10,651 words / 1:18:48
Editor’s Note:
From February 23 to 27, 2012, Jonathan Bowden visited California to speak at a private Counter-Currents gathering in the Bay Area. On Sunday, February 26, after the official program had ended, Jonathan and I sat down in my breakfast room in front of a microphone and talked about philosophy, politics, religion, and above all, art. This is, to my knowledge, the last interview Jonathan recorded. He died a little more than a month later on March 29, 2012. We would like to thank V. S. and S. F. for this transcript. To listen to the audio recording in a player, click here [1] for Part 1 and here [2] for Part 2, or on the players below. To download the mp3, right-click here [1] for Part 1 or here [2] for Part 2, and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
Part 1 (42:37):
http://cdn.counter-currents.com/radio/CCR-BowdenFinalInterview_Pt1-20130107.mp3 [1]Part 2 (36:11):
http://cdn.counter-currents.com/radio/CCR-BowdenFinalInterview_Pt2-20130107.mp3 [2]Greg Johnson: Welcome to Counter-Currents Radio. I’m your host Greg Johnson. With us today is Jonathan Bowden. First of all, I need to ask you is it “Boden” or Bowden?
Jonathan Bowden: Depends where you are in England basically, if you are in the North of England you say “Boden,” but if you are from the South of England, and I’m from the South of England, you say Bowden.
GJ: Bowden, all right Jonathan Bowden. I know Jonathan Bowden as a writer, as a painter, as an orator, but I don’t know much about his past, and so the first thing I’d like to do is find out where you’re from, what kind of educational background you have, what kind of family you have, and so forth.
JB: Yes, I was born in Kent in southeast England in 1962, and we moved about a bit, moved to Sussex for a while. But I grew up in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, which are counties in Southern England to the west of London. I went to a Catholic Grammar school which was a private school in British terms and went to Cambridge later on, although I regard myself as essentially self-educated in the sense that it never stops. [Jonathan was having me on. He never went to Cambridge. In 1983–84 he completed one year toward a B.A. in history at London University’s Birkbeck College, then quit.–GJ.]
GJ: Right, what did you take your degree in?
JB: English and History.
GJ: So what did you focus on in your studies of English and History?
JB: English was very much some of the early Modernist writers such as Wyndham Lewis and some of the late Victorian ideologues and pedagogues like Thomas Carlyle. This is my own schooling of the course, if you like, my own use of the thing for my own purposes. And in history, the English Civil War.
GJ: Tell me, are you influenced by writers like Carlyle and William Morris, certain critics of industrial civilization in the nineteenth century?
JB: Yes, although part of me perversely likes industrialization in an Ayn Rand sort of a way. I’m critical of the ugliness and debauched modernity that it’s led to, a sort of barren and desiccated quality. But on the other hand there’s a part of me that admires thrusting modernism, and its energy and achievement, and I’m torn between the utilitarian, sort of dourness that a lot of modernity has become, and the freshness and energy that transpired at its beginning, so I tend to take in a Nietzschean way from different concepts like Romanticism and modernism, things which I like. I tend to view things positively rather than negatively. I tend to be dialectical, so there are parts of modernism which I choose to admire and revere, and there’s parts that have led on to things which I dislike or despise. So my view doesn’t tend to be either or. It tends to be synthetic in a sense, or syncretic, whereby I take up all sorts of tendencies and use them in a firmament of becoming. That’s my own notion anyway.
GJ: I share that same kind of ambivalence. I’m very much attracted to modernism in its more heroic and idealistic manifestations, but there is also a kind of leveling utilitarian modernity that’s blighted cities and societies.
JB: Yes, cube-like blocks of endless sugar cubes of concrete festooning cities across the globe.
GJ: Which modern architects do you like, or modern city planners?
JB: After the spirit of Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead, in a way I like Mies van der Rohe. I like elements of Le Corbusier, but one thing that’s always mistaken with him and with the concept of brutalism in particular, is that the concrete has to be finished, it has to be painted. In England there’s been an enormous cult of brutalist concrete architecture lasting from the late ’60s until the early ’80s; throughout the ’70s anyway — and the whole point of that unfinished concrete structure and superstructure was that it should be painted; it should be light; it should be ethereal; it should dance in the sun. There’s not much sun in England of course. That’s one of the problems. But they just left it in an unpainted and dour state, and it’s sort of NCP car park architecture.
GJ: Do you like Frank Lloyd Wright?
JB: Yes very much so. In particular the private houses that he developed for millionaire clients, but there’s two types of modernism, as Bill Hopkins the art critic said to me a long time ago. The modernism for the rich and modernism for the masses, who tend to be poor or poorer. The modernism for the masses tends to be rat-runs and tunnels and sorts of architectonics which are similar to J. G. Ballard’s novel High Rise where you cram human beings into these enormous blocks in the air and allow them to fester and engage in tumult with each other. And there’s the modernism of the rich, where everything works, and it’s light and spacious and ethereal, and these blocks which were put up in the 1920s and 1930s in areas like Kensington and Chelsea in West London still work, and are still perfect today.
GJ: One thing that struck me about From Bauhaus to Our House . . .
JB: Oh, Tom Wolfe . . .
GJ: Yes. One thing that struck me about Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House is that he begins by talking about how the rich in the past were really absolute dictators of taste and that if they wanted a mansion, they would get it in whatever chateau style that they demanded. And then with the beginning of modernism, suddenly architects were dictating to the wealthy the kind of buildings that they would live in, the kind of buildings that they would house their factories and offices in. And it struck me that what was going on there was a certain loss of self-confidence among the bourgeoisie that provided an entree for modernism to come in. Does that make sense to you?
JB: Yes, I think very much so. Also it’s the concept of the auteur in film applied in a different way. It’s the romantic ideal of the individual genius artist imposing upon clients, particularly rich clients who are paying for the deed in the first instance. It’s always been a fantasy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if nor before, and you had a lot of these modernists who dictated what the new taste was to people who had no idea and were quite scandalized by it but didn’t wish to appear as reactionary or as unknowing or as unsophisticated. So they partly privatized their own taste to these artists, who moved in and dictated to them what it should be.
GJ: It seems that an analogous thing happened with modernist painting. Most people when they look at modern art think in the privacy of their own soul, “I don’t really like this; I don’t find this beautiful,” and in the past I think people would have openly stated that they didn’t find this beautiful, but there is a sense of a lack of self confidence in traditions of judgment about what’s beautiful, and therefore people became in some ways intimidated into accepting it. One person that I think is very interesting is Gertrude Stein. There was a big exhibit in San Francisco last year on the Gertrude Stein art collection and the collection of her family. They were great patrons of Matisse and Picasso and other Modernist artists. I wandered through this exhibition, and it just struck me that these people were highly susceptible to modern art because of a certain insecurity about their own status and identity, and I thought that that might be a factor in the rise of modern art. Do you think that that makes sense?
JB: Yes, it’s partly an outsider’s vision. It’s partly a psycho-pathological vision which is re-routed and made to suit insiders. It’s also the fact that it’s one of the first aesthetics since high Christian art where ugliness is part of the picture. In Christian art of course the ugliness is demonic and it’s the depictions of the devil and his realm and is the depiction of the hellish in a Hieronymus Bosch sort of way, or in a way of Bruegel or Grünewald.
But in modernist art of course, ugliness is integrated into it because modernist art is dialectical, so it deals with what is traditionally regarded as beautiful and what is traditionally regarded as ugly and plays games between the two of them.
Modernist art is also concerned with concepts like fury and power. Power instead of beauty, or power as beauty, and these aesthetics are not popular. They are elitist aesthetics, but they are elitist aesthetics of the modern world rather than the early-modern, the medieval, the feudal, or the ancient.
And yet they have always existed in art. The depictions of the Gorgon’s head in Ancient Greek sculpture is the realization of ugliness, the demonic, and the ferocious as a new type of transgressive beauty.
GJ: You are a painter, and a lot of your paintings, all of them really, are modernist. I like some of them quite a lot. I actually bought several of them from you. Yet I am not necessarily a big fan of modern art. I do like Italian Futurism quite a lot; I like its dynamism. I go and look at Picasso though, and I just think, the man doesn’t draw very well, he has a penchant for ugliness. So I am a bit of a naive person when it comes to appreciating modern art. Can you give me a sense of your views of modernism in painting? Who do you think is great, who do you think is bad? What are the standards by which you judge these people?
JB: One of the problems of course is that there are no standards, apart from inbuilt critical reflexivity over time whereby a mass of critics — a critical mass — build up to deify some work and demean others. What’s fashionable, what is perceived to be good, what people will spend money on, what has become retrospectively critically acclaimed. These are the taxonomies of the modern. But there’s no intrinsic valuation as to what is good or bad in art after about 1860. You can make judgments, however, and my judgement is whether the work makes you feel alive when you look at it or more deadened when you look at it.
I don’t care for Picasso particularly, although he has some fine pictures in his overall oeuvre, and he’s a man of multiple styles rather than one style that’s worked out in different areas.
My point about modernism is there are certain works and certain artists who are quite literally extraordinary, and their paintings have never been painted before, and their images have never been seen in the human mind before. It’s the belief that things can be made over again. Not in perfection but in ecstatic imperfection.
Take Francis Bacon, for example. Bacon’s work is ugly and repellent to many people, and yet the fury and the energy, particularly in the early canvases, is such that some of those images have never been seen before, and they’re images which sum up quite a bit of the twentieth century in quite an unsentimental way as well. And I regard that as the extraordinary achievement of a type of painting which may well have come to an end.
A couple of hundred years from now, Modernism may be looked back on as a cul-de-sac actually, that doesn’t relate to previous forms of art and doesn’t move forward towards anything new. If you look at painting today, the conspicuous thing is its absence. Modern art in the student context is all film and video and installations, which actually relates to more traditional narrative and replicatory and representational forms of art.
Art’s about dreaming while you are awake, and quite a lot of Modern Art, quite a lot of Surrealist Art for example is nothing more than the reification of dreams.
GJ: Who in your opinion are the greatest Modernist painters? Who are the ones who make you feel more alive when you look at their paintings?
JB: In British terms people like Piper and Vaughan and Bacon and Sutherland and Wyndham Lewis and Roberts, but they’re just in the British context. In the global context, I reckon Dalí is probably the greatest modern artist of the twentieth century.
GJ: I’m a great fan of his work, too. There was an exhibit of his I saw a couple of years ago in Atlanta of his work, spanning his whole artistic career, but they had a lot of the very large canvases from his later years, and they were extremely religious and extremely nationalistic, and it hit me why Dalí became a declassed and unfashionable on the Left because of the Spanish Civil War and the side he took in that.
Who are some of the other painters who you think are really exceptional before the twentieth century?
JB: Before the twentieth century I think who influenced me are the most imaginative painters. People like Blake, people like Fuseli, people like John Martin, people like Bosch, Grünewald, and Breughel. People like Medieval manuscript illuminators and this sort of thing who are anonymous as far as we are concerned because their names don’t come down to us but who can alternate between the angelic and the demonic in marvelous and meaningful ways.
If you take Rembrandt for example, many of the paintings are indescribably beautiful in their way, and yet the emotional impact for me would be a work like The Ox Carcass which would be dismissed as ugly or inhuman or transgressive, in relation to many prior codifications of what people go to art for.
I go to art for a more delineated and expectant form of life. I go to art to see energy and to see energy realized in form. But my tastes tend to be a bit strong really, and I tend to like work which is rather visceral and over the top and imaginative and surreal. But let’s put it this way, Botticelli is probably a greater artist than Bosch, artist qua artist, and yet Bosch is the most extraordinary artist in the Western tradition, emotionally speaking from my own point of view.
GJ: Would you say that you are more drawn to the sublime in art rather than to the beautiful?
JB: Yes, the sublime and the demonic.
GJ: You are also a writer of fiction and of essays. How would you categorize your fiction for people out there who haven’t read it yet and might be curious about it?
JB: They are sort of Gothic fictions really. They are intellectual horror novels and stories. Although I don’t care that much for horror as a genre, but I do like the burlesque extremism of it and of the better element of the Gothic tradition. I don’t like the way modern horror has developed in the Stephen King sort of way, but I do like intellectual horror that goes back through Lovecraft to Poe and involves people like Ambrose Bierce and people like Algernon Blackwood in the English tradition. I also like the creepy ghost story tradition in English letters which is still not exhausted and you could do quite a bit with.
But I’m interested in the concretization of dreams and the use of narratives that embody fantasy. I think that the point of fiction writers today is to put the reality into life because people are living such fictional lives. I agree with J. G. Ballard that people live through television screens and through video and through the internet to such a degree that it’s fantasy piled upon fantasy, and yet the way out of that dilemma is to put some realism back into the fantasy, and that may involve even greater forms of surreality and surrealness.
GJ: You’ve mentioned Ballard a couple of times, what do you like about his work, and who are some of the other contemporary fiction writers whom you follow?
JB: I’ve always admired Ballard. He was one of the first adult writers that as an adolescent I came across and who spoke to me directly. It’s because he believes that the ferocity of the imagination is the most important artistic attribute, and he’s not interested in psychologically realistic and representational work. If you take an earlier work like The Drowned World, it’s incredibly lush and self-sustaining. It’s baroque and overdone in all sorts of ways. It’s a rococo and baroque performance, and I do like that “painting in words” element which is very current in his fiction.
As for other people I like William Golding. I like Anthony Burgess. It’s always difficult with people whose reputations are not completely formed by critical opinion because they are too close to the present day. But in American letters, I quite like Truman Capote, even though there are things about him that alienate me, but I quite like his work. I also like the poet Robinson Jeffers, the Californian neo-pagan extremist who corresponded with D. H. Lawrence and is, rhetorically anyway, the most extreme pagan poet in the English language during the last century.
GJ: Do you have any fondness for the writings of Flannery O’Connor?
JB: Yes, very much so. As a Catholic in the deep south of the United States of America, looking at these crazed, Billy-Bob Protestants, I like all that sort of thing because she’s drawn to extreme you see. She’s drawn to outsiders. As a Catholic in an ultra-Protestant environment, she feels a bit of an outsider really and yet she’s fascinated by these people who wrestle with snakes in church and fire guns into the roof of the church and can be swayed by these evangelical passions of maudlin excess and emotional debauchery.
GJ: (Laughs) Let me just gather my thoughts here! I had all kinds of images rushing through my mind when you were saying that! Flannery O’Connor has a wonderful essay called “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” where she quotes Thomas Mann saying that the grotesque is the ultimate anti-bourgeois style. By that she takes him to mean that the grotesque is what resists the whole modern narrative of moral progress and also technological and scientific progress. The progressive mind believes that we are going to create a world where everybody’s healthy with gleaming teeth, their minds are healthy, and evil is progressively mitigated. And so she cleaves to the grotesque because she wants to disrupt the kind of modern optimism and instead give you a sense that there’s another order of the world that resists that kind of ironing out and straightening up.
JB: Well there’s bound to be a Protestant element in a Catholic who’s so transfigured by Protestant culture, so she’s bound to be a bit of a Jansenist and a bit of a pessimist. A sort of emotive pessimist; and yes the grotesque is within the Romantic sensibility and the early modern sensibility a way of projecting anti-bourgeois sentiment and morally licentious extremism in prose, on film, and in pictorial art.
Yes, I suppose I am a bit of an anti-bourgeois artist in a way. I’m not conservative when it comes to aesthetic matters but then I regard myself as a revolutionary conservative in any respect.
GJ: Another contemporary person who’s aesthetic is I think very Flannery O’Connoresque, and for the same metaphysical reasons and with the same kind of political agenda that’s anti-progressive, is the film maker David Lynch. What do you think of Lynch?
JB: Yes, I like Lynch. The cultivation of the supernumerary beheading is part and parcel of his attitude towards life. I think that the intrusion of the surreal and the overheated into otherwise normative narratives is what makes them startling, what makes them forbidding. They’re dreams, although dreams are often not that interesting in a strange sort of way. What’s interesting is lucid dreaming, dreaming while you are awake and sentient.
J. G. Ballard has a doctrine called The Death of Affect and he has another doctrine called The Normalization of the Psychopathic and both are evident in Lynch’s cinema and similar types of grotesque, post-modernist art in certain respects. The Death of Affect is the fact that we are surrounded by such an overkill of media that it’s only by retreating into the private fantasies of the living mind that we can find an individual way out though all of these other myths that people would have us live within. And the psychopathological urge is the fact that people are bored. There’s a comedian in Britain who has a slogan for the mass of the population which is “Live, Work, Consume, Die. You are bored, this is the antidote.” And a lot of art in contemporary circumstances is an attempt to get people to live more realistic fictions.
GJ: So let’s talk about film. Who are you favorite film makers? And what do you think of the aesthetic nature and the aesthetic potential of film.
JB: Film’s aesthetic potential is limitless. I’ve made a few films of my own. I’ve made one film called Venus Flytrap, which is about a mad scientist who wants to take over the world with plants that feed on human flesh. It’s a sort of Roger Cormanesque B movie but with Nietzchean and Odinic themes and shot in a sort of post-modern way. I made another film about Punch and Judy called Grand Guignol. Punch and Judy has always obsessed me because it’s part of the British Folk Tradition. But it’s also so unbelievably violent and demotic and anti-bourgeois in its unconstrained glee, sadism, pitilessness, and love of the burlesque.
Filmmakers who influenced me, I like Syberberg’s work a great deal, I like Tarkovsy’s work a great deal, I like Powell’s work a great deal. It would be Michael Powell rather than David Lean for me in terms of British cinema, just to look narrowly at one’s own national tradition. I like a lot of film noir. I like Fritz Lang, particularly the films he made before he left Germany which are quite truly extraordinary. I like the early Soviet cinema as well.
I like Riefenstahl’s films, even though she’s a sort of, almost a delinquent Romantic in a way. The Romanticism is so obsessional and so ur-conscious and so yearning, it’s almost amusing in a way. I know that sounds a bit blasphemous in relation to a film like Triumph of the Will. But there is a sort of undercurrent of yearning expectancy that is explosively anti-bourgeois in its fullness and extent, and although I’ve got a certain sympathy for the bourgeoisie as a class, and I’m not anti-bourgeois politically, culturally and aesthetically, I’m always drawn to the extreme and to that which is partly outside the circle of what is accepted. But I wouldn’t consider my own tastes to be counter cultural in a leftist sense. I consider them to be counter-current in terms of what might be said to exist in the mainstream, that ought to be mainstream and is the most interesting part of the mainstream.
GJ: Let’s talk about opera. One of my favorite Riefenstahl films is Tiefland which is actually a film based on a Romantic opera. Do you like opera and if so, what sort of opera? What composers, and what do you think is aesthetically powerful about opera? Why does it work?
JB: It works because it is so unconstrained, and there is no constraint placed upon the remit of its emotional extremism and lustful range. In terms of contemporary opera I like Harrison Birtwistle quite a lot. He wrote an opera called Punch and Judy which is very violent and episodic and picaresque. Wagner I suppose above all, and in the twentieth century, people like Berg. I like Wozzeck and Lulu, again for their extremity and their coming to terms with the nature of man in a way which is stylistically accomplished but very near the edge of what can be expressed.
GJ: Yet for all of your interest in modernism and art and painting and sculpture and architecture, you are also something of a traditionalist and a conservative. You are one of the leading people in the New Right scene in Great Britain. How do your reconcile these things? Most people would think that that is simply contradictory and makes no sense.
JB: Yes, it’s an odd one. I think that the only way that things can be reconciled is to say that I am an elitist and an inegalitarian, and the moral Left in art, if there is such a thing, tends to egalitarianism and equality in its judgments. So if I favor the modern world or parts of the modern world, I want the modern world to be as unequal as possible and elitist in spirit. and therefore what appears superficially to maybe be Left wing, from a very sort of staid and conservative perspective, is nothing of the kind.
It’s a sort of very radical revolutionary Right wing, in that all forms lead onto other forms which are above them, and the degree to which you can never quite take out the prospect of something which is above something else, because there will always be at least the prospect of something above you, and above that which you might seek to achieve, so I see a commitment to certain aesthetics as non-transgressive in the usual way. I don’t see an easy parallel between a commitment to the radical revolutionary Left in art and a commitment to the modern and the new in art. Anyway, moderns only stand on the shoulders of giants that existed before them that enable them to cut loose and do their mad capers so everything builds on something that existed before you and without the concrete that is underneath your feet you’re lost and aimless and atomized.
GJ: So, you think that modernism is traditional in the sense that it is an outgrowth of a past tradition rather than being something that is revolutionary, Leftist in a revolutionary sense and you think that modernism is not leftist because it is not egalitarian meaning that it is not easy for the masses to appreciate. If that is the case what do you think would be the most consistent artistic style if you were a revolutionary egalitarian leftist?
JB: MTV [laughs]
GJ: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. It is very peculiar how a lot of people who profess radical egalitarian ideas cleave to radically inegalitarian forms of art, and maybe it’s a bit of repressed elitism, sublimated elitism on their part. It was quite extraordinary how the high tradition of Western classical music and opera for instance, was kept alive in Communist countries. You’d think that that would be the first thing to go and it would all be replaced with MTV or pop music. Yet they were very anti-Beatles in the USSR and very pro-Tchaikovsky. They weren’t pro-modernist, but they were pro-high art.
JB: Yes. They had the view that the people, the masses could be raised to a higher cultural level and the masses might be capable of being raised to a higher cultural level. I don’t give up on that possibility, although you’d need to control the mass media and certain parts of the internet in order to do that. But it would be an indoctrination. High art is not for the masses and is not for the majority of people, and it can’t be and it is only an ideological statement to say that it ought to be. You could impress these things upon people, you could raise people’s cultural level, you could educate them better, but a lot of that is tokenistic.
In the end, the cultural industry, as Adorno once described it — which we have all around us, and which follows us from cradle to grave and is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty odd days a year — this sort of cultural industry is what the masses partly want. It’s not just imposed upon them, it’s their level which is being appealed down to and they’re being brought up to meet it with the cash nexus as the commercialization of the thing which propels it along. But the idea that the masses are degraded by this material is only partly true. It’s a degradation that they wish to enter in to with fecund glee and foreknowledge, and so I’m very much a conceptual elitist of rather a stark sort.
GJ: I very much like a lot of Socialist Realist art. I like a lot of Socialist Realist painting. I like a number of the composers who composed in the USSR, and in some ways I think that Stalin had fairly good taste in art. I think that Shostakovich was heading in the wrong direction before Stalin scared him into writing his greatest symphony, which is the Fifth Symphony [3].
JB: But they’re all about Stalin those works, aren’t they?
GJ: Yes. Do you think that there’s value in socialist, specifically Soviet art?
JB: Yes, unfortunately in a way, because it doesn’t always fit my thesis in other respects. But you can be steeped in the classical and you can be steeped in the modern. The problem with viewing everything undialectically is to think that you have to make a choice. You have to go with that which is perceived to be classical or that which is perceived as modern. There’s no art that’s more hated than Neo-Classicism amongst the present parvenus of the modern, and yet in actual fact, Breker and Kolbe are not outside the remit of the modern at all, even in their use of planes and their use of the dynamic tension in the body. You seek or relay correlatives with elements in modern art but that’s not really the important point. The important point is that you can do excellent work in all sorts of areas. It’s the energy that you bring to things and the degree to which you can impress a vision of life and death upon the spirit of the material before you.
The eugenic element in Soviet art is probably what makes it interesting because they were attempting to raise mass taste. Which means that you have to go down to meet mass taste in order to be capable of raising it up. Where they made a mistake, in my view, is preventing people from individual self-expression and contributing to art in a modern way by the sort of ludicrous specificity whereby the regime imposes the aesthetic tastes on the entire intellectual avant-garde. That never works. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, they all reverted to doing what they wished to do anyway.
So my view is that you take the best work from all sorts of areas and you corral it together because work’s never acceptable and never respectable all the way around. Aesthetically, if you could depoliticize it, Nazi sculpture for example, is — post Rodin — extraordinarily close to what mass sensibility and the concept of the beautiful is and yet there’s nothing more shocking, nothing more appalling to the contemporary liberal mind than that sort of work.
GJ: I don’t know of any great Soviet painters or sculptors, but I do know of a number of great Soviet composers. I think that Shostakovich was a great composer, I think that Prokofiev did some great work in the USSR. I like a lot of Khachaturian’s compositions. What do you think of them as composers, and why do you think that there was greater music composed in the USSR than there was say, visual art or sculpture or architecture?
JB: Because you could express yourself in a way which the regime couldn’t tease into censorship because music works on another level. It was harder to censor as long as you didn’t make ultra-modernist quotations and as long as you didn’t veer into what they regarded as sheer formalism, you could get away with quite a lot of an emotional range. So Shostakovich could do anthems to the Soviet Police, and yet they could be fine works. Those are just titles, portmanteau titles that could be taken off the work retrospectively and largely, in terms of Shostakovich’s Western reputation, have been.
I think that the reason that Soviet music reached such heights is partly the restrictions that were placed upon it. So although I don’t really agree with putting restrictions on artists, if you want great work, you often have to put certain restrictions on. It’s like the Hollywood code for films, because they enforced bourgeois standards of taste and decency, and because they enforced a degree of compulsive sexlessness, they made film makers extraordinarily imaginative in their recrudescence of the erotic. When you allow people to be very blatant, and to be very crude, which is partly what has happened, you lower the tone and you lower the standards all the way round.
GJ: Isn’t Classicism in the broadest sense simply the creation of those kinds of constrictions and rules that allow the imagination to express itself by giving it a channel through which it has to focus itself. It actually can stimulate creativity rather than constrict it.
JB: Yes, although sometimes classicism can sort of devour itself, like the Promethean eagle devouring the vitals. There is a degree to which at times classicism can become tired, and it needs to be renewed. The modern movement was an attempt to renew, it’s the cleaning of the blades prior to the cultivation of new work.
GJ: Who are your favorite poets?
JB: I like T. S. Eliot, although emotionally I don’t warm to him, I like D. H. Lawrence although he’s probably a greater prose writer than he is a poet. I do rather adore Robinson Jeffers although he’s an acquired taste, I admit that. I like Emily Dickinson actually, in various ways. She amuses me, although there is a sort of innocent minded nature worship and pantheism to her work which isn’t necessarily that interesting. What is interesting is the Calvinist spirit of death consciousness that lurks at the heart of tiny little poetic haikus about bees and birds and what she’s seen going on in the garden of her reclusive life. Who else? I like . . .
GJ: Do you like Blake as a poet as well as a painter?
JB: I prefer him as a painter really. Blake is probably England’s greatest artist actually. In terms of sheer imaginative power. And he created his own religion; he created his own world. Blake’s art is very close to madness in the sense that it’s the desire for solipsism in the creation of a totally alternative space within which art can be itself. I think that you’ve got to be a little less pure than that, otherwise you are shading over into insanity. But art and insanity are very close, and the entire modern movement is partly based, sub specie aeternitatis, on the art of the insane.
GJ: You are an author as well as a reader of comics and graphic novels.
JB: Yes, when I was a child and an adolescent. Yes.
GJ: That’s a quintessentially popular art form. It’s directed primarily to children and young adults, and yet you think that it has a great deal of aesthetic potential. Can you talk a little bit about your sense of that?
JB: Yes, it’s an interesting one, because that’s very much an art for and of the masses. And although I am an elitist, there are moments when you wish to communicate with the majority of people. I suppose the thing that attracted me to them when I was very young was the heroic. The heroic is denied in our culture, in all sorts of ways, and has been disprivileged. Those forces that animated the great epics and Homer have been forced down to the level of comic books literally. Because the heroic is not seen as a necessary or requisite part of a high culture. When you have liberal values supervising the novel and the elite play and the elite film, the heroic will go down into the lowest forms of mass culture.
And yet really what are comics? They’re films on paper, and in certain cultures, like Japan and so on, they’re considered to be genuine art forms of quite a high sort. That isn’t true in the West, but because they are representational, and yet very imaginative, you can communicate with a large number of people instantaneously, and you can also be stereotypical in relation to the heroic, which is more difficult with more complicated forms.
There is also a degree to which the art can be actually quite abstract, because it’s draftsmanship par excellence, and it’s only lines on paper. And if you look at the imaginative input into what is purely a commercial area, there’s this odd trade-off between the aesthetic quality and the risible quality in terms of psychological realism and sociological appropriateness. But that’s not what these things are about.
They are also a pure form of escape and a pure form of sub-literary escapism, and I quite like art as a sort of escapism because we’re all born, we’re all going to die, and there needs to be something to fill the gap in between.
GJ: The graphic novel has emerged as a more artistically serious form of comic book, and for a long time I have to admit that I was somewhat dismissive of this. First of all, people were touting Spiegelman’s Maus, and I thought that this was very tendentious anti-cat propaganda. How is this an improvement on the comic book, and how is this serious as art? Then I started discovering that movies that I thought were really rather good, like A History of Violence [4], were based on graphic novels, and so I started looking into them. I really am very impressed, specifically with the graphic novel Watchmen, which I think is. as a novel really. on the level of some nineteenth-century Romantic novels of the highest order. What do you think of the graphic novel, and what do you think its future is, its potential is?
JB: Well, its potential, because they really are films on paper. There’s no denying that they are what it says on the tin. Therefore, the commercial pressures aside, their artistic future is limitless, because it’s as limitless as the capacity to create stories and to visualize them. So, all that will hold them back is the absence of seriousness with which they are viewed by the general, more literate culture. It’s probably true that mass culture is more visual than elite culture. Because elite culture tends to be more conceptual and tends to be bound by words.
Now, in these types of graphic novels you have sequential art with a storyboard that is a film on paper, and so you do have the ability to create films very cheaply. In some ways, it’s a marvellous medium because it approximates to Wagner’s total art form, because with the exception of music you’ve got almost everything combined.
There’s always something slightly ridiculous about comics, even the high-falutin ones that we’re discussing at the moment, but that’s part of their charm. They do have a charm. They do have a kitsch, which is part of their romantic allure. Because the first literature that most children fall in love with actually, long before they come to books, they look at this sort of material. Even if they quickly outgrow it.
GJ: Who do you think are the best graphic novelists and what are the best graphic novels?
JB: There’s a Batman called Arkham Asylum [5] which is by Dave McKean–visually anyway–and which is quite extraordinary. That was done before computers became fashionable. To paint on a computer screen and to print it out is how that sort of art form is now done, but McKean did individual paintings. Each of those panels is an individual painting situated within a larger conspectus.
I suppose Alan Moore. I don’t care for Alan Moore’s sort of politics, particularly, in so far as it’s subliminally present in his work, but he would have to be considered to be a major talent in the area that he’s chosen to concentrate in. Again, you tend to scan this sort of material. You don’t so much read it as you scan it. It’s very much like watching film. You absorb it. It’s like the wind screen wipers in a car–flick, flick–and then you go to the next page and you absorb it almost osmotically. You float in this material and then put it down. In this sense it’s probably more powerful than visual art, although visual art can reach parts of the mind that nothing else can, because it’s not bounded by narrative, and yet if you bound images by narrative, you have the possibility of reaching very large numbers of people. It’s surprising in some ways that graphic novels haven’t even been even more successful than they could be, but that’s probably because television is in the way, and the DVD is in the way. If those forms were less pronounced, probably they’d have an even greater articulacy than they do at the present time.
GJ: You said that the graphic novel is like the Wagnerian total work of art, except that it lacks music, which brings to mind the movies that have been made from graphic novels which of course include music. One of my theses is that the movie really is the thing that most closely approximates Wagner’s idea of the complete work of art, because with Wagner you still had the staging necessities of the theatre that sort of constrict your points of view, whereas film doesn’t have those constrictions, and therefore it’s more versatile, yet it can incorporate all the other art forms like the complete work of art was supposed to do. Do you think that’s a sensible thesis?
JB: Very much so. Yes. Film is the ultimate art form of the twentieth century and contains all the other arts within its self. That’s why it was important to try and make films. Film is the most frustrating thing to do, however. Because it involves radical collaboration with other people and with other egos, and it’s costly, and it’s extraordinarily time-consuming to do properly. It involves great technical skill and ingenuity. However, digital film-making has democratized the film industry, even though in the end these films are just cut up and put on YouTube or its equivalent. But you can now make films for very little money. The films that I’ve made cost £800 pounds each, which is totally ridiculous in relation to what film technology once cost in the past.
But, yes, I’ve always wanted to make films actually, because films are the total way in which you can live a dream that can impact upon other people and also can be seen in a relatively short and sequential period of time. It takes maybe 8, 10, 16, 24 hours to read a book sequentially over a period. An image can be accessed in seconds, that’s true. But a film you can put life, death and everything else into a spectacle that lasts for one hour. There is probably nothing like it.
GJ: Let’s switch our topics to some philosophical issues. You seem to be quite conversant with a wide range of ideas, especially ideas on the Right. But there’s a great deal of intellectual diversity and deep philosophical divisions amongst various Rightists. For instance, I know people who are Guénonian Traditionalists, and I know people who are Darwinists, and they have very different accounts of the evolution or devolution of man, for instance. Where do you stand on issues like that? Are you a Traditionalist? Are you a Darwinist? Are you a materialist? Are you a dualist? What philosophical outlook do you think is most adequate?
JB: I’d probably be described by a critic looking on from the outside as a Nietzschean, and as a Right-wing Nietzschean, in love with paradox, possibly for its own sake. I’m not technically a Traditionalist in the purest sense, because I don’t necessarily believe that there’s one tradition that one can get back to. The problem with all forms of Perennialism is that there’s no agreement on what one should get back to in relation to a prospective Golden Age.
But the real division for is between those that are metaphysically objectivist and those that are metaphysically subjectivist. All liberal Left-wing thought is metaphysically subjectivist, which means, put very simply, that you make it up as you go along or that life is endlessly socialized in its impact and import.
Metaphysical objectivism is the idea that there are standards outside life and there are concepts which pre-exist man and his consciousness of himself and that are absolute and that lack variation and can always be subscribed to by looking back at them, whereas Nietzsche had the view that, in a sense, such objectivist standards do exist, but we don’t entirely know what they, because we’re not divine, and we cannot perceive the world from its outside by virtue of the fact that we’re meshed in it and its fleshy and contingent circumstances.
So, what you have to do, is you have to become actualized in the space that you’re in and, by subjectively understanding the possibility of the objective that remains behind you, you achieve maximum insight through a morality of strenuousness. So, that’s what I would tend to believe.
In relation to things like Darwinism or regression of man theories à la Evola, I would take the view that perspectivally both can be right. We’ve evolved from lower forms, but you can also see the apes as falling away from one of our particular trajectories in relation to ascent. But it doesn’t bother me. The animalism of man doesn’t bother me as a concept. You only have to look around you in your local Wal-Mart.
GJ: I think that one way to somewhat reduce the tension between the Darwinists and the Traditionalists is simply to recognize that Traditionalism is not necessarily an account of how things actually happened. It’s first and foremost a collocation and synthesis of mythology, and mythology doesn’t necessarily have to be literally true in order to be extremely useful, and I don’t care how silly the idea of man’s devolution from higher beings is from a biological or evolutionary standpoint. When I go to Wal-Mart it makes a lot of sense, and so it’s got its own power and its own truth, and it doesn’t necessarily have to have the kind of truth that competes with scientific truth.
JB: Yes, that’s right. There are different forms of truth, and it’s a Gradgrind human mind that can’t see that. But that’s inevitable. Politics is a rather dry area, and people who are very politically-minded, on the whole, want rather tough, affirmative single-track causations, don’t wish to mix things together, and don’t want to be too philosophically complicated. After all, in the end, politics is about influencing the mass of people, and these issues are of no importance at all to the mass of people, who wish to see their areas less crime-ridden or wish to see their cities with less immigrants in them or more immigrants in them, depending on their point of view.
But these philosophical niceties are actually very important. Religions are enormous psychic novels, and the myths that sustain them are the poetic tropes that give reality and variety to their endless and teeming dreaming.
GJ: Let’s talk about religion. Where do you stand on religious issues? Did you receive any kind of religious training as a young man, and did it stick? How has your religious thinking evolved over time?
JB: Yes, that’s interesting. Emotionally, I’m drawn to religiosity. Although, I suppose if you wish to be very tough-minded and literal about things then I’m an atheist. But I don’t care for atheism as a position emotionally and psychologically because it’s such a desiccated and empty and banal position. All the musical traditions of any import are on the other side. So, I’m very much close to the Existentialists of the 1950s, who, although they framed all their religious concerns within what might be perceived as a rationalist purview, were obsessively religious in their attitude towards life and yet didn’t have a coherent religious system, Christian or otherwise. I’m a bit like that really.
I went to a Catholic school where, contrary to the idea it was sort of a torture chamber with a bit of added excess and brothers dressed in dresses flogging boys whilst you conjugated Latin verbs, it was actually a very good education and set oneself up for adult life in a very adequate way. But religiously, though I admire the myths, I’ve never really been that much of a Christian, although I can be moved by a film like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which struck me as a genuinely religious film and an extraordinarily accomplished artistic film as well; the two combined.
So, I’m emotionally drawn to religion, but I would not in a hard, factual sense be described as a religious person.
GJ: Are you more drawn to Christian or pagan mythology?
JB: No, I’ve been much more drawn to pagan mythology, although there’s a lot of Christian artistic inheritance that would influence me a great deal. But no, I’m emotionally and belletristically and aesthetically and psychosexually, I’m a pagan.
GJ: We were having a conversation a few days ago about astrology, and you said that you had the astrological profile of a fascist dictator, and that brings me to the next question which is: What do you think the ideal political system is?
JB: That’s very difficult at this moment in time to answer. I think the best political system is the most conservative system imaginable combined with the most revolutionary system imaginable. So, it’s something which is classical and flexible. It will be the equivalent of a Classical Modernism, really, in terms of its stylistic aesthetics, but beyond just style and/or aesthetics, its meaning and its sense of itself. It has probably never existed. It’s the lifestyle of Ernst Jünger conceived as the management of a state.
GJ: Are there historical regimes that you think most closely approximate that?
JB: No, not really. It’s why I’m not in love with any particular dictatorship or any particular form of democratic organization. All of them have positive features. All of them have negative features. I perceive of life as essentially dynamic, and therefore there’s never been a static society which was perfect. But humans aren’t perfect. And there’s no such thing as human perfectibility.
My interest in the grotesque is because man is so lopsided and so deliriously imperfect that the idea of utopia is itself slightly risible and will lead to dystopia anyway. But one should attempt to achieve one’s own utopias as long as one realizes that there always imperfect and approximate. Just as human life begins with childhood and ends with the idiocy of pre-senility, societies need to endlessly renew themselves.
My vision of not a just society but a society that’s come to terms with the nature of its own injustice is a quivering sword in a fencer’s hand; morality and social climbing perceived as a form of mountaineering. It’s a society that’s more dangerous than the present one, even though the present one has all sorts of dangers, and is more alive and is more percussively inegalitarian and elitist.
I suppose the open-minded rule of a traditional aristocracy that partly believed that the patronage of the arts was one of the most important things that it could do as well as officiating at religious ceremonies would be the sort of sensibility that I favor.
GJ: What thinkers or writers have influenced your views of politics most?
JB: The most is probably Carlyle and Wyndham Lewis and Machiavelli and, although he’s not really political in a narrow sense, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georges Sorel as well and Curzio Malaparte and D’Annunzio and D. H. Lawrence. But again, the people who’ve influenced me tend to splurge over into the artistic area and are not narrowly political. I suppose Plato, in a way; both to approximate to, to ascribe to and to reject simultaneously.
Amongst contemporary theorists, amongst contemporary politicians, Enoch Powell was an interesting Classicist who wrote poetry, and there’s an existential subtext to some of his articulations. We’re talking in a British context here. Who else? I’m certainly not influenced by Michael Oakeshott and sort of milksop conservatives of that sort. But then again, I’ve always been too revolutionary to be a complete conservative and too conservative to be a complete revolutionary.
I believe in a mixture of the past and the present. I’m an optimistic person, actually. I believe very much in the future. I don’t share the pessimism that most Right-wing people do. Most Right-wingers are pessimistic people and have a strong streak of Puritanism in their personalities. Although there are Puritanical sides to me, they tend to be part of a starkness and part of an aesthetic that is thrown beyond itself.
To me, artistic things are so much more important than anything else, and politics is a way to achieve certain artistic goals that otherwise would fall fallow.
GJ: Ayn Rand had an essay called “Bootleg Romanticism” where she talked about certain forms of literature in the twentieth century that she thought were a refuge where nineteenth-century Romanticism had fled because it had been purged by naturalism and modernism from higher letters. She talks about things like spy shows. I think she talks about The Man from U.N.C.L.E., although she dropped that from the published version that she put it in her book The Romantic Manifesto. She talks about the Bond films. She talks about pulp adventure novels and things like that.
You have a great interest in pulp novels.
JB: . . . Raymond Chandler . . .
GJ: You have an interest in pulp and popular fiction. Is that true?
JB: Yes, partly because its crudity is endlessly amusing and also for its love of the extreme and its love of the radical situation. It’s compelling.
I’m drawn to extremism. I’ve always been an extremist. But I’m not drawn to the usual forms of counter-bourgeois extremism that exist on the Left. So, for me, the elitist spine that has to subsist in everything prevents me from going in a Leftwards direction because egalitarianism is a bore. There’s nothing more boring than egalitarianism. There’s nothing more aesthetically sterile. And that’s why the truth is on the Right side of the equation.
As for popular forms: popular forms can be very mass-oriented and degraded, but they can also be endlessly charming and full of life and brio and energy, and in their very crudity they can escape some of the halting steps that the naturalist’s aesthetic might place upon things. It’s the very abnaturalism and non-naturalism of elements of the popular imagination as perceived artistically in mass culture that can render the grotesque even more baleful, even more illuminating, even more distressingly actual.
GJ: You like Robert E. Howard. You’ve done a lot of writing about his Conan works and other writings. Again, this is a fellow who created a lot of popular literature, yet you are drawn to it even as an anti-egalitarian elitist.
JB: Yes, that’s right. Partly just because of the heroic metaphysic, which is itself a form of elitism, as Rand rightly pointed out. Things are never destroyed in culture. They’re just displaced, and therefore they find new levels for themselves through which they can articulate what they are or might be. So, naturalistic fiction displaced fantasy fiction, which went down into genres like fantasy and science fiction and the rest of it, and then those come up again and become more literary in the hands of somebody like Ballard, whereas popular work and elitist work fertilize each other and interrelate. With me things are never either/or but yes/and, and there’s a degree to which you can see ramifications of the elite in the popular, and you can see dithyrambic populism in elitism. It’s more the treatment and the self-overbecoming which is involved in any creative moment. It’s less where there’s something that’s popular or whether something is populist or whether something is elitist. Life and history will determine that.
Howard is now regarded in part as a sort of, not as an elite writer, but as a qualified elite writer, certainly as a literary writer, which as a pulpster he was never considered to be. Indeed, the triumvirate of the Weird Tales three–Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard–are now considered to be essentially elitist writers who went slumming.
GJ: When I read Rand’s essay it occurred to me that you could run a similar argument regarding music in this sense that in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century Romanticism was dominant in music and then Modernism came in, and the Romantic sensibility was driven off the concert stages, and it showed up in Hollywood, and so you had a lot of film composers who were carrying on the Romantic tradition in ways that more “serious” academic composers were not. What do you think of film music?
JB: I like film music. Partly because it’s an extension of film as the total artwork. It’d be interesting to have film music with a totally blank screen, wouldn’t it? Whereby you actually had a film that was rendered musicological, and then you voided the screen, and just played the music so you had a concert response to what might be programmatic or filmic music.
Yes, I like film music, although its composers are not individually that important, because you can’t abstract it from the film which their product is a part of. But no, a film without music is a deader film. If you ever sit through films which have very little music, you’ve lost a part of the overall experience.
One of the things that interests me a great deal is that ultra-modern music and horror films go very much together. Partly because the Hammer films in Britain could get Modernist composers very cheaply, like Elisabeth Lutyens and this sort of thing, to do these amazing scores which are completely over the top and, from an naturalistic point of view, utterly ridiculous and yet suit that sort of hedonistic and abstracted material even at its most popular and deranged.
So, I quite like that sort of combination of sort of Charles Ives manqué and Hammer horror.
GJ: Kerry Bolton has done a lot of writing for Counter-Currents since our website got started, and he’s published a lot of essays on artists of the Right. We’re going to bring out two volumes of these essays now. He’s written so much that it has exceeded the length of one volume. We’re going to bring out the first volume sometime in the spring.
It is really quite remarkable that some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, especially the first half of the twentieth century, were political Rightists and sometimes rather radical Rightists. It’s interesting to me how Counter-Currents as a metapolitical project embraces the attempt to cultivate artists. One of the things that I would very much like to do is to the extent that it’s possible for a journal to cultivate artists I would very much like to encourage a new artistic scene on the Right. It would be very nice if some of the great artists in the twenty-first century turned out to be Rightists as well.
What are your thoughts about how one can cultivate an artistic/political sub-culture? Do you think that can be cultivated or does that just happen in ways that can never be predicted or controlled?
JB: I think it’s more likely to happen in the latter way in which you just described it. It’s difficult to stimulate such a thing into being, but you can help that which exists. I think that probably works like Bolton’s are very important because what they’re doing is they’re engaging in cultural revisionism. What they’re doing is they’re bringing back into focus all of the people who existed between about 1900 or 1890 and 1945. The great fall off, of course, is the effect of the Second World War. If you wish to get anywhere in the arts since the Second World War you’ve had to have liberal opinions because civilized people couldn’t have illiberal opinions because they could be perceived as leading in a fascistic direction.
But we’re living in a new era now, and we’re living in a post-modern or a post-post-modern or a hyper-real era, and I feel it’s time to bring back all of these titans from the first part of the twentieth century to give people the courage and the energy to say that they believe in new forms of art which are radically unequal and radically inegalitarian in their responses to life.
I feel that the best thing that can be done is to take people up when they appear and to manifest interest in their work and to project them without fear or favor when you’re aware of the nature of their existence. I don’t think you can synthetically bring into being a Right-wing cultural and artistic movement, but you can pick and choose from a large number of people who will come forward in the next ten years or so, or who have created silently and without being recognized since 1945.
GJ: It strikes me that things that I can do as an editor of a journal are really two-fold: Publishing articles like Kerry Bolton’s gives people today a whole pantheon of models that they can look to which can be inspiring and the other thing that’s possible is to provide critical feedback and exposure to contemporary artists who are working in a sort of Right-wing sub-culture and I think that’s really the best that I can do. If there’s more, I would like to know. If there are people out there who want to contact me, we’ll do our best to give you critical feedback and to give your work exposure. And one hopes that there’s a genius out there listening; the next Ezra Pound or the next Roy Campbell. And really, that’s the best we can do.
JB: Yes, I think that’s the best that can be done and what ought to be done and what should be done and what is being done.
GJ: Well, Jonathan, thank you very much. This has been very, very enjoyable, and I hope to talk to you again soon for another Counter-Currents Radio show.
JB: Thanks very much.