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  • The Worst Century EverWilliam Pfaff, The Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia
  • Alex Roland (bio)

William Pfaff's The Bullet's Song (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004) is an extended essay on the intellectual history of modernity, an attempt to discern what went wrong with the twentieth century. Pfaff, a political columnist for the International Herald Tribune and other newspapers and a former essayist for The New Yorker, eschews the term "modernity" and the postmodern vocabulary and theory that so often accompany it. But he shares with critics of modernity a profound sense of disappointment, bordering on despair, for the history of a century that began with such optimism and promise. He uses "inner history of the twentieth century" synonymously with "inner history of the modern crisis" (pp. 12, 7).

Pfaff's introduction suggests that technology will loom large in his analysis. He avows that for many Europeans, including those he studies in this book, "modern industrial technology" is implicated in the failures of the twentieth century because it caused "immense human suffering, social and material destruction, and moral disorder" (p. 5). He considers the "'science' of progress" to be one formulation by which premodern romantics sought to reconcile themselves with modernity (p. 23). He describes his book as "an essay on history and morals" (p. 337), a combination reminiscent of Lewis Mumford and others who have tried to understand the implications of modern technology for the meaning of life. And at the heart of Pfaff's story is the bullet, a technological artifact in the service of ideology and politics.

In the end, however, this promise is unfulfilled. Technology is strangely absent from The Bullet's Song. The book is based on the premise that World War I was "the most important event of the twentieth century" (p. 8). Its transformative power, in which Pfaff believes "beyond doubt," effected two momentous changes in Western civilization. First, it destroyed chivalry, by [End Page 597] which Pfaff seems to understand a cross between civility and humanity. Chivalry, said Ernst Jünger, author of Storm of Steel (1920) and one of Pfaff's protagonists, "vanished forever during the battle of the Somme" (p. 104). Second, says Pfaff, World War I inculcated in a vanguard of public intellectuals a romantic, utopian faith in violence as the instrument of choice to restore the order shattered on the Somme. Pfaff argues that these two themes, the death of chivalry and the romantic embrace of violence in pursuit of a utopian order, dominated world history from 1920 to 1990. Indeed, Pfaff believes that they also explain the international terrorism currently engaging the world's attention.

The Bullet's Song carries these twin trajectories across the twentieth century on the backs of eight biographies. His principals were "intellectuals or artists" who shaped and reflected the transformation Pfaff envisions. Four he associates directly with World War I and the death of chivalry. Four he situates in the ensuing seventy years. His concluding chapter ties their stories together and reveals the conception that unites them in Pfaff's mind.

An "Overture" sets the stage with Filippo Thommaso Marinetti and the futurists, an artistic movement that connected romanticism, violence, and modernity even before World War I broke out. The futurists' enthusiasm for "action, speed, and violence" (p. 38) was so hyperbolic, and so accelerated by the horrors of World War I, that they made Mussolini look moderate, pragmatic, and rational by comparison, and thereby contributed to his ascendancy.

But the quintessential hero of Pfaff's story comes not from this fascist trajectory but rather from an entirely quixotic encounter with modernity. Thomas Edward (T. E.) Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) is for Pfaff "The Fallen Hero," not only the model for the romantic intellectual chasing utopia with a gun, but also the inspiration for many of Pfaff's other subjects. Pfaff discovered Lawrence as an adolescent, when Pfaff was also developing a fascination with war, art (including the futurists), and André Malraux (another of his characters). Of course Lawrence—or Pfaff's adolescent infatuation with him—does not stand up to the historical and intellectual scrutiny to which Pfaff subjects him here. He was not a fascist, Pfaff...

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