Stanley Corngold

Finding One’s Way to “Jane Eyre”

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Dedicated to him, whom I regard “as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things.” 

We have a great deal of critical writing on Victorian novels—the grand products of George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, et. al.—but not as many accounts of how readers come to read these novels.  In 1979, an entire cohort, especially of women, would have pounced on Jane Eyre after reading Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s fetchingly titled feminist study The Madwoman in the Attic. At that time, I was otherwise absorbed (incidentally, like the heroine of Jane Eyre) in reading classical German literature. But now, nearly half a century later, I am with Jane, struck by its power and beauty.

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Kafka’s Literary Unconscious

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An essay in last month’s Town Topics, a Princeton gazette, begins on target: “This is an anniversary year for Franz Kafka, who died on June 3, 1924—a doubly noteworthy centenary, given the immensity of the author’s posthumous presence, which suggests that if ever a writer was born on the day he died, it was Kafka.”[i] Given that “immensity of presence,” one would be hard put to define concisely its core significance. But I will attempt to get to that core by example—the core being the difficult beauty of Kafka’s writing, a beauty that is full of thought, and which has inspired, as is well known, a great variety of attempts to understand it. For Theodor Adorno, in a celebrated essay, satisfying the need to understand Kafka is a matter of life and death!

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Two Histories of Germany: Frank Trentmann’s “Out of the Darkness, the Germans, 1942-2022” and Katja Hoyer’s “Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany”

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Frank Trentmann, a German-born historian, teaches at the University of London and writes books in felicitous English. The special distinction of his latest study is its focus: Out of the Darkness is a history, not of facts alone but of the successive agonies of conscience besetting the Germans from the years 1942 (with the beginning of the rout at Stalingrad) till the present, with Germany’s diffident support of the Ukraine. It is a history of moral mentalities.

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Brother Minds: Kafka and Obama

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The nausea produced by Trump’s “alternative facts”—which are neither facts nor viable alternatives to facts, being merely lies–has led to a good deal of finger-pointing. Is the seeming legitimacy of such lies owed to advanced (post-modern, “post-truth”) literary theory? For, here, it’s said, readings for the truth of complex texts result in nothing more than a vertigo of indetermination. We have no decisive outcomes but only different hypotheses, having unfathomable degrees of validity, that vie for primacy with no end in sight. It’s not my remit to do a history of the concept of truth-skepticism, but we did not need Foucault and Derrida to introduce us to this great negation. There are paramount exemplars of such concerns in German thought, from at least the 18th century on: Doubts about the accessibility of truth abound, but they are not given equivalent status with lies. The polymath G. E. Lessing acknowledged “the diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process.”[1] We have a kind of modern radicalization in Kafka’s skepticism: “A certain [kind of] truth might be found only in the chorus … or choir (im Chor) (emphasis added).[2] Bottom line: we did not need to be vexed by literary theory to declare that “alternative facts” may not be turned into a chorus of part-truth viewpoints and opinions.

As we return finally to another anthropological order, we find the suggestion that criticizing Trump “for not being consistent, reliable, or rational is to misunderstand his leadership philosophy.” Is that true? I’d aver that he has no detectable “philosophy,” unless it’s to have none. By contrast, it’s tempting to invoke, as possibly redeeming, the mind of another ex-President: Barack Hussein Obama.

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Watching “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”

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At the risk of confirming the vicious aperçu of the Viennese senator in Karl-Lueger times who defined “Kultur” as “one Jew copying from another,” I will copy the words of Daniel Mendelsohn in his obituary paean to the editor Robert Gottlieb. Referring to the South Korean TV series Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Gottlieb found it, citing Mendelsohn, full of “honest intentions and stylistic conviction.”[i] I find them there too, and can do so because, again citing Mendelsohn, “he (Gottlieb) was trying furiously to persuade me to watch [it] when he fell ill,” and I’ve borrowed his persuasion.

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On Richard Wolin’s “Heidegger in Ruins”

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This short sprint to the starting gate of a review of Richard Wolin’s solid “Anti-Heidegger,” his recent polemical book Heidegger in Ruins (Yale University Press, 2023).

Fifty years ago, Walter Kaufmann had already reduced Being and Time to bare life, noting how abusive Heidegger’s German was; how evident but unremarked the bleak mood during and after Germany’s World War I defeat, reappearing as Heidegger’s mood of “anxiety” (think: trench warfare) and as a requirement for authenticity; how close to plagiarism were Heidegger’s views on being-toward-death, considering Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Kaufmann is droll and incisive on the academic resistance to criticism of Heidegger even in Heidegger’s own time. After declaring that classical scholars found Heidegger’s reading of a fragment of Anaximander to be untenable; that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant “was widely repudiated by Kant scholars”; and that professors of literature considered Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl, among others, way stations to the destruction of German literature, Kaufmann concludes: “Even so (emphasis added, SC; read closely!), some who know their Kant are awed by the erudition of Heidegger’s classical interpretations; Nietzsche scholars find his Rilke essay stimulating and profound; and Rilke scholars bow before his Nietzsche exegesis.”[i]

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Bensonhurst

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I am standing on West Ninth Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, sometime in the 1930s: a horse-drawn ice wagon has just come down the street, and I am looking at the golden apples the horse has dropped and saying to myself (not the horse), “Your necktie is maroon.”

My mother had an elegant way with colors, which devolved on us children, a flair she developed along with her flair for elegant names; this was clear in the voluntary refinement of her name from “Esther” to “Estelle”—a habit acquired by her younger brother Yitzchak (Isidore, Izzy), who chose to be known to the world as “Morton.” My father, an affable salesman of millinery (i.e., ladies’ hats), did not care for his eccentric brother-in-law; and when he called, my father would answer the phone, saying almost nothing but declaring to my mother, after she had asked who’d called, “Itza Mutt,” reducing her to literally helpless laughter. My father liked to make my mother laugh so hard that she had to run, as best she could, out of the kitchen . . . but I digress.

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The Organization Man: Franz Kafka, Risk Insurance, and the Occasional Hell of Office Life

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Most readers know Franz Kafka as the reclusive author of stories and novels that have since become monumental works of modern literature. Some readers also know him as a bureaucrat who, unhappy in his office, castigated the “hell of office life.” But few know that he rose at the end of his life to the position of Senior Legal Secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (called, after 1918, the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Czech Lands). Kafka was no Bartleby the Scrivener, no harmless office drudge. Rather, he was a brilliant innovator of social and legal reform in “the Manchester of the Empire,” which at the time of Kafka’s tenure, between 1908-1922, was one of the most highly developed industrial areas of Europe.

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