The Look of Things From 1949 to 2004, UNC Press and the UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures published the UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures series. Monographs, anthologies, and critical editions in the series covered an array of topics including medieval and modern literature, theater, linguistics, philology, onomastics, and the history of ideas. Through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, books in the series have been reissued in new paperback and open access digital editions. For a complete list of books visit www.uncpress.org. The Look of Things Poetry and Vision around 1900 carsten strathausen UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Number 126 Copyright © 2003 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons cc by-nc-nd license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses. Suggested citation: Strathausen, Carsten. The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. doi: https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807863237_Strathau- sen Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Strathausen, Carsten. Title: The look of things : poetry and vision around 1900 / by Carsten Strathausen. Other titles: University of North Carolina studies in the Germanic languages and literatures ; no. 126. Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2003] Series: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2002152317 | isbn 978-1-4696-1516-5 (pbk: alk paper) | isbn 978-1-4696-5845-2 (ebook) Subjects: German poetry — 20th century — History and criticism. | German poetry — 19th century — History and criticism. | Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875-1926 — Criticism and interpretation. | Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1874-1929 — Criticism and interpretation. | George, Stefan Anton, 1868-1933 — Criticism and interpretation. | Aestheticism (Literature). Classification: lcc pt551.s77 2003 | ddc 831/.91209 — dc21 To Valerie and Clara contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part I 1. The Speaking Gaze of Modernity 35 2. Intuition and Language 73 Excursus Methods of Reading 107 Part II 3. Aestheticism, Romanticism, and the Body of Language 137 4. Hofmannsthal and the Voice of Language 146 5. Rilke’s Stereoscopic Vision 190 6. Other as Same: The Politics of the George Circle 237 Notes 275 Works Cited 297 Index 311 illustrations 1. Title page of the first edition of Der Teppich des Lebens by Stefan George, 1900 15 2. Editorial commentary on the first edition of Der Teppich des Lebens by Stefan George, 1900 16 3. Two poems from the first edition of Der Teppich des Lebens by Stefan George, 1900 17 4. Photo of the train accident at the Gare Montparnasse in Paris in October 1895 36 5. Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell, 1880–1917 214 6. Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell, 1880–1917, detail 215 7. Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Curtain and Flowered Pitcher, ca. 1899 217 8. Table of contents of the first publication of the Blätter für die Kunst, October 1892 249 9. Photograph of Stefan George by Theodor Hilsdorf, ca. 1928 251 acknowled gments I am indebted to many of my colleagues and friends who have supported me during the many years that I worked on this project. First and foremost, many thanks to Roger Cook for his congenial support throughout my junior years at the University of Missouri as well as for his good humor and endless patience when working with me on early drafts of this book. Peter Gilgen, Noah Heringman, Brad Prager, and Nancy West all provided detailed and extremely helpful commentaries on single chapters of the manuscript. Bill Kerwin, Karen Piper, and Jeff Williams always gave me good advice and kept my spirits up during the final stages of the project, as did the entire crowd at Teller’s (you know who you are!). Ulrich Baer and Neil H. Donahue offered valuable suggestions for revision of the final manuscript. This book would never have seen the light of day without the tireless efforts of Jonathan Hess, series editor for the University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, who always found the time to answer my ques- tions and helped me along at every stage of the publication process. Adam Gori did an excellent job copyediting the final version of the manuscript, correcting numerous stylistic and syntactical errors. Many thanks also to the various institutions that granted me permission to reprint photos and illustrations, in particular to Ute Oelmann from the Stefan George-Archiv in Stuttgart. Both the University of Missouri Research Board and the Re- search Council provided financial support for this project. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Kenneth S. Calhoon. The most inspiring thinker I have known, Ken guided me through my dissertation years at the University of Oregon and helped me to get on track for an academic job. This book is dedicated to my wife, Valerie Kaussen, and our daughter, Clara, with all my love. the lo ok of things Introduction Epistemology is true as long as it recognizes the inadequacy of its own approach and lets itself be propelled forward by the impossibility of the task itself. It becomes untrue by pretending it is successful. —Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie 33 1 Question and Answer, or Aesthetics Revisited This study examines the relationship between poetry, philosophy, and the visual media around 1900. More specifically, it focuses on questions of aesthetic mediation in the poetic works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George. The question of mediation, of course, is central not only to German Aestheticist poetry, but also to literary scholar- ship and philosophical inquiries in general, which, as Jean-François Lyotard has recently argued, is characterized by its condemnation of all possible an- swers in favor of ever new and unanswerable questions. 2 If a question can be answered, Lyotard caricatures the philosophical position, it was either not adequately formulated or merely a technical question, meaning that it should not have been asked at all. Unlike Lyotard, I am inclined to take the issue more seriously. Since the investigation into the essence of things and the concomitant notion of abso- lute truth is, by definition, located beyond the dichotomy of question and answer, it follows that a true question cannot be answered, or, put differ- ently: its answer would be superfluous, because it would already be inherent within the question itself. ‘‘[I]n philosophy,’’ Theodor W. Adorno remarks, ‘‘any authentic question almost always in a certain way includes its answer’’ (Sondern in Philosophie schließt stets fast die authentische Frage in gewisser Weise ihre Antwort ein) ( Negative Dialektik 71). 3 Adorno’s cautious formu- lation (‘‘almost,’’ ‘‘in a certain way’’) betrays a critical distance toward the metaphysical history of this kind of thinking, which he sees exemplified in Martin Heidegger’s ontology. Yet Heidegger is certainly not its only propo- 2 : i n t r o d u c t i o n nent, as Walter Benjamin’s opening remarks in the Origin of German Tragic Drama may serve to illustrate. Writing before his serious engagement with and commitment to Marxism, he argues that the unity of truth is ‘‘out of ’’ or ‘‘beyond all question’’ ( außer Frage ), as he puts it, since otherwise one would necessarily become trapped in an infinite regress of question and answer: ‘‘For if the integral unity in the essence of truth were open to question, then the question would have to be: how far is the answer to the question already given in any conceivable reply which truth might give to questions. And the answer to this question would necessarily provoke the same question again, so that the unity of truth would defy all questioning’’ (Wäre nämlich die integrale Einheit im Wesen der Wahrheit erfragbar, so müßte die Frage lauten, inwiefern auf sie die Antwort selbst schon gegeben sei in jeder denk- baren Antwort, mit der Wahrheit Fragen entspräche. Und wieder müßte vor der Antwort auf diese Frage die gleiche sich wiederholen, dergestalt, daß die Einheit der Frage jeder Fragestellung entginge) ( Ursprung; Gesammelte Schriften I/1: 210). 4 To a certain degree, Benjamin accepts the epistemological dilemma con- stitutive of philosophical thought, whose eternal quest for primordial mean- ing cannot succeed lest it were to lose its reason for being, and thus, para- doxically, its proper meaning. An answer found signifies truth lost, which is why Lyotard’s mockery of the entire philosophical tradition sells the real issue short. At stake is less the paradoxical (or tautological) nature of human thought, but the question of how to come to terms with it. This problem of presentation ( Darstellung ) is crucial to the history of philosophy, and both its formulation and its aesthetic ‘‘solution’’ take on a peculiar shape in mod- ernist poetry around 1900. The Look of Things focuses on precisely this shape in works by Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and George. I realize, of course, that my topic may seem questionable to those readers for whom the poetic search for truth and beauty epitomizes the very ideological perils of bourgeois Aes- theticism. 5 Why, indeed, should contemporary scholarship be interested in what traditionally has been dismissed as a decadent and conservative, if not openly reactionary, aesthetic paradigm? To answer this question, we must recall how recent scholarship has sought to salvage the aesthetic, namely by expanding its traditional scope from the realm of high art to that of popular and mass culture. By means of this shift, the relevance of cultural artifacts could be reasserted without recourse to outmoded and ideologically suspect notions such as authorship, subjec- i n t r o d u c t i o n : 3 tivity, or truth. To the contrary, aesthetic criticism became synonymous with designing a critical apparatus with which to analyze contemporary society and culture as the overdetermined result of economic, political, and ideo- logical factors. One of the earliest and most sophisticated proponents of this approach, Fredric Jameson, argued in 1979 ‘‘that we must rethink the oppo- sition high culture/mass culture in such a way that the emphasis on evalua- tion to which it has traditionally given rise . . . is replaced by a genuinely historical and dialectical approach to these phenomena. Such an approach demands that we read high and mass culture as objectively related and dia- lectically interdependent phenomena, as twin and inseparable forms of the fission of aesthetic production under capitalism’’ ( Signatures 14). Whereas Jameson still argues with reference to particular works of art (films, novels, painting, etc.), the rise of cultural studies during the 1980s and 1990s pre- cipitated the inclusion of everyday phenomena such as sports events, TV shows, and political campaigns into the debate. While I am sympathetic to this expansion of critical inquiry to the realm of popular culture—a move that bridges the gap between academia and other social institutions and thus enables an overall critique of contempo- rary Western culture—I also recognize the potential loss of an aesthetic per- spective and the insights it yields. For once traditional aesthetic categories are cut off from the specific art-objects and the ideal realm to which they originally referred and instead are projected onto a wide variety of cultural phenomena, they cannot but undergo a crucial transformation that funda- mentally alters their analytical value and critical potential. If everything in today’s culture can be subjected to a critique that vehemently rejects the very ideal of aesthetic autonomy, then the difference between art and reality, the aesthetic and the sociopolitical realm becomes completely blurred, if not ef- faced. This loss of distinctions, however, impedes and ultimately disables our inquiry into the various modes of mediation and representation that shape society. Rilke’s famous thing-poems are simply not the same as the mun- dane, everyday objects they describe, but instead enable us to reflect upon and critique the difference between words and things. Art mediates reality, and it is precisely in and through this process of mediation that a social or cultural critique becomes possible at all. It follows that the current trend toward obliterating the cultural divide between high and low art, or, more drastically, between aesthetics and poli- tics, is highly ambivalent: Empowering and debilitating at the same time, it 4 : i n t r o d u c t i o n allows critics to expand their traditionally limited purview and to engage contemporary culture with a clear sense of social responsibility and pur- pose in mind, while, at the same time, exposing this discourse to the danger of itself falling prey to the very commercialization it seeks to critique (the various fashion trends in today’s academic market being only one symp- tom among many). In order to maintain its analytical potential, the realm of the aesthetic certainly must respond to, yet also remain different from, that of economics, politics, or ethics so as to enable the very possibility of their critique. This is precisely why the later Adorno insisted on the paradoxical definition of the work of art as both autonomous and a fait social, meaning that art must be conceptualized as both independent from and contingent upon the social world. Any effort to hypostatize one of the two poles is to lose the crucial tension between them, a loss that literally results in the col- lapse not only of the aesthetic realm and the very notion of the work of art, but also of the critical discourse that refers to it. 6 To side with Adorno against academic popularism (understood in the sense of discussing popular culture in a vernacular or popular language in order to be received by as large an audience as possible) is not to subscribe uncritically to his mandarin elitism nor is it to endorse his misguided de- nunciation of jazz and other forms of popular entertainment as the epitome of the culture industry, which are, therefore, unworthy of intellectual criti- cism. As Andreas Huyssen has argued, Adorno himself was quite aware of the interdependency between modernism and mass culture in spite of the fact that he failed to examine the overall effect and emancipatory potential of this relationship by means of a comprehensive study of popular art. 7 In other words, Adorno’s polemics against mass culture should not obscure the fact that his aesthetic theory nonetheless remains pertinent and offers an important venue of critique even in the context of postmodern culture. One of the major achievements of Fredric Jameson is to have continued Adorno’s project precisely along these lines. Jameson’s incisive analysis of Hollywood blockbuster movies as well as his discussion of postmodern art clearly shows the degree to which these artifacts are significant in their own right and can serve to illuminate the very mode of production they seek to obscure. The lesson to be learned from Adorno, then, concerns the peculiar kind of personal investment that links literary and cultural critics to the subject matter they scrutinize. I am not referring to the traditional notion that one must like or enjoy art in order to criticize it, but that one must approach art i n t r o d u c t i o n : 5 with a particular purpose and interest in mind, namely that of using it as a vantage point from which to gain critical perspective. Whatever the pri- mary focus of the investigation—be it the realm of popular culture or that of high modernist art—the goal of the critic must be to unveil the underlying tension between ideology and its critique, between the utopian promise in- herent in art and the frustration it suffers once called upon to realize itself. In Jameson’s words, even cultural critics investigating popular art must seek to unveil the ‘‘cultural revolution’’ ( Political Unconscious 95) that underlies and inadvertently reconfigures capitalist society such that ‘‘the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being im- plicitly or explicitly Utopian as well’’ ( Signatures 29). It is precisely this ten- sion that I propose to reexamine in this study on modernist poetry and its relation to visual perception around 1900. Hence, the major reason for writing a book on German high literary mod- ernism is not to claim that some aesthetic objects are simply more suited for this kind of critical engagement than others. Although Aestheticist poetry does indeed reflect and comment upon the relationship between art and life, word and world, this metareflexivity is not enough to grant these works some exceptional status, if only for the reason that this view all too easily leads back to the essentializing perspective on art, beauty, and truth that conservative critics have advocated for decades. Nor is it sufficient to argue that the utopian dimension of modernism has become shortchanged and al- most forgotten in much of recent scholarship about postmodernity, which I think is true, but hardly constitutes a unique case in cultural history. Yet it is equally obvious that one cannot discuss the contemporary dystopian af- fect of postmodern culture without reference to and analysis of the modern paradigm it allegedly supersedes, and this conjunction certainly provides some justification for my own revisiting of modernist poetry. In the end, however, this return to the works of German Aestheticism and their recognition as cultural artifacts still worthy of intellectual analysis cannot be justified outside of my actual engagement with them. This state- ment implies that critics cannot but invest particular works of art with the power to speak ‘‘truthfully’’ about the world or to facilitate insights that could not be attained otherwise. Without this investment and the belief that there is something out there to be discovered in and through aesthetic dis- course, critics are left with only two options: either to return to a simplis- tic Marxist determinism based on the base-superstructure model or to em-