The writer on horseback and the crisis of dialectics: Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

Années noires

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle is a profoundly contradictory figure in literary history, whose work has often been received through ideological lens. He was a prolific author of plays, novellas, poems, novels, essays, and journalistic pieces. Biographically, it is noteworthy that, on the one hand, from the 1930s onward, Drieu became an influential advocate of French fascism and a protagonist of intellectual collaboration. On the other hand, he married a Jewish woman in his first marriage, never ceased to flirt with communism, and used his connections to the German embassy to protect close friends like Jean Paulhan from persecution. His aesthetic merit is undisputed, although the evaluation of his work is invariably intertwined with his political and moral compromise. Drieu's work reveals a deep inner conflict and disorientation, characterized by alternating self-loathing, hatred of others, and war fantasies.

Andreas Geisler's scientific project, documented in the monograph L'écrivain à cheval: Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's narrative work between modernity, anti-modernity and postmodernity (Brill Fink, 2024) aims at a comprehensive rereading of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's prose. The central concern of the work is to establish a carefully balanced relationship between Drieu la Rochelle's work and the man, thereby revealing those layers that have thus far remained hidden behind the dominance of the author's biographical and political context. Geisler's work was completed at the University of Bonn. The impetus for the work arose in a seminar at the University of Heidelberg, where Catherine Péant sparked Geisler's interest in the contradictory literary output of the années noires awakened. Paul Geyer, the supervisor of the project in Bonn, also established contact with Jean-François Louette at the Sorbonne.

Geisler develops a literary-historical line of development that traces Drieu's prose not only back to its historical roots (such as Barrès or the dandyism) anchored, but above all their representativeness for the entre-deux-guerres-time and extends this into the present day. The book assumes that Drieu's literary work possesses a disturbing relevance and can provide insights for a better understanding of our own time. A key concept for this analysis is indifference, which is used as a newly faceted term to grasp a development in literature from the beginning to the second half of the 20th century. This development culminates in three analyzed stages in his narrative corpus: erosion ("La Valise vide"), emulsion (L'Homme à cheval) and explosion (Les Chiens de pailleThis leads to the central guiding questions: To what extent does Drieu's work, despite its anti-modernist reflexes, possess a disturbing relevance and offer insights for understanding our own present? And how does the postmodernization evident in his work reflect the subject's capitulation to the unmanageable complexity of the modern world?

The emergence of indifference

The central question revolves around the abolition of dialectical thinking and the emergence of indifference. Geisler primarily draws on the theories of Peter Bürger and Peter Zima, placing them in dialogue for the first time. The term "dark surrealism" originates with Peter Bürger, who uses it in his analysis of the origins of postmodern thought. This "dark surrealism" develops under the influence of the "dark side" of an intellectual current that revolves around the concept of death. Bürger's concept is rooted in the crisis of the master-slave dialectic, triggered by the experiences of the First World War. According to him, the traumatic experience of war led to the meaninglessness of a mediating existence filled with work, resulting in a relapse into immediacy and a direct confrontation with death for some individuals. Peter Bürger explicitly considers the literary work of Drieu la Rochelle to be a product of this "dark surrealism." Bürger, himself a Marxist, grants Drieu's texts a special status and takes his intellectual ambitions seriously. Drieu's work can thus be read as a product of that intellectual current which, after the First World War, addressed the abolition of dialectical thinking and the emergence of indifference. The failure of dialectical mediation, which Drieu stages in his work—for example, in the narrator's "sournoise indifférence" in L'Homme à cheval or the nihilistic explosion in Les Chiens de paille This is thus connected to the concept of death, which Bürger identifies as the core of dark Surrealism. Drieu's work is therefore positioned as a testament to existential despair.

The aim of Geisler's introduction is to provide a theoretical framework for situating Drieu's works within an ascending, though not entirely linear, development toward the dominance of undialectical, indifferent textual features. Friedrich Nietzsche is also identified as an important intellectual precursor to the methodological subversion of dialectical processes and the dissolution of contradictions. The work seeks not primarily to tie Drieu's prose to traditions (as with Barrès) in a backward-looking manner, but rather to demonstrate its potential extension into the present day.

The conclusion attests that Drieu's work is an "exemplary work of a new transitional era." The author, it is argued, stood with one foot in classical modernism and the other already jutting into postmodernism, where the problems of modernity are only addressed ironically. Such conclusions demonstrate that Drieu's protagonists, overwhelmed by modern conditions, choose indifference as a solution, which, however, becomes a problem in itself, as it devalues ​​not only the threatening but also the saving power. In the final novel... Les Chiens de paille Constant's despair leads to his complete, albeit unintentional, destruction.

The comparison shows that the introduction lays the theoretical foundations and demonstrates the methodological courage to use Drieu for analysis, despite his historical baggage, in order to illuminate his continued relevance. The concluding section confirms the initial thesis of "sournoise indifférence" as the core problem and rigorously leads the presented development to its nihilistic culmination.

Erosion: “La Valise vide”

The analysis in Chapter 2 focuses on the novella "La Valise vide" from 1924, which represents the earliest work in the corpus and is assigned to the so-called Rigaut cycle. This novella is interpreted as a pivotal work that situates Drieu within the tension between modernity, anti-modernity, and postmodernity. Thematically, the erosion of the substantiality of interpersonal relationships and the stability of the subject are central. The protagonist, Gonzague, embodies a pronounced emptiness of character. Geisler understands the text as a "key piece of modern moralism" that reflects Drieu's early inner conflict between the allure of the artistic avant-garde and his anti-modern reflex, which views the new as decay. The narrator, often read as Drieu's barely disguised alter ego, projects his own insecurities onto Gonzague, thus transforming "La Valise vide" into a perplexing image in which self-portrait and other-portrait overlap. The indifference that emerges is still presented in this early work as a strategic pose (disinvolture) interpreted as Gonzague's attempt to conceal his vulnerability. The novella is also seen as a prelude to Lipovetsky's "The Age of Emptiness" (The Era of Emptiness) understood.

Emulsion: L'Homme à cheval

Chapter 3 examines the exotic historical novel L'Homme à cheval from 1943. The plot is deliberately set in the politically turbulent South America of the late 19th century, a chosen chronotope of the heroic age (Hegel). The novel stages a post-Romantic search for lost unity in a world that Drieu perceives as lying in ruins. The titular metaphor of emulsion refers to an unstable mixture of competing forces. The central thesis states that the novel, as an "antithesis novel," achieves the desired dialectical mediation between central pairs of opposites, such as... vita activates and vita contemplative (embodied by Jaime Torrijos and Felipe), causes to fail. Jaime, who private, is portrayed as a torn figure, whose initial glorification as homme à cheval in the insight ends: “L'homme à cheval était à pied”. The narrator Felipe serves as guiding spirit Behind Jaime, Felipe admits that his political and amorous machinations are driven not by idealism, but by "frivolity." Felipe pursues this synthesis not out of conviction, but out of vanity and a thirst for recognition, to compensate for his own shortcomings (such as unfulfilled sexual desire). The novel demonstrates that unity exists perfectly only as an idea, and that every bond is temporally and expediently oriented. The chapter exposes Felipe's hypocritical search for meaning as a "sourneous indifference," cleverly concealed beneath a veneer of mysticism and excessive imagery.

Explosion: Les Chiens de paille

Drieu's last completed novel project, Les Chiens de paille (1944), is examined in Chapter 4. The story is set in occupied France, primarily in a marshy area near the Normandy coast. The novel marks the endpoint of the disintegration process, symbolized by the metaphor of explosion, where the possibility of a successful synthesis is no longer even considered. The main character, Constant Trubert, embodies the failed union of vita activates and vita contemplative in a person who has bought his life experience at the price of physical damage (teeth) and total sensory overload. Constant's nihilistic perspective levels political ideologies (Gaullism, Communism, Fascism). All factions are exposed as interchangeable and, in their dependence on foreign powers, as "negative" and "sterile." Constant Trubert is interpreted as the executor of a "fascist surrealism." He stylizes himself as Judas and High Priest, who, through the act of betrayal and human sacrifice (Achievement) seeks to overcome the stagnation of the system through creative destruction. The essential insight lies in the realization that Constant's planned suicide, as an act of supreme self-determination, is rendered absurd in the novel's final lines. For the ritual explosion he intends is instead triggered by the impersonal, random bomb dropped by a British aircraft, which indiscriminately annihilates all involved. Thus, the total indifference of fate triumphs over the vain plans of the individual.

Overall assessment and follow-up questions

Geisler's book makes an important contribution to the rereading of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle by liberating Drieu scholarship from its traditional fixation on biographical and ideological questions of guilt. The study proposes a genealogical perspective that positions Drieu as a profound diagnostician of the existential and ideological collapse of modernity. Through the consistent application of the theoretical framework of dialectics, crisis, and indifference (drawing on Bürger and Zima), Drieu's work is read not as fascist propaganda, but as a literary testament to intellectual despair. The book demonstrates that Drieu's seemingly backward-looking aesthetics and political cynicism were harbingers of postmodern thought patterns (such as arbitrariness, individualism, and hybridity) and anticipated the literary representation of existential emptiness. In particular, the analysis of the ends of L'Homme à cheval and Les Chiens de paille Drieu's alleged pursuit of unity is exposed as a playful, egocentric project, the failure of which the author himself demonstrates in his texts.

Linking Zima's theory of indifference with Bürger's diagnosis of the crisis of dialectics enables a new and unbiased aesthetic evaluation of texts that have previously been ideologically blocked (for understandable reasons). The chosen triad Erosion, emulsion, explosion It offers a clear and vivid framework for illustrating the intensification of indifference in Drieu's later work. Particularly noteworthy is the meticulous deconstruction of the pseudo-dialectic in L'Homme à cheval, which exposes Felipe's idealistic aspirations as "frivolity", and the profound interpretation of the ending of the Chiens de paille as a triumph of contingency over nihilistic planning mania.

The study relies heavily in places on the biographical level and Drieu's non-fictional work (essays, diaries, correspondence) to establish the psychological and ideological prerequisites for the narrative structure. While this is necessary for the analysis of the l'homme et l'œuvreThis approach is complex, but carries the risk of imposing an overly coherent psychological explanation on the texts. Furthermore, the work itself acknowledges that Zima's three-stage model (ambiguity, ambivalence, indifference) exhibits categorical ambiguities when applied to specific texts.

The unfinished final novel seems to indicate a departure from the nihilistic explosion of its predecessor by returning to romantic, value-creating motifs (art, inwardness). The question arises whether this late regression should be interpreted as Drieu's final retreat from the nihilistic boundary he himself described, or whether this "return" is merely another form of irony or an act of despair. Given Drieu's elaborate anti-modernism and arrière-garde leanings, as well as his affinity for cynicism and moral transgression, as seen in Les Chiens de paille Given how the work is being staged, a deeper investigation into the aesthetic parallels between Drieu's late work and the techniques and themes of French post-war literature (such as Alain Robbe-Grillet) seems necessary.