"The
Incestuous
Sister: The Trouble with Grete.
Trakl - Falling to the Stars- Georg Trakl’s “In Venedig” in Light of Venice Poems by Nietzsche and Rilke
One could also remark that the sickly smile, by contradicting what one would ordinarily expect of youthful expression, is already eliding expecta- tions. More important for this discussion is--in keeping with Heidegger's remarks--how the smile is consistent with a notion of departure, how it conceals or holds back. In departing one slips away like the homeless into the uncharted. Likewise, a child's sickly smile conceals in its smile what ails the child. Or more accurately, it reveals what it conceals; namely, that the smile is a mask placed over what will soon defeat that expression. The smile does not offer itself up fully; it slips away quietly. It likewise announces its own depar- ture; just how long can a sick child maintain its smile? That is also what accompanies Trakl into sleep; perhaps it is even what he dreams of, or, if we attend to the work's title, what "Sebastian im Traume" dreams. Like sleep or dream, the smile is withheld from the wakeful gaze of the appropriating self. It will present itself neither fully nor enduringly enough, always charting at its corners its demise, preserving in its sickliness its secret. And so that smile is what necessarily brings Trakl to rest from the ceaseless oscillations and torment that haunt and animate the imagery of his poems.
VI. Suspended in the Mirror of the Sea: Trakl in Limbo
Thetitleofthepoemthatfollows"InVenedig"describesascloselyaspos- sible the site of the departed one: "Vorho? lle" (I, 132-33). He/she is in a perma- nently transitional stage that never ends up anywhere--somewhere in re- move from the dialectical rhythm that had tossed the poet into heaven and then hell. Not that a similar and equally dramatic shift in the imagistic register of the following poems does not occur. On the contrary, departure depends on an enactment of attending to the counter rhythm of what is expressed; it executes a break from the apparent totality of Venice. To stop enacting is to offer oneself up for re-appropriation. Hell's antechamber is reserved for those who remain as nameless as the child or as siteless as the homeless.
Nietzsche's "Venedig" is evidence of the torment of being on the inside. Any attempt at self-overcoming or coming over to another side only inscribes him more stubbornly in the structure of what was to be overcome. Rilke moves away from the totality engineered by his language. He often ap- proaches it with distrust, although such distrust does not appear to erode the basis for belief in totality. Rilke's poem functions as a substitute, and while the incompleteness or speciousness of its gesture cannot remain masked for long, it nonetheless enlists Rilke in its economy. "Fatal" about Venice may be not only its radiance but its fading back into the sea as well. Its destinal truth is the
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revealed fabrication of its figure. Language, which would allow the complete- ness of the inner world to presence itself, is unreliable, unable to legitimate anything outside itself and so sustain the claims of its absolute expressivity. What this "absence of a reliable referent" brings about, however, is a shift in those claims (de Man 47). In the third sonnet of the second part of Die Sonette an Orpheus, Rilke compares the mirror to the interstices of time and asserts that no one has ever knowingly described it (508-09). The suggestion is that what presences itself, even in the poem, is temporally dislocated from its essence, from the horizon that allowed it to show itself. The final stanza performsthatdislocation:"AberdieScho? nstewirdbleiben,bis/dru? beninihre enthaltenen Wangen/eindrang der klare gelo? ste Narziss" (508). The poem is still unable to capture the essence of the mirror. Just where or when the image enters the mirror is impossible to locate; apparently it is in the interstices of time introduced either by the comma in the first line, the break between lines one and two, or simply "over there. " The image captured by the poet's lan- guage is thus asymmetrically related to its essence, which unlike the complete inner world of the Dinggedichte now seems to be an empty midst. Dislocation ("dru? ben") is the condition of all images, and the emptiness of the midst is what frees the image and conditions its appearance.
Trakl's state of limbo is, it would seem, curiously related to Rilke's suspen- sion in the mirror. The exact nature of that relation cannot be explored here. At least in 1917, Rilke hardly was about to recognize himself in reading Trakl. He compared Trakl to Li Tai Po, a Chinese poet of the eighth century. Legend relates that the poet met his death after drunkenly falling from a boat trying to reach after the moon's reflection. "Es fa? llt mir ein," Rilke writes, "dass dieses ganze Werk [Trakls] sein Gleichnis ha? tte in dem Sterben des Li-Tai-Pe: hier wie dort ist das Fallen Vorwand fu? r die unaufhaltsame Himmelfahrt" (Briefe 126-27). Rilke's suspicion of Trakl's work, ("Wer mag er gewesen sein? ") might seem surprising coming from a poet whose next major work, Duiniser Elegien, would close with an image of falling. 11 From what has been said above, it is clear that Rilke recognized in Trakl a need to slip away in order to re-sur- face on the other side of consciousness--although by what standard or mea- sure would Rilke or anyone catch sight of such resurfacing? Nonetheless, Trakl himself seems to have been aware of the heavenly possibilities that Ven- ice offered to the one falling. Writing to Buschbeck on 15 August 1913, he re- marks: "Lieber! Die Welt ist rund. Am Samstag falle ich nach Venedig hin- unter. Immer weiter--zu den Sternen" (I, 523).
Notes
1 See Heidegger, Parmenides (vol. 50). Also see Foti, 30-43.
2 Myuseofthe"expressionless"isintendedtounderlinehowanythingthatissaid in Venice is always already determined. Thus the need to formulate what is not pre-
222 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 2005
scribed. That is also why one can speak of its totalizing rhythm. See Benjamin for a dis- cussion of the expressionless, 115.
3 EnglishparaphrasesofTrakl'sversesrefertoFirmage. Allothertranslations,un- less indicated, are mine.
4 See Peucker for an alternative reading of Trakl's relationship to language.
5 Trakl'sdrugaddictionandearlydeatharetwosuchindicationsofhowhisbiogra- phy could be read to support such claims. More often, the tendency has been to look to his incestuous relationship with his sister as a sign of his inability to get outside of him- self. For a solid examnation of his relationship with his sister, see McLary.
6 The critical edition of Trakl's letters uses a numbering system. It has become common practice to refer to this letter to his friend Ficker as the 106th.
7 Since a summary of the entire text is impossible here, I offer the following few ci- tations from the opening sections to clarify Heideigger's strategy for reading Trakl as well as his understanding of how his poetry emanates from an unspoken gathering point which might be called the poem of poems: "Jetzt gilt es, denjenigen Ort zu ero? rtern, der das dichtende Sagen Georg Trakls zu seinem Gedicht versammelt, den Ort seines Gedichtes. "
"Jeder grosse Dichter dichtet nur aus einem einzigen Gedicht. [. . . ] Das Gedicht eines Dichters bleibt ungesprochen. [. . . ] Dem Ort des Gedichtes entquillt die Woge, die jeweils das Sagen als ein dichtendes bewegt" (vol. 12, 33-34).
8 Heideggerforgoesanalysisofanyonepoemandattendsinsteadtobitsandpieces of 43 different ones.
9 Brown suggests that the reversals in Trakl's poetry are the result of "gratuitous substitution" and so lead to a meaningless interchangeability, 46. Also see Grimm for how such linguistic devices allow him to feign vertiginous suspension in space, 303-04. I am arguing that Trakl consciously invokes such mechanics as a means to chart a way out of this dialectic.
10 See Kudszus, Poetic Process, for a more extensive account of these mechanics.
11 See Finck for a discussion of Trakl based on this remark by Rilke, 115-25. As Rilke's remark indicates, Trakl elides identification; he appears, to paraphrase Foti, to be already displaced into a pastness incapable of being brought forward (Foti 20).
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