The Kraus Project. Jonathan Franzen

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СКАЧАТЬ catalogue of every feeling in the world.45 The buffoon who was banished from the stage, but went on cracking jokes behind the tragic hero as he was leaving, seems fused with the hero for an epoch, amusing himself in a style that reaches into his own heart and, in a strangely suspended tone, almost like Jean Paul’s, sustains the joke that’s being perpetrated here with horror.

      FRAU VON ZYPRESSENBURG: Is one’s father a hunter, too?—TITUS: No, he runs a quiet, solitary business in which resting is his only work; he lies fettered by a higher power, and yet he’s free and independent because he’s disposing of himself;—he’s dead.—FRAU VON ZYPRESSENBURG (aside): How profligately he uses twenty lofty words to say what can be said with one syllable. The man obviously has the makings of an author.

      And it is the loftiest yet tersest paraphrasing of a monosyllabic condition, the way the words here play around death. This blurred emotionality, which Nestroy breathes into the most modest of his characters’ asides, has led literary historians to think that his wit is aimed at their noble impulses.46 In truth, it’s aimed only at their phrases. Nestroy is the first German satirist in whom language forms thoughts about things. He liberates language from its lockjaw, and for every cliché it turns him a profit in thought. Indicative are such expressions as:

      “Good thing I drownded my sorrows, or despair woulda driven me straightaway to drink.”

      Or:

      “The apples go over here! People got no idea how to organdize. They go mixin’ up apples and oranges like apples and oranges.”

      Language is making fun of itself here. The cliché is driven back into the hypocritical convention that created it:

      “All right, out with your decision, my sweet”—“But Herr von Lips, I really must first…”—“I understand, there can be no talk of refusing, but to say yes, you think some deliberation is in order.”

      The cliché inverts itself into truth:

      “I’ve shared adversity with you; it’s now my most sacred duty to stick with you in good times, too!”

      Or, debased to neologism, the language of the upper classes is caricatured by language from the mouths of the unrefined:

      “All of a sudden, here comes a first-magnitude starlet and makes her societal splash at the pinnacle of the ambulatory entreprise…”

      How merely changing a tense suffices for an intention like this can be seen in an inspired example in which “not mincing one’s words” corrects itself. An interpenetration of problem and content:

      “Be bold in your demands, speak openly, without having minced your words!”

      Nestroy’s people speak bombastically when the joke wants to subvert cliché or counteract demagogic emotionality:

      “Oh, I want to be a dreadful servant for thee!”

      He has every domestic speak Schiller sentences, to sober the emotional life of the principals. Often, however, it’s as if the tragic hero had been standing behind the buffoon, for the emotion seems to side with the joke. Genuine matters of the heart are being treated when an office clerk approaches a milliner as if on his way to Eboli’s room:47

      “Your servant’s looking daggers at me—does he know about our former love?”

      Joke and high emotion go hand in hand, and if the times haven’t yet stimulated them to engender each other, they still never cancel each other. To be sure, the poet doesn’t elevate his own wit, unaltered, into his own emotion, but he strengthens it with someone else’s. The two of them play and release each other mutually unharmed. When Nestroy makes light of feeling, we can trust him, and when his wit cuts short a love scene, he disposes of and replaces every other love scene that could have occurred in a similar situation. Where, in a German farce, after the engagement of master and mistress, have the necessities between manservant and maidservant ever been accomplished in fewer words:

      “Why are you looking at me like that?”—“She’s in the service of my future mistress, I’m in the service of her future master, I just toss that out, as various consequentialities could arise from it.”—“Time will tell.”

      And if the aim is to demonstrate, in passages of Nestroyan dialogue, his accelerated method of psychology, where does a scene like this one between a cobbler and a servant stand:

      “Congratulations on the secret jackpot, or whatever it was, but honestly, I was flabbergasted.”—“So was the innkeeper, no less! He made an even stupider face than you. I bet you I could be into him for ten francs now and he wouldn’t dare say anything … Yessiree, to ask for change from a ducat, it arouses respect.”—“Strange! (aside) But suspicions, too … Our master has disappeared. A ducat comes to light among the proletariat … Hm … You’re a cobbler?”—“So they say.”—“And I suppose you made good on a long shot?”—“Oh, you’re probably wondering how an honest cobbler came by a ducat?”—“Well, it is extraordinary … I mean, that is to say, interesting…”—“As a stranger, it’s actually none of your business … but, no, to me, anybody I meet in an inn is a kindred soul. (Shaking his hand) You shall know everything.”—(In inquisitive suspense) “Well, so?”—“You see, the thing is, there’s an incident at the bottom of this … a fundamentally horrible incident that no man on earth may ever learn of, and consequently not you, either.”—“Yes, but…”—“So show yourself worthy of my trust and probe no further!”

      Such values are lost and forgotten. As everywhere in art, and above all in theater, scarcity of time has accustomed audiences to ponderousness.48 Only this would enable the intellect, weary from business, to procure those further pleasures that it has so long regarded as the task of dramatic high art to provide: getting acquainted with the latest advances in psychology, a psychology that is only psychrology,49 the science of coming to terms with mysteries in a rational way, bored amid excitement by instructors, dying amid beauty of boredom, from the French rule de tri to the Nordic integral equation.50 No theatergoer managing to go to bed without the necessary knotty problem. And meanwhile naturalism, which not only met the psychological requirements but satisfied other demands for home use by calling things by their proper names, exhaustively, with nothing left out, while fate hung on the wall like a pendulum clock keeping perfect time. All of this so thoroughly and at such length, until the vengeance of the fettered bourgeois imagination finally vented itself in the psychological operetta.51 In the most out-of-the-way corner of a Nestroyan farce there is more expert feeling for a scene and a better view into the stage-flies of higher worlds than in the repertoire of a German decade. Hauptmann and Wedekind stand as poets, like the pre-Nestroyan Raimund, above considerations of theatrical utility.52 The influence of Anzengruber and his successors is detached at its own risk from the saving grace of dialect.53 Nestroy’s dialect is an artistic tool, not a crutch. You can’t translate his language, but you could reduce the authors of folk plays to their scene value in Standard German. Only a literary historian is capable of discerning an advance over Nestroy in this. But the idea that this man, even if his exploitation for the meaner purposes of theatrical pleasure were to meet with ingratitude, can be so much as mentioned as an intellectual personality in the company of those very things that have Hand and Heart or Faith and HomeСКАЧАТЬ