Chris Berg

2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – the moment which signalled the end of the short and brutal totalitarian 20th century.

The movement had actually begun much earlier. The disintegration of Communist rule in Hungary (which, during 1989, was bringing Hungarians freedom of the press and association, and by October, constitutional reform) meant that East and West Germans were reuniting for holidays in Hungary. Worse, from the perspective of East German officials however, low-level Hungarian border guards were letting many of those East Germans holiday makers slip in out of Hungary and into the West. Porous borders became Hungarian official policy when the liberal Communist regime in September explicitly annulled the migration restrictions formed as part of the East German-Hungarian treaty. Thousands of East Germans began pouring into Austria.

The events of November are well known. Czechoslovakia granted East Germans the same migration freedoms as Hungary had. And without the support traditionally expected from the leadership of the USSR, the East German government was forced to admit that its migration restrictions, which had supported its rule in the 28 years since the Berlin Wall had been erected, had effectively failed. On 9 November, an East German official mistakenly announced that travel to West German was permitted ‘immediately’, and confused, uninformed but thankfully restrained guards on the East allowed the massive stream of excited Germans into the West.

The story of November 1989 is a story of spontaneous and uncoordinated desire for liberty – depending on political confusion, the humanity of border guards in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and the bold excitement of a free future – but it would not have been possible without the world-historical leaders in Washington, Moscow and England. Mikhail Gorbachev declined to act to defend the solidarity of the Soviet Bloc at a very crucial moment. And the triumvirate of John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan redefined the essential questions of the Cold War-the stark dichotomy between Western liberty and Soviet tyranny.

In this IPA Review, John Roskam looks at just what made Reagan tick-his attitude to the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and how that attitude played a central role in winning the Cold War and liberating those behind the Iron Curtain. As Roskam points out, Reagan meant every word of what he said. His description of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’ may have been ridiculed in the left-wing press, but it resonated with those who had actually experienced the Communist system, and those who still were. If it wasn’t for the moral clarity Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II brought to the Cold War stalemate, those migrants escaping across the Hungarian border, or those streams of East Germans flooding through Checkpoint Charlie would have had to stay at home.

In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine the Soviet Union lasting much into the 1990s. The liberating and democratising nature of the internet and the digital revolution might well have totally undermined the Soviet system if it had survived the events of 1989 – studies of Soviet computing show that the system was completely unable to handle the digital age, even before that era fully manifested itself with the internet.

We know now that the Soviet system was moribund and heading towards an inevitable collapse. But that it collapsed in 1989, not 1994, or 1998, is a testament to the leadership of these great figures.

Isn’t it great when events confirm your political prejudices?

If Kevin Rudd’s widely reported speech in early October is any indication, then the Prime Minister sees in the financial crisis the seeds of a grand, epoch-defining work program for the Commonwealth Government. Having come to national prominence claiming his opposition to the ‘Brutopian’ philosophy of Friedrich Hayek – as muddled as his understanding of Hayek’s actual writing was – Rudd has announced that the financial crisis was all the fault of ‘neo-liberalism’, and ‘a political and economic ideology of extreme capitalism’:

this crisis bears the fingerprints of the extreme free-market ideologues who influence much of the neo-liberal economic elite, free-market ideologues who have a naive belief that unrestrained markets are always self-correcting and that markets left to themselves will always achieve optimum outcomes.

It is a bit odd to criticise the ‘naive belief’ that markets self-correct while we all watch the financial market self-correct in the most dramatic of fashions.

Nevertheless, will historians be able to neatly split Kevin Rudd’s first term as Australian Prime Minister as defined at first by deregulation – his government, after all, appointed the first Australian Minister for Deregulation, not that it’s done much good – and then by a period where pro-regulatory forces were in the offence?

One could be forgiven for believing that the era of small government is over, if only we could remember when it had started.

In his October speech, Rudd recalled the character Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street. It is somewhat disconcerting that Kevin Rudd is trying to build his political narrative off the dramatic licence of Stone – someone who may be an extremely talented filmmaker, but is also an anti-capitalist of the most lunar left. Stone, after all, thinks the Cuban dictatorship is just swell, and that the US Government is competent enough to kill its own President and keep it a secret for nearly half a century.

Unfortunately, the Prime Minister sees the financial crisis as a cheap morality play-greed caused the crisis, not bad regulations, or poor risk management, or bad decisions. According to his narrative, it is the role of the government (the good guys) to punish the finance industry (the bad guys). The same left-wingers who ridiculed the simplistic dichotomy of the War on Terror-remember George Bush’s apparently ‘inflammatory’ statement, ‘you are either with us or against us’?-are more than happy to jump aboard their own simplistic dichotomy when it comes to the evil and greedy traders on Wall Street.

Of course, we have to be careful seeing any hint of the future in a speech by this Prime Minister. If we could, then we would also be proud of our role as the founding members of the Asian franchise of the European Union, proud that it was our diplomacy that finally managed to enforce nuclear disarmament around the globe, and proud that our ‘moral leadership’ on climate change had managed to convince China and India to forego economic development and instead help fulfil Labor’s election commitment to save this fragile world.

In the middle of a financial crisis, it is particularly appropriate that this edition of the IPA Review leads with a piece on former Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating. In many ways, the Labor Party is still a post-Keating party, and Kevin Rudd’s Government is a post-Keating Government. But as Greg Barns concludes, ‘Australia’s various and numerous challenges as a nation today require Keating boldness, not Rudd timidity’. The events of the last few weeks have shown us how true that really is.

A review of Novels in Three Lines by Felix Fénéon (NYRB Classics, 2007,176 pages)

Ernest Hemingway once said that his best story was his shortest story, deliberately limited to just six words – ‘For sale: baby shoes, never used’ – an exercise in radical economy which manages to imply a lengthy and tragic back story, without being predictable or hackneyed. Hemingway’s ‘novel’, and the self-imposed restraint which inspired it, has been justly praised and imitated.

But eloquence under word limitations is a skill which has been practiced by working journalists almost since printing was invented. Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines demonstrates just how much literary power that can be achieved in an intimidatingly small space.

Novels in Three Lines – a play on the French title, Nouvelles en trios lignes, which can also be translated as ‘news in three lines’ – is a collection of 1,220 tiny dispatches published in the Parisian newspaper Le Matin, all during 1906. They were printed unsigned in an obscure corner of a Le Matin page. Their topics are mundane, covering crime, death, celebrations and local controversies which would not deserve any more space in the paper than Fénéon’s column would grant them.

Nevertheless when collected together, as Luc Sante has done in this appropriately thin volume, Fénéon’s skill as a literary compositor and the artistry of his dispatches becomes clear. Novels in Three Lines is a remarkable portrait of regional France in the first decade of the twentieth century, and a work of unacknowledged brilliance.

Félix Fénéon may have had a relatively anonymous job in 1906 when he wrote for Le Matin, but he occupied a central place in the artistic community of turn-of-the-century France. He was a prominent art critic, whose writing on Georges Seurat was partly responsible for the latter’s success – indeed, Fénéon was the first owner of Bathing at Asnières. He was a theorist of Pointillism, the post-impressionist movement for which Seurat has become the historical touchstone.

Fénéon was a serial magazine founder, writing journalism anonymously and criticism under his name. When Picasso once asked Fénéon his opinion on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon he responded dryly: ‘you should stick to caricature.’

He was imposingly tall and contemporaries described him as enigmatic. When Paul Signac, a follower of Seurat, painted Fénéon surrounded by garish proto-psychedelic abstraction, Fénéon was deeply unhappy with the portrait – the publishers of Novels in Three Lines have used a much more stoic-looking photograph of Fénéon taken from French police archives, a decision which presumably the author would have preferred.

Fénéon’s mug-shot is, anyway, more in keeping with the volume than Signac’s painting would have been. Novels in Three Lines is a collage of brutality and violence; the vast majority of Fénéon’s dispatches concern murders, suicides and accidents, punctuated by the occasional riot, theft, or crippling inquiry. One random-chosen page describes four separate homicides, five accidental deaths, at least six major injuries, one woman committed for insanity, as well as this piece of bad luck:

Too bad! Mentré of Longwy, who revealed to us that he was the winner of the 250,000 francs in the tuberculosis lottery, seems to have been hoaxed.

Fénéon works within the conventions of journalism. He is careful to record names, locations, and more often than not, ages and job descriptions-butchers, clerks, merchants, nurses and soldiers. His ‘novels’ describe early automobile accidents, they record otherwise parochial regional arguments for a national audience (Le Matin was a Parisian paper), outbreaks of disease and building collapses. It is one of the troubles of historical investigation that the underclass only enter history in times of tragedy – most of what we know of the lives of the non-elites in early modern England comes from the proceedings of the Old Bailey. Fénéon’s dispatches are the only time that Jourdain, of Mézières, or the engineer Mahuet, or Langon, of Sceaux, or M. Jégou de Laz, of Cleden, would penetrate the historical curtain.

So much of the artistry of Fénéon’s epigrammatic journalism rides on its elaborate construction, which constantly flirts with full-blown satire:

Napoléon, a peasant of Saint-Nabord, Vosges, drank a litre of alcohol; very well, but he had put in some phosphorous, hence his death.

Mme Fournier, M. Vouin, M. Septeuil, of Sucy, Tripleval, Septeuil, hanged themselves: neurasthenia, cancer, unemployment.

Often Fénéon delays the core of his story until the very last moment, or holds back a crucial piece of information which completely recasts that which preceded it:

To get back with Artémise Riso, of Les Lilas, was the wish of romantic Jean Voul. She remained inflexible. So he knifed her.

He smuggles slightly ambiguous moral commentary within his reportage, wavering between dispassion and irony:

What?! Children perched on his wall?! With eight rounds M. Olive, property owner in Toulon, forced them to scramble down all bloodied.

An unknown person painted the walls of Pantin cemetery yellow; Dujardin wandered naked through Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône. Crazy people, apparently.

In the London Review of Books, Julian Barnes points out that Fénéon had worked in this form before, but for explicitly political ends, in an anarchist journal in the 1890s, where his black sarcasm was deployed even more aggressively:

Dead sick of himself after reading the book by Samuel Smiles (Know Thyself), a judge just drowned himself at Coulange-la-Vineuse. If only this excellent book could be read throughout the magistracy.

But in his Le Matin column, he eschews politics. Luc Sante’s introduction nevertheless emphasises Fénéon’s complicity, if not outright responsibility for, some of the revolutionary anarchist terrorism that was common to western democracies in the pre-war period. Fénéon was arrested for a bombing in 1894, and, while detonators were found in his clerk’s office at the French War Department, and he was close friends with other convicted bombers, he was released for lack of evidence. Whether Fénéon was guilty or not is sort of beside the point-Sante points out that Fénéon was a true believer in the anarchist cause, even if his printed material (he wrote, all up, very little, and even less under his own name) does not obviously reflect it.

For the turn-of-the-century anarchists, politics was as much an aesthetic practice as it was political. In a twisted variation on the famous Robespierre/Lenin line that omelettes cannot be made without breaking eggs, the poet Laurent Tailhade once defended the bombing of civilians by asking: ‘Of what importance are a few vague people if the gesture is beautiful?’ Tailhade was the sole victim of a cafe bombing a few months later-he did not repudiate anarchism, but would not describe himself as ‘vague’ either.

In Novels in Three Lines, Fénéon shares Tailhade’s nihilism, if not his incredible anti-humanism. Fénéon seems to be obsessed with the artistic potential of mayhem-the book jacket draws comparisons with Andy Warhol’s ‘Death and Disaster’ series-stripping the emotional core out of individual tragedies and recording them either with extreme passivity, or filtered through a dark irony.

So can Novels in Three Lines – which Fénéon never meant to publish, are only available in a collated form never seen by the author, and were intended at the time to be nothing more than journalistic hackery – be considered in any way literature?

The Russian theorist Jan Mukarovsky spoke of a necessary ‘literariness’, where simple communication is pushed to the background, made subservient to expression, or as Mukarovsky put it, the emphasis is given to the ‘act of speech itself.’ Indeed, it is hard to avoid the impression that Fénéon was often much less interested in the subject matter of his dispatches than he was with toying with sentence structure and the ambiguities of language. For Fénéon, the drudgery of copywriting seems to have inspired literary experimentation – having to reformulate variations of the same misfortunes over and over would get very tedious.

Fénéon may have arrived at literariness out of nothing more than boredom, but he still arrived there. Novels in Three Lines is an often comic and always disturbing snapshot of European nihilists and the world they disdained.