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Proquest Dissertations - 1 — THE BUREAUCRATIC MUSE: ON THOMAS BERNHARD'S EXEMPEL, ADALBERT STIFTER'S DER KUSS VON SENTZE, FRANZ KAFKA'S IN DER STRAFKOLONIE AND OSWALD WIENER'S DIE VERBESSERUNG VON MITTELEUROPA, ROMAN by Helen Hughes Submitted for the Degree of Ph.D. University College London November 1993 ProQuest Number: 10044466 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10044466 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 - 2 - ABSTRACT The thesis, as its title suggests, works through examples: it looks at the way in which four literary works have responded to the spirit of bureaucracy. It also looks at the way in which each text, by thematizing bureaucracy, questions itself as a literary text. By working through examples the thesis also thematizes the bureaucratization of literature in that each example is an individual case, selected in order to become one of a group. In the introduction it is argued that the essence of bureaucracy is the translation of pure formal structure into the organization of society. Bureaucratization is the attempt to create a set of rules of procedure, a value-free, machine-like process. It is further argued that the linguistic mechanism of the metatext is crucial to this enterprise. In order to maintain impersonality it is necessary for those working within the bureaucratic structure to be aware at all stages of procedure of how the system functions rather than what it is doing. In Chapter One Exempel, a short text by Thomas Bernhard, is analyzed as the exemplary text amidst exemplary texts. It takes the contextual elements of the courtroom seen through the consciousness of a courtroom journalist to relate the story of a judge who shoots himself in order to set an example. The interpretation argues that the text becomes, as it were, a deterrent to itself. Chapter Two is an analysis of Per Kuss von Sentze by Adalbert Stifter which is seen as an exploration at a very early stage of the consequences and — 3 — contradictions that can arise from placing human relationships in the framework of bureaucratic structures. This is particularly apparent in the prose style that attempts to eliminate emotional responses. Franz Kafka's In der Strafkolonie is discussed as a text that realizes in literary form Max Weber's image of the bureaucratic State, a machine made out of human beings, at the same time as it explores the way in which the dialogue about the machine, in its concern with procedures rather than with the pain inflicted by the machine, is a representation of the way in which perspectives are distorted by the institutionalization of the metatext. Oswald Wiener's die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman is an experimental novel that explores the limits of literary expression as well as bureaucratic forms of expression by creating and destroying various forms of structuring the text while discussing in theoretical terms the relationship between language, society and the individual. — 4 — CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................... p.7 CHAPTER ONE ................................................ p.35 'Dass er jetzt ein Exempel statuieren werde* THOMAS BERNHARD’S EXEMPEL CHAPTER TWO ................................................ p.84 'Der rechte Mensch 1st frel von den GelUsten und Eastern seines Herzens' ADALBERT STIFTER'S DER KUSS VON SENTZE CHAPTER THREE .............................................. p.151 'Das waren Arbeiten, die man eigentlich einem Maschinisten hëtte Uberlassen kOnnen' FRANZ KAFKA'S IN DER STRAFKOLONIE CHAPTER FOUR ............................ .................. p.216 'jedes gedicht hat amtscharacter' OSWALD WIENER'S DIE VERBESSERUNG VON MITTELEUROPA. ROMAN CONCLUSION................................................. p.259 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................... p.270 ILLUSTRATIONS The six cartoons are taken from the book Beamticon; Der Beamte in der Karikatur, ed. by Peter Doll, Heinz Henke, Gernot Joerger, Eike Thombansen, (Herford: Maximilian Verlag, 1984). p.6 Erik Liebermann, Beamticon, p.17. p.34 Jules Stauber, Beamticon, p.89. p.83 Jules Stauber, Beamticon, p.90. p. 150 Gerhard GlUck, Beamticon, p.12. p.215 Erik Liebermann, Beamticon, p.57. p.258 Gerhard GlUck, Beamticon, p.95. - 5 - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my warmest thanks to Professor Martin Swales for all his help, unwavering support and encouragement. I would also like to thank Martin Brady for sharing with me his enthusiasm for experimental art and literature and for helping me with the final stages of correction. - 6 - ZI - 203 Hier a u s g a b e vow AWTRA65F0RMULARCM FUR. ML AUSGABCVON ANTRK6EN ÛBER VORSCHLA&E ZUR VEAfeiKFACHUNG UOK A NTRAGSFORM ULAREN UMM.Tn(run»rN 44 — 7 — INTRODUCTION Wehe, Sie lesen eindringlicher, Sie ruinleren sich ailes, was Sie lesen. Es 1st ganz gleich was Sie lesen, es wird am Ende lëcherllch und 1st am Ende nichts wert. Hüten Sie sich vor dem Eindringen in Kunstwerke, sagte er, Sie verderben sich ailes und jedes, selbst das Geliebteste. Schauen Sie ein Bild nicht lang an, lesen Sie ein Buch nicht zu eindringlich, hOren Sie ein MusikstUck nicht mit der grOssten Intensitët, Sie ruinieren sich ailes und damit das Schünste und das NUtzlichste auf der Welt.^ Nobody who attempts to write a doctoral thesis on a literary topic can, I suspect, entirely escape a slight feeling of assent to Thomas Bernhard's sentiments quoted above. The desire to read and not to analyze is one often uttered by students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. And yet it is a desire that is largely chimerical - if for no other reason than that reading is, at however rudimentary a level, necessarily a reflexive act. And the more academically professional a reader one seeks to become, the more discursiveness and reflectivity tend to come to the fore. I am aware that this is particularly the case - one might even say, the danger - with my work, which is stylistic rather than thematic in character and which explores in considerable detail a tiny corpus of texts. With the exception of Oswald Wiener's die verbeserung von mitteleuropa, roman which has a certain bulk, the other texts are short - two of them (Stifter's Der Kuss von Sentze and Kafka's In der Strafkolonie) are of 'Novelle' length, and Bernhard's Exempel 2 consists of one brief paragraph. I would claim in each case that the issues which I address do take us to the heart of each writer's - 8 — oeuvre, but It cannot be stressed too strongly that the aim of this thesis is not to offer a general literary-historical discussion of OAoC the artistic production of Stifter, Kafka, Bernhard,y^Wiener. Rather, the texts are submitted - in spite of Bernhard's caveat quoted above - to detailed stylistic analysis. The texts are illustrative material in respect of a central argument which is in essence, theoretical. I am concerned in this thesis with four texts, which, in both thematic and stylistic terms, highlight the issue of bureaucracy and its modes. In the pages that follow I shall try to spell out clearly how the bureaucratic issue functions in my argument. But at this stage I wish to stress merely one point: I am concerned primarily with bureaucracy as a mental - and above all else linguistic - the entity. All of us are familiar nowadays with^process of filling out forms. When we engage in this exercise, we find ourselves trying to explain our desires, needs, achievements or entitlements to an institution, a hierarchical framework that regards certain things as applicable and others as not applicable. The bureaucratic form attempts to introduce a dispassionate, rational, universal structure of question and answer into the felt particularity of our lives. For this reason, the language of the bureaucratic document can often strike us as not only impersonal but also inhuman. It is some kind of austere metalanguage to our everyday vernacular and in the process of filling out the form, we are made to stand outside ourselves to reflect on ourselves not in our own, but in an institutional, language. Precisely this experience of cognitive and linguistic self- reflexivity is at the heart both of the texts that concern me in this thesis and of my own engagement with them. - 9 - To repeat the point with which I began: although there is a connection to be made between the bureaucratization of the world , Austria's history as a great Central European Empire, the Hapsburg legacy, particularly as a mythological continuity within the world of letters^, it would take many more examples and a different approach to turn my project into a comment about Austrian prose fiction from 1866 to 1978, The texts form a group for my purposes not primarily because they are by Austrian or Austro-Hungarian authors but because they all confront bureaucracy in ways which will be discussed. It is important to make it clear however that the thesis is not a sociological or an historical analysis of the relationship between Austrian bureaucracy or bureaucratic prose and literature. It is rather a thesis that remains firmly anchored in the realm of literary stylistic interpretation in the belief that as such it is also a useful contribution to an understanding of the ways in which hou/ Lk literature functions and/contributea to an understanding of modern bureaucratized societies. By submitting the texts to close literary interpretive reading I hope to illuminate the ways in which these examples of Austrian or Austro-Hungarian literature have contributed to our understanding and image of such a society.
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