G Flaubert: On Art and Being Ropeable

My sort of observation is mainly moral. I would never have suspected that side of [the existence of a traveler]. The psychological, human, comic side is so plentiful. You come across splendid faces, iridescent existences that glisten and gleam, exceedingly various in their rags and their robes, rich in filth, in their tatters and their finery. And there beneath it all, the old immutable, perennial rascality. That is the simple fact of the matter. What quantities of it pass before one's eyes! Now and again, in one of the towns, I open a newspaper. We seem to be going at a rattling pace. It's not a volcano we're dancing on, it's the plank over a latrine and it looks pretty precarious to me. Before too long, society is going to drown itself in the shit of nineteen centuries, and there will surely be some loud squawking.

To avoid the commonplace you lapse into bombast and, on the other hand, simplicity is so close to the merely platitudinous.

What a splendid Ernest! There he is married, established and perpetually magistrate besides. Behold, a bourgeois and a gentleman! Defender, now more than ever before, of order, propriety and the family. He has nevertheless followed the normal path. He too has been an artist, has carried a dagger and dreamed up ideas for plays. He's been a frivolous student in the Latin Quarter; he had a local shop-girl that he called "his mistress" and I used to scandalise her with my talk when I went to see him in his fetid rooms. He sampled the cancan at the Chaumiere and he drank spiced wine at the Voltaire. Then he got his doctorate. Henceforth began the comedy of being serious, as a sequel to the serious pursuit of the comic. 

Republic or monarch, we won't get beyond all that stuff for some time. It's the outcome of protracted endeavours in which all have played their part from de Maistre down to pere Enfantin. And the republicans have done more than most. What is equality then if it is not the negation of all liberty, all forms of superiority, of Nature itself. Equality, it's slavery. That is why I love art. There, at least, all is liberty in this world of fictions. - Every wish is granted, you can do anything, simultaneously be king and subject, active and passive, victim and priest. No limits there; for you and your kind humanity is a puppet with little bells on its costume to be set jingling with a prod of the pen, just like the street-corner puppeteer who works the strings with his foot.

In my opinion one of the things that proves that art is completely forgotten is the quantity of artists there are swarming about. The more choristers there are in a church, the more it may be supposed that the parishioners themselves are not real believers. They are not concerned about praying to the Good Lord, nor are they concerned about cultivating their gardens, as Candide puts it. They are more interested in having splendid vestments. Instead of towing the public along, you let it pull you. There is more pure bourgeoisdom among men of letters than there is in the grocery business. What are they actually doing, if not endeavouring by every possible device to diddle the customer, while still believing themselves honest! (artists in other words), all of which is the epitome of  bourgeoisdom

Everything feeds into Affectation: oneself, other people, sunlight, graveyards, and so on. . .

If I had a more solid brain I would certainly not have fallen ill from the vexation of doing law. Instead of taking hurt, I would have turned it to my advantage. My grief, instead of sitting in my skull, trickled down into my limbs and twisted them with convulsions. It was a deviation. You often find children who are injured by music. They have real talent, they remember tunes after hearing them once, they become over-excited when they play the piano; their hearts flutter, they lose weight, they go pale, they fall ill. And their poor nerves, like a dog's, are wrenched with pain at the sound of the notes. They are certainly not the Mozarts of the future. The  vocation has been displaced. The idea has slipped into the body and there it lies barren, and the body is wrecked in the process. Neither genius nor good health can come of it.
Same thing in art. Lines of poetry are not made from the passions. And the more personal you are, the weaker you will be. I have always transgressed in that way; because I have always put myself into everything that I have done. For instance, it was me who was in the place of Saint Antony [in F's first-written novel The Temptation of Saint Antony. CS] The temptation was mine rather than the reader's. 187

That is why I detest poetry that comes out in phrases. When it comes to things for which there are no words, the eye is enough. The exhalations of the soul, lyricism, descriptions, I want it all to be done with style. Otherwise it is a prostitution, of art, and even of feeling. . . They are all essentially the same, all the people who tell you about their lost love, their mother's grave, their father's grave, their sacred memories, who kiss medallions, who weep in the moonlight, who go into raptures when they see children, swoon at the theatre, look thoughtful when they stand by the Ocean. Fakers! fakers! triple charlatans! who use their hearts as trampolines in order to reach up to something.

I am turning towards a kind of aesthetic mysticism (if those two words can go together), and I would wish it stronger. When you receive no encouragement from other people, when the outside world disgusts you, enfeebles you, corrupts you and wears you down, then decent and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live. If society carries on the way it is going, I do believe that we shall see a revival of mysticism, as has happened in every gloomy era. Unable to find any outlet, the human spirit will be condensed. Perhaps the day is not far away when we shall witness the return of a universal apathy, of beliefs in the end of the world, of a new Messiah. But because the theological foundations are missing, where will this oblivious enthusiasm find its field of action? Some will seek it out in sex, some in the old religions, some in art; and the human race, like the jews wandering in the desert will chase after all kinds of idols. We have come upon the scene a little too early. In another twenty-five years the point of intersection will be superb. In the hands of a master, when that day comes, prose will be able to play a formidable humanitarian symphony. Books like the Satyricon and The Golden Ass could come back again, transposing into psychic excess everything that such books offered by way of carnal excess. 

When the brain droops, the cock stands up.

The best authors believe that they write tolerably well. (La Bruyere)

I do know that it is impossible to get published anywhere, at the moment, and that all the actual reviews are squalid whores playing the coquette. Pox-ridden to the very marrow, they pull a face at opening their legs to the healthy creations that are desperate to get in. So, the best way is to do what you do, publish in book form, it's more daring, and be on your own. F to Louise Colet, March 1853

We used to have a poor devil of a servant, a man who now drives a hackney-coach; this wretched Louis had - or thought he had - a tapeworm. He talks about it as if it were a real person who talks to him and tells him what it wants, and he always refers to this creature inside him as he. Sometimes he has cravings and he attributes them to the tapeworm: "He wants it," and Louis immediately obliges. Recently he wanted thirty sous worth of brioche; another time he had to have some white wine, and next day he would kick up a fuss if he were given red wine. This poor man eventually sank in his own estimation to the same level as the tapeworm; they are equals and they are locked in a dreadful battle. "Madame," (he said to my sister-in-law recently), that scoundrel has got it in for me; we are daggers drawn, you see; but I shall have my revenge. One of us will be left standing." Well it's the man who will be left standing or should I say the man who will step aside for the tapeworm. So as to kill it and get rid of it, he has recently swallowed a bottle of vitriol, and he is now dying as a result. I am not sure if you appreciate the profundity of this story. Can you see this man finally believing in the almost human existence of what was perhaps only an idea, becoming the slave of his tapeworm! I find it quite dizzying. What a strange thing is the human mind!

I think that the sufferings of the modern artist, by comparison with artists of former times, are like factories compared to craft production.

The political situation has confirmed my old a priori theories about the featherless biped, whom I regard as a cross between a turkey and a vulture.

Perhaps I would've been a great writer if language had not been so unmanageable. (Goethe)

If the moral sciences had two or three primordial laws at their disposal, as in mathematics, then they would make real progress. But they are groping in the shadows, bumping into things at random and wanting to establish them as axiomatic. This word, soul, has spawned almost as many stupid remarks as there are souls!

People write books for everyone, art for everyone, science for everyone, just as they build railways and soup-kitchens. The human race has a passion for moral degradation. And I am angry at having to be part of it.

One thing is for sure, I am part monk. I have always greatly admired those fine sturdy fellows who lead solitary lives, whether dedicated to drunkenness or mysticism. It was really one in the eye for the human race, for the useful, for general well-being.

exposition . . . the purest poetry. . . 

If you want to know my frank and confidential opinion, I have not written anything which I find fully satisfactory. There is in me, very distinctly I believe, an ideal (apologies for that word), an ideal of style, the pursuit of which leaves me gasping without respite. Despair is consequently my normal state of mind. It takes a violent distraction to fetch me out of it. And anyway, I am not naturally cheerful. Gross buffoonery and obscenity in unlimited quantities, but underneath it all is my lugubriousness. In short, life pisses me off considerably and that is the declaration of my faith.

Reread and rework your story. Leave it alone and then take it up again, because books are not sired like children, they are raised like pyramids, according to a premeditated plan, by transporting great blocks and piling them up one on top of the other, a back-breaking grinding toil. And it's totally useless! And it sits in the desert casting a prodigious shadow! The jackals piss all round it and the bourgeois come and clamber over it, and so on; extend the analogy. F to E Feydeau, October 1857

What is the best guise in which to give voice occasionally to one's opinion concerning the events of this world, without having to risk looking like an imbecile later on? This is a rather serious problem. I think the best thing is to portray, in all sincerity, the things you find exasperating. Dissection is a form of revenge.

Those who have no need for the supernatural are rare indeed. Philosophy will always be exclusively the portion of aristocrats. You can fatten up the human throng, bed them up to their bellies in straw and even cover their stables in gold leaf, brutish they will always be, whatever anyone says. The only progress we can hope for is that the brute can be made a little less spiteful.

Lucretius ought to be mentioned with some respect. I see nobody to match him except for Byron, and Byron doesn't have his gravitas, or the sincerity of his sadness. I think the melancholy of the Ancients runs deeper than that of the Moderns, who all more or less hint at immortality beyond the black hole. But for the Ancients that black hole was infinity itself; their dreams dawn and fade against a background of ebony darkness. No cries, no convulsions, nothing but a face fixed in thought. From Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when the gods had gone and Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment when only man existed. Nowhere else do I find such grandeur.

I am suspicious of your novel about the theatre. You are too fond of them, those people! Have you met many who love their art? So many artists are merely bourgeois who have strayed from the path. F to George Sand, September 1868

In the days of Pericles the Greeks produced works of art without knowing whether they would have enough to eat on the morrow. Let us be like the Greeks!

Paganism, Christianity and now the Age of the Lout: these are the three great phases of human history. It is unpleasant to find oneself at the beginning of the third.

The downfall of the bourgeoisie has begun, because it shares the feelings of the rabble. I cannot see that it reads different newspapers, that it enjoys different music, that its pleasures are any more dignified. In both cases, there is the same love of money, the same reverence for the fait accompli, the same need for idols to overturn, the same hatred of anything superior, the same spirit of denigration, the same crass ignorance!

Because of your contempt for intelligence, you think yourselves full of common sense, realistic, practical! But people are only truly practical on the condition that they are a little more than that. . . You would not be enjoying all the benefits of industry if the only ideal of your eighteenth century ancestors had been material usefulness.F to the Municipal Council of Rouen, 1872

I am not a Nature man: I find it's "marvels" less moving than those of Art. It overwhelms me without imparting any "great ideas". I am inclined to tell it inwardly: "that's lovely; I emerged from you quite recently; in a few minutes I shall be back inside you; just leave me in peace. I have better things to do."

From: Flaubert, Selected Letters

Kraus, Kraus, Kraus: Pro Domo et Mundo

Chance Events, Chance Thoughts

I’d like to strictly distinguish my existence [Dasein] from their attendance [Dabeisein]. I live, they just turned up.

The little stations between the major stations are proud of the fact that express trains have to pass them by.

The type of mind that can say what everything is but not what anything seems to be.

Hatred has to make you productive. Or else it’s more sensible to find love in your heart.

The silly sausage who calls a pig a pig commits the supreme act of ingratitude.

Medical proverb: The fathers’ trousers, worn and done, are the neuroses of the son.

Scepticism has progressed from: Que sais-je? to: Do I know?

The modern father: My son’s doing the wrong thing. He’s a mystic.

There’s room enough in the tiniest hut, but not in the same city, for a couple who are blissfully in love.

I’m not in favour of women, just against men.

I once knew a Don Juan of chastity whose Leporello was not even capable of compiling a list of all the ice maidens in town.

A slap-stick threw a toothpick behind a curtain – there was a huge crash. Then he threw a needle – another huge crash. Then he threw a piece of paper – again, a huge crash. Next he took a feather, raised his hand and – yet again, a huge crash. But he hadn’t even thrown it – so he went Woot! and congratulated himself on having put one over the causal nexus. The essence of this kind of humour is the notion that the echo of human action is louder than its call and that one best demonstrates to echoes how impertinent they are by not answering them with any further call.

Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases.

The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance.

Pro Domo et Mundo

Woe betide the age in which art doesn’t make the earth less sure of itself, in which the artist rather than man faints before the abyss separating the two of them!

Art brings life into disorder. Time and again, what mankind’s poets do is re-establish chaos.

Culture comes to an end when the barbarians break free from its midst.

The modern demise of the world will come to pass when the machine enters the phase of perfection and human beings are proven broke and unfixable. The point at which the automobile will no longer succeed in bringing the driver into forwards motion.

Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over Nature.

When a culture senses that its end has come it calls in the priest.

If I’m supposed to believe in something that can’t be seen I’d sooner believe in miracles than in microscopic creepy crawlies.

The legalist declares the responsible party guilty as well as those who know no better.
The humanitarian declares the responsible party guilty and those that know no better innocent.
The anarchist declares both innocent.
The man of culture declares those who know no better guilty and those who did know better innocent.

That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premises. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life’s heart.

Injustice is necessary or else we would never have done.

My glosses need commentaries. Otherwise they’re too easily understood.

Is it my fault that M actually exists? Didn’t I make him up all the same? If he were a general object of mockery, I’d choose someone better. If he makes a claim for damages because he has been insulted by satire then he insults the satirist.

I’m not sure whether the philistine represents a sort of cosmic vacuum or whether he is simply the wall which is separated from the life of the spirit by Toricellian empty space. But whether he's vacuous or just limited, it's clear he's compelled to react to culture with enmity on principle. For what culture does is to make him conscious [gibt ihm ein Bewußtsein] without making him any the more existent [ohne ihm ein Sein zu geben], driving him to a desperation whose logical form is cogito ergo non sum. It would drive him to suicide were it not so cruel as to force him to prove his own non-existence while still alive. Whether it’s a painting being painted or a witticism being made, the philistine is fighting a battle for his very life when he shuts his eyes or stops up his ears.

Many a man I’ve had dealings with in this my many-sided life has something against me or knows something about me. They will all be able to prove something against me – even if it is only that I had dealings with them.


Do I advise you to kick out of home the error that you gave birth to and substitute it with a more veracious adoptee?

Ask your neighbour about what you yourself are already better informed about. His counsel will then be valuable.

What another doesn’t know I decide autocratically. But I’m glad to ask him about what I already know.

The weakling has doubts before the moment of decision, the strong man after it.

It’s no bad thing to think of most things as being of no significance, but of everything as significant.

Only in the ecstasy of linguistic conception do worlds come to be out of chaos.

By night, at my desk, pen in hand, in an advanced state of writerly ecstasy, I’d find the presence of a woman more disturbing than a Germanist interfering in the bedroom.

I don’t relish sticking my nose into my own private business.

I refer to the topic by talking about myself. They stick to the topic but refer to themselves.

I ask no one for a light. I don’t want to be in anyone’s debt. Neither in life, love or literature. And yet I’m definitely a smoker.

When I demonstrate that the world has lost its way by pointing to symptoms of its decline, one of the lost ones always comes and asks me what the symptoms are supposed to do about themselves. They do what they do because they have to – they don't enjoy it. – Alas, I don’t enjoy it either, though I have to too.

The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up. [C.f. Se non e’ vero, e’ ben trovato]

Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause.

The external world is a tiresome side-effect of a sustained condition of uneasiness.

Karl Kraus: Of The Artist

The signs of true artistry – to fashion for oneself a problem out of what is taken for granted and thereby solve the problems of others; to make good their ignorance with one’s own knowledge and doubt oneself down into the depths of hell; to put a question to a servant and give the answer to a master.

Why does the public behave so hatefully towards literature? Because it has a command of language. People would venture forth against the other arts in the same way if singing to each other were as good a means of communicating, or smearing each other with paint or spattering each other with plaster. The unfortunate thing is that Literary Art works with material the rabble handles on a daily basis. This is why literature is beyond help. The public claims for itself the verbal material of literature all the more impudently the further literature distances itself from general comprehensibility. The best thing would be to keep literature a secret from the public until a law came into existence which banned everyday language altogether, or perhaps allowed the general public the use of sign-language in case of emergencies. Before such a law sees the light of day however, it is to be hoped they might have learnt to respond to the famous aria “How’s business, mate?” with a still-life.

Journalism, which has driven the true writers into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of their pastures. The hacks would like to be authors in their own right. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material that he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach. In its hands eternity itself becomes topical, though it just as easily becomes an anachronism too. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. Let it age confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.

Creative men can afford to shut out the impression of others' creativity. Which is why they often turn their backs on the world, even though they regularly perceive its imperfections.

That which has its living element in the material dies before the material. That which has its living element in language lives as long as the language.

The thoughtless man thinks that one only has a thought by having it and clothing it with words. He fails to comprehend that one actually only has it when one has words into which the thought grows.

The sense [Der Sinn (masc)] took hold of the form [die Form (fem)], there was a struggle and she succumbed. A thought was given birth to which had the traits of both.

Language is the mother not the maid of thought.

A reader is incapable of surmising from the mere spoken or written thought that its form existed prior to the material it gives form to, nor should he. But one can show him that it was so by trying to raise up a thought that has slipped below the threshold of consciousness. To produce free associations, as distantly connected as you like from the material of the thought, will be a vain exercise. It simply doesn’t help that the man who has the thought and the other he is trying to induce to see it draw closer to one another by material groping. For instance the thought that one “can’t see the wood for the trees” would never be flushed up by a chance sighting of a wood, nor by that of the trees that veil the wood from sight. It might well present itself though on the path via which it first came into being. Try repeating the tone of voice or the gesture with which one said it to oneself, soon enough a certain something that in some way expresses missing the point or parts instead of wholes will start to shimmer before you and – there you have it, you see the wood that you couldn’t see for the trees. To think in the medium of language means coming into superfluity via superficiality. As last night’s dream comes back to you when you brush a hand against the bed-sheets.

Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.

I fasten onto the thought by the word and it comes to me.

How many thoughts do I have that failed to occur to me and that I couldn’t fix with particular words, but that I whipped up out of language as a whole.

The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together into the thought.

There are people who imitate originality before the fact. When two people have a thought, it doesn’t belong to the one who had it first but to the one who had it better.

In art too the poor man isn't allowed to take anything from the rich man, though the rich man may take everything from the poor man.

Mr. M was reprimanded for having put an ugly sentence to paper. And rightly so. For it came to light that the sentence was actually one of Jean Paul’s and a good one.

If a thought can successfully live in two different forms, it doesn’t have it anywhere near as good as two thoughts that live in a single form.

Art has to be content with itself in an age that knows itself superior to eternity.

The journalist is actually turned on by deadlines. He writes worse when he has time at his disposal.

Heinrich Heine got so far undoing the blouse of the German language that nowadays all the louts can go the grope on her.

The imitator is often better than the innovator.

The book page men plunder Nature’s household in order to dress up their moods. When they write about blowing their noses it comes out sounding like rolling thunder – otherwise, who’d understand what they meant? “That’s just like when …” they say, thinking they do the cosmos a great honour letting the events of the natural world trot alongside their stupendous sentiments and checking if Nature measures up. This is what they call using similes or making comparisons. In fact the most they succeed in doing is every so often shedding light on the means of comparison with the aid of the object of comparison. At any rate it’s a matter of being cultured. The you know what something’s like when it’s like something else. When Heine is full of yearning, that’s like when a fir tree – hopefully there’s a fir tree there which can play along … Let me say once and for all – a poet’s most elementary experiences are something which take place in the depths of his soul and what occurs within occurs in the world outside him as well - in this unique moment of congruity there is no disparity between the image and its meaning, no separation between illustration and text. Shakespeare’s experience of the ingratitude of daughters is born with the image of that ingratitude – the hedge-sparrow feeds the cuckoo so long that it has its head bit off by its young. Heine would first have to discover the meaning of the motif of ingratitude in Nature so that Nature’s way of proceeding could then be compared with the given human situation. The book page men drag themselves into the wider world in order to be able to express themselves in the first place; once they’ve reduced something noble to their own level they discover that it’s actually similar to themselves; once they’ve decked themselves out in others’ finery they recognise themselves. The poet is already a part of Nature; if he is to give expression to Nature, it will be in accordance with her will. Poetry does not depend any sort of fortunate fact involving fir trees having dreams. It is not the egotistical pretension that Nature beholds the poet and is there to do his bidding. On the contrary it is founded on mutual understanding which brings tears to the eyes of the poet too. The facile notion that something apt follows from every movement of the soul has seduced the German ear and brought unspeakable misery upon art! Art has been made a means of killing time and thereby kills off eternity itself. Nature wears a pleasing aspect because we find in her the pretty things that our favourite writers have crammed into her by uttering the words: That’s as if . . . They have snipped life down into a series of ornaments which now decorate our nullity. The fir tree no longer sprouts fresh green needles but has dreams. Oh, it’s much more poetic that way, as well as testifying to the yearning of the poet, which we'd otherwise still need to see some evidence of. Nowadays the poet says quite simply: If the fir tree felt as I did, then I’d feel like the fir tree, viz. dreamy.

Let me warn you about reprints. The living element of what I write is my writing: reproduce it and it will suffocate. For everything depends on the air a phrase breathes and in bad air even a phrase of Shakespeare’s is guaranteed to croak.

A curse upon journalism, it has the Midas touch in reverse; every foreign thought it comes into contact it with it transforms into an opinion! How is one to reclaim stolen gold when the thief manifestly only has a bit of miserable small change in his pocket?

Opinions are of no consequence to art, she sends them on to the journos to use as they see fit and is in danger precisely when the journos declare her to be in the right.

I don’t have any deep reason for disliking novels, for it seems apt to me that something that doesn’t interest me is said in a roundabout way.

They place in his way the obstacles he wanted to free them from.

Varieté. Slap-stick is the only brand of humour with a Weltanschauung nowadays. Because there's a deeper reason to it, it appears to be as much without rhyme or reason as the situations it sets before us. The laughter it provokes in our region of the earth is indeed without rhyme or reason. A human being who suddenly gets down on all fours makes for a primitive contrast which the simplest minds will find irresistible. A scene in which an MC in tails falls to the floor like a sack presupposes somewhat more sophisticated powers of comprehension. What could it be but the ad absurdum of dignity, of the sense of formality, of a thoroughly decorative mode of life? Middle European culture supplies one with all the prerequisites needed to understand this type of humour. The humour of clowning cannot take root here. Between the two there can be no comparison. When two clowns jump up and down on each others’ stomachs the only thing that tickles us is when they suddenly swap spots, the comedy of the unforseen agony. American humour on the other hand is the ad absurdum of the life of man become machine. The action takes place without anything getting in the way, making it plausible for a man to fly into the room via the window only then to be thrown out the door – which he takes with him under his arm as he goes. Life gets tremendously simplified. Because comfort is the highest principle of all, it goes without saying that you can get yourself a beer by using a human being as a beer tap and holding a glass underneath any one of his outlets. People bash each others’ skulls with hatchets and tenderly enquire – did you notice anything? Machines carry out a continuous slaughter, but without shedding a drop of blood. Why all the violence? It's a test of the strength of our comfortable ways. One presses a button and the servant boy cops it in the neck. If something’s a nuisance it is wiped out of existence. Wooden beams bend at will, everything goes swimmingly, there are no idle hands. But then a slip of paper won’t do what it’s told. It refuses to lie there where one has put it for comfort’s sake, it drifts up into the air again and again. How irritating. One sees oneself forced to give it a thumping with a hammer. It’s still twitching. One gets ready to shoot it maybe, one blows it up with dynamite. An outrageous piece of machinery is produced in order to calm the slip of paper down. Life has become terribly complicated. In the end everything goes bottom up because something or other doesn’t want to fit into the system . . . maybe a scrap of sentimentality that a fraud has brought over from Europe.

Karl Kraus By Night

The views of the author of Karl Kraus' aphorisms about sex, art or any other matter are categorically not the views of The Great Stage, though they are related hypothetically to the views of The Great Stage. . .

"The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up."

"Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause."

"That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premisses. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life's heart."

"Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases."

"The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance."

From: By Night (1919)

Eros

Woman is dazzled by gesture; man has esteem for content. Since neither type exists any more, I have to rely on that pitiful mish-mash that's ended up in pants and capers round me lustily in love and in hate. I'm forever having to withdraw nine tenths of my respect to get to a useful remainder. How little humanity remains in the world, when femininity has evaporated.

Art

That thought is not clothed by language, but something that grows into language, is something the modest creator will never bring the shameless tailors to believe.

I have only mastered the language of others. My own language does with me what it will.

There’s no language it’s so difficult to make oneself understood in as language.

A professor of literature said he thought my aphorisms were nothing more than mechanical inversions of conventional idioms. That’s actually quite right. If only he hadn’t failed to grasp the thought that is the driving force of the mechanism – that more comes of the mechanical inversion of conventional idioms than of their mechanical repetition. Did you know that is the very Secret of Today? It’s something you have to have lived through. Not to mention the fact that a conventional idiom still has more going for it than a professor of literature, whom you get nothing out of if you leave him to repeat himself and just as little out of if you mechanically invert him.

He alone is an artist who can make a riddle out of any solution.

Art which doesn’t speak against the contemporary world seems to me to be art which will be lucky to last till tomorrow. Art sends the times into retreat and is thus the opposite of a way of passing time. The true enemy of the times is the living power left in language, which is in direct communication with the world of spirit - the world of spirit which the times have roused to indignation. That conspiracy between language and spirit known as art may well arise under these conditions. The sense of universal ease which takes from language whatever it needs is something the times indulge; true art by contrast can only come from an act of refusal. From an outcry against the times, not appeasement of them. When called on as a consolation, true art departs the deathbed of mankind with a curse. It attains to perfection by way of disillusionment not self-satisfaction.

Time


The true miracle of technology – that it faithfully sets about wrecking everything it’s a compensation for.

What the papers have printed on any single day of the last 50 years has had more power to damage culture than the complete works of Goethe had to help culture.

If I only have a mobile, won’t I be able to find a forest to walk in when I want?! The only reason you can’t live without a mobile is because mobiles exist. Without forests you’ll never be able to live – even when the forests have ceased to exist long ago. The same applies to humanity as a whole. He who has put all its ideals behind him simply becomes a slave to its needs and will find a substitute for forests sooner than for mobiles. Human imagination has found a surrogate for itself in technology; technology is a surrogate for which there’s no surrogate. Those who carry within them no forests of the imagination but do have the inner being of mobiles will grow poorer when there are no forests left in the external world. The forests have ceased to exist because people have the inner being of mobiles as well as having them attached to their heads half the time in the external world. The logic of it is this: technology is connected with the world of spirit in such a way that an emptiness arises because the new gadgets exist and a vacuum if they're not at hand. What comes to pass within the temporal realm is the most indispensible form of nothingness.

1915

The development of European life took such a turn that religion could get no further: at which point the press turned up on the scene and brought everything to an end. Verily, journalism got closer to the frailties of human nature in order to flatter them than religion had in order to offer them help. In short, journalism can do more to harm human beings than religion can do human beings good. How great that personality would have to be which was capable of remaining itself amid the workings of this powerful means of control - an editor responsible to the whole of humanity! And how strong humanity would have to be to give itself up entirely to his responsibility! Yet this means of control is the means of subsistence for a horde of ethical imbeciles, it is what the frail of spirit could not get by without. The Word that was in the beginning they no longer hear. And so an anti-Christian humanity awaits a New Word - from the Centres of Power and Control.

Between language and war there is the following rough connection: the existence of language that has hardened into cliché also explains the general readiness to trade in substance for a surrogate diction, to confidently find unobjectionable about oneself everything that suffices as a reproach to the next man, just as it explains the rush to indignantly unmask what one rather likes doing oneself, tangle up every doubt in a thicket of bad verbiage and casually brush off every suspicion that things are not in order as if it were a naked act of aggression. These are the prime qualities of a language that today resembles nothing so much as a finished product, the life-goal of whose speakers is to shove it under the nose of the right buyer, a language that shines like a saint’s halo but has the plain soul of the average man – the little man who wouldn’t have time to do anything wrong because he swings to and fro between home and office and when that isn’t enough displays his motives for all to see.

Everything that happens, happens for the sake of those who describe it and those who have no experience of it. An enemy spy being led to the gallows has to go the long way round, so that movie-goers have something really interesting to watch; he’s made to gawp again and again into the camera so that the same movie-goers get the facial expression they’re happy with. We keep our peace. We who lived through it do not describe it. The way of thought that leads to the gallows of mankind is a dark one, I had no desire to travel it as the condemned spy of mankind. Yet I must. And I show mankind my face. For the experience which troubles my heart is a horror of the vacuum represented by those technical devices, the minds of men, when confronted by an indescribable superfluity of events.

By Night


Proverbs only come into being when a language is at a stage where silence is still possible.

The hackneyed language of the everyday originates when they have a bit of a fiddle with Language; when they evade Language like the law, or like an enemy; when they answer questions they’ve not been asked with a thousand circumlocutions. I don’t want to share the company of such language; I want to go the long way round it, it, you, whatever you are, that goes round in my head like a wheel; and at night stalks about like the living dead.

Ornaments and flowers of speech are the favourite dress of an age which has forgotten the sense of such expressive forms; they become all the more favoured the further the age outgrows them, the further, that is, the age’s very substance renders it incapable of creating new ornaments and flowers of speech; and it is thus that the state will “draw its sword”, long after it got used to drawing the pin on the poison gas grenades. Can you imagine something like that ever becoming idiomatic?
Technology can create no new idioms, yet it leaves the spirit of mankind in a position where it is unable to do without its old idioms – now that should give you an idea what technology’s all about. The confusion created when a changed mode of existence drags along past forms of life – this is the very element in which the evil of the world lives and grows. The age does not give shape to idioms, it goes pear-shaped feeding on too many; thus it is that it draws its sword time and again, because it is in incurable conflict with itself. A new turn of events will bring forth no new expressive forms, but to be sure the old forms will bring forth events.

“Conquer the world market.” Because businessmen said it, men of war got busy doing it. In the meantime there’s been quite a lot of conquest, though clearly not of the world market.

(Trans. CS)