Authors: Karl Kraus
47
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The Princess of Eboli is Don Carlos’s beloved in the Schiller play.
48
.
In the world of books nowadays, there’s the related paradox of the thousand-page biography.
Precisely when the world accelerated technologically and our time for reading began to shrink, the average length of biographies seemed to double.
It’s as if being bored has become the way to reassure yourself that you’re doing serious reading, as opposed to playing Angry Birds.
49
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“A neologism that (playfully) expresses Kraus’s position on psychoanalysis—the Greek word ‘
psychros
’ means ‘fatuous’ and ‘insignificant.’
Kraus was famously critical of psychoanalysis.
Indeed, his most widely cited aphorism is a dig at it: ‘Psychoanalysis is that disease of the mind for which it believes itself to be the cure.’
Kraus also liked to speak of the ‘psychoanals.’
He believed that psychoanalysis was driven by psychological pathologies—‘you head to the entrance of a stranger’s unconscious when your own home is dirty’—but his chief complaint was with the invasiveness and reductionism of its methods.
These he even managed to portray as the result of a particularly Jewish striverism: ‘They control the press; they control the banks; and now they control the unconscious, too!’
Most often, though, Kraus pointed up the intellectual limitations of psychoanalysis: ‘A good psychologist can quickly get you inside his head.’
Especially appalling to him was the psychoanalytic interpretation of art, which he regarded as a kind of desecration—‘muddy boots’ in the ‘holy place of the artist’s dream.’
“It may be that in going after psychoanalysis Kraus was thinking more of Freud’s followers than of Freud himself.
He tended not to name names in his attacks, though he did occasionally make fun of Freud’s name.
There was, in any case, some friendly contact between Freud and Kraus.
Presenting himself as a devoted reader of
Die Fackel
, Freud solicited Kraus’s support in a series of letters written between 1904 and 1906.
Kraus, for his part, attended several of Freud’s lectures around that time, and in November 1905 he publicly applauded him for trying to debunk the view that homosexuality should be seen as a dangerous form of deviance.
Yet despite the common ground between them, the solidarity that Freud hoped for never materialized.
The correspondence, never robust, petered out altogether, while Kraus’s mocking of psychoanalysis and some of its basic principles (e.g., the Oedipus complex) persisted for decades.” —PR
I agree with Kraus that there’s a lot to find fault with in Freud: his overemphasis on sex, his brute-force application of the Oedipus story, his fascination with puns (to me, any school of thought or literature that makes too much of puns is a priori suspect), his too-neat contraption of id, ego, and superego, and so on.
But the reason he’s easy to find fault with is that he was articulating something that had never been articulated—he was grasping at something nearly ineffable; he was trying to be a scientist of things unknowable through science—and if Kraus had been a reader of novels I think he might have acknowledged this.
Freud was developing a theory to account for psychological truths that his beloved Dostoyevsky had noticed and embodied in his novels: that we do things that we’re not aware of doing; that we often, and without hypocrisy, say the opposite of what we really mean; that just because a motive is irrational doesn’t mean it makes no sense; that we strenuously deny precisely the things that are truest about us; that we fail to see certain obvious, important facts that are right in front of us; that we so often unaccountably sabotage ourselves.
Maybe the satirist and the aphorist and even the dramatist can safely ignore Freud’s ideas, but the realist novelist cannot.
This may be the place to confess that immersing myself in the letters and the narrative of my year in Berlin makes me feel bad.
The particulars are so elusive and fleeting that they’re hard to capture in words, but they have to do with my feeling that I’m still the same person I was at twenty-two but also was
never
that person, not even then.
As if, by way of writing and introspection and self-consciousness, I had the same kind of distance from myself then that I now have by virtue of being thirty years older.
That there’s the thinking, planning, self-improving me, and then there’s a me that just does what it does—makes mistakes that I know to be mistakes.
In 1982 I could feel that my consciousness was riding along on something it couldn’t account for.
And I went ahead and did a thing that makes no sense to me now: I married somebody I was unlikely to stay married to.
Probably I did it because I was trying to control—to overthink—something that ultimately can’t be controlled.
I wanted to plan out a whole life, because thinking and planning were safer than simply immersing myself in life and seeing what happened.
But the controlling, clamping-down self now seems to me not the ego or the superego; it seems, itself, like the id.
Freud’s schema would suggest that I had an overly dominant superego in Berlin, overriding the impulses of the id and forcing myself to do the “right” thing, but this isn’t how it feels.
In the letters, the superego always enters late, in a particularly grating tone of optimism, and tries to put the best face on what the fearful, control-seeking id has done.
The whole thing makes me very sad.
Freud’s psychic architecture of id, ego, superego is more mysterious and suggestive in the original German: the It, the I, and the Over-I.
The German word for “id,” “
Es
,” points toward my objectness—I’m not just good old familiar
me
, I’m also an It, a thing in the world—better than “id” does (at least for us non-Latin-readers).
“Id” to me evoked and still evokes the image of some hot, sexual, powerful, toadlike thing inside me that is nonetheless part of “my” self.
It
is more radical, because it suggests that the me I know, my consciousness as I move through the world, is really just a ghost in the machine, a mysterious by-product of a body composed of dumb atoms.
Like other great schools of twentieth-century criticism—like structuralism, which posits a self constituted by the language it speaks, and like Marxism, for which the self is the instrument of ideology—Freudianism undermines the notion of an individual with free will and limitless agency.
If you look too closely at the self, it disappears.
If I insist that Freud was basically right—that the It does what it does and that my consciousness trails behind it like a yapping little dog, pretending to be in control, inventing motives whose effect is to blind it to what’s really going on—I’m susceptible to a structuralist critique: the reason I think that I’m the ghost in the machine of It is that language is separate from its speaker.
What I’m describing as a disconnect between self and It is in fact an artifact of the disconnect between me and what I’ve spoken or written—because pursuit of the elusive It can happen only via language.
What haunted me in 1982 and briefly drove me crazy wasn’t some chimerical Freudian id but the words that I’d been typing as I hunted for it; it was the words, not the id, that existed independent of me.
And then there’s the Marxist critique: psychoanalysis is a bourgeois institution, a diversion for those with the time and money for it.
You think you’re trying to demystify yourself and better understand the interplay of It and I and Over-I, but in fact all you’re doing is developing a new and bigger mystification to obscure your privilege.
The real It is economic and class relations, which create the ideology that governs you; and so no wonder the It is scary to you.
The “Unconscious” is the sex-drenched bogeyman that you invent to avoid the real bogeyman of ideology; and thus, for the hard-line Marxist as for Kraus, psychoanalysis is the disease of the mind for which it believes itself to be the cure.
I definitely had this disease of the mind in Berlin.
The cure, for me, was to stop spinning in circles of theory and start living.
It was only much later, when I was struggling with my third novel, that I came to appreciate Freud for what he had to teach the fiction writer: that we relate to the world by way of the psychological objects we make of the people closest to us; that a human personality is best understood as a collection of selves in conflict; that we know less than we think we know; that there’s no cure for the human condition.
Freud, to his credit, became reluctant to speak of cures.
Nowadays such values are, if not lost and forgotten, then certainly embattled.
A culture in which people can’t sit still for five minutes without pawing their smartphones gets the hopelessly tautological intellectual framework it deserves: “Personality is all just brain chemistry!”
If Freud’s insights are denied universally enough and vehemently enough, it ceases to matter that vehement denial is a reliable sign that an insight has hit the mark.
If the self is just a ghost in the machine anyway, you might as well embrace the machine and, while you’re at it, make yourself one.
Id
is what you type on your smartphone when you want it to auto-correct and write “I’d.”
50
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Another passage where Kraus’s sputtering rage makes him all but unintelligible.
My guess is that “Nordic integral” is a dig at Ibsen; Reitter points out that “dying amid beauty” is a phrase from the final scene of
Hedda Gabler
.
As for “rule
de tri
,” Reitter, Kehlmann, and Franzen are collectively stumped.
Maybe it has to do with conventional love triangles.
51
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“Kraus isn’t suggesting that the new ‘psychological operetta’ provided authentic release.
Operetta, in his view, shouldn’t make psychological or any other kind of sense: again, its deep realism derives precisely from its nonsensicality.
In a later essay on the ‘domestication’ of operetta, Kraus would write, ‘The demand that operetta should hold up before pure reason is the source of pure operetta idiocy.’
He added, a few lines later, ‘Psychology is the
ultima ratio
of ineptness, and in this way operetta, too, has been flattened.’” —PR
52
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“From the 1890s until the First World War, Kraus admired Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), whose naturalist dramas won him much applause.
But when the war started, Hauptmann, like so many German artists, made patriotic statements in support of it, and Kraus became critical of him.
Later, during the Weimar Republic, Kraus found Hauptmann outright insufferable.
He’d been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912, and as he became a cultural figurehead in the new Germany he began to style himself as an author of Goethe-like significance.
(See the portrayal of Mynheer Peeperkorn, who’s loosely based on Hauptmann, in Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain
.)
“Ferdinand Raimund (1790–1836) was an actor, writer, and director who gained renown in (and beyond) Vienna for his comedies and farces.
Often seen as Nestroy’s immediate forebear in Austro-humor, Raimund got plenty of official recognition after his death—a theater in Vienna was named after him, as was a street—but he wasn’t generally taken seriously as a figure in high culture.
Kraus thought otherwise.
Defending Raimund against Alfred Polgar’s less enthusiastic appraisal, Kraus declared him to be ‘the greatest Austrian poet.’
Granted, for Kraus, this wasn’t saying all that much, but he meant it as a major compliment, and Raimund belonged to the small group of authors whose works he read onstage.
Nowhere in
Die Fackel
does Kraus offer an appreciation of Raimund anywhere near as thorough as ‘Nestroy and Posterity,’ but he did make it clear that he prized the beauty of Raimund’s language.” —PR
53
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“Ludwig Anzengruber (1839–1889) was also an Austrian playwright.
Like Raimund and Nestroy, he wrote ‘folk’ plays, some of them comedies, and the three authors are often grouped together.
But only Anzengruber won a larger following outside of Austria.
Theodor Fontane and Friedrich Engels, among others, found his portrayal of folklife to be winningly concerned with social conditions.
Kraus, however, was not impressed.
Without dwelling on why, he made Anzengruber out to be the lesser author and was irked by his greater acclaim.” —PR