| The Modern Savage: Figures of the Fascist 'Primitive' in Interwar Europe examines primitivist tropes in the fiction and art of three artists from three countries: D. H. Lawrence (England), Max Ernst (Germany. France), and Djuna Barnes (the United States, France). I argue that this range of modernist tropes---whether animal, tribesperson Jew, woman, or forest---overlaps significantly with an idealized agrarian Nature found in fascist ideology. Modernism uses the trope of fascism to stress material vitalist practices that liberate the individual from history, tradition, and the stifling aspects of civilization. This primitivism thus paradoxically leads to a glorification of modernity's innovations through tropes of machinery and the technology of war. I trace the way fascist tropes emerge in modernism through the notion of a "becoming" developed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.; Within each case-study chapter, I explore the way fascism becomes a privileged trope by which to understand the relation between the 'primitive' and the highly aestheticized realm that characterizes modernism in conjunction with eight themes: the fascination with sadomasochism, violence and horror as a positive transformative power, depicted through war, the soldier, bombing or the battlefield; the emphasis on vitalism, especially in the way the biological is seen to multiply and reproduce outside the rational control of the human; the portrayal of female characters as idealized symbols of beauty in contrast to either the virile animal or warrior-soldier; the primitive tribesman or animal as capable of savagely destroying an enervated and lifeless bourgeois society; the emphasis on performativity in which 'primitive' characters are put on display in the style of fascist pageantry and spectacle; the literary movement of decadence, as it informs representations of the primitive, the homosexual, and to emphasize the artificial and constructed nature of the work of art; allusion to animal vision or the animal eve as a return to prelapsarian wholeness in contrast to the 'blind' human world; and finally, the metaphor of the machine, used in Italian Futurism and German protofascism to glorify the mechanical processes of automatism and to emphasize the nonhuman. |
