Five Austrian alternatives

Alternatives, expansions, appendices, problems, and ignorance.  Or:  What about…?

1.  Austria as an empire, Austrian literature beyond Austria.  Gyula Krúdy in Budapest, Italo Svevo in Trieste, and Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka in Prague.  Kafka is a great temptation but would swamp the boat, so to speak – too absorbing, too good.  Much like

2.  Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities (1930-42) and Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932), published far beyond the period I am thinking about but perhaps even more valuable because they are influential interpretations of pre-War Austria.  I pick those two out because of their prominence,  but Austrian culture and history have been obsessively picked apart by lots of later writers like Gregor von Rezzori and Thomas Bernhard.  Hearing the narrator of Old Masters (1985) tear into Adalbert Stifter and Anton Bruckner is hilarious fun.  Poor Bruckner, what’d he do?  Perhaps if I really want to dig into Austrian aesthetics I need to spend more time with

3.  Art and music.  Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Arnold Schoenberg; Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka.  For example.  The “worlds” of fine art and music are usually much narrower than that of literature, and the audiences, the core audiences, much smaller and easier to study.  To understand the audience, though, I do not necessarily need to spend much time with the music or paintings but rather with the

4.  Secondary literature.  Histories cultural, political and social, monographs on artists or movements, albums of photos of Viennese coffeehouses.  It turns out that I am not the first person to think turn-of-the-century Vienna might be interesting.  Please recommend relevant favorites – to save you the trouble, I have read or am reading Carl Schorske and Peter Gay, and am curious about the recent Eric Kandel book although I fear it is a bit long.

The quantity of relevant books is overwhelming – there was nothing like this for Portuguese literature.  I mean, just look at the number of books that center on

5.  Sigmund Freud.  Scientific texts either dissolve into history or are elevated into literature.  I have no apparatus to deal with Freud as a scientist, but I should spend some time with Freud the essayist, the literary Freud.  Which texts, do you think?  The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), or some of the famous case studies?

Freud has appeared only once on Wuthering Expectations in his own words, when I made use of his 1908 insightful essay “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming.”  His ideas on the concept of the Uncanny have been important to my understanding of a great deal of literature, German and otherwise.  So I am sure there is a lot more of interest even if I am ill-equipped to understand or sympathize with the “scientific” Freud.

Well, who knows how many of these ideas I will have the energy to pursue.

Anyone wondering, by the way, if there were any women writers at all in Austria, the answer is yes.  Some were internationally famous, like the Nobel Prize-winning Bertha von Suttner, author of the 1889 pacifist novel Lay Down Your Arms!  (which sounds unreadable).  Some others of greater promise are included in the gloomily titled Into the Sunset: Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Austrian Prose (1999), which I plan to investigate at some point. Thanks to Will at 50Watts for pointing me towards the book.

Wish me luck!  Please join in as you think useful and appropriate.