The Violet Hour

“What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal”

from The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot (1922)

T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is a forsaken world in desperate need of spiritual salvation. Like the Sibyl of Cumea, its inhabitants are hopelessly stretched beyond their means. Souls walk aimlessly around undead cities with their eyes fixed before their feet, uttering short and infrequent sighs. The poem aches with desire for rejuvenating rain, but old fertility rites have been corrupted and the only means of communication with the gods is through charlatans and clairvoyants. Yet, even Madam Sosototris cannot find the hooded man, the one who would give salvation. Instead, he glides around like a specter - an apparition whose seeming presence only reminds us of his painfully conspicuous absence. The poem is a shattered narrative, collecting fragments of cultural memory and mythology. Like an individual recalling all of her memories on her death bed, so too it seemed that Western Civilization was remembering and reliving all of its history in the violet hour before its own terrible demise.

In his notes to the poem, Eliot linked the above quotation from the Wasteland to a small pamphlet Hermann Hesse scribed a few years earlier in which he argued that Dostoyevsky had prophesized the Downfall of Europe in his novel The Brothers Karamazoff. Humanity, Hesse contended, was full of instincts which, while neither good nor bad, every civilization needed to categorize in a moral order by selecting those that were allowed and deemed ‘Good’ and others which were forbidden and termed ‘Evil.’ When a culture began to decay, individuals emerged – represented by the Karamazoffs in Dostoyevsky’s novel – who rejected the arbitrary categories of Good and Evil and dismissed the law of the old order.

In the greater cultural context of modern Europe, Hesse believed that the new ‘Russian man,’ typified by the Karamazovs, was the harbinger of the end of Western Civilization. Dostoyevsky’s novel and the ‘Chaos’ of Eastern Europe revealed a tired culture reeling into the abyss, the vortex and deliquescence of all values, only to be recreated and reborn again. “The ideal of the Karamazov, primeval, Asiatic, and occult, is already beginning to consume the European soul. That is what I mean by the downfall of Europe. This downfall is a return home to the mother, a turning back to Asia, to the source, to the "Faüstischen Muttern" and will necessarily lead, like every death on earth, to a new birth.”

Returning to the passage from The Wasteland in light of Hesse’s essay, some of the contours of Eliot’s obscure poetry are illuminated. The ‘murmur of maternal lamentation’ high in the air was a foreboding whisper of a culture wishing to return to Asia, its mother, to be dissolved and reborn. The faceless ‘hooded hordes’ conjured the ‘Russian men’ whose nihilistic disregard for all norms threatened the stability of the old European order. Yet, most ominous was the city over the mountains in the violet air – the moment of twilight as the cultural and spiritual centers of Europe seemed to crack and burst, manifesting their true essence: spectral, illusory – unreal.

Eliot’s and Hesse’s depictions of the sterility of Western Civilization and their foreboding premonitions of the downfall of Europe were not isolated. In 1922, the same year Eliot published The Wasteland, the cantankerous and misanthropic German Oswald Spengler released the second volume of his opus The Decline of the West. Like Hesse, Spengler conceived of history as the succession of cultures; he even acknowledged Dostoyevsky as a veritable haruspex. According to Spengler, every culture unfolded through various states following an organic logic – passing through ‘youth,’ ‘growth,’ ‘maturity,’ and then falling into ‘decay.’

Although professional historians decried his work as superficial and un-scientific, Spengler found a substantial and sympathetic audience in the intellectual milieu of interwar Europe. The poet William Butler Yeats saw in The Decline of the West “a correspondence too great for coincidence” of the visualization of history in his own poetry. Indeed a large reading population found The Decline of the West to be satisfying, or at least intriguing – by 1927, 100,000 copies had been sold. Spengler, Eliot, and Hesse all tapped into a larger cultural premonition that Western Civilization had gone adrift. In contrast to the Enlightenment which propounded the great progress of European culture or the Hegelian dialectic which ensured the realization of freedom as the goal of history, many intellectuals were convinced that Europe had fallen into twilight.

This reaction against eighteenth century Enlightenment thought was particularly engaged in a revolt against positivism – a rather loose synecdoche like most categorical representations of movements, but generally defined as a tendency to reduce intellectual inquiry into scientific terms and methodologies. Positivist historiography strove to be mimetic and objective, and at its root was an unfailing optimism that history could truly be understood for what it was through scientific measures.

Spengler was explicit in his disdain for positivist methodology. In response to Condorcet and the Enlightenment, he proclaimed, “‘Mankind,’ however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids.” Cultures simply rose and fell; there was no overall trajectory to human history. Furthermore, Spengler was not interested in isolated events, but repetitions and patterns. A historical moment did not derive importance from its spatial and temporal positioning, but instead from what it signified through analogy to other cultures. Unfolding in an organic logic, every culture followed the template or archetype established by the ‘metaphysical structure of historic humanity’ which underlie history. Spengler was not searching for the ‘mathematical laws’ that governed history, but instead for ‘analogies’ that compared repetitions in civilizations and uprooted the hidden organic life-cycles which all cultures must undergo. While science seemed to impose illusory laws on reality and shackle it in dry formula, Spengler thought his methodology could unveil hidden organic truths and provide events with metaphysical meaning.

Frederich Nietzsche, one of the two people to whom Spengler acknowledged his debt in The Decline of the West, was one of positivism’s first and harshest critics. In Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, positivist history was portrayed as merely an intellectual exercise - it provided people with a torrent of meaningless information, linking together isolated events through causal acrobatics. Nietzsche did not advocate an abandonment of history - it was required for life and action. But it needed be in the service of life, not as a servant of science. Under the precept of science, history destroyed illusions – what he termed myths – and the creative instinct. When myth crept into the realm of historical reality it was mercilessly systematized and eviscerated of its artful portrayal of profound meaning. Science recklessly disrobed/unveiled the world unwitting of the fact that knowledge killed action, for action required the veil of illusion. Myth portrayed the absurdity and horror of existence, but in an artful manner that comforted and soothed. The genuine historian would therefore cloak his truth much like the playwright of myths – hidden and ambiguous, enigmatic and artful.

In the revolt against positivism, the term ‘myth’ enjoyed a remarkable resurgence of usage. Myth was an illusive and ill-defined concept, but its vague connotations as archaic and irrational provided an appealing semantic hue. It evaded positivist systematization and intellectualization, was fundamentally ahistorical and pessimistic, provided an anti-individualistic union with the eternal, and facilitated action and virility in an absurd world. Yet, the ‘myth’ that would be utilized in the intellectual discourse in the 1920s and 30s would be seared off of its Nietzschean roots as an art form and grafted onto a political axis.

The intellectual revolt against positivism was not merely confined to a rejection of Enlightenment thought, but also its political derivatives. Consequently, socialism and liberalism, the two great political ideologies of the nineteenth century, were indicted as vague forms of positivism. Only a revolution which rejected the intellectual, political, and social structures rooted in Enlightenment and positivist thought could save Western Civilization from decadence. From the crisis of Marxism and a faltering belief in liberal democracy, a new political form of vitalistic nationalism emerged which proclaimed a total revolution to regenerate and reinvigorate European society. One of the Italian leaders of this movement proclaimed it was a reaction against the “materialistic positivism of the nineteenth century.” Fascism developed from this synthesis of the fin-de-siècle desire to renew a decadent culture and an anti-liberal, anti-parliamentary populist nationalism.

Roger Griffin defined this ‘fascist minimum’ as “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism.” Although each of the terms could operate independently, when the two were synthesized they delimited each other to create a precise political concept – fascism. The palingenetic portion of the equation – a rather archaic word etymologically deriving from palin (again) and genesis (birth), thus connoting a myth of renewal – hints at the coercive appeal of fascism to intellectuals. Intellectuals who prophesized that they were living in the violet hour of Western Civilization had a propensity to be drawn into fascism since it adopted fin-de-siècle ideology and ostensibly claimed to resolve the decadent crisis through populist ultra-nationalism. Fascism assimilated and politicized the terms of counterenlightenment thought in the ideological discourse; thus, when socialism and liberal democracy did not appear to be sufficient vehicles to rejuvenate Western culture, many intellectuals fell into fascism’s ideological orbit. Belief in the eschatological crisis of Western culture was a central component of the fascist equation.