No More Learning

He hands the book to her and she does what she likes with it. One hundred years later, then, what was impossible between Bettina Brentano and Goethe occurs. "But he should have humbled him- self before her in all his splendor and written what she dictated, with both hands, likeJohn on Patmos, kneeling. There was no choice for him before this voice which 'fulfilled the angels' function. '"'"* Reading aloud in a voice that continues to amplify because it feeds back into another woman, Abelone dictates all of Brigge's future insights. She dictates what Bettina Brentano was unable to dictate under the conditions of classical dis- course. The function of angels is of course to announce a death. Dicta- tions are always the death of the author. Whereas Goethe "left empty" the "dark myth" that a woman's voice had prepared for his death,'"' the writer of the Notebooks assumes this myth. The era of the other inter- pretation means being without the honorable title of author and being subject to the dictates of others. Kneeling, as Goethe failed to, Brigge
transcribes. With that, however, the promise that emanated from Abe- lone's incomprehensibility "is still being fulfilled. " I'"
Everything written about women in the Notebooks is dictated by a re- sounding voice, at once Abelone and Bettina: that, for instance, there is
REBUS 345
? nothing to say about her, "because only wrong is done in the telling"; "' that there is no question of writing letters to her, only drafts of letters that Brigge does not send; that all attempts to rise to the level of an author by writing for young ladies (as Goethe might have put it) come to nothing against the will of women "to remove from [their] love all that was tran- sitive"; ''I and that an intransitive love can only consist in a kind of writ- ing that circa 1900is incorporated as literature. What does it mean that women, according to Rilke, "for centuries now . . . have performed the whole of love; they have always played the full dialogue, both parts"? '-'As in Adelbert von Hanstein or Ellen Key, it outlines an alternative literary history consisting of unanswered and intransitive calls of love-of Bettina Brentano, Sappho, Heloike, Gaspara Stampa, Elisa Mercoeur, Clara d'Anduze, Louise Labbe, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Julie Lespinasse, Marie-Anne de Clermont, and so many others. '"
Where the divinity of the author disappeared, women who write appeared, as irreducible as they are unread. Because their texts exist, their writers cannot be confounded with the One Mother who has made someone an author (as Goethe confounded even Bettina Brentano). The discourse network of 1900 obeyed the rule of impossible exhaustion no- where more rigorously than in the field of sexual difference. Not only are Schillerian abstractions such as "Nature" or "The Walk" impossible, but so are all discourses that unify the sexes. Such is the insight that Brigge receives in dictation from his impossible beloved.
Is it possible that one knows nothing of young girls, who nonetheless live? Is it possible that one says "women," "children," "boys," not guessing (despite all one's culture, not guessing) that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?
Yes,it is possible . . .
But if all this is possible-has even more than a semblance of possibility-then surely, for all the world's sake, something must happen. The first comer, he who has had this disturbing thought, must begin to do some of the things that have been neglected; even if he is just anybody, by no means the most suitable person: there is no one else at hand. This young, indifferent foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit down in his room five flights up and write, day and night: yes, he will have to write: that is how it will end. "'
? Queen's Sacrifice
&femme n'ixistepas. Womeninthediscoursenetworkof1900areenu- merable singulars, irreducible to the One Woman or Nature. All the media and the sciences that support the network compete in a queen's sacrifice.
Technical engineers make the first move. The Hungarian chess master Rezso Charousek, immortalized in Gustav Meyrink's Golem, immortal- ized himself through a queen's sacrifice. And Edison, as celebrated by Vil- liers de I'Isle-Adam, betrayed the secret of his profession. "By the way, I'd like to be introduced to that great lady 'Nature' some day, because every- body talks about her and nobody has ever seen her. "'
The novel Tomorrow's Eve unfolds this aphorism across its entire plot. An English lord has fallen helplessly in love with a woman whose beauty (as if to confirm the physiologist Paul Mobius) is surpassed only by the imbecility of everything she says. The father of the phonograph then decides to furnish his despairing friend with a love object that has no troublesome aspects. He reconstructs the man's beloved electromechani- cally in all her corporeality, but exchanges for her mind that of the Woman. Tomorrow's Eve-as Edison's automaton is called-"replaces an intelli- gence with Intelligence itself. "2 A "copy of Nature" is created, which is more perfect than the original in both mind and body, and which will thus "bury" nature. ' Not only is the flesh of the Android imperishable, but the cultural technologies built into her surpass all the possible desires of any lover. Instead of lungs she has two electrical phonographs-far ahead of the then-current state of research-which contain the most beautiful words of love ever spoken by Poets and Thinkers. Lord Ewald
? has only to switch from one woman to the Woman and speak to the An- droid, and the two phonographs will spit out, according to the method of Ebbinghaus, the vocabulary fed into them. They are capable of producing different replies to tender words of love for sixty hours, as a mechanism plays through all possible combinations of the material.
Of course Lord Ewald, to whom Edison explains everything in tech- nical detail, is shaken at first. He cannot think of loving an automaton's limited vocabulary and repertoire of gestures, until the engineer demon- strates that love is always only this litany. Whereas women in plurality (as the case of Abelone shows) say things entirely different from what men would like to hear, the Woman pleases with each of her automatic words. Edison showed before Erdmann, then, that not only every professional language but all everyday language makes d o with a modest store of sig- nifiers, and that, finally, in matters of love as well "the great kaleidoscope of human words" is best left to automatized female media-professionals. '
The programmed outcome occurs; Lord Ewald falls madly in love with the One Woman or Love; and Edison is able to bring a century of "ah's," "oh's," andOlympiastoaclose. "ThismustbethefirsttimethatScience showed it could cure a man, even of love. "' Only the spear can heal the wound it has made. The technological substitute perfects and liquidates all the characteristics attributed to the imaginary image of Woman by Poets and Thinkers. Spallanzani's Olympia could utter the one primal sigh; Edison's mechanical Eve talks for sixty hours. The great lady Nature whom everyone talks about and no one has seen dies of perfect simula- tion-Tomorrow's Eve, or the negative proof that Mother Nature does not exist. In consequence, only women in plurality remain after Edison's experiment, as discarded experimental material, to be sure, but nonethe- less real.
After the technologists come the theoreticians. If the phantasm of Woman arose in the distribution of form and matter, spirit and nature, writing and reading, production and consumption, to the two sexes, a new discourse network cancelled the polarity. As long as women too have an "innate, ineradicable, blindly striving formative principle" that "seizes mental material,"" the complementarity of form and matter, man and woman, is irretrievably lost. Henceforth there are Ariadnes, Bettinas, Abelones, and thus women's discourses. To formulate "the essential dif- ference between the sexes" in "terms such as 'productivity' and 'recep- tivity"' is mere "parochialism in the age of modern psychology. "' Instead of establishing one sole difference between the sexes, modern psychology, through observation and experiment, discovers differential differences that are dependent variables or respectively applied standards. * Even phi- losophers like Otto Weininger-who used psychophysical data and mea-
? QUEEN'S SACRIFICE 349
sured brain weight in an attempt to develop an ideal of each sex-con- cede that "in actual experience neither men nor women exist," but only the mixed relationships or differential differences to which quantitative description alone does justice. ' Weininger's less speculative colleagues did not even attempt to define ideals. The title of an essay by Ernst Simmel, "On the Psychology of Women," written long before Brigge's Notebooks, clearly indicates that it is impossible to speak of members of a sex except in the plural. "'
The many women established in the discourse network of 1900were looked at in every light save that of love. Tomorrow's Eve shows, after all, that the necessary and sufficient condition for love is the Woman as simulacrum. Empirical individual females, unburdened of the ideal, took on other roles. They could speak and write, deviating from the classical polarity of the sexes. Franziska von Reventlow does not mention her child's Name-of-the-Father anywhere in her writing. Accordingly, "we" are confronted, in an anthology entitled Love Songs of Modern Women, "not simply with the normal course of a woman's love life," but with "its demonic and pathological aberrations" as well. "
Since 1896the word and deed of psychoanalysis have existed to ac- commodate these demons and pathologies. The other illness for which Freud provided a cure-obsessional neurosis, the scourge of men-is "only a dialect of the language of hysteria,"ILor of women's language. Freud was faced with the radical new task of listening to women for thirty years and gathering everything they said under the enigmatic ques- tion "What does a woman want? " The fact that the question remained unanswered, as Freud finally confessed, not gratuitously, to a woman who had been his student," is one more piece of evidence for the nonexis- tence of the Woman. Her one "ah! " and the one way in which it might be cured, according to a classical therapist by the name of Mephisto, disap- pear together. The place left vacant is filled by enumerable words, which Freud registers, as if at the bidding of Edison in Villiers's novel. Gramo- phonics commands that one no longer read Holy Writ, but that one listen to divine vibrations-especially since hysteria, although a complete lan- guage, has as many dialects and variations as Morgenstern's Weather- Wendish. Only by offering no response to the love of his female patients could Freud draw out the peculiar vibrations of female sexuality. This rule of nonresponsiveness established as part of psychoanalytic method what Brigge learned from Bettina and Abelone: there is no longer desire when satisfied by the other sex. When Freud once gave in to temptation and, following all the rules of transference, identified the desire of a fe- male hysteric with a certain "Mr. K. " and this "K. " with himself, the cure failed. To the "complete confusion" of the beginner Freud, "the homo-
? sexual (gynecophilic) love for Mrs. K. " was "the strongest unconscious current" of Dora's love life. ''
One of Lacan's mathemes states that psychoanalytic discourse exists as the transposition of hysterical discourse. This implies that women are no longer excluded from knowledge. The nonexistent beloved of all men yields to drives and their vicissitudes, among which genital love is now only an accident-it is even taboo in the consulting room in the Berg- gasse. There was no Poetry to feed the enigmatic knowledge unknowingly transported by female hysterics, or to translate it into love for Freud, to his greater glory as author. Women's knowledge remained knowledge and was transmitted to women-which indeed "would ruin any chance . . . ofsuccessataUniversity""-as thescienceofpsychoanalysis. Marie Bonaparte, to whom Freud divulged his question about the question of women, was only one of many women students; Lou Andreas-Salom6 was another (to say nothing of Freud's daughter).
"Ladies and Gentlemen"-so begins the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, delivered at the University of Vienna during the winter semesters from 1915 to 1917. A discourse based on women's discourse can and must, even under academic conditions, return to women. This distinguishes it from the Discourse of the University, which from I 800 on systematically excluded women so that countless bureaucrats could con- duct their dance around the alma mater. Only a Great Mother could make possible the hero so necessary for subjects of the university to utter any knowledge: the author. I6 A masculine discourse on and from the Mother fed university discourse, just as hysteric discourse fed psychoana- lytic discourse. In 1897, immediately before the only university reform that has ever been worthy of the name, when Arthur Kirchhoff gathered his judgments of Prominent University Professors, Teachers,and Writers on the Aptirude of Women for University Study, the university subject Dr. Hajim Steinthal opined that women should not attend the university, for "in the uncertain hope of producing another Goethe, I could only re- gret the certainty of losing a mother-of-Goethe. " "
Lectures to "Ladies and Gentlemen" thus eliminate, along with "Frau Rat," the necessary preconditions of authorship, even if they produce a great many women writers and analysts. Either there is an alma mater on one side and on the other young men to whom (excluding such impos- sible women as Giinderode) an authorial God's Kingdom is revealed, or the whole interpreter's game between man and the world comes apart. If man and woman, author and mother, can no longer be added up-and the synthesis of form and matter, spirit and world, was man in a psycho- logical sense and the world in a philosophical sense-it was because on August I 8, 1908, a forty-year war for the admission of women to univer-
? sities finally led to victory, even in Prussia. It then became impossible to lead male and only male students around by the nose in the Faustian manner-during the lectures they had so many Cleopatra's noses right before their eyes.
The university reform was a radical turning point in the relationship between sexuality and truth. What disappeared was "the particular char- acter of German students" and that "unbridled student atmosphere" known from the Auerbach's Keller (in Goethe's Fuust). For the first time, women talked about sexuality and thus "cast off the ideal that Germans fortunately still demand from a woman. "'n In other words, only Eve or the One Woman can satisfy the desires of professors and male students, whereas the plurality of women students enter a domain of discourse that, since Edison, no longer knows love. "Having both sexes in the class- room" necessarily means "putting no emphasis whatsoever on sexual dif- ference" and "confronting the phenomena of intellectual-historical life soberly and objectively" rather than in fantasies of love. I9
No sooner said than done. Immediately before he delivers the good news to the ladies among the ladies and gentlemen present that, anatomi- cally, they also have a phallus, and that in dreams they have the symbols wood, paper, and books, Freud states that he owes an account of his treatment of primary sexual characteristics. zoHis response matches the principles of coeducation just cited. "As there can be n o science in u s ~ m Delphzni, there can be none for schoolgirls; and the ladies among you have made it clear by their presence in this lecture-room that they wish to be treated on an equality with men. ""
Now that is equal rights. Nothing stands in the way of writing for women, who, first, have a phallus or stylus and who, second, are wood, paper, or books-least of all a determination of the human race that dif- ferentiated authors as engravers and women as the writing tablets of na- ture. If both sexes can be found on both sides of the difference, they are ready for a writing apparatus that can d o without a subject and a stylus. There was a time when needles in the hands of women wove cloth, when pens in the hands of authors wove another cloth called text. But that time is past. "Machines everywhere, wherever one looks! There is a replace- ment for the countless tasks that man performed with an able hand, a replacement and one with such power and speed. . . . It was only to be expected that after the engineer had taken the very symbol of feminine skill out of women's hands a colleague would come up with the idea of replacing the pen as well, the symbol of masculine intellectual produc- tion, with a machine. ""
Machines do away with polar sexual difference and its symbols. An apparatusthat can replace Man or the symbol of masculine production is
QUEEN'S SACRIFICE 35I
? also accessible to women. Apart from Freud, it was Remington who "granted the female sex access to the office. "z'A writing apparatus that does not represent an erotic union of script and voice, Anselmus and Ser- pentina, Spirit and Nature, is made to order for coeducational purposes. The typewriter brought about (Foucault's Order of Things overlooks such trivialities) "a completely new order of things. ""
Whereas the first generation of women students, described in Mari- anne Weber's The Changing Image of University Women, "consciously renounced the garland of feminine grace," another type soon appeared. This type discovered "an infinite variety of new kinds of human contact in the previously unavailable possibilities of intellectual exchange with young men: comradeship, friendship, love. " Unsurprisingly, this type also "finds ready encouragement from most professors. " Mrs. Forster- Nietzsche was told by a professor in Zurich that "the emancipated women of the earlier period are gradually becoming more charming," and they "are highly valued as secretaries and assistants at universities and librar- ies. "l" She could have heard the same thing from an ex-professor of Basel who went half-blind and had to alternate between using secretaries and typewriters.
"It is better to become the amanuensis of a scholar than to d o scientific work at one's own cost"-such was Ellen Key's advice to working women. z-They found a place in the university mid-way between being slaves at the typewriter and research assistants. As the example of Felice Bauer shows, the situation was the same in office work. Employed by a firm that happened to manufacture phonographs, Kafka's fiancee was promoted from a secretarial to a managerial position in just a few years, simply because she was a good typist. Certainly "office work, whether keeping the books, handling accounts, or typing, gives a woman little op- portunity to make her special, most characteristic contribution. "znYet despite or because of this The Entrance of Women into Male Professions, as one title put it, occurred in the field of text production. Women have the admirable ability "to sink to the level of mere writing machines. " Whereas men, with the commendable exception of a writers' elite and the Stefan George script, continued to depend on their classically formed handwriting and thereby blindly, without resistance, left a market posi- tion unoccupied, young women "with the worst handwriting" advanced "to operating a typewriter"-as if, from the pedagogue's point of view, "one were building a church tower in thin air, having forgotten the foun- dation walls. "zv
That is just it. Foundation walls no longer count. Remington typewrit- ers turned the systematic handicap of women, their insufficient education, into a historical opportunity. The sales division of the firm just cited had
? only to discover, in I 88 I , the masses of unemployed women-and out of an unprofitable innovation came the typewriter as mass-produced prod- uct. '' A two-week intensive course with a rented typewriter made the long classical education required for the secretary Anselmus and his fun- damentally male colleagues in the nineteenth century unnecessary. "The so-called 'emancipation' of women"" was their taking hold of the ma- chine that did away with pedagogical authority over discourse. Office work, in Germany and elsewhere, became the front line in the war be- tween the sexes because it was "not a profession protected by entrance and selective examinations. "
Jonathan Harker, a lawyer in an English notary office, keeps a diary while traveling to Transylvania with documents to be delivered to Count Dracula. The notebook is his salvation from the strange pleasures that
QUEEN'S SACRIFICE 353
? overcome the Count night after night. Harker, like Brigge, Ronne, Lauda, and all the others, notes: "As I must do something or go mad, 1write this diary. " " Harker has learned stenography, but even so notebook writers still gain identifiability, coherence, and thus individuality from their handwriting.
Meanwhile Harker's fianc6e sits longingly at the typewriter back in Exeter. Whereas her betrothed will one day simply inherit the notary practice on the death of his employer, Mina Murray is sorely in need of new discursive technologies. She is an assistant schoolmistress but, not content with pedagogic half-emancipation, she dreams of doing "what 1 see lady journalists do. " So she diligently practices typing and stenogra- phy in order to be able "to take down what he wants to say" after her marriage to J ~ n a t h a n . 'H~owever (as Lily Braun had so rightly seen), the "disintegration of the old family structure" sets in "precisely where one thought oneself quite conservative":" for office girls, even if they have other dreams, there is no "return to any sort of position in the family. "%
The typewriter and officetechnology can never be contained in the closed space of motherhood. Their function is always that of the interface be- tween branching and specified streams of data. This becomes clear as Stoker's novel develops.
Instead of simply taking dictation from Jonathan, now her husband, Mina Harker is forced to become the central relay station of an immense information network. For the Count has arrived secretly in England and is leaving scattered and fearful signs of his presence. One is a madman in whose brain the psychiatrist, Dr. Seward, discovers new and dreadful nerve paths; he immediately has the verbal traces of these paths spoken into his phonograph. Another is Mina's friend, Lucy Westenra; two small wounds appear on her throat and she becomes increasingly somnam- bulant, anemic, and (to put it briefly) hysterical. Finally, there is a Dutch physician, who "has revolutionized therapeutics by his discovery of the continuous evolution of brain-matter. "'- This allows him to discover what is actually behind the scattered evidence of the horror. But his in- sight would remain a gray theory of vampirism if Mina Harker did not undertake the task of exhaustive evidence gathering. She who dreamed of doing what she saw lady journalists do uses her typewriter to transcribe every diary entry, every phonograph roll, every relevant newspaper clip- ping and telegram, every document and log book. She makes copies of her transcriptions; she delivers these daily to all the investigators, and so on and on. "
The Count, had he any idea of what was occurring, might have ex- claimed in the words of Schreber: "For years they have been keeping books01other notations, in which all my thoughts, my verbal expres-
? sions, my personal articles, all objects in my possession or anywhere near me, all people I come into contact with, etc. , are written down. "
It is not always easy for a woman to incorporate into a text every shred of evidence of a perverse desire. Seward's (not to say Stransky's) phono- graphic roll turns faster than a typist's hands would like. The "wonderful machine" is also so "cruelly true" that the transcribing Mina perceives the beating of tormented hearts "in its very tones. " ' But a discourse func- tionary does not give in, simply because she has become a discourse func- tionary. Her friend, however, like so many hysterics since Eugene Azam and Richard Wagner, suddenly manifests a second personality at night: while still wretched and docile, she refuses medication, draws her gums back from her eyeteeth, and speaks in an uncharacteristically soft, sala- cious voice. It is as if Kundry in the first act of Pursiful had become Kun- dry in the magic garden.
"What does a woman want? " In the discourse network of 1900 the alternatives are no longer motherhood or hysteria, but the machine or destruction. Mina Harker types, whereas Lucy Westenra's second per- sonality is the will willed by a despotic signifier.
On the one hand, a de- sexualization permits the most intimate diaries and most perverse sexu- alities to be textualized; on the other hand, there is the truth. Indeed, precisely the truth corresponds to Freud's original insight and was simul- taneously being publicized by an extended juristic-journalistic dragnet: the fact that hysteria consists in having been seduced by a despot. Lucy's sleepwalking does not arise from her own soul, but from her paternal in- heritance. *'The dreams of wolves and the bites from eyeteeth are no fan-
QUEEN'S SACRIFICE 355
s
? tasies; they are the Count's engrams in brain and throat. Whereas Mina types, her friend ends up on the nocturnal side of machine writing. Two tiny bite wounds on the throat materialize Beyerlen's law that eyeteeth or a piece of type, through a single, brief application of pressure, place the entire engram in the proper position on skin or paper. "The spot that should be seen is always visible, except at the moment when visibility is necessary or is believed to be necessary. " For blind acts of writing, only after-the-fact decoding is possible. But someone who, like Lucy's Dutch physician, is deeply immersed in Charcot's theory of hysteria can take the wounds and dreams of a hysteric for the sexuality they signify and hunt down the dream wolf (at the risk of becoming hysterical oneself) by the light of day.
No despot can survive when a whole multimedia system of psycho- analysis and textual technologies goes after him. The special forces have "scientific experience," whereas Dracula has only his "child's brain" with engrams dating back to the battle of Mohacs (1526). "He does have an inkling of the power about to bring him down, for otherwise he would not throw the phonographic rolls and typescripts he finds into the fire. But the hunters have Mina and "thank God there is the other copy in the safe. "" Under the conditions of information technology, the old-European despot disintegrates into the limit value of Brownian motion, which is the noise in all channels. "
AstabtotheheartturnstheUndeadtodust. Dracula'ssalaciouslywhis- pering bride, the resurrected vampire Lucy, is put to death a second time, and finally, on the threshold of his homeland, so is he. A multimedia sys- tem, filmed over twenty times, attacks with typescript copies and tele- grams, newspaper clippings and wax rolls (as these different sorts of dis- courseareneatlylabeled). Thegreatbird nolongerfliesoverTransylvania.
"They pluck in their terror handfuls of plumes from the imperial Eagle, and with no greater credit in consequence than that they face, keeping their equipoise, the awful bloody beak that turns upon them . . . Everyone looks haggard, and our only wonder is that they succeed in looking at all. "'' It is always the same story in the discourse network of 1900. The last lines of Henry James, before the agony began, were pre- served by a typewriter. And the enigma of their meaning is the prehistory of this materiality.
The writer James, famous for his compact yet overarticulated style, turned to dictation before 1900in order to move from style to "free, un- answered speech," thus to "diffusion" or flight of ideas. In 1907Theo- dora Bosanquet, an employee in a London typing service who was at the
? QUEEN'S SACRIFICE 357
time busy typing the Report of the Royal Commission on Coast Erosion, was ordered to report to James, who in the initial interview appeared as a "benevolent Napoleon. " Thus began Bosanquet's "job, as alarming as it was fascinating, of serving as medium between the spoken and machined word. " Alarming, because Bosanquet was of course only the will of the dictator's will, who in his dreams again and again appeared as Napoleon. Fascinating, because she became indispensable: whenever the pink noise of the Remington ceased, James would have no more ideas. "
Gertrude Stein'sdark oracle predicted everything, all of it, even that an oracle was incapable of warning anyone. The writer who engaged a me- dium in 1907 in order to shift his style to "Remingtonese" was felled by a stroke in 1915. Sheer facts of literary history realize an epoch's wildest phantasm. The blood clot in the brain did not deprive James of clear dic- tion, but it did claim all prearranged meanings. Paralysis and asymbolia know only the real. And this real is a machine. The Remington, together with its medium, were ordered to the deathbed in order to take three dic- tations from a delirious brain. Two are composed as if the emperor of the French, that great artist of dictation, had issued and signed them; the third notes that the imperial eagle is bleeding to death and why it is bleeding.
Nothing is more unthinkable, but nothing is clearer: a machine regis- ters itself.
When King David was old and of many days, he asked for a beautiful young woman to warm him. And they gave him Abigail of Sunem. The writer does not ask for Theodora Bosanquet, but for her typewriter. And the queen's sacrifice is complete.
In the discourse network of 1900-this is its open secret-there is no sexual relation between the sexes. Apparent exceptions do not alter the fact. If Maupassant, who probably for the same venereal-opthalmological reasons as Nietzsche occasionally dictated to a secretary, could not re- frain from sleeping with her, it was only as preparation for a full-stage separation comedy. " The comedies of unification, by contrast, are left to the media and their literary ancillary industries. According to a fine taut- ology, men and women, who are linked together by media, come together in media. Thus the entertainment industry daily creates new phantasms out of the open secret of 1900. After Dracula's black heart has bled dry, the powerless hero Harker and his typist are able to have a child after all. As long as there are gramophones and secretaries, every boss and word- smith is smiling.
"My Honey Wants to Take Me Sailing on Sunday," runs a song from 1929, which sings out the industrial secret of its fiction in the first verse.
? Triumend an der Schreibmaschin'
saB die kleine Josephin',
die Sehnsucht des Herzens, die Ghrte die Hand. Der Chef kam und las es und staunte, da stand:
"Am Sonntag will mein S&r
mit mir segeln gehn,
sofern die Winde wehn,
das wir' doch wunderschh!
Am Sonntag will mein SiiRer . . . "
At the typewriter in a dream
There sat little Josephine
Her longing heart played with her hands
The boss came and read it but didn't understand:
"My honey wants to take me sailing on Sunday
we'll sail away
and that will be so lovely! Myhoney wants to take me. .
The Lyre and the Typewn'ter,a 1913 screenplay that was unfortu- nately never filmed, promises to take up Anselmus's and Serpentina's dreams of Atlantis. It is included in Pinthus's Movie Book, and it links movies, the typewriter, and writing in a perfect picture of the times, in which only a gramophone and sound track are lacking. Richard A. Ber- mann's technological Atlantis begins when a swarthy typist comes home from the movies, which she loves to distraction, and tells her boyfriend everything promised in the silent film. The film within the film, however, begins with the opposite: a young writer of verses chews on his pen in vain and tears up sheets of paper after writing one line. "Ce vide papier que sa blancheur defend" inspires writers after Mallarm6 only with the wish to flee? *The writer runs out and is soon following a woman, but she is not one of those who d o it for money, and finally she closes her door in his face. Only then does the sign on her door, her promise, become ~eadable? ~
MINNIE TlPP
Typing Service Transcription of Literary Works
Dictation
. '"?
? QUEEN'S SACRIFICE 359
The writer rings the bell, is admitted, assumes a dictating pose and says: "Miss, I love you! " And Minnie-just like her namesake in Stoker, who also no longer knew anything as private-simply types it out on her ma- chine. " The next day the bill arrives in the mail. When messengers with- out kings and discourse functionaries without bureaucrats transport mes- sages from medium to medium, messages containing meaning o r love d o not arrive. Money, the most annihilating signifier of all, standardizes them. (In 1898 one thousand typed words cost I O Pf. )l'
If this were not enough, Bermann's screenplay stipulates that the typed line "Miss, I love you! " appear on the "white screen. '' Even if the woman had been sitting at a typewriter on which it was not possible to see the typescript, film would make amorous whispering mute, visible, and ridicu- lous. A discourse network of rigorous evidence gathering does not ignore the soul; it confronts it with mechanical devices and women who go to the movies. Bermann's screen reverses Demeny's phonoscope, which combined experimental phonetics and serial photography to divide the two seconds it takes a man's mouth to pronounce the sound series "JE v ous AI ME" into twenty still shots of the mouth's successive positions. 'l
But of course men grow in front of machines. Afterwards, the young writer is able to write poems about his love that Minnie Tipp finds read- able and, through her copies, is able to turn into "several hundred per- fectly transcribed manuscripts," which literary critics can read. With typewritten copy "one secures and increases one's market. "5' Thus the book goes to press and the divinely comic day arrives when the two, the man with the lyre and the woman with the typewriter, "no longer t y ~ e d . " ~E'nd of the film within the film. Francesca and Paolo, Serpentina and Anselmus in the age of the film screen.
The two lovers in the frame story, however, are not brought together. The swarthy movie-goer and typist sees in the film the triumph of the feminine power of reeducation in even the most outdated of male profes- sions. To her friend, who believes in works written with the pen, the story means that the typewriter turns high literature into mass literature and makes women frigid. Whereupon the woman laughs.
Twenty-four years later this laughter will have infected the revue girls who dance across the keyboard of a giant typewriter in Billy Wilder's film
Ready, Willing, and Able.
Yet The Lyle and the Typewriter, a year before it was written, was filmed-in the real. In 1912the writer Kafka met Felice Bauer one eve- ning at the house of Max Brod, immediately after the typist had been granted the head clerkship of her parlograph and dictation-machine firm
? or, in other words, had attained a power opposed to her previous posi- tion: she was allowed to sign Carl Lindstrom A. G. Kafka spent the fol- lowing weeks in his office at a typewriter, which he was not accustomed to use and which he misused to write the initial love letter^. ^' These letters revolve around a spoken word "which so amazed me that I banged the table. You actually said you enjoyed copying manuscripts, that you had also been copying manuscripts in Berlin for some gentleman (curse the sound of that word when unaccompanied by name and explanation! ) and you asked Max to send you some manuscripts. " "
Thunder and lightning, or the knock on the table. Jealousy of a name- less man in Berlin (who also dictates to Minnie Tipp, to the horror of the film hero),'' jealousy of his friend (whoworked in the telephone division of the Prague Postal Service)-jealousy of the entire media network, then, teaches the writer to love. This means that it is not love at all. Mr. K. and Felice B. (to speak with Freud and MallarmC) will never be a single mummy under happy palms, even if they were only the palms in a library like Lindhorst's.
That evening defies description: Kafka and Brod are going through Kafka's still-unpublished manuscripts and selecting those that will even- tually be published by Rowohlt. Also present is Felice, stopping over dur- ing a trip, who happens to mention that she enjoys typing manuscripts. She omits the fact that such work also pays-which distinguishes her from Minnie Tipp. But Kafka is already burning with love. He is able to type himself; there is even someone in his office whose job is to type for him, and Kafka's "principal task" as well as "happiness" consists "in being able to dictate to a living person. "'* But this functionary is a man and has never declared that Kafka's happiness is his as well. Office work remains the one-sided pleasure of a pervert who, in spite of his bureau- cratic position, constantly reverts to cunning measures ii la George. As Kafka writes to Felice Bauer: "I could never work as independently as you seem to; I slither out of responsibility like a snake; I have to sign many things, but every evaded signature seems like a gain; I also sign everything (though I really shouldn't) with FK only, as though that could exonerate me; for this reason 1 also feel drawn toward the typewriter in anything concerning the office, because its work, especially when exe- cuted at the hands of the typist, is so impersonal. ""
A woman who can type and sign documents is made to order for someone who systematically avoids signatures and yet, when switching from the office to his own desk every evening, is always betrayed by his handwriting. FK's double-entry bookkeeping, which registers the flow of documents in bureaucratic anonymity during the day and in literary man- uscripts during the night, seems to have found a "happy ending. " With a
QUEEN'S SACRIFICE 361
? 362 1900
typist as wife, the unknown writer would have "the operational means of the printing press at his disposal" right at his desk. " It would be literally true that the typewriter "arrives as the liberator of those dedicated to the demanding service of the pen. "6'
But Felice Bauer's self-advertisement (notto say "the sign on her door") is directed to Brod, and the man whose texts she transcribes is a professor in Berlin. Bauer's professional independence does not rule out, but rather stipulates, that her literary taste, such as it is, places any number of writ- ers above Kafka. The gloominess of intransitive writing hardly charms women. The composer of love letters therefore fabricated texts, even with- out Minnie Tipp's adornments, that would be readable, indeed media- appropriatefor typists. As if the feminine power of reeducation had taken root, Kafka showed intense interest in Carl Lindstriim's company cata- logs-because, like a second Wildenbruch, he considered gramophonics "a threat. ''6zAs if subaltern bureaucrats were more independent than fe- male managers, Kafka made plans for a massive media network in the name of that very company. Lindstr6m was to develop parlographs that could be connected to typewriters, to juke boxes, to telephone booths, and finally to that fearful recorder of real data, the gramophone/' This gigantic project could appropriately have been called Project Dracula, and, in the seventy years since it was written down, it has been realized.
But Ms. Bauer (as far as one can judge from her side of the correspon- dence, which was destroyed) did not take up the suggestion.
Dracula appears once more, just where the marriage between the lyre and the typewriter does not take place. "Writing" in Kafka's sense "is a deep sleep, and thus death, and just as one will and cannot pull a dead manoutofhisgrave,soitiswithmeatmydeskatnight. "" Fromthesite of this grave or desk the writer not only fantasized about the massive me- dia network of a company whose strategy was the coupling and mass production of recording devices,"'but he put such a network together, if only by using or misusing available technologies.
For twenty-four weeks he sent up three letters per day, but did not take a train, which would have brought him to Berlin in a couple of hours, and he did not answer the telephone. . . . The correspondenceshows how it is possible to touch, chain, torture, dominate, and destroy another person,simply through the system- atic and total use of the mail and telephone.
First, Kafka established an exact schedule of all mail pick-ups in Prague and of all deliveries in Berlin. Second, he plotted Felice's movements between home and office by the hour, so he would know what time of day she would receive a letter, depending on whether it was addressed to her office or residence. Third, he deter- mined the exact path each letter would take, through which hands it would pass, at home (concierge, mother and sisters of the unfortunate) and at the office (mail- room, orderlies, secretaries). Fourth, he noted the time and distance taken by a
? normal letter on the one hand, and by an express letter on the other. Fifth, he noted the time it would take a telegram to reach her. . . . If one considers that Kafka not only put the words he had just written into envelopes, but also made mysterious references to letters he had written but not sent and likewise stuck in, whenever they fit, recriminations that he had formulated weeks before; if one considers that, in extreme cases, he put the ten to twelve pages of a single letter, written at different times, into as many different envelopes and mailboxes, one must admit that Kafka maximized the dispatch of all modalities and schedules of the mail in order, with this collective firepower, to force Felice to surrender. "
Cournot's brilliant analysis shows that in Kafka's stories the modali- ties of the technological channels of information-cross-talk and delay, networks and noise-levels-served no uncertain purpose. The love letters that Erich Heller celebrates as "the work of an unknown minnesinger from the first half of the twentieth century" break all technical reco~ds. ~' The anonymity of an FK has nothing to do with the namelessness of a minnesinger. It simply makes very clear that no love is to be given to women employed in discursive functions. The concentrated firepower of letters, express mail, and telegrams stands where cultured women or simple feminine readers once would willingly have been all eyes and ears. But the possibility of effortlessly recruiting feminine readers disappears along with the "meaning" that neither the writer Kafka nor the reader Bauer can find in "The Judgment. ""* The reason Rilke distributed his Chicory so awkwardly, by hand, was that no one was asking for it. The fact that Kafka vied for an arbitrary individual with an empty face rather than for a public changes nothing in the lack of demand. Only the dead need technically calculate their love letters.
If writers in the discourse network of 1900are the discarded material that they write down, then nothing can take place beyond writing itself. "I have the definite feeling that through marriage, through the union, through the dissolution of this nothingness that I am, I shall perish. ""' There is no chance on either side of the Kafka-Bauer correspondence of words reaching through to a soul. On one side is writing that occupies the place of madness and incessantly dissolves into its nothingness. "' On the other side, the processing of texts begins, which is no less transitory, only a medium among media.
The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature proclaims the motto that masses of molecules and spinning electrons are more exciting than the smile or tears of a woman (di una Rilke reported that one woman identified his cranial-suture-phonographic expansion of the five senses with "presence of mind and grace of love. " The writer, however, disagreed. Love "would not serve the poet, for individual variety must be
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? constantly present to him, he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full e~tent. "'T~hat means, as in Kafka's letter strategies and plans for the Lindstrijm company, the creation of unheard-of media-network connec- tions, such as those between coronal sutures and writing.
At the same time, the media-network amateurs Rilke and Kafka still politely formulated their queen's sacrifice: in gentle qualifications and love letters that were machine written and thus not love letters. But the expressionists had bad manners. "Get out with your love! " cries Ehren- stein's Tubutsch. -' Doblin demanded, in a single sentence, "the self-loss [Entselbstung],the exteriorization of the author" and the end of literary "eroticism. " The dissolution of the function of authorship drove all love out of books: love described as well as the constitutive love that joined the Poet and feminine readers in empathy. Material equality on paper guar- antees quite "naturally" that "the novel has as little to do with love as painting has to do with man or woman. "" When the imagination and "feeling" no longer react, then "love, woman, and so on" disappear from "a literature for discriminating bachelors. ""
So much for programmatic declarations from the founding period. To conclude, consider later, confirming evidence from two exact literary his- torians, who have registered the central fact and its preconditions. Benn and Valery demonstrate in theory and practice that the new order of things, founded by the typewriter, is the space of contemporary writing. "Circa 1900,"the union of love disappears from paper.
Art is a truth that does not yet exist. In the most significant novels since rqoo, women are ranged in categories: in the ethnic-geographic (Conrad), the artistic (DieGottinnen),and the aesthetic (Dorian Gray). In part they are brought in aphoristically, serving a purpose of ovation and reminiscence rather than deter- mining structure, and thus speaking a foreign language: in The Magic Mountain. In the most serious instance, love is a test faced by a newly developing typological principle. '*
Taking stock of things in this way has consequences for paper itself.
A celebration for Dionysus, for wine rather than corn, for Bacchus rather than Demeter, for phallic congestion rather than the nine-month's magic, for the apho- rism rather than the historical novel! One has worked on a piece, with paper and typewriter,thoughts, sentences,itsitsonthedesk. Onereturnsfromotherspheres, from acquaintances, professional circles, overloadings of the brain with circum- stances, overflows, repressions of every flight and dream-after hours of it one returns and sees the white streaks on the desk. What is it? A lifeless something, vague worlds, something painfully, effortfully put together, thought together, grouped, tested, improved, a pathetic remainder, loose, unproven, weak-tinder, decadent nothing. The whole of it an absurdity, an illness of the race, a black mark, a confusion of all relation? There comes Pallas, unerring, always with the helmet, never fertile, the slim childless goddess, born of her father, sexless. '-
? A literature that only arranges women and even despises the Woman or Mother, a literature for discriminating bachelors, has bitter need of a Pallas as tutelary goddess. Whatever bachelor machines produce with "paper and typewriter" remains refuse as long as there is no one to clean up the desk and magically transform refuse into art.
Little has changed, then, since the days of Nietzsche. In a typewritten letter to Overbeck, the half-blind man complains that his Malling Hansen is as "skittish as a young dog," and makes for "little entertainment" and "much trouble. " He is looking for young people to relieve his writing difficulties and would "for this purpose even agree to a two-year mar- riage. "-n Benn realized Nietzsche's subjunctive in his "marriage of com- radeship.