her father, her consumptive
stepmother
and three young step-siblings.
Trakl - IN CONTEXT- POETRY AND EXPERIENCE IN THE CULTURAL DEBATES OF THE BRENNER CIRCLE
50 Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), p. 514.
51 The HKA corrects spelling in the review. I am quoting from the unrevised text as it is
reprinted in Sauermann, 'Trakls Lesung in Innsbruck im Jahre 1913', p. 192.
Ficker chooses to cut when he reprints excerpts in Der Brenner. 52 Indeed, Ficker suggests that it is too early to offer an interpretation of Trakl's poetry. It is better to let the poems themselves, as they appear in the pages of Der Brenner reflect 'das, was dunkel und was licht in ihnen erscheint'. 53
We are now in a position to connect my first sketch of Trakl's poetic techniques with the view of his poetry which has emerged on putting his writing back in the context of Der Brenner from which it first emerged. When we first looked at Trakl's poetry, we observed a shift of perspective which could take the poem either closer to a sense of redemption or irrevocably remove it. In either case 'Sinn' and 'Bild' could change abruptly. This technique now appears analogous to those that Trakl uses in his aphorism on Kraus, since this poem similarly deprives the reader of a framework with which to make sense of the intense experience with which they have nevertheless become involved. Reading Trakl's poetry, we participate in a shift of perspective of which we cannot say whether it is redemptive or not: we can say only that our perspective alters radically. For Trakl's contemporaries, this shift of perspective and the associated experience of meaninglessness was felt to be both uplifting and significant. It moved the reader beyond stale patterns of understanding. At the same time, readers needed some way of coping with the sense of vertigo the poetry engendered. To put the strategy they developed in a wider context, I want to consider the cultural legacy of Trakl's poetic techniques as it can be seen in the responses of Adorno and Heidegger to the poetry. This will prepare the way for understanding the relation between Trakl's difficult modernist poetry and what I called at the very start of the argument 'common sense realism'.
V MODERNIST TRAKL AND BEYOND
The reading suggested by Heinrich and Steuer (Trakl's poetry articulating a meaning which is beyond meaning, but not the undermining of meaning tout court) is an early version of what could be called the strong Modernist account of Trakl which is clearly set out in the analyses by Adorno and Heidegger. For Adorno, Trakl's poetry is an example of an aesthetic logic beyond logic, rigorously combining elements without subjecting them to standard patterns of communica- tion, a form of everyday speech stylized beyond itself, and yet neither clearly distinguishable from the speech patterns the poet hopes to overcome nor protected from an oneiric collapse of all forms of communication. 54 Similarly for Heidegger, turning to Trakl to help him gloss his own thought in the seminar he gave to explicate his lecture 'Zeit und Sein' in 1962, poetry written by a generation of poets which includes Trakl but also Rilke and Benn, articulates a form of purpose
52 Ficker drops the epithet 'Futurist' as well as softening the critique of Trakl's style of declamation: 'Der Dichter las leider etwas zu schwach, wie von Verborgenheiten heraus, aus Vergangenheiten oder Zuku ? nften, und erst spa ? ter konnte man in dem monotonen gebethaften Insichsprechen dieses schon a ? u"erlich ganz eigenartigen Menschen Worte und Sa ? tze, dann Bilder und Rhythmen erkennen, die das Gefu ? ge seiner Dichtung bilden. ' 'Vorlesungen von Robert Michel und Georg Trakl', Der Brenner, 4 (1913/14), 336-38 (p. 338).
53 Der Brenner, 4 (1913/14), p. 338. . .
54 For a discussion of Trakl and aesthetic logic, from Asthetische Theorie, see Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1970-), VII, 431-42. For a discussion of Trakl and free verse, from Minima Moralia, see Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 250-51.
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 341
342 BEN MORGAN
beyond human purpose. Heidegger makes this point by engaging with a specific formulation used by Trakl which it is worth looking at in detail since it illustrates very clearly what is at stake in the modernist reading of his poetry.
Heidegger picks up a recurring linguistic pattern that Trakl uses in two poems he wrote under the influence of Karl Klammer's translations of Rimbaud, which translated the il y a of Rimbaud's prose poem Enfance as 'Es ist': 'Es ist eine Uhr, die nicht schla ? gt, | Es ist ein Schneeloch mit einem Nest von wei"en Tieren. | Es ist eine Kathedrale, die versinkt, und ein See, der u ? berschwillt. '55 In his 'Psalm', which he dedicated to Kraus, and in 'De profundis', both written in 1912, Trakl took up and radicalized the formulation he found in Klammer's Rimbaud, using it to open each of the poems by sketching situations that are at once striking and disturbed. 56 'De profundis' starts with a series of declarations in which the epithets (black, brown, lonely, empty) highlight the inadequacy of the information being communicated rather than filling in the blanks, only to unexpectedly reveal that the scene is being described by someone affected by its sadness: 'Es ist ein Stoppelfeld, in das ein schwarzer Regen fa ? llt. | Es ist ein brauner Baum, der einsam dasteht. | Es ist ein Zischelwind, der leere Hu ? tten umkreist. | Wie traurig dieser Abend' (HKA, I, 46). Similarly, 'Psalm' begins with an inexplicably devastated scene: 'Es ist ein Licht, das der Wind ausgelo ? scht hat. /[. . . ] Es ist ein Weinberg, verbrannt und Schwarz mit Lo ? chern voll Spinnen. ' This is contrasted with a South Sea idyll at once cultic, sensual and violent, and then, once again, we hear the voice of a speaker to whom the contrast between devastation and a lost world matters deeply emerging from the apparently neutral declarations: 'O unser verlorenes Paradies' (HKA, I, 55).
Heidegger is interested in Trakl's use of the Es ist, which he contrasts with the more usual Es gibt. The latter phrase, as it is used in everyday language, articulates human purposes. We might, for instance, use it to let someone know there is a good trout stream in the vicinity. To speak in this way, and relate the world to the sorts of things human beings do in it, is preferable, for Heidegger, to adopting an attitude of false neutrality otherwise associated with the verb 'to be'. Yet even more revealing is Trakl's Es ist. Like the phrase Es gibt, it is addressed to and includes human beings, and so acknowledges the way we are addressed by the world, and involved in it. At the same time, it presents us with a world that speaks to us but without being reducible to human purposes, an address to the listener
55 Arthur Rimbaud, Leben und Dichtung, trans. by K. L. Ammer [5 Karl Klammer] (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1921) p. 231.
56 The topic of Rimbaud's influence on Trakl has often been discussed in the secondary literature. Two essays in particular are relevant to the arguments I am developing in this essay. Herbert Lindenberger, writing in 1958, succinctly summarized possible parallels between the projects of the two poets, noting their success 'in breaking the logical junctures of the conventional poetic language and their consequent ability to define a type of visionary experience that had never before found a place in poetry', Herbert Lindenberger, 'Georg Trakl and Rimbaud: A Study in Influence and Development', Comparative Literature, 10 (1958), 21-35 (p. 34). Re ? my Colombat argues that Trakl draws on the Rimbaud-esque figure of the magician in his characterization of Karl Kraus. Re ? my Colombat, 'Existenzkrise und ''Illumination''', in Kemper (ed. ), Gedichte von Georg Trakl, pp. 62-79 (pp. 75-77).
over and beyond what is familiar and at our disposal, or, in Heidegger's words: 'ein Unverfu ? gbares, das Angehende als ein Unheimliches, das Da ? monische'. 57
As we have seen, the early responses to Trakl hear in the poetry the articulation of an emphatic meaning beyond everyday communication. This reading establishes the pattern for later modernist readings of the poet. At the same time, there is another facet of the early responses which it is worth drawing attention to because it changes how we should read the repeated invocations of an emphatic, but meaningful experience beyond the limits of familiar communication and allows us to see the modernist project as in fact a version of common sense realism. Steuer's review of Trakl's performance commented on his weak declamation and on the difficulty of the poetry but finally suggested everything was held together by the figure of the poet as poet: 'Denn ein Dichter ist dieser stille, alles in sich umtauschende Mensch gewi" , davon u ? berzeugt jedes seiner Gedichte, die Offenbarungen gleich wirken' (HKA, II, 720). A similar move can be found in Heinrich's comments on 'Die Erscheinung Georg Trakls'. Here, too, the untimely message that Trakl has to communicate is underwritten by his status as visionary poet: '[ich fu ? hlte] von vornherein das Bedeutungsvolle des in sich gekehrten Menschen. '58 Indeed, the same double movement is observable in Wittgenstein's comments. The poetry may not be intelligible but it is 'genial', that is to say guaranteed by the figure of the brilliant poet behind the writing.
As we have already seen, Trakl is not the only writer whose importance, for the Brenner circle, is underwritten by an emphatic experience. Kraus's moral authority was thought to be derived from his character, and from the experience that underpinned it. The same structure can be found in the approach to other authors praised in the pages of the journal. For instance, whilst Dallago disapproves of Otto Weininger's theoretical position because it seems to submit the messy, desiring lives of real men and women to an abstract idea, he nevertheless thinks Weininger's thought is worthy of comment and discussion because of the uprightness of the man himself: 'Solche Rechtschaffenheit verleiht einem Werke Leben und Dauer. '59 Similarly, Dallago's enthusiasm for Walt Whitman's poetry was expressed as an enthusiasm for the type of life and the attitudes that Whitman the poet embodied: 'Er war der gro ? "te Sa ? nger einer ganz Scho ? pfungswillen gewordenen Menschennatur. '60 Likewise in another essay, Dallago insists, as he lists his role models (Whitman, Nietzsche, Segantini - a late nineteenth-century painter of Alpine landscapes - and Jesus of Nazareth) that what they have in common is the quality of being, emphatically, 'meine Menschen'. 61
When, therefore, the emphatic vision of Trakl's barely intelligible poetry is understood by his contemporaries to be grounded in and guaranteed by Trakl the poet and by the combination of experience and authority that that implies, his readers are following a pattern frequently deployed in the 1910s and beyond. It is a pattern that strongly shapes the way Trakl is read after his death. The commemorative volume edited by Ficker in 1926, Erinnerung an Georg Trakl,
57 Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, 4th edn (Tu ? bingen: Niemeyer, 2000), p. 43.
58 Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), p. 512.
59 Carl Dallago, 'Otto Weininger und sein Werk', Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), 1-17 (p. 1).
60 Carl Dallago, 'Walt Whitmann' [sic], Der Brenner, 1 (1910/11), 145-147 (p. 147).
61 Carl Dallago, 'Pans Erwachen', Der Brenner, 1 (1910/11), 663-69 (p. 666).
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 343
344 BEN MORGAN
reprinting Karl Borroma ? us Heinrich's essay and recollections of encounters with Trakl by Hans Limbach and Ficker himself, continues this trend, which, indeed, is made programmatic in the title of a further contribution: 'Der Mensch und Dichter Georg Trakl'. 62 The trend continues in a study of Trakl's poetry published in Der Brenner in 1934 under the title 'Das Bild des Menschen bei Georg Trakl' by Werner Meyknecht. What Trakl's poetry communicates, for Meyknecht, is a version of being human that is grounded, as we have now come to expect for readers of Trakl, in the experience of the poet himself: 'Denn dieses Bild des Menschen ist es, das im Geist dem Dichter vorschwebte, da er es in seinem Herzen trug und sich in ihm erkannte. '63
Heidegger's account of Trakl in the two essays he published on the poet in the 1950s can be understood as directed precisely against this sort of reading. Heidegger suggests that the poetry must be separated from the poet, and hopes to avoid a sociological, psychoanalytic, biographical or historical reading because he does not want to read either poetry or language in terms of something beyond them. 64 Heidegger's defence of a certain autonomy of the poetry from the poet might seem like good critical practice. But as a reading of Trakl it is open to challenge. Indeed, Heidegger's strategy itself seems on closer inspection to be a version of the model of reading he purports to reject. In the second of his essays, 'Die Sprache im Gedicht', Heidegger focuses in particular on a line from the poem 'Fru ? hling der Seele' (HKA, I, 141-42) first published in Der Brenner on 15 March 1914. The line that Heidegger singles out is 'Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden'. In Heidegger's reading, this should not be read as a Platonic withdrawal from bodily life, as the lament of a soul imprisoned in a body. Rather, it articulates a leaving behind of the familiar, a being called away from oneself to discover oneself. The figure of the stranger in Trakl's poetry calls us to go beyond ourselves, to revise our view of the childhood from which we have emerged, both individually and culturally, and so prepare the way for a different version of humanity, one which, in Heidegger's reading, will lead us to re-interpret our lives so thoroughly that even our notion of gender will be reconsidered. Heidegger concludes in a tone which echoes the concerns of Kraus from forty years earlier:
Vertra ? umte Romantik abseits der technisch-wirtschaftlichen Welt des modernen Massendaseins? Oder - das klare Wissen des ''Wahnsinnigen'', der Anderes sieht und sinnt als die Berichterstatter des Aktuellen, die sich in der Historie des Gegenwa ? rtigen erscho ? pfen, dessen vorgerechnete Zukunft je nur die Verla ? ngerung des Aktuellen ist, eine Zukunft, die ohne Ankunft eines Geschickes bleibt, das den Menschen erst im Anbeginn seines Wesens angeht. 65
Heidegger's reading of Trakl very closely follows the structure to be found in the responses of the poet's contemporaries. The poetry articulates a vision of something which breaks with alienated habits of communication (the merely
62 Erwin Wahrhold, 'Der Mensch und Dichter Georg Trakl', in Ficker (ed. ), Erinnerung an Georg Trakl, pp. 21-82.
63 Werner Meyknecht, 'Das Bild des Menschen bei Georg Trakl', Der Brenner, 15 (1934), 48-85 (p. 48).
64 Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, pp. 18, 37.
65 Ibid. , p. 80.
topical, 'das Aktuelle'), to present instead a vision of something different, something still to come. Moreover, this alternative vision is to be found articulated by a figure who is in part a construction of the poetry (the 'Fremdling' on whom Heidegger's reading focuses), but in part, also, the poet himself, whose emphatic experience returns in Heidegger's text, albeit in scare quotes, in the form of 'das klare Wissen des ''Wahnsinnigen'', der Anderes sieht'.
To sum up the story so far: some recent accounts of Trakl have rationalized his haunting images, piecing the fragments together to form a coherent critique of other cultural positions in the 1910s; alternatively, critics have emphasized the fragmentariness, and insisted on the resulting meaninglessness as the point of the poetry. My account has returned to the responses of Trakl's contemporaries to show how readers in the 1910s cut a path between these two extremes and saw the poetry as leaving behind familiar patterns of communication to articulate a meaning as yet barely intelligible but waiting for a future reader who has left behind the alienated habits of today. For contemporaries, the significance of the puzzling vision articulated in the poems was guaranteed by the figure of the poet himself and his emphatic way of experiencing the world. Trakl was not the only figure to be read this way: Rimbaud, Whitman, Nietzsche were all figures who guaranteed their challenging message with their person. Heidegger's reading exactly reproduces this structure even as it purports to break with it. But that is perhaps not surprising, given that Heidegger was himself a contemporary of Trakl who could recall, when writing to Hannah Arendt in the 1950s, the vivid effect of first encountering his poems in issues of Der Brenner in 1912. 66
Trakl's poetry thus presents us with an interesting cultural conundrum. On the one hand, with his abrupt but dislocated shifts and his strategically disruptive deployment of epithets he writes poems which push beyond the boundaries of the familiar. At the same time, it seems that the disruption is never taken in an unqualified form by readers. It is always tempered by the guarantee supplied by the figure of the poet himself, following a widespread pattern of the 1910s by which cultural experiment is underwritten by the probity of the experimenter and the reader is given an ethical role-model to identify with as they face the challenge of cultural innovation. The combination of the challenge to meaning and the familiar pattern of identification with a cultural hero might seem problematic. Certainly, Heidegger hopes to move beyond readings which create Trakl as a hero because he is worried that this familiar discursive pattern will inhibit the very process of cultural change to which he thinks Trakl is contributing. But, as we have seen, Heidegger's own argument reproduces a version of the same pattern. On the one hand, he invokes the vision of the individual considered 'mad' by the surrounding culture, on the other, he supplies alternative agents as a guarantee that the uncanny experience to which the reader submits is genuine: language, or being itself are personified again and again by Heidegger's prose style. 67 Adorno similarly uses the trope of personification, although in his case it is aspects of the work of art (Bildelemente) rather than language or being that perform actions more normally
66 Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Briefe 1925-1975, ed. by Ursula Ludz, 3rd edn (Frankfurt a. M. : Klostermann, 2002), p. 137 (MH to AH, 15 December 1952).
67 For instance, the famous assertion: 'Die Sprache spricht. ' Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 13.
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 345
346 BEN MORGAN
attributed to human beings. 68 Aesthetic experiment needs to be accompanied by the sense of an agent we can trust. This agent may not be named as a human being, but readers, and indeed the critics themselves, will relate to it as a human being. The human element is inescapable, even for critics as austere as Adorno or Heidegger - or indeed Derrida. 69
Is this humanizing or anthropomorphic reaction to the disruptive rigour of Trakl's texts something we should try to avoid or overcome? Maybe, but maybe not. So far, I have explained the dual impulse observable in readings of Trakl with reference to the cultural habits of the 1910s and the need to legitimate moral or aesthetic experiments by an appeal to character. Yet the structure has a much longer history. It is the rhetorical figure analysed by Aristotle under the name of e-thos or moral character: 'The orator persuades by moral character when his speech is delivered in such a manner as to render him worthy of confidence; for we feel confidence in a greater degree and more readily in persons of worth in regard to everything in general, but where there is no certainty and there is room for doubt, our confidence is absolute. '70 For Aristotle, we relate to ideas and arguments as things which are of necessity delivered by a person of a particular character, and which are persuading us towards some good or away from some evil. We move in a world of human action and human aims. Looking at the cultural discourses of the 1910s, this habit seems to be very hard to shake, and perhaps it does not need shaking. If, for contemporary readers, Trakl's poems were guaranteed by the genuineness of the poet, the texts themselves were often also populated by characters valued for a sort of genuineness, as we have seen in the Kraus poem, but as is also evident in the poems featuring Dostoevsky's Sonja, Elis and Helian. As we have seen with the Kraus poem, the sense of moral authority is conveyed even though the figure that underpins it never quite comes into focus. The same could be said of the other Trakl characters, and once again, a final comparison to the treatment of characters by another contributor to Der Brenner is instructive.
Carl Dallago wrote an article in 1911 celebrating in particular the figures of Marmeladov and Sonja in Crime and Punishment. Contrasting Dostoevsky's novel with more recent texts celebrated by the press which are not underpinned by experience, and in which characters are simply arranged ('gruppiert') to form a plot, the article consists largely in a quotation from the alcoholic Marmeladov's account of how he starts drinking again, and of how Sonja, nagged by her stepmother Katerina Ivanovna, goes out to become a prostitute to earn money for
68 Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, 431.
69 Derrida summarizes Heidegger's argument that Trakl's poetry articulates a spirituality beyond or before Christianity which transcends cultural habits. He then criticizes the attempt to distinguish Trakl from Christianity, seeing the going beyond itself as part of the Christian tradition. Having presented this view of a poetry which takes us behind or beneath the habits of metaphysics and onto-theology, Derrida then finishes the article by letting an imaginary Heidegger speak in his defence. Once again, an austere modernist reading finishes with a variety of personification or prosopopeia. Human figures are apparently inescapable. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, pp. 108-09.
70 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by J. H. Freese (London: Heinemann, 1926), 1356a.
her father, her consumptive stepmother and three young step-siblings. Dallago comments: 'Ein Mensch in der lasterhaftesten Hu ? lle ist immer noch mehr, als geputzte und gedrillte Anstandstiere, in denen das eigentlich Menschliche vo ? llig getilgt ist. '71 Dallago is uncritical in the way he treats Marmeladov as a human being rather than a fiction: as the record of an authentic experience. Trakl is more circumspect in the way he takes up or creates figures, and it might seem as though the poems, in their refusal to focus, offer us a model of how we should read his own character, as he paradoxically proves his own moral worth by calling into question its very possibility: e-thos made all the more convincing by the way it calls itself into question. But the result is a version of e-thos nevertheless. However much he tries to withdraw and call character into question at all levels, this can and will always be read as an example of Trakl's own austere ethics.
In that sense, Trakl's poetry fits perfectly neatly alongside a Dostoevsky novel: it remains a version of realism, a troubled version no doubt, but realism nonetheless, as we are offered figures, including that of the poet, of more or less good character with whom to identify as we confront the suspension of familiar meanings. Trakl's is a version of realism which can find its way to shared concerns or a shared model of humanity only negatively: by questioning its own tools, and images. The comparison with Wittgenstein reminds us that it is only one version among the many possible, and it can be very precisely described using Wittgenstein's formulation. It is the realism of an individual, or of a group, that cannot yet, as could the later Wittgenstein, invent new images or 'neue Gleichnisse', but must content itself with staging the inadequacy of the old, and filling the vacuum with the figure of a luminous humanity.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Ben Morgan is Fellow and Tutor in German at Worcester College, Oxford. He is author of On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (Fordham University Press, 2012), and editor, with Carolin Duttlinger and Anthony Phelan, of Walter Benjamins anthropologisches Denken (Rombach, 2012).
Correspondence to: Ben Morgan, Worcester College, Oxford, OX1 2HB. Email: ben. morgan@worc. ox. ac. uk
71 Carl Dallago, 'In Gesellschaft von Bu ? chern', Der Brenner, 2 (1911/12), 407-19 (p. 419).
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 347
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