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the pompous, self-regarding self-satisfaction of the
ancien régime.
As he himself described his aim in
Die Fackel
: ‘What has been laid down here is nothing else than a drainage system for the broad marshes of phraseology.’ 23
    The Last Days of Mankind
was written – usually late at night – during the summers of World War I and immediately afterward. On occasions Kraus escaped to Switzerland, to avoid the turmoil of Vienna and the attentions of the censor. His deformity had helped him avoid military service, which made him already suspect in the eyes of certain critics, but his opposition to the aims of the Central Powers earned him even more opprobrium. The play was his verdict on the war, and although certain passages appeared in
Die Fackel
in 1919it wasn’t completed until 1921, by which time Kraus had added much new material. 24 The play draws a cumulative strength from hundreds of small vignettes, all taken from newspaper reports and, therefore, not invented. Life at the front, in all its horror and absurdity, is juxtaposed (in a verbal equivalent of Kurt Schwitters’s technique) with events back in Vienna, in all
their
absurdity and venality. Language is still the central element for Kraus (
Last Days
is essentially a play for voices rather than action). We witness the Kaiser’s voice, that of the poet, the man at the front, Jewish dialects from Vienna, deliberately cheek-by-jowl with one another to throw each crime – of thought or action – into relief. The satirist’s technique, of holding one phrase (or thought, or belief, or conviction) against its opposite, or reciprocal, is devastatingly effective, the more so as time passes.
    The play has been rarely performed because of its length – ten hours – and Kraus himself claimed that it was intended only for performances on Mars because ‘people on Earth could not bear the reality presented to them.’ 25 At the end of the play, mankind destroys itself in a hail of fire, and the last lines, put into the mouth of God, are those attributed to the Kaiser at the start of the war: ‘I did not want it.’ Brecht’s epitaph of Kraus was: ‘As the epoch raised its hand to end its life, he was this hand.’ 26
    The most overwhelming of the great books that appeared in 1922 was
Ulysses,
by James Joyce. On the surface, the form of Joyce’s
Ulysses
could not be more different from
The Waste Land
or Virginia Woolf’s
Jacob’s Room,
which will be considered later. But there are similarities, and the authors were aware of them.
Ulysses
was also in part a response to the war – the last line reads: ‘Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914–1921.’ As Eliot does in
The Waste Land,
Joyce, as Eliot himself commented in a review, uses an ancient myth (in this case Homer) as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’ 27
    Born in Dublin in 1882, Joyce was the oldest child in a family of ten. The family struggled financially but still managed to give James a good education at Jesuit schools and University College, Dublin. He then moved to Paris, where at first he thought he might be a doctor. Soon, though, he started to write. From 1905 he lived in Trieste with Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway who he had met on Nassau Street, Dublin, in 1904.
Chamber Music
was published in 1907, and
Dubliners,
a series of short stories, in 1914. On the outbreak of war, Joyce was obliged to move to neutral Zurich (Ireland was then ruled by Great Britain), though he considered Prague as an alternative. 28 During hostilities, he published
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
but it was
Ulysses
that brought him international fame. Some chapters appeared first in 1919 in a London magazine, the
Egoist.
However, the printers and some subscribers took objection, and publication of subsequent chapters was discontinued. Joyce next turned to an avant-garde American magazine,