blah-feme

I know you're there (the great white shark speaks)

Occasionally (very rarely, in fact)  I am caught short by the extraordinarily intense mark of intention that makes itself felt in my writing. It is not that I seek this out or look to say, say and say in a way that is of or for 'me', but that, sometimes, very rarely, I am surprised by the strong impression of encountering myself talking back to me from the 'page'.

Quite why one passage should strike me like this and another doesn't is extremely difficult to ascertain. In such moments I am called to question the popular wisdom in enlightened liberal educational institutions that characterises the programme of education as enabling students to find their own voice.

This emphasis on the search for that singular vocality in writing, for that indelible trace that cannot and will not unhinge itself from the acousmêtre of the author, is grounded in a notion hat the best of writing is always the most original, the most unique, the most individuated.

And yet, those moments that seem to 'speak' to me of me, those intensely reflexive turns in the written prose that speak back are precisely those things I dislike in my writing, Only when I am able to write as if  in control of the materials –  only as if unfolding an idea in full and erudite spontaneity, as if in short, I were someone else – only then do I feel that the writing is good, secure. In shot, writing is always for me a kind of effacement.

I want to purge those embarrassing Northern vowels, that mark of suburbia, of the Midlands, of bland, safe lower bourgeois, poorly educated autodidact. I want to write as if I were from a glorious and aristocratic generation of emigré Jews, of dissident Palestinians, of Hungarian violinist, of African rebels, or Cuban guerillas; of Clarissa Furtwangler, Szagylyn Passmaker, Hyacinth Smortlyna, Mahmoud Kobal, Cruella Rozhdestvinsky. Wouldn't it be great to be that, to be other than this white, bland, suburban bore?

When students begin to write critically, intelligently, creatively, perhaps the last thing we should do is encourage to write as themselves. Who on earth wants to do that? Why not encourage them to write as if.

AND YET.... In this tendency to efface ourselves is precisely located the operation of a certain power at its most unmediated, in this feigning of boredom with oneself, with the routinely quotidian white. To play act as if in turmoil with oneself, to march endlessly through the detritus of one's average life in search of something else, something new, something Other, is the act of a class terminally ensnared in luxury, in excess without telos, without suffering. It is the feigning, the colonising , the ruthless appropriation even of the pain this class inflicts as if to say – we cause you harm and yet we maintain the right to own your suffering, to colonise it with our soft and whining pettinesses.

Here then is precisely the burden: to rage against self is to play act as if powerless; and yet to valorise the care of that same self is to enact that brutality of a self-obsession in the face of  the cruelty inflicted on others.

No way out. No way out???

In that encounter with the self, as if speaking back to oneself from the written page, then, one experiences a moment of extraordinary uncanniness when the promise of some kind of way out is glimpsed if only for a moment: the self becomes performative, split, epistemologically impossible, the creepy doppelgänger that promises both a death and a rebirth.

I am you, speaking back to to you. Who do you think you are?

Mahler and Strauss

[extract from my forthcoming book]

It is clear (or, at least, intensely apparent) that bodies are the sites of discourse. This is amply demonstrated at the Habsburg twilight by the proliferation of theses on pathology, disease, gender and sexuality, which concentrate their energies on the fleshly; they constitute a powerfully overdetermined focusing of discursive activity on the body. Whilst it is certainly the case that the Habsburg fin de siècle deals with the body in ways deeply indebted to a long and vigorous humanist tradition of the body, the particularity of the re-figuration of that tradition is what concerns us here: how did the new sciences of the body circumscribe the public experience of Mahler’s body? And how did public debates about the body and its appropriation frame Mahler’s private figurations of his own body? To attempt to answer this last question is no simple matter: unlike many of his contemporaries, Mahler has left us very little of the usual material for biographical speculation – no diaries, no memoirs, very little in his letters as to the way he saw himself, his oeuvre or his milieu. This chapter will thus attempt to think through the problematic of Mahler’s body as an historical object of analysis by scrutinising some of the contemporaneous literatures (fiction, psychoanalysis, medicine) that help form a cultural currency of the body, and will employ a series of interpretative strategies that centre on Mahler’s body as an agent in the formation of that currency.

Mahler’s body, it seems, was a deviant body: in the late nineteenth-century (racio-)criminological mind, there is an unbroken continuity from the deviant bodies of prostitutes, harridans, perverts, homosexuals, criminals, through to the bearers of sickness, the insane and ‘lower’ racial types such as the Hottentot, the Negro and the Gypsy; the Jewish male body is similarly marked in the raciological discourses of the time by its physical ‘inadequacy’ and deviant genus. As we shall see, it is a crucial determining inclination of Viennese raciology to read the surfaces of bodies and their morphology as bedeutsam (‘meaningful’) of their Charakter (‘character’) or Gattung (‘species’). The inclusion of the Jewish body amongst the other ‘deviant’ bodies is grounded in a logic of marginalisation through embodiment: this structural trope identified by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain is strictly binaristic. Her most useful observation for our purposes is that one encounters in a range of literary sources from the fin de siècle a tendency to juxtapose the seamless, ‘light’ and ‘invisible’ body of hegemonic masculinity with the intensely visible and over-signified fleshly bodies of its deviant Others. Something of this alteritous formulation is captured in a short diary entry made by that most eloquent of witnesses to the Habsburg twilight, Franz Kafka, in 1914, three years after Mahler’s death, in which he observed two men in a room in the building opposite his window:

29 July. The two friends, one of them blond, resembling Richard Strauss, smiling, reserved, clever; the other dark, correctly dressed, mild-mannered yet firm, too dainty, lisped;

This striking duality, one that Sander Gilman has also recognised in the Mahler/Straus juxtaposition, is a telling addendum to Scarry: not only were hegemonic masculinities characterised by their ‘lightness’ but they were also marked by a comfortable physicality (‘smiling, reserved, clever’). The overdetermined embodiment of the Other of that comfortable physicality, the thin, dark, slightly fussily dressed, ‘too dainty’ masculinity of the ‘smart Jew’ (or any smart Other), is achieved – unlike Scarry’s British colonial examples of the overdetermined healthy bodies of, for example, ‘black’ men – through a sickliness or over-articulated counter-physicality: it is in the Other that the body seems to be under a kind of malevolent erasure, not in the wielders of discourse, as in Scarry’s model. If we nonetheless accept Scarry’s thesis that ‘those without power’ will have a ‘body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction and wounding’ (my emphasis), and that this body marks a territory that contracts one’s sphere of existence, ‘down to the small circle of one’s immediate presence’, we must also recognise the specificity of the Austro-German imagining of the duality in the slenderness and wistful cerebrality of the Jewish Other and the healthy physicality of the hegemon. The ‘wounding’ that Scarry so eloquently outlines is manifest here in an internalised (racial) mark of difference: the Jew is marked out as suffering from (wounded by) its peculiar ontogeny, from its very biological givenness. The urgent problem for a public male Jew like Mahler was not how to attempt to acquire the comfortable public physicality of the hegemon, but how to erase or somehow challenge the bodily impediment (of the sickly Jewish ‘intellectual’ body) to the wielding of public cultural power. The consequences of Scarry’s theory of embodiment are far-reaching, but of usefulness in this context only if modified slightly: whilst intense representation (embodiment) can function as a way of regulating the symbolic meanings of bodies, which stand outside the hegemonic physicality of ‘upright’ bourgeois propriety, that embodiment can work as a kind of pathologisation and ‘thinning’ rather than as a thickening of the physicality of the racial Other.

At the Habsburg fin de siècle, one certainly encounters a range of body types that are wilfully and consistently marginalised from dominant discourses, thereby safeguarding the putative ‘normality’ of certain forms of military, bourgeois and public masculinities. The deviant bodies are often marked by their racial difference and, as we have seen, the Jewish male body stands as an exemplar of the dissidence of ‘non-German’ masculinities. Like Kafka’s huge (baby-)father in the Das Urteil, the upright male body of the empowered Austro-German hegemon is a highly discursive graphism (an emptied ‘shape’ or shell) that can expand itself to cover an inordinate amount of cultural space and, like the Kaiser-figure in Heinrich Mann’s ironic novel Der Untertan, that hegemonic graphism is empty, unfettered by deviant ‘character’ and has ‘no limits on [its] extension out into the world’ despite (perhaps because of) its fleshly physicality. To use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, it is a completely deterritorialized body. For the Jewish body, conversely, it is the perception of its very particularly embodied ‘character’ (its thin, spindly awkwardness) that marks it as an impediment to the experience of and pleasuring in cultural space. As we shall see, the anxiety about space finds particularly powerful expression in German-Jewish literature from the period and has been linked by Deleuze and Guattari to Kafka’s notion of a ‘minor literature’. The attempt to disrupt that impediment, the strategic dislocation of the body (as a kind of internalised flesh(l)y ghetto) from Jewish male creativity, a strategy followed with zeal by Mahler, Kafka, Brod, Werfel, Buber and other German-Jewish intellectuals from the long fin de siècle, is a crucially assimilationist project, and one which, as we shall see, finds resonance in Kafka’s view of writing and Mahler’s view of composing.

Listening with Kafka: a barred exit

In 1914, three years after composer Gustav Mahler’s death, Kafka began work on a short prose fragment, which he completed some time in 1917 and to which Kafka’s editor Max Brod later gave the title ‘Auf der Galerie’.

Click here to see the fragment in German

Click here to read the fragment in English

I want to begin by addressin the fragmen's writerly-performative quality. The structuring of the text around two incompatible narratives works as a critical play on the epistemological groundedness of authoriality and subject positioning.

This critical pleasuring in the ambiguation of the authorial/narrating voice also engages at least two incompatible ‘types’ of masculinity: the ‘active’ (but, perhaps, deluded) masculine hero and the passive (but, perhaps, less deluded, less aggrandised) weeping observer.

The two paragraphs effect this duality through both narrative and indexical means: for Roland Barthes, the structure of narrative is usefully articulated through what he terms nuclei or ‘kernels’, events in the narrative that are crucial for that narrative’s cohesion – events that cannot be dispensed with if the narrative (or diegesis) is transposed from one medium to another; the index is a medium-specific operator that fleshes out the bones of the chain of nuclei through an accumulative action, grounding the diegesis in the medium of its telling.

What is significant here is the way in which Kafka attempts to subvert this functional duality (a duality articualted by Lukács as the difference between ‘Beschreiben’ and ‘Erzählen’, finding a useful complement in Jakobson’s ‘metaphor/metonomy’ duality ) by fundamentally integrating the telling of the diegesis into its writing: Kafka heaps writerly (medium-specific) indices onto the telling such that it is inseparable from its writing, inseparable from its qualitative grounding as a specific mediality.

This classically ‘modernist’ gesture – the intense medialisation of an apparently universally translatable ‘message’ – is also readable as a set of quite specific meditations on cultural agency, gender and the location of what David Schwarz has termed the ‘listening subject’.

The first paragraph plays out a hyperbolically ‘Freudian’ narrative of masculine agency. The father proxy in the ring must at all costs be vanquished by the young visitor in order to save (win) the suffering sexualised (consumptive) equestrienne from her brutalisation at the hands of the monstrous father.

The equestrienne stands as the cipher of Verkehr between the two men, a ‘transaction’ that helps mark the patrilineal and Oedipal ground of masculinity and the woman’s place in that transaction as Waaren (literally ‘goods’ or ware). The visitor is thus able to activate his masculinity by penetrating the membrane of the circle along a teleological vector; the trauma of this violent action is marked by a sudden (putative) silencing of the music with a shout of ‘Stop!’.

This shout, ‘durch die Fanfaren des immer sich anpassenden Orchesters’ (‘over the fanfares of the incessant accompanying orchestra’), rises above the degraded Alltagsmusik of the circus in order to figure the visitor as the bearer of a reproachful, ‘higher’, cultural counter-capital. Moreover, not only does the visitor traverse the boundary of the ring, but he ‘plunges’ into it: ‘stürzte in die Manege’ (literally ‘would tumble, fall or plunge’, continuing the conditional mood). This precipitous drop into the ring adds to the sense of trauma at the visitor’s incursion, which, within the Freudian logic that this paragraph sets up, is a hyperbolic (pathological) overstatement of the act of penetration.

The epistemological trajectory of this paragraph is underscored by the deployment of a range of figurations of sonic materials which draw on contemporaneous imaginations of the music/noise dualism. In this first paragraph, sound(/music) engages a complex array of tropes. On the one hand, it helps characterise the paragraph as ‘monstrous’ through the Orchestra’s cacophonous Brausen: incessant, it churns out stock fanfares, and the other noises generated my inhuman mechanisms – ventilators, steam hammers – are indexical expansions of the core image of a merely utilitarian (commercial) music.

On the other hand, sound functions as the sonic channelling of two opposing engagements of power – (i) the patriarchal monstrous brutilisation of the equestrienne marked by the Brausen and (ii) the traumatic ‘Stop!’ of the visitor – both marked by a character-giving utilisation of sound, accompaniment versus voice. In this duality of inside/outside, the first engagement of power is environmental in character, part of a circular, circumscribed ‘inner’ territory of degradation that locates the father proxy at that centre, wielding a range of masculine cultural resources that are simultaneously canonic (masculine strength, the driver of the action) and dissident (cruel, brutal).

Sound marks this territory by ‘accompanying’ the action, figuring it as a degrading sadomasochistic spectacle that can be ordered for its audience by the addition of sonic markers, like a perverse Hollywood narrative, accompanied by a ‘hidden’ post-Wagnerian orchestra.

The second engagement of power is a highly charged singular act of ‘sounding out’, carried on the voice, a mark of exemplary masculine subjectivity, but also the duplicitous bearer of a masculinity in crisis: vocal production can be seen at the fin de siècle as a supplement to the canonical mediacy (mediality) of writing where, as Sarah Webster Goodwin amongst others has shown, ‘voicing out’ draws attention to the sonorous body and is therefore dangerous in that it is grounded in the delicate body-physical, that privileged (and demeaned) site of the feminine in the nineteenth-century misogynistic imagination.

In Kafka this stands for an atavistic but ironic ‘recuperation’ of a model of masculinity lost in the great administration of the law, lost to the figure of the impresario mediator – voice as a last hope in the face of the brutalising anonymity of public masculinity, commercial culture, mechanised production.

But all this is not so.

Or so the next paragraph would seem to suggest. The sudden eruption of the indicative mood is traumatic: as Boa puts it, ‘the thudding syllables come as hammer blows to destroy the speculative edifice of a possible story’ and it is no accident that Boa should reach for the metaphor of hammer blows, resonating the ironic hyperbolic ‘Zarathustran’ masculinity of the first paragraph and thereby underlining the epistemological incongruity of the second with it.

This paragraph, by positing a second epistemologically dissonant version of events alongside the first, forces the narratee to rethink the reliability of the first paragraph fundamentally. It is thereby tempting to think of the story as presenting two realities, one false and one true, the first paragraph clearly a fiction, the second marked as ‘real’ by the indicative mood.

Yet this reading assumes a simple mapping of verbal mood to narrator reliability which, I suggest, is difficult to sustain in the light of Kafka’s use of language here: whereas the ‘truth’ of the first is questioned by the conditional mood and by the overblown heroism of the young visitor with its hyperbolic Freudian sexual circus, the second is called into question by the dream-like tone of the language: it is unfolded, almost as if in slow motion, in a long chain of clauses all of which relate back to a single grammatical subject - the adoring grandfather figure [‘der Direktor… vorsorglich sie auf den Apfelschimmel hebt… sich nicht entschliessen kann, das Peitschenzeichen zu geben… neben dem Pferd mit offenem Munde einherläuft…’].

This relay of clauses fixed to a single subject is a masterful writerly play on the German structuring of the clause around verb positioning, the closure of each link in the chain marked by the finite verb, heaping narrative action upon action to draw out the narrative line, and the narratee with it, towards an expected closure; but that closure is attenuated; the equestrienne takes her bow and, in the strange dislocated coda marked out from the rest of the paragraph by a hyphen, a characteristically dissident use of punctuation, the visitor to the gallery weeps ‘without knowing it’.

The beautiful strangeness of this ending, its pointed and studied ambiguity, brings one to rethink the simplicity of the unreality/reality dualism, and to call that binarism into question, to leave the boundary between the two porous.

As in the first paragraph, the content of the second is underscored by references to sonic materials, and, like in the first paragraph, those materials help flesh out a pointed juxtaposition of active and passive masculinities by recognising two kinds of sound – voice and accompaniment: however, it is the ringmaster that has ownership of the voice here, crying ‘English words of warning’, ‘exhorting’ the groom to be careful, and, like the visitor with his ‘Stop!’ of the first paragraph, he implores the orchestra to be silent.

The silencing of the orchestra here underscores the epistemological dissonance between the two paragraphs: in the first, the voice is owned by the visitor and engaged as a reproach to the banality and cruelty of the circus; in the second, the voice is commanded by the ringmaster, and is engaged to structure the audience’s (narratee’s) attention drawing it to his ‘kleine Enkelin’, the skilful equestrienne, by the silencing of the orchestra.

In the strange coda, moreover, the visitor sinks ‘in the final march as if into a heavy dream’, activating that commonplace trope of music as a place where subjectivity is lost, a place of dangerous and debilitating pleasures. The music operates here like a ‘sonorous envelope’.

There is a tendency in the post-Enlightenment Western European imagination of music to perceive it as a way of ‘transforming’ or temporarily suspending everyday modes of being, of moving beyond the mundane into a higher (or at least different) state of consciousness.

In Kafka, this tendency takes on an ironic or critical edge: the great post-Schopenhauerian articulation of music as a kind of narcotic is here blocked by the crossing and cancelling out of exit trajectories. One way leads to the ludicrous over-articulation of masculinity in the plunging thrusting ‘Stop!’ of the first paragraph by the (assumed) silencing of the music; the second leads to a debilitated, foreclosed masculinity, in which the music envelops the visitor and returns him to a womb-like state in which ‘crying without knowing it’ marks his infantilisation, an abject returning to the semiotic.

In both instances, the ‘way out’ is barred.