Dieses Pseudo-Karl-Kraus-Zitat ist noch kaum 20 Jahre alt und in den digitalisierten Texten von Karl Kraus unauffindbar.
Das Zitat wird anscheinend das erste Mal im Jahr 1997 ohne Quellenangabe in einem humoristischen "Österreich-Lexikon" des Reclam Verlags Karl Kraus unterschoben, und später von Burgtheaterdirektor*innen öfters zitiert.
Das Falschzitat ist nicht sehr weit verbreitet, hat es aber immerhin in ein paar Tageszeitungen geschafft (Link) (Link) .
Wenn auch Kolleginnen und Kollegen von der Karl-Kraus-Forschung bestätigt haben werden, dass ihnen dieses Zitat noch nie untergekommen ist, kann man sicher sein, dass es ein Kuckuckszitat ist.
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Quellen:
Beispiele für falsche Zuschreibungen:
Gerd Holzheimer: "Wenn alle Strick' reissen, häng ich mich auf. Ein Österreich-Lexikon," Reclam Verlag, Leipzig: 1997, S. 32. (Link)
Beil (Link); Burgtheater (Link); Der Standard (Link); Die Presse (Link)
Artikel in Arbeit.
_________
Dank:
Ich danke Ralf Bülow und R. Boglowski für ihre Recherchen.
ANHANG für Misha L.
_______________________________________-
HOW TO READ A BOOK
This talk was delivered at the opening of the first book fair in Turin,
Italy, on May 18.
THE idea of a book fair in the city where, a century ago, Friedrich
Nietzsche lost his mind has, in its own turn, a nice ring of madness - a Mobius
ring to be precise (commonly known as a vicious circle), for several stalls in
this book fair are occupied by the complete or selected works of this great
German. On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of
publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the
limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot
measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all
prefer to regard as unending.
On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the
worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller
amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the
shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful
of dust. Yet even this form of the future is better than the memory of a few
surviving relatives or friends on which one cannot rely, and often it is
precisely the appetite for this posthumous dimension which sets one's pen in
motion.
So as we toss and turn these rectangular objects in our hands - those in
octavo, in quarto, in duodecimo, etc., etc. - we won't be terribly amiss if we
surmise that we fondle in our hands, as it were, the actual or potential urns
with someone's rustling ashes. In a manner of speaking, libraries (private or
public) and book stores are cemeteries; so are book fairs. After all, what goes
into writing a book - be that a novel, a philosophical treatise, a collection
of poems, a biography or a thriller - is, ultimately, a man's only life: good
or bad, but always finite. Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an
exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book nobody
gets younger.
Nor does one become any
younger by reading it. Since that is so, our natural preference should be for
good books. The paradox, however, lies in the fact that in literature, as
nearly everywhere, ''good'' is not an autonomous category: it is defined by its
distinction from ''bad.'' What's more, in order to write a good book, a writer
must read a great deal of trash - otherwise, he won't be able to develop the
necessary criteria. That's what may constitute bad literature's best defense at
the Last Judgment; that's also the raison d'etre of these proceedings.
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YET since we are all moribund and since reading books is time-consuming,
we must devise a system that allows us a semblance of economy. Of course there
is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving,
mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that
fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.
Hence the need for concision, condensation, fusion - for the works that bring
the human predicament, in all its diversity, into its sharpest possible focus;
in other words, the need for a short cut. Hence, too - as a byproduct of our
suspicion that such short cuts exist (and they do exist, but about that later)
-the need for some compass in the ocean of available literature.
The role of that compass, of course, is eagerly played by literary
criticism, by reviewers. Alas, its needle oscillates wildly. What is North for
some is the South (South America, to be precise) for others; the same goes in
an even wilder degree for East and West. The trouble with a reviewer is
(minimum) threefold: (A) he can be a hack, and as ignorant as ourselves, (B) he
can have strong predilections for a certain kind of writing, or simply be on
the take with the publishing industry, and (C) if he is a writer of talent, he
will turn his review-writing into an independent art form - Jorge Luis Borges
is a case in point - and you may end up by reading reviews rather than the
books themselves.
In any case, you find yourselves adrift in the ocean, with pages and
pages rustling in every direction, clinging to a raft of whose ability to stay
afloat you are not so sure. The alternative therefore would be to develop your
own taste, to build your own compass, to familiarize yourself, as it were, with
particular stars and constellations - dim or bright but always remote. This,
however, takes a hell of a lot of time, and you may easily find yourself old
and gray, heading for the exit with a lousy volume under your arm. Another
alternative - or perhaps just a part of the same - is to rely on hearsay; a
friend's advice, a reference caught in a text that you happen to like. Although
not institutionalized in any fashion (which wouldn't be such a bad idea), this
kind of procedure is familiar to all of us from a tender age. Yet this too
proves to be poor insurance, for the ocean of available literature swells and
widens constantly.
So where is terra firma, even though it may be but an uninhabitable
island? Where is our good man Friday, let alone a Cheetah?
Before I come up with my
suggestion - nay! with what I perceive as the only solution for developing
sound taste in literature, I'd like to say a few words about this solution's
source, i.e., about my humble self. I'd like to do it not because of my
personal vanity, but because I believe that the value of an idea is related to
the context from which it emerges. Indeed, had I been a publisher, I'd be
putting on my books' covers not only their authors' names but also the exact
age at which they composed this or that work, in order to enable their readers
to decide whether they care to reckon with the information or the views
contained in a book written by a man so much younger - or, for that matter, so
much older - than they are themselves.
THE source of the suggestion to come belongs to the category of people
(alas, I can no longer use the term ''generation,'' which implies a certain
sense of mass and unity) for whom literature has always been a matter of some
hundred names; to the people whose social graces would make Robinson Crusoe or
even Tarzan wince: to those who feel awkward at large gatherings, do not dance
at parties, tend to find metaphysical excuses for adultery and are finicky
about discussing politics. Such people normally dislike themselves far more
than their detractors dislike them. Such people still prefer alcohol and
tobacco to heroin or marijuana - such people are those whom, in W. H. Auden's
words, ''one will not find on the barricades and who never shoot themselves or
their lovers.'' If such people however occasionally find themselves swimming in
their blood on the floor of prison cells or speaking from a platform, it is
because they rebel against (or, more precisely, object to) - not some
particular injustice - but the order of the world as a whole. They have no
illusions about the objectivity of the views they put forth; on the contrary,
they insist on their unpardonable subjectivity right from the threshold.
They act in this fashion, however, not for the purpose of shielding
themselves from possible attack: as a rule, they are fully aware of the
vulnerability pertinent to their views and the positions they defend. Yet -
taking the stance somewhat opposite to Darwinian - they consider vulnerability
the primary trait of living matter; they are interested in the survival of the
defeatist. This, I must add, has less to do with masochistic tendencies,
nowadays attributed to almost every man of letters, than with their
instinctive, often firsthand knowledge that extreme subjectivity, prejudice and
indeed idiosyncrasy are what helps art to avoid cliche. And the resistance to
cliche is what distinguishes art from life.
Now that you know the background of what I am about to say, I may just
as well say it. The way to develop good taste in literature is to read poetry.
If you think that I am speaking out of professional partisanship, that I am
trying to advance my own guild interests, you are badly mistaken. For, being
the supreme form of human locution, poetry is not only the most concise, the
most condensed way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the
highest possible standards for any linguistic operation - especially one on
paper.
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of
verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history,
social studies or the art of fiction. Good style in prose is always hostage to
the precision, speed and laconic intensity of poetic diction. A child of
epitaph and epigram, conceived indeed as a short cut to any conceivable subject
matter, poetry to prose is a great disciplinarian. It teaches the latter not
only the value of each word but also the mercurial mental patterns of the
species, alternatives to linear composition, the knack of omitting the
self-evident, emphasis on detail, the technique of anticlimax. Above all,
poetry develops in prose that appetite for metaphysics that distinguishes a
work of art from mere belles-lettres. It must be admitted, however, that in
this particular regard, prose has proven to be a rather lazy pupil.
Please, don't get me wrong: I am not trying to debunk prose. The truth
of the matter is that poetry simply happens to be older than prose and thus has
covered a greater distance. Literature started with poetry, with the song of a
nomad that predates the scribblings of a settler. And although I have compared
somewhere the difference between poetry and prose to that between the air force
and the infantry, the suggestion that I make now has nothing to do with either
hierarchy or the anthropological origins of literature. All I am trying to do
is to be practical and spare your eyesight and brain cells a lot of useless
printed matter. Poetry, one might say, has been invented for just this purpose
- for it is synonymous with economy. What one should do, therefore, is repeat,
albeit in miniature, the process that took place in our civilization in the
course of two millennia. It is easier than you might think, for the body of
poetry is far less voluminous than that of prose. What's more, if you are
concerned mainly with contemporary literature, then your job is indeed a piece
of cake. All you have to do is to arm yourselves for a couple of months with
the works of poets in your mother tongue, preferably from the first half of this
century. I suppose you'll end up with a dozen rather slim books, and by the end
of the summer you -that is, your literary taste - will be in great shape.
IF your mother tongue is English, I may recommend to you Robert Frost,
Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore and
Elizabeth Bishop. If the language is German, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl,
Peter Huchel, Ingeborg Bachmann and Gottfried Benn. If it is Spanish, Antonio
Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, Juan Ramon
Jimenez and Octavio Paz will do. If the language is Polish - or if you know
Polish (which would be to your great advantage, because the most extraordinary
poetry of this century is written in that language) - I'd like to mention to
you the names of Leopold Staff, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert and Wieslawa
Szymborska. If it is French, then of course Apollinaire, Jules Supervielle,
Pierre Reverdy, Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob, Francis Jammes, Andre Frenaud some
of Eluard, a bit of Aragon, Victor Segalen, and Henri Michaux. If it is Greek,
then you should read Constantine Cavafy, George Seferis, Yannis Ritsos. If it
is Dutch, then your must is Martinus Nijhoff, particularly his stunning
''Awater.'' If it is Portuguese, you should try Fernando Pessoa and perhaps
Carlos Drummond de Andrade. If the language is Swedish, read Gunnar Ekelof,
Harry Martinson, Werner Aspenstrom, Tomas Transtromer. If it is Russian, it
should be, to say the least, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova,
Boris Pasternak, Vladislav Khodasevich, Viktor Khlebnikov, Nikolai Kluyev,
Nikolai Zabolotsky. If it is Italian, I don't presume to submit any name to
this audience, and if I still mention Quasimodo, Saba, Ungaretti and Montale,
it is simply because I have long wanted to acknowledge my personal, private
gratitude and debt to these four great poets whose lines influenced my own life
rather crucially, and I am glad to do so while standing on Italian soil.
If after going through the
works of any of these, you would drop a book of prose picked from the shelf, it
won't be your fault. If you'd continue to read it, that will be to the author's
credit; that will mean that this author has indeed something to add to the
truth about our existence as it was known to these few poets just mentioned;
that would prove at least that this author is not redundant, that his language
has an independent energy or grace. Or else, that would mean that reading is
your incurable addiction. As addictions go, this is not the worst one.
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Let me draw a caricature here, for caricatures accentuate the essential.
In this caricature I see a reader whose both hands are occupied with holding
open books. In the left, he holds a collection of poems, in the right, a volume
of prose. Let's see which he drops first. Of course, he may fill both his palms
with prose volumes, but that will leave him with self-negating criteria. And of
course he may also ask what distinguishes good poetry from bad, and where is
his guarantee that what he holds in his left hand is indeed worth bothering
with?
WELL, for one thing what he holds in his left hand will be, in all
likelihood, lighter than what he holds in the right. Secondly, poetry, as
Montale once put it, is an incurably semantic art, and the chances for
charlatanism in it are extremely low. By the third line a reader will know what
sort of thing he holds in his left hand, for poetry makes sense fast and the
quality of language in it makes itself felt immediately. After three lines he
may take a glance at what he has in the right.
This is, as I told you, a
caricature. At the same time, I believe, this might be the posture many of you
will unwittingly assume at this book fair. Make sure, at least, that the books
in your hands belong to different genres of literature. Now, this shifting eyes
from left to right is of course a maddening enterprise; still, there are no
horses on the streets of Torino any longer, and the sight of a cabby flogging
his animal won't aggravate the state you will be in leaving these premises.
Besides, a hundred years hence, nobody's insanity will matter much to the
multitudes whose number will exceed by far the total of little black letters in
all the books at this book fair put together. So you may as well try the little
trick I've just suggested. Like the proverbial proletariat, you stand to lose
nothing; what you may gain are new associative chains.
Joseph Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature.
