The Kraus Project. Jonathan Franzen
pay.
Here is Rhodes, now come and show
Your art, this is your chance!
Or hold your tongue and go,
If today you cannot dance.
“A talent for thundering as well”—that sounds like journalism, doesn’t it? But from thunder not a sound and from the lightning only a twinkle. Only glimmerings, only the heat lightning of thoughts that went down somewhere or will sometime.
For just as an original thought need not always be new, so the person who has a new thought can easily have got it from someone else. This will remain a paradox for everyone except those who believe that thoughts are preformed, and that the creative individual is merely a chosen vessel, and that thoughts and poems existed before thinkers and poets—those who believe in the metaphysical way of thought, which is a miasma, whereas opinion is contagious, that is, it requires direct contact in order to be caught, in order to spread. Thus a creative head may say originally what somebody else has already said, and someone else may already be imitating a thought that won’t occur to the creative head until later. And it’s only in the rapture of linguistic conception that a world grows out of chaos. The subtlest illumination or shading of a thought, the tinting, the toning: only work like this goes truly unlost; no matter how pedantic, laughable, and meaningless it may seem at the time, it will eventually come to benefit the general public and yield, in the end, as a well-deserved harvest, those opinions that today are sold unripe with wanton greed. Everything that’s created remains as it was before it was created. The artist fetches it down from the heavens as a finished thing. Eternity has no beginning. Poetry or a joke: the act of creation lies between what’s self-evident and what is permanent.66 Let there be light, again and again. It was already there and can reassemble itself from the spectrum. Science is spectral analysis: art is the synthesis of light. Thought is in the world, but it isn’t had. It’s refracted by the prism of material experience into elements of language; the artist binds them into a thought. A thought is a discovered thing, a recovered thing. And whoever goes looking for it is an honest finder; it belongs to him even if somebody before him has already found it.
In this and only in this way did Heine anticipate Nietzsche with the idea of a Nazarene type.67 He demonstrates, with every word of his polemic against Platen, how far removed he was from the world of Eros and Christianity, which nevertheless shows up in his poem “Psyche” with such neat serendipity. In the transformations of Eros, Heine was able to see only the goal of experience, not the way of it; he applied ethical and aesthetic norms to it, and here, where we arrive at the border between the demonstrably true and the demonstrably silly, he anticipated not Nietzsche but the late Herr Maximilian Harden.68 In the famous Platen polemic—which owes its fame solely to our pulp interest in the persons involved and to the even pulpier pleasure we get from the part under attack, and which would have to have destroyed Heine’s reputation if there existed in Germany a feeling for true polemical power instead of the mere carping of meanness—in this document, Heine chooses to make his erotic confession with the words:69
The one likes to eat onions, the other has more of a feeling for warm friendship, and I as an honest man must frankly confess that I like to eat onions, and a crooked female cook is dearer to me than the most beautiful friend of beauty.70
This isn’t gentlemanly, but it isn’t profound, either. He apparently had no concept of the diversity of sexual love, which confirms itself even in the things it rejects, and he crammed this wide world into the crude schema of man and woman, normal and abnormal. Indeed, even on his deathbed, the image that comes to hand is of the milkmaid who “kisses with thick lips and strongly smells of cow chips,” although here she’s only supposed to be more warming than fame, not warm friendship.71 The person who understands the soul this way is a feuilletonist! Heine’s polemic is feuilletonistic in the disconnectedness with which opinion and wit run alongside each other. The outlook can reach no further than the humor can. A person who makes fun of his adversary’s sex life is incapable of rising to polemical power. And a person who ridicules his adversary’s poverty can make no better joke than this: Platen’s Oedipus would “not have been so biting if its author had had more to bite on.” Bad opinions can only make bad jokes. The play of wit and word, which compresses whole worlds of contrast onto the tiniest of surfaces and can therefore be the most valuable kind of play, must, in Heine’s hands, as in the hands of the dismal Saphir, become a slack pun, because there are no moral funds to underwrite it.72 I believe he twice makes awful reference to somebody having a bad case of “melancolic.” Such coinages—as also, for example, his quotations from the “sownets” of Platen or his avowal that he and Rothschild have been on “famillionaire” terms—he naturally then blames on Hirsch-Hyacinth.73 This from a polemicist who talks about his trusty Protestant kitchen hatchet! A hatchet that can’t even trim a sentence! The structural backbone of his attack on Börne consists of direct quotations from Börne, and every time he brings Börne out to speak you can detect quite precisely the point at which Börne stops and Heine’s own yakking takes over.74 He does it in the heavy-handed porcelain story.75 At every step, you want to revise, condense, deepen. “In addition to the passage of the Polish soldiers, I have characterized the occurrences in Rhenisch Bavaria as the next lever which, following the July Revolution, gave rise to the agitation in Germany and had the most profound influence even on our countrymen in Paris” is not a sentence I would have let stand. The parts without a frame; the whole without composition; that short-windedness that has to keep catching itself in a new paragraph, as if to say “So, and now let’s talk about something else.”76 Had Heine been capable of aphorism (for which, indeed, the longest wind is needed), he could have made it through even a hundred pages of polemic. Of Börne, the ethically and intellectually rejected person who towers over the writer attacking him, he says, “In the end, all of his hostilities were nothing more than the petty jealousies that the little drummer boy feels for the great drum major—he envies me for the big plume that struts so boldly in the wind, and for my richly embroidered uniform, on which there’s more silver than he, the little drummer boy, could buy with his entire life savings, and for the skill with which I twirl my big baton, etc.” The skill is undeniable; and the drum major is also dead-on. Heine sees in Börne’s household “an immorality that disgusts” him; his “soul’s entire feeling for purity” bristles “at the thought of coming in the slightest contact with Börne’s immediate surroundings.” He has also wondered for the longest time whether Madame Wohl is Börne’s lover “or merely his wife.”77 This perfectly fine joke is characteristic of the rootlessness78 of Heine’s wit, for it pays off with the opposite of Heine’s notion of sexual morality. Heine would have to have been curious, in a straightforward bourgeois way, as to whether Madame Wohl was Börne’s wife or merely his lover. Indeed, on his deathbed he still sets great store by his avowal that he never touched a woman he knew was married. But there are yet more embarrassing contradictions in this piece. Jean Paul, for example, is called “the muddled polymath of Bayreuth,” while Heine says, of himself, that he has “planted in the literature of Europe monuments redounding to the eternal credit of the German Mind.”79 The German Mind, however, would mainly like to escape with its life; and it will rise again only when the intellectual flood of filth in Germany has run its course: when people again begin to appreciate the mental labor of linguistically creative manliness80 and to distinguish it from the learnable manual labor of linguistic ticklings. And will there then be anything left of Heine but his death?
The deathbed poetry, parts of Romancero, Lamentations, Lazarus: