Читать книгу The Kraus Project - Джонатан Франзен, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Franzen - Страница 10

BETWEEN TWO STRAINS OF LIFE

FINAL WORD [TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES”]

To report the insignificant fact that “Heine and the Consequences” is in its third edition in seven years, after having been circulated in Die Fackel as well, is not the motive for this supplement.1 The wish is to append something else, which likewise, in the guise of a correction, allows the correctness of a deeper observation to be recognized for the first time.2 Everything that’s said here, and in every chapter about the loss of life in contemporary life and the linguistic betrayal of German humanity, has a train of thought leading to the brink of this war, thanks to which my truths now also have the quality of self-evidence. An explanation is needed only at the point where, in my desperation to escape the machine, I said that I preferred an already fully dehumanized zone to that beauty-smitten thing that resisted the relentless march of progress with the leftover wreckage of humankind.3 This antithesis, now broken open by the war, was resolved in later aphorisms in favor of precisely the latter life-form, as the one with a yearning for life and for form, which, on account of just such a yearning, and of a self-preservative instinct as well, was obliged to undertake emergency defense against the tyranny of a valueless utility, according to which life is finished products and culture the trappings. The question “in which hell would the artist prefer to fry” gave way to the urgent verdict that humanity preferred not to fry in this hell, as a result of the corrective insight of the artist himself, who now no longer has the right and no longer the possibility of seeking to securely lock away his inner self, but only the duty of seeing which parties of mankind are struggling, like him, for the preservation of this kind of happiness and against the coercions of a philosophy of life that has squeezed all the motivations out of life, so as to save it solely for the profit motive. But the fact that those were the regions from whose character the disturbance came in peaceful times: to succumb to doubt about this would be wartime treason against the nature that is warding off the machine.4 It does it; and it does it, if need be, with the help of the machine itself, like the artist who isn’t above using the industrial methods of his times to preserve himself from them.5 Faced with the imperfection of life, he affirms the substitute for life; faced with half individuals, he affirms the patented system for avoiding personalities entirely. The person who helps himself to the machine is rewarded to the same extent that the people who help the machine are impoverished. Because the latter doesn’t liberate a person but makes him its slave, it brings him not to himself but under artillery fire. However, the kind of thinking that, unlike power, doesn’t need a “New Orientation”6 to reestablish its command knows that it was merely creating an emergency exit from the chaos of peace, and that what seemed contradictory about the division of values into “German-Romance” was merely the internal contradiction of modern life, which is today being resolved by way of events.7 The frame of reference that seemed unwilling to accept the “lazzarone as a cultural ideal alongside the German constable” thereby affirmed him more than the ones who were willing to accept the ideal—because it promised “picturesqueness”—and who are the real Germans. The phrase “beauty mongers from Paris to Palermo” may now apply to that horde of educated Huns who bear the blame for transforming the values of life into tourist attractions.8 The thinking here about language and human beings is more akin to the type who can laze around in the sun, wallowing in deeper aimlessness, than to the insufferable conqueror of a place in the sun, with whose way of thinking it was of course in keeping to ornamentally dishonor a more colorful existence and thereby beautify its own downfall. In that consecrated state of mind, which desires “basalt-free”9 orderliness and utility truly only for the higher purpose of tending to the castles and marvels of the soul without being disturbed, I had no choice but to prefer the company of commercial scum like that, because they provided the best instruments for securing respite from a noisy world in which, only because they were no longer human beings, they themselves could no longer disturb me. The others did, however, because they were half human.10 This used to be too little for me, and now it has ended up being so much. And this problem—in which, very similarly, the antithesis Berlin-Vienna is settled in favor of Vienna—is further illuminated by the collapse, which reveals that the entire contradiction was situated squarely in the sphere of life’s mechanization. That it’s not a matter simply of “German/Romance” but of “Germany/world” is shown by the colorful world’s insistence on its color.11 America, where things are better, joins forces with the world of antique forms to finish off a higgledy-piggledy that scrapes together functionality from here and beauty from there and keeps hoping to muddle through with its deadly conflation of valuables and values, the frightful application of old emblems to new realities. The Anglo-Saxon defends his ends and the Latin his form against a mishmash that turns means into an end and form into a pretext. Since art here is merely trappings; since, everywhere you look, this literal-mindedness, this orderliness, this miserable facility with instruments reveals the loss of humanity it has cost to win for the populace a life so emptied out; since there are no longer even the superficial values for which all depth of soul and all the sacred value of the German language were sacrificed in the collision of two strains of life; since the German really wasn’t an American at all, but merely an American with basalts—conditions here can no longer serve as a starting point for the imagination. Because they use Mind and God and gas12 to gather gold, the imagination turns away from a dehumanized people and toward a beauty-smitten one, which defends its wreckage against the inexorable fury of the times. In my flight from it, I was compelled to commit an injustice. I’ve never rejected the party of humane values, and now, when, oh, the standpoint has been reached where I’m able to side with it, I owe the world’s Spirit an apology for nothing but the guilt of having been born in times like these, and for the necessity of making my home in the escape from them.