8 posts tagged “romanticism”

to sign up for this presentation on Heidegger and poetry, because I sit down and read the first line of the essay that refers to Hölderlin's "Brod und Wein" and immediately put down the Heidegger and run to the shelf to read "Brod und Wein" again, and half of it makes me delirious, and then I page through the bilingual edition of Hamburger translations to "Häefte [sic] des Lebens" ("The Middle of Life"):

Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

Weh mir, wo nehm' ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kallt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.

With yellow pears the land,
And full of wild roses,
Hangs down into the lake,
O graceful swans,
And drunk with kisses,
You dip your heads
Into the hallowed-sober water.

Alas, where shall I find when
Winter comes, flowers, and where
Sunshine,
And the shadows of earth?
The walls stand
Speechless and cold, in the wind
Weathercocks clatter. (tr. Michael Hamburger, pp. 158-59)

Now these are, I think, pyrotechnics not always on display in Hölderlin: his work is not all jaw-dropping.  But this astounded me when I read it seven or eight years ago, as now, and on both occasions I wanted immediately to share it with everyone.  I think it is pure genius, and I don't know what else to say.  Perhaps that isn't good pedagogy.  Probably not, and therein lies the problem: presentations in graduate seminars are basically cakewalks, stage fright notwithstanding, but I somehow have to work outwards from this core of my engagement with poetry to explicating Heidegger.  In Spanish, did I mention that?  In Spanish.  Maybe I'll just bring in "En la noche escura" and read that and be done with it.  Maybe I'll talk about secularization in Europe.  Maybe, as I did Wednesday, I will just bewilder most of the class; I could talk for 5 minutes and leave 25 for Q & A.

A love letter from Karoline von Günderrode.  Sort of.

Den vorigen Sonntag war ich den ganzen Tag allein zu Hause, abends hatte ich etwas Brustschmerzen, und nicht nur war ich sehr ruhig darüber, ich möchte fast sagen innig froh, ich dachte an alle mich umgebenden drückenden Verhältnisse und da war mir der Gedanke, ihrer vielleicht bald entfesselt zu sein, sehr erwünscht.  Zugleich dankte ich dem Schicksal, daß es mich so lange hatte leben leben lassen, um etwas von Schellings göttlicher Philosophie zu begreifen, und was ich noch nicht begriffen, zu ahnen; . . . Auch Deiner gedachte ich . . .

Last Sunday I was home alone the whole day, in the evening I had a pain in my chest, and not only was I quite calm about it, I might almost say inwardly joyful, I thought of all the pressing circumstances that surround me and then the much-desired thought that I might soon be released from them.  At the same time I was grateful for the good fortune that I'd been allowed to live long enough to understand something of Schelling's divine philosophy, and to have an idea of what I don't yet understand; . . . I also thought of you . . .

Written 22 March, 1805.  I always feel like crap around that time of year too.  Maybe I should try Schelling.

I am starting to think there is simply no good source on German Orientalism in English.  I found a promising-looking book called German Orientalisms, but there was depressingly little concrete data and a bit more "Are today's Turks yesterday's Jews?" rhetoric than I could process.*  I got a lot from a 1970s book on the image of India, but it didn't tell me much about other parts of the East.  I found an excellent article on Günderrode's play Udohla which mentioned the contrived Aryan/Semitic racial opposition— I wondered if Persians, i.e. Zoroastrians, were considered Aryan in this context, so I checked the footnote, and this is how I came to Johann David Michaelis and his notion of sending the German Jews to work on sugar plantations, since Jews are made for warm climates:

Such a people can perhaps become useful to us in agriculture and manufacturing, if one manages them in the proper manner.  They would become even more useful if we had sugar islands which from time to time could depopulate the European fatherland, sugar islands which, with the wealth they produce, nevertheless have an unhealthy climate. (Michaelis, from the Orientalische und exegetische Bibliothek, 1782; qtd. in Jonathan Hess, "Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary," Jewish Social Studies 6.2 [Winter 2000], p. 58)

This image apparently left a strong impression on Hess's scholarly imagination, since he spends a great deal of his 46-page article unpacking the significance of sugar and colonies for German anti-Semitism.  It's all fascinating to a point, but when I came to a contemporary reference to sugar as "this seductive salt" I had a giggling fit, and it all went quickly downhill.  Okay, filed for later use: failed German plan to deport the Jews to a sugar island in the Caribbean.  I'm starting to wonder if I'm completely out of my depth.

* That question is a direct quote; the author doesn't answer it.  He also writes something about Europe being buried under a flood of fast food and Hollywood movies, which sounds pretty gross, especially if the White Castle Sliders mix with the Shamrock Shakes and "Blade" sequels...

At the library.  I have been lying fallow for too long: a week and a day.  This week could have been a century; I pricked my finger, swooned, and blurred my view of the future.  Now we start anew.  Five books like five bright birds, spines and songs.  Which to read?

Nabokov's Onegin is good, by the way, I think.  Amusing in his efforts to wring every last Newton of syntactic force from the few vestiges of a case system in English: him, them, us— sometimes clunky, sometimes astounding, it surely has no equal.  All of Pushkin in Russian is online, ten volumes.  I studied Russian for a year, almost ten years ago now; I remember almost nothing, and my motives for the study were bleak.  But for years afterwards the owner of my favorite café in Madison would ask me how the Russian was going, even when I had a pile of German books in front of me.  I never want to lose anything (other than linguistics, which I mostly hated; even now I shudder when I encounter certain themes in analytic philosophy, remembering hours of uncomprehended Gricean implicature and government and binding theory); I want to redeem the lost hours etc. etc.  This desire has not proved to have any bearing on the job market for slavicists, or on my irrational fear of Russia and, um, its food.  (Is it any scarier than German food?  Unlikely.  I... like... beets...  I don't know.)

As if on cue, the one woman I know who studies Russian at Berkeley scampered past me en route to the stacks; I whispered her name, but she didn't hear me, unsurprisingly.  I should email her.  I should talk to some human being in town before I snap.  The 24-hour Cammie Show at the house (special guest star Not-Having-A-Job!) is making me squirrelly...

Kein Ort. Nirgends is Wolf's novella about an imagined meeting between Kleist and Günderrode.  I turn out to have a copy of the English translation in my library; after some resistance to the mere idea I decided to sample it.

Wolf is certainly an artful stylist, although the full effect doesn't always come across in translation.

Hmm.

Okay, I seem to be unable to write a balanced review: I couldn't keep reading it.  I kept putting it down and remarking on its failures to Paul, picking it up again, getting more frustrated and discussing those failures more intricately; I'll leave it up to anyone else to tell me if it gets better.

Example:

He can easily imagine, down to every individual turn of phrase, what tattle the members of Frankfurt society are telling behind his back.  To stall his fiancée, and then to jilt her.  Why does it matter to him what they say?  Why this horror at standing up to their judgment?  Why, when putting this distance between himself and them has failed to bring any relief, does he still feel the temptation: it is better to die than face that.

Ah: because their reproach confirms his own self-reproaches.  Immorality!  They do not know the meaning of the word.  But he knows.  To fail to pay life the debt it demands, and the living what they are compelled to demand; to feel truly alive only when one is writing . . .  These ghastly six months in Wedekind's home.  In some secret sense they had been for him an indescribable holiday: his condition forbade him even so much as to think about writing.  In the nearness to death this compulsion to write falls away.  One lives simply in order to live.  Now, how could that idea be expressed?

One really ought to think about something else.

This is an irritatingly psychologically-minded critical essay with delusions of being fiction.  There are footnotes.  Who is Wedekind?  What was Der Prinz von Homburg?  To which of Kleist's letters does this passage make reference?  But you don't care, because no one talks, thinks or lives like this, not in 1979, not in 1804, no writer ever, no place on earth.  What competent novelist doesn't know that?  Writers don't have writerly thoughts: they shit, they go to the grocery store, they wake up late and groggy and off their game.  Sehnsucht is notoriously unstable as a state of mind.

I thought Wolf's Kassandra had its moments, but I couldn't get into it in the end: it seemed to be trying so hard, so disingenuously, to determine the reader's reaction to the thoughts and ideas and words of every character— in fiction this is, I think, fatal.  Fiction is what you write when you don't have an agenda.  You can write perfectly good, perfectly beautiful, persuasive essays, without requiring your readers to buy into the contingency and opacity of imaginary people with imaginary thoughts to get your point.  The only decent piece of author-biographical fiction I can think of is Büchner's Lenz, which is a masterpiece, written out of obvious and unfathomable sympathy with its subject.  Do any of you know any others?

I like to read this as an apology for the impenetrable parts of the Fichte-Studien.

Novalis: Soliloquy (1798)

It's quite a peculiar thing about speaking and writing; a proper conversation is a mere word game.  One can but marvel at the ridiculous error that people make in thinking that they speak about things.  No one realizes the very particularity of language: that it is only concerned with itself.  And this is why it is such a wondrous and fruitful secret: that when one speaks merely in order to speak, one gives voice to the most splendid, original truths. But if one wants to speak about something specific, capricious language makes one say the most ridiculous and mixed-up things.  This is the source of the hate that so many serious people have for language.  They notice its mischievousness, but not the fact that despicable chatter is the infinitely serious side of language.  If one could only make it clear to people that language is like mathematical formulas.  Formulas comprise a world of their own: they play only with themselves, express nothing but their own wondrous nature and are for that very reason so expressive.  For that very reason as well, the peculiar relational play of things reflects itself in them.  It is only through their freedom that fomulas are a part of nature, and only in their free movement does the world soul express itself and make them into a tender measure and outline of things.  So it is too with language: whoever has a keen feeling for its application, its rhythm, its musical spirit; whoever perceives in himself the tender effect of its inner nature and moves tongue or hand accordingly will be a prophet.  On the other hand, whoever is acquainted with this feeling but hasn't a good enough ear or sense for language to write truths like these will be tricked by language and ridiculed by the people just as Cassandra was by the Trojans.  Even if I think I have indicated most clearly with this the essence and task of poesy, I am nevertheless certain that no one can understand it, and because I have wanted to say it, I have said something completely ridiculous, and no poesy arises in this way.  But what if I had to speak, and this drive to speak were a marker for the inspiration, the effectivity of the language in me?  And suppose my will wanted only that which I had to do?  Thus in the end my will could, without my knowledge or belief, be poesy and render a secret of language intelligible?  Thus I would be a competent writer (for a writer is after all only someone enthused by language)?

This is about as lucid as the man gets, but it made me pretty happy.  "Poesie" in German is a far less dippy word than "poesy" in English, belonging somewhere between "poetics" and "poiesis;" the word for tender, "zartlich," is probably the single most common word in German Romanticism, although "Gefühl" is not far behind.

I dearly wanted to title this post "They play only with themselves," but it seemed too childish.

Those of you conversant in that barbarian tongue I read can have at this week's delicacy of Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde.  Interesting book.  Being in love, being happy, being a genius, is all — somewhat — like being a plant: it's that early Boden und Chlorophyll ideology that went over like a lead balloon, but here it is in all its glory.  We spent class talking about the fact that Schlegel's idea of femininity is not progressive but in fact reactionary, because he projects his masculine fantasies onto his beloved et cetera et cetera: really the one unremarkable thing about this remarkably weird patchwork novel.  Schlegel was probably closer in affinity to Sterne than Stendhal, for instance, and I've seen more sexist and unpleasant relationships in real life than the flowering love of Julius and Lucinde (so far) — much of it is written in a spirit of pure, goofy joy, and it's pretty hard for me to hold the ideology of his age against the man when he's bubbling over with praise for Lucinde's paintings and her sense of humor.  The melancholic version of this stuff descends much faster into actual violence and cruelty.  There's some surprising violence and cruelty in the "Apprenticeship in Masculinity" narrative at the center of Lucinde, in fact, all of which fights an increasingly doomed battle against misandry and gives a strikingly good portrait of the thin line between slapdash stoicism and mental collapse.

Anyway, there are three Schlegels: Friedrich, August, and Dorothea.  (That last looks like a fairly boring research paper, but it's the only thing I could find with any information in English, so caveat lector.)  Like every fool who finds him- or herself poised at the dawn of a new age, they thought they had figured it all out.  Goethe was lucky to be born early enough to skirt temptation, and the youngsters often threw vegetables in his tall, marble direction in the midst of their enthusiasm.  Schwärmerei, that's how you say that in German: Pastures Not Parliament!  Nicht Höflichkeit sondern Kartöfflichkeit!  Narcissus is, after all, a flower too.  I'm being highly ridiculous here, but I really think context is everything— I don't understand the leveling impulse that reduces Lucinde to the familiar narcissistic male gaze when there's so much particularity to the literary circle that nourished it.  Three Schlegels might seem like a lot, but compared to the historical number of male human beings it's really quite modest.

The novel could all end badly, though, so I may retract all of this.  The professor hinted that the ending Makes No Sense, which gives me hope.

I located Jena on a map.  It was in northern Wisconsin.  "Hegel spent his life teaching in f-ing northern Wisconsin?" I exclaimed in awe.  I looked more closely and the borders shifted—it was an extremely large map—so that Jena now appeared to be in Canada.  Paul looked over my shoulder at it.  "I don't think that's the same Jena," he said gently.  I became irrationally furious: of course he was right, of course Jena was actually in Germany, oh the humiliation.

I don't know what this dream means, of course, but it might have been tracking my experience of reading Hölderlin's "Brot und Wein" last night, after exasperation at (Friedrich) Schlegel's "Gespräch über die Poesie" led me to toss it down and start flipping through Paul de Man instead.  If I have to read one more account of the development of Western literature from ancient times along these lines—in English, for your reading pleasure:

A pure fountainhead of new heroic poetry flowed across Europe with the appearance of the Teutons.  And when the wild energy of Gothic poetry merged through the influence of the Arabs with the echoes of the charming fairy tales of the Orient, there flourished on the southern coast of the Mediterranean a merry trade of inventors of lovely songs and unusual stories which also spread, now in this form, now in that, along with the Latin saints' legends, worldly romances, praising love and arms.

—I will start reciting Dada verse in class.  But "Brot und Wein:" flashes of beauty and clarity so familiar that I felt I had been squinting at them in the dark my whole life, interleaved with total strangeness.  Strange names, strange rhythms, some signs pointing towards your heart and others pointing to a vacant sky.  Heimlich und unheimlich.

Vater Aether! so riefs und flog von Zunge zu Zunge
  Tausendfach, es ertrug keiner das Leben allein;
Ausgeteilet erfreut solch Gut und getauschet, mit Fremden,
  Wirds ein Jubel, es wächst schlafend des Wortes Gewalt:
Vater! heiter! und hallt, so weit es gehet, das uralt
  Zeichen, von Eltern geerbt, treffend und schaffend hinab.

For sound alone, those last three lines are worth everything I've read this semester and then some.  But the conceptual play of vacancy and fullness—it troubles me...