This caught my attention because I scored a copy of Volume 1 for $0.50 at a library sale and I love ponderous German books. More to the point, fascinated well beyond Boomer good and evil interest by WWII due to family history tying to both Germany and Poland and the resistance in the latter. So pleased to see someone, anyone has read it.
Because they are massive, autobiographical, and formally complicated, I am put in the mind of the significantly easier to read (and frankly mesmerising) Anniversaries of Uwe Johnson, which if you are unfamiliar with it I recommend heartily.
This time of year is both exhausting and enervating and I will likely not try to read something as dense and difficult as tAoR but will return here before I do for further guidance. Cheers!
Thanks for writing! I haven't read Anniversaries but it has been on my list for some time; I'll definitely prioritize checking it out. I've also seen Alexander Kluge's work cited a bunch on this same kind of postwar "reorganization of memory/possibility against historical loss" topic.
You're also very correct re: the seasonal energy sap. Enjoy the summer/bummer, Weiss will be waiting. Please do check back in if you do read it, and thanks again.
Quite an overview, by @mark iosifescu, of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss.
Sure, Weiss was convinced of his dense structural approach in his semi-autobiographical trilogy about resistance to the Nazis, but why - and to what effect? "...a tough read in any language" is hardly compelling. Should it have been titled The Arcane of Resistance?
What is most convincing about the structure and/or content being compelling to today? And to say that it is - surely in hundreds of pages something would be. "Build unity" - at least there's that. Yes. See today, in electoral realms at the least, Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani and, though she is much neurotically decried, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and similar others.
The way you open with the 6 failures (or many more) it sounds like the aesthetics of defeat rather than resistance, but such is the nature of hard lessons, or realities.
Why would Weiss think retrospection would be trivial? It might have been the most interesting thing. Context and perspective, why not? It seems to me when you fight for a new world in the old and then the old is destroyed, you are left to pick up the pieces, which can be a very different thing.
As for the debate or balance between reform and revolution, some interesting and penetrating things can be said about it, but when either side flat rejects the merit of the other the thought is typically simplistic and of no actual world. The Mamdani, Bernie, and AOC examples are telling, and in their vein I've written what might be thought of as a sequel to The Aesthetics of Resistance, in Most Revolutionary. But it's not a historical autofiction. Instead, it's of the day, directly and explicitly. And it's purposefully not dense. Challenging, perhaps, but normatively so to some and not technically to any or all.
As far as content goes in this still genocidal age, it seems novels should be an endless flow of Resistance rather than the glorified idiosyncratic Desistance that they so often are. Would be good if The Aesthetics of Resistance could open some doors in that regard.
Regarding the possible purposes or effects of the text's difficulty, I'll point again to Weiss's words, which I quote in the piece, on "the difficulties the characters in the novel had in arriving at their interpretations. The readers, who are confronted with those people, have to go through the same exertion at any rate, make the same efforts the second time around. Nothing is made easy for them, just as things weren’t made easy for the characters in the novel.” That is: a reader who has to labor through the novel's action as if part of an ongoing argument (studded though the argument may be with arcana or theory or jargon) is being enlisted in the revolutionary project as it actually operates, at least in Weiss's estimation. To deliver revolution as a predigested summary would, I think, be to seriously misunderstand the effort involved. That said—it's always worth thinking about the degree to which literature that purports to speak for the masses is actually available/accessible to them, but that's a big topic and anyway, I'm not sure it's what you're worried about.
Re Bernie, AOC, Mamdani: sure, there is lots of useful stuff in Weiss on electoral paths, the virtues and pitfalls of lining up with the progressive wings of centrist parties, etc. etc. Nothing maps too neatly to the present—which is why books are books and real life is real life—but Weiss will give you lots to work with, if you decide to go ahead and read him.
Typically this sort of thing - real history of thought and action - is done in history books, even popular type firsthand history books like George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. I don't object to what Weiss is doing in The Aesthetics of Resistance. It sounds interesting and potentially valuable if perhaps unnecessarily tedious.
Though hybrid forms are often very insightful and valuable, the difference between a novel and a history - even if it's a fictionalized history of consciousness and conscience - is that a novel is fully an art, whereas histories are structures not of art, at least not fully. Both may be replete with ideas and experience, but in novels with poor art these can be greatly diminished just as they might be in histories with baffling structures.
Some histories and analyses have seemingly funky structures that are lively and great, as do some novels, so no formulaic approach is advisable. I'm leery of the miasma too-often found in the too-realistic or too-naturalistic novels, where you are inclined to say with Rebecca West that "one of the damned thing is ample." Make it new. Take us forward. Make it more revolutionary or intelligible. Something better and better for us and the world. Not something false, of course, something new as well as old, something newly clear or intriguing, wonderful or useful from the old muddle.
Or what is the muddling for - if not the next thing rather than the old thing. An art, an artist can weigh in on that, invoke it at the least and even greatly explore it. So can historians. Any intellectual can. The question is do they?
I might quibble with some of the hard novel/history splits, but yes, agreed re a kind of gratuitous, performative realism: an airless reproduction of the world—if that were even possible—would be of, like, extremely limited value, practically or artistically. Which is not to say that realist art (as a label) and its political applications/misapplications isn't a crucial component of the discursive/theoretical universe Weiss is working through. It comes up again and again in the book, in debates among characters who embody more or less every possible gradation of aesthetic principles along the realism/abstraction spectrum.
This caught my attention because I scored a copy of Volume 1 for $0.50 at a library sale and I love ponderous German books. More to the point, fascinated well beyond Boomer good and evil interest by WWII due to family history tying to both Germany and Poland and the resistance in the latter. So pleased to see someone, anyone has read it.
Because they are massive, autobiographical, and formally complicated, I am put in the mind of the significantly easier to read (and frankly mesmerising) Anniversaries of Uwe Johnson, which if you are unfamiliar with it I recommend heartily.
This time of year is both exhausting and enervating and I will likely not try to read something as dense and difficult as tAoR but will return here before I do for further guidance. Cheers!
Thanks for writing! I haven't read Anniversaries but it has been on my list for some time; I'll definitely prioritize checking it out. I've also seen Alexander Kluge's work cited a bunch on this same kind of postwar "reorganization of memory/possibility against historical loss" topic.
You're also very correct re: the seasonal energy sap. Enjoy the summer/bummer, Weiss will be waiting. Please do check back in if you do read it, and thanks again.
Quite an overview, by @mark iosifescu, of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss.
Sure, Weiss was convinced of his dense structural approach in his semi-autobiographical trilogy about resistance to the Nazis, but why - and to what effect? "...a tough read in any language" is hardly compelling. Should it have been titled The Arcane of Resistance?
What is most convincing about the structure and/or content being compelling to today? And to say that it is - surely in hundreds of pages something would be. "Build unity" - at least there's that. Yes. See today, in electoral realms at the least, Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani and, though she is much neurotically decried, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and similar others.
The way you open with the 6 failures (or many more) it sounds like the aesthetics of defeat rather than resistance, but such is the nature of hard lessons, or realities.
Why would Weiss think retrospection would be trivial? It might have been the most interesting thing. Context and perspective, why not? It seems to me when you fight for a new world in the old and then the old is destroyed, you are left to pick up the pieces, which can be a very different thing.
As for the debate or balance between reform and revolution, some interesting and penetrating things can be said about it, but when either side flat rejects the merit of the other the thought is typically simplistic and of no actual world. The Mamdani, Bernie, and AOC examples are telling, and in their vein I've written what might be thought of as a sequel to The Aesthetics of Resistance, in Most Revolutionary. But it's not a historical autofiction. Instead, it's of the day, directly and explicitly. And it's purposefully not dense. Challenging, perhaps, but normatively so to some and not technically to any or all.
As far as content goes in this still genocidal age, it seems novels should be an endless flow of Resistance rather than the glorified idiosyncratic Desistance that they so often are. Would be good if The Aesthetics of Resistance could open some doors in that regard.
Thanks, Tony, for this rollicking note.
Regarding the possible purposes or effects of the text's difficulty, I'll point again to Weiss's words, which I quote in the piece, on "the difficulties the characters in the novel had in arriving at their interpretations. The readers, who are confronted with those people, have to go through the same exertion at any rate, make the same efforts the second time around. Nothing is made easy for them, just as things weren’t made easy for the characters in the novel.” That is: a reader who has to labor through the novel's action as if part of an ongoing argument (studded though the argument may be with arcana or theory or jargon) is being enlisted in the revolutionary project as it actually operates, at least in Weiss's estimation. To deliver revolution as a predigested summary would, I think, be to seriously misunderstand the effort involved. That said—it's always worth thinking about the degree to which literature that purports to speak for the masses is actually available/accessible to them, but that's a big topic and anyway, I'm not sure it's what you're worried about.
Re Bernie, AOC, Mamdani: sure, there is lots of useful stuff in Weiss on electoral paths, the virtues and pitfalls of lining up with the progressive wings of centrist parties, etc. etc. Nothing maps too neatly to the present—which is why books are books and real life is real life—but Weiss will give you lots to work with, if you decide to go ahead and read him.
Typically this sort of thing - real history of thought and action - is done in history books, even popular type firsthand history books like George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. I don't object to what Weiss is doing in The Aesthetics of Resistance. It sounds interesting and potentially valuable if perhaps unnecessarily tedious.
Though hybrid forms are often very insightful and valuable, the difference between a novel and a history - even if it's a fictionalized history of consciousness and conscience - is that a novel is fully an art, whereas histories are structures not of art, at least not fully. Both may be replete with ideas and experience, but in novels with poor art these can be greatly diminished just as they might be in histories with baffling structures.
Some histories and analyses have seemingly funky structures that are lively and great, as do some novels, so no formulaic approach is advisable. I'm leery of the miasma too-often found in the too-realistic or too-naturalistic novels, where you are inclined to say with Rebecca West that "one of the damned thing is ample." Make it new. Take us forward. Make it more revolutionary or intelligible. Something better and better for us and the world. Not something false, of course, something new as well as old, something newly clear or intriguing, wonderful or useful from the old muddle.
Or what is the muddling for - if not the next thing rather than the old thing. An art, an artist can weigh in on that, invoke it at the least and even greatly explore it. So can historians. Any intellectual can. The question is do they?
I might quibble with some of the hard novel/history splits, but yes, agreed re a kind of gratuitous, performative realism: an airless reproduction of the world—if that were even possible—would be of, like, extremely limited value, practically or artistically. Which is not to say that realist art (as a label) and its political applications/misapplications isn't a crucial component of the discursive/theoretical universe Weiss is working through. It comes up again and again in the book, in debates among characters who embody more or less every possible gradation of aesthetic principles along the realism/abstraction spectrum.