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THESIS

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LIBRARY
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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

THE KUNSTLERPROBLEMATIK AND THE MEANING
AND FUNCTION OF ART IN WORKS BY
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL AND THOMAS MANN

 

presented by

BONNIE J . BROUGHTON

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

M.A. degree in GERMAN STUDIES

 

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THE KHNSTLERPROBLEMATIK AND THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF ART
IN WORKS BY HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL AND THOMAS MANN

BY

Bonnie J Broughton

AN ABSTRACT OF A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Linguistics and Languages

Dr. Raimund Belgardt

ABSTRACT

THE KUNSTLERPROBLEMATIK AND THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF ART
IN WORKS BY HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL AND THOMAS MANN

BY

Bonnie J Broughton

After Nietzsche's call for a rethinking of traditional
values, questions about the nature and function of art,
artists, and works of art became prominent under the label
of Modernism in Western culture at the beginning of the 20th
century. For German authors this attention to fundamental
questions led to an artist’s crisis, or Kfinstlerproblematik,
which caused writers such as Hofmannsthal and Mann to use
their writing for working through their doubts about the
adequacy of human language to express experience as well as
the question of how artists find inspiration and are then
able to shape experience into expression.

Because of the difference between the organizing aspect
of language and the unorganized vagueness of pre-
articulated, felt experience, it was not and will never be
Possible to resolve the artist's crisis, but their work did
enable them and also their readers to gain a deeper
understanding of the issues involved, including why human

beings find art so compelling-

DEDICATION

To my long-suffering Master’s committee members, Prof.
Raimund Belgardt, Prof. Kurt Schild, Prof. Richard Peterson,
and Prof. Heinz Dill (deceased), who stayed with me and
believed in me through many years of existential adventures
and crises. The academic and personal progress I have made
in German Studies and in life in general would not have been

possible without your inspiration and kind guidance.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction 1
1. The Problem of Art in Modernism 4
1.1. Modernism in Music, Painting, and Literature 10
2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Sprachkrise 14
2.1. Hofmannsthal and Modernism 16
2.2. The Artist’s Language Crisis in Ein Brief 71
3. Thomas Mann and the Writer Who Can’t Write 79
3.1. The Artist in Crisis Defined: Schwere Stunde 30
3.2. The Artist and Art That Lives: Tonio Kroger 38

 

 

3.3. The Artist and Eros in the Word: Der Tod in Venedig ...... 43

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Modern and Postmodern Alternatives to the Word 49
4.1. Music and Words 49
4.1.1. Wagner and the Multi-Medium Gesamtkunstwerk 50
4.1.2. Benjamin Britten’s Opera Death in Venice 51
4.2. Color 57
4.2.1. Hofmannsthal: Die Briefe des Zurfickgekehrtenmmmmmmm57
4.3. Music, Color, Light, Words and Movement Combined:
Kandinsky’s Der gelbe Klang 60
4.4. Words Used in New Ways - "62
4.4.1. Dadaism: Words as Sounds to be Felt 63

 

4.4.2. Words as Fragments of Sound, Feeling and Meaning in
Arno Schmidt's Leviathan 64

 

5. Why Have Alternatives to the Word Failed? Some Words in
Defense of Words 68

6. The Artist's Crisis Before Modernism 72

 

6.1. The Bible: The Word as Creative Logos and Parable ............ 72

 

 

6.2. Ancient Greece: Plato’s Republic and Symposium ..................... 73
7. Phenomenological Explanations: Heidegger 76
Conclusion 79

 

 

Bibliography 94

INTRODUCTION
Literature, in forms both high and popular, has been

part of the human story since the beginning of written

language—-one could even say that art, and literature

specifically, is the human story. But why is literature so
compelling for both authors and their audiences? Why do
writers write, and why do readers read? These questions
lead naturally to fundamental and long-debated issues about
the meaning and function not only of literature, but of art

itself in human society and ultimately to the relationship

between art and life. In the case of literature this refers

in general to the limits and possibilities of language and
knowledge, and specifically to the relationship between
words and the things that words are supposed to represent.
These questions have teased and tortured both
‘philosophers and writers ever since they began to reflect
<3n them, and satisfactory answers have eluded even the most
iJispired thinkers. The topic seems to be beyond the ability
cxf the subjective human mind to grasp, even though its
iiisues have been basic to human experience over our
hiAstory. The difficulty seems to lie in the coincidence
trfiit the object to be understood is also the medium of
understanding: language use is not only determined by

tilillking, thinking is itself shaped and limited by

language. The result is that whenever we would try to
discover something about how language functions, we find
ourselves subjectively stationed in the center of the issue
already, and thus it becomes difficult to find the distance
needed for a more objective perspective and understanding.
Heidegger, at the beginning of the epilogue to his Origin

of the Work of Art, states that “the foregoing reflections

 

are concerned with the riddle of art, the riddle that art
itself is. They are far from claiming to solve the riddle.
The task is to see the riddle.”1 A clarified understanding
of even the questions would be doing much, and that is
exactly what this thesis will attempt to do, along with a
consideration of the successes and failures of various
attempts not just to “see” the riddle of art, but also to
solve it.

In order to produce a firmer understanding of the
‘Yriddle”, the following reflections will examine what is
czalled in German the Kfinstlerproblematik, or artist’s
cxxisis, in which the nature and function of art, the
airtist, and the work of art became central themes of German
-litnerature in Early Modernism at the beginning of the 20th

CEWTtury. I will mainly focus on the different ways that

X

Y (Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell, ed. (New
Ork: HarperCollins, 1993) 83.

 

Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Ein Brief and Thomas Mann in

Schwere Stunde, Der Tod in Venedig, and Tonio Kroger used

depictions of writers who can't write in order to explore
two main aspects of the artist’s crisis: the language
crisis of how artists cope-—or do not cope—-with the limits
and the crisis of how individual artists

of their means,

themselves relate art to life and find inspiration, even

though the classical notions about ‘beauty' became

critically problematic with the advent of Modernism.

An exhaustive treatment of this topic would also
necessarily include writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and
Franz Kafka, as well as a long list of Expressionist
authors from Gottfried Benn to Kurt Schwitters, but a close

examination of the sufferings and struggles of

Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos and Mann's writers-in-crisis

Gustav von Aschenbach and Tonio Kroger (among others) with

“their identity, their inspiration, and their means of

czxpression, i.e., the word, will be sufficient for

exploring these main aspects of the Modernist artist's
Crrisis. The characters provided their creators not only the
Opuportunity to explore these issues through their own
WIfiLtihg, but also a way to work through and overcome their
‘RWTI artistic crises to a considerable extent. A close

exéimination of these works in the context of each other and

also other works by the same and other authors will bring
further light for a clearer understanding of the motivation
behind Hofmannsthal's and Mann's use of the above mentioned
characters.

However, these works also show that writers can never
fully overcome the Kfinstlerproblematik as long as humankind
depends on a language of words. In various forms, questions
about the function and possibilities of art and artists
must necessarily exist as long as artistic representation
exists, and literature has so far survived all attempts to
declare words to be useless or to find more effective means
to replace words with other mediums such as color or music.
In spite of all experiments within modernistic works, the
word continued to be the medium of choice, if perhaps
reluctantly so, even for word-skeptics such as Hofmannsthal
‘who paradoxically wrote about his experience of the
aabsolute inadequacy and powerlessness of words to truly

express experience, and yet did so both powerfully and

elegantly.

1- TPhe Problem of Art in Modernism
The Modernist period may be described as the time from

thé? end of the l9m‘century until World War II in which the

relationship of art to life became problematic as never
before. Modernism affected literature, painting, and music
particularly forcefully in German culture, both singly and
in combination.

Among philosophers who laid the foundation of German
Modernism, none played a more influential role than

Nietzsche, who called for an “absolute skepticism toward

all inherited concepts”2 and an Umwertung, or transvaluation

of values, whether in politics, ethics, religion, or art.

This attitude spread throughout the arts, and led to more

than a reaction against the traditions and institutions of
the past: instead of further building on or reacting to
previous conventions, Modernism designated a revolutionary
break from the past which was characterized by intense
self-awareness and questioning about the possibilities and
‘validity of the means and forms previously used by artists,
seven to the point of declaring l’art pour l’art (art for
airt’s sake) in France and the asocial and amoral
allstraction and detachment of art from life. Art should
herve no function to make human beings morally better, and

beuiuty is to be understood as only a subjective “effect”.3

 

 

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and H.J.

Siollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) 409.
Gregor Streim, Das ,Leben’ in der Kunst: Untersuchungen zur Asthetik

Miler! Hofmannsthal (WUrzburg: Konigshausen und Neumann, 1996) 30-

The most self-consciously active and provocative of these
revolutionary artists became known as the avant—garde.

In contrast, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter
Bfirger describes Modernism and the avant-garde as beginning
at the end of the 19U‘century with the Aestheticism and its
“pure” detachment from life and recognition of the
consequent “lack of social impact” of such art. He poses
that art at this time entered a “stage of self-criticism”
and criticism of its role as an institution, a development
which made an “objective understanding” of the past periods
of art possible and which discovered the “progressive
detachment of art from real life contexts” and thus also

the need for artists to somehow “reintegrate art into the

praxis of life.”4

In Germany, Modernism developed in this more
‘purposeful direction. Instead of simply declaring that art
tvas empty except for subjective meaning, various artists
arud philosophers, above all Wagner and Nietzsche, developed
tile idea that modern life was infected by an excessive
irrtellectualism which not only separated scholarship and
ard: from life but was even hostile to it,5 a trend that had

lDeQflJn with the emphasis by Socrates and Plato on form and

 

 

Efeter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Guarde, trans. Michael Shaw
5(Mlnf1eapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 22-23.
Relss, Hans, The Writer's Task from Nietzsche to Brecht (London: The

on the intellect over the body. The task of the modern
artist, then, was to find a way to reconcile art with life.
According to Nietzsche, the greatness and power that
art had in the unity of life and art in the stage tragedies
of Ancient Greece was lost after the Kunsttriebe of
Dionysus and Apollo, i.e., irrationality and rationality,
chaos and order, were divided from each other. He states in

Die Geburt der Tragbdie:

 

Im Gegensatz zu allen denen, welche beflissen
sind, die KUnste aus einem einzigen Prinzip, als
dem notwendigen Lebensquell jedes Kunstwerks
abzuleiten, halte ich den Blick auf jene beiden
kUnstlerischen Gottheiten der Griechen, Apollo
und Dionysus, geheftet und erkenne in ihnen die
lebendigen und anschaulichen Reprasentanten
zweier in ihren tiefsten Wesen und ihren hochsten
Zielen verschiedenen Kunstwelten. Apollo steht
vor mir, als der verklarende Genius des principii
individuationis, durch den allein die Erlosung im
Scheine wahrhaft zu erlangen ist: wahrend unter
dem mystischen Jubelruf des Dionysus der Bann der
Individuation zersprengt wird und der Weg zu den
MUttern des Seins, zu dem innersten Kern der
Dinge offen liegt.6

Apollo represents the individual intellect, order, and
ruarmony, and it triumphs over and gives form to the
Fusimordial, dream-filled, chaotic content of life--and of
true individual unified with all life--in Dionysus. Apollo

.iS ‘the logos which appeals to reason and the intellect, and

 

 

yacmillan Press Ltd., 1978) 14.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Sémtliche Werke in zwdlf Banden, Bd. 1: Die
Seburt der Tragddie, Der griechische Staat (Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner
eflag. 1964) 132.

Dionysus is intoxication and music which appeals to the
emotions. Although Apollo would seem to be superior, this
is not actually the case, as both are needed for art to
truly relate to life, and Apollo is only the God of ordered
semblance and appearance, while Dionysus is the God of life
and creation itself.

Nietzsche further theorized as to why both are needed:
their combination in art functions to make life bearable by
presenting a beautified semblance of our “Existenz selbst
der ’schlechtesten Welt’”:

Hier zeigt sich das Dionysische, an dem
Apollinischen gemessen, als die ewige und
ursprfingliche Kunstgewalt, die fiberhaupt die
ganze Welt der Erscheinung ins Dasein ruft: in
deren Mitte ein neuer Verklarungsschein notig
wird, um die belebte Welt der Individuation im
Leben festzuhalten. Konnten wir uns eine
Menschwerdung der Dissonanz denken—-und was ist
sonst der Mensch? —- so wfirde diese Dissonanz, um
leben zu kennen, eine herrliche Illusion
brauchen, die ihr einen Schonheitsschleier fiber
ihr ganzes Wesen decke. Dies ist die wahre
Kunstabsicht des Apollo: in dessen Namen wir alle
jene zahllosen Illusionen des schonen Scheins
zusammenfassen, die in jedem Augenblick das
Dasein fiberhaupt lebenswert machen und zum
Erleben des nachsten Augenblicks drangen.7

However, since life is also only a “world of
'aiipearances”: what great art shows us is also something
that may be called “real" life:

Denn dass es im Leben wirklich so tragisch

\
7
la letzsche 189-190.

zugeht, wfirde am wenigsten die Entstehung einer
Kunstform erklaren; wenn anders die Kunst nicht
nur Nachahmung der Naturwirklichkeit, sondern
gerade ein metaphysisches Supplement der
Naturwirklichkeit ist, zu deren Uberwindung
neben sie gestellt. Der tragische Mythus, sofern
er fiberhaupt zur Kunst gehdrt, nimmt auch vollen
Anteil an dieser metaphysischen
Verklérungsabsicht der Kunst fiberhaupt: was
erklart er aber, wenn er die Erscheinungswelt
unter dem Bilde des leidenden Helden vorffihrt?
Die “Realitat“ dieser Erscheinungswelt am
wenigsten, denn er sagt uns gerade: “Seht hin!
Seht genau hin! Dies ist eure Daseinsuhr!“8

But for some the modern skepticism over meaning and
the “reality” of perception led not to a view of art as
“metaphysical supplement” to reality, itself also “real”,
but to a Wirklichkeitskrise concerning the possibility of
knowledge and meaning, and to an intense, even willful
subjectivity in art. For instance, Gottfried Benn wrote
that “there is no outer reality, there is only human
consciousness, constantly building, modifying, building new

[/9

worlds out of its own creativity. Nietzsche's oft—quoted

declaration of the “death of God” left meaning either up to
the individual or else non—existent. According to Irving
Howe, this view

cultivates, in Thomas Mann’s phrase, “a sympathy
for the abyss.” It strips man of his systems of
belief and his ideal claims, and then proposes
the one uniquely modern style of salvation: a

salvation of, by, and for the self. In modernist

\
8

9 Nietzsche 151 .

P L1Cited in: Irving Howe, The Idea of the Modern (New York: Horizon
reSS, 1967) 15.

 

culture, the object perceived seems always on the
verge of being swallowed up by the perceiving
agent, and the act of perception in danger of
being exalted to the substance of‘reality.10

Furthermore, in an era that included technological
developments such as photography, art was no longer needed
for objective realism; it was necessarily freed and even
forced to explore previously unconsidered possibilities for
depiction and expression.

This led to innovations which attempted to abandon
traditional means and forms of aesthetic representation
from the past and to experiment and shock with new forms
and subjects, thus with the hope of also beginning an
umwertung of how to experience and understand art. Instead
of aiming at realistic representation and meaning in a
conventional sense through the intellect which is
determined by, for example, verbal mediums such as words,
art should reconnect to life by communicating in a more
abstract, primitive way to the emotions or to a kind of
pre-lingual, even subconscious level of understanding that

éippeals through multiple senses—~and even across senses--

tllrough sound, color, light, form, and movement.

-1 ~11. Modernism in Music, Painting, and Literature

Howe 14 .

10

 

According to Christopher Butler, it is this
“conceptual interrelationship between innovations” across
the various forms of art that made Modernism revolutionary.
In music, for example, Arnold Schenberg, Alban Berg, and
Anton Webern composed in twelve-tone note rows which
ignored traditional notions of harmony and meaning.
Schonberg also pioneered the Spechstimme technique of half-

spoken singing. He composed an opera, Die glfickliche Hand

 

(1911), whose aim was “the utmost unreality” (i.e., anti-
realism) and attempted the “renunciation of any conscious
thought, any conventional plot”:

The whole thing should have the effect (not of a
dream) but of chords. Of music. It must never
suggest symbols, or meaning, or thoughts, but
simply the play of colors and forms. Just as
music never drags a meaning around with it, at
least not in the form in which it [music]
manifests itself, even though meaning is inherent
in its nature, so too this should simply be like
sounds for the eye, and so far as I am concerned
everyone is free to think or feel something
similar to what he thinks or feels while writing
music.11

Namely the reader, viewer, or listener is not expected to
receive an objective communication, but should subjectively
PrOduce “something similar.”

In painting, Vincent Van Gogh used bold strokes of

Clexr that seemed to “overpower the definition of

\

1
Arnold Schdnberg, quoted in: Butler 87.

H

According to Christopher Butler, it is this
“conceptual interrelationship between innovations” across
the various forms of art that made Modernism revolutionary.
In music, for example, Arnold Schenberg, Alban Berg, and
Anton Webern composed in twelve-tone note rows which
ignored traditional notions of harmony and meaning.
Schénberg also pioneered the Spechstimme technique of half-

spoken singing. He composed an opera, Die glfickliche Hand

 

(1911), whose aim was “the utmost unreality” (i.e., anti-
realism) and attempted the “renunciation of any conscious
thought, any conventional plot”:

The whole thing should have the effect (not of a
dream) but of chords. Of music. It must never
suggest symbols, or meaning, or thoughts, but
simply the play of colors and forms. Just as
music never drags a meaning around with it, at
least not in the form in which it [music]
manifests itself, even though meaning is inherent
in its nature, so too this should simply be like
sounds for the eye, and so far as I am concerned
everyone is free to think or feel something
similar to what he thinks or feels while writing
music.11

Namely the reader, viewer, or listener is not expected to
receive an objective communication, but should subjectively
Produce “something similar.”

In painting, Vincent Van Gogh used bold strokes of

COlor that seemed to “overpower the definition of

\
11

Arnold Schonberg, quoted in: Butler 87.

H

objects,”12 according to Butler, and depict the world
through his inner experience, and Pablo Picasso went even
further with depictions that defied traditional uses of
space, sometimes with a simultaneous view of an object or
figure from more than one side, or else from multiple
moments in time.

Wassily Kandinsky may be considered to be the most
radically modernist painter by being the first to produce
radically abstract, non—representational painting in 1910,
emphasizing instead the basic elements of point, line, and
color over realism. He also aggressively crossed the
boundaries of artistic medium and meaning, often calling
paintings “compositions”, and extending himself beyond
painting to writing a play in 1912 (one year after
Schdnberg's), Der gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound), that had
almost no words, but plenty of movement, light, color, and
sound, plus a volume of woodcuts and poetry entitled
Klange(Sounds), and also various articles and books
Presenting his theories on the meaning and intensifying
effect of combinations of color, movement, and sound.

In German literature at the turn of the ZOU‘century

the artist’s crisis appeared as a challenge to tradition in

\
12
C3hristopher Bulter, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting

ifllfihigope 1900-1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 37.

 

12

two main forms: firstly in a Sprachskepsis or even a
Sprachkrise—-a skepticism and even crisis about the ability
of art to convey experience through human language--and
secondly in the questioning of Classical and Romantic ideas
about the activity of artists themselves and the meaning of
beauty and its role as a source of inspiration. The most
extreme form of the former may be found in the Dadaists’
avant—garde, irrational use of words, i.e. their
Lautgedichte made of nonsense words which were meant to
draw attention to the limits of language.

Similarly to Nietzsche, Fritz Mauthner in his Beitrage
zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901-1903) expressed a radical
skepticism about the limiting effect of language on human
knowledge and the perception of experience. Language is a
“Sprachschreck, ein Schrecken fiber das absurde Ungeheuer
der Sprache“ and a “Traumbuch der armen wortglaubigen
Menschheit“n, an “elendes Erkenntniswerkzeug”, that is

u
“ Later,

“wertlos far unsere Erkenntnis der Wirklichkeit.
in 1922, Ludwig Wittgenstein declared in his Tractatus

LQQEEQ-philosophicus that the tyrannical power of language

 

makes knowledge of the world difficult because the

 

 

13
CoA.M.Noble, Syrachskepsisziiber Dichtung der Modern (Milnchen: Edition

fiext u. Kritik, 1978) 24.
Walter Eschenbach, ,,Fritz Mauthner und die Sprachkrise der

gahrhundertwende“, Available
W.mauthner-gesellschaft.de/mauthner/fm/eschl.html, May 2001.

13

Erkenntnisproblem is firstly a Sprachproblem.15

2. Hugo von Hoffmannsthal's Sprachkrise

There are no known personal crises in Hofmannsthal's
life that may be directly related to his preoccupation with
the isolation of the artist and the artist's crisis in his
writings. Even though it was sometimes assumed by
contemporaries that he must have been going through a
crisis of creativity that drew him to the figure of an
artist who can't write, he himself was clearly able to
overcome such an obstacle and write. One might rather say
that he was suffering through a Sprach— und
Wirklichkeitskrise, a crisis having to do with the
mediating role of language in the perception and then
communication of his experienced reality.16

His attention to the topic is perhaps due more to his
personality and the spirit of the time in which he lived.
Hofmannsthal was born in 1874 into a well—to-do family in
Vienna during the winding down of the Austro-Hungarian

finpire and the rise of Bismarck’s newly unified Germany. In

1873 the Viennese stock market had crashed, and the last

\

s

W .398, for example, Mathias Mayer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Stuttgart;
elmar: Metzler, 1993) 1, and Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann, Hugo von
Wsthal: Brief des Lord Chandos (Frankfurt am Main; Leipzig, 2000)

14

quarter of the 19U‘century saw increasing insecurity and a
general vacuum of values, resulting in feelings of
dissatisfaction with the traditions of the past and in a
ferment of political and economic ideas, even to the point
of an end-time feeling and an anticipation of war. This of
course was realized in the outbreak of World War I which
also marked the final breakup of the Empire.

Hofmannsthal himself was a reflective, sensitive
genius who began publishing poems at sixteen. A nervous,
often depressed adult, he pondered on and reflected his
times back to his world. Like Nietzsche, he feared that the
valuelessness of l’art pour l’art, which was prominent not
only in Paris but also in Vienna, could lead society into
cultural decadence: the aesthete who creates beautiful
effects but lacks the moral challenge of life and art is a
stunted, lifeless artist and just an entertainer who
neglects that art needs to have a further purpose or else
it is empty.

However, as Reiss points out, the decadent condition
Of society would be due not only to the degradation of art
to mere entertainment but also to the degeneration of life
through language: if words are inadequate to their task,
theYare false and necessarily falsify everything expressed

thrkdugh them. Furthermore, thought is also suspect because

15

it too relies on language. Thus, our experience of reality,
which is mediated by thought, is also unreliable and

deceptive.17

2.1. Hofmannsthal and Modernism
Hofmannsthal may be said to have defined and
established the modernist artist's crisis in German

literature with his 1901/1902 work, Ein Brief, but he had

 

already been reflecting on the meaning of Modernism and the
crisis of artistic means for some years. In his essay

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1893) he tries to explain his

 

understanding of the new direction in literature as a
turning away from an emphasis on the traditional devices of
plot and character development, for which writers like
Goethe and Shakespeare had been praised as geniuses, to
instead a dissection of the subjective psychological states
of individuals, their moods, their illusions, and in the
world where science can analyze “reality” down to the atom,
the analysis of even the smallest effects the world
produces in them:

Was von Periode zu Periode in diesem geistigen

Sinn “modern“ ist, lasst sich leichter fUhlen als

definieren... Heute scheinen zwei Dinge “modern“

zu sein: die Analyse des Lebens und die Flucht
aus dem Leben. Gering ist die Freude an Handlung,

 

 

7 .
Reiss 50-54, 56, 66.

16

am Zusammenspiel der auBeren und inneren
Lebensmachte, am Wilhelm—Meisterlichen
Lebenlernen und am Shakespearischen Weltlauf. Man
treibt Anatomie des eigenen Seelenlebens, oder
man traumt. Reflexion oder Phantasie, Spiegelbild
oder Traumbild. Modern sind alte Mdbel und junge
Nervositaten. Modern ist Paul Bourget und Buddha;
das Zerschneiden von Atomen und das Ballspielen
mit dem All; modern ist die Zergliederung einer
Laune, eines Seufzers, eines Skrupels; und modern
ist die instinktmaBige, fast somnambule Hingabe
an jede Offenbarung des Schdnen, an einen
Farbenakkord, eine funkelnde Metapher, eine
wundervolle Allegorie. (XI:149)18

These effects include not only impressions made by beauty
and color, but also those produced by metaphor and
allegory, i.e. words. But here, Hofmannsthal also goes
beyond the traditional question of how and if art can
relate to life to a consideration of how life can relate to
life--“die Flucht aus dem Leben”, which led him eventually,
according to Reiss, to the question of the role of language
in understanding and communicating the experience of these
effects.

In a speech from 1896 entitled Poesie und Leben,

 

Hofmannsthal was already expressing his doubts about words
as adequate means for communication. Asked to give a talk
about the current state of poetry, he gave an ironically

long speech declaring that there was nothing he could say,

because even names—-simple signifiers—-strike him as empty

‘

18
All Hofmannsthal citations are from: Hugo von Hofmannsthal,

17

and worthless:

Ich mfisste Ihnen allerdings verschweigen, dass
mir die meisten Namen nichts, rein gar nichts
sagen; ...dass ich ernsthaft erkannt zu haben
glaube, dass man fiber die Kfinste fiberhaupt fast
gar nicht reden soll, fast gar nicht reden kann,
dass es nur das Unwesentliche und Wertlose an den
Kfinsten ist, was sich der Beredung nicht durch
sein stummes Wesen ganz von selber entzieht, und
daB man desto schweigsamer wird, je tiefer man
einmal in die Ingrfinde der Kfinste hineingekommen
ist... (XI:260—261)

But this does not mean that the objects signified are
themselves empty and worthless. Even if words themselves do
not “speak” to him, outside objects, whether man-made or
even nature itself, have a lively impact, even a
Nietzschean jasagen to life and the many colors of its
Apollo veil covering life's Dionysian chaos:

...Aber der Frfihling drauBen und die Stadt, in
der wir leben, mit den vielen Kirchen und den
vielen Garten und den vielerlei Arten von
Menschen, und das sonderbare, betrfigerische,
jasagende Element des Lebens kamen mir mit so
vielen bunten Schleiern zu Hilfe, daB Sie glauben
wfirden, ich habe mit Ihnen geopfert, wo ich gegen
Sie geopfert habe, und mich loben wfirden.
(XI:261)

Nevertheless, despite the intensity of effects, he

still feels that between experience and expression there is

necessarily an abyss of silence:

Alles Lob, das ich meinem Dichter spenden kann,
wird Ihnen dfirftig vorkommen; nur dfinn und

 

 

Egsammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben. Ed. I: Gedichte, Lyrische Drama;
Bd. XI: Prosa I; Bd. XII: Prosa II (Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer: 1956)

18

schwach wird es fiber eine breite Kluft des
Schweigens zu Ihnen hintonen. (XI:262)

The problem is the words themselves. They are merely a
“weightless web” of sounds whose arrangement moves the
bearer or reader to the remembrance of a fleeting
psychological state:

Ich weiB nicht, ob Ihnen unter all dem ermfidenden
Geschwatz von Individualitat, Stil, Gesinnung,
Stimmung und so fort nicht das BewuBtsein daffir
abhanden gekommen ist, daB das Material der
Poesie die Worte sind, daB ein Gedicht ein
gewichtloses Gewebe aus Worten ist, die durch
ihre Anordnung, ihren Klang und ihren Inhalt,
indem sie die Erinnerung an Sichtbares und die
Erinnerung an Herbares mit dem Element der
Bewegung verbinden, einen genau umschriebenen
traumhaft deutlichen, flfichtigen Seelenzustand
hervorrufen, den wir Stimmung nennen. (XI:263)

He depressingly states his opinion that there is no
direct connection between art and life, nor between life
and art. Words are impossibly lifeless. Nevertheless, words
are all one has:

Die Worte sind alles, die Worte, mit denen man
Geschehenes und Gehortes zu einem neuen Dasein
hervorrufen und nach inspirierten Gesetzen als in
Bewegtes vorspiegeln kann. Es ffihrt von der
Poesie kein direkter Weg ins Leben, aus dem Leben
keiner in die Poesie. Das Wort als Trager eines
Lebensinhaltes und das traumhafte Bruderwort,
welches in einem Gedicht stehen kann, streben
auseinander und schweben fremd aneinander
vorfiber, wie die beiden Eimer eines Brunnens.
Kein auBerliches Gesetz verbannt aus der Kunst
alles Vernfinfteln, alles Hadern mit dem Leben,
jeden unmittelbaren Bezug auf das Leben und jede
direkte Nachahmung des Lebens, sondern die
einfache Unmdglichkeit: diese schweren Dinge

l9

kennen dort ebenso wenig leben als eine Kuh in
den Wipfeln der Baume. (XI:263)

Following Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal saw the purpose of
art as to appeal to the whole person by presenting a
“unified” art as was supposed to exist in Ancient Greece.
According to Reiss, he often quoted Robert Steele’s dictum
that “the whole man must move together”, and thus the work
of the poet as a “whole person” is to produce works whose
value comes from the new combinations of words in a form
that touches the relations between elements and emotions in
the lives of the spectator, hearer, or reader as a whole
person, and only then can the poet be said to create images
that “turn life into words”, and vice versa:19
...den Wert der Dichtung entscheidet nicht der
Sinn (sonst ware sie etwa Weisheit, Gelehrtheit),
sondern die Form, das heiBt durchaus nichts
Auberliches, sondern jenes tief Erregende in MaB
und Klang, wodurch zu allen Zeiten die
Ursprfinglichen, die Meister sich von den
Nachfahren, den Kfinstlern zweiter Ordnung
unterschieden haben. (268)
Form is defined as an organization of the outward sound and
mass of words. The understanding of the Innigkeit of words,
however, cannot be given by the artist as long as the
Innigkeit of life is not understood: words are something

Spiritual, hanging between “Gott und Geschdpf”, and the

best that the artist can do is to say not what something

20

is, but what it is not. Hofmannsthal ends the speech with
this depressing statement: “Was das Meer ist, darum darf
man am wenigsten die Fische fragen. Nur hechstens daB es

nicht von Holz ist, erfahrt man von ihnen.“ (XI:268)

2.2. The Artist’s Language Crisis in Ein Brief

 

In Ein Brief, written in 1901 and published in 1902,

 

Hofmannsthal uses a fictional character set in Renaissance
England to work through his own beginning-of—the-ZOUL
century Modernist struggles with the relationship-—or
rather the impossibility of the relationship--between
vision, knowledge, and expression.

Hofmannstal presents us with the figure of a certain
Philipp Lord Chandos, younger son of the Earl of Bath, who
writes a letter to Francis Bacon to try to explain and
apologize for his inability to produce any kind of literary
writing during the previous two years. Lord Chandos is a
writer whose crisis begins after he had already achieved
success and praise for his work while still a teenager,
much like Hofmannsthal himself:

...bin denn ichs, der nun Sechsundzwanzigjahrige,
der mit neunzehn jenen “Neuen Paris”, jenen
“Traum der Daphne”, jenes “Epithalamium“

hinschrieb, diese unter dem Prunk ihrer Worte
hintaumelnden Schaferspiele, deren eine

‘_

9 Reiss 56—59.

21

himmlische Kenigin und einige allzu nachsichtige
Lords und Herren sich noch zu entsinnen gnadig
genug sind? (XII:7)

His ability to produce and use words had been a wonder
of talent and form, but now words seem so strange and
foreign to him that it is as if he had never seen them
before:

Und konnte ich... alle Spuren und Narben dieser
Ausgeburt meines angespanntesten Denkens so
vollig aus meinem unbegreiflichen Innern
verlieren, daB mich in Ihrem Brief, ...der Titel,
jenes kleinen Traktates fremd und kalt anstarrt,
ja daB ich ihn nicht als ein gelaufiges Bild
zusammengefaBter Worte sogleich auffassen,
sondern nur Wort ffir Wort verstehen konnte, als
traten sie mir diese lateinischen werter, so
verbunden, zum ersten Male vors Auge? (XII:8)

He is suffering from a “sickness of his spirit” that
shows him the impossibility of writing across a “bridgeless
abyss”. His writer’s block had come as he was planning to
write a history of King Henry VIII. His expectations were
no less than to pour out a literary work that would be
beyond a creative presentation of form, a creation of both
poetry and truth itself and be as heartfelt as music, as
perfect as mathematics, and true as life:

...Und aus dem Sallust floH in jenen glficklichen,
belebten Tagen wie durch nie verstopfte Rehren
die Erkenntnis der Form, die jenseits des Geheges
der rhetorischen Kunststficke erst geahnt werden
kann, die, von welcher man nicht mehr sagen kann,
daB sie das Stoffliche anordne, denn sie

durchdringt es, sie hebt es auf und schafft
Dichtung und Wahrheit zugleich, ein Widerspiel

22

ewiger Krafte, ein Ding, herrlich wie Musik und
Algebra. Dies war mein Lieblingsplan. (XII:9)

He had believed that he sensed in the fables and myths
of ancient Greece and Rome the hieroglyphs of hidden truths
about life, a “geheime, unerschdpfliche WeiBheit”(XII:9)
that had inspired other artists to paint and sculpt, and
that could also inspire him to new achievements. He had
pondered and longed to disappear into the antique world of
both physical and intellectual inspiration, of both “die
nackten, glanzenden Leiber” of the Sirens and the letters
of Cicero and Julius Caesar and unite them in a Nietzschean
fashion, then to return again with “Zungen”, i.e., with the
ability to articulate what he had experienced.

However, he then became so overcome by the experience
that he could not communicate it. He has had a vision of
life in which he saw all of nature as a unity in which
there are no contradictions such as spirit and flesh, and
every being in it as a “key” to the understanding of this
whole, and himself in the middle of it. In this unity of
reality, words became mere fragments that don’t and can't
hang together meaningfully. No wonder that he is unable to
directly articulate this experience into language, either
in thought or speech form:

Mein Fall ist, in Kfirze, dieser: Es ist mir
vollig die Fahigkeit abhanden gekommen, fiber

23

irgend etwas zusammenhangend zu denken oder zu
sprechen.(XII:1l)

Not only are words inadequate to express felt
experience, Hofmannsthal gives a richly sense-affecting
picture of how repulsive their inadequacy becomes. They are
like decaying fungi, hopelessly formless, even if once
useable, and now they are even disgusting as he tries to
form them and feel them in his mouth.

...Ich empfand ein unerklarliches Unbehagen, die
Worte “Geist”, “Seele” oder “Korper” nur
auszusprechen. ...sondern die abstrakten Worte,
deren sich doch die Zunge naturgemaB bedienen
muB, ...zerfielen mir im Munde wie modrige
Pilze.(XII:ll—12)

This crisis of expression then leads to a crisis about
the ability to judge and to doubts about the certainty of
knowledge in the world, until even his previous vision of
unity crumbles into pieces, and the pieces into still
smaller fragments:

Es gelang mir nicht mehr, sie mit dem
vereinfachenden Blick der Gewohnheit zu erfassen.
Es zerfiel mir alles in Teile, die Teile wieder
in Teile, und nichts mehr lieB sich mit einem
Begriff umspannen. Die einzelnen Worte schwammen
um mich; sie gerannen zu Augen, die mich
anstarrten und in die ich wieder hineinstarren
muB: Wirbel sind sie, in die hinabzusehen mich
schwindelt, die sich unaufhaltsam drehen und
durch die hindurch man ins Leere kommt. (XII:13)

He envisions an ultimate emptiness of words

themselves, and they lose their connections to meaning and

24

even each other. They can do no more than mutely stare
back at him like eyes when he confronts them. In this
moment, language seems to him to be a formless abyss,
leading to a lonely emptiness instead of a way to
communicating meaning.

Unfortunately, the contemplation of the perfect
harmonies of form in ancient Greece and Rome do not relieve
this formless emptiness, but conjure up a picture of
eyeless, lifeless statues in a garden, and leave him with a
horrible feeling of loneliness.(XII:13) The words and the
vision they represent, i.e., the “eyes” are gone, and
communication is not possible.

However, when he overcomes and flees from this horrible
state of lonely awareness he becomes himself an unnameable
Dasein, a “being” who is ready to see life anew, although
curiously not hardly any different from anyone else. But
his artist’s eyes then become overcome and he is again
filled with a new way of seeing the world around him as a
unity, even in single objects, and although he can hardly
give his experience names, he nevertheless succeeds to
describe it to a considerable extent by means of supposedly
unreliable words:

...die Worte lassen mich wiederum im Stich. Denn

es ist ja etwas vellig Unbenanntes und auch wohl
kaum Benennbares, das in solchen Augenblicken,

25

irgendeine Erscheinung meiner alltaglichen
Umgebung mit einer fiberschwellenden Flut beheren
Lebens wie ein GefaB erffillend, mir sich
ankfindet.... Eine GieBkanne, eine auf dem Felde
verlassene Egge, ein Hund in der Sonne, ein
firmlicher Kirchhof, ein Krfippel, ein kleines
Bauernhaus, alles dies kann das GefaB meiner
Offenbarung werden. (XII:14)

It should be noted that the objects that are inspiring
him as an artist, such as a watering can, a dog, a small
farmhouse, a cripple, etc., are not perfect, beautiful
platonic forms but the everyday objects of life—-and death:
after having poison spread for the rats in his cellar, the
feeling of unity lets him see and feel their death
struggles. This new vision also makes the life—and-death
histories of ancient Greece and Rome come alive for him as
if he were experiencing everything along with them, in a
moment of both more and less than sympathy and empathy in
which life and death, dreaming and waking run together
(XII:15-l6).

This vision is felt rather than thought. Mute objects
are able to “speak” to him in a wordless but meaningful
“language” of feeling that he somehow understands with his
heart and that fills him with a feeling of seeing life in
everything and a kind of divine love of unity with and for

all things, alive or not, and his own body-—or at least his

heart-—is composed of “ciphers” that unlock for him the

26

 

whole mystery of being:

Diese stummen und manchmal unbelebten Kreaturen
heben sich mir mit einer solchen Ffille, einer
solchen Gegenwart der Liebe entgegen, daB

mein beglficktes Auge auch ringsum auf keinen
toten Fleck zu fallen vermag. Es erscheint mir
alles, was meine verworrensten Gedanken berfihren,
etwas zu sein.... ich ffihle ein entzfickendes,
schlechthin unendliches Widerspiel in mir und um
mich, und es gibt unter den
gegeneinanderspielenden Materien keine, in die
ich nicht hinfiberzuflieBen vermdchte. Es ist mir
dann, als bestfinde mein Kerper aus lauter
Chiffren, die mir alles aufschlieBen. Oder als
kdnnten wir in ein neues, ahnungsvolles
Verhaltnis zum ganzen Dasein treten, wenn wir
anfingen, mit dem Herzen zu denken. (XII:16-17)

The great irony of Ein Brief is that Hofmannsthal

 

writes very powerfully and elegantly about the
impossibility of writing, but a closer consideration shows
that this is not a contradiction, as some maintain.20
Knowledge is not the problem, nor is having a “vision”
about life. The difficulty lies in how the artist--or
anyone else--can cross the abyss and communicate his or her
way of seeing life. The problem that depresses Hofmannsthal
is not that one cannot write about something, but rather
that the words themselves are potentially meaningless and
useless because words express feelings that are mediated

through thought, which in turn depends on language for its

form, and thus both thought and expression necessarily lack

27

the richness and color of feeling.

Benjamin Bennett points out that “what Chandos had
earlier striven for by intellect, he now achieves in the
immediacy of experience,” and claims that Hofmannsthal is
asserting that there are two classes of people: those who
can use their poetic vision and those who can‘t: the
intellectual artist and the non-intellectual. Lord Chandos
clearly belongs to the first group. The irony, according to
Bennett, is that this poetic vision is something that
aesthetes and “intellectuals strive for but can never
attain,” and that “the non-intellectual possesses but can
make no use of,” nor do they appreciate what they have,
i.e., a “direct perception of the perfect wholeness of
being.” He then further states that Hofmannsthal “is
concerned less with the agony of the intellectual than with
the tragic discrepancy itself.”21

The “agony of the intellectual” artist in crisis,
along with the role of the everyday in the person and work
of the artist, and the difference between artist and
amateur as classes of people, are however central themes in
various treatments of the Kfinstlerproblematik by Thomas

Mann.

 

20

a See, for example, Bennett 110.

Bennett 111-113.

28

3. Thomas Mann and the Writer Who Can't Write

Thomas Mann also used the depiction of an artist in
crisis in several of his works at the beginning of the 20th
century in order to explore the identity and problems of
the artist and to overcome various doubts and concerns
about art. His characters were often fictional but with

semi—autobiographical elements, as with Tonio Krfiger (1903)

 

and Gustav von Aschenbach in Der Tod in Venedig (1912). In

 

Schwere Stunde (1905), however, he presents a fictional

 

treatment of a real writer whom he never names but is
obviously Schiller. Mann uses this pillar of Classicism to
explore his Modernist questions and to introduce the major
motifs that he ponders at more length in the other texts.
For Mann, artists are people in life who “see” the
world and themselves differently, and thus are necessarily
lonely outsiders. They seek happiness but find inspiration
in both extraordinary beauty and in ordinary objects, and
also in both Eros and their own suffering, and these things
are often connected and related somehow to their ability to
create. Their need for self-understanding and for
communicating their vision with others, however, can lead
them instead into an abyss of formless feeling in which

they are not able to produce.

29

 

3.1. The Artist in Crisis Defined: Schwere Stunde

 

The torment and frustration of a writer who can’t
write is familiar enough to anyone who has struggled with
verbal expression, such as in Thomas Mann’s imagining of

Schiller in a middle-of—the-night writing crisis in Schwere

Stunde”:

Er stand vom Schreibtisch auf, von seiner
kleinen, gebrechlichen Schreibekommode, stand auf
wie ein Verzweifelter und ging mit hangendem
Kopfe in den entgegengesetzten Winkel des Zimmers
zum Ofen... und schlechtes Wetter war fiber Jena
seit Wochen, seit Wochen, das war richtig, ein
miserables und hassenswertes Wetter, das man in
allen Nerven spfirte, wfist, finster und kalt, und
der Dezemberwind heulte im Ofenrohr, verwahrlost
und gottverlassen, daB es klang nach nachtiger
Heide im Sturm und Irrsal und heillosem Gram der
Seele. Aber gut war sie nicht, diese enge
Gefangenschaft, nicht gut ffir die Gedanken und
den Rhythmus des Blutes, aus dem die Gedanken
kamen.... (418-419)

The burden of taking the unformed chaos of experience
and expressing it in a communicable form is for him like
imposing form on the sea, and yet it is at the same time a
burden that, like the sea, is both horrible and
irresistible:

Er stand am Ofen und blickte mit einem raschen
und schmerzlich angestrengten Blinzeln hinfiber zu

dem Werk, von dem er geflohen war, dieser Last,
diesem Druck, dieser Gewissensqual, diesem Meer,

 

R All citations are from: Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke in zwolf
Banden, IX: Erzéhlungen (Berlin; Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1965)

 

30

das auszutrinken, dieser furchtbaren Aufgabe, die
sein Stolz und sein Elend, sein Himmel und seine
Verdammnis war. Es schleppte sich, es stockte,
es stand--schon wieder, schon wieder! Das Wetter
war schuld und sein Katarrh und seine Mfidigkeit.
Oder das Werk? Oder die Arbeit selbst? Die eine
unglfickselige und der Verzweiflung geweihte
Empfangnis war? (418)

Such despair leads Mann's Schiller to an existential
reflection about the source, process, purpose, and personal
price of his writing, and he concludes that it is Schmerz
und Leiden which fuels and feeds poetic Leidenschaft and
‘Nhich develops the ability to express what is experienced.
Pain is not to be avoided, but a thing to be grateful for
as a necessity for creation, i.e., a death out of which one
creates life in art. Furthermore, it is both this struggle
eand this ability to name experience, i.e., put the
(experience into words, that combined together can save the
eartist from being overwhelmed by his or her vision:

Eine Nacht der flammenden Stimmung, da man auf
einmal in einem genialisch leidenschaftlichen
Lichte sah, was werden konnte, wenn man immer
solcher Gnade genieBen dfirfte, muBte bezahlt
werden mit einer Woche der Finsternis und der
Lahmung... Der Schmerz... Wie das Wort ihm die
Brust weitete! Er reckte sich auf, verschrankte
die Arme; und sein Blick, unter den retlichen,
zusammenstehenden Brauen, beseelte sich mit
schdner Klage. Man war noch nicht elend, ganz
elend noch nicht, solange es meglich war, seinem
Elend eine stolze und edle Benennung zu schenken.
Eins war Not: Der gute Mut, seinem Leben groBe
und schone Namen zu geben! ...Glauben, an den
Schmerz glauben konnen.... Das Talent selbst--war
es nicht Schmerz? Und wenn das dort, das unselige

31

Werk, ihn Leiden machte, war es nicht in Ordnung
so und fast schon ein gutes Zeichen? (421—422)

Amateur authors, i.e., those whose ability to bring
form to their expression may come easier but ultimately may
also be comparatively weak and ineffective, no matter how
Inuch or strongly they feel, do not experience this
suffering as intensively as the developed artist:

Es hat noch niemals gesprudelt, und sein
Misstrauen wfirde erst eigentlich beginnen, wenn
er das tate. Nur bei Stfimpern und Dilettanten
sprudelt es, bei den Schnellzufriedenen und
Unwissenden, die nicht unter dem Druck und der
Zucht des Talents lebten. Denn das Talent, meine
Herren und Damen dort unten, weithin im Parterre,
das Talent ist nichts Leichtes, nichts
Tandelndes, es ist nicht ohne weiteres ein
Konnen. In der Wurzel ist es Bedfirfnis, ein
kritisches Wissen um das Ideal, eine
Ungenfigsamkeit, die sich ihr Kennen nicht

ohne Qual erst schafft und steigert. Und den
GrdBten, den Ungenfigsamsten ist ihr Talent die
scharfste GeiBel.(422)

For Mann, the human quest for self-knowledge is
eternal and leads to a search for the meaning of existence
in general. This search is no less than the search for life
itself, for knowledge of the self and knowledge of others,
i.e., the world, and an understanding of the relationship
between these opposing things. For developed artists, this
is a more painful, painstaking search because they live

more self-consciously and they try to create or rather re—

create their understanding and impressions of life in an

32

expression that is a communicable form, but their
experience may be more than the limits of the form can
express.

Pain and suffering are however not the only sources of
artistic vision for Mann. The pain-producing search for
life and knowledge is also more specifically the search for
love, beauty, happiness, and the feeling of being alive. It
is to know and be known, to see beauty and to be seen as
beautiful, and to love and to be loved, whether by a single
person in a close relationship or by an adoring public.
Mann describes Schiller jealously praising his own
greatness and ability to suffer as well as egotistically
longing for and justifying the love of his readers by his
struggle to produce:

Gekannt sein--gekannt und geliebt von den velkern
der Erde! Schwatzet von Ichsucht, die ihr nichts
wiBt von der SfiBigkeit dieses Traumes und
Dranges! Ichsfichtig ist alles AuBerordentliche,
sofern es leidet.
...Denn tiefer noch, als diese Ichsucht, lebte
das BewuBtsein, sich dennoch bei alldem im
Dienste vor irgend etwas Hohem, ohne Verdienst
freilich, sondern unter einer Notwendigkeit,
uneigennfitzig zu verzehren und aufzuopfern. Und
dies war seine Eifersucht DaB niemand groBer
werde als er, der nicht auch tiefer als er um
dieses Hohe gelitten. (422-423)

Mann associates inspiration with Glfick (happiness),

which in Schiller's mind is connected with his wife who is

sleeping all the while that Schiller himself is awake and

33

musing over the meaning, purpose, and use of his suffering.
Feminine muses and happiness through women’s love have long
been seen as sources of creative inspiration for (mainly
male) artists. As Goethe writes at the end of Faust II,

Das Unbeschreibliche,

Hier wird's getan;

das Ewigweibliche

Zieht uns hinan. (12108-12111)23

And yet Schiller also feels what is yet another
paradox of the artist's production according to Mann: it is
his closeness to her that makes his inspiration possible,
and yet his inspiration prevents closeness, because
artists' privileged vision requires a certain distance,
even a Verfremdung (to use Brecht’s term) from humanity
which necessarily separates them from others.

Mein Weib! Geliebte! Folgtest du meiner Sehnsucht
und tratest du zu mir, mein Glfick zu sein?.... Und
ich darf nicht allzusehr dein, nie ganz in dir
sein, um dessentwillen, was meine Sendung ist....
(425)

Schiller’s wife cannot share his suffering, because
she belongs to a different, more everyday level of
experience of the world. She is a worldly muse, not an
otherworldly one, who nevertheless feeds him with

transcendent inspiration; a mortal object for his love, who

also loves him, and out of this love he creates the “music”

34

in his soul from which he then forms words. After looking
at her, he is able to begin to write again:

Wer schuf, wie er, aus dem Nichts, aus der
eigenen Brust? War nicht als Musik, als reines
Urbild des Seins ein Gedicht in seiner Seele
geboren, lange bevor es sich Gleichnis und Kleid
aus der Welt der Erscheinungen lieh? Geschichte,
Weltweisheit, Leidenschaft: Mittel und Vorwande,
nicht mehr, ffir etwas, was wenig mit ihnen zu
schaffen, was seine Heimat in orphischen Tiefen
hatte. Worte, Begriffe: Tasten nur, die sein
Kfinstlertum schlug, um ein verborgenes
Saitenspiel klingen zu machen... (424)

...er ging und ergriff die Feder....

Nicht ins Chaos hinabsteigen, sich wenigstens
nicht dort aufhalten! Sondern aus dem Chaos,
welches die Ffille ist, ans Licht emporheben, was
fahig und reif ist, Form zu gewinnen. Nicht
grfibeln! Arbeiten! Begrenzen, ausschalten,
gestalten, fertig werden.... (425)

Words and putting feeling into form thus becomes the way of
salvation out of the chaos and abyss of feeling.

As the artist learns to visit the chaotic sea of human
experience, and then observe it from within long enough to
gain experience, but then also finds the means and the
talent to observe it from without, he or she will be able
to express the “music” of life, however fragmentary, and
achieve the sought—after goal, i.e., knowledge and even
happiness:

Und es wurde fertig, das Leidenswerk. Es wurde

vielleicht nicht gut, aber es wurde fertig. Und
als es fertig war, siehe, da war es auch gut. Und

 

” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: eine Tragpdie, Erster und zweiter

Teil (Munich: dtv, 1997) 351.

 

35

aus seiner Seele, aus Musik und Idee, rangen sich
neue Werke hervor, klingende und schimmernde
Gebilde, die in heiliger Form die unendliche
Heimat wunderbar ahnen lieBen, wie in der Muschel
das Meer saust, dem sie entfischt ist.(425)
Thus we see that in this short (only nine pages) but
intensive text, Thomas Mann uses the writer Friedrich
Schiller to explore his own understanding of the

fundamental issues connected with being an artist and

producing art, a device which he also uses in Tonio Krdger

 

and in Der Tod in Venedig, among other works. His Schiller

 

can be said to be an epitome of the artist in crisis,
according to Mann's understanding of it. He uses the
negative figure of a writer who can't write to positively
understand what artists are, and how they do what they do.

For Mann, genuinely talented artists are different
from other people not only in their ability to see but also
in their ability to express themselves. They see the world
differently; namely, they observe themselves and humanity
with a greater sense of distance, but they are also then
able to express their vision back to the world in various
degrees and fragmentary bits through various means of sense
media and communication, whether visual or aural, in
paintings, music, writing, etc. The “ordinary” person does
not reflect to the same degree and depth because this

observational distance is lacking or lesser, and the

36

ability to put expression into form is weaker and less
precise.

Difference creates distance and separateness from the
everyday world, and separateness causes the desire for
belonging to the ordinary and everyday, in spite of its
ultimate impossibility. This is also the cause of suffering
for the artist, and the degree of difference potentially
parallels the depth of pain. But this pain also creates the
desire for knowledge of the self and the world as well as
an understanding of this separateness. Thus difference and
separateness are also the very thing that makes possible
the artist’s privileged perspective, and thus also the
source of artistic satisfaction and achievement.

The need for inspiration leads not only to a search
for knowledge, but also “beauty” of form, by which may be
meant both the elegant simplicity of the ordinary as well
as the purity of form. Thus, even works with “ugly” content
may be nevertheless beautiful if their form is well-
ordered.

This need and longing often involves a longing for
love which is usually depicted as somehow impossible, and
thus the source of even more deep suffering and
inspiration. But this poses yet another question: why does

the artist so often find love and beauty necessary for

37

inspiration? I propose that the following examples from
Tonio Kréger and Der Tod in Venedig will show that it has a
function that is directly related to the search for self—
knowledge and knowledge of the world, and a connection
between the artist’s knowledge and the need to share this

knowledge.

3.2. The Artist and Art That Lives: Tonio Krbger

 

The nature of the genuine artist and of artistic
production is the central theme of Mann’s 1905 short story
Tonio Krdger. The story presents a writer who is the
product of both the blond North and the dark South, with
all the things these regions symbolize, much like Mann
himself. It begins with his childhood and the events and
personalities that influenced him, including his affection
for a blond boy and an unrequited love for a blond girl in
school. The story then moves to the studio of his painter-
girlfriend Lisaweta in Munich where he discusses with her
his musings about the nature of art and artists. It
continues with his lonely journey to the North, including a
trip to his childhood (in many senses,) and ends with his
letters to Lisaweta about his experiences and further
thoughts about art.

Tonio learns early as a teenager that he is different.

38

His darkness not only makes him look different from the
others, he is different because he sees differently and has
different interests. Unlike the other children, he is
obsessed with literature, writes poetry, and he observes
and reflects on the world from this perspective of
difference which aids the development of his artist’s eye.
He also suffers wordlessly because of his love for blond,
blue-eyed “normal” people like Hans and Inge who do not or
cannot share his interests and vision. However it is this
very suffering that is both the source of his inspiration
and the thing that makes him confront and question the
meaning of the world and himself in it-—a process which
also makes him happy:

Tonio sprach nicht. Er empfand Schmerz.

...Die Sache war die, daB Tonio Hans Hansen
liebte und schon vieles um ihn gelitten hatte.
Wer am meisten liebt, ist der Unterlegene und muB
leiden, --diese schlichte und harte Lehre hatte
seine vierzehnjahrige Seele bereits vom Leben
entgegengenommen; und er war so geartet, daB er
solche Erfahrungen wohl vermerkte, sie gleichsam
innerlich aufschrieb und gewissermaBen seine
Freude daran hatte... Auch war es so mit ihm
bestellt, dab er solche Lehren weit wichtiger und
interessanter achtete als die Kenntnisse, die man
in der Schule aufnétigte, ja, daB er sich wahrend
der Unterrichtsstunden in den gotischen
Klassengewolben meistens damit abgab, solche
Einsichten bis auf Grund zu empfinden und vollig
auszudenken. Und diese Beschaftigung bereitete
ihm eine ganz ahnliche Genugtuung, wie wenn er
mit seiner Geige [...] in seinem Zimmer
umherging... (205-206)

39

'va

'8

(T

(3"
(I)

The blond Hans Hansen won’t understand Schiller’s 993
Carlos, even if he does actually read it as Tonio hopes,
but Tonio is also somehow content to leave him in the world
of horse books that he prefers:

Hans wfirde Don Carlos lesen, und dann wfirden sie
etwas miteinander haben, [...]vielleicht brachte
er ihn noch dazu, Verse zu schreiben?... Nein,
nein das wollte er nicht! Hans sollte nicht
werden wie Tonio, sondern bleiben, wie er war, so
hell und stark, wie alle ihn liebten und Tonio am
meisten! Aber daB er Don Carlos las, wfirde
trotzdem nicht schaden... Und Tonio ging durch
das alte, untersetzte Tor, ging am Hafen entlang
und die steile, zugige und nasse Giebelgasse
hinauf zum Haus seiner Eltern. Damals lebte sein
Herz; Sehnsucht war darin und schwermfitiger Neid
und ein klein wenig Verachtung und eine ganze
keusche Seligkeit. (213)

 

 

As an adult, Tonio becomes an artist, and suffers, but

realizes like Schiller in Schwere Stunde that suffering and

 

“death“ to an average existence are inspiration for art,
because “gute Werke nur unter dem Druck eines schlimmen
Lebens entstehen... wer lebt, nicht arbeitet, und daB man
gestorben sein muB, um ganz ein Schaffender zu sein.“ (224)
He adopts the life of an artist wholeheartedly and
dedicates himself to the power of the intellect and the
word, a power which he holds for “die erhabenste auf Erden”
because it permits him to have a vision of no less than
humanity and the world, including himself, “enthroned”

above “unbewuBten und stummen Leben“, and allows him to see

40

s ‘p

v.

beyond language:

Sie scharfte seinen Blick und lieB ihn die groBen

werter durchschauen, die der Menschen Busen
blahen, sie erschloB ihm der Menschen Seelen und
seine eigene, machte ihn hellsehend und zeigte
ihm das Innere der Welt und alles Letzte, was
hinter den Worten und Taten ist. (222)
Like Nietzsche, he feels that although his vision and
talent set him apart from the rest of life and humanity,
the joy that art brings is the only thing that makes life

bearable:

Da kam, mit der Qual und dem Hochmut der

Erkenntnis, die Einsamkeit, weil es im Kreise der

Harmlosen mit dem frohlich dunklen Sinn nicht
litt.... Aber mehr und mehr versfiBte sich ihm
auch die Lust am Worte und der Form, denn er

pflegte zu sagen (und hatte es auch bereits

aufgeschrieben, daB die Kenntnis der Seele allein
unfehlbar trfibsinnig machen wfirde, wenn nicht die

Vergnfigungen des Ausdrucks uns wach und munter
erhielten.... (222)

As his girlfriend works at her painting, he muses
aloud on the nature of art and artists: “Aber was ist der
Kfinstler? Vor keiner Frage hat die Bequemlichkeit und
Erkenntnistragheit der Menschheit sich zaher erwiesen als
vor dieser.“ (230) Artists need detachment from life and
humanity in order to impose form on life and thus produce
art, live—filled art, but they also need feelings and
experience of life in order to have living content for
their form. Tonio admits to Lisaweta that despite his

differentness, he necessarily loves ordinary life because

41

he is a writer of literature, and so should any real

artist:
Nicht als eine Vision von blutiger Grebe und
wilder Schenheit, nicht als das Ungewfihnliche
stellt es uns Ungewohnlichen sich dar; sondern
das Normale, Wohlanstandige und Liebenswfirdige
ist das Reich unserer Sehnsucht, ist das Leben in
seiner verffihrerischen Banalitat! Der ist noch
lange kein Kfinstler, meine Liebe, dessen letzte
und tiefste Schwarmerei das Raffinierte,
Exzentrische und Satanische ist, der die
Sehnsucht nicht kennt nach dem Harmlosen,
Einfachen und Lebendigen, nach ein wenig
Freundschaft, Hingebung, Vertraulichkeit und
menschlichem Glfick - die verstohlene und zehrende
Sehnsucht, Lisaweta, nach den Wonnen der
Gewohnlichkeit! (235)

But artists also suffer from their vision—-what Tonio
calls “Erkenntnisekel” (knowledge-sickness): “der Zustand,
in dem es dem Menschen genfigt, eine Sache durchschauen, um
sich bereits zum Sterben angewidert... zu ffihlen.“ (233)
What the artist sees is sometimes too much. And thus words
become the artists' way to relieve themselves of the burden
of their vision and their feelings.(234)

Still stalled in his work by his ponderings about life
and art and artists, Tonio decides to have a change of
scene by traveling north to the city of his childhood and
then beyond to Denmark. His strange experiences with trying
to prove his identity to the authorities in his own

hometown, where his home has been turned into a library and

his only identification is his corrected manuscript of

42

text-in-progress, plus a coincidental confrontation with
the sight of Hans and Inge, the blond, blue-eyed “ordinary”
people he had adored in childhood, prompt him to write
Lisaweta a letter filled with further observations on the
nature of the artist’s love of life, which he compares to
the divine love for humanity mentioned in I Corinthians 13:

Ich stehe zwischen ywei Welten, bin in keiner
daheim und habe es infolgedessen ein wenig schwer
...Ich bewundere die Stolzen und Kalten, die auf
den Pfaden der groBen, der damonischen Schdnheit
abenteuern und den "Menschen“ verachten, - aber
ich beneide sie nicht. Denn wenn irgendetwas
imstande ist, aus einem Literaten einen Dichter
zu machen, so ist es diese meine Bfirgerliebe zum
Menschlichen, Lebendigen und Gewdhnlichen. Alle
Wérme, alle Gfite, aller Humor kommt aus ihr, und
fast will mir scheinen, als sei sie jene Liebe
selbst, von der geschrieben steht, daB einer mit
Menschen- und Engelszungen reden konne und ohne
sie doch nur ein tonendes Erz und eine klingende
Schelle sei. (271)

Without this love of life, the artist’s work is but

lifeless, empty form.

3.3. The Artist and Eros in the Word: Der Tod in Venedig

 

Thomas Mann further explores the nature of inspiration

in Der Tod in Venedig (1912) by illustrating the decline

 

and death of the writer Gustav von Ashenbach as he attempts
to overcome his writer’s block and is confronted by his
imbalance as an artist. This imbalance is due to a

Nietzschean overemphasis on order, cool intellect and

43

Apollo, i.e., the things that have trained his talent for
form and a suppression of life and earthly feeling, i.e.
Dionysus. His attempt to overcome this imbalance by
awakening Eros in his ordered life, and then also in his
writing, will lead to losing himself mentally and
eventually to his contracting of cholera and his physical
degradation and destruction.
Like Mann himself, Gustav von Aschenbach is a writer
whom society has praised as a master of language, his
phrasing and word choice earning his works a pedestal
position in the schools as examples of writing. He is a man
who is used to expressing himself through words and has
been praised and honored for his talent and perfection of
form.
As a young artist he had been rash and lively, and he
had cynically questioned the meaning of art itself:
Er hatte dem Geiste gefrdnt, mit der Erkenntnis
Raubbau getrieben, Saatfrucht vermahlen,
Geheimnisse preisgegeben, das Talent verdachtigt,
die Kunst verraten... durch seine Zynismen fiber
das fragwfirdige Wesen der Kunst, des Kfinstlertums
selbst in Atem gehalten. (465-466)

But as a mature artist he had learned to put “sympathy

with the abyss” of feeling behind him and concentrate on

producing art distinguished by dignity, mastery of form,

and a care with phrasing that eventually earned him the

noble addition of “von” to his name and put his works on

mandatory academic reading lists:
War es eine geistige Folge dieser “Wiedergeburt”,
dieser neuen Wfirde und Strenge, daB man um
dieselbe Zeit ein fast fibermaBiges Erstarken
seines Schdnheitssinnes beobachtete, jene adelige
Reinheit, Einfachheit und EbenmaBigkeit der
Formgebung, welche seinen Produktion fortan ein
so sinnfalliges, ja gewolltes Geprage des
Meisterlichkeit und Klassizitat verlieh? (466-
467)

As the story begins, however, his inability to find
inspiration and to write, plus a mysterious and symbol-
laden, sensuous dream, lead him to decide to travel south
to Venice for a change of scene, the opposite direction of
Tonio Krdger. However, this journey also turns out to be an
experience that challenges his identity as an artist,
although toward death instead of toward life. But where
Tonio Kroger survives and finds himself on his trip,
Aschenbach loses himself as a man and as an artist and
dies.

At his hotel in Venice he sees a Polish mother and her
children, among whom is an unusually pretty boy named
Tadzio. Aschenbach is struck by the statue-like physical
perfection of the boy, and finds himself more and more out
of control in his need to follow the boy around Venice in

order to observe his beauty, feel love for him, and be

inspired by this love. Aschenbach even lets himself be

45

talked into dying his hair and wearing makeup and more
youthful clothing in the hopes of being pleasing to his
object, something his former sense of dignity would have
never allowed.

Nevertheless, in spite of his feelings he cannot bring
himself to speak with the boy nor have any real contact
except glances. He is in the grip of an infatuation such
that even when he knows that Venice is hiding from the
tourists the fact that cholera is spreading, he does not
warn the others as he can neither bear the thought that
Tadzio's family might leave nor can he leave himself, even
to save his life, as long as Tadzio is still there.

His justification for his actions is that this exposure
to beauty will put “Eros in the word” and not only enable
him to write, but even inspire him to produce works which
will surpass what he had previously achieved by
incorporating thought into feeling and feeling into
thought:

Und zwar ging sein Verlangen dahin, in Tadzios
Gegenwart zu arbeiten, beim Schreiben den Wuchs
des Knaben zum Muster zu nehmen, seinen Stil den
Linien dieses Korpers folgen zu lassen, der ihm
gettlich schien, und seine Schdnheit ins Geistige
zu tragen, wie der Adler einst den troischen
Hirten zum Ather trug. Nie hatte er die Lust des
Wortes sfiBer empfunden, nie so gewusst, daB Eros
im Worte sei, wie wahrend der gefahrlich

kOStlichen Stunden, in denen er, an seinem rohen
Tische unter dem Schattentuch, im Angesicht des

46

Idols und die Music seiner Stimme im Ohr...
Sonderbare Stunden! Sonderbar entnervende Mfihe!
Seltsam zeugender Verkehr des Geistes mit einem
Kerper! Als Aschenbach seine Arbeit verwahrte und
vom Strande aufbrach, ffihlte er sich erschopft,
ja zerrfittet, und ihm war, als ob sein Gewissen
wie nach einer Ausschweifung Klage ffihre. (504-
505)

But as a lifelong devotee of perfection of form he is
overwhelmed by his inability to bring order to his passion:
he gives in to his feelings and follows the boy and his
family around Venice, helpless to stop himself, until he
eventually contracts cholera--perhaps from decaying,
infested strawberries, symbolic of the decay of both
Aschenbach and Venice itself. He has another dream which is
literally an orgy of Dionysian symbolism, after which he
acknowledges and gives in to his loss of Apollo, and he
dies later while sitting on the beach, observing Tadzio,
and daydreaming—-or perhaps hallucinating——about Plato's
dialog with Phaedrus about the dangers of the abyss of
feeling for the artist. He has spent his life in art, but
both he and his art have lost their connection to life and

they cannot regain balance.

Christopher Butler points out that Der Tod in Venedig

 

is a modernist work not only because of its Expressionist
emphasis on psychological states and its presentation of a

Nietzschean confrontation between Dionysus and Apollo, but

47

also because of Mann’s use of ambiguity of voice and hidden
quotation, such as in the Plato conversations, which Mann
slightly reworks for his own purposes. Which ideas are
Plato's and which are Aschenbach’s own thoughts is
sometimes not clear. It “dramatizes the divided

consciousness” by having the “self split off from its ‘own’

voice, and the language of citation takes over.”24

Aschenbach can’t even find words of his own.

Of course, Hofmannsthal and Mann were not the only
writers to pursue the language and inspiration issues of
the Kfinstlerproblematik. Lord Chandos could have penned
this poem by Ernst Stadler:

In einem alten Buche stieB ich auf ein Wort, das
traf mich wie ein Schlag und brennt durch meine
Tage fort:

Und wenn ich mich an trfibe Lust vergebe,

Schein, Lug und Spiel zu mir anstatt des Wesens
hebe,

Als ware Dunkles klar, als wenn nicht Leben
tausend wild verschlossene Tore trfige,

Und Dinge fasse, deren Sein mich niemals
aufgewfihlt,

Wenn mich willkommner Traum mit Sammethanden
streicht,

Und Tag und Wirklichkeit von mir entweicht,

Der Welt entfremdet, fremd dem tiefsten Ich,

Dann steht das Wort mir auf: Mensch, werde
wesentlich!25

And Gustav von Aschenbach might as well have written

Stadtler’s poem “Form ist Wollust” during his struggle to

 

2‘ Butler 98-99.

48

balance order and feeling:

Form und Riegel muBten erst zerspringen,

Welt durch aufgeschlossene Rohren dringen:

Form ist Wollust, Friede, himmlisches
Genfigen,

Doch mich reiBt es, Ackerschollen
umzupflfigen.

Form will mich verschnfiren und verengen,
Doch will ich mein Sein in alle Weiten
drangen -

Form ist klare Harte ohn’ Erbarmen,

Doch mich reibt es zu den Dumpfen, zu den
Armen,

Und in grenzenlosem Michverschenken

Will mich Leben mit Erffillung tr'anken.26

4. Modern and Postmodern Alternatives to the Word

Language orders and gives form to feeling, and it
makes thought and communicative expression possible.
However, other mediums, such as music or color or movement,
are also able to communicate and be expressive, and are
more directly communicative than words alone. This fact was
not overlooked by modern artists, and some tried to
reinforce or strengthen their art by employing multiple
forms. Others attempted to even replace words with other

media.

4.1. Music and Words

Music is perhaps the first means that comes to mind

 

25 Dietrich Bode, ed., Gedichte des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Reclam,

 

49

when thinking about alternative ways to communicate. The
power of music as a tool to affect people has been
acknowledged and warned against since at least the time of
Socrates, and today some music forms such as rap are blamed
for youth violence and immorality and even the corruption
of society in general. Much myth and mystery surrounds the
power of music, and objectively one can only observe that
it does somehow touch people more directly in ways that

words, or words alone, do not.

4.1.1. Wagner and the Multi—Medium Gesamtkunstwerk

 

One of Nietzsche's inspirations for his theories of
art was, of course, the composer Richard Wagner.

Wagner had hoped to revolutionize the opera stage with
his Gesamtkunstwerke in which he was composer, librettist,
and stage director, presenting Germanic myths in a way he
believed would make art again a “medium of life” and thus
restore the function of stage art that had been developed
in ancient Greece but lost by the time of modern,
“decadent” societyf27 Music and words would support each
other and the result would be a more affecting, effective

work. As he states in Art and Revolution:

 

 

1966) 44.
“ Bode 46.
27 Streim 37.

50

The deeds of Gods and men, their sufferings,
their delights, as they,--in all solemnity and
glee, as eternal rhythm, as eternal harmony of
every motion and of all creation,--lay disclosed
in Apollo himself; here they became actual and
true. For all that in them moved and lived, as it
moved and lived in the beholders, here found its
perfect expression; where eye and ear, as soul
and heart, lifelike and actual, seized and
perceived all, and saw all in spirit and in body
revealed; so that the imagination need no longer
vex itself with the attempt to conjure up the
image. Such a tragedy-day was a Feast of the God;
for here the god spoke clearly and intelligibly
forth, and the poet, as high-priest, stood real
and embodied in his artwork, led the measures of
the dance, raised voices to a choir, and in
ringing words proclaimed the utterances of
godlike wisdom.

Such was the Grecian work of art; such their
god Apollo, incarnated in actual, living art;
such was the Grecian people in its highest truth
and beauty.28

4.1.2. Benjamin Britten’s Opera Death in Venice

 

The difference between music and words as mediums may
be illustrated by Britten’s musical setting of Thomas

Mann's Der Tod in Venedig. As already mentioned, Mann was

 

famous for his extraordinary use of language and choice of
words, and his novella is a deep, complex, multi—layered
work, and thus any attempt to write an opera based on it
would seem to somehow disfigure the story or possibly

result in a quite different work. But I think that it is a

 

2' Wagner, Richard, The Artwork of the Future and Other Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis. (Lincoln;
London: Universitz of Nebraska Press, 1993) 33.

 

51

testament to Britten's talent that the more familiar you
are with Mann’s novella and the music forms that Britten
employs, the more you can appreciate and marvel at this
operatic setting of it.

The addition of music in the opera Death in Venice

 

brings a richness and directness to Thomas Mann's story
that the text alone cannot produce, and yet also manages to
stay very true to Mann. The novella is expressionistic in
that it emphasizes the psychological states and
disintegration of the main character, and it has a plot
that mostly concerns his reactions and self-analysis. Much
of the action in the story consists of the articulated and
unspoken feelings, longings, and experiences within
Aschenbach’s own mind, and in the opera these are often
conveyed through wordless passages of music. Furthermore,
Britten’s smaller orchestra sound and sparse orchestration
conveys the solitariness of Aschenbach’s lonely thoughts.
Because Mann depicts Venice as a complex, deceptive
place, dissonance and “tonal ambiguity”,:29 with polytonal

a 30 ' 0 I o o u
and semitonal harmonies fit its mu51cal description very

well-—something that words could not begin to accomplish.

 

m Eric Roseberry, ”Tonal Ambiguity in Death in Venice: A Symphonic

View” in: Donald Mitchell, ed., Death in Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987) 86.

w Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten (London: J.M. Dent and
Sons, Ltd., 1979) 531.

 

 

52

The conflicting, contrary situation of Venice is implied by
the mixed meters of the overture, often changing at each
bar: 5/4 — 4/4 — 6/4 - 5/4 - 4/4 — 5/4 — 2/4 - 4/4 - 6/4 —
5/4 - 3/4 - 4/4 - 2/4...M’Throughout the piece Britten
slips in and out of traditional tonality, sometimes
employing Schonberg’s twelve-tone row technique. Also,
there is often no key signature, and sometimes he mixes
modes,32 with the orchestral line in one key and the vocal
line in another.

The multi-medium influence of Wagner and Modernism is
shown by the importance of the orchestra vs. text in
telling the story, the frequent blur between aria and
recitative, and the use of leitmotifs instead of verbal
descriptions representing various people, things, places
and emotions that are important to the piece, e.g.
“Tadzio”, “plague”, Venice (“La Serenissima”), “longing”
and “canker”. The “canker” motif is a basso ostinato,
repeating itself over and over again in order to convey
Aschenbach’s increasingly obsessive and deteriorating state
of mind as he follows the Polish family around Venice.

Later in the story, all the notes of the Tadzio motif are

 

31
32

Britten 35-37.
Evans 533.

S3

played at once as a tone cluster in order to indicate
Aschenbach’s panic that Tadzio might leave the area.
Furthermore, there is the Gesamtkunstwerk-like
addition of visuals, in this case dance. To reinforce the
other elements and to emphasize the differentness and
heightened grace of Tadzio and his family, they are all
portrayed by dancers rather than singers. To still further
emphasize their separateness from Aschenbach, Britten uses
the Western equivalent of a Balinese gamelan-tuned
percussion orchestra to play their motifs, and “Tadzio” is
even based on a Balinese mode. By thus casting ballet
dancers in main roles, Britten raised dance in opera from a
kind of sideshow “to a new formal, dramatic and expressive

33
status”.

This Eastern element also serves to give (what is
to Western ears) an aura of exotic beauty, separate and
rare, which was precisely the effect he wanted to achieve.
Britten also excels at other musical effects in the
opera. We hear impressions not only of the bells of
Venice’s churches, but also the rowing of the gondolas, the
lilt of their movement and the little waves lapping against

them. We hear the gentle little breezes (a woodwind motif

of two chords) and the oppressive, plague-filled wind (with

 

B Mervyn Cooke, ”Britten and the Gamelan: Balinese Influence in Death

in Venice” in: Mitchell 115, 119, 121.

54

tuba). We even hear the snipping of the hotel barber’s
scissors in mincing woodwind notes.

But Britten’s musically descriptive talent goes even
further than effects and impressions and feelings;
sometimes music even replaces the words from the novella.
To those familiar with the text, hearing the orchestral
introduction to Aschenbach’s Dionysian nightmare at the end
of the story is to also hear the words of the correlative
passage in the narrative: “In dieser Nacht hatte er einen
furchtbaren Traum...”34

There are other things that the music can
automatically convey or emphasize. For instance, the common
function of the death figures is hinted at in the book by
certain described features that they may share, like red
hair or a red tie, or a skull-like face. In the opera,
these features are visually evident, and furthermore these
figures are all sung by the same person. Also, the songs of
the strolling players are only briefly described in the
novella; in the opera, they can be fully realized, with
lyrics that comment on Aschenbach’s personal crisis. (“For
you, forgotten honor, work and duty.... How shall I save my

35
soul?”)

 

34
35

Mann 528.
Britten 201.

55

In 1971, Britten himself was facing a life threatening
heart condition and he began looking for one last big role
to write for the tenor Peter Pears, who had been his
friend, colleague, and companion since 1937, and for whom

6 Britten and his chosen

he had written many of his works.3
librettist, Myfanwy Piper, acquired the rights to the
story37 and together they received permission and total
support from Mann’s family: Mann’s son 6010 even wrote back
that the writer used to say that if anyone were to set his

38

novel Dr. Faustus to music, it should be Britten. Thus he

 

began to compose the opera in October of 1971, and despite
other commitments and deteriorating health, finished the
score just before Christmas of 1972.

The critics were on the whole very impressed. One
wrote, “Benjamin Britten, consistently perverse in his
choice of opera subjects, has once again proved to be

impossible. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a complicated

 

and intense story, an artist’s inner monologue, lacking
conversation, lacking plot, has against all odds become a
great opera. Britten has turned it into one of the richest

and deepest of operatic character studies.”39

 

Rosamund Strode, ”A Death in Venice Chronicle“ in: Mitchell 26.
” Strode 29-30.
” Strode 26.

Edward Greenfield, The Guardian (16 June 1973) in: Mitchell 198.

 

56

Sadly, despite the effective use of both music and
text, it has not become a popular opera, and apart from a
few productions to celebrate the 25fl‘anniversary of its
premieres in England and the United States, it has been

largely unknown outside of the English-speaking world.

4.2. Color

Language orders and gives form to thought, and as with
music, some artists have suggested color as a more direct
medium of communication that could even possibly replace

words.

4.2.1. Hofmannsthal: Die Briefe des Zurfickgekehrten

In Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brief, color is included in his

 

vision of a total unity of all things, even if not in a
form as to be able to distinguish between colors.
Immediately following his description of the transformation
of words into modrige Pilze he describes the transformation
of his speech into colors so overwhelming that they make
him nauseous as he tries to talk to his little daughter:
...und dabei die mir im Munde zustromenden
Begriffe pldtzlich eine solche schillernde
Farbung annahmen und so ineinander fiberflossen,
daB ich den Satz, so gut es ging, zu Ende
haspelnd, so wie wenn mir unwohl ware und auch

tatsachlich bleich im Gesicht und mit heftigen
Druck auf der Stirn, das Kind allein lieB, die

57

Tfir mir zuschlug und mich erst zu Pferde...
wieder einigermaBen herstellte. (XII:12)

Hofmannsthal wrote Ein Brief in 1902, and later

 

returned to the idea of color as a form of communication in

1907 with another fictional letter, the Briefe des

 

Zurfickgekehrten, incidentally five years before Kandinsky

 

published his theories about color in Uber das Geistige in

 

der Kunst.

 

Here Hofmannsthal offers the mental progression not of
an author, but of a businessman who is returning to Germany
after an absence of 18 years. But like Chandos, he is
undergoing an existential crisis of knowledge and language,
in which his knowledge is divided against itself, and he
complains that he cannot find the words to explain what he
has experienced:
Meine Begriffe sind mir fiber dem wirklichen
Ansehen in diesen vier Monaten verlorengegangen,
und ich weiB nicht, was an ihre Stelle getreten
ist: ein zerspaltenes Geffihl von der Gegenwart,
eine zerstreute Benommenheit, eine innere
Unordnung, die nahe an Unzufriedenheit ist - und
fast zum ersten Mal im Leben widerfahrt mirs, daB
ein Geffihl von mir selbst sich aufdrangt.
(XII:279)

Again like Chandos, he is writing to a friend to explain

the kind of sickness he feels, sparked by the

contemplation of an exhibition of paintings by Van Gogh.

The things that makes the biggest impression on him are the

58

colors, which let loose a feeling of understanding of the
“Beings” he sees:

Aber was sind Farben, wofern nicht das innerste
Leben der Gegenstande in ihnen hervorbricht! Und
dieses innerste Leben war da, Baum und Stein und
Mauer und Holzweg gaben ihr Innerstes von sich,
gleichsam entgegen warfen sie es mir, aber nicht
die Wollust und Harmonie ihres schdnen stummen
Lebens, wie sie mir vorzeiten manchmal aus alten
Bildern, wie eine zauberische Atmosphare
entgegenfloB: nein, nur die Wucht des Daseins,
das wfitende, von Unglaublichkeit umstarrte Wunder
ihres Daseins fiel mir meine Seele an...
(XII:303)

He sees Beings in all things, natural and man-made:

jeder Baum, jeder Streif gelben oder grfinlichen
Feldes, jeder Zaun, jeder in den Steinhfigel
gerissene Hohlweg, ein Wesen der zinnerne Krug,
die irdene Schfissel, der Tisch, der plumpe Sessel
- sich mir wie neugeboren aus dem furchtbaren
Chaos des Nichtlebens, aus dem Abgrund der
Wesenlosigkeit entgegenhob, daB ich ffihlte, nein,
daB ich wuBte, wie jedes dieser Dinge, dieser
Geschdpfe aus einem ffirchterlichen Zweifel an der
Welt herausgeboren war... (XII:303-304)

And much like Chandos, the vision of these Beings leads to
further visions, but now the Beings are seen in an
explosion of color in a unity of the abyss and the heights
of both inside and outside of himself:

Und nun konnte ich, von Bild zu Bild, ein Etwas
ffihlen, konnte das Untereinander, das Miteinander
der Gebilde ffihlen, wie ihr innerstes Leben in
der Farbe vorbrach und wie die Farben eine um die
andern alle trug, und konnte in dem allem ein
Herz spfiren, die Seele dessen, der das gemacht
hatte, der mit dieser Vision sich selbst
antwortete auf den Starrkrampf der

59

ffirchterlichsten Zweifel, konnte ffihlen, konnte
durchblicken, konnte genieBen Abgrfinde und Gipfel
AuBen und Innen... (XII:304)

The man tries to find the words to further describe
the effect that color now has for him. It forms him and his
ideas, it drives him to communicate his vision with others,
it could even be called love: “Es schwebt mir um diese
Dinge etwas mir selber Unerklarliches, etwas wie Liebe -
kann es Liebe geben zum Gestaltlosen, zum Wesenlosen?“
(XII:306)

The color of the waves at sea show him not only the
world but also himself, i.e., his own whole life, past
present and future. Color is a wordless language, superior
to music, that renews our souls. Color is also the
“brother” of pain, that draws him into eternity. (XII:309-
310)

Die Briefe des Zurfickgekehrten tries to pick up where
the Chandos Bgief leaves off, but it doesn't make the
situation of artist really any clearer. “Color” is simply
declared to be the “answer” to the question of how the mind

would “think” before language imposes form.

4.3. Music, Color, Light and Movement Combined: Kandinsky's
Der gelbe Klang

Wassily Kandinsky is most famous for his paintings,

and is generally considered to be the pioneer of non—
representational painting. He was also an original art
theorist. However, he tried a more concrete attempt to use
color to communicate on a higher level than just words in

his “stage composition” Der gelbe Klang, written in 1909—

 

1910 and published in 1912. This play consists of an
introduction and six scenes, or “pictures”, in which the
movement of color, light, sound, and objects on the stage
are intended to all combine in order to make a strong,
coordinated impression. The only words are not dialog in
any traditional sense, unless one counts Picture 2, in
which a man says to a child, “Schweigenll” Otherwise words
seem to be unconnected to context or sense, or are even
deliberately contradictory. In the introduction,
disembodied voices proclaim behind the stage, “Steinharte
Traume” and “Finsteres Licht bei dem... sonnigsten...
Tag“.4o
There is also a lack of accessible symbolism, unless
one counts the last scene which ends the piece with a giant
man extending his arms until he forms a cross, after which

the stage goes dark.

Der gelbe Klang was intended to demonstrate

 

 

w Denkler, Horst. Einakter und kleine Dramen des Expressionismus

(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968) 55.

61

Kandinsky's theories of art and the possibilities of
various artistic mediums. But instead of entirely
dismissing words (as he nevertheless largely does on the
stage,) he proposed that all mediums can be used together
in combination because they all have the same goal, i.e.,
“die Verfeinerung der Seele” through “Erkenntnis” produced
by art which is understood through “innere Vibrationen”.41
Kandinsky prefered to refer to words as “Buchstaben”, which
emphasized their symbolic nature for him as “Wesen mit
innerem Leben” and thus also meaning and purpose, if also

. . . 42
not in a traditional sense.

As a work, Der gelbe Klang exists today more on the

 

page than on the stage. Despite Kandinsky's theories about
the power of combined mediums, it remains almost too
inaccessible to produce for the theater. Hofmannsthal’s
Briefe des Zurfickgekehrten are also relatively unknown.
Unfortunately, both of the attempts to overcome the
shortcomings of the word have been mostly neglected and

forgotten.

4.4. Words Used in New Ways

Some Modernist (and later) authors tried to continue

 

“ Wassikly Kandinsky, “Uber Bfihnenkomposition“ in: Der Blaue Reiter

(Munich: Piper, 1967) 190-191.
a Kandinsky, “Uber die Formfrage“ in: Der Blaue Reiter, 157—158.

 

 

62

to use words, but only indirectly or less directly as

carriers of meaning.

4.4.1. Dadaism: Words as Sounds to Be Felt
The Expressionist subjectivity and experimentation with
language produced a movement in Zurich called Dadaism which
attempted to reduce words to mere sounds. “Verses without
words” were intended to overcome language “ruined by
journalism” by tapping the inner magic of words: “Man ziehe
sich in die innerste Alchemie des Wortes zurfick, man gebe
auch das Wort noch preis, und bewahre so der Dichtung ihren
letzten heiligsten Bezirk.“” Sometimes Dada poetry readings
were accompanied by performances of dance.
Probably the most famous example of a Dada poem is

this Lautgedicht by Hugo Ball:

Karawane

jolifanto bambla o falli bambla

groBgiga m'pfa habla horem

egiga goramen

higo bloiko russula huju

hollaka hollala

anlogo bung

blago bung blago bung

bosso fataka

fi fifi fi

schampa wulla wussa olobo

hej tatta gorem

eschige zunbada
wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu

 

‘3 Bode 220 .

63

tumba ba-umf
kusa gauma
ba - umffi'1

Other than the title, “Caravan”, and perhaps the first
word which reminds one of “elephant”, the other “words” are
chosen for their sound and rhythm effects.

These poems, consisting of apparently nonsense words,
had combinations of sounds which were to produce an effect
on the bearer as opposed to appealing directly to the
hearer’s intellect. But as with Kandinsky’s stage work,
they are charming curiosities rather than “meaningful”
pieces, because their effect is vague and their
inspirational value is just as unable to be articulated.
Bode reminds us of Pinthus’s critique that the wordplay of
the Expressionists went from a transvaluation of sense to
nonsense: “Man begann, die Um-Wirklichkeit zur Un-

Wirklichkeit aufzuldsen.45

4.4.2. Words as Fragments of Feeling and Meaning: Arno

Schmidt’s Leviathan

 

Arno Schmidt’s first published stories appeared in
1949 and his writings reflect his personal postwar

pessimism and modernist preoccupation with the connection

 

“ Bode 201-202.
‘5 Bode 10 .

between language and art. Because of his eclecticism as an
author he cannot be simply categorized. Arising at a time
between Modernism and Postmodernism, he never claimed to be
an Avantgardist, but preferred to think of himself as a
Tradionalist linked to his favorite authors from German
Romanticism and the Enlightenment; he was however more
experimental and progressive. His stories sometimes have a
subjective, creative bizarreness which would link him more
to Romanticists like E.T.A. Hoffmann than to Thomas Mann.
According to Wolfgang Albrecht, Schmidt has to rather be
seen as “beides, Traditionalist Egg Modernist”, although
recent scholarship has preferred to label him as a
Postmodernist.46

He had been a soldier in WWII and afterwards basically
shut himself off from the world to write subjective and
sometimes deeply depressed works that are notorious
examples of obfuscation. He developed what he called his
“Etym” theory to explain how basic meanings are offered
symbolically to the reader though words, and he practiced
this theory with a fragmentary phrasing style which
presented words in a way intended to appeal in a stronger
and more direct way to both the intellect and to the

emotions. Thus his texts are not so much read as felt or

 

“ Wolfgang Albrecht, Arno Schmidt (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998) 113-114.

 

65

experienced. His frequent and seemingly chaotic use of
color, symbolism, and indirect references to other works
(of mostly German literature) are intended to reach beyond
intellectual understanding and touch the reader’s memory
and feelings directly. In short, he presents works which
leave much organizational work up to the reader.

A comparison with the opening lines of Tonio Krfiger

 

shows the difference in how words are handled by these two
authors. Mann begins the work with a rather direct although
poetic description of Tonio’s bland world, which will then
contrast later with the intense colors of Tonio’s mind:
Die Wintersonne stand nur als armer Schein,
milchig und matt hinter Wolkenschichten fiber der
engen Stadt. Nah und zugig war’s in den
giebeligen Gassen, und manchmal fiel eine Art von
weichem Hagel, nicht Eis, nicht Schnee.47
The world that Mann presents is symbolic, but does not ever
leave the realm of recognizably objective references.

Schmidt, at the end of his post-WWII (1949) short

story Leviathan, presents a description of a winter sun

 

that does not make objective sense but yet reflects the

senselessness of the hopeless situation that his characters
are in. After the bombing of Dresden at the end of the war,
an unnamed soldier and his girlfriend are fleeing from the

front in an old, rusted, barely working train which will

66

eventually hang over the precipice of a cliff where a
bridge had been bombed out. They will have no choice but to
stay in the train or else jump together to their deaths,
which is Schmidt’s pessimistic analogy to the situation of
Germany as a whole at the end of the war. As they are
preparing to jump, the soldier first throws out ahead of
them the journal that he had been keeping of their escape.
This further symbolizes the situation of the artist: words
cannot help them anymore, but the author throws them out
into the world, not knowing who will find them, nor what
will be made of them.
Ende
Wir werden in die grobrote bereifte Tfir treten.
Goldig geschleiert wird die Teufels-Winter-Sonne
lauern, weisrosa und ballkalt. Sie wird das Kinn
vorschieben und bengelhaft den Mund spitzen, die
Hfiften zum Schwung heben. Starr werde ich den Arm
um sie legen.Da schlenkere ich das Heft voran:
flieg. Fetzen.48
The characters are sometimes only indicated by “we" and
“she” and “I”, and stand literally on a border between life
and death, and between the expressible and the
inexpressible. Mention of color and new or invented word
combinations create the need for the reader to feel a way

to meaning (“golden... the devil’s winter sun... white-pink

and ball-cold”), and sentence fragments of just one word

 

0 Mann 528.

67

are meant to cause the reader to fill in the rest with non-
verbal meaning (“fly. Shreds.”)

However, just as with the more experimental modernist
authors, Schmidt's readership is also very limited, and for
many critics his impact is also not in the works themselves

but in the experimental nature of them.

5. Why Have Alternatives to the Word Failed? Some Words in
Defense of Words

Alternatives to written verbal expression have had
very little lasting or far-reaching success in improving on
or replacing the use of words. Arno Schmidt’s fragmentary
style is at best an acquired taste that has often put him
at the fringe of both critical and popular reception,
although he has some devoted fans. Kandinsky’s experiment

with the stage, Der gelbe Klang, has almost never been

 

produced, but remains ironically a curiosity to read along
with his theories of art and communication. The rare

performances of Britten’s opera Death in Venice receive

 

both critical acclaim and receptive audiences--especially
if they are already Britten fans--but here, music is not

used instead of words, but rather as an addition to and

 

w Arno Schmidt, Werke, Bd.1 (Zurich: Arno Schmidt Stiftung in Haffmans

Verlag, 1987) 54.

68

support of Mann's text.

Arranged sounds such as music, and visual phenomena
such as color, light, and movement, as well as other
phenomena perceived directly through the physical senses
such as taste, touch, and smell, are necessarily directly
pre-verbal human experiences, as opposed to experiences
mediated by thought and therefore language in the
intellect. Being direct, they must by definition affect us
and our emotions sooner and more deeply than words which
must first be received by the eye or the ear and then
understood in some form by human intellect before they can
affect us with meaning beyond their sound or their
appearance on the page. But that is not the same as to say
that words are ineffective as a medium of communication;
only that they are necessarily b nature not as direct.
Words organize and shape feeling and experience in ways
that make our feelings and experiences useful and
communicable to ourselves and others, and this mediated
usefulness is often more effective for communication than
unmediated and vague feeling.

The great paradox of the writer's crisis is, as noted
earlier, that the authors discussed here present their
readers with written depictions of writers who can’t write,

and they do so with a very eloquent use of the very medium,

69

i.e., words, which they are claiming to be inadequate for
the expression of experience.

This is a paradox because both of these opposing views
are true in some degree. Experience is indeed felt before
it is articulated into human language, and what is felt is
non-verbal. But on the other hand, many authors have also
found it possible to use human language to describe their
emotions and thus convey these non-verbal experiences very
effectively and affectingly, such that they produce or
reproduce intense reactions and feelings of identification
and empathy in the reader. And for Hofmannsthal and Mann,
using words had this function: to put feeling into form
became the way to save themselves from the non-articulation
and the lonely retention of their experiences.

Additionally, the future can be said to be made
possible in that events are created or at least possible to
influence because of words. Plans have to be actively
communicated between people if they want to affect the
course of events before they happen, or even to make things
happen in the first place. First the word in one mind, then
the word in other minds, and then the implementation.

There is furthermore something about articulating
one’s experience into words that makes experience seem more

objectively real, as if writing about subjective experience

70

establishes it in the objective world of others, and as if
human lives have to be recorded and passed on to others in
order to have meaning and influence in a society. It is as
if words themselves have a creative power. Thus a
forgotten, unrecorded experience or a forgotten life can be
said to have less meaning and existence for humanity as a
whole than a fictitious life, even though the latter exists
only by means of words in the minds of readers.

This idea is not limited to German literature at the
beginning of the 20U‘century. One need only remember the

effect that Goethe’s Die Leiden desyjungen Werther had on

 

the readers of its time to see that this is so: young men
began dressing like Werther and killing themselves over
unrequited love as he did after reading it.

Nor is it limited to Germany: recently I had the great
fortune to work at Jena University in Germany when one of
Canada's foremost living writers, Robert Kroetsch, spent a
semester there as a guest professor. As a living, working
writer, his views about his craft were especially
fascinating, and he liked to say that “real life is nothing
without fiction,” because “it is fiction that makes us
real. We haven't got an identity until someone tells our

stories.”

71

6. The Artist's Crisis Before Modernism
Coming as it did at the beginning of Modernism and

Expressionism, Ein Brief posed questions about the very

 

heart and the source of our ideas about what art is. If,
however, this work by Hofmannsthal is considered to signal
the beginning of Modernist questioning about the artist’s
vision, as well as the inadequacy of language to convey
what the artist perceives to minds who do not see as the
artist does, it is certainly not the first appearence of
this topic in literature.

As already stated, the basic questions that became
central with Modernism have existed since the beginning of
human history. Already in ancient Greece and in biblical
times the words and the use of language were either doubted

or mythified because of their potentials and limits.

6.1. The Bible: The Word as Creative Logos and Parable

In the Bible, language, naming, and the concept of the
Eggg have divine power. A word from God is all that is
needed to create the earth, the universe, and every living
thing in it. In fact, this notion of the essential
creative power of words goes even further: God the Creator
is described as the Logos, the “word” itself:

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was

72

with God, and the Word was God, and he was in the
beginning with God. All things were made through
Him and without Him nothing was made that was
made. In Him was life, and the life was the light
of men. And the darkness did not comprehend it.
(John 1:1—5, New King James Version)
The limits of words are also a feature of language use
in the Bible. In the New Testament Jesus uses parables with
their symbolism and analogies to present spiritual lessons,

as the depth of the truths he is trying to teach make

direct appeals to intellect not possible.

6.2. Ancient Greece: Plato’s Republic and Symposium

 

Plato’s parable of the cave in The Republic expresses

 

despair about the ability of language to represent reality
in even more extremely than Hofmannsthal. For Plato, not
just language but all knowledge is potentially deceptive
because of the limits of not only human knowledge and
language, but also the ability of the human mind to grasp
and understand the fullness of reality. To try to
illustrate this point he uses a parable of prisoners who
are in a cave, chained and sitting so that they all observe
a shadow play on a wall which they all assume to be the
form and limit of experience, i.e., reality. The shadows
of course are not “real”, in the sense of being the

immediate source of experience, but only an effect, namely

73

they reflect real happenings but are only a result of
actions elsewhere. The artist is the privileged person who
has somehow become free enough from the chains to move
about, see the real actions behind the shadow play, and
even leave the darkness of the cave for the light above
which is blinding at first, and who then attempts to
communicate back to the others what he or she has seen.
However, the experience of the people in chains is too
limited to fully understand what the artist is trying to
represent, even though the capability to become_just as
enlightened exists in everyone. Thus the meaning of the
artist’s works is mysterious at best if not incredible and
misleading.49
Plato also discusses the topic of art in the

Symposium, but here he has Socrates discussing the nature

 

of love and its role in the creation of art:

Love is so wise a poet that he can make another
the same; at least everyone becomes a poet whom
Love touches, everyone who before that had no
“music in is soul”. This we may fittingly use as
a proof that Love is a god poet or active maker
in practically all the creations of the fine
arts; for what one has not or knows not, one can
neither give to another nor teach another. Now
take the making of all living things; who will
dispute that they are the clever work of Love, by
which all living things are made and begotten?
And craftsmanship in the arts; don't we know that

 

w Plato, Great Dialogs of Plato, trans. W.D. Rouse (New York; London:

Penguin Books, 1984) 312-317.

74

where this god is teacher, art turns out noble
and illustrious, but where there is no touch of
Love, it is all in the dark?!50
Echoing the words of John, love is seen as the creative
force behind all living things, but here also as the force
behind the creation of all living Egg.
Love itself is actually the “love for the beautiful,”51
and so:
[t]here in life and there alone, my dear Socrates
. . . is life worth living for man while he
contemplates Beauty itself. (106)
Thus, artists, among others, seek inspiration and love in
beauty——however they define it--as a force of creation for
both life and art, and the artist loves life by seeing
beauty in it which intensifies the desire to understand
both self and other and to feel untied to the other and
share this understanding.

This concept of love can perhaps be understood in less
abstract ways. Society in general and other people
individually function as mirrors that reflect back to us
images (whether accurate or not) of who we (and they) are.
Love makes relationships between people closer and thus it

intensifies the mirror’s potential for learning about

oneself and about others, as well as about what one is

 

5" Plato 92.
l Plato 99.

75

capable of and about what the world is.

Love also turns other people, other things, and even
oneself into objects of beauty, and this then brings
happiness in the intensified contemplation of them. It also
makes one feel more alive and self—aware. Thus love
inspires on an existential level as both a confirmation of
existence and a intensifier of vision, whether or not it is
returned or realized, and these things are essential to the
vision that produces art.

Love therefore creates art and “music” in the pre-
verbal, unformed, felt, experiencing of life. The artist’s
problem and burden is how to take this wordless feeling and
put it into living words—-or notes or pictures, depending
on the artistic form. Living art is then art that loves
life in all its aspects, including anything “real”: the
banal and the everyday, and even ugliness and death are
made “beautiful” when formed by art, since beauty could be
said under Modernism to have been liberated from
traditional views, no longer meaning beautiful content but
redefined to refer to either subjective opinion or else the

effectiveness or well-formedness of the work.

7. Phenomenological Explanations: Heidegger

Heidegger, inheriting Nietzsche’s Modernist views,

76

also concerned himself with language as a basic feature of
Being, as well as with the relationship between language

and art. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes began as a lecture in

 

Freiburg, and was published with added material in 1956. In
it he attempts to discover the “origin”, or rather essence
of art, artists, and works of art. This thesis began with a
quote from the epilog to this text that states that
understanding even the questions around the nature of art
would be doing much. In the course of the book, he dissects
not just the problem of art but also attempts to solve it.

Like Hofmannsthal's protagonist in Die Briefe des

 

Zurfickgekehrten, Heidegger is inspired by a painting by Van

 

Gogh. Specifically, he chooses the example of a peasant
woman’s shoes in a picture. He states that a work of art is
first of all a “thing”, and as a work of art the picture of
the shoes satisfy his three modes for defining “thingness”:
they are a “bearer of traits”, the “unity of a manifold of
sensations”, and they are “formed matter”.52

Even though only a picture of a physical thing, the
work is itself a thing and the painting of the shoes
presents us with no less than “truth”, and art itself is

“truth setting itself to work,” because art “discloses” the

essence of a thing that we already know. Thus, the work of

77

art is not a reproduction of a thing, but a thing itself
that also reveals the essence of the thing itself!53
When we see artworks, they “speak” to us and take us

54
suddenly “somewhere else”,

namely they create a “world”,
in which the work of art rises up into a lighted focus by
being presented. Thus art is a projection or a
presentation, not a representation, according to Heidegger.
Beauty is the “light” or “shining” in the work (181), and
language, as a means of pointing to and naming of things,

is the first projection of a thing.

The problem with language, as he states in The Wayyto

 

Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache) is that we are necessarily

 

in the middle of it. To understand it we would have to be
able to create some distance from it. (389)

Curiously, he declares that while lived experience is
the source of both artistic creation and art appreciation,
it is also “the element in which art dies.” (204) Perhaps
he is referring to the abyss of feeling that Thomas Mann
warns of. Furthermore, he states that beauty is not related
to form, but it is inseparable from truth as part of the
light of truth.(206) This, however, sounds more akin to

classical notions which equated the Beautiful with the Good

 

2 Heidegger 156
3 Heidegger 161-162.
4 Heidegger 161.

78

and the True, which Nietzsche has dismissed with the

declaration that truth is ugly.

CONCLUSION

In any literate human society, there are members who
possess talent in varying degrees for creating and
presenting verbal pictures of human life in some of its
many aspects. Some of them may even feel personally driven
to write, no matter what else they do in their lives.
Likewise there are members, i.e., readers, who feel drawn
to read what others or they themselves have written. These
facts of human existence are evidence that there is
something about both the production and the consumption of
writing that feeds something essential in human beings.
Even beyond the biblical saying that people do not “live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4), they seem to also live and
hunger for words themselves from other humans; they live
for communication and they crave stories of others’ lives
as well as wanting to tell others of their own lives, no
matter how simply or insufficiently: Primitive peoples
produce cave drawings to record their experiences, and
children take great delight in their simple depictions of

the people, places, objects, and events in their world.

79

Furthermore, young children often unrelentingly beg adults
to read stories to them, and every year adults spend
billions of dollars going to see the latest movies or
renting films to View on their televisions at home.

It should thus be no surprise that society watchers
often complain that too many children and adults
addictively spend too much of their time amusing themselves
with the fictional lives that television and the movies
offer for public entertainment, instead of actively living
out their own lives, and predict the negative effects that
this produces, such as passivity and unrealistic
expectations in life. Experts continually debate as to how
much of the deviant behavior of children and adults can be
traced back to the examples of violence and mental cruelty
they have been exposed to in entertainment media and
sensational news stories. And yet, there is no evidence
that people will give up their fascination with stories, in
spite of all the warnings by societal watchdogs.

People crave not just words, but also other forms of
artistic media that represent aspects of human existence
and experience, such as music, and even shape their own
identity and sense of what is important in life by means of
it. From people who can't carry a tune, but who

nevertheless sing in the shower, to teenagers who seem to

80

find their music to be the most important and interesting
thing in their lives, music has a long—observed but still
not generally fully understood power. Actors, singers,
writers, and other providers of verbal and musical
entertainment are idolized such that not just their fictive
lives but also their real lives become the object of
obsessive interest by society.

This need and fascination for stories and
communication is also evidenced by the fact that isolation
and deprivation of communication and verbal stimulation is
used as punishment, whether individually as a way to show
hurt in a relationship, institutionally in a prison, or
even in the form of denying a child access to television or
playing with friends for a time as a disciplinary action.
Isolation and lack of contact with others is considered to
be one of the worst fates possible for human beings, and
humans fear it so greatly that they sometimes go to
counter-productive and self-destructive lengths to avoid
it.

And so there is something about visual, aural, and
verbal representations of life that attracts and fascinates
audiences of many sorts, whether as readers, viewers, or
hearers, that makes them seek it out, even if they do not

lack for people with whom they can communicate.

81

Simply stated, people need art and crave presentations
of life, whether in high forms such as literature or in
popular entertainment forms such as film, even if they do
not understand why. They also need to express themselves
through artistic media, whether in the simple self-
expression of using words to tell a story to another person
or in the more sophisticated composition of a novel, a
painting, a play or an opera. In short, people need to
express themselves and further to communicate and exchange
ideas and feelings with others regarding themselves and
their experience in the world. And in order to communicate,
they need a medium.

Art exists because it is humanity's way of telling its
story. It is its way of observing and reflecting on its
situation and its possibilities. Artists single out and
focus their attention on some aspect of their subjective
experience present it as an object for others' subjective
attention.

The work of art presents not necessarily what the
artist intends, but is a real symbol whose truth value for
the audience depends on the audience itself, and so can be
more “true” than life for some people, depending on their
ability to find meaning in the symbol. Thus, the more a

work can relate to humanity as a whole, for example by

82

using everyday objects or handling basic themes such as
identity and death, the more life and greatness a work may
achieve.

Why is art so compelling? Because of its function to
present symbols of life, both artist and audience are
driven to art by the love of knowledge, i.e. the desire to
know the self and the non-self, namely the world, and also
the love of life itself, expressed in the desire to
experience life and to create new life and experience,
something made possible by the creative aspect of
literature.

Artists are those whose ability to create from
perspective of distance from life enables them to see
differently, and whose talent to form their experience into
a communicative medium allows them to present their vision.
They also have a need to do so, because love inspires by
giving them a heightened ability to focus, intensify, and
sharpen their attention on some aspect of life and then
urges them to share with others. Thus, love is here
understood as either Chandos’s wordless feeling of oneness
with life and creation, or as the longing to become one
with creation, expressed by Aschenbach’s love for Tadzio or
Tonio Krfiger’s love for Hans and Inge. Audiences are drawn

to art because of the same longing to see life and be

83

closer to it and be more actively alive.

Why do artists use words, in spite of their inherent
problems as a medium for presenting meaning? Because we
have no real substitute for the precision, variety, and
efficacy of words to present ideas and communicate feelings
to others. The artists of German Modernism show that
despite the gap between language and experience, words are
ultimately not replaceable, and art risks failure in
communication when words are either ignored or used as mere
sounds.

Can artists ever solve their crisis? After Nietzsche
set into motion the overthrow of traditional ways of
thinking about art, artists in all media, including
painting, music, and literature, began to explore
fundamental questions about the relationship between art
and life, and their possibilities and limits of
representation in their respective medium. His call for a
transvaluation of values undermined the faith in accepted
traditions of the past and beliefs about art and its
nature, production, and function in society. For many
writers of the time this questioning led to a crisis that
left some doubting their ability to express themselves at
all. And yet, by exploring and explaining their problem in

words, i.e., the very means that are in question, these

84

authors showed that words, although imperfect, can indeed
be useful and effective as a means of communication, even
for communicating the imperfectness of words, provided that
the reader or listener already has some reference to make
the words meaningful. Words are not only useful, they make
most of communication itself possible, because they give
form to feeling.

Is art life, or is life art? This question can be
settled with a simple “yes!” Art is a kind of creation, but
a man-made object, as opposed to nature-made. It is both
“true” and “false”, because art is an interpretation and
presentation of some limited aspect of life, and because it
is an interpretation, it is more or less objectively
“true”-—and false. It is misleading, i.e., false, while it
sometimes manipulates real elements in ways that do not
show the real connections and consequences of real
motivations and actions.

However, whether true or false, and no matter what the
specific topic of a work, there is always some aspect, some
incident, some possibly real element from human experience
which is displayed, dissected, reflected upon, readjusted,
and/or reacted to in any text, both objectively and
subjectively, which allows a text to become accessible to

its readers. Both author and reader accompany the

85

characters of a story through their subjective experiences,
and their fictional lives become examples of the
possibilities in “real” life. The reader necessarily brings
an additional subjectivity to each text by interpreting and
reacting to the characters' lives through the limits and/or
richness of his or her own life experiences. Thus,
irrespective of the intentions and the depth of private
self-reflectiveness on the part of the author, it is the
attitudes and interpretations of the reader that will make
the author’s art a lesson in life whenever relating with
the reader's own life.

We observe other lives, real and fictional, and find
them amusing, irritating, heroic, tragic, interesting, or
boring, and so by judging we evaluate them consciously or
subconsciously for what larger lessons we can learn from
them about humankind and the way the world works. Jean-Paul
Sartre, while emphasizing the essential subjectivity of
experience, allowed for objectivity in only one instance:
although “Man is choice”, i.e., life is necessarily made up
of a continuation of choices about how to act, and in
making these choices, each subjective individual provides
an example of choice universally for others. Thus,
literature with its fictional examples of other lives

provides examples of life for the reader to evaluate and

86

then accept or reject for him- or herself.

The question, “What is art?”, is associated with
Modernism, but does not originate with it. In various
forms and in various ways, the nature, limitations,
fascinations, and even dangers of art and specifically
literature have been formally investigated by humankind at
least as far back as Plato and the ancient Greeks.

Nor is this topic limited to the past. It can even be
at the heart of a postmodern work or even a popular recent
motion picture: it was the central theme of the 1998 film
“Shakespeare in Love” which won 7 Oscars in 1999, including
Best Picture, although the entertainment value of the film
took precedence over any abstract considerations of the
nature of art.

The film begins by presenting a Shakespeare who can
only write when he has a love interest to inspire him. His
writer's block is therefore used to explore the connection
between art and life, and inspiration and love, and how
they all interrelate. Additionally, the screenplay has
Queen Elizabeth pose a question, in the form of a wager in
order to make it even more suspenseful, as to whether the
true nature of love can be presented on the stage, namely
can art truly be alive and convincing, i.e., present life.

Of course, since Shakespeare's primary art form was drama,

87

a successful presentation also depends on the actors, but
the question remains no less valid.

In German literature, this basic question became
related to other questions about how artists become
inspired, and the possibility or impossibility of language
for communicating this inspiration, resulting in a concept
known as the Kfinstlerproblematik, or artist crisis, which
became a central feature of Modernism. For some authors,
such as Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, it even
became an ongoing theme of their work. Thus, Hofmannsthal
and Mann, are saved from their own abyss of wordless
feeling by writing about Lord Chandos, Tonio Krdger, and
Gustav von Aschenbach. These stories also show that the
search by both writer and reader for keys to “know thyself”
is a part of the human condition and thus will necessarily
continue as long as there is human life.

It should come as no surprise that writers have
sometimes made this Kfinstlerproblematik itself the subject
of their works. A writer draws from anything and everything
that goes through his or her mind, and thus it is only to
be expected that writers will sometimes include their
reflections on the nature and purpose of their own literary
activity, and by extension on art in general. German works

such as Ein Brief and Die Briefe des Zurfickgekehrtens by

 

 

88

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Schwere Stunde, Tonio Krdger,

 

 

and Der Tod in Venedig by Thomas Mann provide us with

 

fascinating explorations into the nature of art and its
relationship to life by portraying writers who can’t
produce and then who struggle to understand why this is so.
In each of these three cases, life itself is both the
inspiration for and the hindrance to producing art. Writers
who can't write suffer from more than writer’s block or
procrastination: it is rather because of an imbalance or
breakdown in either their experience, their inspiration, or
their ability to express themselves in language media such
as words: sometimes they are experiencing either too little
or too much of life to express themselves adequately in
words, which are in themselves too weak sometimes to
express what the human mind may also be too small to grasp,
but sometimes it is the recognition of the gap between
experience and expression that silences them. Through the
not-so-silent sufferings of the artists depicted, these
works show that art, as expressions of life, no matter how
fragmentary and incomplete, is a valid and fruitful means
for pursuing the eternal human quest for self-knowledge and
the eternal desire to depict, dissect, and understand the
great riddle and mystery of human existence. This explains

its fascination and its necessity for both producer and

89

consumer whether in high or in popular forms. Furthermore,
art will always necessarily remain a fragmentary and
incomplete picture of life, no matter how insightful the
vision of the artist, because works are necessarily also
limited both to their media, as well as to the vision of
the artist and the limits of his or her talent and
experience. In short, Kfinstler are forever doomed to their
Problematik: even though art has a function and a purpose,
its goal can never fully be reached. Art can never give us
a total picture for understanding or experiencing life: no
artist’s vision and no reader’s understanding is equal to
more than a fragmentary piece of the whole of life, the
universe, and the interrelations of all things. Thus even
those whose talent for expression may somewhat more
correlate with their depth of experience must forever
remain ultimately unsatisfied, and thus never free of the
Kfinstlerproblematik. The limitations of production, i.e.,
of human vision and also of artistic medium, guarantee that
artists will never fully be able to express life (i.e.,
produce art) in more than a fragmentary way, and thus the
quest to understand life through art will never be
ultimately satisfied.

In the end it is no new, Modernist discovery to find

that words are ultimately unsatisfactory for communicating

90

artistic vision about the essence and meaning of the whole
of human experience. No medium that imposes form on
“unformed” experience can ever truly communicate to another
person what something feels like.

Nevertheless, people will neither give up producing
art nor seeking it, because life and art are necessarily
bound together: people not only want to feel that they are
alive, they also want to express to themselves and others
what they experience. The form that a human being imposes
on experience in order to express it and understand it thus
also forms and creates that person's world, or at least the
sense or meaning it has for that person. So, to put into
form something of human experience is to create art or to
make life art and to make art that “lives”, whether or not
one shares this art with another.

One of Hofmannsthal’s first published poems declares
the world to be but an “eternal poem” and each person a
subjective “verse” who creates the world for themselves:

Was ist die Welt? Ein ewiges Gedicht,

Daraus der Geist der Gottheit strahlt und glfiht,
Daraus der Wein der Weisheit schaumt und sprfiht,
Daraus der Laut der Liebe zu uns spricht

Und jedes Menschen wechselndes Gemfit,

Ein Strahl ists, der aus dieser Sonne bricht,
Ein Vers, der sich an tausend andere flicht,

Der unbemerkt verhallt, verlischt, verblfiht.

Und doch auch eine Welt ffir sich allein,

91

Voll sfiB-geheimer, nievernommner Tene,
Begabt mit eigner, unentweihter Schene,

Und keines Andern Nachhall, Widerschein.
Und wenn du gar zu lesen drin verstfindest,
Ein Buch, das du im Leben nicht ergrfindest.
(I:467)

92

BIBLIOGRAPHY

93

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Britten, Benjamin. Death in Venice. An Opera in Two Acts.
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Bode, Dietrich, ed. Gedichte des Expressionismus.
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Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Guarde. Trans. Michael
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Denkler, Horst. Einakter und kleine Dramen des
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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: Eine Tragpdie. Erster
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Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben.
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Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sémtliche Werke in zwélf Banden. Bd.
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Wagner, Richard. The Artwork of the Future and Other Works.
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Albrecht, Wolfgang. Arno Schmidt. Stuttgart; Weimar:
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Bennett, Benjamin. Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Cambridge:
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Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism. Oxford: Clarendon
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Eschenbach, Walter. “Fritz Mauthner und die Sprachkrise der
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Evans, Peter. The Music of Benjamin Britten. London: J.M.
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Herbert, David, ed. The Operas of Benjamin Britten. New
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Howe, Irving. The Idea of the Modern in Literature and
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Mayer, Mathias. Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Stuttgart; Weimar:
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Mitchell, Donald, ed. Death in Venice. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Noble, C.A.M., Sprachskepsis: fiber Dichtung der Moderne.

 

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Mfinchen: Edition Text u. Kritik, 1978.

Palmer, Christopher, ed. The Britten Companion. Cambridge:
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Reiss, Hans. The Writer’s Task from Nietzsche to Brecht.
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Schmidt-Bergmann, Hansgeorg. Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Brief
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Streim, Gregor. Das “Leben” in der Kunst: Untersuchungen
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