FIL Adorno Now

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Adorno Now

Joseph Litvak

ts a bit of a stretch, in the context of this forum, to choose

Theodor Adornos Notes to Literature. The two volumes of Shierry

Weber Nicholsens translation were published in 1991 and 1992

respectivelyjust barely fitting into the category of works published in

the last five or ten years. While the most recent of the essays collected

in these two volumes date from the sixties, some, qualifying as juvenilia,were written as long ago as the early thirties. Indeed, the only obviously

Victorian piece in the collection, Adornos short essay on The Old Curi-

osity Shop(1841), first appeared in 1931. So were clearly not talking hot

off the presses. Yet its this very antiquity, along with the outsiders or

exiles relation to Anglo-American literature and culture, that consti-

tutes much of Adornos appeal for me. Or rather, Adorno appeals to

me because hes taught me the unsettling power of the primitive, the

outmoded, the awkwardly old-world. Coming before our own critical

moment, as he comes to Victorian and English writing from someplace

else, Adorno exerts the uncanny fascination of the revenant: of the

prehistoric that returns to haunt the modern, not least by threateningto surpass it.

Im echoing, in fact, Adornos essay on The Old Curiosity Shop,

where he observes that the prebourgeois form of Dickenss novels

becomes a means of dissolving the very bourgeois world they depict (2:

172). He goes on to write: The novels of Dickens contain a fragment

of the dispersed baroque that maintains a strange ghostly presence in

the nineteenth century (2: 171). Ive argued in Strange Gourmets(1997)

that Adornos criticism itself maintains a strange ghostly presence in

contemporary cultural studies, and I like to imagine my own recent

work as contributing to Adornos dispersion.

More and more, Ive come to understand this project of disper-sion in light of the Jewishness that, despite major cultural and historical

differences (including the fact that Adorno identified strongly enough

with his Catholic mother to take her family name), Im pleased to think

I


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of as sharing with Adorno. Ive come to understand it, that is, as a way

of disseminating a certainJewish style, or of revealing it, both within the

Victorian fiction I study and within current Anglo-American critical

practice, neither of which has much of a reputation for looking

Jewish. Not that the latter (even more than the former) can be faulted

for its lack of what Matthew Arnold called Hebraism. For all the clatof

the various critical movements and motifs that might have promoted

the Hellenism, the free play, that Arnold posed as Hebraisms neces-

sary counterforce, nothing is quite as impressive as the elasticity with

which our Hebraic strictness of conscience has managed, not to ruin

the fun outright, but to corner it and capture it and keep it under tight

control (151, 150). To be sure, it is hard to imagine a weightier or more

resounding assertion of moral seriousness than Adornos most famous

sentence: To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric (Prisms34). At

the same time, however, it is equally hard to imagine a more dazzling

stylist than that sentences author, whom the Nazi horror forced to flee

Germany for a long exile in England and the United States. More than

Walter Benjamin, more than Roland Barthes, more than Jacques

Derrida, Adorno epitomizes the ostentatious stylistic virtuosity that the

would-be intellectual journalist and the would-be journalist intellectual,

neither of whom can stand a show-off, agree to call bad writing.

But what complicates Adornos gravity isnt just the relations

between virtue and virtuosity, or between morality and style, as he

titles one of the fragments in his Minima Moralia(1951). What compli-

cates Adornos gravity is also his levity: his Jewish (as differentiated from

Hebraic) way of developing the comic tendency of styles ontological

lightness. Im aware that this statement itself may sound laughable.

Adorno as teddy bear? Commentators have pronounced Adorno

humorless (Jameson, Late Marxism145), and have gone on to note his

hostility toward the comic in virtually all of its modern forms, which he

seems to loathe almost as much as jazz. Admittedly, the foreclosure of

the comic continues, in one of the later essays in Notes to Literature, even

as Adorno softens his statement about poetry after Auschwitz: The

statement that it is not possible to write poetry after Auschwitz does not

hold absolutely, but it is certain that after Auschwitz, because Auschwitzwas possible and remains possible for the foreseeable future, light-

hearted art is no longer conceivable (2: 251). Yet a loophole may be

spotted: lighthearted artis no longer conceivable, but Adorno doesnt

say that, after and because of Auschwitz, lighthearted criticism is no


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longer conceivable. Distasteful though it may seem, he even practices

such a criticism, nowhere more overtly than in Notes to Literature. Here,

for instance, is Adorno on punctuation marks:

When the hero of Gottfried Kellers novel Der grne Heinrich was asked about the

German capital letter P, he exclaimed, Thats pumpernickel! That experience is

certainly true of the figures of punctuation. An exclamation point looks like an

index finger raised in warning; a question mark looks like a flashing light or the

blink of an eye. A colon, says Karl Kraus, opens its mouth wide: woe to the writer who

does not fill it with something nourishing. Visually, the semicolon looks like a

drooping mustache; I am even more aware of its gamey taste. With self-satisfied

peasant cunning, German quotation marks [>>


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Of the Austrian-Jewish critic Karl Kraus, whom Fredric

Jameson has identified as Adornos truest [stylistic] precursor (Late

Marxism63), Adorno writes, for example:

The sympathy that Kraus showed many dialect writers and comedians, in preference

to so-called high literature and in protest against it, is inspired by complicity with the

undomesticated mimetic moment. It is also the root of Kraus jokes: in them

language imitates the gestures of language the way the grimaces of the comedian

imitate the face of the person he parodies. (Notes2: 55)

Just as Kraus sympathizes with dialect writers and comedians against so-

called high literature, so the Adorno of Notes to Literature flouts the

conventions of scholarly high seriousness by writing with brashly feuil-

letonish eclecticism about subjects ranging from the exalted and the

difficult (Goethe, Proust, Hlderlin, Beckett, Benjamin, Kracauer) to

such trifling matter[s] (2: 11), as he slyly calls them, such tchotchkes

of mere style, as quotation marks, foreign words, titles, and the essay

form itself. And just as Krauss jokes recall the grimaces of the come-

dian imitating the face of the person he parodies, so Adornos crossover

cheekiness wickedly mimics the sort of fatuous fluency best represented

today by a New York Times apparatchik holding forth on the latest

disturbing cultural trendthe most disturbing of which is always

attempts by literature professors to write about cultural trends. For

while Adorno is cheeky, hes also, as Ive noted, famously grouchy, as

befits one who, less famously, expressed a certain regard for the Marx

brothers (Dialectic 137). Far from undermining his comedy, that is,

Adornos legendary irascibilityhis grimacing mask of aversion and

disinclinationmotivates it, as the humorlessly obsessive complaining

of Jewish humor motivates, or puts a human face on, languages endless

capacity for producing complaints. The more you complain, after all,

the less serious work you have to do; the more negative your attitude,

the more you can enjoy the undomesticated mimetic moment: the

moment in which, unmuzzled, you get to sink your teeth into the sheer

styleness of style.

As the example of Martin Heidegger (one of Adornos favorite

btes noires) most egregiously demonstrates, style of course isntalways oronly light: in Heideggers jargon of authenticity, as in the stereotypes of

the culture industry, style hardens into stylization. Which is why

Adornos comedy in Notes to Literatureoften consists in making heavy or

would-be heavy style, like Heideggers, speak against itself, in parodi-


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cally turning its very oppressiveness back into the gestural prehistory

that, like an anxious immigrant parvenu, it struggles to overcome. How

many Jewish jokes, from Freud and Proust to the Borscht Belt and

Wendy Wasserstein, play on just this reversal of gentility into its

repressed antecedents? How many of these jokes, that is, show the

reversal as, precisely, an effect of gesture, where gesture is the part of

language that, like a provincial accent or an unassimilated parent,

embarrasseslanguage? That the embarrassment should strike at the very

moment when language is most concerned to make a good impression

accounts, of course, for the particular sting with which the jokes them-

selves strike. Just when language thinks it has everything, especially

itself, under control, it starts gesturing, or even gesticulating, thereby

hysterically displaying one of the classic signs of an always excessive

Jewish identity. The Jewish humorist in Adorno does his most mischie-

vous work whento trope on Sander Gilmans termhe brings out

the hidden language of the Jews in authors whom the revelation

would mortify, whento invoke one of Freuds Jewish jokeshe

changes anti-Semitism to ante-Semitism (36).

Adornos fluency in a variety of languages itself argues against

the reduction of Jewishness in his text to shtetl vulgarity and parvenu

hysteria. That fluency serves to recall a much more attractive family of

Jewish images, in which Jewishness is associated with cosmopolitanism,

erudition, intelligence, intellectuality, and so forth. Of course, not

everyone finds those images so attractive, as Adorno suggests in Words

from Abroad, another of the delights to be found in Notes. As enraged as

a book reviewer vilifying yet another instance of academic bad writing,

the old neighbor who screamed at the schoolboy Adorno, You

goddamned little devil! Shut up with your High German and learn to

speak German right (2: 186), recognized the need to misrecognize

smartness as stupidity, especially when the smartness comes out of a

diabolically clever little Jew. And yet, in their malevolence, the resentful

style police alert us to something important: the peculiar, and peculiarly

Jewish, tenacity with which the stupid indeed pervades the smart in

Adornos writing. In the most explicitly Jewish moment in Titles,

Adorno remarks: The work itself [. . .] no more knows its true title thanthe zaddik knows his mystical name (2: 5). Never does Adorno sound

more rabbinically wise than here, where he also, not coincidentally,

sounds a lot like Benjamin. But Adornos wise aphorismabout how the

zaddik, the Hasidic leader, doesnt know his mystical nameis wise


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about the interplay between wisdom and a certain unwisdom. Thema-

tized here, that interplay is in fact the fundamental principle, the funda-

mentally comicprinciple, of Adornos style. The Adornian project that

Jameson has called the writing of dialectical sentences (Marxism and

Form53) resembles nothing so much as the project of Krauss dialect

writers and comedians, who, after all, stage the dialectical intimacy that

obtains between languages intelligence and languages silliness. Heres

a representative dialectical sentence, which is to say a representative

dialect sentence, from Titles: By virtue of their incommensurability,

concrete titles become a means of making an impression on the

consumer; they thereby become commensurable, exchangeable by virtue

of their inexchangeability (2: 9). Whats dialectical about this distinc-

tively Adornian sentence is obviously the tight paradoxical choreography

of its logic and diction and syntax (which is even tighter and more para-

doxical in the original). While distinctively Adornian, moreover, such a

sentence might also stand as the very model of distinction itself, or at any

rate of a certain smart style, in criticism and theory today. Yet if the dialect

that this dialectical sentence epitomizes is therefore the dialect of the

distinguished professor, the accents of another, less fancy dialect may

also be heard within the sentence, making its tightness seem strangely

loose and its professorial wit seem strangely funny. This dialect isnt

exactly the Yiddish that trips through High German, but it bears a close

relation to the ethnic outsiders hyperexpressiveness, whereby the dialect

writer or comedian, mimicking the sheer clownish acrobatics of style in

which, say, incommensurable flip-flops into commensurable and

exchangeable into inexchangeable, uncovers and embodies the

energy ofnonsensein sense: a nonsense, in turn, that plays no small part

in making Adorno, that smart aleck, so smart.

It might sound like a put-down to point out what Adorno has

in common with Sid Caesar, S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Fields, and yes,

Chico and Groucho Marx. Coming from one of the self-styled cham-

pions of good writing, the comparison would no doubt carry all the

murderous rancor of the old neighbors curse. Coming from me, the

comparison is high praiseas high as my praise for one last sentence

from Titles, a sentence that disarmingly articulates the complicity ofthe silly and the smart at work in Notes, and that reveals the true title

of these two extraordinary volumes, their zaddiks mystical name. For

the essay collection that Adorno, clowning around with Mendelssohns

Songs without Words (183245), had initially wanted to name Words


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without Songs, his publisher, raising the musical allusion several levels

higher (2: 6), proposed the title Notes to Literature:That was incompa-

rably better than my somewhat stupid bon mot (2: 6). But Adorno thus

takes care to preserve his etwas dmmliches Bonmot (NotenIII: 11),

in the palimpsestic mode that we have learned to call sous rature. For

while he writes Notes to Literatureover it, it underwrites Notes to Literature.

The older these books get, the more they keep faith with the genius of

the dumb joke that is their archaic, their Jewish name.

Tufts University

WORKS CITED

Adorno, Theodor W. Noten zur Literatur, III. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976.

. Notes to Literature. 2 vols. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann.

New York: Columbia UP, 1991, 1992.

. Minima Moralia: Reflexions from Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London:

Verso, 1974.

. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT P, 1983.

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Ed. J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1969.

Freud, Sigmund.Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. and ed. James Strachey.

New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.

Gilman, Sander.Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John

Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso,

1990.

. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

Litvak, Joseph. Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel. Durham: Duke UP,

1997.

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