Torchbearer or Parasite?

Having written 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats' in February 1939, W.H. Auden later penned a rather more cutting response to the Irish Bard.

To get the Last Poems of Yeats,
You need not mug up on dates;
All a reader requires
Is some knowledge of gyres
And the sort of people he hates.

Change a few details here and there and this poetic sally could have been written about another of Auden's touchstones, the Viennese satirist and polemicist Karl Kraus. Kraus was also famous for hating people and expanding upon that hate in his largely incomprehensible journal Die Fackel, published in Vienna between 1899 and 1936. Yet he inspired and inspires significant fans, drawn to his baleful attacks against the greats, including Heinrich Heine, and his support for underdogs, such as Franz Wedekind (or internationally overlooked figures like Johann Nestroy). Jonathan Franzen is the latest in this short line of Kraus advocates who, using his influence within a largely conservative, return-watching book industry, has issued The Kraus Project as his latest tome.

The volume is, in essence, Franzen's translation of four Kraus essays, Heine and the Consequences (1910), Nestroy and Posterity (1912), Afterword to 'Heine and the Consequences' (1911) and Between Two Strains of Life: Final Word (1917) and the brief but chilling poem from the time of Hitler's assent to power, Let No One Ask... (1934). But the really interesting meat of the matter is to be found in Franzen's annotations 'with assistance and additional notes from Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann'. Using Kraus's clever-clever, labyrinthine demolition of the (in Kraus's view) all-too-lionised Heine as a springboard, Franzen seeks to create a bridge between then and now.

The two authors certainly share a penchant for linguistic acid and they constantly fell totems, though Franzen is less thorough in his reasoning. Apple and Amazon are subjects for censure. Kraus was equally dismissive and fearing of the march of technology. But then Franzen promptly rubber stamps Microsoft and Google's presence in his life, based purely on his distrust of the 'coolness' of Apple. Gmail is, for him, convenient. Twitter and Facebook are odious, as is the cosy consumption of cable news. But then he compares Kraus's virtuoso take-downs to a form of early blogging. You're never in doubt about what Kraus thinks. With Franzen, I'm not so sure – particularly when it comes to the tediously over-touted Bob Dylan. Yet, as has been shown within his own career, Franzen's not great in differentiating between the hare and the hounds.

Skipping between the then and the now, The Kraus Project is ultimately just a brilliant excuse for Franzen to reenact the postures of his oh-so-hating hero, all the time supported by Reitter and Kehlmann's cooler, though not unengagingly academic eye on the texts in hand. Yet however amusing, occasionally self-doubting – even, at times, self-knowing – Franzen appears, certainly in comparison to Kraus, the process of reading the book is often wearying, with bloated footnootes swelling over several pages, reducing Kraus's thoughts to mere slivers. And that's if you can stomach the endless pessimism.

On Heine's damning analysis of fellow writer Ludwig Börne, Kraus said that 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'. The same could be said for Franzen. OK, so he rightly criticises Kraus's vicious anti-Semitism (the self-loathing act of the bright, bourgeois, assimilated Viennese Jew), though does he go far enough? He also frequently points out when Kraus becomes incomprehensible – not, in fact, just the gripe of a struggling translator – but you can't help but feel that Franzen is so in awe of Kraus and his work that he is, in effect, becoming his modern day parrot.

Kraus wouldn't stand for Franzen's repetition of key phrases. He might also have blanched at Franzen's 'beyond all this I had the immeasurably good fortune not only to discover very early what I wanted to do with my life but to have the freedom and the talent to pursue it'. And I'm not quite as convinced as Franzen is of the prescience of Kraus. Rather, reading The Kraus Project, I wondered whether both he and Franzen, as presented here, are strangely loveable parasites of a specific moment, devouring the biggest, juiciest morsels, inflating their own self-worth (and self-doubt), providing witty, beautifully-written, tantalisingly embittered flashcards to redress the optimism and gregariousness of the world around them. Click here to order a copy.

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