Vielfalt AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN STUDIES EIN STUDENTENZEITSCHRIFT DES GERMAN STUDIES DEPARTMENTS
Editorial Board Hillary Amann Emilio Comay del Junco Jack Deming Carol Fraser Karl Hart Joseph Henry Nada Khashaba Menemsha MacBain
Stephanie Treherne
Editors’ Note
Vorwort
“Vielfalt” translates to “multiplicity,” or “diversity,” and we have tried to keep those aspects in mind when creating Vielfalt – the Department of German Studies’ first undergraduate academic journal. This has led us to seek out papers not only in both languages, but also on an appropriately diverse range of subjects, from representations of race and gender in Weimar Germany to Goethe’s “Ganymed,” The drive to diversify has also meant seeking out and including artwork, fiction, and even a translational lexicon. We’ve also drawn on work from students outside the German program, attempting to foster interdisciplinarity across both faculty and departmental lines, as well as the often seemingly unbridgable gap between students and faculty, with an essay written by Professor Andrew Piper. Much of the work seen in Vielfalt brings new perspectives to the German canon, offering queer, feminist and postcolonial perspectives. We hope to have opened up the possibilities of an academic journal, to argue for academically categorical flexibility, and to reevaluate what is considered to fall within the field of “German Studies.” Vielfalt’s first issue comes at a time when many language and culture programs are being cut around the world, and such programs here at McGill face an uncertain future. In light of this, we hope that our attempt to reflect on the boundaries and possibilities of our own discipline will spur serious thought about the role and value of a department like German Studies.
Als wir die erste Ausgabe von diesem Magazin konzipierten, beabsichtigten wir die komplexe Bedeutung des Titels „Vielfalt“ in die Tat umzusetzen. Die deutschen Werke ebenso wie die englischen repräsentieren insofern eine Vielzahl an Themen, dazu gehört die Darstellung von Rasse und Geschlecht in der Weimarer Republik ebenso wie der Vergleich zweier Vertonungen von Goethes Ganymed. Unserem Wunsch gemäß einer Bandbreite an verschiedenen Themen und Genres Raum zu geben, umfasst die erste Ausgabe unterschiedliche Arbeiten wie Fotographien, kreatives Schreiben und ein Übersetzer-Lexikon. Mit Werken von Studenten außerhalb der Germanistik strebt Vielfalt nach echter Interdisziplinarität. Indem wir ebenfalls einen Aufsatz von Prof. Andrew Piper veröffentlichen, versucht unser Magazin zudem gleichzeitig ein Mittel zu sein, um die manchmal unüberbrückbare Grenze zwischen Professoren und Studenten zu überwinden. Viele der hier präsentierten Werke eröffnen neue Perspektiven im Rahmen des Feminismus, Postkolonialismus, der Queer-Theorie um nur einige zu nennen, auf kanonische Werke der deutschen Kultur. Wir hoffen auf diese Weise nicht nur die Möglichkeiten einer akademischen Zeitschrift zu erweitern, sondern auch für akademische Flexibilität einzutreten und letztendlich die bisherigen Grenzen der Germanistik neu zu überdenken. Diese erste Ausgsbe von Vielfalt wird in einer für Sprach- und Kulturprogramme weltweit problematischen Phase veröffentlicht, da viele Programme in Nordamerika sowie in Europa vor der Abschaffung stehen und die Zukunft der Literatur-, Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften an McGill ungewiss ist, selbst wenn letztere nicht unmittelbar von einer Schließung bedroht sind. Angesichts dieses Zustands hoffen wir, dass der Versuch über die Grenzen und Möglichkeiten unserer eigenen Disziplin nachzudenken, ernsthafte Gedanken über den Wert und die Rolle der Germanistik anregen wird. —Emilio Comay del Junco und Joseph Henry
—Emilio Comay del Junco and Joseph Henry
Aaron Vansintjan
Table of Contents
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Idea for a Translational Lexicon
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JACK DEMING AND SALLY LIN Geringfügigkeit
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CAROL FRASER Assembling the New Woman: Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum
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FLORA DUNSTER ,,Gefahr ins Leere zu stürzen“: sprachlice Turnerei und das Collageartige in Reisende auf einem Bein
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MENEMSHA MACBAIN The Glory of Being Swallowed Up in a Great Unit!: Satire in The Loyal Subject
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HANNAH MARTIN A Grotesque Interpretation of the Past: Post-structuralism, Aesthetics, and Historicism in The Tin Drum
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WHITNEY MALLETT Abject
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AMY GOH Echoes of Lot’s Daughters: The Case of Freud’s Dora and Hysteria in Wedekind’s Lulu
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NADA KHASHABA The Homoerotic in Two Settings of Goethe’s “Ganymed”
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DANIEL MÍGUEZ DE LUCA Genug. When can you say enough? ANDREW PIPER
WITH ART BY harry cepka, flora dunster, naomi endicott, whitney mallett, aaron vansintjan, stephanie treherne
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Idea for a Translational Lexicon WORDS BY JACK DEMING ILLUSTRATIONS BY SALLY LIN
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ach word is a locus of the affective forces of all other words. A lexeme is a nexus (Lat. “a binding together,” connection/connexion). The linguistic force emitting from or bearing down upon any unit/place of language does not stop at the margins of the page, at the serifs, or at the end of a voiced sound. There is an essential nextness in the marrow of language. Words are like knees and elbows, joints (Germ. Gelenke, links). Boundaries don’t stop them: how could something stop itself? The way that we interact with language is best described as a continuing expansion. We reach (reichen) with words to understand things– in reaching that we have space, locations, areas (Bereiche) – we grasp the world materially and in so doing we have ideas of it (begreifen, Begriff ) – we grip a world that grows and ripens (reifen) from the roots of our handholds. Words are immanent (Lat. in + manere, “remain within”): they remain at hand (en main). A boundary is a bond (Bund, verbunden), something that by ending and by bounding – by definition (Lat. definitio – to lay down boundaries) – grasps and binds together the two realms that it divides. The middle is where nature natures, where reality –Wirklichkeit – works in both directions. Translation rides the force of languages by inhabiting them at their boundaries, at the front lines of the conflicts that unite them. Any lexicon or space of definition must be translational, because points of ending are always points of connection. What sets worlds apart from each other is what brings them together. Translation is never a failure – it is a trespassing, the passing of a threshold, a threshpass. We cut what’s grown and reap and thresh, we cut so we can gather. When two languages are duly inhabited, translational encoding and decoding occurs in both directions. We as language learners should become more conscious of and active in the translation that inevitably occurs when two languages are brought together, no matter which language we more directly inhabit at any one time. We need to become conscious of the ways that our German is encoded in and decoded by our English, and how our English is encoded in and decoded by our German. We need to map out the reference points that we create, and before long we will see our words move, and we’ll move with them.
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Appendix To develop — ent-wickeln Development is the unwinding of a long string (ent [distance] + wickeln – to coil, to wind – wick like the wick of a candle) – to develop something is to uncoil it, to unwind it, unwrap it – to tease it out of something larger. Development is not an increase in complexity – adding many things together – but the opposite – to develop is to simplify, untangle.
2
Inspiration — Ein-hauch-ung (in-breath-ing) — Inspiration is a “breathing in” (Lat. spirare, to breathe), and it is something that we breathe in – there is no inspiration without respiration – spirit that inspires is breath, Geist, Begeisterung, Hauch – there is no aspiration without the sense of elevation that we take from the air – Air – Luft – Lift – Cf. the French expression l’espirit d’escalier – the feeling after a conversation when you imagine yourself saying things you should have said but didn’t – the spirit’s escalation and a spire, a spiral.
Glades and Gladness, Faces, Trees and Light How farre that little candell throwes his beames. —Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice The word “glade” refers to a clearing in the woods. Centuries ago it had the sense of a brilliant appearance in the sky, or a bright space between clouds. Etymologically it is possibly related to gladness. Maybe that’s why we say that “her face lit up,” or “she beamed.” The word beam (of light) is related to Baum, the German word for tree (as in “wooden beam”), and the Greek root associated with Baum has the sense of a growth in one direction. Lights beam like trees grow. In fact, the root of Baum/beam meaning “to grow” is quite similar to one of the Indo-European bases for our verb “to be.” Maybe lights beam and trees grow like things are. But what’s strange is how readily one finds a route leading from the sense of “glade” as a clearing in the woods to the trees cleared to make the glade. Light can’t beam where trees are growing, but here light turns out to be quite like what obscures it.
To disappoint — attire - tire - wear - weary - worn tragen
The things we wear have something of weariness about them – they become worn out before long – our attire, though a much fancier word, is no less tired for it. The worn things are carried (tragen, porter), but mostly they carry – they hold us within them like doors hold their rooms.
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ent-täuschen
Enttäuschen is in German made up of the inseperable prefix ent, the “distancing prefix,” meaning roughly a sort of undoing or negating (like the English prefixes “de”- and “dis”- as in dis-(s)tance, Abstand in German, distance as literally a standing away from something else), and täuschen, meaning to delude, mislead, deceive. So disappointment, with its literal German sense encoded into English, is a sort of disillusionment, an unveiling, a sadness from being informed of the state of things, and from understanding suddenly that one’s hopes and expectations were imaginary. Maybe every disappointment is just a happy assurance that we don’t live in a total state of delusion.
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Geringfügigkeit
Carol Fraser
einen moment ganz allein, oder ganz in der mitte der anderen menschen, froh und bequem : wir brauchen keine zigaretten, um das zu erfahren, aber es klingt merkwürdig dies zu wollen, ohne diesen vorwand. man fängt vielleicht zu rauchen an, wenn ein älterer bruder einem eine zigarette auf einer party gab, oder wenn man (schließlich!) unabhängig von den eltern ist, frisch achtzehn und ein bisschen besoffen in der mitte der stadt. aber warum fährt man damit fort? nach zwei, drei zigaretten hintereinander fühlt man gar nicht mehr dieses ‘zauberrauchgefühl’ im ganzen körper, das beides teenage-rebellion und physische empfindung ist; nein, wenn man wirklich nikotinabhängig ist, denkt man, nur zwei minuten nachdem eine zigarette ausgeraucht wurde, dass es eigentlich keine wirklich überhaupt gab. und, natürlich, man weißt es schon, aber darin gibt es auch einen lustgewinn – was damals luxus, oder im besonderen verpönt war, wird schon bloß eine notwendigkeit, ein teil vom alltagsleben. also leben wir in einer welt, wo man nicht viel zeit allein erfährt, oder so denken manche leute. damit fünf minuten der stille – nur du und deine kippe, wo kein anderer mensch dabei sein sollte, weil du rauchst – diese ruhe ist der originale luxus, was die nonnen und mönche jeden tag in ihren zellen haben und die anderen bloß wünschen, dass die haben könnten. macht nichts, später riechst du danach, oder hast gelbe zähne. du hast eine illusion der freiheit für nur 10 € pro schachtel.
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Assembling the New Woman HANNAH HÖCH’S FROM AN ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM
Flora Dunster
“The core of the problem: the individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will.” —Simone de Beauvoir
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n the 1920’s and early 1930’s Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch created a complex series of photomontages entitled From an Ethnographic Museum.1 These works have often been discussed in terms of their representation of gender, a theme pervasive in Höch’s career. However, given the racial framework and the social context in which they were created, it is also pertinent that they be examined in terms of the construction drawing them together – the ethnographic museum. With this in mind, I would like to take up Höch’s series as not only a critique of the objectification of women, but also of the aesthetic other, and consider this in light of the trend toward primitivism popular in many of the artistic circles contemporary to Höch’s. Though the Ethnographic Museum is often interpreted as having a feminist goal, in many ways the works superficially resist this, and it is this intersection of gender and race that needs to be inspected further. Therefore, I will deconstruct some of the social conditions informing three works from From an Ethnographic Museum, and argue that Höch’s series, rather than ignoring colonial problems or using them with negative intentions, takes up this issue in conjunction with that of feminism, creating a problematic grey area in which the two discourses interact. In order to better understand the Ethnographic Museum, certain social contexts need to be accounted for, particularly those regarding women and empire in the Weimar Republic. Most of the scholarly writing to date discusses Höch’s series as a statement on the Weimer Republic’s conception of the New Woman, a figure defined by perceived autonomy and liberation, seen as modern and part of “a new freedom to seek social, political, and sexual self-definition.”2 Whether or not this is an accurate reflection of the circumstances facing the women of Weimar has been argued in both directions, but Höch’s
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visual statements would seem to point toward the fact that “the socioeconomic status of women did not improve significantly during these years.”3 The Berlin Dada in particular has been credited with remaining misogynistic, making Höch’s contribution to their artistic output all the more important.4 She is primarily remembered for using images taken from mass media to subvert popular conceptions of womanhood, creating juxtapositions open to multiple interpretations, “the meaning of each fragment...contingent and incomplete.”5 In the Ethnographic Museum, this might be understood as a site of transculturation, in which women (represented by Höch) take on the role of “subordinated or marginal groups [...] and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture,”6 creating new possibilities for figurative representation and a world where women are aesthetically conflated with the broad concept of “other.” The issue of empire is considerably more problematic. Maud Lavin, author of Cut with the Kitchen Knife: the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch, provides socio-historical context for the artistic tendency to draw on “primitive” cultures, noting that “Germany had lost its colonies in 1918 as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, and the photographs published in Weimar mass media tended to be nostalgic for empire.”7 Similar to visual experimentation and popular thought in other European countries, German media and the discourse accompanying it often represented the women of “exotic” cultures as naive, childlike and simple – ideals that point back not only to non-European cultures, but to long held Western conceptions of femininity, New Woman or not. These ideals are strongly reflected in Höch’s scrapbook, which includes photographs of African and Polynesian women.8 The photographs repeatedly depict “women and animals apparently at one
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with nature,”9 a stereotype that has pervasively followed women from all parts of the world. However, Lavin also notes that Höch’s “preference for the exotic extended to movie star photos she selected for her scrapbook,”10 drawing the scope of analysis back to the idea of womanhood, and the exoticization of femininity in popular culture. The Ethnographic Museum series troubles the issue of display, specifically the display of the self. Höch created this series during a time when ethnological exhibitions were popular and humans were presented for the gaze of European audiences, clearly reflected in the content of the works. Höch appropriated a foreign other, whose place and treatment in Europe was socially lower than that of women – though still idealized – and applied elements of this unfamiliar aesthetic to a widely recognized construction of femininity, revealing “the representation of beauty as a cultural formula rather than a natural given.”11 In doing so Höch exoticized something identifiable, making it strange through the use of photomontage and through the liberties the medium allowed her to take in creating new spaces within her work. She specifically took advantage of this by generating pedestals for her figures to rest on, creating distance between her fictional subjects and her viewers, who are in turn confronted with the idea of a distinctly alien and uncomfortable figure positioned as art, thus forcing them to question their own “safe” constructions, such as race and gender, and the ways these inform social conventions. In the same way that Germany constructed the New Woman and Western society constructed the primitive, Höch constructed her own world, one in which she was able to conduct an “exploration of self through a representation of the Other.”12 The Ethnographic Museum takes the idea of Other one step further than the fragmented women Höch became associated with, adding a racial dimension that has complicated and confounded analysis of her work. The series points toward the commodification of both the New Woman and of “primitive” societies, positioning both as cultural fetishes by posing them within a representational framework. Though Höch’s political take on the position of women is clear, her views on race are less so. Scholars have criticized her for participating in the “rather derogatory trend toward romanticized negrophilia,”13 while others have lauded her for exposing “the
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Western fascination with the primitive and the exotic.”14 Therefore, given both the photomontages and the content of Höch’s scrapbook, it is pertinent to ask whether she was interested in pursuing a critique of racism and colonialism, or whether her aim was solely to explore the social issues wound up in representations of gender. Can an intersectional analysis be drawn? Or does Höch exemplify
(Figure 1) Monument II: Vanity, 1926
first wave feminism by ignoring issues of class and race, using “primitive”women to promote the plight of those who were arguably more privileged? This intersection of self and other, European and non-European, is evident in Monument II: Vanity, from 1926 (Figure 1). Höch positions a culturally ambiguous figure atop an imposing pedestal, informing the viewer as to the focal point of the composition. The figure itself is a pastiche, constructed from a pair of classically-shaped, smooth white legs and their attached torso, connected to a muscular and vaguely masculine chest, which in turn segues into an animalistic mask and an imposing headdress. The only suggestion of “real” femininity is the legs, which fit a Eurocentric paradigm of perfection, and appear as though they might be drawn from classical sculpture. The strangeness
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of the body is threatening and vague, suggesting miscegenation and the mixing of perfect whiteness with looming primitivism. From the waist up, the Western viewer is unsure as to whether the figure is really that of a woman, and this confounding of classical norms with otherness causes them to question their construction of femininity, as well as the way that both the feminine and the exotic are seen not as subjects, but as objects. The pedestal informs this, forcing the viewer to think back to the idea of the imaginary ethnographic museum that Höch refers to, and thus to the construction of the ethnographic museum as a system for display. The ethnographic museum as a formal category for display became popular in the second half of the nineteenth century, as colonial contact created a new market for knowledge.15 Display of “artefacts,” be they practical or aesthetic, was intended to be scientific and objective, though this was not generally the case. Ethnographic institutions served to assert the whiteness of their audience, and to re-affirm the audience’s position as cultured and refined – the visitor rather than the display itself. That many artists at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries were inspired to appropriate the aesthetic features of “exotic” objects is well known, and Höch is no exception. At the same that these museums began to emphasize the summary relationships among objects – the sense that this or that specimen metonymically suggested a larger and coherent whole, and the idea that a general understanding of the world could be inferred adequately by a collection of things removed from their context of origin,16 – so too was this idea adopted by Western society and the artists working within it. Höch “had a great interest in Negro sculpture, and in all ethnographic things,”17 and though it would be inappropriate to make an assumption as to whether or not she meant to amalgamate the diverse cultures represented in museums and exhibitions into a foreign whole, this can ultimately be seen as one result of her project. This is apparent in Sadness, from 1925 (Figure 2), which provides the viewer with even fewer markers of whiteness than Monument II: Vanity. The six-armed figure confronts and reflects the viewer’s gaze head-on, reinforced by its position in the centre of a pedestal. The only evidence of Western femininity is the slender set of lower arms, whose delicate hands curl in a mannered fashion. Aside from this, we know the figure to be fe-
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(Figure 2) Sadness, 1925
male due to the chest, which sports a pair of long, conical breasts, deviating from the same Western norm of perfect and youthful beauty pointed toward by the legs in Monument II: Vanity. Each element of the figure is disparate and fragmented, leading one to wonder as to the derivation of each limb. Patricia Leighten notes that, “The major source of images and information about Africa was the popular press, itself influenced by prejudice, fantasy, and political interests,”18 which is where Höch gathered material for photomontages such as this one. There is no evidence as to the cultural origin of the fragments, though this does not seem to be of concern. Particularly given the content of her scrapbooks, this series seems more absorbed with using the idea of cultural other to offset the perceived other in German society – women – and expose the subordination of this politicized group through the subordination of another. The fragments juxtapose the white limbs at the centre, and therefore do not need to be identified as unique, as their very presence is enough to signify that of ideal femininity, and by proxy the New Woman, thus revealing her place within society through contrast. This strategy is best explained by Simone de Beauvoir, who states in The Second Sex that “the subject can be posed only in being op-
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posed – he [sic] sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.”19 Though the socio-political contexts informing de Beauvoir, the French modernists and the Berlin Dada were different, the latter two groups were contemporary to each other, and because of this certain aspects of the French move toward primitivism as a stylistic choice can help to elucidate Höch’s “Ethnographic Museum,” at least in terms of colonialism. This group, notably Pablo Picasso, sought to “subvert Western artistic traditions – and the social order in which they were implicated – by celebrating a Nietzchean return to those imagined “primitive states.”20 There are some crucial similarities between this outlook and Höch’s, namely the desire to visually subvert a normative social order. Though with different intentions, both Höch and the French modernists used a foreign aesthetic to undermine what they perceived to be problematic aspects of their society, making the everyday strange through the act of appropriation. There is also the critical fact that primitivism, for Picasso and his artistic circle, was “part of a cultural discourse in which ‘Africa’ conveyed widely accepted meanings that [could not] be extricated from allusions to its art and people...with its unavoidable associations of white cruelty and exploitation.”21 Not only does this coincide with Höch’s use of culturally specific artifacts as metonymic devices, it points toward what might be interpreted as the positive side of her critique – a desire to expose the oppression and objectification of German women, using as her primary referent “the way race is socially encoded in the ethnographic museum,”22 and thus exhibiting awareness of the negative aspects of Germany’s colonial project by acknowledging that those colonized were placed in positions of subordination to the imperial power. However, there remains the fact that using these images of colonized nations to achieve a goal specifically benefitting Western women arguably marginalizes those who were already of lower status, using them to prove a point rather than effect change. Abduction, a photomontage from 1925 (Figure 3), uses the cross-cultural comparison between Germany and the generalized other to its full advantage. The work is unlike those previously discussed, which assemble bodily and sculptural fragments to create a new whole. Instead, Höch superimposes an image onto an otherwise intact object, a
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wooden statue of an animal with four figures seated atop. In its original photographic context, the statue was pictured resting on a base with nothing in the background, “suggesting a museum display.”23 Höch appropriated this image, pasting it onto a larger pedestal, adding a background of “cherry red fruit trees (which look like cartoon versions of jungle foliage),”24 and replacing one of the four human heads within the sculpture with that of an archetypical New Woman. More so than other works within the Ethnographic Museum, Abduction clearly places a visual representation of Western femininity within an othered context, blatantly stating that not only is the statue an object, but the woman as well. Facing backwards, away from her three companions, the woman is distinctly
(Figure 3) Abduction, 1925
out of place. Her mouth is open and expressive, in contrast to the other heads, which remain serene and expressionless. Many pieces within the series combine self and other, but Abduction takes this one step further by replacing the other with the self. The New Woman is out of place, uncomfortable, abducted from her cultural context, which is in contrast to many of Höch’s works that do the opposite – contextually removing the other and making it uncomfortable in the presence of Western perfection. Though Höch’s bodily pastiches also speak to the objectification of women within society, Abduction firmly places the New Woman within the frame of the ethnographic museum by inserting her into an object already associated with it, rather than create something new and jarring. Thus the effect of Abduction is far greater than other works within the series, as it makes a clear statement on the position of the
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New Woman within German society. Given the multiple and intersecting problems that From an Ethnographic Museum creates for analysis, both social and formal, it is unsurprising that many scholars have simply concluded their discussion of Höch’s work with the assertion that ultimately, it is the irony behind the images that leaves the strongest impression. This results from “Dada ambiguity,”25 and is crucial for interpretation due to the fact that it is in “the power of irony to lay the foundation for a critique of racism.”26 However, the question remains: do Höch’s images leave viewers with a positive message, and can it be argued that they sought to critique racism, as well as sexism? Given the evidence collected, from contextual and visual analysis, it is hard to reach a definitive conclusion. It is undeniable that the Ethnographic Museum has good intentions, though these may have simply been to “comment on the categorization and display of people as objects,”27 namely the New Woman. Though there does not seem to be an explicit disapproval of racist or colonial ideology, “her irony often functions as implicit criticism,”27 and this is where difficulty is met. It would be easy to praise Höch for her (first-wave) feminist critique of society, but this is troubled by the fact that her critique is categorically first wave, and thus from a contemporary or third wave perspective less effective in that it only fights for the rights of a specific group of women, using the plight of others to achieve a narrow-minded political agenda. It would also be easy to vilify Höch for appropriating images only available to her in the first place due to a colonial project, when it is clear from the title of the series that she had some eye toward the problematic situation posed by ethnographic display. Like so many other works, the Ethnographic Museum seems to be a case of good intentions gone wrong. Similar to other artists, Höch displays ignorance not of the colonial project, but of the implications created in using it for cultural and artistic purposes, perpetuating rather than exposing racist ideals. However, by acknowledging that the colonial other was oppressed – whether or not in comparison to European women – an important step forward is made. Because this association is formed, it can be argued that Höch did create a positive critique of colonial issues, though only superficially. Ultimately, what analysis leaves is a grey area, in which beauty is strange and nothing is safe, and it is up to the viewer to decide whether or not to accept Höch’s images as constructive and productive.
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WORKS CITED
1 Stein, Jean. “From an Ethnographic Museum.” Grand Street 58 (1996). 2 Lavin, Maud. “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch.” New German Critique 51 (1990) 64. 3 Ibid. 4 Hemus, Ruth. Dada’s Women. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009) 93. 5 Ibid., 107. 6 Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (London: Routledge, 1992) 6. 7 Lavin, Maud. Cut With the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993) 107. 8 Ibid., 74. 9 Ibid., 109. 10 Ibid., 116. 11 Ibid., 340. 12 Ibid., 341. 13 Ibid., 335. 14 Hemus, 125. 15 Jenkins, David. “Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays: Museum Exhibitions and the Making of American Anthropology.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36.2 (1994), 244. 16 Jenkins, 243. 17 Lavin, “Cut with the Kitchen Knife,” 342. 18 Leighten, Patricia. “The While Peril and L’Art negre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism.” Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History. Ed. Kymberly N. Pinder. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 236. 19 de Beauvoir, Simone. “Woman as Other.” The Second Sex. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 28. 20 Leighten, 234. 21Ibid. 22 Lavin, “Cut with the Kitchen Knife,” 352. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Hemus, 126. 26 Sensemann, Susan. “Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch, by Maud Lavin.” Design Issues 10.1 (1994), 72. 27 Lavin, “Cut with the Kitchen Knife,” 335. 28 Ibid., 334.
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Harry Cepka MAN WITH SWANS
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,,Gefahr ins Leere zu stürzen“: SPRACHLICHE TURNEREI UND DAS COLLAGEARTIGE IN REISENDE AUF EINEM BEIN
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in Stil ist fast ein körperlicher Ausdruck des Denkens,“ sagte Herta Müller in einem Interview.1 In Reisende auf einem Bein ist gerade dies wohl das Anziehende an Müllers Schreiben, die Genauigkeit und durchdachte Biegsamkeit mit denen ihre Gedanken sich um und in der Sprache bewegen. Sie hüpfen und springen durch linguistische und bildliche Assoziationsketten, und bieten die Gelegenheit ihnen nachzuklettern. Der collageartige Stil entsteht von einer Spannung zwischen der Notwendigkeit und der Unzuverlässigkeit der Sprache. Der eigenartige, zersplitterte Stil Müllers wurde schon sehr viel besprochen. Norbert Otto Eke beschreibt ihn als „eine aus ‚Rhythmuseinhalten’ konstruierte Prosa, die Wirklichkeit in einer kaleidoskopartigen Wahrnehmung fragmentiert.“2 Lyn Marven nach, ist diese Bruchstückhaftigkeit das Ergebnis von „specific traumas in Romania.“3 Sie bemerkt: „Reisende auf einem Bein is also the first piece of work to feature collage – as a motif within the story – and prefigures a split in Müller’s artistic output into prose texts, which have become increasingly direct depictions of the repression under Ceaușescu, and collages, which reproduce structures of trauma on a formal level.“4 Marven trennt Müllers Arbeit verständlicherweise in zwei Kategorien: Collage und Prosa. In Herta Müllers Schreiben - besonders in Reisende auf einem Bein – ist die Grenze zwischen Collage und Prosa aber nicht so klar. Ungeachtet daran, ob ihr Stil von Trauma beruht, ist die Kaleidoskopartigkeit auf vielerlei Gründen eher eine Collageartigkeit. Auffällig in Reisende auf einem Bein ist, dass die Erzählung auf allen Ebenen der Sprache sehr starke Aufmerksamkeit schenkt. Müllers Hauptfigur, Irene, wird von ihrem Freund, Stefan, „akribisch“ genannt, denn
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Menemsha MacBain sie „häng[t] an jedem Wort.“5 Irene hat ihre Genauigkeit bei der Sprache von ihrer Schöpferin geerbt, denn der ganze Text ist von Müllers eigener sorgsamer Sprachverwendung geprägt. Ihre Präzision ist manchmal in kleinen Wortspielen zu finden. „Ich hätte nichts dagegen. Es ist mir gleich,“ sagt Irene an einem Photograph. Die Erwiderung folgt ohne Pause, und ohne Kommentar von dem Erzähler: „Haben Sie nichts dagegen, oder ist es Ihnen gleich.“6 Da die Frage des Photographs direkt unter die Sätze von Irene steht, sind die Unterscheide zwischen den Sätze sofort klar. Komma, Pronomenwechsel, verkehrter Syntax – so ein Beispiel von deutschem Satzbau findet man in einem Grammatikbuch. Durch die sehr pingelige Natur der Erwiderung, und durch die physikalische Nähe der Sätze, spielt Müllers Sprache auf zwei Ebenen, eine linguistische und eine visuelle. Die visuelle Darstellung der Sprache ist wichtig. Wörter in Reisende auf einem Bein haben eine körperliche Präsenz, und werden synästhetisch empfunden. Oft werden einzelne Wörter durch ihr Hyperpräsentsein auffällig. „Jetzt sind sie eine Weile hier, sagte der Sacharbeiter. Das Wort Weile stand noch in seinem Gesicht wie der Schatten unter seinem Kinn.“7 Hier geht es nicht um ein geschriebenes Wort, das durch seine Natur sehbar wäre, sondern um ein gesprochenes Wort, das sich geisterhaft benimmt. Durch diese synästhetische Beschreibung weist der Text darauf hin, dass „Weile“ eine tiefere, fast unheimlich Bedeutung habe. Andere Wörter werden durch andere Sinne genau so emphatisch dargestellt. Als Irene beim Senat für Inneres ist, findet sie, dass das Wort „Inneres“ „wie Magen und Gedärm [klang].“8 Obwohl diese drei Wörter Synonyme sein können, gesprochen sind sie keineswegs ähnlich. Irgendwie sind die Bedeutungen der Wörter mit ihren Klängen geblendet worden. Aus der Perspektive Irenes,
11
reimen sich hier Bedeutungen, nicht Silben, auf einander. Diese der Sprache gewidmet Aufmerksamkeit spiegelt sich in dem Glauben wieder, dass Wörter als Anker und Orientierungspunkte benutzt werden können. Wie Müller selbst erklärt hat, „Um uns der eigenen Existenz zu versichern, brauchen wir Gegenstände, die Gesten und die Wörter. Je mehr Wörter wir uns nehmen dürfen, desto freier sind wir doch.“9 Die Nähe, in der Wörter, Existenz, und Freiheit verbunden sind, verleiht den Wörtern eine Schwere, die diese akute Empfindung der Sprache verdient. Gerade um dieses Prinzip geht es in Irenes Erfahrung der Sprache in Reisende auf einem Bein. Isoliert – in dem anderen Land wegen ihrer Minderheitsgehörigkeit, und im Deutschland wegen ihres Ausländerseins – wendet Irene sich an die Sprache, Symbol gleichzeitig einer verlorenen Zugehörigkeit und ihres gegenwärtigen Außenseitertums. Allein, sie versucht durch Wörter ihr Dasein sicherzustellen. „Der Koffer stand lange geschlossen im Flur, als wäre Irene nur halb am Leben. Sie konnte nicht denken, nicht gehen. Ob sie sprechen konnte, sie versuchte es. Ob das gesprochen war, sie wusste es nicht.“10 Ihre Unsicherheit über ihren Zustand wird in der Unfähigkeit zu Sprechen widergespiegelt. Sogar das parataktische Schreiben dieser Szene unterstreicht Irenes Schwierigkeiten. Es ist als ob, um jedes Wort gekämpft werden müsste, und deswegen nur die Essentielle gesagt werden kann. Wenn man sich mit einzelnen Wörtern seiner Existenz versichern kann, würde es Sinn machen, dass man die Kraft fürs Leben in ganzen Sätzen finden könnte. Wie Irene aber entdeckt, stimmt dies nicht. Wie Irene es Franz erklärt: „Man glaubt, man kann von diesen Sätzen leben weil sie waghalsig sind.“11 Dazu sammelt Irene Sätze, die sie überall gefunden hat. Das Buch beginnt sogar mit einer ihrer gesammelten Sätze, ein Zitat von Cesare Pavese: „Aber ich war nicht mehr jung.“12 Später wird dieses Zitat wiedereingeführt – dieses Mal unzitiert – als ein Satz, „den [Irene] jahrelang mit sich herumgetragen und verwandelt hat.“13 Er ist das erste Zitat aus der Sammlung Irenes, der präsentiert wird. „Gefahr ins Leere zu stürzen,“ lautet ein Zweites,
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das Irene als eine „Warnung auf ihrem Leben bezogen [hatte].“14 Ein anderer Satz, den Irene in einem Buch gefunden hat, warnt: „Graben ist immer am Rande der Legalität.“15 Die Sätze, von denen Irene zu leben versucht, sind nicht sehr lebensfroh, aber wichtiger noch, sind sie auch nicht ausreichend für ihre Arbeit. Irene findet, dass nach ein Paar Jahren bekommen die Sätze „einen ganz gewöhnlichen Klang,“16 umso mehr, als sie das Eigentum ihres Sammlers werden und „haben keine fremde Stimme [...] Nur noch die eigene. Ein paar Wörter die man sonst nicht ausspricht. Wie ein Photo, auf dem man selber ist, mit einem sonderbaren Ausdruck. Ihre Waghalsigkeit ist verloren.“17 Sie werden komplett von ihrem Sammler assimiliert, und wegen der wechselnden, zeitlichen Perspektive ihres Sammlers verschwimmen ihre Bedeutungen und ändern sich. Der Glauben an Wörter scheitert, wegen dieser Verwandlung, die passiert wenn man die Sätze zu eigen macht. Ein Misstrauen an der Sprache, das mit der Notwendigkeit der Sprache als Instrument der Selbstbestimmung im Konflikt steht, kommt ans Licht. Nach Müller ist die Sprache „eine geruch-, geschmack-, und farblose Sache, und es hängt ja immer individuell von jedem einzelnen ab, was er daraus macht. Die Sprache transportiert ja nur. Sie ist ja nicht an sich Inhalt.“18 Die Probleme, die Irene beim Satzsammeln gehabt hat, werden hier knapp zusammengefasst und erklärt. Müller teilt ihr Misstrauen mit ihrer Hauptfigur, die es durch den extrem sorgsamen Ausdruck ihrer Ideen demonstriert. Jeder Satz und jedes einzelnes Wort muss genau überlegt werden. „Es war ihre Art, die Wörter zu ordnen im Mund, bevor sie sprach.“19 Irene versucht genau ihre Meinung auszusprechen, um die Bedeutung der von ihr gesprochener Sprache so gut wie möglich zu beherrschen. Das ultimative Ergebnis dieser komplizierten Hasseliebebeziehung mit der Sprache ist die Collage. Kontrolle, Fragmentierung, visuelle und auditive Ästhetik – all die stilistische Auswahlmöglichkeiten, die von dem Druck des Missbrauchs der Sprache gezwungen wurden, finden sich in einer Collage zusammen. Die Collage wird zentral für Reisende auf einem Bein, nicht nur als Motiv, sondern auch als Erzähltechnik.
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Diese Erzähltechnik wird besonders gut von einem Ausschnitt demonstriert, den Marven „impoverished“ und „degenerate“ fand.20 Müller beschreibt die Collage Irenes: Ein Riesenrad mit fliegenden Leuten neben einem fernen Wasser. Ein Flugzeug am Himmel neben einer Hand. Ein Gesicht, das flog von der Geschwindigkeit neben einem Mädchen im Schaukelstuhl. Eine Hand, die auf den Revolver drückte neben einem Mann, der auf dem Fahrrad durch das Spiegelbild der Bäume fuhr. Ein schreiender Schirmmützen, die stehend aufs Wasser schauten. Eine alte Frau, die auf dem Balkon über der Stadt saß. Eine Frau mit schwarzer Sonnenbrille. Ein Toter im Anzug. Eine Wassermühle. Ein durchwühltes Zimmer. Ein Junge im Matrosenanzug. Eine wimmelnde Einkaufsstraße. Eine Drehtür im steinigen Gebirge.21 Hier ist Marven besonders auf der Syntax fixiert, denn sie fand es beispielhaft für die Fragmentierung, beziehungsweise den Trauma.22 Trauma hin oder her, dieser Katalog repräsentiert eher das Intermediale an Müllers Schreiben. Er ist gleichzeitig eine Beschreibung, und eine verbale Abbildung davon, was er beschreibt. Gerade durch den „verarmten“ Syntax, und geschnittene Ideen ahmt die Sprache nach einer Collage, wo disparaten, unvollständigen Teilen zusammengefügt werden, um ein Ganzes zu machen, das immer noch die Schnitten zeigt. Er löscht jede Grenze, die es zwischen Collage und Prosa gibt. In Reisende auf einem Bein werden Wörter immer wie Bilder einer Collage benutzt. Wie die Photos, die Irene aus Zeitungen ausschnitt, sind die Wörter und die Satze, die sie aus der Welt um ihr aussucht, und dann für sich verwendet. Irene bringt ihre Umgebung durch Bilder und durch Wörter in einer neuen Ordnung. Wenn Bilder oder Wörter, der Impuls zu sammeln bleibt derselbe. Es ist oft nicht klar ob das Anziehende visuell oder auditiv ist. Plötzlich von Graffiti auf einer Wand fällt Irene ein Wort ein. „KALTES LAND KALTE HERZEN RUF DOCH MAL AN JENS,“ läuft das Graffiti.23 Als Irene von diesem Graffiti ein Wort nimmt, bleibt es immer noch mit Kapital geschrieben, sogar als sie es in ihrem Mund
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probiert. „JENS, sagte Irene.“24. Irene spricht das Wort aus genau wie es ihr ausgesehen hat. Das Bildliche ist mündlich worden. Dass das Wort „JENS“ noch Spüren von seinem Ursprung enthält erinnert stark an den Beschreibungen vom Collagebau. Das Übriggebliebene, zwar das es kapitalisiert bleibt, weißt noch an dem Prozess des Sammelns hin, genau wie die Photos in Irenes Collage, dessen „Ränder selten gerade geschnitten [waren][...] Wo Irenes Hand gezittert hatte, sah der Rand so aus, als nehme die Zeitung das Photo zurück ins Papier.“25 In beiden Fallen, egal wozu die Teile benutzt werden, weisen sie auf ihrem früheren Kontext hin. Eine Collage ist auch ein sehr passendes Metapher für die Sprache selbst, denn Wörter, wie die einzelnen Bildteile einer Collage, haben immer zwei oder mehr Kontexte. Jedes Wort wird dadurch definiert, dass man etwas mit dem Wort verbindet; ein Geräusch, ein Ruch, oder ein ganzes Erlebnis. Als man sie benutzt, tragen sie immer noch die Überbleibsel dieser früheren Erfahrung, auch wenn diese Überbleibsel nur dem Sprecher erkennbar sind. Dieses Thema wird von Müller in einigen von ihren Aufsätzen beleuchtet. Als Müller von dem Taschentuch erzählt, spielt sie wieder mit Wörtlich zweisprachig, auf Deutsch, sowie auf Rumänisch. Der kulminierende Punkt im Wortspiel kommt in einer von Müllers Collagen, wo es dem Leser gelassen ist, das Wortspiel zum Ende zu bringen. Früher in der Rede hat Müller über die Idee vom Handtuch geredet, beziehungsweise die intuitive Verbindung des Taschentuchs mit Tränen verstärket. Dazu noch hat sie die Image von flatternden Taschentüchern bei der Zugabfahrt beschreibt, und ihre frühe Assoziation des rumänischen Wort TREN mit dem deutschen TRÄNE, und des rumänischen BATIST mit HANDTUCH erklärt.26 Da die Collage, die sie präsentiert, spricht von Batist und Zuge, kann der Leser, anhand von den bisher erklärten Beziehungen dieser Wörter, fassen, dass es in dieser Collage zum Teil um einen Taschentuch geht. Die Collage selbst zu verstehen braucht ein Verständnis der Sprache als etwas Collageartiges. Im Reisende auf einem Bein sind sogar ganze Szene doppeldeutig im diesem Sinn. In einem Stil, den Müller selbst „Autofiktional“ nannte, werden Erfahrungen aus dem Leben
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der Schriftstellerin ausgeschnitten, und in die Reinfolge Irenes Lebens gesetzt. Herta Müllers Erlebnis beim Bundesnachrichtdienst, zum Beispiel, wird ins Leben Irenes gestellt, mit sogar denselben Wörtern, die Müller benutzt hat, ihre eigene Erfahrung zu beschreiben.27 Als gefragt wird, ob sie „damals mit dem dortigen Geheimdienst zu tun [hatten],“ antworten beide Irene und Müller mit typischer grammatischer Genauigkeit: „Er mit mir. Das ist ein Unterschied.“28 Mit solchen zweideutiger Momente, wird die fragmentierte Natur der Episoden im Text erklärt. Das Buch ist eher eine Collage als Prosa, ein von verschiedene Elemente zusammengeklebte Narrativ, das in gesamt, ein kunstvolles Bild von der Hauptfiguren ergibt. Das Collageartige ist nicht nur das Ergebnis der sprachlichen Spannung, es ist auch die Erlösung davon. Müller benutzt das Collageartige ihre Meinung klarer auszudrucken, und aus den Begrenzungen der Sprache auszubrechen. Sie lässt oft Brotkrümel hinter sich, die dem Leser es ermöglichen, ihre mentale Turnerei zu folgen. Obwohl sie in ihrer Aufsätze ihre Gedankensprünge erklärt, in Reisende auf einem Bein manipuliert Müller die collageartige Natur der Sprache um denselben Ziel zu erreichen. Durch wiederkehrende Motive schöpft sie in den Gedanken des Lesers die Assoziationen, die gebraucht sind, um ihr nachzufolgen. In dem ersten Kapitel, wo Irene immer noch in dem anderen Land ist, wird das Wort „Fisch“ wiederholt erwähnt. „Was essen die Leute im Dorf./ Fisch./ Und am Morgen./ Fisch./ Und die Kinder./ Fisch.“29 Später, ist es das letzte Image des Kapitels. „Drei Mädchen saßen [...] in Sand. Sie aßen Fisch. Sie Kicherten.“30 Das Wort „Fisch“ wird durch diese Wiederholung in den Gedanken des Lesers mit dem anderen Land verbunden. Als das Wort Fisch später in Irenes Collage wiederkehrt,31 fällt es dem Leser sofort aus, und erinnert ihm an dem anderen Land. Müller schafft einen collageartigen Stil, der weder Prosa noch Poesie zu nennen ist. Sie baut eine Sprache, die über der Grenze zwischen bildlich und linguistisch schwebt. Dadurch schreibt Müller einen Roman, der in seiner fragmentierten Ganzheit ermöglicht ihr die erkannten Beschränkungen der
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Sprache zu überwinden, und den dringenden Bedarf sich auszudrucken zu erfühlen.
WORKS CITED
1 “Kulturzeit. With Herta Müller.” Youtube.com 15 Oct. 2009. 2 Eke, Norbert Otto. “Augen/Blicke oder: Die Wahrnehmung der Welt in den Bildern. Annäherung an Herta Müller.” Die erfundene Wahrnehmung: Annäherung an Herta Müller (Paderborn: Igel- Verl. Wiss., 1991) 17. 3 Marven, Lyn. “”In Allem ist der Riss”: Trauma, Fragmentation, and the Body in Herta Müller’s Prose and Collages.” The Modern Language Review 100.2 (2005): 396. JSTOR. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. 4 Ibid., 397. 5 Müller, Herta. Reisende Auf Einem Bein. (Frankfort/ Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verl., 2010) 158. 6 Ibid., 17. 7 Ibid., 55. 8 Ibid., 130. 9 Müller, Herta. “Nobelvorlesung: Jedes Wort weiß etwas vom Teufelskreis.” Nobelprize.org. Die Nobelstiftung, 7 Dec. 2009. 10 Müller, Reisende, 41. 11 Ibid., 99. 12 Ibid., 5. 13 Ibid., 24. 14 Ibid., 90. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 100. 17 Ibid. 18 Müller, Wolfgang, and Herta Müller. “Poesie ist ja nichts Angenehmes”: Gespräch Mit Herta Müller.” Monatshefte 89.4 (1997): 469. University of Wisconsin Press. 19 Müller, Reisende, 81. 20 Marven, 400. 21 Müller, Reisende, 49-50. 22 Marven, 401. 23 Müller, Reisende, 98. 24 Ibid., 98. 25 Ibid., 50. 26 Müller, Nobelvorlesung. 27 Müller, Herta. “Es ist immer derselbe Schnee und immer derselbe Onkel.” Herta Müller: Fünfter Würth-Preis Für Europäische Literatur. (Künzelsau: Swiridoff, 2006) 34. 28 Müller, Schnee, 34, Reisende, 27. 29 Müller, Reisende, 14. 30 Ibid., 16.
14
The Glory of Being Swallowed Up in a Great Unit! SATIRE IN THE LOYAL SUBJECT
H
einrich Mann’s The Loyal Subject is a fiercely loaded critique of Wilhelmine Germany, whose effectiveness functions primarily through the narrator’s use of irony and satire. The text’s protagonist, Diederich Hessling, functions as the locus of Mann’s satire, in his exaggeration of conservative Wilhelminism. Traditionally, satire is defined as “an attack on stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor [...] often in the form of an exaggeration, or distortion of reality.”1 Heinrich Mann’s text does just this, employing scathing hyperbole in order to magnify Wilhelmine Germany’s increasing susceptibility to nationalism, conservatism, anti-Semitism, and proto-fascism, all through the terribly unlikable Diederich Hessling. Thus, Hessling as the “loyal subject,” acts as the textual vehicle for satire. In this way, Mann’s use of satire also falls into the literary category of “Juvenalian satire,” a decidedly more bitter and ironic form of criticism against “contemporary persons and institutions that is filled with personal invective, angry moral indignation, and pessimism.”2 Wilhelmine Germany is the subject of critique, parodied through the characterization of Diederich as impotent, dependent on servility, and an empty vessel ready to be filled with whatever dogma happens to be the most popular. Heinrich Mann introduces Diedrich Hessling through an assertion of his “weakness,” declaring him a “dreamy, delicate child, frightened of everything, and troubled frequently by earaches.” 3 This opening line does quite a bit of work, indicating the reader to several important points, which will carry satire throughout the text. Mann immediately declares Hessling’s feebleness, from his physical maladies to his timid neuroses, signaling to the reader that this character will not enact the archetypical role of “hero.” The exaggeration of “poor” Diederich’s complaints, too, works to establish a sense of humor against the character. It is assumed that the reader
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Hannah Martin will not laugh with Hessling but, rather, at him. As such, the humor in this “delicate” characterization establishes a farcical distance between the narrator and the protagonist, thus instituting a literary structure for criticism. This unflattering portrait reveals Diedrich to be fearful of his “beloved fairy tales,” toads, gnomes, and – worst of all – his father, whom he was “moreover compelled to love.”4 However, he does love the father, whose cruelty and strict hand compels Diederich to awe and fascination. Hessling’s father acts as the first instance of authority in his life, and from whom Diederich’s relationship with authority is established. The narrator informs the reader that “whenever he had pilfered, or told a lie, he would come cringing shyly like a dog to his father’s desk, until Herr Hessling noticed that something was wrong and took a stick form the wall.”5 Diedrich’s ready selfsubmission communicates an obedience that is not so much earnest as it is innately necessary. The narrator’s “animalization” of Diederich – comparing him to a dog whose guilty conscious cannot help but surrender to his master’s authority – may be understood as a signifier of his slavish nature. Diederich readily, and willingly, relinquishes his dignity. The narrator’s assertion of Diederich’s slavishness may be understood as pitiful – a failure of self-defense and agency – and, consequently, a point of criticism. This eagerness for punishment may be also codified as masochistic, yielding with it a satirical sting of humor. The text plays with satire, too, as “Diederich’s submissiveness and confidence [are] shaken by doubts [after] his misdeeds remained undiscovered.”6 Here, the narrator seems to suggest that Diederich’s confidence is not only bound up in the paternal system of law and punishment, but also dependent upon it. Once the severity of this system is dispelled, however, Diederich becomes mischievous, albeit cowardly so. “Once when his father, who had a stiff leg, fell downstairs, the boy clapped
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his hands madly – and then ran away.”7 His masochism now turns into sadism, as Diederich derives pleasure in his father’s loss of authority. The humor, here, is in his persistent timidness. Even as he enjoys the spectacle, he fears being penalized for a crime that he has not committed, retreating in guilty pleasure. The narrator describes Diederich as disgusted by his own natural compulsion towards submission, and terrorizes those who likewise bend in submission. His mother, for example, who coddles Diederich and nurtures his cowardice, is a victim of such cruelty. The narrator affirms that, “he exploited his mother’s tender moods, but felt no respect for her. Her resemblance to himself made that impossible, for he had no self-respect.”8 After his father, Dietrich continues to find both a sense of definition and dread in hegemonic authorities. “After so many fearful powers, to which he was subjected: after the fairy-toad, after his father, God, the ghost of the Castle and the police [...] Diedrich now fell under the sway of one even more terrible, one which swallowed people up completely – the school.”9 This mock “epic catalogue” takes another stab of satire, itemizing every petty “terror” in epic enumeration and exaggeration, and thus demeaning little Diederich’s fear and adoration as the banality of it all is revealed. These little hegemonies all culminate in the Gymnasium, into which Diedrich would gladly be swallowed. Thus, his initial hesitations are ironized, as the narrator affirms that little persuasion is needed for Diederich to be fully integrated. “Diedrich was so constituted that he was delighted to belong to an impersonal entity, to this immovable, inhumanly indifferent, mechanical organization which was the school, the Gymnasium.” 10 Here, there appears to be a desire to be engulfed within the impersonality, indifference, and wholly anonymous mechanism of the school. His slavish obedience demands that his individuality be completely nullified in the masses; that he must exchange his individual desires for those of the hegemony. Furthermore, in doing so, he voids all personal responsibility – a sort of cowardly “freedom.” He need not strive for his own convictions, morality, or purpose: in his (ultimately) flexible servitude, he may adopt the certainties of the “group.” Here, he may fulfill “duty” without the burden of responsibility, while finding the same sort of confidence, which he first found in his father’s authority.
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This exchange of the self for the masses continues as Diedrich finds special comfort in the student fraternity, the Neo-Teutons. Expected to do nothing but participate in drink and revelry, he notices that their rituals practiced in unison seem to have the effect of making them whole. “Around him was the rind of open mouths, all singing the same songs and drinking the same drinks [...] He felt as though he were sweating, together with the others, from the same body.”11 Here, the narrator describes a unified “metamorphosis” of the Neo-Teutons, wherein ritual literally turns many into one. This imagery is interesting for many reasons, all of which point toward scathing satire. Diederich finds wonder, a certain “sacredness” even, in this fusion of selves. Thus, this union of men gathered at a table suggests something biblical, recalling Christ’s Last Supper. However, Mann’s image acts a bastardization of this biblical moment. Not only is the table devoid of wine and bread (here, there is only rank beer), but, furthermore, the idea of Christ acting as the scared purpose, into which “we who are many form one body,”12is replaced for the chance to be drunk together. The sensual and crude language with which inebriation is described – all perspiration and open orifices – alludes to Rabelais’ “carnivalesque,”13 whose carnal descriptions of drunkenness and bodily functions were the highest form of French medieval satire. It is as if Diederich and his ‘band of brothers’ become (as one of “the same body”) the giant Gargantua14 of Rabelais’ imagination. Thus, the narrator’s use of this symbolically loaded image, and Diederich’s false reverence of it, transform this literary moment into sharp criticism. This moment reveals Diederich as blind to his own “idolatry” and lack of individual agency, as well as desirous of it. The narrator actively distances himself from the value system of Diederich; in doing so, exposing this false reverence as a moment of mockery. The same language of “belonging,” as employed in the Gymnasium’s description, remains consistent here as well, albeit more hyperbolic. “He had sunk his personality into the students’ corps, whose will and brain were his.”15 Again, there is a literalization of himself merging with the masses, along with his loss of personality. The exaggerated nature of this statement – the supposed fusion of “brains” merging together (a problematic image as any, pointing directly to proto-fascism) – gestures towards Diederich’s growing fanaticism. What
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remains, moreover, is his fear of responsibility – existing as one body in the Neo-Teutons, “nobody could separate him from it, or attack him individually.” 16 The narrator, here, establishes Diedrich’s state of arrested development. He refuses to become an individual, stubbornly wishing to remain submerged in others. All that evolves is his dogmatism. This dogma only increases as Diederich enters his military service, wherein he learns that the whole system “had only one end in view: to degrade one’s personal dignity to a minimum ... And that impressed him. Miserable as he was, indeed precisely on that account, it inspired him with deep respect and a sort of suicidal enthusiasm [...] Rapidly and inevitably one degenerated to the status of an insect, of a part in the machine, of so much raw material to be moulded by an omnipotent will.” 17 This militaristic fanaticism is shown at its climax the moment Diederich witnesses Frederich Wilhelmine II, the ruling power of Wilhelmine Germany, for the first time. The narrator’s commentary on the Emperor is grossly exaggerated and reverent, inviting the reader to conflate this embellished image to be in sync with Diederich’s dogmatic view. “There on the horse rode Power [...] the Power which transcends us and whose hooves we kiss [...] Which we have in our blood, for in our blood is submission.” 18 The Emperor is made Christlike; again, the narrator plays with loaded imagery in order to show false reverence, bastardization and biting satire. However, the narrator also affords the reader with a rare glimpse of realism in the next lines. In one of the few occurrences in the text – perhaps the only – the narrator assumes the position of a perspective outside of Diederich’s. Instead, his commentary follows the gaze of the Emperor, who looks down upon the mad Diederich, running behind him in the hopes of prolonging his gaze upon “Power’” himself. The narrator comments, as if atop Frederich’s horse, “Diederich looked like a man in a very dangerous state of fanaticism, dirty and torn, with wild eyes – from his horse the Emperor flashed his eyes in a glance that went straight through him.”19 This turn in perspective is striking, as it shows a rare glimpse of the reality of dogmatism: dangerous, fanatic, and chaotic. To emphasize the criticism made here, too, the author includes a moment of humiliation: Diederich “slips ... violently into a puddle” before his God-like Emperor, who
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laughs disdainfully at him. The answer that the narrator gives for all this is, simply: “the fellow was a monarchist, a loyal subject!”20 Thus, this change in perspective, along with a portrait of hyperbolic humiliation, provides a moment of harsh – almost cruel – mockery, showing full Juvenalian satire.” “This sort of suicidal enthusiasm which Diederich finds in all hegemonic authorities gestures toward the metaphorical death of “self.” Diederich wishes to liquidate his individuality for a “rebirth” in the masses. Ultimately, Mann gives “poor” Diederich such a desired fate. By depicting Diederich in a state of arrested development and fanaticism, blotting out all personality and individual desire, the author effectively kills any individuality in Diederich. The “loyal subject’s” vacuous personality allows the text to use Diederich as a hollow symbol, a prototype of conservative Wilhelmine Germany. In losing his ‘self,’ Diederich’s character may act as a receptacle for conservative Wilhelmian ideals – nationalism, jingoism, anti-Semitism – and thus function as a caricature of Wilhelmine Germany. As Diederich’s “Wilhelmine tendencies” are inflated, hyperbolized, and emphasized for satire, his image additionally is transformed into one that may literally represent the masses. Furthermore, Diederich is representative of Friedrich Wilhelm II himself. Consequently, his caricature is that a twofold performer: a symbol of the masses and the man whom the masses wish to imitate. This multifaceted image behaves as a perfect symbol of satire: a comic and pathetic manifestation of the blind desire to imitate – to loss one’s self in another. The text’s conclusion further establishes the link between Diederich, the imitating masses, and Friedrich himself, as Diederich adopts a mustache he notices to be in fashion among the higher ranks. Looking at himself in the mirror, with his new Wilhelmine mustache, Diederich is struck by the new “power” of his gaze, “which inspired fear in Diedrich ... as though they glared from the countenance of Power itself.”21 The text leaves the reader with Diederich looking at himself in the mirror, viewing the reflection of himself and of Wilhelmine Germany, all folding out before him. The fear inspired upon viewing this reflection is a final ironic twist – the narrator commenting that the reader, too, ought to be afraid of such blind reverence – that Diederich’s dogmatism is a symbol of warring that readers must give pause to in their own mirrored reflections.
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WORKS CITED
1 “Satire.” M.H Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009). 2 Ibid. 3 Mann, Heinrich. The Loyal Subject. (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1998), 1. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 3. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 18. 12 The Holy Bible, King James Version, Romans 12:5. 13 Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World (Indiana: Indiana Press, 1984) 14 Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel (New York: Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2005) 15 Mann, 18. 16 Ibid., 20. 17 Ibid., 32. 18 Ibid., 43. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Mann, 70.
Amy Goh MIRROR Vielfalt
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A Grotesque Interpretation of the Past POST-STRUCTURALISM, AESTHETICS, AND HISTORICISM IN GÜNTER GRASS’S THE TIN DRUM
Whitney Mallett
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ichel Foucault explains that since the seventeenth century, relationships of representation and signification have been destabilized. The link between the written mark and what it designated was revealed as arbitrary. “The profound kinship of language with the world was thus dissolved.”1 In Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, it is evident that the direct relationship between the visible and the expressible has vanished. When Oskar attempts to describe the expression on his mother’s face in a photograph, he says “of course the simple word soulful would not suffice here.”2 When describing Sister Inge’s pin, he says “the small word red says nothing.”3 Oskar explains that this colour red is the background for a passion that he finds “quite understandable, but could not name.”4 Oskar emphasizes his frustration at the insufficiency of words to express what he is feeling, leading him to create a cluster of descriptors: Her pin expanded into who knew what: a sea of banners, an alpine glow, a splash of poppy field, ready to revolt, who knew against whom: against red Indians, cherries, nosebleeds, against cockscombs, red blood cells. 5 Even these metaphors seem insufficient: “nosebleeds do nothing, banners fade.”6 However, the use of language in the face of its own insufficiency has a grotesque effect. Foucault explains the power of aestheticized language: “Nothing except perhaps literature, and even then in a fashion more allusive and diagonal than direct,” is able to recall the “enigmatic, monotonous, stubborn, and primitive being” from before a similitude between the marks and the things they designated.7 It may seem antiintuitive that language at its most indirect can evoke something similar to when language and the world had a direct relationship. Foucault clarifies, that “in the modern age, literature is that which compensates for (not that which confirms) the signify-
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ing function of language.”8 Even Foucault engages in this compensatory mode when he is trying to describe its effect. He describes the being, which this sort of allusive language evokes, as an “enigmatic, monotonous, stubborn, and primitive being,” a “raw being,” the “living being of language.”9 Like Grass, he relies on a cluster of words to express what he means. Similarly, Oskar does not think he can be contained by one name, interchangeably using I, Oskar, Matzerath, Bronski, Satan, and Jesus to refer to himself. On the novel’s last page, Oskar says “he’s run out of words”10 – alternatively, Ralph Manheim’s translation says, “words fail me.”11 The novel exploits these linguistic limitations to create an alternate form of expression that does not function through signification or representation. This is how it is grotesque. Signifiers have lost a one-to-one relationship with what they signify. The Tin Drum suggests that in this new organization of culture, words can take on a new power. Throughout the novel, words have visceral effects on the characters. The “magical word orgy” causes Gretchen to tremble and let out a little gasp when she reads it.12 Oskar suggests that these effects work outside the realm of signification. He describes Gretchen as “ready and willing for an orgy when she said orgy, yet had no real idea what an orgy was.”13 The words “light” and “match” get under Oskar’s grandfather Koljaiczek’s skin, and cause him to blush.14 Oskar says that he reacts the same way to any description of a child being washed and brushed each evening before bed.15 Their subjective experiences have established certain associations with the respective words. Koljaiczek is reminded that he committed arson and Oskar is reminded of Maria. His experience of finding Greff ’s dead body incites a similar linguistic association in Oskar. He says, “to this day Oskar still gags, still feels that stab, when anyone speaks of
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hanging, even hanging out the laundry, in his presence.”16 Oskar’s associations suggest that what words signify is conditional to personal history. By showing how even linguistic signifiers lack a standardized and objective signification, the novel contends that a subjective interpretation of history is the only kind possible. Oskar’s reaction to Greff ’s hanging is one of many examples in the novel where experiences of violence demand aestheticized language. Upon seeing Greff ’s dead body, Oskar recalls: a prickling, stabbing sensation rose slowly from my private parts, followed my buttocks along my numbing back, ascended my spinal column, settled in the back of my neck, struck me hot and cold, bounded down between my legs, shriveled my already tiny sack, leapt right over my now bent back and lodged itself once more behind my head, contracting there.17 The sheer volume of the description suggests that Oskar’s reaction is inexpressible. It cannot be contained in a word, like “disturbed.” He compensates with sixty words instead. Other instances of violence demand similar techniques. At the end of the first book, the chapter “Faith, Hope, Love” marks a noted break from the novel’s autobiographic style to relay Oskar’s experience of Kristallnacht. Throughout the chapter, Oskar repeatedly describes Meyn as the musician who “played the trumpet too beautifully for words.”18 The chapter suggests that the violence of the early pogroms against the Jews, and the general violence of the war to come, is too terrible for words. Attempts to express the horrors through one-to-one signification are abandoned. Meaning is instead created through the differences between words. Oskar rewrites his portrait of Meyn the musician various times, suggesting that none of the versions are satisfactory. Meaning is made between these versions. The chapter proposes the easy categorization of individuals into social roles – the musician, the watchmaker, etc. – only to destabilize these associations, in much the same way as the SA men, after writing “Jewish Sow” on the window of Markus’s store, “kicked in the window with the heels of their boots, so that the slur they had cast on Markus could now only be guessed at.”19 We are asked to compare Meyn the musician with Meyn the
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man with Meyn the SA man; Laubschad the watchmaker with Laubschad the member of the SPCA; Hitler the Santa Claus with Hitler the gasman; as well as, Oskar the victim with Oskar as a guilty party who warmed his hands by the burning synagogue and looted drums from Markus’s store.20 The chapter, “Faith, Love, Hope,” often expresses exactly the opposite of what it means. Meaning must be interpreted through the juxtaposition of the “inhuman cruelty of animals” with the “bravery” of setting fire to the synagogue. 21 By demonstrating multiple versions of the night’s events, the chapter suggests that any interpretation of the events is conditional to whose story is being told – Oskar’s or Markus’s or Meyn’s or his cats’ or Laubschad’s. In addition to the chapter “Faith, Hope, Love,” the novel’s style breaks at three other moments of violence. It’s style changes to a dramatic script in the chapter in which four nuns are mowed down by machine guns.22 Bruno replaces Oskar as the narrator in the chapter telling the story of the post-war refugees from Danzig heading westward. Bruno relays the violence, pillaging, and death that Oskar remembers. The chapter calls to mind the journey of the Jews and other targets of the Holocaust to the concentration camps on freight cars. Bruno becomes a surrogate for Oskar, just as Oskar is a surrogate for the many concentration camp victims who aren’t alive to tell their own stories. Similarly, Gottfried Vittlar’s testimony replaces Oskar’s account of the murder, in “one of the most interesting criminal cases of the postwar period.”23 These descriptions of pre-war, wartime, and post-war violence demonstrate how aestheticized language can be used to express horrors that direct language doesn’t seem adequate to relay. The entire novel, not just these four breaks in style, uses aesthetics as a response to WWII. However, these four breaks make the connection between violence and aesthetics conspicuous. The juxtaposition of different styles estranges us from the text. The medium of transmission is made opaque, and we are reminded there is no transparent style or form of writing. Grass’s highly aestheticized novel seems an appropriate response not only to the extreme violence of WWII but also to the highly aestheticized Nazi regime. We can compare Grass’s post-war novel to Benjamin’s highly aestheticized essays.
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In Foucault and the Art of Ethics, Timothy O’Leary explains that there are two possible responses to the destruction of tradition: aestheticizing politics, which means politics such as fascism that ritualize political life, and politicizing aesthetics, in which Benjamin partakes.24 Benjamin drafted On the Concept of History in 1940. Like Grass’s novel it reacts to a mode of historicism, one which was exemplified by the Nazis’ interpretation of history in the years leading up to WWII. Also like Grass, Benjamin resorts to metaphoric language, suggesting that everything is interpretation in the content and form of the essay. Both Grass and Benjamin expose a common tendency to interpret events as meaningful retroactively. In The Tin Drum, Oskar recounts his life from the mental institution. His interpretation, as well as our interpretation, of his life is framed by the knowledge of where he ends up. Benjamin explains, “Historicism contents itself with presenting a causal connection between various moments in history.”25 The mental institution becomes our point of departure. Benjamin explains that having such encourages the historian to grasp “the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.”26 The historian creates causal links, rather than “telling the sequence of events like beads on a rosary.” Oskar interprets the events of his life like Benjamin’s historian. He claims he had been promised the ring finger upon his birth, in code, by the word “drumstick,” that certain finger-length scars on the back of his friend Herbert Truczinski had forecast it, and that the cartridge case from Saspe Cemetary, which had the same dimensions as the ring ringer, also predicted it.27 Gottfried Vittlar, at first, scoffs at Oskar’s archaic reading of these signs. Foucault would say it belongs to the forms of resemblance that were ubiquitous in Western culture up until the end of the sixteenth century.28 However, on second thought, Vittlar has to admit that “any open-minded person would easily grasp the sequence: drumstick, scar, cartridge case, ring finger.”29 Vittlar’s reaction reveals that we like to think that though we like to think that we are beyond interpreting meaning the way Oskar has done, it is really still quite common. Similarly, earlier in the novel, Oskar claims “he doesn’t truly believe in omens,” and then immediately after he says that he
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must admit that “there were plenty of omens of a disaster.”30 Although Oskar partakes in the same way of reading the world, he reveals the grownups’ tendency to do so as naive. He exploits their need to create causal links by staging his accident on the cellar stairs. “From then on, the story was this: On his third birthday our little Oskar fell down the cellar stairs, he was still in one piece, he just couldn’t grow any more.”31 The grownups reading’ of the situation suggests something of history and something of language. About the fall, Oskar says, “on my first day as a drummer I had managed to give the world a sign.”32 Oskar’s drum is like a recording device. His new status of a drummer lets him write “the prose of the world”33. The accident also demands the reader to consider his or her own reading of signs. Because the mental institution is the novel’s point of departure, we are conditioned to question Oskar’s status as a reliable narrator. A reader may create a causal link between Oskar’s institutionalization and his reason for why he didn’t grow, coming to the conclusion that because Oskar is crazy, his reasoning is unreliable. Readers are also urged to consider that perhaps Oskar is also making causal links when he interprets “the true nature of the condition” as his own will power.34 Although Oskar reveals the fallacies in the way we read signs in the world, the novel suggests that these readings are inescapable. Reading a novel depends on this mode of interpretation. However, by making these tendencies conspicuous, The Tin Drum cautions us against perceiving subjective interpretations as objective truths, especially when it comes to historic events. Although Oskar acts much like Benjamin’s historian, his position in the mental institution goes against the grain of the common teleological interpretation of history. Benjamin explains how we project a progressive relationship between the events of the past, no matter how destructive, and our present departure point: Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel of history] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 35 The mass destruction of WWI and WWII
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urged the world to consider what progress had resulted in. The military advancements and subsequent deaths urged the world to ask, is technological progress synonymous with human progress? Oskar urges the reader to think about this question with observations like, “since Hitler came to power there were more and more houses with vacuum cleaners.”36 Oskar’s refusal to grow also challenges the Enlightenment ideal of progress, associated with the grownup world that he resists entering. However, Oskar undermines his explicit resistance to growth. During his journey on the freight car, the transition between war and post-war, he grows a hump. His stint in the stone-cutting profession shows how, in the period of “blossoming […] comfort” following the currency reform, he almost became a good, bourgeois citizen living like Maria.37 The poem the performers sing on the concrete pillboxes predicts this era of reform, and suggests the possibility of a causal reading: “Though death still has many to take […]The bourgeois life is on its way!”38 Oskar’s purported growth also suggests a causal relationship. In the last chapter in Book 2, the section of the book restricted to the war, Oskar insists he grew a whole inch. However, the way Oskar tacks it onto Bruno’s transcription suggests its verity is doubtful. Similarly, the novel suggests the fallacy of reading the war’s suffering as ennobling. The Tin Drum suggests that redemption often replaces progress as a point of departure for interpreting history. The narrative reveals the need to make meaning out of the past. In Book 3, many characters try to make the past meaningful by mapping onto it a narrative of redemption. Benjamin describes this phenomenon: “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.”39 In Grass’s novel, the Onion Cellar – a bar where people share painful wartime memories, peel onions, and cry – is a site of the desire to read the past as redemptive.40 Its aestheticization and commercialization reveals this type of story was in fashion and many were willing to pay for it. The communal act of crying has a purifying effect on the Cellar’s customers. Similarly, Klepp’s post-war return to the world from his hiatus in bed is accompanied by ritual washing.
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Oskar explains, “This was no mere washing, it was purification.”41 Oskar takes credit for Klepp’s transformation.42 The Onion Cellar customers’ tears and Klepp’s resurrection are brought on when Oskar drums his life story. By revealing the illusion of this redemption story, the novel is self-critical. The Tin Drum acknowledges that its narrative functions in a similar way. Like Oskar’s drumming, the novel recounts his life story and, arguably, attempts to provide Germans a way to reconcile their collective guilt. The novel’s closing suggests that guilt is never entirely escapable. Oskar feels he will never be from it: “forever coming toward me: Black was the Cook always somewhere behind me.”43 By finishing with a poem about the Black Cook, the novel suggests that indirect, allusive language – whether grotesque aesthetics or the pure language of poetry – is the only way to express this feeling. These interpretations of history as leading toward progress and redemption transform time. When we read the past to serve our present interests we fill time with our expectations. Benjamin explains, “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.”44 Oskar notes that despite the destruction, the clock in the main hall keeps ticking during the assault on the Polish post office: “It kept running and I didn’t know how to interpret this indifference on the part of Time as a good or bad omen.”45 Oskar feels it is necessary to interpret the random preservation of the clock. It is precisely this mode of reading the clock’s preservation that fills time. By making filled time both the cause and the effect of Oskar’s act of interpretation, Grass shows how the effect of interpretation in the present transforms the past. Oskar thinks that the inhumanity of war should make time stop. He fails to realize that events like wars are the markers by which we interpret the past and present. Benjamin makes the distinction between clock time and calendar time. For Benjamin, clock time is the empty, homogeneous time that is transformed by historicism; calendar time is a “historical time-lapse camera”46 that expands and contracts time based on momentous events like wars. Calendar time is not standardized; it is distorted by interpretation. Benjamin explains, “calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical
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consciousness.”47 Grass is engaging with the same ideas as Benjamin. However for Grass, clocks have the same potential for distortion as recording devices. Grass emphasizes that clocks are controlled by humans. Oskar observes, “the clock remains nothing without the grownup. He winds it, sets it forward or back.”48 The grownups ignore their own agency: “Grownups see more behind and in clocks, than clocks could possibly signify.”49 Oskar’s observations reveal that people like to see themselves as objects of history when, in fact, they are subjects who write history. The first thing Oskar’s voice shatters is the grandfather clock’s glass covering, suggesting his resistance toward this mode of interpretation. “The interior of the precious clock, however, was undamaged.”50 Despite his antagonism toward this mode of interpretation, it proves indestructible. Oskar himself partakes in it increasingly throughout the novel. The mechanical clock is contrasted with traditional methods of regulating time. Oskar observes that “carpets were, according to house rules, only beaten on Tuesdays and Saturdays.”51 These regulatory carpet beatings decrease along with Hitler’s rise and the increase in vacuum cleaners.52 The upheaval of tradition accompanies war. Characters are forced to find new ways of regulating their lives, and must create new organizations of culture. In Oskar’s postwar residence, he notes that “it smelled of old calendars. I saw no calendars; however, the smell came from the carpets.”53 In the post-war time, everyday rituals like the carpets return to regulate time instead of momentous events like battles. In this new organization, however, the signifier has lost its relationship to the signified. The smell of the calendars is no longer attached to the calendars. History and time are subject to linguistic structures and acts of interpretation in this new position of loss. The recording of history will always be accompanied by distortion, so one must make this distortion conspicuous. Visceral expression is enabled by literary language, which is particularly obtuse, allusive, indirect, surreal, metaphoric, magical, and diagonal. The Tin Drum’s aesthetics show that this sort of language can compensate for what has been lost. The grotesque can communicate a sense of loss in the human condition, exacerbated by the horrors and violence of war.
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WORKS CITED
1 Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (London: Tavistock, 1970), 43. 2 Grass, Gunter. The Tin Drum. Trans. Ralph Manheim. (New York: Vintage, 1990), 43. 3 Ibid., 143. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 142. 6 Ibid., 143. 7 Ibid., 43. 8 Ibid., 44. 9 Ibid., 43, 44. 10 Ibid., 563. 11 Ibid., 589. 12 Ibid., 80. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 19. 15 Ibid., 248. 16 Ibid., 296. 17 Ibid., 297. 18 Ibid., 181, 3, 9. 19 Ibid., 186. 20 Ibid., 181-9. 21 Ibid., 185. 22 Ibid, 314 – 24. 23 Ibid., 565. 24 O’Leary, Timothy. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 124. 25 Benjamin, Walter. “On the concept of history” Accessed online at <http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2> 26 Ibid. 27 Grass, 543. 28 Foucault, 17. 29 Grass, 543. 30 Ibid., 181. 31 Ibid., 52. 32 Ibid. 33 Foucault, 17. 34 Grass, The Tin Drum, 52. 35 Benjamin, “On the concept of history” 36 Ibid., 160. 37 Ibid., 440. 38 Ibid., 320. 39 Benjamin, “On the concept of history” 40 Ibid., 497-511. 41 Ibid., 486. 42 Ibid., 488. 43 Ibid., 563. 44 Benjamin, “On the concept of history” 45 Ibid., 208. 46 Benjamin, “On the concept of history” 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 55. 49 Ibid., 55-56. 50 Ibid., 55. 51 Ibid., 85. 52 Ibid., 160. 53 Ibid., 457.
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Abject
Amy Goh
Abject, the words jarring the ribcage What is expelled from the orifices of the body, injected, pushed into the tubes that squeeze out marrow thin, putrid earth dirt soil grit in my body, in the bones that grasp the greasy flesh abject, like the syllables that jostle my scarecrow frame pushed into the throat, back; miniature worlds encapsulated in a bubble; fragile, mountains littered like a trashcan flipped over a sullen skysublime.
Amy Goh PEEL OFF WINTERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S SKIN Vielfalt
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Echoes of Lot’s Daughters THE CASE OF FREUD’S DORA AND HYSTERIA IN WEDEKIND’S LULU
Nada Khashaba “Every analyst has come across certain women who cling with especial intensity and tenacity to the bond with their father and to the wish in which it culminates of having a child by him.” 1 —Sigmund Freud
R
obert Polhemus’ theory of the Lot complex includes a detailed and comprehensive delineation of the Lot narratives underlying themes. The main features of the biblical story that I will, for the sake of brevity, emphasize are: the father-motherdaughter dynamic, progeny versus sex for pleasure, morality and feminine Ideals, and the “castrated” female. These themes connect the three texts that this essay analyzes and elucidate Freud’s own projections on Dora of his desire for psychological “seed” to “bear fruit.” Fantasy, reality and the father-daughter narrative The Lot complex identifies the mutually beneficial attraction between older men and younger women, fathers and daughters, and the ramifications of the sexual codification of women through a patriarchal lens that is so farreaching it seems almost invisible. Psychoanalysis is not exempt from this structure, and was itself “borne” out of the generative interactions of Josef Breuer and the infamous “Anna O,” who quickly becomes a “jealous wife” and actually simulates a virgin birth by him. Father Freud’s “seed” of psychoanalysis was also energetically sustained through the “suggestions” he passed onto his daughters,2 both real and metaphorical. In the Lot narrative, women are depicted quite explicitly as units of exchange between battling masculine forces. To “save” the Father’s representatives (the Angels), Lot offers up his virgin daughters to the raging mob, and later, abandons his wife to the crisis in order to save his daughters, who are the ideal vessels for his continued existence. This arbitrary patricentric morality condones the father’s sins, but destroys the mother for hers. In her unac-
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ceptable attachment to her home and past, the mother cannot move forward and is punished with dusty extinction as a pillar of salt, and as a consequence, the daughters must becomes virgin-brides for the sake of patriarchal continuity. Virginity is held up as the highest ideal, outweighing even motherhood in importance. The wife is sexualized and so indivisible from her “sinful past,” which results in her fossilization, and the daughter’s consequent sexuality is only forgiven because it reaffirms the system that dissimulates the mother, that is, until she herself fosters a daughter to replace her. The virgin-bride is powerfully attractive because it is an uninvaded space on the precipice of conquest, unlike Sapphism, which is a “virginity” that, in turn, dissimilates the “conquerer.” This forgiveness is only granted by the division of the daughter into two: one maintaining the non-sexual child-parent union, whilst the other fulfils the primordial fantasy, so that at one time, the daughter is both lover and child, mother and virgin, bride and babe. This multiplication of the female identity not only discounts the culpability of the “well-intentioned” anti-hero Lot by shifting it onto the conniving daughters,3 but more importantly, it is only by splitting can a space be permitted for female subjectivity within a story that is devoid of any substantial feminine identity. Besides being a conversation amongst male figures, the Lot story leaves its female characters nameless, voiceless, and unidentified, except as reflections and perversions of the Virgin-MotherWhore Trinity. And after giving birth to the world’s new forefathers, the Ammonites and Moabites, the daughters slip silently back into the anonymity of HIStory, fusing meekly with their mother’s ashen memory.
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This archaic allegory of female sexuality pervades Freud’s Dora dream narrative of the burning house in complex ways. The primary father figure is Dora’s biological father, who is duplicated in both Herr K. and Freud in different ways: Freud neatly sums up Dora’s illness, with its emulation of her father’s own situation, as a somatic symptom of repressed sexual impulses that are obstructing her from achieving the “cure.” She is “summoning up [her] old love for [her] father in order to protect [her] against [her] love for Herr K,”4 guessing that Dora’s hysteria is an indignant reaction against
contradictoriness. This ambivalence towards Frau K. is mirrored by the Governess’ relationship to Dora,8 whose affection and confidence was betrayed twice for the same reason; that is, to achieve exclusive “romantic” access to her father, and in an attempt to remove the spectral Mother, exiling the expectant “childbride-sister” who modestly awaits her father’s favor. If Dora is stuck in time as the patient sister-child overhearing her father’s sexual engagement, then Frank Wedekind’s Lulu portrays the sexually active half, the “other” forever frozen in a moment of incestuous embrace
Whitney Mallett GIRL/MAIDEN WITHOUT HANDS the threat of being deflowered, but not recognizing himself as an active part of that threat.5 Dora feels part of a transaction, in which “she had been handed over” in exchange for a ‘blind eye,”6 and so by refusing Herr K.’s advances so expressly, she is perhaps trying to persuade her father to fulfill his primordial role and save her from the “fiery consumption” of a lusting world. Before this realization, the intramarital triangles had been overlooked, even embraced, by the contented Dora who clearly identified with Frau K. as a mother-replacement, and so tended to their children as a good sister/surrogate should, sharing the burden of motherhood with her role-model and double.7 However, the realization of her ill-usage at the hands of sexually manipulative men and women is what alters Dora’s attitude and gives it its seeming
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Shedding surfaces; shifting identities In juxtaposition to Freud’s overzealous sexualized exposition of the hysterical Dora, Wedekind’s Lulu can be viewed as the victim of a tragically unsuccessful therapy at the hands of an outspoken misogynist. Originally written as two plays, Earth Spirit documents the “hysterical” behavior of a sexual abuse victim, and Pandora’s Box, the consequences of the failure to internalize the Lot framework of patriarchal progeny. Like Ida Bauer’s borrowed alias,9 and Lot’s anonymous women, Lulu moves through a series of nicknames and images that embody her fragmented selves as refracted through the eyes of idealizing and infantilizing men. She careers from being Schoning’s Mignon, to Goll’s Nelly, Schwarz’s Eve, through to Alva’s Katya, and finally everyman’s Daisy, each death
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resulting in a metamorphosis, externalized by changing clothes, literally shedding the skin that each “creator” wraps her in to show her willingness to accommodate the next. She is dressed as Pierrot in the first act, Eve in the second, and a Bacchanalian elf in the third. In Pandora’s Box, she becomes a false comtesse, a demi-mondaine, and only in the final act does she appropriately don the “flower-girl” rags she was born in, that “no dog in London would even piss on.”10 Each man tries to define her within a framework designed to suit his needs,11 as seen most clearly by juxtaposing Schwarz’s virginal “Eve” – whose body is transgressed and owned exclusively by Adam – with Alva’s Lolita-type creation. Scene Four of Act One shows a farcical chase scene in which Schwarz quite forcefully subdues the resistant Lulu, and in her submission tells her he “would call [her] Eve.” Apathetic to his need to delude himself, she submits to his fetishization by provocatively repeating “as you wish” and “I am yours” in order to attune to his sexual whim.12 She sees herself as “his condom,”13 merging her sterile sexuality with her self-proclaimed usage as a receptacle for phallic “projections.” She is equally compliant as Alva’s “charming little whore,”14 and his need to debase her for his sexual gratification is obvious in the stream of slurs he spits out at his beloved “nutmeg grater, [his] open sewer, [his] cloaca, [his] spittoon, [his] snot-covered hanky, cesspool, screwing machine, shitcart, craphole…”15 Even Schoning is later coaxed by Lulu with pleas of “Tie me up! Whip me! – til you draw blood!” eroticizing the sadomasochistic power dynamic of male-female relations and, to save her life, perceptively playing on the law-maker’s need to punish.16 The same system that exploited her sexuality as a child (in the form of parent-pimp Schigolch, and less-so Schoning) finally condemns and regulates her promiscuity by ripping out her uterus. Jack the Ripper is the embodiment of the castrating society that divides a woman into parts; she is reduced to a body to be taken apart and appraised, be it her legs “those sweet rivals,”17 or those “two scary eyes”18 that invite instant death, or the “expressive” mouth “so fresh still,”19 that entices the brutal anatomy collector. Though her “very
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flesh IS Lulu,”20 only Geschwitz calls her that, and instead, as Alva observes “you don’t see lips, you see kisses.”21 By this, he means her beauty is inseparable from the masculine desire that vitalizes it, like a “doll, your puppet,”22 she is a sensation, an addictive visceral experience, an Idea reflected back, “not a woman-[she is] all warm silken loops.”23 I want to specifically discuss the roles of Schigolch and Schoning as ideal father figures, and how their relationship to Lulu can be paralleled with the Dora father structure. A wealthy widow, Lulu’s economic autonomy frees her from patriarchal ownership and allows her unbounded sexuality to flourish despite the restrictions imposed by marriage. And it is this overt sexual prowess that directly causes the deaths of her first three husbands, who are unable to accept it. All of her husbands are artists, except Doctor Goll, whom the sensible Schoning selects for her, and to whom she owes her financial and sexual independence. This choice seems to refract Wedekind’s own Strindbergian misogyny threefold, and presents the “creator” as victim of his creation.” Schoning, like Freud, sees his “object” most clearly, and his final culminating act is an attempt to end Lulu’s destructive potential. The antithesis of Lulu’s sexual liberation24 is reflected in Dora’s hysteria that, seemingly results from the internalization of contradictory patricentricity. Her apparently vindictive cessation25 of analysis is mirrored in Lulu’s murder of Schoning. Freud’s counterpart, he is too tangled up in his own “jail”26 of desire to recognize his doomed failure, and must be killed in order for Lulu to survive as she is, unaltered. Similarly, Freud’s unheeded countertransference destroys his therapeutic involvement in Dora’s recovery, and he does not cure her socially-ordained “aphonia,” because he cannot unearth her voice from within his. Schoning personifies the combination of sexual intuitiveness27 and moral conformity that exists in the therapist, best delineated in his cool-blooded confrontation with Schwarz’s suicidal melancholia, and his matterof-fact elucidation of his delusion: “It’s you fault if you were deceived.”28 He astutely remarks that “beauty conquers shamelessness [and that Lulu’s] very flesh signifies self-conquest,”29 briefly exposing the duplicity of patriarchal morality. Her awareness of her carnal power allows
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her to manipulate her own reflected idealization and survive her many patrons’ attempts at “cattle-branding.” And finally, it is this very flesh, Lulu’s biological womanhood that is finally attacked, and “conquered.” She understands and defines herself completely through this male sexualization, and momentarily identifies with the monstrously-female Geschwitz only when she “look(s) in the mirror” of reflected masculine libido, wanting to “slip[…] between [her] own legs” as a man, “having ME between the pillows.”30 A Trinity of Ideals - the mother-daughter narrative Entirely absent from both the Lulu plays and Freud’s Dora narrative is the mother’s voice. Discussed once in a brief paragraph, Freud “never made the mother’s acquaintance”31 and can only “imagine her as an uncultivated woman and a foolish one,” whose “interests upon domestic affairs” not only qualifies her for “housewife’s psychosis” but is indirectly blamed for her husband’s “estrangement.”32 Lulu’s harlot mother is mentioned in passing, and besides Geschwitz, Lulu is the only female character in the first half, represented in fragments through illusory costume. Like a crude catalogue of her malleability, the pimp Castpiani provides a pictorial catalogue of her “in the elf costume […] as Pierrot, […] and the one where you are Eve standing before a mirror.”33 The ambivalence of the “Madonna” image in Dora’s second dream mirrors this crisis of female identification. Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s second dream, though admittedly incomplete through little fault of his own, seems more careless than the rest of his deliberated analyses. Firstly, he explains it as a revenge fantasy against her father, taking for granted that his imagined death is an example of wish-fulfillment. Echoing her own vengeful suicide note, Dora fantasizes patricide as the “key”34 to her freedom, both sexual and intellectual; she can now “not the least sadly [begin] reading” any book she wants, and more generally explore unconquered terrain - so to speak - such as her own personal sexuality. Typically, Freud gives more weight to the sexual anxiety of the dream, and explains the symbolism of the words “box”, “station”, “cemetery”, “thick wood” and
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“nymphs”35 to be easy substitutions for female genitalia, and thus expressing a fantasy of defloration. This does not contradict his revenge theory, but in fact embellishes it by asserting that Dora’s defloration, or her “[going] among strangers”, would be the ultimate vengeance, breaking her father’s heart “with grief and with longing for her.”36 The theme of defloration as revenge37 also pervades the second half of the Lulu narrative, where Lulu facilitates the rape of Geschwitz who “had let [Rodrigo Quast] rob her of her fossilized38 virginity”39 to save Lulu’s life. Both the sister figure and the lesbian are desexualized spaces uncolonized by patriarchy, and Geschwitz embodies both through her self-effacing devotion to the uncaring and abusive Lulu. An epitome of the self-sacrificing unconditional love that is synonymous with the maternal, Geschwitz vows to “never leave her side”, and even begs to “take [her] place”40 in order to protect her child-sister-lover from the Father-system’s lust. Geschwitz is physically desecrated by a man, but it is Lulu who has dominion over her existence41 and though they are physically parted in their final moments, when the one is murdered by castration, the other necessarily follows in perpetual silence: “I shall now silence you.”42 This forced division of the sisters is an attempt to surmount female subjectivity in the same way that an accurate depiction of the Matriarch is erased through enforced “aphonia.” At one point during the analysis, Freud notes that Dora gives up speech and takes up writing in its stead. This is duplicated in the second dream, where the absent voice of the (m)other is regained in script. The dream inverts the suicide note, avenging Dora on her father and displaces the vengeance through wish-fulfilment. The mother announces the death of the father, and invites her daughter to join the ceremony. Freud doesn’t explicitly endorse the following view, but perhaps the mother’s sudden elevation in her daughter’s psyche as a “harbinger of doom” might be interpreted as a desire to reconnect with the forgotten Matriarch after the passing of patriarchy. Reconstructing the family portrait This potential reconnection is echoed in Act Four, where we close with an unlikely
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reclamation of the mother-daughter relationship, and the responsibility of the twin-feminine as an avenue to exhume the female voice. Through an inversion of the Lot narrative, Madelaine the prostitute and her daughter Kadega present a hopeful possibility for reconciling this damaged bond and reawakening “sleep”’ complicity. A mother-whore, or abandoned wife, Madelaine is a sexual slave to the economic control that binds her to patriarchy and she both profits from, and is damaged by, the system that propagates her ostracism. She embodies the self-effacing mother, and sacrifices her once-valuable virginity to save her daughter’s “little flower,” though she jokingly claims her motivation is “maternal jealousy.”43 A “ripe” thirteen year-old virgin, Kadega is considered “old enough to seem a young Queen,”44 and her sexual precocity makes her vaguely aware that “they’ll like [her] that way.”45 When the “apocalyptic” crisis occurs in Scene Twenty, the daughter replaces the mother, but not for the preservation of the father’s continuity, but for the mother’s own sake. Kadega’s readiness “to die for [her] maman”46 relieves the Mother’s lonesome burden, and by reversing roles, the twin-feminine is invoked, and Madelaine is allowed to symbolically recapture her pre-colonized self. The Pierrot portrait that shadows over the entire play hangs above this revolutionary moment, satirizing the “baby skirt”47 that draws “monsters” in, but holds the potential of reunification through struggle. This portrait provides an alternative lens through which to view the Madonna symbol. If Lulu-Pierrot is trapped in pederasty, then Dora sees her captured self reflected in the Madonna image. Dora stares “rapt in silent admiration”48 for two hours in front of the Virgin-mother, not knowing “what had pleased her so much about the picture.” The two-hour bracket is linked to the “consummation” at the lake, and it is interesting that in the dream-world, Dora is mesmerized for the length of this symbolic time span by a woman in a frame. When asked what had silenced her, Dora “could find no clear answer to make. At last she said: ‘The Madonna’.”49 Though Freud intended to single out this theme, he may have missed some very important connec-
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tions in his eagerness to attune it to his preconceived model. Firstly, her inability to describe her “stunned” state despite its psychical potency is partly due to the ineffability of so omnipotent and contradictory an Ideal. Secondly, the idea of the “framed woman” as a portrait of true feminine identity is a typically patriarchical imposition, literally limiting her to the “box”50 that encapsulates her. Like frames and doorways, windows and mirrors are also classic motifs of female representation,51 both in the sense of reduced mobility and liminality, and by conveying the idea of reflection/refraction and fragmentation. The castrating castrate Medusa can only be vanquished by confronting her own reflection, in the same style that, in her dream, Dora confronts the impossible ideals that haunt her waking life on her way to mourning her father. Freud insists this is a fantasy about defloration, using the picture of the wood and the nymphs as evidence of symbolic female sexuality. However, it would be equally acceptable to interpret the “thick wood” as a phallocentric colloquialism, and the “nymphs” are the parody of female sexuality, as espied by the sexually-intrusive satyrs (“the phantasy of a man seeking to force an entrance into the female genitals”), thus changing the “picture of a woman” to simply a male projection of womanhood.52 Instead of being a clear-cut “symbolic geography of sex,” it becomes Freud’s personal geography of sex derived from the semiotics of a male-constructed culture. Even if we adopt the Freudian interpretation of the dream as a wish for defloration, it then seems incongruent for Dora to refuse the “invitations” of accompaniment in her sexual voyage through the “thick wood” of boxed femininity, and though she “saw the station in front of [her, she] could not reach it.”53 Perhaps she never wished to reach the station, since when the dreamscape changes, “she went calmly to her room, and began reading a big book that lay on her writing-table.”54 The sexual guilt that manifests itself in the “immaculate conceptio”’ nine months after the assumed sexual “misste” at the lake, is somehow confused for
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“love for Herr K. [that] has persisted to the present day-though” – Freud admits – “it is true you are unconscious of it.”55 Despite having noted her disgust in his analysis of her upper-body displacement, he maintains that “her illness is a demonstration of her love for Herr K.”56 Monstrosity misunderstood Dora’s scathing impatience with Freud’s smug satisfaction begins with the sarcastic question “Why, has anything so very remarkable come out?,” and follows with the announcement at the next session that she will cease treatment out of sheer impatience. She seems to be humoring Freud when “she nodded assent” to his remark about her “longing” for Herr K. Freud himself admits that this is “a thing which [he] had not expected,”57 implying that this particular suggestion has been repeatedly and almost continually rejected. Perhaps still stuck in the transference web, Freud concludes his fragment by asserting in his postscript defense that “the transference took me unawares, and because of the unknown quality in me which reminded Dora of Herr K., she took her revenge on me […] and deserted me.”58 In this way, he transposes the “jealous wife” image onto himself as “the jilted one,” despite having reminded her that she is “free to stop the treatment at any time.”59 Freud is as full of contradictions as are his hysterical patients, and his whole argument about contradiction (“Yes means Yes, No means Yes”)60 sheds light on his inability to perceive the abusive undertones of Dora’s sexual experience. “But what monsters you all are!”61 Madelaine exclaims to the greedy men who are eagerly and indifferently bidding on her daughter’s womb. It is unclear who the monster of this monster tragedy is, whether it be the Whore, the Lesbian, the Adulteress, or the men that invent these classifications, and manipulate them according to their desire. It is also uncertain where the monster of Dora lies, and whether it really is her stubborn attachment to infancy through illness that is dangerous, or rather the solipsistic disregard and misunderstanding experienced at the hands of the true monster in his manifold manifesta-
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REFERENCES
1 Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1989), 673. 2 Polhemus, Robert M. Lot’s daughters: sex. redemption, and women’s quest for authority. (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005) 38-9. “To Anna Freud’s reckoning, she and psychoanalysis were twins who started out competing for their father’s attention”. Freud’s own daughter is held up as the “inheritor of her twin, the mother of psychoanalysis; the one to whom primary responsibility for its spirit, its future, was passed.” 3 To “preserve the seed of our father” (Polhemus 18), the daughters plan to inebriate their Father, and then separately “seduce” him while he sleeps, since he would never consciously lie with them. 4 Freud, 211. 5 In this way, he is most like the Lot figure whose well-intentioned sexual transgressions for the “good of mankind” allow him to violate his society’s taboos. And yet, his indulgence is forgiven because of his importance in ‘“sublimating” a paternally-ordained crisis. Another perhaps coincidental affinity between the Lots is their ‘mind-altered’ states; Lot is so drunk he “perceived not when she lay down, and when she arose” (18), Schoning becomes a morphine addict throughout his marriage to Lulu, and Freud is a known advocate for cocaine use, and a self-proclaimed coke-fiend. 6 Freud, 188. 7 Ibid., 182. “Dora had taken the greatest care of
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Flora Dunster
the K’s two little children, and had been almost a mother to them.” 8 Ibid., 189-90. “What the governess had from time to time been to Dora, Dora had been to Herr K.’s children”. The surrogate-mother ideal is quite prevalent in this fragment, and is, like the splitsister concept, a manner of replacing the mother. Frau K. and the governess are also both sources of Dora’s sexual knowledge, and embody the motif of the more “precocious” older sister of the Lot narrative. Freud looks upon “this woman as the source of Dora’s secret knowledge,” whose provocative knowledge is protected by the conveniently amnesiac Dora who is reluctant to betray her ‘big sister’. 9 Polhemus, 219. Dora is the name of Dickens’ childbride character in David Copperfield. Dickens’ own daughter is her namesake. 10 Wedekind, Frank. The First “Lulu.” Trans. Eric Bently. New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc. (1989), 177. 11 Wedekind, 196. The conversation between Lulu and Dr. Hilti in Act Five perfectly sums up the difference between a whore and a wife; both are units of sexual exchange for the “married men” who themselves engage in extramarital “filth” because “their wives are so ugly”. Lulu, “[qui] fais l’amour” is condemned, whilst “Daddykins [who] did it to beget children” is forgiven. This Lottish justification sets up the Father as both a hero of civilization, and an anti-hero forced to partake in “forbidden fruit” by manipulative, corrupting women. So, even though male sexuality animates
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and defines the female as sexual object, men are somehow portrayed as victims of, and slaves to, female agency. 12 Wedekind, 57. 13 Ibid., 82. 14 Ibid., 111. 15 Ibid., 114. 16 Ibid., 119. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 113. 19 Ibid., 119. 20 Ibid., 116. 21 Ibid., 185. 22 Ibid., 64. 23 Ibid., 114. 24 Lulu and Dora are both suffering at the hands of inherited sexual deviance. Lulu’s pedophilic father surrogate Schigolch trains her in the same arts that lead to her brutal treatment, while he, “asthmatic” and aging, flirts with a barmaid downstairs. Dora, also inherits her father’s sexual misconduct through symptoms that emulate his, and this in itself, can be seen as both empowering and masochistic. Her illness is both a somatic response to internalized guilt enforced by the father’s desires, and a self-simulated avenue for free expression within the constraints of her indoctrination. 25 Freud, 237. “If cruel impulses and revengeful motives […] become transferred onto the physician during treatment, […] then it is not to be wondered at if the patient’s condition is unaf-
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fected by his therapeutic efforts”. While Lulu is portrayed as cruel because she is unapologetically sexual, and refuses to “silence” herself, Freud presents Dora as equally “revengeful” in her stubborn attachment to illness, and her refusal to permit Freud’s usurpation. 26 Freud, 118. 27 Wedekind, 35. “The spirit inhabits the fig leaf ”. In a quasi-Freudian discussion about art and inspiration, Schoning sums up the intertwining dynamics of body and soul, sex and “creativity,” shameless physical beauty and aesthetic purity. The symbol of the “fig leaf ” embodies the double concept of sex and morality; it represents both the shroud of God-fearing civilization as well as a reminder of the sexualized body. 28 Ibid., 86. 29 Ibid., 116. 30 Wedekind, 118. 31 Freud, 179. 32 Ibid. 33 Wedekind, 133. 34 Freud, 223. Freud substitutes “station” for “box”, and then again for “key”, which is the “masculine counterpart to the question “where is the box?’”. This key that cannot be found, or reached may stand-in for the obsolete father, who can no longer be expected to monopolize access to Dora’s “box.” 35 Freud, 224. 36 Freud, 223. 37 This is an extension of the virgin-succubus formula enforced by Athena onto her devotee, Medusa. Athena is a product of pure patriarchy, and Lulu mimics her cruel assimilation, whilst at the same time, paradoxically embodying her victimized opposite, more easily identified as the “monster” Geschwtiz. 38 The link between Eros and Thanatos is clear here, and an image is conjured up of Lot’s ‘dusty’ wife, her sexualization petrifying her forever in the pages of biblical HIStory. 39 Wedekind, 187. 40 Wedekind, 186-7. 41 Both Lulu and Jack call Geschwitz monster: Lulu as the offspring of a patriarchal mentality, and Jack as the instrument of its execution. However, only Lulu makes Geschwitz actually feel “deformed” as Athena does Medusa, and both are ‘exiled.’ the land of Man and Virgin girls to that of sistermonsters, i.e. where the lesbian, the barren, the ‘defiled’ and the castrated live. 42 Wedekind, 205. 43 Wedekind, 128. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 167. 46 Ibid., 168. 47 Ibid., 167
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48 Freud, 222 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. “Box” signifies a woman, as does the depreciatory word “Weibsbild” (224). 51 The parallels are endless: both Medusa’s and Narcissus’ vanity is enabled by, and punished using, their reflections, the evil Queen in Snow White is taunted to madness by her mirror, Faust sees his desire reflected back in the hazy form of a woman. 52 Ibid. 224. 53 Ibid. 221. 54 Ibid. 224. 55 Ibid. 227. 56 Ibid. 192. 57 Ibid. 229. 58 Ibid. 236. 59 Ibid. 227. 60 Ibid. 203.“If this ‘No’, instead of being regarded as the expression of an impartial judgment (of which, indeed, the patient is incapable), is ignored, and if work is continued, the first evidence soon begins to appear that in such a case ‘No’ signifies the desired ‘Yes’.” This is a dangerous argument that discounts the validity of the patient’s own contributions, and puts the analyst in the seat of an all-knowing god. 61 Wedekind, 129.
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The Homoerotic in Two Settings of Goethe’s Ganymed Daniel Míguez de Luca
T
he effect that a composer’s art has on a particular listener is a very complex phenomenon, and it can vary depending on the historical and societal context in which listeners find themselves. Occasionally, a large gap between the composer’s and the listener’s reality can alter the interpretation and meaning of a musical work. The issue of homosexuality is a very interesting one to look at in the context of the German Lied of the nineteenth century, since the very concept of same-sex love has changed tremendously in the last fifty years, let alone in the past two hundred years. While studying two nineteenth-century musical settings of Goethe’s poem “Ganymed,” a twenty-first century listener may find Hugo Wolf ’s lied to be a more effective and relevant expression of homoeroticism than Franz Schubert’s. Concepts of sexuality have changed greatly throughout history, and when discussing these two musical settings of Goethe’s “Ganymed,” we must be particularly aware of these changes. In these two lieder, the character of Ganymede has been interpreted in at least three different ways: as a mythological figure in Ancient Greece, as a classical figure in nineteenthcentury Germany, and as the main character in German lieder to a twenty-first-century listener. In these three time periods, there are very different perceptions of homosexuality. Ganymede is an ancient Greek mythological character whose physical beauty and virility made Zeus choose him as his water bearer and lover.1 In Ancient Greek culture, the eros, or love, between a younger and an older man was considered a higher form of love than that between a man and a woman. An older man could appreciate and indulge in the physical beauty of
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a younger man or boy.2 However, in nineteenth-century Europe, attitudes towards male same-sex desire were very different, even though Classical culture was studied and appreciated. To define what sexuality was in the nineteenth century is a very difficult task, and philosophers such as Michel Foucault have found it a problematic undertaking.3 While discussing knowledge and sex, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes that in the nineteenth century, a culmination of historical beliefs created the idea that homosexuality was an act to be kept secret.4 It is in this historical context that Schubert, and Wolf reinterpreted the story of Ganymede in their art. The homoerotic, and the erotic in general, were themes that were presented in different ways than today. Male effeminacy and the deconstruction of masculinity were tools that were used to create the musical language of “non-normative” eroticism.5 Schubert’s setting of “Ganymed,” published in 1817, deals particularly with gender tropes in order to construct his musical representation of homosexual love.6 Generally, Schubert’s music has been labeled as effeminate, even by contemporaries such as Schumann. The musical language in “Ganymed” is that of simplicity, and lacks the associated with masculinity in the nineteenth century.7 The final goal of the song is a cadence in C major (m. 116,) and moves there with a cadential passage on the words “allliebender Vater” (all-loving father) (mm. 110-116.)8 This music represents the moment when Ganymede accepts Zeus’ love and is taken to the heavens, and thus it is the affirmation of homosexual love in this text. Before the cadential movement in mm. 110-116, there are other attempts to reach the important C major-cadence, but
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to no avail. In m. 84, there is a cadential dominant chord in C major that fails to reach the tonic, moving deceptively to a dominant of A minor, the submediant chord of C major (m. 85). In the measures that follow, there are several more moves to a perfect authentic cadence in the tonic of C major (mm. 93-94, 99, 108-109,) but it is not until m. 116 that the final cadence is heard. 9 The various approaches (and failures) to the final cadential arrival are non-assertive, and, in Schubert’s time, were associated with femininity.10 Another musical element of Schubert’s lied that academics have linked to femininity is the simplicity of the cyclical introduction.11 Until m. 17, the song moves harmonically between tonic and dominant, and melodic patterns in the right-hand piano part (m. 1-2,) and in the vocal line (mm. 9-11 and 13-15) repeat themselves in close succession.12 Musically, Schubert used “feminine” tropes to present Ganymede’s effeminacy, and he presents the homoerotic elements of the poem in this way. Hugo Wolf set Goethe’s poem to music seven decades later, and in a different musical and social context. Though still in the nineteenth century, Wolf ’s setting of “Ganymed” was composed in 1888 and, in relation to Schubert’s setting, is in a more modern musical aesthetic.13 Wolf also uses different musical devices to express the situation in which Ganymede finds himself. The “feminine” tropes used by Schubert are not as transparent in this setting, since Wolf puts more emphasis on erotic desire. Lawrence Kramer uses the term “libidinal desire” to describe Ganymede’s emotion towards the “allliedender Vater”, Zeus, and describes this desire as energy withheld until the end of the lied, when Ganymede accepts the embrace. 14 The piano plays a very important role in creating the increase in energy throughout the song, caused by the lack of release. In the left hand of the piano part, the music becomes more active as the final cadence approaches. From mm. 1-16, static quarter-note chords move the piece along until a small transition (mm. 16-22) leads to a different pattern. The next pattern is less
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static, as the chords move in octave-sized motion, and at m. 31, the chords are broken into sixteenth-note ascending figures. A tremolo pattern, and thus another increase in energy, at m. 42, brings the piece to the concluding statement (“allliebender Vater.”)15 The fact that the patterns never repeat, but rather become more active, does not give the listener any release until the end of the song, a phenomenon that is comparable to that of erotic desire. Wolf uses other methods to depict the libidinal experience, some of which are similar to the one’s Schubert uses. Cadence plays a role in Wolf ’s setting, but in a less tonally conventional way than in Schubert’s. While Schubert’s setting has evaded cadences that express weakness instead of virility, Wolf ’s has an ambiguous harmonic language throughout. It is not until m. 62, even after the text “allliebender Vater,” that a perfect authentic cadence is heard in root position for the first.16 Wolf ’s setting has cyclical elements, as Schubert’s does, but the achieved effect is almost contrary. From m. 1-16, the right-hand piano part has a simple moving eighth-note line, moving around the notes of the chords helped below by the left hand. This pattern returns at m. 42, but because of the changed pattern in the left hand discussed in the previous paragraph, one does not have the impression of returning to the same musical place.17 Instead, recognition provides a sense of stability to the idea being expressed, because alterations have been made.18 How effective and relevant are the two lieder to the twenty-first century listener? The goal is not to say that one of the Ganymed settings is better than the other, but rather that one more successfully communicates the idea of homoerotic love, and that is Wolf ’s setting. Schubert’s setting seems to be a much more conservative approach to the homoeroticism of the Ganymede story, but that it is not merely because it was written seventy-one years prior. The ways in which homosexuality are dealt with involve stereotypical aspects of femininity and effeminacy, very rudimentary concepts in gender representa-
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tion, and give Schubert’s version of Ganymed a caricatural quality. The struggle between weakness and virility, submissiveness and dominance, are not only dated, but enforce polarities that are currently being challenged by scholars in gender and queer studies.19 Alternatively, Wolf has used eroticism and lust to represent the homosexual topic of the love between Zeus and Ganymede. There is an ambiguous quality to this setting’s lustful musical language that does not rely on separation of gender and sexual orientation. The erotic tropes in Wolf ’s lied are based on the sexual experience and on the energy produced by libidinal desire, and “dismantles the gender of [the] subject” of Ganymede’s love, as well as Ganymede himself.20 Whether or not it was his goal, Wolf deemphasizes polarities of gender and sexuality, and thus validates, rather than denigrates, homoeroticism.
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WORKS CITED
1 Ringer, Mark. Schubert’s Theater of Song. (Milwaukee: Amadeus Press 2009) 28-9. 2 Kramer, Lawrence. “The Ganymede Complex: Schubert’s Songs and the Homoerotic Language.” Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 120. 3 Foucault, Michel. “Part 1: We ‘Other Victorians’.” The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 8. 4 Segwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Epistemology of the Closet.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Eds. H. Abelove, M.A. Barale, and D.M. Halperin. (New York: Routledge, 1993) 8. 5 Kramer, “The Ganymede Complex”, 98. 6 Kramer, Lawrence. “Musical Form and Fin-deSiècle Lied.” German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Rufus Hallmark. (New York: Routledge, 2010) 168. 7 Brett, Philip. “Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire.” 19th Century Music 21.2 (Fall 1997), 155. 8 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. English songtext of “Ganymed.” Trans. anonymous. Franz Schubert. Lieder 1 (for low voice). Ed. Walther Dürr. (Kassel: Bärenheiter, 2005), li. 9 Schubert, Franz. “Ganymed.” Lieder 1 (for low voice). Ed. Walther Dürr. Kassel: Bärenheiter (2005), 107. 10 Brett, 157. 11 Kramer, Lawrence. “Hugo Wolf: Subjectivity in the Fin-de-Siècle Lied.” German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Rufus Hallmark. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 259. 12 Schubert, 104. 13 Kramer, “Musical Form,” 166. 14 Ibid., 167-8. 15 Wolf Hugo. “Ganymed.” Goethe-Lieder 50. (Leipizig: C.F. Peters c. 1900), 39-43. Accessed from Petrucci Music Library, 28 October, 2010. 16 Kramer, “Musical Form,” 169-71. 17 Wolf, “Ganymed,” 39-43. 18 Kramer, “The Ganymede Complex,” 125. 19 Fausto-Sterling, Anne “Dueling Dualisms.” Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. (New York: Basic Books 2000) 8-10. 20 Kramer, “Musical Form,” 174-5.
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Schubert I mm. 1-3. mm 9-11. mm. 13-15.
IV mm. 99-101
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II mm. 84-86.
V mm. 108-110
III mm. 92-95.
VI mm. 113-116
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Wolf I mm. 2-4
II mm. 15-16
V mm. 41-43
VI mm. 57-58
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VII mm. 59-61
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Naomi Endicott
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Genug. When can you say enough?
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nough poses a challenge. The problem of enough – which is to say the problem of surplus and satiety – resides at the very core of our modern world. You might say that modernity and enough are synonyms, coincident semantic spaces of a single problem. To be modern is to wrestle with the idea of enough: what it means to locate a sense of boundaries within life, to accept finitude, and to give up on a sense of progress, whether personal, cultural, or even at the level of the human itself. Enough is enough. As a word, “enough” is rather strange. This strangeness should tell us something about its significance. As the Grimms’ dictionary informs us, enough’s German equivalent, “genug,” has “a rather strange position and history.” It can be both an adjective and a substantive (“lang genug/ long enough” versus “er sagt genug/he said enough”), it has no comparative form (unlike similar adjectives of degree such as “wenig” or “few”), and it is one of the few adjectives in German or English that comes after the word it modifies (“weit genug/far enough”), although in German this only became exclusively the case by the beginning of the eighteenth century. 1 Enough also looks strange. It is an odd amalgam of suspect phonetic combinations. The “gh” sounds like “f ” (as in tough), “ou” does not sound like the more familiar “ow” (round) or “oo” (through), but the slightly gruntish “uh” (rough). And then there’s that “e,” which can be said long or short (especially when you’re mad, “eeenough!”), and usually does not stand alone at the beginning of a word, especially when the next letter is an “n” (think of words like encase, ennoble, enchant – enough?). Strangeness, however, seems to have been the condition of its commonality. We have derivatives of genug in almost all Germanic languages – Swedish nog,
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Andrew Piper
Danish nok, Icelandic nóg, Dutch genoeg. When you look at it long enough, you begin to see the way enough is where German and English seem to touch. gEnOugH. Enough is the sound of translation. For a writer like Goethe, genug was a charged word. This from someone who worked on his literary masterpiece, Faust, for 59 years, wrote in almost every conceivable genre, and composed over 14,000 letters. His collected works now runs to 143 volumes. And not everything is printed. Enough is enough. When can someone say enough in Goethe’s work? For Tasso, the slightly mad hero of Goethe’s play, the answer is never. As the prince Alphons will remark upon receiving Tasso’s book as a gift: Lang wünscht’ ich schon, du möchtest dich entschließen Und endlich sagen: Hier! es ist genug. Long have I desired that you would decide And finally say: Here! It is enough. (Torquato Tasso, lines 395-96) “Genug” is the word that the writer cannot say. It must be spoken for him, in the subjunctive. For princes, on the other hand, enough is the vocabulary of power. As the barbarian king, Thoas, would remark to Iphigenie as she recounts her awful family history in Goethe’s rewriting of Euripedes’ drama: Verbirg sie schweigend auch. Es sei genug Der Gräuel! Conceal these deeds with your silence, too. It is enough The horror! (Iphigenie auf Tauris, lines 397-98)
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Enough is the word of sovereigns, not authors. By the time of Goethe’s late period, however, which we usually mark as commencing around Schiller’s death in 1805, genug will be a word that the author employs with increasing frequency. Again and again we find sentences like, “Genug, das Jagdgedicht selbst war abgesendet, von welchem wir jedoch einige Worte nachzubringen haben [Enough, the poem of the hunt was sent off, about which we nevertheless have a few words to report].”2 Enough is the sign of a narrative hastening, of not having enough time. It is a word of old age, of a “late style,” in Edward Said’s terms.3 But I think Goethe’s attention to the word “enough” has more to tell us than just the way it could capture a certain mode of being in the world, of a physiology of style if you will. The line I cited above is taken from Goethe’s novella, “Der Mann von funzig Jahren” [The Man of Fifty], which readers of this journal will know is one of those works that I consider to be of immense significance to the history of literature. The line addresses the rather elaborate social and textual drama in which the Major, the so-called Man of Fifty, is supposed to send the Widow, whom his son is courting, a copy of his poem (the Jagdgedicht) by returning it inside of her woven container, the Brieftasche. The letter case is referred to in the narrative as “Penelopean,” after Odysseus’ wife who continually weaves and undoes her shroud to keep her suitors at bay until her husband returns home. The Widow, too, is keeping suitors at arm’s length, namely the Major’s son. Genug thus signifies a crucial boundary moment, one in which a narrative portion of the text has come to an end (the act of sending the poem) and a new one is about to begin (the act of receiving the poem). But this very boundary is marked by its transgression in a double sense – it repeats, at the level of synopsis, what the narrative has previously tried to explain (“the poem of the hunt was sent off ”) just as it fails to continue forward, with the narrative substituting instead more synopsis (“about which we nevertheless have
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a few words to report”). In place of either the reception or the citation of the poem, we are offered its paraphrase. “Enough” is the sign of a doubling that is also a difference. Something is omitted by being included in a more condensed form. The object that “enough” modifies in this paragraph is both within and without the syntactical unit of the sentence. Distillation and transformation go together. Enough is the sign of paraphrase, of being in other words. At its most fundamental level, paraphrase is the art of speaking otherwise (“para” for outside, “phrasis” for speech). Like its related concepts of “paradox” and “parody,” paraphrase has a challenging relationship to an origin. It says in other words what cannot be said originally. It is anything but repetition. But on the other hand, paraphrase does not speak about, it speaks for. Paraphrase enacts a confusion of the “I,” of who speaks. Paraphrase does not just challenge, it enfolds something within itself. As in the German synonym, zusammenfassen, it brings together diverse elements as a form of synthesis. It makes a claim to totality, a totality that is also a birth, a generative moment of unfolding. Paraphrase is marked by this double aspect of performative compaction and surplus. One can begin to see how the dual structure of enfolding and unfolding, contraction and expansion that resides within paraphrase could make it such an attractive figure for Goethe’s late thought, grounded as it was in notions of morphology, polarity and spirality. Few words have become more troubling today for the teaching of literature than that of paraphrase. Ever since Cleanth Brooks invoked, already in 1947, “the heresy of paraphrase” as the basis of literary criticism, who would dare summarize a poem?4 (And my students have no doubt received this from me as a comment on their papers – “too much summary,” “not enough analysis.” Enough already). But I think there is wisdom to be found in Goethe’s insight about the “enough” of paraphrase. For Goethe, paraphrase challenged our traditional relationship to reading, to the way we engage with our texts and
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the way you are continually asked to do so in class. In place of a culture of citation – of extracting something from a text in order to memorize it or dissect it – paraphrase forces us to assume a transformative stance towards writing. But it does so by asking us to assume the voice of another, to enter into the space of the text and think like it. As we enfold ourselves in the work of another, we also unfold ourselves out of it through the act of synthetic transformation. Paraphrase isn’t criticism in the traditional sense. When we paraphrase, we do not stand outside of the work and talk about it. Instead, paraphrase is a way of comingling. It is a way of reading just long enough to make something your own. It is a way of making reading matter. Ok, enough.
WORKS CITED
1 “Genug”, Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jakob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, Bd.4,Hg. von der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin in Zusammenarbeit mit der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1965-) 3486-3503. 2 Goethe, J.W. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 10, Hg. Gerhard Neumann. (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989) 466. 3 Said, Edward W. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. (New York: Pantheon, 2006). 4 Brooks, Cleanth “The Heresy of Paraphrase” The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, [1947], 1974) 201.
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Biographies HARRY CEPKA has recently completed his Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in German Literature and Culture in Translation. JACK DEMING is a U2 Honours German Studies student whose interests include Goethe, Spinoza, translation theory, and the materiality of literature. Next year he will write his thesis on the form of Die Schale (The Shell) in the poetic and natural scientific work of Goethe and others. FLORA DUNSTER is a U2 Honours Art History student with a minor in Women’s Studies. Her interests include feminist approaches to art history, performance art, and embodied experiences of viewing. She is also a photographer, working primarily with medium format film. NAOMI ENDICOTT is a U2 Honours Religious Studies student. She’s interested in the Protestant Reformation and apocryphal scripture. Jane Endicott took the original version of the picture when biking across Germany in 1983. CAROL FRASER is a U3 East Asian Studies and German Studies student with a minor in Art History. Her research interests include sexuality in contemporary Berlin and Japanese experimental film. AMY GOH is a U1 English Literature student with minors in East Asian Studies and German Literature and Culture in Translation. She is interested in modernism, Nietzsche, and the potential of new media to express the fragmentation of identities. She is also a freelance artist; her work can be found at kuroneko.yolasite.com. NADA KHASHABA is a U3 Drama and Theatre Major, with a minor in German Literature and Culture in Translation. Her interests include posthumanism, Japanese anime, trash aesthetics and modernist theater. She is also president of the German Students’ Association.
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SALLY LIN is a U2 Anthropology and Psychology. student. She is academically interested in the social aspects of health, and is artistically interested in the relationship between images and words. MENEMSHA MACBAIN is a U3 German Studies student. She is also interested in Middle East studies. WHITNEY MALLETT is a U3 Honours English Literature student with a minor concentration in German Literature and Culture in Translation. HANNAH MARTIN is a U3 English Literature student, with a double minor in German Language and Literature and Culture in Translation. She spent last fall studying at the Freie-Universität-Berlin. Some of her interests include hypertext, German Expressionism, the internet, Berlin, cultural memory, southern American mythology, graphic novels, and film. DANIEL MÍGUEZ DE LUCA is a U3 Music student. His principal instrument is the tuba, but his interests also include music history and theory. ANDREW PIPER is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies. His research follows the history of networks and literary topologies, practices of textual circulation, and the relationship between media and reading. His 2009 book Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age won the MLA Prize for a first book. STEPHANIE TREHERNE is a U2 Anatomy and Cell Biology student. AARON VANSINTJAN is a U3 Joint Honours Philosophy and Environment student. His interests include the intersections between environment and the self, how to be sustainable in a culture of unsustainability, and living well.
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Thanks to SYLVIA RIEGER, Language Coordinator in the Department of German Studies, for her generous assistance in revising our German.
RIHAM REZA, VP Finance of the German Students’ Association for her invaluable assistance in securing funding.
THE ARTS UNDERGRADUATE SOCIETY for their generous funding.
DAILY PUBLICATIONS SOCIETY for the use of their offices.
THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN STUDIES for their support and use of facilities.
GERMAN STUDENTS’ ASSOCIATION
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