closed out of inclusion
by
Douglas Messerli
Marjorie
Perloff Edge of Irony: Modernism in the
Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
In her newest
critical work Marjorie Perloff, as she did a few years back in her
autobiographical study, The Vienna
Paradox, again hones in on her Austrian roots; but this time her focus is
not on family—although her grandfather, Richard Schüller, pre-World War I
Austrian Sektionschef for commerce,
does make a brief appearance—but is an intense study of the transition after
World War I from the former Habsburg Empire to the small country of today’s
Austria.
The former Empire, Perloff makes clear,
while providing a solid German-language education to its citizens, was a
multi-lingual world with a wide-range of languages; accordingly the writers we
now perceive as some of the most noted German-language figures of the
century—Perloff centers her study on Karl Krauss, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil,
Elias Canetti, Paul Celan, and, as a “coda” Ludwig von Wittgenstein—spoke
several languages, coming as they did from the far corners of that empire, none
of them born or raised in Vienna. What these writers have in common, the author
makes clear, is a sophisticated education within a multi-cultural perspective
that allowed for intellectual perceptions that, in their erotic, linguistic,
and, most importantly, ironic viewpoints, were far different from the more
analytical and political concerns of authors of the German Weimar Republic. As
Perloff expresses it:
Weimar was the workshop for radical ideas, from Marxist theory
to Heidegger’s ontological
exploration of being-in-the-world to
the film theory of Kracauer, Rudolf
Arnheim, and Benjamin himself.
But that is not to say that
Austro-Modernism, from Freud and
Wittgenstein and Kraus, to Musil and
Roth, to Celan and Bachmann,
is to be understood as a weaker
version of the strong intellectual
formation of the Weimer Republic. It
was merely different. Given
the particular situation of the
Habsburg Empire and its dis-
solution, given the eastern (and
largely Jewish) origins of its
writers, it developed in another
direction, its hallmark being a
profound skepticism about the power
of government—any gov-
ernment or, for that matter,
economic system—to reform human
life. In Austro-Modernist fiction
and poetry, irony—an irony linked
less to satire (which posits the
possibility for reform) than to a sense
of the absurd—is thus the dominant
mode. The writer’s situation is
perceived not as a mandate for change—change that is always, for
the Austrians, under suspicion—but
as an urgent opportunity for
for probing analysis of fundamental
desires and principles.
The writers she explores, all assimilated
Jews (some of whom were even anti-Semitic) had been given, no matter whether
they grew up in Czernowitz in Bukovina (later Romania, now part of Ukraine),
Brody in the former Galicia (later part of Poland, now Ukraine), Brno (now the
Czech Republic), Ruse (now in Bulgaria), or even as a London schoolboy, were
classically educated in the German tradition; but their rich cultural
backgrounds, along with their sudden sense of exile after World War I, made
them far different writers than those who came of age in Germany itself,
producing what Perloff hints, and I would more forcibly argue, a richer and
denser, and certainly far more erotic sense of experience.
These writers’ works may often seem, on
the surface, less experimental than the European Dada, Futurist, and Surrealist
writers; Kraus, Perloff argues, was often an early conceptualist, using (a bit
like the American writer John Dos Passos) found materials; both Musil and Roth
created highly plotted fictions whose stories interwove characters and events
that, sometimes like musical symphonies, repeated and reiterated literary
themes; Canetti used the autobiographical form to explore his literary
concerns; Celan, in an argument by Perloff which surely might raise some
hackles, wrote several of what she describes as “love poems” (she also offers
us her own translations, which are fascinating for rendering his often clotted
poems in translation much more clearly); and the philosopher Wittgenstein who,
as we know, did not so much postulate philosophical concepts as question and
challenge ideas in his notebooks, dialogues, and propositions.
Perloff engages us in separate chapters
on every one of these important writers, exploring their differences in terms
of their cultural Habsburg Empire backgrounds rather than the more standard approaches
of their religious or other later national identities. It is important, the
critic reminds us, to comprehend even Kafka’s work in the context of the
Empire, rather than simply describing him as a German language Czech fabulist
and absurdist.
Although Perloff is clearly better on
writing about Kraus, Roth, Canetti, and Wittgenstein (on whom she previously
devoted an entire book in Wittgenstein’s
Ladder) than the always difficult and encyclopedic Musil—I’m convinced it
is nearly impossible to write a simple essay on Musil’s vast and unfinished
fiction which, like Proust, simply is best read than talked about—and the word-packed
Celan (Perloff, to give her credit, does perceive him as a dense Holocaust
poet, but simply features his not as dense love poems), all of her insights are
memorable, and, to me, explain why I myself have always preferred Austrian
literature (including pre-World War I writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, as
well as post-World War II writers such as Heimito von Doderer, Albert-Paris Gütersloh, Ingeborg Bachmann (to
whom a great many of Celan’s poems were written), Thomas Bernhard, and Peter
Handke—many of whom I have published and also written about--as opposed to
Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and other
Germans.
Obviously, one doesn’t need to state a
preference for one group of German-language authors over another, since all of
these are important figures in world literature (and I have also more recently
published a great many former East German poets, who wrote out of their own
sense of exile). It is simply that the post-Habsburg world of desire and ironic
loss is, for me, far more appealing. And thanks to Perloff’s brilliant new
study, I now understand why.
Los Angeles,
September 8, 2016
