Authors: Karl Kraus
It’s clear that I haven’t read enough marxist lit., because I’ve never seen a marxist confront what has always struck me as the one problematic term in the entire ideology, namely
guilt
, the factor that exempts the philosopher from class conflict, since he or she has a privileged position in society yet wants to eliminate the privilege—
before getting to the problem of the prison-house of language, which I was trapped in even as I sat there.
The more I tried to write about what I was feeling, the more I seemed simply to be creating language about language, piling up signifiers that referred to themselves and carried me further from, not closer to, the moral and emotional horror of what I’d done to W, which was to use her as a signifier in the hermetic literary world of me and V—
because dangerous things happen when you spend a night pretending the person you’re with is someone else, pretend so vigorously that reality
disappears
and you’re left with this face, these kitten eyes that belong to—whom?
WHOM?
WHOM WHOM WHOM?
At this point I went literally crazy for about fifteen minutes.
Tried to pull my face off with my fingers, tried to rip up the bedsheets with my teeth, ran downstairs and tried to leave the building to call W, but I couldn’t unlock the street door, no matter how hard I yanked on it.
Some shadow thing in me, some thing that my conscious self could never see clearly but that was no less
me
than my conscious self was, had momentarily got the upper hand.
The thing in control of me made me give the street door a despairing kick, and—it seemed like a miracle, a gift from the world or from God—the lock freed up.
Out on the street, liberated from my prison-house, I became halfway sane.
I met W for a drink and a proper farewell (she was leaving for Spain the next morning), and she told me it sounded as if I was spending too much time alone.
The next day, alone, I described to V what had happened while I was typing:
It began when I called up the picture of those kitten eyes.
That’s what made me crumple up and cry.
But what made it bad was something else: it was like a self-tightening knot, as I guess I knew it would be, if it ever happened.
I’ll tell you what my impulses were: to smash the typewriter, to throw it out the window.
to smash the mirror with it, smash the window, then smash it.
to smash the mirror with the ashtray, to pound the typewriter with the ashtray, to throw the ashtray through the window.
to cut my face with a knife.
to throw myself out the window.
to bloody my fingers trying to rip the typewriter to pieces.
How the knot started tightening.
When I began to cry, I knew that I couldn’t keep typing.
But I wanted to describe what I was feeling.
I thought of taking the paper out and writing it longhand.
But then the thought, the feeling, of wanting to
describe
what was
happening
—this became what was happening.
The impulse of wanting to control (through writing) this lack of control turned out to be the real source of the lack of control.
So that every time I thought of ceasing to be crazy and going back to the typewriter, I became more crazy and more furious with the typewriter, until I was biting the sheet.
It became clear to me that this could go on indefinitely, until the neighbors called the police.
So I gave up on the idea of describing this (because IT COULD NOT BE DESCRIBED) and surrendered myself to my self-preservative instinct, went to call [W].
Why the front door nearly did it to me: I was powerless to stop it from being a symbol of the imprisonment I felt not being able to describe what was happening, the schizophrenic fight between the side of me that kept wanting to narrate and the side that refused to be narrated anymore.
That the latter side was confronted nonetheless by a symbol nearly drove it into complete control.
(One sees in hindsight, of course, how the unconscious tends to the self-tightening: how in all my pulling on the door (which I’ve had some trouble with before), I didn’t once think of pushing.)
After I finished this letter and put it in the mail, I was too frightened and disgusted by my typewriter to touch it for several days.
I took W’s advice and went out more to see people, including the young Canadian, James, who turned out to be gay.
He was having all manner of guilt-free sexual adventures and intrigues, and for an apartment five times the size of mine, in a more accessible neighborhood, he was paying less rent than I was.
I still had my literary superiority, but it was all I had.
V responded to my own bombshell letter with worry and sympathy but also the news that she was thinking about harming herself; she mentioned the sharpness of her letter opener and the five-story drop from her bedroom window.
(“Letter” and “story”: the section of my brain devoted to significance continued to find it everywhere.
I couldn’t distinguish reality from literary figure, a threat from a trope, which was the whole trouble with living through letters and stories.) In a different letter, she reported that she was still “seeing” her guy in New York—it hadn’t been the one-night stand that I’d supposed.
I was very confused by this, but my little psychotic episode had so frightened me that I smothered my confusion with avowals of love, fidelity, optimism, and concern for V’s well-being.
After my unsatisfactory visit to Vienna, my new Canadian friend offered to let me live with him and split his already low rent.
Among the many reasons I said yes was that his place was on Karl-Marx-Straße, which I thought would be a very cool address.
I immediately wrote a letter of tortured apology and self-justification to Frau Keller, asking to be excused from my lease and to get my security deposit back, since I was giving her the required thirty-day notice.
A few days before V arrived to spend her winter break with me, Frau Keller came to my room to inspect it for damage.
She was a short, stout, sallow, miserable person.
I repeated that I’d given her proper notice and was due a refund of 350 marks; she replied that she was about to be hospitalized for a “procedure.”
As if in a trance, she began to circle the room, pointing out, with heavy sighs of disapproval, the cracked glass top of the coffee table, the broken hinge on the wardrobe, the disgusting stains on the carpeting—all
features
of the room she’d rented me.
I said that she knew very well that earlier tenants had done the damage.
In reply, she sighed once more, shook her head, unbuttoned the top of her dress, and reached into her enormous bra.
I thought she was going to take out a wad of cash, but instead she pulled down the bra and showed me a large bandage on one of her breasts.
“
Ist verbrannt, Herr Franzen
,” she said, looking me gravely in the eye.
“
Ist verbrannt
.”
“It’s burned up, Mr.
Franzen.”
I never got my money back.
60
.
In the original, “scientific paper pushers” is
Wissenschaftlhuber
.
Reitter: “Kraus is playing on the Austrianism
Gschaftlhuber
, which means ‘someone who makes a lot of his job without being good at it’ or, more simply, ‘poseur.’”
61
.
“In February of 1908 Kraus notched one of his most satisfying victories in the eternal struggle against the
Neue Freie Presse
.
The occasion was a small earthquake that had rattled Vienna.
Posing as a civil engineer and a regular reader of the newspaper, Kraus sent in a pseudoscientific letter full of risible claims—e.g., ‘what we have here is telluric earthquake (in the narrow sense),’ rather than ‘a cosmic earthquake (in the broad sense)’—which the
NFP
nevertheless printed as serious commentary.
Three years later, Kraus struck again.
He managed to sneak into the
NFP
under another pseudonym (at the time, the paper had a policy of not mentioning him) and again by submitting a report on an earthquake, in which he pretended to be a scientist and offered up a number of absurdities.
Among the more over-the-top of these was that ‘half an hour before the earthquake, the
Grubenhund
that had been sleeping in the laboratory began to howl.’
Despite the
Hund
(dog) in it, the word ‘
Grubenhund
’ doesn’t refer to a kind of dog.
It’s a term for a cart used in mining (the second earthquake was supposed to have taken place in mining country).
With the phrase ‘the problem of the
Grubenhund
,’ Kraus evokes the lazy credulity with which newspapers treated expert scientific testimony.
In the essays that revealed the hoaxes, ‘The Earthquake’ and ‘The Grubenhund,’ Kraus also suggests that the
NFP
’s Jewish loyalties played a role in the debacle.
Kraus gave his first made-up civil engineer a name and address that invited the
NFP
to infer that the engineer was a Jew.
If he hadn’t done so, Kraus maintains, the
NFP
would have screened the letter more carefully.” —PR
62
.
“The Nestroy line cited by Kraus sends up the would-be scientific talk about the expected appearance, in 1834, of Halley’s Comet.
Kraus is proposing that the line could have been used, eighty years later, for a prank like his earthquake dispatch: in 1910, the comet’s predicted return had attracted a lot of journalistic attention.” —PR
63
.
The
Vormärz
was the period between 1815 and the revolution of March 1848.
Literally “Before March.”
64
.
“The historian Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature back when ‘literature’ was construed more broadly (1902), had insisted that systematic study of a topic should be embarked on without presuppositions and had thereby prompted a debate about objectivity in the human sciences.
Kraus had his doubts about Mommsen’s ideal.
In 1901 he’d published in his
Fackel
‘The Presuppositionless Mommsen,’ a screed against Mommsen by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and he’d defended Chamberlain when a reader sent in a letter attacking his piece.
Kraus’s oxymoronic phrase ‘dogmas of its presuppositionlessness’ suggests that Mommsen’s ideal was self-contradictory: the idea that forgoing presuppositions will be productive is itself a (liberal) presupposition.
“The final phrase, about art and life, plays on the last line of the prologue to Schiller’s
Wallenstein
.” —PR
65
.
“In Nestroy’s
The Evil Spirit Lumpazivagabundus
, there’s a character named Signora Palpiti, who turns out to come from Purkersdorf.
Ludwig Wahrmund was an Austrian expert on ecclesiastical law whose ‘modern’ views got him into trouble with the church.
Louis Treumann was a Viennese opera singer whose arrest for breach of contract was something of a scandal.
Kraus had covered both ‘affairs’ in 1908 issues of the
Fackel
.” —PR
66
.
“‘Roast-chicken era’ is a literal translation of
Backhendlzeit
, which is basically the Austrian equivalent of the term
Vormärz
—it refers to the 1815–1848 period.
Kraus is using the conventional meaning while playing on its literal one, with his talk of ‘fresh-baked seriousness.’
The moral historian in question is Friedrich Schlögl, and the passage Kraus cites comes from Schlögl’s book
On Viennese Folk Theater
(1883).
“In the quoted passage itself:
Die beiden Grasel
was a theatrical adaptation of a folksy novel of the same title, published in 1854.
The ‘Josefstadt’ (Theater in der Josefstadt) was already a venerable theater and is now the oldest one continuously performing in Vienna.
Tapper was a popular card game, usually played by three people and often involving gambling; it’s featured in a number of Schnitzler’s works, including
Lieutenant Gustl
(1901).” —PR