Fascist Bonding and Euphoria in Michel Tournier's The Ogre

Abstract

Michel Tournier's 1970 novel, The Ogre, is one of many literary texts and films to emerge since the late 1960s exploring the psychic, erotic and aesthetic processes which informed mass fascination with, and support for, fascism. In France, artistic articulations of these processes were accompanied by reflection on the problem in the work of Julia Kristeva, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and others work prompted by the events of May 1968, which provided confirmation of a crisis in Marxist theory and practice. Since effective opposition to capitalism and, most recently, to the repressive policies of the Gaullist government was not arising from the working class, artists, intellectuals and others began to examine the symbolic processes which were defusing the oppositional power of the masses and to affirm the revolutionary potential of art in the realm of subjectivity. Of course, the limitations and failures of Marxism had been investigated before May 1968 in both France and Germany. In the 1930s Georges Bataille and Ernst Bloch had already examined the means by which fascism drew strength from repressed psychic and libidinal forces, as well as instances of cultural nonsynchronism; indeed, their analyses will be crucial to my reading of The Ogre. And after the Second World War, works such as Alain Resnais's film Night and Fog and Giinter Grass's The Tin Drum took up the problems of the aestheticization of politics (e.g., cinema's essential role in National Socialism, even in the concentration camps) and the subjective dimensions offascism. But as Saul Friedlinder claims in Reflections ofNazism,' a new discourse emerges on these aspects of fascist culture and politics in the