Джонатан Франзен – The Kraus Project (страница 5)

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: here he no doubt had the best of all helpers in raising his form to the level of genuine figuration. It took the experience of dying to make Heine a poet. It was a dictate: sing, bird, or die. Death is an even better helper than Paris; death in Paris, pain and homesickness, they do finally accomplish something authentic.

I hear the trot, the hooves beat near,

The dark rider comes to fetch me here—

He tears me away, from Mathilde I must part,

Oh, the thought will burst my heart!

This is a different poetry from the one whose success is proven in the account books. For Heine’s influence derives from the Book of Songs, not the Romancero, and if you want to judge the accomplishments by the man, you have to open the former, not the latter. Death concentrates, death clears away the trifling underworld-weariness81 and lends pathos to the cynicism. Heine’s witticisms, so often just the dissonance of an unlyrical perspective, produce a higher harmony here. Compressed by its extinction, his wit finds more powerful fusions; and tasteless items such as “Get thee to a nunnery, dear child, or get thee a shave” become rarer.82 The mot traditionally ascribed to him, “Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier,”83 is perhaps, in its much-admired triteness, an invention of those who wanted Heine to remain true to his style to the end. But it suits the whole not badly. Both in belief and unbelief, Heine can’t rid himself of the imagery of commerce. Love itself says to the god of songs that “it demands guarantees,” and the god asks how many kisses Love will advance him against his golden lyre. And meanwhile Heine’s cynicism, this stale potpie of wit and woe, has become rather pleasing to the German palate, though the palate may not want to admit it. Compared with Offenbach, in whose orchestra the thousand-year misery is ringed by a dance of eternal delight, this ridiculer of misery looks like a trained Asra next to a born Bluebeard—to the kind that kills when it loves.84

… What does the lonely tear want?85 What does a humor want which smiles through tears because both the strength to cry and the strength to laugh are lacking? But the “brilliance of language” isn’t lacking, and it runs in the family. And it’s uncanny how few people notice that it comes from chopped liver, and how many have spread it all over their household bread. Their noses are stuffed, their eyes are blind, but their ears are wide open to every hit song.86 And so, thanks to Heine, the feuilleton has evolved to the highest level of perfection. There’s nothing to be done with an original, but copies can always be improved. When the imitators of Heine began to fear that somebody would expose them, all they had to do was become forgers of Heine, and they could go into mass production under his name. They take up a lot of space in the literature of Heine. But the experts who succeeded in exposing the fraud aren’t expert enough to realize that to expose the thief is to have exposed the owner.87 He himself broke into the house with a skeleton key, leaving the door open behind him. He set a bad example for his successors. He taught them the trick. And the farther the trick spread, the more delicious it became. Thus the pieties of journalism demand that every editorial masthead today include at least a bedbug from Heine’s “mattress grave.” Every Sunday it creeps flatly through the columns and stinks the art out of our noses! But to be tricked out of a real life in this way is entertaining to us. In times that had time, art gave us one to resolve. In times that have the Times, form and content are split apart for faster understanding. Because we have no time, writers are obliged to say in many words what could have been succinctly put. So Heine really is the forerunner of modern nervous systems, praised by artists who fail to notice that the philistines have tolerated him a lot better than he tolerated philistines. For the philistines relent in their hatred of Heine when they take his poetry into account, while the artists take Heine’s hatred of philistines into account in order to rescue his personality. And so, eternally relevant because of a misunderstanding, he vindicates the pretty coinage “cosmopolite,” in which the cosmos reconciled itself to politics. Detlev von Liliencron had a merely provincial outlook. But it seems to me that he was more cosmic in Schleswig-Holstein than Heine was in the cosmos. In the end, the people who never came out of their province will go farther than the people who never came into one.88