The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Autobiography as Literary Criticism
Review:
I picked up a copy of The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir, by Marjorie Perloff because the idea of a memoir about Vienna intrigued me, and because I've always been enthralled by the critical mind of this noted and innovative literary scholar. After I'd read it, I ordered some more copies to bestow on friends, most of whom have no particular interest in Vienna whatsoever.
"Why are you giving me this book?" one of my more suspicious friends asked me. "What is there about this book that sets it apart from all the immigrant narratives, from all the nostalgic recounting of `old Vienna,' from all the other autobiographies that people turn to when they begin to realize that time is passing and whatever they don't set down will be forgotten?" The central distinction is this: Perloff doesn't just record her own experiences or those of her family and friends, she uses those experiences - the experiences of her extended family, experiences of other famous emigrants from Vienna, together with information about books, museums, websites, as well as restaurants, street guides and all kinds of other information - for other purposes than telling about her self. She's not seeking her own `roots,' but draws on those roots to examine some of the important and pressing questions that only a critic of the world with great experience, perspective and expertise can ask.
What Perloff is exploring with her delineation and examination of the civilization in which her family was nurtured and from which it was expelled is far more complex than just where she comes from, or even what really were the negative effects of the Holocaust. She is asking what are the functions, the potential and the limitations of civilization: what should we value in culture, what should we discard, what can we know, what can we improve, and what are the individual limitations. At one point Perloff quotes Wittgenstein
if we think of the world's future, we always mean where it will be if it keeps going as we see it going now and it doesn't occur to us that it is not going in a straight line but in a curve, constantly changing direction. (33)
The lessons from history are not imperatives for the future, and therefore every detail must be examined, and it is the role of the artist and the critic to perform this examination, and to edify . Therefore Perloff delineates the achievements, on all sides, of her family - their successful careers in Austria and elsewhere, their connections, their accomplishment throughout - but she also notes their failure to perceive and/or act within Austrian society to counter or prevent what was to come. Except for some foreign bank accounts that came in handy for the family after their escape in August of 1938, there seems to have been little understanding of the dangers inherent in the historical situation. If Grandfather Schuller was allowed into Italy because of a welcome from Mussolini to his former negotiator, it was not political foresight that made Schuller prepare an escape route for a Jew, but belief in Austria transcending personal considerations that saved him.
The technique of postmodern pastiche is everywhere, but it is not here an indication of the eradication of values. Perloff is an expert at weaving together associations, websites, museums, biography, memoir, gossip, lunch, poetry and making sense of them all. This pastiche is born from the sensibility of the multicultural, world-wise individual, comfortable everywhere in the universe. Perloff, in opposition to the refugee, the outsider, really believes in a society, but it is an ur society, which incorporates and transcends the differences. Her criticism of European disdain for American society, and American naiveté as to European society, is an attempt to bring the two together.
More than anything else, there is a love story in this autobiographical account -- it is a love story with America, that country that whatever its cultural limitations in comparison to the hoch kultur of Vienna, gave her and her family shelter and opportunity to thrive to such an extent that politics could be safely and comfortably ignored. Written after September 11, when the US is besieged not only by enemies without but also by the intelligentsia within, this book serves as a reminder of perspective. So that although it begins with the story of Arnold Schoenberg who despite his appreciation for the United States, never found in it a lasting and appreciative audience, it concludes with Adorno, who longed for the taste of European culture and returned there after the War.


Rating:
Summary: The Viennese-Jewish-Refugee Identity Crunch
Review: Marjorie Perloff, the noted and prolific literary critic and comparativist, has written a thoughtful introspection about the intersection of her life with the complexities of the fading Vienna of the 20's and thirties. It's a dizzying array of contrasts and passages: not only her (and her family's) adjustment to American society of the 1940;s and 1950's, but the passage of Arnold Schoenberg, and the contrast of John Cage and Schoenberg. Perloff sheds a personal light on the ambivalences towards Jewishness and the imperatives of conversions. The photographs of girls in dirndls and her prestigious grandfather in morning suit are stunning reminders of the power of illustration and the evocation of period. Though this is memoiristic, Perloff remains a literary critic and there are efforts to re-address Adorno and Gombrich (for example)in terms of their own refugee pasts. Marjorie Perloff changed her name from Gabriele to Marjorie, her school from PS 7 to the fashionable Fieldston, her academic address from Catholic University ultimately to Stanford. The book is about what change means, how it reiterates, to someone whose life was abruptly forced, by the Anschluss, into a totally new mode of looking at the world and thinking about it.