, Croce, Ortega, HG Wells, Lawrence, Koestler, Paul Morand, Drieu La Rochelle, Auden, Malraux and Aragon or Ernst Jünger, the adolescent Landsknecht who died after his century, with the century, shedding the last glimmers of his magnificent intelligence. To name a few of the heroes of the dazzling fresco drawn by Serra, full of dialogue and stimuli, divided into two basic parts: the first, describing the features of the myth; The second is about the role of top performers. Guns and made-up letters, as Andrés Trapiello wrote in his day.
The attentive reader will find in Serra’s book an original and unprecedented invitation to reflection, amidst a tense and inexhaustible narrative, through first-hand sources and personal encounters with the author. In the pages of Armed Aesthetics, individual and collective history intertwine with the living power of culture. Warrior writers are children of modernity, but also of its fears and myths: Nancy Cunard, Diana and Unity Mitfford, children of the cyclical revolt of the senses, escaping seemingly irreversible collapse with fascinating figures and femme fatales like Frieda. von Richtofen, or on another level Tina Modotti, in collective limbo. While the British and the French embarked on erotic, exotic, ideological and spiritual journeys; Italians, Germans, Central Europeans and Spaniards in their mid-thirties yearn to escape them. Our civil war confirms this with more than just the long, difficult and terrible three-year period that Orwell describes so well: pages where the illusions of armed aesthetics collide. Although not always. In 1938, Serra tells it, Antonio Delfini published in Italy with Il ricardo della Basca the best literary text ever conceived on the Spanish war: it served to morally condemn the bombing of Guernica and the massacres at Santander; A somewhat rosy story about the paradise of a provincial dreamer and the daughter of a Basque exile. Delfini was a luxurious marginal, an armed and also unarmed esthete, from a wealthy family from Modena and possessed of a refined sensibility. His initial political disengagement irritated his most loyal friends; After the war, he would sign the manifesto of a communist-conservative party; this is something Maurizio Serra sees today as a less extravagant combination than it seemed at the time. Around all this, the author of the book creates an extraordinary and occasionally unpredictable play, skillfully mining first-hand sources, showing the constant dialogue between dissonant and friendly voices of powerful intensity. It is not for nothing that he is a great cultural biographer and has produced a fine profile of culture’s most complex characters. His biographical trilogy with Malaparte, D’Annunzio and Svevo (La antivida de Italo Svevo, Fórcola 2017) is his best-known.
As the book moves from the features of the myth to its interpreters, Stefan George comes to life thanks to the magnificent portrait of his student, the Germanist Friedrich Gundolf; The poetic Broch of The Death of Virgil appears, as well as Thomas Mann’s monumental biblical tetralogy. But the original prototype of the warrior aesthetic lies in the incomparable Gabriele D’Annunzio, who knew how to reveal all his flaws, but no one could see how they evaporated over time, leaving in the background the most processed and fertile essence of vate. D’Annunzio, who comes to life separately as “The Magnificent” in Serra’s massive biography, worked throughout his long life to appear worse than he actually was in human terms. Didn’t you want to be unique? Is he the superman who scandalized the provincial bourgeoisie who created him, who flourished in the great halls and crowded squares, in the speculations and intrigues initiated by the newly united Italy, and who left a trace of himself? He pushed his fate, like a chair-bound Alfieri who forces himself not to give up, like an Alfieri with a disturbed personality who, drawing inhuman strength from his own depressive states, brings the creative capacity of a talented person to the top. He was a Latino who put himself beyond good and evil; An idea from the Scandinavian mists but reinvented in its own way. “The past no longer has any value, the present has no value. The present is nothing but maya,” he said. He lived his life in a constantly emerging state, the state he experienced when he fell in love, but then transformed into something else. If we must point out one paradigm of the poet Condottiero, it is D’Annunzio, perhaps his anthropological model.
The aesthetic is also repeated in another character discussed, such as the Frenchman Henry de Montherlant; We can catch a prismatic, irreducible and even Mephistophelian fluorescence in this character: Roman nobleman, samurai, bullfighter, captain of fortune, Renaissance spirit. the enlightened traveler, the athlete, the Verdun soldier, the orientalist poet, the Chinese mandarin and even the penultimate Templar. Montherlant’s enemies are the traditional enemies of the armed aesthetic: conformism and convention, lazily devoted intellectuals, feminists and liberated women, politicians, moralists, confessors and the rest of the family. According to the author of this exciting book, they are all usurpers of true poetic citizenship.