Epilogue by Elisabeth Roudinesco

Marcourt, 5 March 1988

Beneath the snow, the village seems to have preserved intact the signs of its memory. There are no advertisement hoardings, no businesses and no neo lights. The history of the countryside seems frozen in motionless time, rather like the madness of the asylum, in which one could endlessly inscribe the unfolding of past events. Marcourt is an abandoned relic.

For household goods and everyday purchases, the inhabitants of Marcourt visit La Roche-en-Ardenne, an interesting medieval town which was rebuilt in 1944. The ‘Nature and Health’ park, designed for walking, is a made-to-measure green space, with Hungarian boars and convalescent deer. A placard refers to La Boverie. There is no sign of the White Cross Inn. In summer, this ill-defined area becomes a camping site. A handful of white caravans, sunk deep in the snow, remind one of holiday rituals, of hunting, fishing, swimming, and visits to the caves.

As I look at the guide-book, I reflect that the abduction of January 1791 did not happen here, but in the Parc de la Boverie, which is now the part of the town of Liege, to the south of the island watered by the Meuse. Xhoris is some dozens of kilometers away, and Stavelot  is further still. Apollinaire spent the summer here on 1899, at the Hotel du Mal Aime. What was he doing in  Théroigne’s country. Did he know of her existence? Had he read ‘Sisina’?

Olivier came with me to Marcourt, bringing his daughter, little Helene. The Journal des Enfants had asked her to write an account of her journey. Why Belgium? What relation was there to the Bicentenary?  Did the Revolution happen at Marcourt? Who was this ‘Tremoigne’? What were women’s rights? Are dotty people sent to asylums? The answers to the questions proved to be interlocking. I thought of my mother’s death, of the Union des femmes francaises, in which she was involved for a period, after the war. I thought of my aunt too, who had been a suffragette in the very early days.. I thought of my other aunt, who has emigrated from Romania, and who spoke several different languages. I thought of Francoise Dolto*, who was not afraid to die. I had never needed to be ‘feminist’, since all the women who had featured in my childhood had already been so. Fortunately. The women’s struggle has ended. The Revolution is over. I sent a postcard to my god-daughter Alice. I sent another card to my friend Elisabeth Badinter, who had insisted that I make the journey to Maracourt.

Had Theroigne had been schizophrenic or manic-depressive? The terminology matters little. Mourning and melancholia have no need of science. I feel I have invented everything, and that I have pondered over the celebration of a trompe l’oeil** bicentenary and of a nostalgia centenary.  Which have I been concerned with, Revolution or psychoanalysis? Had I been searching for Freud behind Pinel, and for Ferenczi after Mesmer? It would be claimed nowadays that this whole story had simply been a question of ‘neurones’ and of the power of the media.

The dominant memory at Marcourt was of the horrors of war. In September 1944, the patriots of the Belgian Resistance had pitched camp above Marcourt with a view of linking up with the American army, which was stationed at Hotten. At the crossroads, on the La Roche road, they attacked two enemy machine-gun carriers. The first was destroyed, but the second managed to escape. The first was destroyed, but the second managed to escape. For sometime afterwards, the head  of a decapitated soldier was to be seen in a sunken road, a grim symbol of this final struggle against barbarism. The German retaliation was terrible. Troops marched into the village and set fire to thirty-odd houses. Prisoners were burned alive in an old barn. Each year, on 9 September, friends and relatives gathered in a votive chapel, to remember the massacre.

Theroigne, the patriot of yesteryear, has never been associated with this celebration.

In Hodister, which is in the mountains, Noelle Mormont lives surrounded by her memories. She is a lovely old lady, a former teacher who is familiar with Theroigne’s story. In order to remind the inhabitants of their ancestors, she has written a chronicle, in which she describes the circumstances and deeds of the two local celebrities. Before Theroigne, there had been Evrard Mercurian, general of the Jesuit order. His surname encompassed Marcourt, which was derived from the Latin Mercurium and Mercury, god of journeys and of communication. It is a curious repetition: two children of this ‘mercurial’ village- the Jesuit Mercurian and the Amazon of Mericourt – had won glory by escaping and conquering the world in search of a new faith.

We took Noelle to visit Marcourt cemetery. I inspected every grave, hooping to find some inscription, date or portrait which might conjure up the presence of the Terwagnes. There was nothing, no shadow or shade, not even the slightest trace of this huge family. Even the dead disappeared.

The presbytery was inhabited by a private person, who rented it from the parish. Every Sunday, the only curé  in the area did his rounds, celebrating several masses on the same day. Those with a religious vocation are rare, and the faithful are elderly. Nevertheless, the church was in good repair, with a baroque choir, pious images and ultra-modern heating. The main door overlooks some waste ground, flanked by some huts serving as a tourist information bureau. With Rene Moureau as our guide, we visited the tawdry corrugated-iron structure in which the sympathetic man struggled to harvest a few fragments of local culture. He proudly showed us Anne-Josephe’s baptismal certificate, which was kept under glass. Suddenly, Helene asked where ‘Tremoigne’ had lived, where her house and that of her parents had been. It had been in that very spot, opposite the church, where the tourist information bureau now was.

The house had changed hands several times in the course if the nineteenth century until finally, in 1873, at the request of Houba, the curé , it had been demolished. He felt that it was attracting too many visitors. By effacing the last living race of the amazon, the priest sought to banish all record of the Revolution from human memory. He believed that archives were silent, forgot that a church document could restore Theroigne’s legal existence, in the very place where it has been destroyed. Did he perhaps dream at night of Michelet’s imprecations?  Did he fear the spread of a new contagion, coming from France, from Liege or rom the Brabant? Did he perhaps see the great Sabbath of the Bastille danced beneath his windows? History does not tell us. But, at Marcourt, aside from a baptismal certificate, Theroigne is nowhere to be found.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7oise_Dolto

** French for 'deceive the eye' is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface.

Disciplinary Sanitorium by Eduard Limonov

 

Chapter 1: the hard violence

 

Old Vinton Smith the hero of the novel believed that he was born in 44 or 45. That means that he and I are of the same age since 1984 has long since wheezed by and nothing resembling the society created by Orwell’s imagination can be found on the surface of the globe. I decided to reread the adventures of a man my age the plot is silly in presumably Britain in presumably 1984.

Extramarital sex between party members is forbidden and Winston violates this ban and is supposed to be punished by five years hard time.  A visit with Julia in a room above an antique store in the Prols quarter from as it later turns out is  a thought police agent and succumbs to villain O'Brien's provocation and conspires verbally against the party which also is punished by death.  He also acquires Goldstein's Banned Book; death penalty again.

 

Smith is arrested tortured his will is suppressed in the last chapter he is released free but it is clear to the reader that immediately outside the book he will be arrested and liquidated. It is also clear that the silly plot is used by Orwell to show the reader the Society of the future the Britain Oceania of 1984 whether the author considered the product of his work a prophecy or only a possible model of the future is irrelevant. Smith did not evoke sympathy in me and I disliked him in the highest degree. In fact he is a standard character of English literature the little man five false teeth and ulcer on his leg. Forgetting Oceania we see a typical middle-aged English clerk; recall T. S. Eliot ‘I grow old I grow old I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,’ or the protagonist of Graham Green’s novel The Human Factor.

 

 Orwell assures us that his Clerk's horrific story plays out in the future in 1984 but a careful reader understands that the book is conveniently set in the past but it was written in 1948 and largely set in 48. The rocket bombs that were dropping on London every dozen pages bring to mind their foul tools launched by the Germans in World War II Winston and Julia meet at the bell tower in the area where an atomic bomb fell 30 years ago gang of young men were in shorts of the same color and stout men in black uniforms with iron padded boots and gloves in their hands are borrowed from German history from 1920 to 1945. The blue and the black jumpsuits of the book's heroes also belong there. Floating fortresses of Oceania are of course copies from the American flying fortresses American bombers. The three-year plan and colonies for homeless children are unmistakably borrowed from the Soviet history. It has long been established that Goldstein with his goatee is written off of Trotsky two minutes of hate and hate week are most likely borrowed from the rituals of some Freudian sect. The great purges of the 50s and 60s in the book no doubt traced their origins to Stalin's purges as absurd as these purges may seem from the West they bear a consequence and the necessity of the struggle for power in order to hold power Stalin had to eliminate his rivals and to not seem like an anti-revolutionary he had to invent all those incredible betrayals and connections with foreign intelligence services and he achieved his goal in 1984 there is an abundance of details of the past and only a couple of details of the supposed future.

 

First of all the famous television screen of which it is known that you can turn it off. O'Brien a member of the high hierarchy had the right to turn his TV off for half an hour. At the time of writing this novel television already existed albeit in an embryonic semi-experimental state.Orwell had chosen the new invention as the main character of the future and the main means of control. He had made some remarks in the first pages about police helicopters hovering over the streets looking inside the windows spying on the citizens but realizing how limited this method was he corrected himself installing receiving and transmitting television sets in the homes of party members. This is theoretically possible however not to mention the cost of the project. The information processing center would have to be monstrously large and maybe half to the population would have to watch the other half of the population even computers don't really solve this problem since spying on all of your movements and texts via computers is a Sisyphean labor not to mention the endlessness of this whole observation endeavor. In the absence of a telescreen does the modern civilized European or American allow himself extravagant behavior within the walls of his apartment. The most that the big brother or his employees can expect to see while spying is sex scenes and scandals. Modern television certainly controls the population but not by watching you but by showing.

 [let me interject here in this case that of course Limonov  not very on point here and Orwell with his telescreens is probably more right than Limonov of ever knew because while spying on you on even if you don't have any extravagant behavior is what is happening right now. But all right, this intro to the book it's basically a preface was written in 88 so bear that in mind let's continue with the translation.]

Newspeak also belong to Orwell's present vulgar simplification and mixing of languages is a normal phenomenon it happens everywhere with all their languages of the world at once for example the infiltration of English into other languages from  French spoiled by English it exists and it's bridgehead is expanding but not with the help of men and black uniforms and with batons in their hands but absolutely voluntarily according to necessity and the wishes of the masses.

 

The basic premise on which the intrigue this super book is based on is that in the future extramarital sex will be punishable by five years in the penal camps and this little tidbit Orville did not borrow it from past experience because the impossibility is strikingly obvious. Family is celebrated by all regimes. Though family unit was sacred for the Soviet and hidden regimes, for Petan yesterday, Raymond Barr and Reagan today sex was a legal and deserved right of the German Soldier officer or Party official. Brothels accompanied the German Army. The second man in the USSR after Stalin  Lavrentiy Beria head of the formidable KGB drove around the streets of Moscow in a car looking for a beautiful young girls. Everyone knows that a sexually satisfied citizen is less inclined to take interest in social problems. It would seem that the party already in power should be interested in having their population to sublimate some of its energy although of course power always prefers orderly sex unions. Only a crazed and insane power is suddenly capable of banning sex even if only for members of the ruling party and severely punishing violations of the ban. Orwell's phrase describing Winston and Julia's sexual act it as a  political strike against the party was nonsense. It sounds beautiful as a chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. Incidentally there is a certain inarticulate volatile similarity between lotramones sons of murderer(?) and 1984 as one nightmare dream is just like another.

 

Orwell's characters have no ambitions not even human thirst for power or hatred for those who challenge this power, they are bearing machine logic. It not clear why O'Brien chooses to victimize this insignificant little Winston Smith, why he and the thought police drag Smith into the net like FBI agents drag an American Senator into a scandal in order to bring him down. By the middle of the book it emerges that Smith has been followed from the very first page. They were reading his diary following him in the Prols quarters. They were watching his acts of love with Julie through a TV screen hidden behind an engraving. The gothic William O'Brien ( the image of an Inquisitor investigator borrowed from Dostoyevsky) addresses Smith with a theological speeches excusable only to a school boy twisting the arms of another schoolboy in a dark corner. When you finally surrender to us it must be done out of your free will he hisses. It is impossible to believe the seriousness of the superpower one of whose top officials behaves like an operatic villain. The famous scene of the failed torture by rats is done by Orwell in the manner of Edgar Poe, obsolete and patriarchal. More and more people are dealing with Smith as the end of the book approaches. Why are they fiddling with a varicose man with five false teeth unable to bend over without bone pain. A prematurely aged official of the ministry of Truth in fact Smith is a law abiding citizen. He goes to work carefully and even finds a certain pleasure in his work. There is no need to suppress Smith's will, it is suppressed from the first page of the book. All O'Brien’s State, his big brother and Orwell do is follow an already wingless fly on the glass, catch it now and then pluck off one leg at a time release it again and examine how will it behave,if the will  fly again. Winston Smith may be convincing in his insignificance. Big Brother O'Brien and the party tearing off its legs is I think literary failure. Mr. Orwell lacked talent. Clearly he wanted to make a book about pure violence but it turned out to be a caricature, a future in the style of housewives novels. The Divine Marquis in 120 days of Sodom succeeded far more to the same end as for me I prefer the futurologist H. G. Wells in his time machine. The creator of 1984 was inspired by a misunderstood foreign non-english past. It seemed to Orwell that the societies of German and Stalinist Russia were bound together exclusively by violence. State violence was undoubtedly a necessary element in the structure of both regimes but the amount and the significance of violence is exaggerated both by Orwell back in 1948 and by foreigners in general (I mean not residents of Germany or the USSR), hell is other peoples’ mythological totalitarian systems erected by the West in its own imagination with innocent grace in order to arouse the hatred necessary to fight the enemy. You need to demonize your enemy and as a result the real countries and systems are replaced by monsters by cutting off their real motivations for behavior. Only phenomenon of ugly abstract cruelty remains of the party in 1984, as brutal and vicious as savage Indian scalpers in westerns. if we forget about the worldwide acclaim of 1984 and try to evaluate this book by the standards of literature one is surprised by the infantilism and melodramatic nature of this book . Qualities inherent to pop literature never declared as such. 1984 is written in fact in the genre of the bestseller. I can see why the book of the month club demanded to remove chapters from Goldstein's book along with an after board that explained the principles of Newspeak. Only those two pieces are not written in pop style. It's also fitting that 1984 inspired pop star David Bowie to create his show. 1984 is the future as imagined by a popular imagination nurtured by cheap newspaper myths always half a century behind reality.

 

chapter 2:  the new soft violence

 

 Soft methods of controlling the masses began long before the end of World War II suppressing the populations of other countries. Hitler seduced the Germans with national socialism while imprisoned in Landsberg Fortress back in 1924. He sketched out a model of the popular Volkswagen car and the blueprint for the ideal home for the average German, five rooms with a bath. He seemed to intend to rule his Nation with gentle violence frightened by the manifestations of its own cannibalism. In the first and above all in the second world wars ‘civilized Humanity’ recoiled from hard regimes to the regimes of soft violence plus there were two new crucial factors; the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons and the emergence of new production technologies that made it possible to feed the masses.

In the essence of hard violence there is a physical repression of a man. Soft violence is based on the encouragement of his own weaknesses. The ideal of hard violence is to turn the world into a Maximum Security Prison. The ideals of soft violence is to turn a man into a pet. Soft violence does not operate with black uniforms batons or torture; in its Arsenal there are false goals of material well-being, the fear of unemployment, the fear of the economic crisis, the fear and shame of being poorer or worse than the neighbors and finally just laziness and human inertia. Suicides of the unemployed are an example of this mighty group of soft violence, the degree of psychological pressure the incitement to prosperity to which a citizen of civilized parts of the planet is subjected to in the showcase of modern civilization. The screens of televisions computers and mini-tels glow enticingly. The French communication system from the 80s that combined television telephone and computer is a Minotaur. The public is dazzled by the abundance of information by the power of their cars that propel them in a rush of collective madness of movement. A portrait of Big Brother on the walls would look miserable compared to the increasingly powerful tricks of publicity. Blinded by the juggler of procedures to the rattle of the drums of statistics ( they decisively favor relative mathematics resplendent numbers which the public has no time to understand) to the rumble of increasingly worse quality pop music the civilized inhabitants of happy developed countries make their speedy journey from birth to retirement.

This lucky western denizen likes to repeat to himself that an unusually high material standard of living has been only achieved in Europe, the United States and  Australia, mostly white countries on the planet while the rest of the poor non-white World leads a miserable existence. It's so much contempt in the term ‘underdeveloped countries’ but the civilized man is panic-stricken. He's living on credit and often at the expense of those despised underdeveloped countries, his gigantic yield of interest on his loans that is why he surrenders himself every day to the patronage of the guardian state losing or abandoning himself the basic human privileges inherent or biological species independence and free will. For his obedience he is rewarded with substitutes. His dreams of travel are embodied in organized tourism, his terms for adventure can be safely satisfied by turning on the TV or going to the cinema police novels and movies with an inordinate amount of revolvers and shots are substitutes for the daily dose of the struggle for life that the human being needs and used to defend himself. Modern civilized man is paranoid about his security but his interference with his own security is not only undesirable but punishable by law and civilized soft regime societies the security of citizens is the business of the police. in soft regime society and that is the fundamental difference from hard regime Society. It is not the party, not a gang of miscreants that suppress the trembling majority but everyone to one degree or another suppresses everyone. They do it for free and against their own selves for that is the nature of the relationship. Many, however, would probably better served by a soft regime Society. The insignificant Winston Smith would find himself in a better position than the energetic O'Brien. I can see Smith putting his varicose food out on the asphalt of the freeway leading to the Côte d'Azur at this very moment traffic thousands of cars ahead with the Smiths and the Julies and their children going on vacation. O'Brien with his glasses on his nose reading the Bible in a cell at the Fleury-Mérogis Prison; he fired his hunting rifle at his Arab immigrant neighbors because he was unable to bear the noise.

 Unless they forget that they live in the best of societies the domesticated masses derive great pleasure watching dystrophic African children covered with flies and the skeletons of the Auschwitz. The moral of the demonstration is this: it is useless to try and organize any other Society. Look at what happened before, look what those attempts led to, what Marxism in Ethiopia and Hitler's fascism produced and the frightened masses sit quietly and pollinate their brains with Jesus wines and detergents suggesting that they buy super delicate toilet paper and wear not black but brightly colored childish fabrics  (aside from violent mathematization and articulation of life) there is also forced infantilization.

 

Among all crimes the most terrible but not at all punishable is this is the crime against oneself; the failure of an individual to take advantage of his own life, listening to silly musical, noises parking the car engaging in unremarkable and uninteresting labor and boom, your time on Earth is out. The collective so-called civilized humanity has succeeded in creating and imposing on everyone down to the fringes of the planet a colorless boring stupid life devoid of real pleasures and life of pets.

Against the violence of Big Brother the old hard regime and boots and Sinister uniforms it is still possible to rise up in a rebellion but how can you rebel against your own weaknesses?

Original English translation from Russian by Nikolai reworked from the transcript here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2380Clo57ic&t=1372s

Why Karl Kraus Was So Angry by Jonathan Franzen

 

Consider the facts. He was a late child in a prosperous, well-assimilated Jewish family whose business generated a large enough and steady enough income to make him financial independent for life. This in turn enabled him to publish Die Fackel exactly as he wished, without making concessions to advertisers or subscribers. He had a close circle of good friends and a much larger circle of admirers, many of the fanatical, some of them famous. He was an electrifying public speaker, capable of filling the largest theaters, which went a long way towards satisfying his youthful ambition to be an actor. Although he never married, he had some brilliant affairs and a deep, long-term relationship with Sidonie. He seems to have suffered nothing like the conflicts with his father that Kafka had with his, nor to have regretted not having children. His only significant health problem  was a curvature of the spine, and even this had the benefit of exempting him from military service. So how did a person so extremely fortunate become a Great Hater?

Kafka once diagnosed in German-Jewish writers a ‘terrible inner state,’ related to a bad  relationship with Judaism. A bad inner state can certainly be discerned in Kraus’s agon with Heine, as in a handful of other Kraus texts (including ‘He’s Still a Jew’ and his short play Literatur) and in his strikingly personal vendetta against certain Jews, including the publisher of the Neue Freie Presse. But Kraus’s Jewish problem seems to me at most a supporting element in his larger project – his exposure of Austrian hypocrisies and corruption, his championing of language and literature he considered authentic and underappreciated. And although there was certainly plenty to be angry about in Austrian society; most people find ways to keep their anger from consuming their lives. You could understand a Viennese laborer with a sixty-hour work-week in bad conditions being enraged. But the privileged and sociable Kraus?

 

I wonder if he was so angry because he was so privileged. In “Nestroy and Posterity,’ the Great Hater defends his hatred like this: ‘acid wants a gleam, and the rust says it’s only being corrosive.’ Kraus hated bad language because he loved good language – because he had the gifts- both intellectual and financial, to cultivate that love. And the person who’s been lucky in life can’t help expecting the world to keep going his way; when the world insists ongoing wrong ways, corrupt and tasteless ways, he feel as betrayed by it. He could have enjoyed a good life if only the bad world hasn’t spoiled it. And so he gets angry, and the anger itself then further isolates him and heightens his sense of specialness. Being angry at newspapers beloved by the bourgeoisie was away for Kraus to say ‘I don’t belong to you’ to a bourgeoisie whose upward striving  was uncomfortably close to his own. His anger at privileged writers who pulled strings to escape combat in the First World War was a kind of homeopathic attack on the even greater privilege that he himself enjoyed, the privilege of a morally pure medical excuse not to serve. He was a journalist  who savaged other journalists, most of whom, unlike him, had to work for a living. Anger relieved some of the discomfort of his own privilege, by reassuring him that he was also a victim.

Kraus, like any artist, wanted above all to be an individual, and his anger can further be seen as a violent shrugging-off of categories that threatened his individual integrity.  His privilege was just one of these categories. As the scholar Edward Timms  writes in his magisterial study of Kraus, ‘He was a Jew by birth, an Austrian by nationality, a Viennese by residence, a German by language, a journalist by profession, bourgeois by social status and a rentier by economic position. Amid the ideological turmoil of Austria-Hungary, all of these ascribed identities seemed like falsifications.’ For much of his life Kraus was defiantly anti-political; he seemed to form professional alliances  almost with the intention of later torpedoing them spectacularly; and he was  given to paradoxical utterances like ‘It is known that my hatred of the Jewish press is exceeded only by my  hatred of the anti-Semitic press, while my hatred of the anti-Semitic press is exceeded only by my hatred of the Jewish press.’ Since it is also known that Kraus’s favorite play was King Lear, I wonder if he might have seen his own fate in Cordelia, the cherished late child who loves the king and who, precisely because she’s been the privileged daughter, secure in the king’s love, his the personal integrity to refuse to debase her language and lie to him in his dotage. Privilege set Kraus, too, on the road to being an independent individual, but the world seemed bent on thwarting him. It disappointed him the way Lear disappoints Cordelia, and in Kraus this became a recipe for anger. In his yearning for a better world, in which true individuality was possible, he kept applying the acid of his anger to everything that was false.

 

Let me turn to my own example, since I’ve been reading it into Kraus’s story anyway.

I was a late child in a loving family that, although it wasn’t nearly prosperous enough to make me a rentier, did have enough money to place me in a good public school district and send me to an excellent college, where I learned to love literature and language. I was a white male heterosexual with good friends and perfect health, and beyond all this I had the immeasurably good fortune not only to discover very early what I wanted to do with my life but to have the freedom and talent to pursue it. I had such an embarrassment of riches that I can barely stand to enumerate them here. And yet, for all my privileges, I became an extremely angry person. Anger descended on me so near in time to when I fell in love with Kraus’s writings that the two occurrences are practically indistinguishable.

I wasn’t born angry. If anything, I was born the opposite. It may sound like an exaggeration, but I think it is accurate to say that I knew nothing about anger until I was twenty-two. As an adolescent, I’d had moments of sullenness and rebellion against authority, but, like Kraus, I’d had minimal conflict with my father, and the worst that could be said of me and my mother was that we bickered like an old married couple. Real anger, anger as a way of life, was foreign to me until one particular afternoon in April 1982. I was on a deserted train platform in Hannover. I’d come from Munich and was waiting for a train to Berlin, it was a dark gray German day, and I took a handful of of German coins out of my pocket and started throwing them on the platform. There was an element of anti-German hostility in this, because I’d recently had a horrible experience with a penny-pinching old German woman, and it did me good to imagine other penny-pinching German women bending down to pick the coins up, as I knew they would, and thereby aggravating their knee and hip pains. The way I hurled the coins, though, was more generally angry. I was angry at the world in a way I’d never been before. The proximate cause of my anger was my failure to have sex with an unbelievably pretty girl in Munich, except that it hadn’t actually been a failure, it had been a decision on my part. A few hours later, on the platform in Hannover, I marked my entry into the life that came after that decision by throwing away my coins. Then I boarded a train and went back to Berlin and enrolled in a class on Karl Kraus.

Paul Reitter kindly refines my theory and elaborates:

“Kraus hated his fellow German –Jewish writers for many reasons, not the least of which was that they wasted what he himself was so determined to use: privilege. Certainly many German-Jewish writers had money troubles, and Kraus, to his credit, was quite sensitive to the problem of penury – he helped keep the (German-Jewish) poets Peter Altenberg and Else Lasker-Schuler afloat. Yet a lot fin de siecle Germa-Jewish authors were as Kraus saw it, like him: well positioned to take some risks. Like him (and say Stefan Zweig), they were the children of the newly emancipated and prosperous Grunderzeit (industrial boom of the mid-19^th century) generation. If their fathers often tried to steer them into business, as Kraus suggests in his drama Literatur, there were resources to fall back on, something that ultimately made turning to letters much easier. Nor was there any lack of talent; Kraus always claimed that the German-Jewish literati had an abundance of that. But despite having so many advantages, these writers mostly chose to play it safe, reinforcing a bad paradigm of feutilletonism* or parroting the latest style of expressionism, while treating such cultural authorities as the Neue Freie Presse with servile respect. The psychological needs and assimilationist tendencies that drove German-Jewish authors to do this were of interest to Kraus: hence the play Literatur, which Kafka esteemed and which, in fact, inspired his famous meditations on the ‘terrible inner state’ of German-Jewish writers. However, those needs and tendencies didn’t excuse anything. As motives for bad linguistic behavior, they struck Kraus as tawdry.

“Could there be similar dynamics – minus the Jewish element- operating in some of our own contemporary literary scenes? The anecdotal evidence keeps piling up. Let’s say that someone has given you a recent novel. You can’t recall seeing reviews of this book, but it looks like a high-end production. The press that published it was a very good one, and on its covers are blurbs from respected figures in the world of letters. Would you be surprised to learn that the author of the novel lives in Park Slope with a husband and two children? Would you be surprised to read, on the author’s website, that she grew up in Lake Forest, was educated at Brown, and teaches writing as an adjunct at the New School? When I encounter such author information, I sometimes wonder how the economics work. Advances are small, book sales are declining, teaching jobs don’t pay well, and Park Slope is very expensive, as are kids. Maybe the family is just getting by. But in an age of soaring college tuition and health insurance costs, not many people from an affluent background are willing to take upon themselves the hazards of real, open-ended downward mobility. Maybe, then, the husband is a lawyer or in finance. Yet mixed couples aren’t the norm, I’m told. If the husband is a fellow author, it may well be that the couple has gotten help from its baby-boomer parents. And if that’s so, writing doesn’t, and probably won’t ever pay the bills.

 

‘Yet there is still the desire as well as the pressure to succeed. For literati, as for professors of literature, the increasingly steep straight path to recognizable signs of accomplishment is to produce conventional work of high quality. I enjoy a lot of writing created on this route, and I’m not about to echo Kraus’s apocalyptic condemnation of the talented authors who take it. What feels sad, nevertheless, is that at a time when a relatively small percentage of the New York literary scene appears to be supporting itself through its writing, a high percentage of the scene is so very cautious. Indeed, the scene routinely demands of itself and others both cautiousness and the display of the most uncontroversial virtues (balance, moderation, warmth, etc.). God forbid that a novelist should be a little mean to her characters. Much more than in previous ward, we find such authorial harshness framed  as reason enough for a (cautiously) negative review. Of course, sometimes the calls for niceness are themselves nasty. But in the more  august places, that’s certainly not the norm. One can be generally for civility in reviewing and still be alarmed by the fact of a measured, polite, unfavorable appraisal of Joseph Anton, which appeared in The New York Review of Books (and exhibits a particular dislike for the ‘egregiously uncharitable treatment of exes in Rushdie’s memoir), could in notoriety as a full-on  ‘takedown’ job. Or consider that a few years ago, the critic and novelist Dale Peck got a lot of attention merely being rude to some well-known writers. Consider also that even as a brilliant a reviewer as the late John Leonard has been posthumously taken to task for the immoderation that was a function of his exuberance. So what if his riffing and ranting wasn’t always comprehensible? It was unfailingly fun, and the style was his alone. But it made Leonard’s Times reviewer ‘ yearn for a more straightforward or prioritized analysis.’ Because, of course, critics should all sound more or less alike.’

I might add that the tyranny of niceness, in contemporary fiction, is enforced by the terror of the Internet and is ninth-grade social dynamics. Writers afraid of running a foul of the bloggers and the tweeters, of becoming universally ‘known’ as not a nice person, can defend themselves with laudable sentiments: literacy and self-expression are good, bigotry is bad, working people are the salt of the earth, love is more important than money, technology is fun, animals have feelings, children are less corrupt than adults, and so on. To attempt a harsh critique of the electronic system that reduces writers to these bromides is to risk having it become common ‘knowledge’ that you’re a hater, a loner, not one of us.




*The term feuilleton was invented by the editors of the French Journal des débats; Julien Louis Geoffroy and Bertin the Elder, in 1800. The feuilleton has been described as a "talk of the town", and a contemporary English-language example of the form is the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker.