Jonathan Franzen - The Kraus Project

Instrument made into ornament, and so badly degenerated that even the current mania for decorating consumer goods can scarcely keep up with the progress of applied art in the daily press; because at least we have yet to hear that the Wiener Werkstätte is manufacturing burglary tools. 11 And even in the style of the most up-to-the-minute impressionistic journalism the Heinean model does not disavow itself. Without Heine, no feuilleton. 12 This is the French disease he smuggled in to us. 13 How easy it is to get sick in Paris! How lax the morality of the German feel for language becomes! The French language lets every filou have his way with her. You have to prove yourself a man in full before the German language will give you the time of day, and that’s only the beginning of the trouble you’re in for. With French, though, everything goes smoothly, with that perfect lack of inhibition which is perfection in a woman and a lack in a language. And the Jacob’s ladder that leads to her is a climax you’ll find in the German dictionary: Geschmeichel, Geschmeide, Geschmeidig, Geschmeiß. 14 Anybody and everybody can procure her services for the feuilleton. She’s a lazy Susan of the mind. The most well-grounded head isn’t safe from flashes of inspiration when it deals with her. We get everything from languages, because they contain everything that can become thought. Language arouses and stimulates, like a woman, brings joy and, with it, thought. 15 The German language, however, is a companion who will think and make poetry only for the man who can give her children. You wouldn’t want to be married like this to any German housewife. And yet the woman of Paris need say nothing except, at the crucial moment, très jolie, and you’ll believe anything of her. Her mind is in her face. And if her partner had beauty in his brain as well, Romance life would not be merely très jolie but fecund, ringed not by bibelots and dainties, but by deeds and monuments. 16

If they say of a German author that he must have learned a lot from the French, this is the highest praise only if it isn’t true. For it means: he’s indebted to the German language for what the French gives to everybody. People here are still being linguistically creative when people over there are already playing with the children, who came blowing in, nobody knows how. But ever since Heinrich Heine imported the trick, it’s been purely an exercise in diligence if a German feuilletonist goes to Paris to fetch himself some talent. 17 If somebody nowadays actually goes to Rhodes because people dance better there, he is truly an excessively conscientious swindler. That was still necessary in Heine’s day. You’d been to Rhodes, and back here people believed that you could dance. 18 Today they’ll believe that a cripple who has never left Vienna can dance the cancan, and many a person who never had a single good finger now plays the viola. 19 The profitable return on distance from the reader should never be underestimated, and foreign milieus continue to be what gets taken for art. People are very talented in the jungle, and talent begins in the East around the time you reach Bucharest. 20 The writer who knocks the dust off foreign costumes is getting at the fascination of the material in the most convenient way imaginable. And so a reader with a brain has the strongest distrust imaginable of storytellers who knock about in foreign milieus. The best-case scenario continues to be that they weren’t there; but most of them are unfortunately so constituted that they actually have to take a trip in order to tell a story. Of course, to have spent two years in Paris isn’t merely the advantage of such Habakkuks, it’s their definition. 21 They strew the drifting sand of French, which finds its way into the pockets of every dolt, into the eyes of German readers. And let the inverse of an epigram of Nestroy, 22 this true satirical thinker, apply to them: things go well enough from Paris to St. Pölten, but from there to Vienna the road gets very long! 23 (If the local swindlers don’t make a killing of their own along this stretch.) 24 Now, with Paris, not only the content was acquired but the form as well. The form, though—this form that is only an envelope for the content, not the content itself; that is merely dress for the body, not flesh to the spirit—this form only had to be discovered once for it to be there for all time. Heinrich Heine took care of that, and thanks to him our gentlemen no longer need betake themselves to Paris. You can write feuilletons today without having personally sniffed your way to the Champs Élysées. The great trick of linguistic fraud, which in Germany pays far better than the greatest achievement of linguistic creativity, keeps working in generation after generation of newspapers, furnishing casual readers everywhere with the most agreeable of excuses for avoiding literature. 25 Talent flutters aimlessly in the world and gives sweet nourishment to the philistine’s hatred of genius. Writing feuilletons means twining curls on a bald head; but these curls please the public better than a lion’s mane of thoughts. Esprit and charm, which presumably were necessary in developing the trick and becoming adept at it, are now passed on by it automatically. With an easy hand, Heine pushed open the door to this dreadful development, and the magician who brought talent within reach of the unendowed surely himself doesn’t stand all that far above the development. 26

The trick keeps working. Paralleling the kitschification of practical life via ornament, as traced by the good American Adolf Loos, is an interlarding of journalism with intellectual elements, but here the resulting confusion is even more catastrophic. 27 Instead of draining the press intellectually and restoring to literature the juices that were “extracted” from it—extorted from it—the progressive world proceeds ever afresh with the renovation of its intellectual decorations. The literary ornament doesn’t get demolished, it gets modernized in the Wiener Werkstätten of the mind. Feuilleton, mood reporting, fluff pieces—the motto “Feather Thy Nest” 28 brings the poetic flourish, too, into the homes of the masses. And nothing is more important to journalism than restoring the gloss, again and again, to the glaze of corruption. The more it adds to the profiteer’s intellectual and material wealth, the greater its need to cloak its ill intentions pleasingly. In this, the Mind itself lends a hand, sacrificing itself, as does the spirit that was stolen from the Mind. A Sunday edition’s catch can no longer take place without dangling the highest of literary values as bait, the Economist no longer goes in for robbery unless the surviving representatives of culture act as fences. 29 But far more disgraceful than literature’s marching in the triumph of this pillage, far more dangerous than this attachement of intellectual authority to the villainy, is the villainy’s interlarding, its gilding, with the Mind, which it has siphoned off from literature and which it drags along through the local pages and all the other latrines of public opinion. The press as a social institution—since it’s simply unavoidable that the dearth of imagination get filled up with facts—would have its place in the progressive order. But what does the news that it rained in Hong Kong have to do with the Mind? And why does an arranged stock-market catastrophe or a small extortion or even just the unpaid suppression of a fact demand the entire grand apparatus, in which academics don’t shy from collaborating and for which even aesthetes will hustle so hard that their feet sweat? That train stations or public toilets, works of utility and necessity, are cluttered up with decorative junk is tolerable. But why are thieves’ dens fitted out by van de Velde? 30 Only because their purpose would otherwise be obvious at a glance, and passersby would not willingly have their pockets turned inside out twice a day. 31 Curiosity is always stronger than caution, and so the chicanery dolls itself up in tassels and lace.

Читать дальше