Endre Kiss
From Gargantua-Zarathustra to Job-Ahasuerus
About the Literature as Social Institution and Personal Existence
2024.07.12.
Franz Werfel’s poetic and human fate is linked with the fate of the belles-lettres of the twentieth century in a unique, concise and classic way. For our usual judgement, the belles-lettres are constituted with works and authors, so that it can appear from the beginning as questionable, that it is not the literary phenomena which characterize the institution ’literature’, but the social institution ’literature’ characterizes the fate of a literary actor. In Werfel’s case however, the personal existence and the social institution are coinciding in an examplary way.
His life is so close together imbricated with the institution of the literature, that a reflection on Franz Werfel entails necessarily also a reflection on the fate of the belles lettres of the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, it is the specific hermeneutical horizon of our years, that necessarily provokes the intensive and cathartic understanding of this identity. In the past decades, we had in front of us a literary scene, where it was quite inconceivable to find an author like Franz Werfel. It means, in other words, that the ‘institution belles lettres’, like it has still been palpable in and through Franz Werfel’s existence, was no longer existing after 1945.
In every respect, this literature, also as new social institution, had lost its large influence, its relation to the real and not beforehand already largely socialized public. This institution has also further largely professionalized and does not work any longer on the basis of evident, traditional, literary motivations and causes. It is here about a literature (also about a new institution), that is no longer written for the readers, that would be precisely socialized by this reading in a society based on the culture. The institution "literature", of which Franz Werfel is straight the ideal-typical personification and the ideal itself, is inconceivable without this public and it goes also without saying that this literature has won its exclusive legitimacy straight from this interaction and communication with his public (1).
Franz Werfel’s unprecedented lint with that concept and with that practice of the "belles lettres", like we have still known it in the first half of the twentieth century, more concretely, up to Hitler, sharpens sensitively the contrast between the diverse concepts of literature. Adorno’s famous question, whether there would still be some poetry after Auschwitz, can be transformed into the question about the possibility of a Central European literature in general. On the one side, another post-Hitlerian repression adopted in the late real socialism quite concrete forms, but also did however not succeed to restore in the non-socialist Central Europe the faith in the eternity and incommensurability of the belles lettres.
Franz Werfel himself could obviously never think, that his fate could be one day identified with the institution of literature in a good time. He wanted just not a literary fate, rather wanted in his way of seeing to traditionally realize himself existentially through the literature. Metaphorically said, he wanted to realize an existential unity of Zarathustra and Gargantua. He was thus however also personifying both tendencies of the modern-bourgeoise social culture, from which Zarathustra was rather publicly assumed, the Gargantua hidden behind him was however all the more clearly concealed and evicted (2).
The identification of Werfel’s personality with the double of Gargantua and Zarathustra, standing in the center of our interpretation, has also already become thematical with former critics and interprets of the phenomenon Werfel. Thus, we interpret Robert Musil’s ‘Firemouth’ (Feuermaul as a name) expressing, in a very concrete form, that the "fire" evokes Zarathustra’s element and the "mouth" that of Gargantua. Alfred
Alfred Polgar’s description of Franz Werfel’s seems however also to us valuable: ‘However, as Mr. Werfel was reading, full of God and fervent (feuersbrünstig)...’ (3). The peculiar combination of both principles, "full of God" (Zarathustra), but also ‘fervent’ (Gargantua), appears also. The clear and exact description of Werfels declamation represents also a certain dynamic of both principles – Gargantua defeats Zarathustra : ‘Precisely so however, that Mr. Werfel was doing harm to his poem while reciting so immodestly-irresistibly, ineluctably, was so aiming the interpretation as object before the work" (4).
Gargantua and Zarathustra are as principles of the ideal-typical humanity however not only contrasts, they have already from the beginning trains, that bring them largely close to each other. Gargantua breaks often out on the summits of his life joy in Zarathustra-like tirades and Zarathustra’s eudemonism also does not lack at all in the trains of Gargantua (5).
Friedrich Torberg speaks of Franz Werfel’s ’promiscuity’, that can be interpreted as a train, which symbolizes exemplarily the unity of Gargantua and Zarathustra. This fundamental train, metaphorically expressed as an homogeneous articulation of Gargantua and Zarathustra, explains also Franz Werfel’s "polarity fluctuations" (6) between "left and right", but also his polarities, apparently different, only so difficult to explain. The categories and the criteria of the eminent political and social groupings appear in our hermeneutical horizon as being independent from existential pretentions, they were however not so in their real historical nature. That somebody can become, at least for a time, a Bolshewist for motives inherent in Zarathustra, appears to us as a pure impossibility, it was formerly not even so rare (7), it is similar also with Franz Werfel’s political extreme attitudes (8), it is however no everyday situation, that the alternative "violence or Sermon on the Mount" stand so directly by the side of each other (9).
It seems to us, that Ernst Schönwiese, in his reconstruction of the "timeless" in Werfel’s attitudes also reflects the same existential terms: ’For the truth has always two faces, insofar as it offers firstly one view of the time and thus the reverse of the historical moment, but also a second deeper look, for an eternal-timeless is visible through the phenomenon of the time’ (10).
From this existential pretention of a union of the basic principles of Gargantua and Zarathustra, is emerging also that passion, seeming often very abstract, for the humanity and humanism, which indeed so often as abstract idealism let us have forgotten the literature, paraphrazed somewhat in the lines "The world starts again in every second", has not only been perceived in Werfel oeuvre, but also frequently mocked on it.
This existential demand also explains, why in Werfel literally everything is always in the shadow of thei eternity, every second, every life, every situation is inseparable from the eternity and the totality. This train of Werfel’s vision of the world seems similar, if not identical, to the impressionist cult of life par excellence. We can however not speak of an identity, because the existential-anthropological background of both approaches is just differing (11).
The omnipotence and the endless identification gift of Gargantua-Zarathustra with the sum of the life induced the so determining problematic of the double (Doppelgaenger) in the young Werfel. In him, it is not about a painful inner double coexistence, not about a true and compulsive danger of a doubling of the personality. To articulate the challenge, the historical and existential problems through the state of double, did not emerge in him from an original double nature, rather from the probably heuristical doubling of the poet, who aspires to the unification of everything not only from one perspective, i.e. not only from the perspective of the Gargantua or of the Zarathustra. It can then be said, that the claim, but also the intentionality, to understand the whole, does not expand only to the object ’whole’, but also to the perspectives of the whole’.
The existential-anthropological and the sociological dimensions are unifying in Werfel’s attitude of the merger of Gargantua and Zarathustra mainly in a very broad eudemonism reaching from the animal-creature levels up to the intellectual complexity. Psychology, politics, art, spirit and all other domains are not so often separated in Werfel, as we are used to perceive it in other forms of discourses (12). There is no other position, apart from this global eudemonism, this endless philosophy of luck, from which we could have testify in possession of Werfel’s complete integrity.
From the same evidence, Werfel refuses – despite his "vital" openness towards all directions – that political system, above all the "theoretical" communism, because such a system must, in its abstraction, necessarily inflict violence to the real life. Precisely the "hostility to the life" of such systems makes them however also be rather matter of faith instead of a scientifically foreseen system. Werfel’s global eudemonism is fully consciously experienced and articulated, his following remark appears to us as very important: "The state of the non-suffering is indeed is a sine qua non condition of the luck, but for long not yet the luck itself" (13).
From all of that it results already, that Franz Werfel’s eudemonism was not at all exhausting in self-realization, it is also an utopia of historical extent, from which a – every time obviously differently concretized – practice is starting (14). In this (and only in this) sense, Alfred Döblin is right, when still before 1933, in his categorization of the authors of the German literature in great orientations, he classifies Franz Werfel in the ’spiritual revolutionary’ (geistesrevolutionaer) type.
But what has to do a Werfel, represented like an organic and vital unity of Gargantua and Zarathustra, with the religiosity? We can answer this question in two different contexts.
The first, original and autochthon version of the answer to the question would arise from a development of Werfel’s religious moments as well of Gargantua’s, as also of Zarathustra’s manner. Gargantua is the representative of a system of eudemonist-religious values, Zarathustra the messenger of a similar system also of a similar eudemonist value order. Such a combination of the representation and of the announcement of a value system moving into the religious is already for the young Werfel examplarily characteristic.
The second version of the answer would suppose, that we build the post-war history as the true hermeneutic horizon around this question. After the end of the First World War, that system of conditions namely changed, which – revendicating maybe all centuries – produced this type of bourgeois become artist of the stature of Gargantua and Zarathustra. Then, the question of the religiosity after 1918-1919 should also be put again.
Werfel’s gradual enstrangement from the type Gargantua-Zarathustra toward Job-Ahasuerus begins already during the First World War, here he sees – like many of his generation – already a history, that is as an ’escape from God’.
In the first period (that might not be of course calculated most accurately chronologically), Franz Werfel appears as Gargantua-Zarathustra, as a man of the endless ’self-expansion’, an endless self-identification with the universe, the whole, with the humanity. The fundamental attitude reverses in its opposite.
When becoming from Gargantua-Zarathustra Job-Ahasuerus, an attitude of the ’self-limitation’, ’self-restriction’, appears in place of the ’self-expansion’, from the self-identification with the whole, or rather with the humanity.
Werfel’s way between "above" and "down below", between "right" and "left", between Judaism and Catholicism, between eroticism and ascethicism is always again caused by his double identity Gargantua and Zarathustra. Werfel’s train quoted by Klarmann comes however also from the same source, the same of his rejection of every ’systematization’.
The history, the concrete of the history, brought with itself, that from Gargantua-Zarathustra in the course of the time always more clearly an escapist or even refugee has become a mixture of Job and Ahasuerus (we already emphasized at the beginning of this text, that this metamorphosis is in our mind also characteristic for the fate of the literature of our century).
Obviously, the main emphases and accents change in every respect. If this changement is really occuring, in this sense, we understand also the double possibility of response to the question of the position of the religiosity in Werfel. If it is, in the time of the prevailing of Gargantua-Zarathustra, about an investigation of the religious motives of both, then the image is perfectly modifying after the transformation in Job-Ahasuerus, a fully new concept of the religiosity appears. If it is in Gargantua-Zarathustra about a post-Christian option of the new religiosity of the eudemonism and of the identification with the universe, Werfel comes back in this second period to a more traditional Christian religiosity, also socially and politically represented, nevertheless also appropriated to the reality of the twentieth century, historically-philosophically reflected and understood.
We have indicated, that in the field of the religiosity there are clear overlappings and multiple common grounds between both periods. This however does not mean, that there are not also determining and qualifying differences, tangible turns between them. So, Werfel’s Theologumena written in 1942-1944, despite its Nietzschean elements, can be examplarily comprehended as an absolutely Anti-Zarathustra.
The principles Job and Ahasuerus personify the "self-restriction" instead of the "self-expansion", and this in the most concrete way. His life and work, the literature and the circles of the humanity are always restricted day after day, the escape is directly thematized in Werfel’s most works. The dichotomy of the persecutor and of the persecuted dominates the world of these late works. In the second half of Werfel’s life, almost all types of persécution seem also to be thematized, psychological, religious, political and even metaphysical motivations become manifest.
Also the literature escape may not be taken and understood as a metaphor, the idea of the Finis poesiae is, since the thirties, a constantly recurring and constantly reformulated idea Werfel’s. On all real and symbolic roads, the refugees do not flee only in front of their multiple opponents, they also flee to God, thus Werfel’s late work bifurcates from the earthly existence of the first half of this life, from Gargantua’s and Zarathustra’s imagination to a clear otherwordly concept, to Job and Ahasuerus.
As the literature about the exile literature quite rightly ascertains it, the distance in the space often leads to the spiritual distance, Franz Werfel becomes also different in America, his Star of the Unborn contains indeed the cosmic thinking of the author, informs however as well on Gargantua’s and Zarathustra’s world as also on the same of Job and Ahasuerus, but it oversteps both as well.
If we think of this historical, even historically related change of role between Gargntua-Zarathustra and Job-Ahasuerus, so we can also have a double opinion about the fundamental question. It is fully arguable, that Franz Werfel was an intellectual and poetic adventurer, that has been in touch, all along his career, essentially with every possible orientation. It can however be said with just as much right, that Franz Werfel did remain absolutely faithful, up to the end, to his original and not extremly complex vision of the world, the reason why he had always to change, was the irresistible, constant modification of the history in the twentieth century.
A reflection on the twentieth century evokes a meditation also on the works like Franz Werfel’s one. If representatives of the later centuries have a retrospective look at this century, then we cannot be quite certain, that they will understand it. If these future humans however understand this century, they will also inquire after a literary work like Franz Werfel’s one.
NOTES
(1)It is not easy at all to expose these criteria in an ordered form, that have effectively played a role in the constitution of the determining Belles Lettres. Without having at disposal a sociological analysis, we would say as indication, that the literary quality is mainly decided by the literary creators themselves and, in this sense, the criteria of this literariness are formulated by this group. In this way, the literature succeeded essentially in the same situation, in which the modern music or a good part of the modern painting is already for many decades.
(2) We only wanted to remind through a short information, that for example, the unconscious put by Freud in the foreground bears many trains of the Gargantua banished by the bourgeois consciousness and hunted in the unconscious.
(3) Alfred Polgar, 'Franz Werfel' (1914), in : A.P. Sperrsitz. Vienna, 1980. 53. – Apart from this brilliant and deep insight, also other Polgar’s remarks are of relevance : "Franz Werfel does not appear like : =poetry=. More like: =Opera=. On the fleshy, smooth face with the short split musician’s chin and the big, soft mouth, which lower lip is rolling powerfully outside in the ecstasy, he appears as a physiognomic symbol (!) for a passionate song... There are wonderful poems, received and created as such by the spirit... Everyday, general words shine here like never before, their sense is still part of music, their sound still a fragment of sense" (Ibidem, 53-54).
(4) Ibidem, 55.
(5) We have only to remind of that whole circle of thought, rich of perspectives, in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, in which the body is envisaged as ’great reason’.
(6) Ernst Schönwiese, Literature in Vienna between 1930 - 1980. Vienna - Munich, 1980. 93.
(7) Only from Nietzsche’s Hungarian reception we can give several examples (s. Endre Kiss, A világnézet kora. Friedrich Nietzsche abszolutumokat relativizáló hatása Magyarországon 1918-19-ig. (About Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception relativizing absolute values in Hungary up to 1918-19), Budapest, 1982), where this attitude was characteristic mainly for Ottó Korvin and Lajos Biró. Ervin Sinkó describes in his key-novel Egy regény regénye (The Novel of a Novel) the intensive presence of the Nietzschean philosophy at the high time of the Soviet Republic in Ungarn, an intensive presence, that - so Sinkó – could have even surprised the once unsuspecting Béla Kun later in exile. Somewhat more generally, this context applies also for the best known and most important Bolshevik, who has made his choice for such motives, just for Georg Lukács.
(8) Robert Musil is reporting appropriately this peculiar fact (also in relation with Franz Blei): "...old canonesses affirm still today, that he is the man, who has introduced the revolution in Austria, together with a Franz Werfel, from whom we otherwise only hear good things" (Robert Musil, Collected works. Vol. 8. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1980. P. 1199.)
(9) Hans Gerd Rötzer, ’Introduction’, in : Definition of the Concept of the Literary Expressionism. Darmstadt, 1976. X.
(10) Ernst Schönwiese, in the quoted work 92.
(11) The emphasis of the anthropological and socio-cultural difference replaces obviously the numerous possibilities of the linguistic, literary and aesthetic analysis. In such a way, it results, that the most deep difference is simultaneously also the best suitable one. William M. Johnston contributed relevantly in the reconstruction of the concept of the Viennese impressionism (one of his most recent works : 'The Viennese Impressionism. A new estimation of a once popular category’, in : Files of the international symposium' Arthur Schnitzler and his time’. Published by Giuseppe Farese. Bern - Frankfurt am Main - New York, 1988.), the author of this work also acknowledges the Viennese Impressionism' a structural, historical and ideal-typical ideological-historical importance (The Death of the k.u.k. World Order in Vienna. Vienna - Köln - Graz, 1986).
(12) The following sentence summarizes examplarily a multiple programm effective in several domains of the intellectual and social life : "He (the poet - E.K.) is there, to make the life...holy." (Quoted in : Paul Wimmer, Franz Werfel’s dramatic edition. Vienna, 1973. 49.)
(13)Realism and interiority. Berlin-Vienna-Leipzig, 1932. 21. – Another definition of the luck in Werfel from the same work: "The luck is the richness of the reality remelted in interiority." ("Glück ist der Reichtum der zur Innerlichkeit umgeschmolzenen Wirklichkeit.")
Published:
Von Gargantua-Zarathustra zu Hiob-Ahasver. Über Franz Werfel und über das Schicksal des Literarischen in unserem Jahrhundert. in: Jahrbuch der Ungarischen Germanistik. Budapest, 1992. 177-184.
