private lives, impersonal authors

 

When the New Criticism was at its height in the postwar period, a lotta intellectual energy was devoted to dispelling belles lettres and its tiresome construction of the author as the constant reference point for the work. In choosing between life and the work, the New Criticism robustly chose the work, and purged fantasies of authorial intention as much as they could. The Eliotic impersonality of the author was the ideal. What did the text say? That was the question. Not: what did the author want?

Yet, concurrently with the feverish coldness of the cult of impersonality, outside of academia, celebrity culture was moving in precisely the opposite direction. Just as the actor in a movie overshadowed the character he or she is playing (so that we often speak of Humphrey Bogart in x movie or Marilyn Monroe in y movie with little regard for the names of the characters in x or y movie), so, too, the publicity machine was rolling out countless personal facts and quirks about authors.

Joseph Roth, in 1929, was already writing about this. In an essay entitled “The Private Life”, Roth wrote: “For some years I have struggled, vainly, not to know about the private life of contemporary authors.”

For Roth, the fortress of privacy around the individual was being dissolved in the twentieth century by the medias in which we all bathe. He spots, in the discussion of authors, the kind of stereotypical motifs that introduce us to the lives of actors or politicians:

“Thus, for example, the important author Döblin, whose public influence is without doubt interesting enough, almost never introduced in regards to his books without the assertion that begins: he is a neurologist and practices in the North of Berlin. The repulsive and childish arrogance of the intrusive writing, who is so “well informed”, is everywhere unconstrained. The writer has to announce it – and even, at each occasion, with a foolish, joyful cry: aha! I knew it! A worker’s doctor in the North – thus diminishing the meaning of the author just as much as he devalues his necessary distance from the public. Compared to this barbarism, the mockable efforts of an eager Germanist to uncover superfluous trivialities out of the private life of his object of study are gestures of an aristocratic delicatesse.”

We could bookend the literary culture of modernism by putting, on one side, the impersonal artist of the New Critics, and on the other side, the Life magazine adoring portraits of authors. The Hemingways and Scott Fitzgeralds, who, in the American context, are the celebrity authors par excellence, stars in the Hollywood mold. They played themselves and they wrote. But what they wrote was only who they were.

Roth was of course concerned about literature, but not just literature. His notion was that the private life, with all its splendours and miseries, was being de-formed by being subject to the thousandfold pokings of the media, businesses, and the state. The harm in this for literature, to Roth, was self-evident: “for it has already become customary to view the writer a such a priori in terms of his private life.”

Live by the buzz, die by the buzz.

In this period, the late twenties and early thirties, Roth was withdrawing from his earlier fellow traveling sentiments and trying to find a politics to stand on against the Nazis and the Stalinists. This was his vector. Out of the loss of the private life, Roth foresaw the loss of the meaning of life entirely.;

“Nothing makes an author hotter than his quality as an “eyewitness” of the events that he is treating. Since some time, book reviewers have loved to give particular praise to those books which aren’t books – meaning: the lack of a literary quality qualifies as a plus. Then they pull out the slogan: This book is more than a novel! It is a piece of life!

What does that mean? More than a novel?

Within literature a piece of life only receives value when it has been given a worthy form. An unformed “piece of life” is not more than a novel, but less: it is nothing, it doesn’t even come into the picture. Or one begins to publish the written correspondence of paramilitary murders… They are so neat, round, juicy pieces of life! And literature has ceased to exist.”

The Clock Repairman's gesture

 
In his essay, A kaddish for Austria: On Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald zeroes in on a bit of personal trivia (one of those bits that operate as signatures of some nameless process) that he gets from Roth’s biographer:

“Bronsen reported that Roth collected clocks randomly; and that fooling with clocks in his final years grew into a mania. What fascinated Roth with clocks was condensed into his last piece of published prose in the first weekend of April, 1939  in the Pariser Tageszeitung.”
The essay – one of those feuilleton of which Roth was one of the great masters – was entitled “At the clock repairs shop.” Sebald takes the piece as revelatory of something essential in Roth’s conception of the artist – or storyteller:

„Thus he sat, like the clock repairman, with a magnifying glass stuck in place before his eye, and looed into the broken wonderwork of wheels and gears, “as if he gazed through a blackframed hole into a distant past”. The clock repairman’s hope, like that of the writer, ist that by a small turn of the wrist [durch einen winzigen Eingriff] he can bring everything back to the beginning to restart it all in its correctly intended order.”

That’s a powerfully nostalgic and hopelessly anachronistic image of the power of the writer. Especially given the historical circumstances in Paris at the time, the Paris in which Roth was drinking himself to death, sensing the mass death to come. Our own sense of the mass death to come has now been sucked into the mass media and banalized as a zombie apocalypse, which is also, in its way, something Roth foresaw – or rather saw about his own time. In an essay that Michael Hoffman has not, I believe, englished, “Self-critique”, from 1929, Roth described his realism as the realism of the irrealism of his time – a time in which the self has hollowed itself out. The artistic response to this, Roth wrote, was to bring the reader face to face with that most difficult of all things to represent: boredom. The essay begins on a typically hard to measure sentence: “It is in some ways painful to deal with an extraordinarily good writer, such as myself, without severity and blame.” Roth goes on to say that his book, Right and Left, has hardly any beginning, really no end, has no characters and no psychology. It is not that he feels that there are no books with beginnings, ends, characters and psychology – the 19^th century epic novel up to Proust has them – but Roth believes that this is no longer possible in the world in which he and the reader exist. The substance of the reader’s grandparents is of a different type from the substance-lessness of his contemporaries.

„But I have attempted – on the contrary – to produce in my reader a certain feeling of boredom, which is a necessary consequence of linguistic precision and the effort to portray the hollowness of the present not convexly, not to present the insubstantability of our contemporaries as “tragic” or “daemonic” but instead to precisely mirror the hopelessness of this world.”

One could say that Roth is enjoying a little too much his stay at the Hotel Grand Abyss. He was a man who knew Europe’s hotels, eventually making his circuit of the sleaziest among them. Still, there is something in the connection between boredom and Roth’s sense of the impending pogram. Perhaps the boredom is the necessary preface. It is a boredom that emerges from the planned system of excitement, which had its model, in the twenties, in the hypermodernity of Berlin. And which is now our wonderful world.

Or so says one mood. Another mood is: fuck that. Expropriate that boredom. Use it against the military-industrial perpetual entertainment complex. Stand up.

The colonized and the exiled

Normally, histories of Europe talk about colonialism in terms of a mother country, or center, and a periphery. But in actuality, the periphery was located in Europe itself. It was located in Europe’s peasantry. Colonialism and the agricultural revolution in Europe are parts of the same process – the process that gave us capitalism and, more generally, the process of production that has become the norm, either achieved or striven for, across ideologies, for the last century.

The doubling of the European and the American savage is the secret heart of the noble savage myth. While conventional histories attribute the noble savage idea, wrongly, to Rousseau, and attribute the savagery solely to the Indians, in actuality the topos was as much about the European peasant, about the laws and norms concerning the forest and the field, which is what Europe largely was, as much as America, up through the 17th century in England and France. And of course all through the 19th century for much of Prussia and Austro-Hungary, Italy and Spain. The peasant was always considered a savage by the city intellectual – Engels called them simply stupid, idiots, clowns (a word for rustic in the 16th century, from, one school holds, colōnus “farmer, settler – from which comes, of course, colony) - and in Vienna, around 1900, intellectuals would say things like Vienna lives in the 20th century while Galician peasants live in the fifteenth.

I’ve been thinking about this as I’m reading Claudio Magris excellent study of Joseph Roth and the culture of exiles from the Ostjuden. It is from Magris book that I learned that Roth, who was born in a shtetl, wrote an impassioned study in 1927, Juden auf Wanderschaft, of the culture and immigration of Jews from the shtetl. It begins with thunderously excommunicating introduction that reminds me very much of the Black power high notes of the 1960s:

“This book waives all applause and approval, but also even the contradictions and criticism of those who disregard, disrespect, hate and persecute the Eastern European Jews. It is not turned to those Western Europeans who, out of the fact that they were born to elevators and toilets, deduce the right to make bad jokes about Romanian lice, Galician bedbugs, and Russian fleas. This book waives as well the “objective” reader, who with his cheap and sour good intentions squints at the East and its inhabitants from the shaky towers of Western civilization; lamenting, out of pure humanity, the lack of good sewage and out of fear of infection wants to imprison the poor immigrants in barracks, leaving the solution of a social problem to mass death. This book will not be read by those who deny their own father or grandfather, who through chance escaped from the barracks. This book is not written for a reader who will take it badly of the author that he treated the object of his study with love instead of “scientific empiricism”, which is another name for boredom. “

The kickass and risky gambit of telling off your reader from the first sentence – that is how you know you are reading a writer for whom books and molotov cocktails are interchangeable. Or at least, who knows that this is one circuit of exchange.

Magris’s book, which in French is Loin d’ou, hasn’t, I think, been translated from Italian to English. Too bad. It prods a thickly covered historical lacuna: under the murder of the European Jews there was a culture that we miss more and more today, a culture in which the dialectic between the prophet – the magghid – and modernity’s “symbol workers” was seeded with ways of thinking through an escape from the ruthless cruelty of the modern treadmill of production. This too was murdered.