Modern Mind

one really understands themselves completely, least of all the man of science who, so certain of himself and his methods, precipitates the greatest calamity. Devastated by the wasteland of his life, Henry had opted for a ‘planned’ madness, only to have that backfire on him too. Life, for Pirandello, was like a play within a play, a device he used many times: one can never be entirely sure who is acting and who is not. One cannot even be sure when one is acting oneself.
    Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus,
discussed in chapter 9, was actually published in the annus mirabilis of 1922. So too was
The Last Days of Mankind,
the great work of Wittgenstein’s Viennese friend Karl Kraus. Kraus, who was Jewish, had been part of
Jung Wien
at the Café Griensteidl in the early years of the century, mixing with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Adolf Loos, and Arnold Schoenberg. He was a difficult and slightly deformed man, with a congenital abnormality in his shoulders that gave him a stoop. A satirist of almost unrivalled mordancy, he earned most of his considerable income from lectures and readings. At the same time, he published a magazine,
Die Fackel
(The Torch), three times a month, from 1899 until his death in 1936. This made him a lot of enemies but also earned him a wide following, which even extended to the troops on the front line in World War I. Punctilious to a degree, he was no less interested in language than his philosopher friend and was genuinely pained by solecisms, infelicitous turns of phrase, ungainly constructions. His aim, he once said, ‘is to pin down the Age between quotation marks.’ 22 Bitterly opposed to feminine emancipation, which he regarded as ‘a hysterical response to sexual neurosis,’ he hated the smugness and anti-Semitism of the Viennese press, together with the freewheeling freemasonry that, more than once, led him into the libel courts. Kraus was in effect doing in literature and society what Loos was doing in architecture, attacking the pompous, self-regarding self-satisfaction of the
ancien régime.
As he himself described his aim in
Die Fackel
: ‘What has been laid down here is nothing else than a drainage system for the broad marshes of phraseology.’ 23
    The Last Days of Mankind
was written – usually late at night – during the summers of World War I and immediately afterward. On occasions Kraus escaped to Switzerland, to avoid the turmoil of Vienna and the attentions of the censor. His deformity had helped him avoid military service, which made him already suspect in the eyes of certain critics, but his opposition to the aims of the Central Powers earned him even more opprobrium. The play was his verdict on the war, and although certain passages appeared in
Die Fackel
in 1919it wasn’t completed until 1921, by which time Kraus had added much new material. 24 The play draws a cumulative strength from hundreds of small vignettes, all taken from newspaper reports and, therefore, not invented. Life at the front, in all its horror and absurdity, is juxtaposed (in a verbal equivalent of Kurt Schwitters’s technique) with events back in Vienna, in all
their
absurdity and venality. Language is still the central element for Kraus (
Last Days
is essentially a play for voices rather than action). We witness the Kaiser’s voice, that of the poet, the man at the front, Jewish dialects from Vienna, deliberately cheek-by-jowl with one another to throw each crime – of thought or action – into relief. The satirist’s technique, of holding one phrase (or thought, or belief, or conviction) against its opposite, or reciprocal, is devastatingly effective, the more so as time passes.
    The play has been rarely performed because of its length – ten hours – and Kraus himself claimed that it was intended only for performances on Mars because ‘people on Earth could not bear the reality presented to them.’ 25 At the end of the play, mankind destroys itself in a hail of fire, and the last lines, put into the mouth of God, are those attributed to the Kaiser at the start of the war: ‘I did not want it.’ Brecht’s epitaph of Kraus was: ‘As the epoch raised its hand to end its life, he was this hand.’ 26
    The most overwhelming of the great books that appeared in 1922 was
Ulysses,
by James Joyce. On the surface, the form of Joyce’s
Ulysses
could not be more different from
The Waste Land
or Virginia Woolf’s
Jacob’s Room,
which will be considered later. But there are