Such faulty and bungled German or Austrian, whichever you prefer, I had never before read in my whole intellectual life in an author who is, of all things, famous today for his precise and clear prose. Stifter's prose is anything but precise and it is the least clear I have come across, it is packed with distorted metaphors and faulty and confused ideas, and I really wonder why this provincial dilettante, who at any rate was an inspector of schools in Upper Austria, is today revered to such an extent by writers, and above all by the younger writers, and not by any means by the least known or least noticed ones. I believe that none of these people has ever really read Stifter but they have always only venerated him blindly, that they have always only heard of him but never really read him, like myself. As I was truly reading Stifter a year ago, that grandmaster of prose writing, as he is called, I felt disgusted with myself for ever having revered this bungler of a writer, or indeed loved him. I had read Stifter in my youth and my memory of him had been based on these reading experiences. I had read Stifter between the ages of twelve and sixteen, at a time when I was totally uncritical. After that I never reexamined Stifter. For very long stretches of his prose Stifter is an unbearable chatterbox, he has an incompetent and, which is most despicable, a slovenly style and he is moreover, in actual fact, the most boring and mendacious author in the whole of German literature. Stifter's prose, which is reputed to be pregnant and precise, is in fact woolly, helpless and irresponsible, and pervaded by a petit-bourgeois sentimentality and a petit-bourgeois gaucherie that turns one's stomach at the reading of Witiko or The Papers of My Great-grandfather. The Papers of My Great-grandfather, in particular, is, from the very first few lines, an attempt to present a recklessly spun-out, sentimental and boring prose full of internal and external mistakes as a work of art, when it is nothing but a petitbourgeois concoction from Linz. But then it would be quite inconceivable that a petit-bourgeois provincial dump like Linz, which has, since the days of Kepler, remained a provincial hole veritably crying out to high heaven, which has an opera house where they cannot sing, a theatre where they cannot act, painters who cannot paint and writers who cannot write, should suddenly give birth to a genius — and Stifter is universally described as one. Stifter is no genius, Stifter is a philistine living a cramped life and a musty petit bourgeois and schoolmaster writing in a cramped style, who did not even meet the minimum requirements of the language, let alone was able to produce works of art, Reger said. All in all, he said, Stifter is one of the greatest disappointments of my artistic life. Every third or at least every fourth sentence of Stifter's is wrong, every other or every third metaphor is a failure, and Stifter's mind generally, at least in his literary writings, is a mediocre mind. Stifter in fact is one of the most unimaginative writers who ever wrote anything and one of the most antipoetical and unpoetical ones to boot. But readers and literary scholars have always been taken in by that man Stifter. The fact that the man, towards the end of his life, killed himself changes nothing about his absolute mediocrity. I do not know any writer in the world who is such a dilettante and a bungler, and moreover so blinkered and narrow-minded as Stifter, and so world-famous at the same time. Things are much the same with Anton Bruckner, Reger said; with his perverse fear of God and his obsession with Catholicism he left Upper Austria for Vienna and totally surrendered himself to the emperor and to God. Bruckner was no genius either. His music is confused and just as unclear and bungled as Stifter's prose. But whereas Stifter today, strictly speaking, is only the dead paper of German literary scholars, Bruckner is moving everyone to tears.
Similar Books
