Pages 124-59
Notes from the night bar seem just so, as if a curator, a second person, had assembled the rambles of a government functionary from among various journals. It is not an entertaining read; is indeed reminiscent of Hienlien’s later work, much knocking around inside of the protagonist’s head. But, this protagonist, animated by Junger, is a genius of insight, and might be thought to represent Junger’s brother, George, whose theories in his Perfection of Technology find pride of place in Martin Venator’s journal as Manuel the Steward, mere waiter and bar keep to the Tyrant, the Domo, and Attila, a visiting dignitary from the Yellow Khan. Eumeswil is situated in a world at once ours, experiencing all the same things up through WWII, but then being subjected to a technological disaster of some sort, and recovering, along deft lines.
Manuel begins a dreary discussion of a political dissent journal which his brother and father. The father, or genitor, turns out to have wished for Martin’s abortion, for which the son never forgives. The narrative flow goes from journalistic dissent, to academic discourse and past changes of power figures in politics. Amidst this “The anarch nurtures no expectations,” lurking as the ultimate social skeptic.
Birds are employed as a human analog, with species granted social roles in the bird kingdom like types of human actors.
“Seen politically, systems follow one another, each consuming the previous one. They live on ever-bequeathed and ever-disappointed hope, which never entirely fades. Its spark is all that survives, as it eats its way along the blasting fuse. For the spark, history is meely an occasion never a goal.”
Rosner, the bird scientists begins attending the midnight symposiums of the tyrant, who remains cast I shadow. “Rosner is a materialist of purest water, and as such too intelligent to be a Darwinist.”
Manuel does not drink, rather tends bar, monitoring consumption, it seems, to maintain a level between the keeping of knowledge close in sobriety and of lack of recall in drunkenness. He is dosing the tyrant’s guests to make them most informative, as he was drugged before acceptance. Amazing facts about birds, mostly the Condor, are related. Tyranny is regarded as the best way to delay chaos and its battle.
Myth and folk zoology began to enter the narrative in the vein of Carlos Castenada, with more sense. Ancient assassination s discussed, as well as the means by which tyrants and demagogues are subject to manias and driven to despotism. HITLER is unnamed, but referred to as “A large scale demagogue,” most accurately, against all modern convention that miscasts that rampant fool as a tyrant or despot, the two words conjoined in the term dictator.
“Any one who is oppressed can get back to his feet, if the oppression has not cost him his life. Pygmies shorten the legs of Africans in order to cut them down to size; white Negroes flatten the literary language.” Writing in the 70s, when white Negroes were limited to musicians, Junger must have been horrified by this trend by 1990!
The corporate and banking substructure of society is alluded to as the grudge with his genitor is expanded, revealing this as outtakes from a private journal. Finance, scandal and other maxims, mostly historical to us are discussed. This sets up more anarch guidelines:
“… reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest wellsprings of misfortune in the world.”
The nature of creativity comes ot the fore at the Night bar:
“...genius is transmuted into visible harmony… Genius dwells not in some afterlife, but in our midst.
“It is unlikely that Homer knew how to write; the letter inhibits free singing.”
“Compulsory schooling is essentially a means of curtailing natural strength and exploiting people.”
“… people pay with blood and gold. The man knows that gold is his due, the woman knows even more so that it is her due…”
“To wrest gold from the individual, to rob him of his claims—these are the strivings of the states; while eh seeks to hide his gold from them…”
“The more domesticated human beings are, the more easily they fall for any swindle. But gold is credible. It contains its own value, hence it never inveigles. The fact that it is shown openly here is one of the merits of Eumeswil.”
Junger’s novel was first published three years after the Gold Standard was eliminated as backing the U.S. Dollar, the world reserve currency. It is of keen interest that he was not permitted by the editor, or perhaps was not comfortable—firebrand fringe writer that he was—in naming Hitler, even as he was criticized for a demagogue, which he obviously was, rather than a tyrant. Did Junger realize that Hitler’s brand of evil would be used to stamp evil on every declared enemy of the World Government beginning in the 1980s, down to the 2020s, and a reusable stigmata, that would be rendered more cartoonish with every media slain year?
After this descent into the banality of political discourse in any age, Junger is poised to bring the reader back to the metaphysical truth according to its harshest mirror, the meaninglessness of work and the corrosive dynamics of working with people in such a context, people most of whome one would never willingly associate with in post modern anti-society, in his “Day in The Casbah.’
I have selected four phrases for possible titles from the text, from longest to shortest. I wonder, would my reader make the same choice?
‘By Plutonian Might’
‘The Great Luminar’
‘Witches’ Hammer’
‘Dream’
The next section begins on journal document 28. One wonders, did Junger write this odd journalistic novel as a series of 50 musings?
The science-fiction trajectory has lolled, in mid-novel, will it pick back up or fall flat?
