Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Kraus II. 1925. Oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm. Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna
I live in an era of decline and inhabit a doomed domain.
–Karl Kraus[1]
The concept that this is the most advanced, the most progressive, of all times, rather than an era of the decline of the human spirit, does our hearts good and caresses our amour-propre. It is a consideration that arises from a profound misunderstanding of the biological functions of evolution, as well as the embrace of a central assumption of Hegelian history, and it gives moreover pride of place to the young. As the most recent inhabitants of a planet or a culture, we are therefore the best, knowing the most, and find the past disposable as a matter of aesthetic and moral consideration. Which is not to say that from our privileged position at the apex of human and cosmic development we can pick up those scraps which are most useful to us. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but still we see more than they, is the underlying assumption.
There is of course no basis in any sense for this assumption. If Karl Kraus touched a truth for himself and others of his sensibility in the early years of the 20th century with the observation above, then we enter not the fourth millennium of progress of the human spirit in these years but rather the second century of its decline. It is a sobering assessment, and Adorno, Benjamin and others, all of whom found in Kraus an exemplary spirit of their great times, extended his melancholy.
The role of art in a doomed society, if there is one, has been much on my mind recently, for it’s fair to ask what it may look like in an era of decline. I have never been able to embrace the Nietzschean solution for either art or life; no one who truly understands the truth that Schopenhauer expressed can ever properly do so. David Ian Rabey in English Drama Since 1940 suggests that a central question for theatre in a declining society is “How do we live?” (And consequently and perhaps more relevant its corollary, “How do we die?”) Obviously any artistic expression must be a rear-guard action in this era; Expressionist, Neue Sachlichkeit and New Expressionist work, which foreground the expression of the individual spirit and the depths which sound its true identity, is one approach, and perhaps the most radically sound. But even this expression becomes more and more pointless and invisible, at least from the perspective of that declining culture, and it becomes harder and harder to justify the effort and the time required. It is not available to all of us to act as Klimt did when he withdrew his three great paintings for the University of Vienna and retreated into the extraordinary but more private beauty of his final period.
It may be that the Expressionist must now remain silent in a final gesture of antagonism to decline. Upon the beginning of the conflagration of the First World War, Kraus mourned the dead individual and dead culture in their initial stages of disintegration and decay, and as this second century of decline continues, his words echo perhaps more softly now, soon themselves no doubt to be consigned to nothingness:
In these great times which I knew when they were this small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it; and which, because in the realm of organic growth no such transformation is possible, we had better call fat times and, truly, hard times as well; in these times in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen; in these serious times which have died laughing at the thought that they might become serious; which, surprised by their own tragedy, are reaching for diversion and, catching themselves redhanded, are groping for words; in these loud times which boom with the horrible symphony of actions which produce reports and of reports which cause actions: in these times you should not expect any words of my own from me — none but these words which barely manage to prevent silence from being misinterpreted. … In the realm of poverty of imagination where people die of spiritual famine without feeling spiritual hunger, where pens are dipped in blood and swords in ink, that which is not thought must be done, but that which is only thought is unutterable. Expect no words of my own from me. Nor would I be able to say anything new, for in the room in which one writes there is such noise, and at this time one should not determine whether it comes from animals, from children, or merely from mortars. He who encourages deeds with words desecrates words and deeds and is doubly despicable. … Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent![2]
And perhaps more blunt an epitaph — for his work, for the human spirit, for the culture and so many other things besides — is Kraus’s final poem, written on 13 September 1933 and which touches me particularly today for some reason:
Don’t ask why all this time I never spoke.
Wordless am I,
and won’t say why.
And silence reigns because the bedrock broke.
No word redeems;
one only speaks in dreams.
A smiling sun the sleeper’s images evoke.
Time marches on;
the final difference is none.
The word expired when that world awoke.[3]
Footnotes
- Quoted in Patrick Werkner, Austrian Expressionism: The Formative Years. Translated by Nicholas T. Parsons. Palo Alto, CA: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1993, p. 2. [↩]
- Karl Kraus, In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 70-71. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 259. [↩]
Yes? That’s surprising. Well, despite being seen by and large as the philosopher who esteems art in toto–not that you necessarily have this view–Nietzsche is at the same time extremely critical of art, or certain types of art, and as a few discerning critics realize, he may be more suspicious of it than Plato. But this is an instructive passage for the kind of art that he does extol, and it is the tragic vision par excellence, precisely what is necessary in an age of decline:
“Tragedy is so far from providing evidence for pessimism among the Hellenes in Schopenhauer’s sense that it has to be considered the decisive repudiation of that idea and the *counter-verdict* to it. Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest porblems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the *sacrifice* of its highest types–*that* is what I called Dionysian, *that* is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the *tragic* poet. *Not* so as to get rid of ruth and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge–it was thus Aristotle understood it–: but, beyond ruth and terror, *to realize in oneself* the eternal joy of becoming–that joy which also encompasses *joy in destruction”.–Twilight of the Idols
Is there true silence though if even resignation is given figuration, in poetry, song, or whatever art form?