The Kraus Project (28 page)

If the voice of this age had been preserved in a phonograph recording, the inner lies would have suffered for the outward fidelity, and the ear wouldn’t have distinguished the one from the other.
In this way, time renders the essence unrecognizable and would grant amnesty to the greatest crime ever committed under the sun, under the stars.
I’ve rescued the essence, and my ear has discovered the sound of deeds and my eye the gesture of speeches, and my voice, simply by repeating, has quoted in such a way that the fundamental tone remained recorded for all time.

And let me speak to the yet unknowing world

How these things came about: so shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;

Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fall’n on the inventors’ heads; all this can I

Truly deliver.

And if the times could no longer hear, a Being above them would still hear!
I’ve done nothing more than abbreviate this deadly quantity which, in its unmeasurability, is counting on the imbalance between times and
Times
.
All of its blood really was just ink—now the writing will be done in blood!
This is the world war.
This is my manifesto.
I have considered everything carefully
.
I have taken upon myself the tragedy that disintegrates into scenes of disintegrating mankind, so that the Spirit that takes pity on sacrifice may hear, even if it has renounced for all future its connection with human hearing.
May it receive the fundamental tone of these times, the echo of my bloody insanity, through which I share in the guilt for these noises.
May it let this stand as a redemption!

     
This is the last we see of the Grumbler, and he’s clearly quite out of his mind.
Throughout the play, he’s been the only character to imagine the horror of mechanized death in the trenches, the only character to see through the lies and propaganda.
This would be less notable if there were only ten characters, but there are hundreds; the numerical imbalance casts the Grumbler as a profoundly solitary prophet.
Nothing can save Austrian humanity, but he will be the one person to record its downfall for whoever and whatever comes after.
With “
I have considered everything carefully
,” he is quoting from the Austrian emperor’s proclamation of war, laying claim to a kind of imperial power.
His megalomania in this final scene is reminiscent of King Lear in his scenes on the heath; also of my own psychotic moment in the fall.
It didn’t occur to me when I was writing my paper, but I must have been drawn to the scene because I’d experienced something like it: alone at my writing desk, racked by guilt, awaiting apocalypse, reading my own words, convinced that I could see what no one else could see, and getting so lost in figuration that reality dissolved.
Blood as ink, ink as blood: figuration has driven the Grumbler crazy, too, making the outside world indistinguishable from the inside of his head.
His thoughts aren’t the echo of his times, his times are the echo of his thoughts!
Which is why, in the earlier scene, he thanks the Optimist and accepts credit as the author of monstrosities he didn’t write, merely quoted.
      
In my paper, I applied “Nestroy and Posterity” to the figure of the Grumbler.
I called particular attention to the satirist’s relationship with an age that has lost all connection to the Spirit: “He is its product and its hopeless antithesis.”
Kraus had certainly been nearly alone in his early opposition to the war; Hauptmann, Rilke, Mann, and Musil all wrote in patriotic support of it, and, as Edward Timms notes in his big Kraus study, “Every socialist party in Europe voted unanimously with its own government in favour of war, with the exception of two Serbian socialists and the Bolshevik caucus in the Russian Duma.”
But Hermann Hesse, too, was against the war from the beginning.
As it proceeded, Kraus found a growing number of sympathizers in Vienna, including some within the government who provided him with documents that he worked into his play, and by 1917 the Austrian Socialists were calling for an armistice.
Kraus may have felt alone, but he had to know that he was not alone.
And so I argued that the Grumbler, in his total isolation and its attendant megalomania, should be seen as another of Kraus’s satiric exaggerations.
What would the product and hopeless antithesis of an insane war look like?
It would look like the Grumbler.
The abstracted, ideal satirist.
      
I remember reading in a liner note that after Stravinsky finished writing
Petruchka
he was laid low for weeks with “acute intracostal neuralgia due to nicotine poisoning.”
Although my Kraus paper was as rough and ploddingly written as
Petruchka
is perfect, I combusted what even for me was an enormous number of cigarettes while writing it.
I was trying to be the one person in the seminar to actually read and understand the text, I was wrestling on my own with one of the most difficult German-language authors, and I was doing it while V brooded on a sofa and my Canadian friend waltzed in and out, humming opera.
By the time I took the U-Bahn out to the last class of the semester, I had a bad cold and a Dickensian cough.
With burning eyes, and in stumbling German, I read my paper aloud and let Professor Hindemith bat aside the one question with which a leftist interrupted me: “You use the word ‘positivistic’—are you defending Karl Popper?”
When I was finished, I had my proudest moment in two years in Germany—one of the proudest in my life, in fact.
Hindemith smiled at me, looked around the smoke-filled room, and said, “Here’s a lesson for us all.
It took an
American
to explain what we’ve spent a whole semester trying to understand.”
Then we discussed Karl Popper.

Afterword to “Heine and the Consequences” (1911)

1
.
“‘Heine and the Consequences’ first appeared, in 1910, as a small stand-alone publication, a pamphlet for which Kraus obviously had high hopes.
Priced at eighty pfennigs in Germany, it didn’t cost much more than an equally long issue of
Die Fackel
.
The following year, Kraus reprinted the essay in
Die Fackel
, with this afterword as a foreword.
Foreword became afterword a decade later, when Kraus reprinted the essay once again, in his collection
The Destruction of the World Through Black Magic
(1922).”—PR

2
.
I.e., the newspaper, specifically the feuilleton.
The riff that follows—on the interchangeability of reader and writer, the self-sufficing loop of eating and regurgitation—further points to the kinship between feuilletons then and the blogosphere now.

3
.
Indeed, nobody is funnier than depressives.
Not only that, but the more depressive they are, the funnier they are—up to a point.
My friend who committed suicide was the funniest friend I ever had.

4
.
This paragraph particularly interests me because it’s shadowed by Kraus’s envy of fiction—which, after my immersion in his work, I began in earnest to try to write.
      
As a wedding present, three months after I returned from Berlin, my college German professor George Avery gave me a hardcover edition of Kraus’s
The Third Walpurgis Night
.
George, who had opened my eyes to the connection between literature and the living of life, was becoming something of a second father to me, a father who read novels and cared about them deeply; an alternate father who, in his Greek-American way, embraced every pleasure and preferred beauty to engineering.
I’d been a good student of his, and it must have been a wish to become his best ex-student
ever
—to prove myself worthy, to demonstrate my love—that led me, in the months following my wedding, to try to translate the two difficult Kraus essays I’d brought home from Berlin.
      
I did the work late in the afternoon, after six or seven hours of writing short stories, in the bedroom of the little Somerville, Massachusetts, apartment that V and I were renting for $300 a month, while our elderly landlords, Mr.
and Mrs.
Frongillo, shouted at each other upstairs and watched television at high volumes.
I was so bent on proving to my parents that I could succeed as a writer, and on proving to George that I still cared about the writers he loved, that I could work seventy hours a week for months at a stretch.
      
When I’d finished drafts of the two translations, I sent them to George.
He returned them a few weeks later, with marginal notations in his microscopic handwriting, and with a letter in which he applauded my effort but said that he could also see how “devilishly difficult” it was to translate Kraus.
Taking his hint, I looked at the drafts with a fresh eye and was discouraged to find them stilted and nearly unreadable.
Almost every sentence needed further work, and I was so worn out by the work I’d already done that I buried the pages in a file folder.
      
But Kraus had changed me.
When I gave up on short stories and returned to my novel, I was mindful of his moral fervor, his satirical rage, his hatred of the media, his preoccupation with apocalypse, and his boldness as a sentence writer.
I wanted to expose America’s contradictions the way he’d exposed Austria’s, and I wanted to do it via the novel, the popular genre that he’d disdained but I did not.
I still hoped to finish my Kraus project, too, after my novel had made me famous and a millionaire.
To honor these hopes, I collected clippings from the Sunday
Times
and the daily
Boston
Globe
, which V and I subscribed to.
For some reason—perhaps to reassure myself that other people, too, were getting married—I read the nuptials pages of the
Times
religiously, clipping headlines like

CYNTHIA PIGOTT MARRIED TO LOUIS BACON

     
and, my favorite,

MISS LEBOURGEOIS TO MARRY WRITER

     
I read the
Globe
with an especially cold Krausian eye, and it obligingly enraged me with its triviality and its shoddy proofreading and its dopily punning weather headlines.
I was so disturbed by the rootless, meaningless “wit” of
HEAD-ON SPLASH,
which I imagined would not amuse the family of someone killed in a car crash, and of
AUTUMNIC BALM,
which offended my sense of the seriousness of the nuclear peril, that I finally wrote a slashingly Krausian letter to the editor.
The
Globe
actually printed the letter, but it managed, with characteristic carelessness, to mangle my punch line as “Automatic Balm,” thereby rendering my point incomprehensible.
Although Kraus was no Freudian, he had a Freud-like belief in the significance of journalistic parapraxis—he saw an unconscious compulsion to truth-telling in mistakes like “King Lehar” for “King Lear” (Franz Lehár being an operetta composer whom Kraus couldn’t stand)—and I, who was both Krausian and Freudian, believed it was no accident that some typesetter at the
Globe
had “inadvertently” protected the paper from recognizing its own linguistic culpability.
I was so enraged that I later devoted many pages of my second novel to making fun of what a shitty paper the
Globe
was.
(In a tacit abandonment of my Kraus project, following the failure of my first novel to make me rich or famous, I also deployed the best clippings I’d saved from the
Times
in a chapter of the second novel, as examples of the rhetoric of Progress.) My rage back then—directed not just at the media but at Boston, Boston drivers, the people at the lab where I worked, the computer at the lab, my family, V’s family, Ronald Reagan, George H.
W.
Bush, literary theorists, the minimalist fiction writers then in vogue, and men who divorced their wives—is foreign to me now.
It must have had to do with the profound isolation of my married life with V (those were the only substantially friendless years of my life) and with the ruthlessness with which, in my ambition and poverty, I was denying myself pleasure.
      
There was probably also, as I’ve argued, an element of the privileged person’s anger at the world for disappointing him.
If I turned out not to have enough of this anger to make me a junior Kraus, it was because of the genre I’d chosen.
Kraus twice, in his “Afterword,” makes envious reference to the novelist, first as the one kind of linguistic artist who can actually earn a living, and then, more snidely, as the kind of writer whose audience isn’t frightened away if “he’s rumored to be an artist.”
When a hard-core satirist like Kraus manages to achieve some popularity, it can only mean that his audience doesn’t understand him.
But when novelists start taking this position, you get the dead end of mid-century American art fiction; you get late Gaddis.
(I’ll pass over in silence the attitudes of art-fiction writers in much of contemporary Europe.) But it’s actually a reasonable and defensible position for an aphorist and densely allusive satirical glosser like Kraus.
The lack of an audience whom he could respect was a foregone conclusion, and so he never had to stop being angry: he could be the Great Hater at his writing desk, be his society’s hopeless antithesis, and then he could put down his pen and have a cozy personal life with whatever friends he hadn’t made into enemies with his writing.
It was an arrangement that worked throughout his life.
Whereas, when a novelist finds an audience, even a small one, he or she is in a different relation to it, for the reason Kraus suggests: the relation is based on recognition, not misunderstanding.
With a relation like that, with an audience like that, it becomes simply dishonest to remain so angry.
And the mental work that fiction fundamentally requires, which is to imagine what it’s like to be somebody you are not, further undermines anger in the long run.
The more I wrote novels, the less I trusted my own righteousness, and the more prone I was to sympathizing with people like the typesetters at the
Globe
.
Maybe it was a sneering jerk who’d written “Automatic,” but maybe it was some soul who’d simply been asked to do too much too quickly.
Plus, as the Internet rose to power, disseminating information that could be trusted as little as it cost to read it, I became so grateful to papers like the
Times
and the
Globe
for still existing, and for continuing to pay halfway responsible reporters to report, that I lost all interest in tearing them down.
      
And so, sometime in the nineties, I took my bad Kraus translations out of my active file cabinet and put them into deeper storage.
Kraus’s sentences never stopped running through my head—
And they all have a tone of discovery, as if the world had only just now been created … Reality is a meaningless exaggeration of all the details satire left behind fifty years ago—
but I didn’t think about my project again until I met Daniel Kehlmann.
I felt that I’d outgrown Kraus, felt that he was an angry young man’s kind of writer, ultimately not a novelist’s kind of writer.
What’s drawn me back to him now is partly my affection for Kehlmann and my susceptibility to his enthusiasm; partly the opportunity to understand better, thanks to Paul Reitter, what the hell Kraus was talking about; and partly the beauty of Kraus’s language and humor, to which I’ve attempted to do more justice here than I did at twenty-three; but also, and maybe most important, a nagging sense that apocalypse, after seeming to recede for a while, is still in the picture.
      
In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the Antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the Four Horsemen.
Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion.
The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world.
(Kraus’s dictate “Sing, bird, or die” could now read “Tweet, bird, or die.”) But what happens to the people who became writers
because
yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement?
What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?
As fewer and fewer readers are able to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer—I’m thinking of Rachel Kushner’s
The Flamethrowers
, Adam Haslett’s
You Are Not a Stranger Here
, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s
Ms.
Hempel Chronicles
, Clancy Martin’s
How to Sell
—Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, laboring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they’re the only business hiring.
And the more of the population that lives like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices and the greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when you’re not making much money you want your entertainment for free, and when your life is hard you want instant gratification (“Overnight free shipping!”).
      
But so the physical book goes on the endangered-species list, so responsible book reviewers go extinct, so literary novelists are conscripted into Jennifer Weinerish self-promotion, so the Big Six publishers get killed and devoured by Amazon, so independent bookstores disappear: this looks like an apocalypse only if most of your friends are writers, editors, or booksellers (as most of mine are).
Plus it’s possible that the story isn’t over.
Maybe the Internet experiment in consumer reviewing will result in such flagrant corruption (already one-third of all online product reviews are said to be bogus) that people will clamor for the return of professional reviewers.
Maybe an economically significant number of readers will come to recognize the human and cultural costs of Amazonian hegemony and go back to local bookstores or at least to
barnesandnoble.com
, which offers the same books and a superior e-reader, and whose owners have more progressive politics.
Maybe people will get as sick of Twitter as they once got sick of cigarettes.
Twitter’s and Facebook’s latest models for making money still seem to me like one part pyramid scheme, one part wishful thinking, and one part repugnant panoptical surveillance.
      
I could, it’s true, make a larger apocalyptic argument about the logic of the machine, which in Kraus’s day was still localized in Europe and America but has now gone global and is accelerating the denaturization of the planet and sterilization of its oceans.
I could point to the transformation of Canada’s boreal forest into a toxic lake of tar-sand by-products, the leveling of Asia’s remaining forests for Chinese-made ultra-low-cost porch furniture at Home Depot, the damming of the Amazon and the endgame clear-cutting of its forests for beef and mineral production, the whole mind-set of “Screw the consequences, we want to buy a lot of crap and we want to buy it cheap, with overnight free shipping,” and the direct connection between this American mind-set and a new Chinese prosperity that—in a classic Krausian collision of old values with new valuables—funds the slaughter of millions of Pacific sharks for the luxury of their fins and tens of thousands of African elephants for their ivory.
And meanwhile the overheating of the atmosphere, meanwhile the calamitous overuse of antibiotics by agribusiness, meanwhile the widespread tinkering with cell nucleii, which may well prove to be as disastrous as tinkering with atomic nucleii.
And, yes, the thermonuclear warheads are still in their silos and subs.
      
But apocalypse isn’t necessarily the physical end of the world.
Indeed, the word more directly implies an element of final cosmic judgment.
In Kraus’s invocation of the Deluge at the end of “Nestroy,” as in his talk of a “fully dehumanized zone” in his “Final Word” (my translation of which will follow this long dilation) and his endless chronicling of crimes against truth and the German language in
The Last Days of Mankind
, he’s referring not merely to physical destruction.
In fact, the great title of his play would be better rendered in English as
The Last Days of Humanity
: “dehumanized” doesn’t mean “depopulated,” and if the First World War spelled the end of humanity in Austria, it wasn’t because there were no longer any people there.
Kraus was appalled by the carnage, but he saw it as the result, not the cause, of a loss of humanity by people who were still living.
Living but damned, cosmically damned.
      
But a judgment like this obviously depends on what you mean by “humanity.”
Whether I like it or not, the world being created by the infernal machine of techno-consumerism is still a world made by human beings.
As I write this, in the fall of 2012, it seems as if half the advertisements on network television are featuring people bending over smartphones; there’s a particularly noxious/great one in which all the twenty-somethings at a wedding reception are doing nothing but taking smartphone photos and instantly texting them to one another.
To describe this dismal spectacle in apocalyptic terms, as a “dehumanization” of a wedding, is to advance a particular moral conception of humanity; and if you follow Nietzsche and reject the moral judgment in favor of an aesthetic one, you’re immediately confronted by Bourdieu’s persuasive connection of aesthetics with class and privilege; and the next thing you know, you’re translating
The Last Days of Mankind
as
The Last Days of Privileging the Things I Personally Find Beautiful
.
      
And maybe this is not such a bad thing.
Maybe—I already had intimations of this in Berlin, at twenty-two, alone at my desk—apocalypse is, paradoxically, always individual, always personal.
(Think of the Grumbler, alone at his desk, sinking into the psychotic solipsism that’s the end point of his apocalyptic thinking.) I have a brief tenure on earth, bracketed by infinities of nothingness, and during the first part of this tenure I form an attachment to a particular set of human values that are shaped inevitably by my social circumstances.
If I’d been born in 1159, when the world was steadier, I might well have felt, at fifty-three, that the next generation would share my values and appreciate the same things I appreciated; no apocalypse pending.
But I was born in 1959, when TV was something you watched only during prime time and on weekends, and people wrote letters and put them in the mail, and every magazine and newspaper had a robust Books section, and venerable publishers made long-term investments in young writers, and New Criticism reigned in English departments, and the Amazon Basin was intact, and antibiotics were used only to treat serious infections, not pumped into healthy cows.
It wasn’t necessarily a better world (we had bomb shelters and segregated swimming pools), but it was the only world I knew to try to find my place in as a writer.
And so today, fifty-three years later, Kraus’s signal complaint in the Nestroy essay—that the new world has lost the capacity even to