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.
“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 dissolution, 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 government
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
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions
(September 2016).
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