Arrivederci, Fallaci, Fare Thee Well

Now that you were dead, they would listen to you.
-- Oriana Fallaci, A Man

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They called her aggressive, abrasive -- racist, even. Her mind was the fierce, gifted offspring of a most felicitous marriage of reason and emotion: each book an assault on the citadel of postmodern European presumption, each sentence a cavalry charge. Were we to conduct an intellectual autopsy on Oriana Fallaci, were we to behold her brain we would have to compare it to a cannonball; her sex we would have to compare to its etymological source, to a sword's or dagger's sheath.

One of the boldest of contemporary voices of a dying (or rather, long dead) Europe, she was a ferociously indignant echo of what had once been the most harmonious chorus of civilization. Ever. This was a civilization that in the 500-year aftermath of its glorious Renaissance could devise only more and more grotesque ways of betraying its own promise: the Inquisition, the Hundred Years' War, the Jacobin Terror, the Napoleonic Campaigns, the Scramble for Africa, the Great War and its eventual issue, the Great Dictators, each of whom -- the German and the Russian -- bequeathed to posterity (to us) totalized, collectivized, industrialized state murder.

But indignation assures that one's pessimism will never be overwhelming, never quite enervating. Reading Fallaci I sense thrust together the split scream of Antonin Artaud and the unified sublimity of Friedrich Schiller. I hear the cri de coeur from a cryptic public address Artaud gave upon his release from incarceration in an insane asylum -- eight mean, mostly war years during which he incurred dozens of electroshock sessions and the loss of his teeth and much of his hair, but also during which he wrote fully half of his 24 volumes of Collected Works -- the cri de coeur, C'est un vrai désespéré qui vous parle! ("This is a truly desperate man who speaks to you!"). Reading Fallaci I sense that bitter but proud solicitation blended with the admonishing, transcendent aspiration of Schiller's "Ode to Joy" which Beethoven adapted for the finale of his 9th Symphony, after he himself had gone deaf:

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!                   Oh friends, not these sounds!
Sondern lasst uns angenehmere            Let us raise our voices in more
anstimmen, und freudenvollere!           pleasing and more joyful sounds!

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That, to me, is the force of Fallaci's reason. That her mere body, wracked of late with cancer, has perished means little compared to the relentlessness with which in her late years she chastised a dead Europe and exhorted its despised but would-be savoir step-children, America and Israel, to carry on the fight -- our fight -- for civilization worthy of the name. Fallaci was a restless, rambunctious rebuke to all of our intellectuals who have gone deaf, dumb and/or blind in the face of the calamitous threat of Islam.

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Arrivederci, Fallaci. Fare thee well.

(H/T to Asher for the wee-hour heads up on this one.)

* Updated with new links *

Some further tributes:

Iraqi Bloggers Central has the definitive round-up
Stefania
Debbie Schlussel
Michael Ledeen
David Horowitz
Michelle Malkin
Robert Spencer
Judith Weiss
ZionistYoungster
Stop the ACLU.
Gates of Vienna
The Anti-Jihad Pundit

Read the comments at ¡No Pasarán!
A 2002 review of Fallaci's The Rage and The Pride

*New! (9/18)*: Daniel Pipes's informative summary of her career
Say goodbye to Oriana: video footage from her funeral.

* Three galleries of photos * (this one's my favorite):

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Comments

[tylerbede]

Aggression, abrasiveness -- even what is now called “racism” were, in a more muscular age, badges of honor.

Cara Fallaci was unafraid to express strong, clear opinions. That they were unpopular, that they opened her up to a critical deconstruction dialectic (to use obscurantist terms) makes her more commendable.

Europe IS dead, or rather living a zombie existence

There is a little understood irony about the human condition and that is that if you have nothing worth dying for you have nothing worth living for.

Ariana knew Europa once rode the bull. She bore witness that it is a passive bystander to its own demise.

Ave atque vale amicus certus

[JMK]

Way to go, Tyler! "rode the bull" - haven't heard that in a while.

[Ernesto Ribeiro]

Oriana was the best warrior on press. She even did lead Henry Kissinger to compare himself as cowboy and agree that Vietnamese War was been made "unable". Later, he said "That damned interview was the worst thing I could doing..."

Ciao, bella... we will miss you.

[JMK]

Thank you for contributing, Ernesto. I'm glad you're here.

A happy civilization bears freshly in mind all the generations to come. A sad one gazes forlornly at ones past. It's up to us to be our own versions of Fallaci now, to be proud and strong -- and eventually, maybe happy.