Those garish, sickly smiles

"Man sieht einen Menschen und denkt, was für ein sympathischer Mensch, und bald sieht man (als würde einem auf den Kopf geschlagen!), was für ein gemeiner Mensch, was für ein lächerlicher Mensch, was für ein niedriger Menschentypus."

You see a person and you think, what a nice person, and soon you see (as if it smacked you on the head!), what a cruel person, what a ridiculous person, what a lowly kind of person.

Thomas Bernhard, Watten

 

TB Wave / Kleiner Österreichischer Staatspreis

Es ist nichts zu loben, nichts zu verdammen, nichts anzuklagen, aber es ist vieles lächerlich; es ist alles lächerlich, wenn man an den Tod denkt. [...] Die Zeitalter sind schwachsinnig, das Dämonische in uns ein immerwährender vaterländischer Kerker, in dem die Elemente der Dummheit und der Rücksichtslosigkeit zur tagtäglichen Notdurft geworden sind. Der Staat ist ein Gebilde, das fortwährend zum Scheitern, das Volk ein solches, das ununterbrochen zur Infamie und zur Geistesschwäche verurteilt ist. Das Leben Hoffnungslosigkeit, an die sich die Philosophien anlehnen, in welcher alles letzten Endes verrückt werden muß. Wir sind Österreicher, wir sind apathisch; wir sind das Leben als das gemeine Desinteresse am Leben. [...] Wir haben nichts zu berichten, als daß wir erbärmlich sind, durch Einbildungskraft einer philosophisch-ökonomisch-mechanischen Monotonie verfallen. Mittel zum Zwecke des Niedergangs, Geschöpfe der Agonie, erklärt sich uns alles, verstehen wir nichts. Wir bevölkern ein Trauma, wir fürchten uns, wir haben ein Recht, uns zu fürchten, wir sehen schon, wenn auch undeutlich im Hintergrund: die Riesen der Angst. Was wir denken, ist nachgedacht, was wir empfinden, ist chaotisch, was wir sind, ist unklar. Wir brauchen uns nicht zu schämen, aber wir sind auch nichts und wir verdienen nichts als das Chaos. 

____________ 

There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is ridiculous; everything is ridiculous, when one thinks about death. [...] Our era is feeble-minded, the demonic within us a perpetual national prison, in which the elements of stupidity and carelessness have become a daily need. The state is a construct which is forever condemned to miscarriage, the people one that is endlessly condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness. Life is a hopelessness, on which the philosophies are dependent, in which all must finally become insane. We are Austrians, we are apathetic; we are life as the general disinterest in life. [...] We have nothing to report, except that we are pitiful, brought down by the imaginative powers of a philosophical-economic-mechanical monotony. Means to a destructive end, creatures of agony, everything is explained to us and we understand nothing.  We populate a trauma, we are frightened, we have a right to be frightened, we see already, if only as dim shapes in the background: the giants of fear. What we think is already thought, what we feel is chaotic, what we are is unclear. We don't need to be ashamed, but we are nothing and we deserve nothing other than chaos.

Excerpted from the acceptance speech for the Österreichischer Staatspreis, 1968.

Translation altered from that of Carol Brown Janeaway in My Prizes.

Different Prizes pt. 2

Replying to a previous post, Brandon (The Enthusiast) writes:

I've been thinking more and more on those prizes— those "external goods" dangling around here and New York, that seem to keep working their way further and further inward— and it makes me really stick closer to that Internal Good.

I hadn’t considered the issue precisely as Brandon has portrayed it here: for me, I was thinking of Doc in the Boston Aquarium (from Robert Kramer’s Route One USA) musing on the “different prizes” of the culture that strays from the standard ideal of bourgeois America. In Doc’s (and my) original conception, prizes are differentiated between cultural norms, and it is in some sense the burden of those who have devoted their lives to a particular culture that they may only strive towards their culturally-determined prizes. Different pathways lead to different prizes, neither are objectively worth more. Doc’s goal in this little pep-talk is to remind the non-bourgeois individual, whose heart is heavy when he catches a glimpse of the comfortable, domestic life from which he has opted out (I use the masculine, because it seems likely that Doc is directing his talk self-ward, or possibly at director Kramer), that his choice of a different path also brings with it certain opportunities, its own lonely, precarious, yet noble prizes as well.
Brandon’s conception of the “external good” versus the “inner good” considers the situation from within a single cultural milieu, separating the prizes of an endeavor itself (in the university, the love of learning, the φιλοσοφία) from those which stem from the social and economic factors which affect those who partake in said endeavor (the cushy jobs, salaries, stipends, wine and cheese receptions, esteem of peers, cultural capital, etc.).
I’m sure Brandon is thinking also of the art world in NYC, where the actual artworks on the walls are often the least important things at a gallery opening—and are duly ignored by the majority of the socializing crowd. Artworks are sold not for their aesthetic value, but for the current position of the artist/gallery on the market. This position is always determined 90% by pure marketing, 10% by the quality of the artist’s oeuvre as a whole (although there’s no accounting for taste), and 0% by the quality of the work in question. No one would deny this, I think. (And if I sound bitter, it’s because I am: Chelsea is an absolute shit-show these days).
In the academy, the situation is different, and perhaps much more naive (which is not necessarily a bad thing: cynical collaboration is sometimes much worse). It is, in fact, pounded into the heads of incoming students that they are here to learn, to enrich their minds, to become better people. The motto "non scholae sed vitae discimus" (we learn not for school, but for life) provides the cover for what is at heart a training in docility and discipline, picking up enough cultural capital along the way to clear the path towards the highest-paid positions of bourgeois society. The ones who really get fooled return to the fray, and let themselves be trained to do such training, navigating an intricate obstacle course of groveling and pedantic ostentation, ending up with tenure in middle America. The first thing thrown aboard is this ideal of learning for life—the pure encounter between living man and printed word—rather than for school. Unlike the art world insularity, which is openly accepted, the academy never acknowledges the fact that it operates as an enclosed economy, that learning occurs as a stepping stone not towards enlightenment, but towards academic success—the key which (supposedly) unlocks the reservoirs of capital.
All this what I’ve just said is pure Übertreibung (exaggeration), yet to quote Thomas Bernhard, “ohne Übertreibung kann man gar nichts sagen.”
At any rate, I think its important to point out that there are certain ‘prizes’ in the academic world which have naught to do with the “inner good” of the literary experience, and everything to do with the sociological function of the university in present-day capitalistic society. Unlike the art-world, which (for better or for worse) accepts its new role (however ironically), the academy naively presumes idealism where there is only cynicism.

Riegel and Gruppe 47

In "Proklomation des Hektographismus," which first appeared in the second issue of Zwischen den Kriegen, Werner Riegel begins a paragraph with a cryptic critique of the post-war literary scene, speaking of the “Kilometerstein 47” on the highway of literary progress, as well as a list of the top three authors of the time: “Oberst Hemingway” (5 bestsellers), “Kuli Plivier” (3 bestsellers), and “Gerhardt Maria Kramer” (1 bestseller). Riegel then drops the code and issues a string of barbs against the members of Gruppe 47:

Es lohnt leider nicht, die Namen derer zu nennen, die sich da unten in Süddeutschland als Gruppe 47 etabliert haben, die über ihr schlechtes Leben stöhnen und sich gegenseitig Literaturpreise verleihen. Was heißt überhaupt verleihen! Jedenfalls ist es für uns ein Festessen, zu sehen wie die Spießerliteraten der »Literatur« auf die Spießer schimpfen, die nicht so doof sind, mit Bücherschreiben Geld verdienen zu wollen sondern lieber im Toto wetten.¹

This reminded me of Thomas Bernhard's characterization, in a letter to Siegfried Unseld, of Gruppe 47 as "Literaturtombola."²


1. Werner Riegel, Ausgewahlte Werke in Einzelausgaben, Band 1 (Stuttgart: Literarisches Bureau Christ & Fez, 2006) p. 42.
2. http://literaturgefluester.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/bernhard-und-handke-in-der-osterreichischen-literatur/.

So ist es (Bernhard)

Auch von den Handwerkern
haben wir genug
Gerade auch
von den sogenannten einfachen Leuten
die komplizierten haben wir immer gehaßt
aber jetzt hassen wir auch die einfachen
wir vertragen weder die komplizierten
noch die einfachen
Wenn wir auf die Straße gehen
ekelt es uns vor allen
das ist die Wahrheit

[from Einfach Kompliziert]