Crocodile Hunting in Berlin

Until Death Do Us Part…But until then there is a lot of road to haul. How does one explain a condition  that has been genetically stamped into humanity since the origins of the oral tradition and the hieroglyphic scrawling of recorded history. Hatred, violence , its containment,control,  and rationalizations, reading like fairy tales on the hissing of summer lawns. Philosophers have offered numerous definitions: René Descartes said hate was the urge to withdraw from something that is thought bad. Aristotle saw hate as the incurable desire to annihilate an object.In psychology, Sigmund Freud defined hate as an ego state that wishes to destroy the source of its unhappiness. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss ( 1899-2009) felt that the party would get out of hand, and all the laughs, would end flowing in tears with the obliteration of the human species as inevitable as Marxist prophesy.

Lutes, City of Smoke

“I knew that, slowly and steadily, humanity was breeding such situations as a sick body breeds pus,” he wrote. “It was as if our race was no longer able to cope with its own numbers… War and defeat had accelerated a universal process, and facilitated the establishment of an infection that would never again disappear from the face of the world.” ( Claude Levi-Strauss )  Lévi-Strauss suggests that there is a meaningful difference between Europeans and the Amazonian indians  and it is in contemplating this difference that he confronted what he believes is the real problem facing humanity. Lévi-Strauss is highly critical  of  the Western world  which he identifies with the Nazi’s and the Holocaust. . But these are not problems of “Western civilization” per se, for he sees the same problem in “Eastern civilization,” in  the caste system of Hindu India,an institutionalized, and only arguably more humane, version of naziism where people who are different are kept separate and unequal. Lévi-Strauss, like Malthus before him, a gloomy  and bitter prognoses  on the future: “There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animal,” he said. “And it’s clear that the density of human beings has become so great … that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world on which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.”

Lutes, Berlin, ''where draughtsmanship meets cartooning ''

 “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.” As he saw it, whether misanthropic or not, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and to try to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking. The myth, its artistic representation and its own reconciliation with violence is what Theodor Adorno referred to as ” art being magic delivered from the lie of being truth” Levi-Srauss’s theory of binary and opposites  can reasonably be concluded with an assertion that if myth can be created it can also be shattered and replaced, or left to rot like his beloved ”pus”.

Lutes, Berlin

”The Pentagon yesterday it will scour its procedures for identifying volatile soldiers hidden in the ranks following the Fort Hood shooting rampage and lapses that might allow others to slip through bureaucratic cracks. A 45-day emergency investigation…..” ( Globe and Mail ) An identification test for violence. A mass of contradiction indicating the binary theory of Lev-Strauss.  the army is based on violence and fear yet the selection process for recruits is based on passing psychological tests confirming normality…. Apparently, the symbolism, and role of guns, uniforms, medals, and groups is fundamental to the analysis, but has not been included within the broader definition of the study. 
novelist Jason Lutes has devoted much of his career on the creation of his ”Berlin” series which is about the German city between the years 1928 and 1933, and a host of characters that inhabit and inform us of that time. It could be categorized as  historical fiction, but at the same time an artistic work that derives its power from tearing away at established archetypes and peeling off layers of myth in the same way Levi-Strauss came to his version of conclusions regarding human behavior. Lutes  examines how the lives of different characters from different backgrounds play a part in the  setting of the stage for the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World  War II. The insights and perceptions of Fascism by Lutes, leads one to conclude  that the movement is itself less ideological, in so far as it actively proclaims and rationalizes the principle of domination that was concealed, and less manifest elsewhere in the West; the dynamic was more subtle and manipulative in letting the Third Reich do their collective bidding, at least  up to a certain point. Lutes work addresses Berlin as the epicenter, and laboratory for this fermentation and distillation of  toxic substance  and blood sacrifice. A city on a collision between polarizing thought and the recourse to physical force. A few artists and intellectuals were not going to prevent the ”1000 year Reich”, a birthright defined by ”destiny”. 

Lutes’s City of Stones and City of Smoke addresses  the issues of art, science and politics from an engaged yet detached human perspective in which the physical violence and fear of the dominant is delegated to the dominated. The opportunity to despise creates its own form of alienation. Which, far from liberating the oppressors, imprisons them further. Blinded by passion and cheap ,short term gain, they are ultimately paralyzed by the same fear.  Part of the narrative is  the largely overshadowed failure of the Weimar Republic and the transformation of Berlin from one of Europe’s most progressive cities to a center of evil and repression. At the center of the story are Kurt and Marthe, two progressives seeking love as various political forces vie for control of post-World War I Germany. But the story wanders and meanders throughout the city, bringing in dozens of characters as their lives intersect. Fractured and fragmented, a unity is established and a sense  of redemption, though at times ambiguous, is somehow  snatched from the jaws of …..fate.

”Partly it was that instinct, I wanted to humanize German people. I wanted to have a counteraction of that great weight of villainy and evil that’s been placed on the German people, and somewhat deservedly. It’s such an easy way to objectify and distance yourself from something. The more you point your finger at something else, you aren’t going to recognize when you behave that way in some small way.  …The history classes I had were pretty horrible. I had one on World War II, and the week started off with the teacher putting in a videotape, and the first image was bulldozers pushing bodies into a hole. That was the first sight I got of the holocaust. And people didn’t know how to talk about it. I was just kind of puzzled and appalled.” ( Jason Lutes )

Jason Lutes, Berlin

Like Levi-Strauss who argued that primitive cultures hunting crocodiles and worshipping the genitalia of Super Crocs somewhere along  the Amazon were no less ”civilized” than Eurocentric ruling classes and their obedience to Baal and various false messiahs.For Levi-Strauss,this  resulted in a pronounced scepticism towards the philosophical and artistic achievements of the literate civilisations of the Old World. Known as structuralism, Levi-Strauss reduced mythology and rituals to their basic components to find an underlying pattern.Essentially, he looked at cultures in a pagan perspective and his establishment, and promotion of myth was not dissimilar to Nietzsche. Therefore, Levi-Strauss himself had his own binary component. His theories on primitive societies held that the characteristics of the native mind are equal to those in Western civilization and that all communities function using folklore based on opposites. “I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact,” he said.

It is this ” slow dancing ” with myth that makes Lutes work so appealing and revealing on an unconventional platform based on comic book format.  Levi-Strauss was a Marxist, which from step one, limits the notion of mutability and transcendence. He  applied the structural approach employed in linguistics to discover a common form in myth. He looked for opposing concepts — using examples such as raw versus cooked, natural versus cultural, and life versus death — that underpinned all ideas in society. His originality was to interpret myth and custom not so much as the distinct creation of a particular culture, but as different expressions of images universally innate to homo sapiens.  In elucidating these common mental structures he relied less on meticulous observation in the field than upon a series of imaginative insights which were often greeted with scepticism among other savants in the Occidental  world.

Lutes, Berlin

The true meaning of myth, Lévi-Strauss held, lay below the narrative surface, and was to be detected by considering the changes apparent in different versions of the same legend. In his own metaphor, he studied the relationship between various narratives rather as a musician would seek to weave together different instrumental parts to form a symphony. He maintained that the structure of the human mind was more easily elicited in “cold” primitive societies, where the existing way of life was not questioned, than in the “hot” societies of the developed world, where the pursuit of progress undermined stability.

Lutes’s work in its unambitiously, ambitous way , explores a certain mutablity and diversifies the dogmatism inherent in most ”professional ” studies, especially those of such proud as a peacock plummage of Levi-Strauss. In fact Lute’s interpretaion of fate, and its subtle nuances is more convincing than Levi-Strauss. In the comic panel format it is easy to see the mechanics of human action and the welcoming embrace of destiny, its disappointment and occasional escape of the protagonists.  .  Its not avoiding an alleged fate,but a choosing and timing  of its enactment into reality.  

Lutes, Berlin

”Mr. Lévi-Strauss suggests that the universal incest taboo is the way human societies resolve the opposing dangers of excessive love and hatred for close blood relations. He also rejected one of the fundamental features of Western thought: seeing individual self-expression as the height of creativity.” Like Freud, Levi-Strauss suffers from  something of a one track thought process, an obsession masking a lack of imagination, and subsequently represses various issues into a multitude of variations on the same theme. Odd, how unassuming artists like Jason Lutes make more sense in a graphic novel than a revered academic can produce in 70 years of work.