»The Pillars of the Sea« by Sylvain Tesson | Phallic shaped things

Pretty potent, this nature Photo: imago/blickwinkel One of the great passions of the French “adventurer” (self-described) Sylvain Tesson seems to be climbing phallic-shaped things. The magazine “Cicero” already reported on the man two years ago: “He loved to climb church towers, including Cologne Cathedral once…” But when he sees tower-like rock formations, he goes crazy. Everything scepter-shaped fascinates him: steep cliffs, rock needles, pile and post-shaped rocks, columns, pillars. He seems to be particularly fond of so-called surf pillars that rise out of the sea near the coast and which Tesson calls “sea pillars”: “Every time I set foot on the reef of the surf pillar, I think of Botticelli.”

Surf pillars are his everything: “We wander from one surf pillar to the next. What unites them all? They stink of salty death, they blaze in the sea, embody freedom." He seeks out these pillars, all over the world, and climbs them until he finally reaches the top, where he enjoys the "serious, solemn atmosphere" and indulges in a state of intoxication apparently triggered by the body's own cocktail of hormones: "Skyward, at the very tip, where the moment merges with space, the magic works... There is nothing on the surf pillar Ugly.”

“My ascents are prayers.” But they are also actions that seem to arise partly from an erotic obsession. According to Tesson, climbing a rock rising out of the sea is “almost like love: ridiculous movements, fleeting satisfaction.”

The travel writer's book, which has just been published in German, leaves a strong impression: tons of pathos, generously dosed, is his preferred stylistic device. When reading it, you get the feeling that Ernst Jünger, Karl May and Rüdiger Nehberg had together created a human writing machine. Which sometimes leads to unintentional comedy: "Passing desolate shopping areas and apocalyptic motorway junctions, we approach the surf pillars like hot-blooded lovers."

»My ascents are prayers.«

When he wants to say that he wants to travel all over the area, Tesson does not write that he wants to travel all over the area. Rather, he writes that he wants to “leave his shadow on the paths of the world.” When he wants to say that he inflated an inflatable boat, he does not write that he inflated an inflatable boat, but: "Often we inflated our boat on the pebbles ... with the feeling that with our pumping movement the wheel of fate was set in motion in time with a countdown." If he wants to say that there is ice in Antarctica, he does not write that there is ice there, but: "Antarctica gives birth to its ice."

The sea is not just blue, but it “bleeds blue”. Time doesn't pass, but "the hours disperse." Life is a “layer cake of memories and dreams”. Woodlice that crawl around on the top of a surf pier are the “guardians of the forgotten tower”. The sun does not shine on the mountains in the morning, but rather “wakes up the peaks with a golden caress.” It's as if the author wanted to cover each of his sentences with centimeter-thick icing.

There are long passages that consist of pompous descriptions of nature: "souled" and mysteriously "whispering" winds, "opening" fog, "sobbing" expanses, "sobbing" landscapes, "bulging" sunlight, towering rocks (phallic things!). The author's favorite obsession appears repeatedly: that he merges with the nature around him.

Tesson's "literary approach to nature" was "inspired by German Romanticism," says Deutschlandfunk, praising him as an "undogmatic critic of civilization." So far, hardly anyone seems to have noticed that the alleged critic is actually a natural kitsch super spreader. Again and again the “groaning”, “troubled”, “unleashed”, “surging” or still lying sea! "A wave of love floods me, for the sea, for life and for the seagulls." "Sometimes a ray of sunshine makes the sea glitter, sometimes the rain slaps the world in the face." "The unchanging is less dangerous than the flowing." Anyone who has read Klaus Theweleit's study "Men's Fantasy" will have a lot to interpret in this book.

It is possible that Tesson sees himself not only as a travel writer, conqueror of phallic-shaped natural phenomena and master of shapeless waves, but also as an expressionist poet: “Tree trunks burst forth like a clear scream.” “The sky trembles in the flames.” August Stramm is in da House. Sometimes he also writes sentences that read like Botho Strauss aphorisms and are simply bright nonsense: "The pillar is less a refuge than a junction in which the threads of continuity come together."

Tesson writes “sometimes very profound sentences,” the broadcaster Deutschlandfunk Kultur attested to him a few years ago. In reality, we are dealing with an almost thoughtless murmur and incantation, which comes across partly as high school poetry converted into a running text, partly as broad-legged, self-congratulatory manspreading journalism: "We have climbed the pillars of freedom, under the widest sky in whose light we have ever bathed, in the most pristine landscape that has ever been transferred to us."

The author, who portrays himself as a "forest walker" in the sense of Ernst Jünger, as a "lone wolf" and as a wild seeker of freedom and danger, constantly has to reassure himself of his own masculinity and to do this expand his reduced ideas of masculinity: the male body must be toughened and steeled, atavistic male rituals are glorified. The man should penetrate, conquer, climb, take possession, open up the untouched, be fearless, experience adventures, perform heroic deeds. When danger threatens, the true man feels a vitalistic surge. Fear and pain have a “cleansing” effect on him.

What's also annoying is the pretentious linguistic exaltation and inflating of even the smallest banality, the habit of constantly attaching garlands of language. There are also a number of pretentious comparisons, the ridiculousness of which is obvious: “On the cliff, the cormorants dry themselves just above the water. Like priests who have just bathed." A ship's captain is a "Socrates in an oilskin." And radiates “the superiority of an iceberg”. And has “two watery eyes to look at the ice.” On his travels and excursions, the author also meets a few other men who have been steeled by nature. For example, someone who has an “eagle face,” an “intense look,” and “skin like leather.” And one whose “look seems to hurl angry lightning bolts into the night.”

The self-absorbed pulp prose is enriched with all sorts of rancid, culturally pessimistic cleverness (“Not a single bird nests at the peak of commodity society”), unfunny jokes (“If you fall from a surf pier, at least the memorial column is already there”) and nature-romantic, pseudo-philosophical esoteric blah-blah: “When we step onto untouched ground, we are overcome by a divided feeling... mystical because it seals a primeval connection: the alliance between man and the soil that goes back to the first footprint in the clay.

In France, many intellectuals accuse the author of being partly responsible for the "banalization and normalization of right-wing extremism." Some had begun to ask themselves whether “his books (…) were not in fact discreet, fascist incendiary writings.” At least that’s how the French weekly magazine “Le Nouvel Obs” (until 2024 “L’Obs”) put it.

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