J. P. Stern (1920–1991)

Perhaps the only interesting discussion in this book (aside from the analogy concerning surgery and pain with which Stern ends the book, comparing Jünger’s perspective to the disinterested patient staring intently at his organs being stitched together and admiring the surgeons who carry out the deed efficiently) is that which contrasts the specificity and proneness to pretentious pseudo-philosophical babble of which the German language suffers from in comparison to English. But that’s about it.

The rest of it is an example of the kind of facile and pedantic work which literary theory was more than happy to churn out during the mid-twentieth century. Stern introduces entirely arbitrary laws and reasonings just so he can construe Jünger’s work as plainly wrong because he doesn’t concede to the humanistic trappings Stern so admires in writers like Melville and Tolstoy. He outright condemns cynicism in writing, believes you can only write about death by utilising the superabundance of life (and by means of this superabundance writers can then AND ONLY THEN overextend into the beyond, that ‘beyond’ being that which one can never be justified to speak/write about by any empirical measure), that to abstract and wax philosophically does a complete disservice to the lived experience Jünger tries to portray, and that some kind of representational 1:1 portrait is the only kind of work acceptable, the only novelistic medium which can be considered ‘right’ (you have to let the objects breathe! forget your subjectivity and attempts to bring these perceptions into a grander, conceptual structure you may have worked out!)

I just fundamentally disagree with Stern’s method, I find it dry, unartistic and his attempts to try and hide behind some literary theory, some canon, (as if it had some kind of scientific rigour!) wholly objectionable.… (mehr)