Jonathan Franzen - The Kraus Project

“She don’t believe in the comet, she’s in for an eye-opener…”

he continues:

“I’ve had the thing figured out for quite a while now. The astral fire of the solar ring in the golden number of Urion has left the constellation of the planetary system in the universe of parallaxes and landed, by means of fixed-star quadrants, in the ellipse of the ecliptic; in consequence, according to the diagonals of approximation of the perpendicular rings, the next comet will have to smash into the earth. My calculations are as clear as shoe polish…”

And sound as plausible as if Nestroy had studied the problem of the “Grubenhund” at its journalistic source. 61 The sentence, just as it is, eighty years later, when the astronomers again personally came hither in a comet’s stead, could have been printed in the Neue Freie Presse. 62 I also reserve the right to send it in sometime. But even beyond this kind of applicability in urgent cases, Nestroy won’t become obsolete. For he took such accurate note of human nature’s weakness that posterity could feel observed by him, too, if it hadn’t grown a thick skin in the meantime. No wisdom can get through to it, but it has itself tattooed with enlightenment. And thus it considers itself more beautiful than the Vormärz. 63 But since enlightenment comes off with soap, lies have to help out. This present day of ours never ventures out without a protective guard of historians to club down memory for it. What it most wants to hear is that the Vormärz compares to it like a candle hawker to an electricity company. Scientific truth would be better served, however, if the present day were told that the Vormärz is the light and the present day enlightenment. Among the dogmas of its presuppositionlessness is the belief that art indeed used to be gay but life is serious now. 64 And our times manage to be vain about even this. For, supposedly, in the theatrical season that constitutes the first half of the nineteenth century, people were interested solely in the affair of Demoiselle Palpiti vulgo Tichatschek, whereas now they’re generally enthusiastic about the affair of Professor Wahrmund and only occasionally about the Treumann affair. 65 If this is how things stand, long live the Vormärz! But there’s still another way to grasp the difference. In the age of absolutism, passion for theater was an outgrowth of the artistic feeling aroused by political suppression. In times of universal suffrage, theater gossip is the residue of a culture impoverished by political freedom. Comparing our notorious intellectual life to that of the Vormärz is such an unparalleled affront to the Vormärz that only the moral degeneracy left behind by fifty thousand performances of The Merry Widow can excuse the excess. The grand press alone has the right to look down with contempt on the little coffeehouse that used to spread, by laughably inadequate means, the gossip that people in those days couldn’t live without because politics were forbidden, while today people can’t live without it because politics are allowed. One decade of phraseological enslavement has supplied people’s imaginations with more stage-prop rubbish than a century of absolutist tyranny, with the important difference that intellectual productivity was furthered by prohibitions to the same degree that it’s now being crippled by the editorial page. But one shouldn’t imagine that people let themselves be marched off from the theater into politics so directly. The path of permissible play leads through pinochle. This the liberal educators must concede. How the rhetoric of Progress slips up and speaks the truth can be seen in the delicious comment of a moral historian from the eighties who rejects the roast-chicken era and serves up the fresh-baked seriousness of life as follows: 66

Times have changed since the days of Bäuerle, Meisl and Gleich, and although the old guard of unalloyed Viennese, the respectable families, may still scratch the theatrical itch that they inherited from “Grammerstädter, Biz, Hartriegel and Schwenninger” to the extent that they are wont never to miss a premiere at the Royal Temple of the Muses or a revival of Beiden Grasel at the Josefstadt, the main force of their compatriots has long since been diverted from the road to the theater by the most various of enticements, and devotes its free time to a game of Tapper, a meal at the local vineyard, or a production by a folksinging company that’s currently en vogue—times and people have changed. 67

Later on, life became even more serious, there came the issues, the Gschnas parties, 68 the geological discoveries, the American tour of the men’s glee club, and it will be important for even later times to learn: it was not in the Vormärz that the following announcement appeared in Viennese newspapers:

Yesterday’s competition at the “Dumb Fellow” saw the first prize go to Fräulein Luise Kemtner, sister of the well-known Hernals innkeeper Koncel, for the smallest foot (19½), and to Herr Moritz Mayer for the largest bald spot. Prizes will be awarded today for the narrowest lady’s waist and the biggest nose.

This is what Vienna looks like in 1912. Reality is a meaningless exaggeration of all the details that satire left behind fifty years ago. 69 But the nose is even bigger, the fellow is even dumber where he believes that he’s progressed, and the contest for the largest bald spot stands alongside the results of the Bauernfeld Prize as the image of a justice that recognizes true merit. 70 One glance into the new world as it’s manifested in one issue of the local roundup, one breath of this godless air of omniscience and omnipresence, will force the reproachful question: What does Nestroy have against his contemporaries? Truly, he’s ahead of himself. As if anticipating, he attacks his small environs with an asperity worthy of a later cause. He’s already coming into his satirical inheritance. Dawn is already breaking, here and there, on his gentle scenes, and he scents putrefaction in the morning air. He sees all those things coming up that won’t come up in order to be present, but will be present in order to climb. With what fervor he would have jumped on them if he’d found them fifty years later! The coziness that tolerates this kind of expansion, accommodates this kind of tourist trade, reveals its inner fraudulence in this kind of blending: what a caricature he would have made of the helpless malice of this innocent, cross-eyed face! 71 The farce of counterfeit authenticity cozying up to grand trends, rather than falling in line with them, has followed him like an epilogue; the all-blanketing haze of issues, which the times impose on themselves to while away eternity, smokes above his grave. He turned his mankind out of its little garden of paradise, but he doesn’t know yet how it will behave itself outside. He turns back in the face of a posterity that disavows the values of the Spirit, he doesn’t live to see the respectless intelligence that knows that technology is more important than beauty and doesn’t know that technology is at most a way to beauty, and that there can be no thanks at the destination, and that the ends are the means of forgetting the means. He can’t yet see that a time will come where girls take it like a man and their banished sexuality seeks refuge in men to revenge itself on nature. 72 Where talent wages a smear campaign against character, and education forgets its good upbringing. Where standards are universally raised and no one meets them. Where everyone has individuality and everyone the same, and hysteria is the glue that holds together the social order. But of all the issues that came after him—issues indispensable to mankind since it lost its legends—he did live to see politics. He was there when the noise got so loud that it raised the dead, which is always a signal that it’s time for the Spirit to go home to bed. This then produces a posterity that can’t be toured in even fifty years. The satirist could seize the great opportunity, but it no longer grasps him. What lives on is misunderstanding. Thanks to its artistic insensibility, Nestroy’s posterity does the same thing as his contemporaries, who were in material agreement with him: the latter took him for a topical jokester, while his posterity says he’s obsolete. He hits posterity and so it doesn’t recognize him. Satire lives between errors, between the one that’s too close to it and the one that it’s too far from. Art is what outlasts its subject matter. But the test of art becomes the test of times as well, and if past times in their succession always managed to experience art in their remoteness from its subject matter, these times of ours experience remoteness from art and hold the subject matter in their hands. For them, anything that isn’t telegraphed is over with. Their reporters replace their imagination. Because times that can’t hear language can judge only information value. They can still laugh at jokes, if they were personally party to the occasion. How are they, whose memory extends no further than their digestion, supposed to make the leap into anything that isn’t explained to them directly? Applying the mind to things that people no longer remember upsets their digestion. They grasp only with their hands. And machines make even hands unnecessary. The organs of these times oppose the calling of all art, which is to enter into the understanding of those who live afterward. There no longer are any people who live afterward, there are only people who live, who express enormous satisfaction that they do, that they live in a present that sees to its own news and conceals nothing from the future. Joyful as the morning paper, they crow upon the civilized dunghill that it’s no longer the concern of art to shape into a world. They have their own talent. If you’re a villain you don’t need honor, if you’re a coward you don’t need to be afraid, and if you have money you don’t need to have respect. Nothing is allowed to survive, immortality is what’s outlived itself. Things stick where they lie. Freaks with deformities balance out good fortune, because they can claim that heroes were hermaphrodites. 73 Herr Bernhard Shaw guarantees the superfluity of all that might prove useful between being awake and sleeping. To the irony of his and all shallow minds no depth is unfathomable, to the haughtiness of his and all flat minds no heights are unattainable. There’s earthly laughter everywhere. Satire, however, has the answer to such laughter. For it’s the art that, more than any other art, outlives itself, and this means the dead times, too. The harder the material, the greater the attack. The more desperate the struggle, the stronger the art. The satiric artist stands at the end of a development that renounces art. He is its product and its hopeless antithesis. 74 He organizes the Spirit’s flight from mankind, he is the rear guard. After him, the deluge. In the fifty years since Nestroy’s death, his spirit has experienced things that encourage it to go on living. It stands wedged in between the paunches of every profession, delivers monologues, and laughs metaphysically.