As Esther Allen rightly observes, we have Joseph Roth’s books because of Michael Hofmann’s obsessive diligence as a translator. Or maybe, in his irredeemable complexity, Joseph Roth has us.

To be simultaneously vehement and committed to a neo-Romantic skepticism is not easy—-yet Roth managed it. His journalism and feuilletons on interwar Europe serve as glimpses into a past that could not predict the genocide in its future. Unlike other authors and scholars, Roth was difficult, which is to say, he refused to go along in order to get along with his peers.

Where, for example, Michel Leiris lionized the rituals of violence enacted by bullfights, Roth repeatedly editorialized against the inane cruelty of the sport. In a piece for Frankfurter Zeitung published on October 1, 1925, Roth describes the bullfight's role in placating the people of Nimes. (One can almost hear the Hermann Broch's Virgil groaning as he enters the emperor's festivities, and recognizes his pre-determined role in them.)

A young clownish fellow runs through the ring with a purple parasol, teasing the bull and performing for the audience, as Roth recounts:

Pursued by the bull, and shielded by the umbrella, he scrambles over the fence, and then, from his own cowardly safety, he jabs the umbrella into the bull's testicles. Huge laughter in the arena. The audience split their sides. The ugliest appurtenance invented by man becomes a weapon against the most appurtenance of the beast. The fellow couldn't have found a better expression of human dignity if he'd tried.

Once the bull is alone in the ring, Roth shifts into a supple act of identification with the tormented creature:

Bewildered, exhausted, foaming at the muzzle, the bull stops and faces the gate behind which, he knows, is the good, warm, protective shed, redolent of home. Oh, but the gate is shut and may never open again! The people are howling and laughing, and it seems that the bull has learned to distinguish between shouts intended to provoke him, and mere derision. A colossal contempt, bigger than the entire arena, fills the soul of the bull. Now he knows he is being laughed at. Now he no longer has the strength to be furious. Now he understands his helplessness. Now he has ceased to be an animal. Now he is the embodiment of all the martyrs of history. Now he looks like a mocked, beaten Jew from the East, now like a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, now like a gladiator torn to pieces, now like a tortured girl facing a medieval witch trial, and in his eyes there is a glimmer of that luminous pain that burned in the eye of Christ. The bull stands where he is and no longer hopes.

There is often this moment in which a vignette tilts towards embodied social critique in Roth’s nonfiction. He lures us in with details before holding a mirror to social behavior. But he doesn’t quite scold the reader. Nor does he moralize from a position of piety. He simply ambles along for another few paragraphs, providing a play-by-play of the bullfight, and then turns his pen to the spectators, the crowd watching the show, noting their impatience, their eagerness for action, the insatiable hunger that relies on its deniability:

The kindhearted, well-bred, polite citizens who take part in the game from a safe distance, by calling out fearlessly and brandishing heroic handkerchiefs, the tailors and hairdressers in their Sunday best—they are getting excited. Foam isn't enough for them anymore. They want to see blood, the good fellows!

Unable to fit into the crowd properly, Roth admits that he, like the “little white dog” belonging to a lady nearby, would prefer “to help” the bull. “But what can two poor pups like us do against five thousand people?” he asks, identifying himself with the dog rather than the humans present.

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I’ve been thinking about Roth the critic . . . and the chimneys of Paris . . . and an essay Roth wrote about René Clair’s silent film, Sous les Toits de Paris (1930). . . and the way Clair, himself, described the origins of this film:

At the time I was shooting my second or third silent picture, I heard a circle of street singers in Paris, on my way home from the studios. I thought how sad it was that I had no sound with which to make a picture. Four years later, sound came, and I returned to my street-singers idea.

And about a comment Rene Clair made while shooting this film in May 1929—a concern about how the “monster” of sound might ruin cinema:

Can the talking picture be poetic? There is reason to fear that the precision of the verbal expression will drive poetry off the screen just as it drives off the atmosphere of the daydream. The imaginary words we used to put into the mouths of those silent beings in those dialogues of images will always be more beautiful than any actual sentences. The heroes of the screen spoke to the imagination with the complicity of silence. Tomorrow they will talk nonsense into our ears and we will be unable to shut it out.

The film’s original trailer is above—and the film is worth watching. In it, one can observe the techniques Clair developed to communicate those “imaginary words.”

For example, in the bar scene where the two male protagonists argue over Pola, the gramophone recording of Rossini's William Tell Overture starts to skip, creating an aura of sonic discord. Clair also shot the argument through a window, a technique that Sacha Guitry later borrowed to indicate unheard conversations.

But I wanted to talk about Joseph Roth’s commentary on this comedy, which he ends in a note of wistful uncanniness. “This sound film has all the charm of perdition,” he writes, continuing:

Not one of those playing here will ever leave this world. They will fall further and further into it, sink into the hill of years that come rolling up unstoppably, smiling, to the song of the accordion. Melancholy will always be a sister to their joys. They will always drink, love, throw dice, steal. Their fate is implacable. That's what gives the film its sadness. But the implacableness has a sheen of mildness, which makes it seem, as it were, placable. That's why it's such a joyful film.

The repetition. The absence of words to lay claim to a certain heaviness—- a logistical complexity of interpretation. The further and further of falling into family where melancholy dines with joy. The gorgeous irresolute resolution of a line like: But the implacableness has a sheen of mildness, which makes it seem, as it were, placable.

If you’d like to read Roth’s entire piece, you can download a PDF copy below (which includes annotations for no reason whatsoever, unless one counts my amusement and pleasure).

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 Joseph Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise : Essays from France, 1925-1939, trans. Michael Hofmann and Katharina Ochse (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2003): 202-205. Roth’s essay was originally published in Frankfurter Zeitung on October 28, 1930.

“Under the Roofs of Paris” (1930) as directed by Rene Clair is available from Criterion as well as Criterion Channel.