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THE CRITICISMOF PETERSZONDI
specially edited by
Michael Hays
boundary 2
Volume XI, No. 3
Spring 1983
State University of New York
at Binghamton

is an internationaljournal
of postmodernliterature
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ASSOCIATEEDITORS ARTEDITOR
Paul Bov4
WilliamOverstreet DESIGN
ASSISTANT
EDITORS
Cullinan... Bonnie
DanielO'Hara PRINTER
Joseph Buttigieg
JonathanArac PhillipTomashek
DonaldPease
PRODUCTION
EDITORIAL
BOARD
Dennis Dunda
CharlesAltieri RonaldPole nak
DavidFarrellKrell ASSISTANTS
ShermanPaul
Joseph Riddel Susan Behan
EdwardW. Said Sheila
.Skjec
RobertForrest CarolFischler
CristinaBacchilega CarolynHuston
Lisa Relchbach
GiovannaCovi TYPOGRAPHY
Davidlhrman
David Randal Parragh
D B. Goo ite
Penny3. Bronson

CONTENTS
MICHAELHAYS, Introduction / 1
1
JEAN BOLLACK, Opening Remarks / 7

MANFREDFRANK, The Text and its Style. Schleiermacher's
Hermeneutic Language / 11
RAINERNAGELE Text, History and the Critical Subject.

Notes on Peter Szondi's Theory and
Praxis of Hermeneutics / 29
Discussion of Frank and

NAgele papers / 43
GERTMATTENKLOTT For Theater, the Drama is the
Libretto / 53
Further comments in lieu of a

discussion / 67
MICHAELHAYS Drama and Dramatic Theory: Peter Szondi
and the Modern Theater /
Discussion / 83

BERNARDBOSCHENSTEIN Peter Szondi: "Studies on
H61derlin."Exemplarity of
a Path I 93
Discussion / 107
TIMOTHYBAHTI Fate in the Past: Peter Szondi's Reading of
German Romantic Genre Theory / 111
Discussion / 127
THOMASFRIES Critical Relation. Peter Szondi's Studies

on Celan / 139
Discussion / 155
KARLGROB Theory and Practice of Philology: Reflections
on the Public Statements of
Peter Szondi / 169
II
PETERSZONDI Theory of the Modern Drama, Parts I
and II / 191
PETERSZONDI Reading "Engf(0hrung."An Essay on the
Poetry of Paul Celan / 231
CONTRIBUTORS / 265

Introduction
I
At the time of his death in 1971 Peter Szondi had already
established his reputation as a major new voice in Continental
criticism. Since that time, and particularly since Suhrkamp Verlag
published his complete critical works (see section IV below) and
issued five volumes of his unpublished lectures, Szondi's stature has
increased, even in the potentially hostile climate of post-structuralist
France. Translations of his works have appeared in French, Italian,
Polish, Swedish, and, no doubt, other languages as well, others, that
is, than English. With the exception of a few recently published
articles, none of Szondi's work has been made available to the world
of Anglo-American criticism and literary theory. Given the continuing
interest in Lukacs, Adorno and Benjamin, from whom Szondi, in part,
derived his methodological assumptions, and in the light of Szondi's
powerful deployment of linguistic and hermeneutic theory, his
absence from the field of current literary-critical debate in England
and the United States is all the more surprising and unfortunate.
Two volumes of Szondi's essays and his book on the modern
drama will soon be published in English, but these books will not pro-
vide much more than an introduction to some particular aspects of
Szondi's oevure, since this work includes major theoretical and prac-

tical investigations of literary history, genre theory, the language and
technique of interpretation, hemeneutics, philology, the philosophy of
history, and numerous readings in the drama and poetry of classical
and modern Europe.
11
In order to outline these contributions in some detail, and in-
troduce the reader to some of the questions raised by Szondi's critical
enterprise, this special issue of boundary 2 combines a group of
essays about or arising out of Szondi's works with two lengthy texts
by Szondi himself. It is hoped that this procedure will both permit a
confrontation with Szondi's many leveled critical discourse and pro-
vide some evidence of the impact of this discourse on current
criticism as well as on our ideas of the role of the critic both inside
and outside the unversity.
The history of this issue of boundary 2 is itself part of that
process, since an initial interest in publishing several of Szondi's
texts soon grew into a discussion of the place Szondi might occupy in
the contemporary critical world. From this opening discussion bet-
ween Paul Bove, William Spanos, Jean Bollack and myself, arose the
plan for a colloquium which would attempt a serious critical apprecia-
tion of Szondi's work and, perhaps, reexamine the critical lines of
communication between Germany, France and the United States. The
first section of this volume is devoted to the proceedings of that
meeting, which was held in Paris in the summer of 1978 at the Maison
des Sciences de I'Homme. The colloquium was sponsored by Jean
Bollack and boundary 2 with the gracious support of Peter Szondi's
parents, and included participants from Germany, Switzerland,
France, Belgium and the United States. Besides the main speakers,
these included Mayotte Bollack, Lille; Barbara Cassin, Paris; Michel
Deguy, Paris; Jacques Derrida, Paris; Christian L. Hart-Nibbrig,Berne;
Hans Hildebrand, Essen; Andr6 Laks, Lille; Louis Marin, Pris; Henri
Meschonnic, Paris; Glen Most, Heidelberg; William Spanos, Bingham-
ton, N.Y.; and Heinz Wigmann, Paris.
The format presented here in section I is essentially that of the
colloquium: each paper or set of papers was followed by a discussion
in which all the colloquium's participants joined. Some of the richest
matter for further investigation was in fact unearthed in these discus-
sions.
As will become obvious to the reader, the papers and discus-
sions involve and respond to several broad areas of Szondi's
theoretical and practical work. The first two texts, for example, those
by Manfred Frank and Ranier N&gele,explore and in fact extend Szon-
di's investigations of hermeneutic theory and language analysis,
thereby commenting on and continuing his effort to overcome the bar-
riers between German hermeneutics and French post-structuralist
analysis. Their presentations, which trace the path Szondi laid out
from Schleiermacher and the German idealists to Derrida, Lacan and

contemporary linguistic discourse, also mark the epistemological
ground upon which much of Szondi's work is built. The debate that
followed these contributions and reemerged later in the colloquium,
shows how tensely alive the questions raised by Szondi are in contem-
porary philosophy and literary theory-particularly his delineation of
the critical subject and its relation to its textual object and historical
situation.
The five following papers focus on somewhat more limited and
less purely theoretical/methodological aspects of Szondi's work, but,
since it was axiomatic for Szondi to investigate theory and method at
the same time he examined a literary or dramatic text, the theoretical
implications of his readings always emerge as he engages himself
with that text. Thus, the same issues appear in several of these
papers.
The order of the papers also corresponds to a certain
chronological development in Szondi's work. Gert Mattenklott and
Michael Hays turn to Szondi's early investigations of the drama in
order to discuss the evolution and practical implications of Szondi's
method and his theory of dramatic form.
Bernhard B6schenstein and Timothy Bahti discuss different
dimensions of Szondi's analysis of the German romantics, particular-
ly Hl61derlin,in the light of contemporary language and genre theory.
Thomas Fries completes this movement by reinvoking the problem of
language and meaning in his analysis of Szondi's readings of Celan's
poetry. This text and the discussion that follows it return us to the
opening dialogue on the position and function of both language and
the subject, a debate to which Jacques Derrida, Michel Deguy, Henri
Meschonnic and others contribute their own energetic and probing
discourses.
The final text in the first section seems to move away from the
world of abstract literary-philosophical debate in order to engage the
reader in a confrontation with academic and social politics in a very
immediate sense: KarlGrob outlines Peter Szondi's personal involve-
ment in the traumatic conflicts which flared in Berlin (and elsewhere)
in the late 1960s. But as Grob's narration proceeds, it becomes clear
that the terrain of the earlier papers has not at all been left behind. In-
deed Grob's paper is a moving commentary on the personal integrity
of a man, Peter Szondi, who was convinced that knowledge acquired
through the philosophical and critical-theoretical investigation of the
printed and spoken word is of value only insofar as it enhances per-
sonal and intellectual freedom. He refused to allow his discourse (or
that of his profession) to become a means of escaping everyday reali-
ty or simply an adjunct rhetoric in a system of power and oppression.
Ill
The second section of this volume is devoted entirely to two
essays by Szondi. The first is a translation of the introduction and
parts one and two of Theorie des modernen Dramas, Szondi's first

book. It demonstrates his interest in the historical origins of genre
and in the development of formal conceptions which correspond to
the social and ideological assumptions of the people who deploy
these formal statements. Here the dramatic text becomes a
spatialization of and a commentary on the historical situation in
which it arose.
This same condition marks the poetry of Paul Celan, but, in
this last work of Szondi's, the problem of language itself and that of
the reader occupy the central position. The interpretive act gives way
to the event of reading.
IV
For readers who are not familiar with Szondi or his work the
following brief biographical and bibliographical sketch will provide
some further details.
Szondi was born in Budapest on May 27, 1929. His father is
Leopold Szondi, the well-known psychologist. Szondi's academic
career began with his studies at the University of Zurich and the
University of Paris. While in Zurich he studied primarily with Emil
Staiger (see Jean Bollack's opening remarks for more information
about Szondi's intellectual heritage). In 1961 he moved to Berlin,
where he began teaching at the Freie Universitat. Soon after, he was
named full professor and director of the Seminar fOrallgemeine und
vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. He died in Berlin, by his own
hand, on October 18, 1971.
Szondi's major publications include:
Theorie des modernen Dramas (Frankfurta.M., 1956), 3rd revised ed.

1963. In this book Szondi examines the problem of form, particularly
that of dialogic structure, and its collapse in the modern drama. He
provides a theoretical framework within which to understand the col-
lapse in terms of the cultural reality which constituted this formal-
aesthetic practice. Hegel and Adorno are drawn upon to establish a
methodolgical starting point.
Versuch Ober das Tragische (Frankfurt a.M., 1961). Here Szondi ex-
pands his technique of formal analysis by combining a reading of
nineteenth and twentieth century theories of tragedy with a
diachronic investigation of the "tragic" elements in plays by
Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Buchner and others.
Holderlin-Studien. Mit einem Traktat Ober philologische Erkenntnis
(Frankfurta.M., 1967), 2nd ed. 1970. This volume includes the earlier
published Der andere Pfeil. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte von
Holderlins hymnischem Spatstil (Frankfurt a.M., 1963). In these
essays Szondi moves away from the drama and begins an examina-
tion of H61derlinand German romantic philology that will occupy him
for several years. He provides concrete readings of Holderlin's late

poems in the context of a theoretical analysis of the development and
socio-aesthetic location of such poetry.
Satz und Gegensatz. Sechs Essays (Frankfurta.M., 1964). Essays on

Schlegel, Schiller, Kleist, Mann and Benjamin.
Celan-Studien (Frankfurta.M., 1972). Published after Szondi's death,
this volume collects his essays on Celan's poetry. The movement of
these texts is towards an understanding of the logic of poetic produc-
tion in terms of the position and function of language itself. They ex-
plore the readers relation to the poetic object rather than providing
traditional "interpretations."
Lekturenund Lektionen. Versuche OberLiteratur,Literaturtheorieund
Literatursoziologie (Frankfurt a.M., 1973). Published posthumously
under the supervision of Szondi's literary executor, the subtitle ex-
plains the range of these essays, several of which expand Szondi's
methodology to include a more sharply defined sociological and
linguistic analysis, are more congenial to the French post-
structuralists.
Uber eine"freie (d.h. freie) Universitit." Stellungnahmen eines
Philologen (Franfurt a.M., 1973). On the role of academic critics and
criticism in the social politics of the university and in society at large.
All but the last of the above have been published by Suhrkamp
in two volumes, Schriften I, II (Frankfurt a.M., 1978). The same
publisher has brought out a collection of Szondi's lecture notes as
"Studienausgabe der Vorlesungen." These five volumes include:
Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie 1,11(1974). Lectures on aesthetics,
genre theory, the philosophy of history and related topics.
Die Theorie des bOrgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert. Der
Kaufmann, Der Hausvater und der Hofmeister (1974). An analysis of
the rise of bourgeois drama in England, France and Germany.
Das lyrische Drama des Fin de Siecle (1975).
EinfOhrungin die literarische Hermeneutik (1975). A discussion of the

history of the hermeneutic enterprise which attempts to establish a
stable theoretical ground for contemporary hermeneutic practice.
Michael Hays

Opening Remarks
Jean Bollack
translated by Paula Pavlovich
I wish first to thank on behalf of all participants, the parents of

Peter Szondi, professor and Mrs. Leopold Szondi, who by their
generous contribution have made this meeting possible. I would also
like to thank the Maison des Sciences de I'Homme first of all for hav-
ing welcomed us as a research group in the history of philology and
interpretation, which shows their generosity of heart, considering in
this way that such activities have a place in the human sciences, and
secondly for offering us their hospitality during this special collo-
quium on literary epistemology.
The work of these sessions falls within the framework of the
social history of philology, the study of which is centered in this
house. When Michael Hays and his colleague Paul Bov6 spoke to me
last year of their project to dedicate an issue of their journal to Szondi,
I was delighted for two reasons. First of all, because his work
deserves to be thus handled, situated and propagated in connection
with the translations which are presently being prepared in the United
States and secondly, because their interest in literary theory and their
reflection on literary practice was in line with our own work. So, I pro-
posed that the members of this group, who are bound by research in
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common, come to Paris so that this reflection could be undertaken us-
ing the works they are preparing as a point of departure. It is not so
much that I felt obligated by my friendship to Peter Szondi; this
meeting was not conceived as an in memoriam, in the usual sense of
the term, but rather in the critical spirit characteristic of Szondi's
methods, as a work session during which we will each take a stand
towards the problems which they raise.
The rules and ethics of Szondi's doctrine, I would say, provide
us with a guide to understanding him in the historical context which
was his. In fact, he considered it unjust to deprive anyone or any thing,
event or phenomenon, of its history, that is, its independence within
the context which was its own and which sometimes outlives it. His
positions are best understood in relation to the postwar university
and in the intellectual space of post-Hitler Germany. He was in-
fluenced by a native Swiss who exercised his professional authority in
the spirit of a truly liberal university, a university nonetheless deeply
marked by the German philological traditions of the 19th century: Emil
Staiger, a man who also succumbed on occasion to the ideology of
the times. However, he found other masters (maitres a penser) among
those who distanced themselves from the university. Staiger must
have taught him the importance of theory in literary matters, but at the
same time revealed the theoretical deficiency of the very one he
taught. Three models, whom he had taken from the beginning, and
who in his eyes belonged to the same spiritual family, stayed with him
right up to the end of his life and served him as a constant and implicit
point of reference: Lukics, Benjamin, and Adorno. Three Jews, three
marginal members of the German nation which had formed them in-
tellectually and had given them their first success, the latter two
refugees and exiles like Szondi himself. (In addition to his influence,
Adorno contributed his friendship and his living presence in the same
intellectual world-very early Adorno began to count a great deal in
Szondi's private life.) It was this marginality that he chose to defend
inside the university when he entered it professionally in 1959. He
realized that his career, one of those generally termed brilliant, was
due as much to the particular misfortunes of which he was a victim as
to his talent. He was regularly astonished, without a trace of naivet6,
at having been admitted, such as he was, into the sacred college of
"full" professors.
His trajectory can be appreciated in two different manners
depending on whether one places oneself outside of or within a clear-
ly intellectual perspective-as we will during this colloquium. At the
very beginning he grasped a form which could express his criticism of
university traditions: the essay. The Theory of the Modern Drama,
which arose from that critique, was his first academic confirmation.
The text is a conceptually rigorous analysis presented in an exoteric
style. In order to understand Szondi's particular situation in the in-
tellectual realm, we must imagine the interest which such a book was
able to arouse in the world of letters and in the theatre, and also the
inclination which drew him toward concerns outside the university:
literary journals, the theatre, and cinema. On the level of his work, this
is expressed in a modernism based on theory. He owed the prestige
he had with his students and colleagues, not only to the quality of his
courses, carefully elaborated even in their presentation, but also to
his reputation outside of the university. Parts of his courses ap-
peared, reworked in the form of books. Thus, he occupied a position
inside the institution which was not simply given to him by his peers.
This recognition, within and without, was due to historical conditions,
to the particular situation of the university as it still existed twenty
years ago in the world of high culture. Instead of being complacent
about this division and using his professorship only as a means of
earning a living, he brought into the institution the same concern for
distinction which animated him outside of it. The Institute for General
and Comparative Literature-Seminar fOr AlIgemeine und
Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (this name corresponds to his
disposition toward theory, a disposition which led him to refuse a
chair in German literature)-this institute, which he formed with great
care in Berlin in 1965-66, was an object of admiration for its high stan-
dards, the quality of its library, and its exemplary organizations. Far
from rejecting the academic institution through disdain and
negligence, Szondi criticized it all the more to ensure the achievement
of his expectations.
It is true that it would have been difficult for him to create in
such a short time, a comparable bastion outside of Germany where
the potential for such a structure already existed. There, his students
found the double benefit of an elaborate technical formation and an
indirect participation in contemporary intellectual life. His national
status as an intellectual, which he owed to his public fame, but of
which his professorship was an essential aspect, allowed him to take
stands in newspapers (of quality) and, in the most diverse of affairs,
defend people or causes. The criticism which marked all of his
stances, his non-identification with the established, led him to go
beyond the existing forms of contestation whose raisons d'etre he felt
obliged to comprehend, so much so that he knowingly and without
hesitation, prepared the way for the calling into question of what he
had worked to build, as if he were convinced that he was an only ar-
tisan of transformation and transition. His conduct, logical and ar-
resting as it was, could not be proposed as a model, since, on the one
hand, it is marked by the seal of history and on the other its force
stems from a consciously accepted anachronism, almost artifice. He
knew the objective reasons which guaranteed his emancipatory
engagement would be compromised by movements of emancipation,
he knew that there was probably no longer a stage for the role he had
played.
The Text and Its Style. Schleiermacher's
HermeneuticTheoryof Language
Manfred Frank
translated by Richard Hannah and Michael Hays
For the last twenty years there has been a marked increase
within the cultural sciences of theories that are based in one way or
another on language. This is true of analytic philosophy, structural
semiology and existential hermeneutics. Common to each of them is
the attempt to revise the modern paradigm of "transcendental con-
sciousness" or "subjectivity" in terms of language theory. Before I
speculate on the motive for this change in the paradigm, let me draw
attention to a seemingly related circumstance, namely that the unity
of the paradigm in no way provided these approaches with a common
basis for discussion and research. Of course, there have been fruitful
confrontations both in West Germany and in the United States be-
tween the practitioners of analytic philosophy and phenomenological
hermeneutics. Yet the few, faint-hearted attempts to bring about a
discussion between representatives of these groups and the French
post-structuralist semioticians have rarely succeeded in establishing
a forum. To be sure, the initial polemics and defensiveness-Alfred
11
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Schmidt's Geschichte und Struktur(1971) is typical-have yielded in
the meantime to an increasingly favorable reception of the singular
and powerful thoughts which streamed in from France on a rising tide
of often questionable translation. And yet, as far as I can see, there
have not been any effective attempts to mediate between these
divergent methodological options. Rather, the rift in methodological
standards, which used to run the length of the border, has now merely
been transferred into West Germany.
I said that these attempts at mediation had found little resonance,
not that there hadn't been any. Peter Szondi, for one, in his seminars,
lectures and publications called for translation of the French
semiologists and encouraged a critical reception of their work. As an
individual who, like Friedrich Schlegel, was competent in the areas of
literary theory and philosophical aesthetics, as well as in the literary
history of several European languages, Szondi knew only too well that
his opinions seemed out of the ordinary. Germanistics, which has
long been obligated to ideas emanating from neighboring disciplines,
especially philosophy and sociology, since germanists were unable to
lay an independent and satisfactory theoretical foundation for their
discipline, cut itself off from the intellectual tradition embodied by
Szondi and paid for its refusal to engage in the effort of mediation bet-
ween various methodological options with an unrestrained pluralism
of methods that constitutes, in effect, both a renunciation of any type
of dialectic and an unprecedented complicity with the pluralism of the
free (academic) market. Thus, Germanistics offers us a striking ex-
ample of the common experience that temporal progress does not
necessarily imply progress in knowledge. In this area of study there
are, as Ernst Robert Curtius said concerning literary criticism in
general, only romanticism and beginnings.
Ironically, however, this situation creates an advantage for
Germanistics. In its hour of need, it can have recourse to the treasures
of the romantics' founding efforts without thereby articulating an
"archaeological" interest. Szondi was able to show both how viable
Schleiermacher's philological starting point remains and how well
suited it is to institute a dialogue between the structuralists and
linguistic-analytic hermeneutic positions.
Szondi's call for a new, more fundamental reading of Schleier-
macher's hermeneutics, which began with the publication of
"L'herm6neutiquede Schleiermacher,"' did have some effect in West
Germany. My own work is unthinkable without Szondi, and there are
other works that follow this same line.2 And yet, Szondi's article
seems to have had little effect in France-which is all the more
regretable, since it was published in French. The task of mediation
will remain unfinished if the French semiologists do not accept
Szondi's encouragement and work to establish an international
dialogue. My presentation should be understood as a renewed at-
tempt to introduce Schleiermacher into France. And even if I hope to
add a few important touches to Szondi's portrait of Schleiermacher,
as well as contradict it in some other respects, I would like to
acknowledge my debt to Szondi's initial, epoch-making re-reading of
12

Schleiermacher's hermeneutics.
However, before I begin, I want to speculate as to why the
dialogue with contemporary French theoreticians has failed. Now, if
the differences between those analytic forays dependent on a
methedological discipline and those of an existentialist hermeneutics
that wishes to ground scientific hypotheses in irrefutable com-
munication processes located in the historical effects of a work, if
these differences can be cleared up as indicated in the work of Apel,
Taylor, von Wright and Toumlin, it is because they are all indebted (if
you will allow me to simplify for the sake of brevity)to a "semanticist"
perspective. They are all concerned with either an explanation of the
process of understanding meaning or a test of the validity of
judgements about the meaning of utterances. In spite of its
methodological viewpoint, the question as to How to do Things with
Words is not in essential opposition to the question as to how verbal
perspectives on the world are constructed and how they dictate the
horizon of meaning to the individual enclosed by these language
structures. Even models in which the category of the subject is no
longer considered appropriate to the explanation of "the meaning of
meaning" are concerned with a contemporary reformulation of the
classic critique of meaning. To inquire as to the meaning of human
utterances is apparently more fundamental than the question of their
reasonability. Here we can make a connection with the neo-Kantian
tradition (Cassirer, for example) in which the restrictive logical sense
of the transcendental synthesis is broadened to include the output of
our symbolic capacity in general and our linguistic capacity in par-
ticular. And if, in the wake of Wittgenstein, symbolic forms are
thought of as rule-governed structures that determine the concrete
actions of designating and giving meaning, and even as able to
independently extend and transform the lexical-syntactical repertoire,
then they must also be granted the capacity for spontaneity and
reflection, the traditional hallmarks of subjectivity.
From this perspective, the English Channel, which has often
served metonymically to represent the division between Anglo-Saxon
and continental philosophy, has not really effected any discursive rup-
ture: the premises and methods of analytic philosophy are based on
the same paradigm of reflection that has held sway over continental
metaphysics since Parmenides. At any rate, this is the objection that
both analytic philosophy and hermeneutic theory (broadly construed)
must meet as soon as they take up the challenge of French
semiology. For example, Derrida sees common premises at work in
Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, Austin and Searle's speech-act theory,
and even in Foucault's "archaeology."' These premises surreptitious-
ly conflate the competing positions into the unity of a single,
scientific formation according to Derrida. In concert, they assume
that consciousness, parole or "discourse" provide fundamental ac-
cess to the meaning of utterances, even if such utterances, as
elements of social institutions, are initially unavailable to the in-
dividual and must, to use a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, be
recuperated by means of an "archaeological" reconstruction. The
13

Parmenidian "noein", the cognitive perception of being in its being,
makes sense only under the assumption that something positive
rather than nothing (i b6v) is given. Thus, non-being is not, it has no
presence, no truth, that might be uniformly repeated and it cannot be
regarded as the possible object of a necessarily general knowledge.
Friedrich Schlegel termed the nothing of Parmenides an "emptiness,
seeking fulfillment," "a gap in being" (Dasein), that, itself unseeable,
allowed the determination of the seeable.5
Only signs and the relations that they bear to one another (the
new mass of the encodable) are visible, objective, significant, and,
thus, replicable and generalizable within the frameworkof a structure.
The gap as such escapes the eye of knowledge, although it is pre-
cisely this gap that instituted the positive terms in their function as
signs, that is, as meaning-expressive unities. As Saussure
demonstrated, the identity building of signs and their integration into
the economy of an articulated system is the result of a process
whereby quite specific cuts are made in the unarticulated mass of
signifying material (the significance of which he characterized as "en
soi nulle") through which individual blocks are separated from one
another and thereby invested with profile, contour and particular
features, in short, with differential characteristics. Only when the
work of differentiation and interval formation among the "termes
pleins et positifs" has been accomplished (and, precisely stated, this
work moves forward continuously with each sign usage) can the
"distinctness" of the sign as the synthesis of intelligible meanings
and material substrata of expression be completed.6 In other words,
only when the work of differentiation withdraws itself, as it were, from
the completed structure of the signifier is the same structure
transformed from a meaningless, furrowed matter to an articulated
order of signs which can express meaningfully. This is an old insight,
with its most famous formulation in Spinoza's "Omnis determinatio
est negatio," and it is still present in Sartre's axiom, "Non-being is the
basis for the determination of being."7
Beyond this, reference to Spinoza, Hegel or Sartre is not very
helpful, for, according to these thinkers, negation remains midway
between two positions for the benefit of which it operates and
sublates itself. On the other hand, there persists the aggravation that
befalls the "semanticism" of meaning comprehension in the work of
Lacan and Derridaas a result of its insistence upon a dialectically un-
sublatable denial, one that splits meaning off from itself without
allowing it any recourse to itself. When Gadamer speaks of a
"speculative structure" of language, he means to imply that the two
terms of the process of communication reflect themselves in one
another and are, thus, essentially homogeneous.8 In the process of
consciousness arising out of historical effect (wirkungsgechichtlich),
one spirit (Geist) always speaks to another, or, radically reformulated,
the context of meaning of a tradition speaks to itself in the form of a
comprehension opened in opposition to this tradition. In this manner
the historical effects based (wirkungsgeschichtliche) hermeneutics of
Gadamer and Ricoeur, as well as all communication or information
14

theories, make connection with the paradigm of reflection in which
the alienation of consciousness from itself can only be a way station
along the path of its constant returnto itself. However, as Derridahas
emphasised, there is an alterity of a completely different order that of
necessity remains unnoticed in such conceptions. Every element
within the order of a linguistic world view, even before it is able to
grasp itself as what it is, carries within itself the traces of all other
elements of the signifying structure. That is, it does not achieve its
identity-as-meaning from its specular relation to itself or to an im-
perishable, authentic core of truth, but, rather, from its open aliena-
tion (Vercusserung) in that which is its other. As Derrida says, "In
order to be itself, it must set itself off an interval from that which it is
not."9Thus, the meaning that is to be understood is not based in a
continuum composed purely of meaning equal to itself, but in that
which is itself not meaningful. The immediate transparency of mean-
ing is already clouded at its origin; and, if one were to describe it the
effable, then one would have to call its origin silence, as Mallarmedid.
The trouble is that this insight also applies to reflection
itself-thus to the fundamental theorem of modernity, with which
philosophy believed it had demonstrated its claim to a rigorous scien-
tific method. However, one can neither think reflection without
presupposing a simple self-conscious identity (otherwise one term in
the relation could not be sure of being aware of itself in the other,
rather than yet another), nor can one overlook the fact that this identi-
ty is never immediately present to itself; it must call the other-the
other term in the relation-as witness to its likeness to itself.
Hdlderlinhad already presented the aporia in this form, and Fichte, to
whom H6lderlin refers, discovered that the testimony of the other
seemed to be verified by means of the identity's prereflective
knowledge of itself. And yet, Fichte too got caught in a circle. On the
one hand, as he demonstrated in the Wissenschaftslehre nova
methodo of 1798, the certainity of the idea, "1,"(its concept) is bound
to the difference of at least two mutually sublating expressions ("You
think 'I' and to that extent not of anything else, thus, not not-I").On
the other hand, this cleavage of the two terms must once again be in-
vaded by a direct contemplation of their non-separation, otherwise,
the other is no longer the same as the One, and the irreducible identity
of the thought, "1,"no longer obtains.10
There is no way out, the condition for the possibility of the I is
its expenditure for the other. This, of course, cleaves the self into two
parts, no matter how gladly it disavows its own differential basis after
the fact. The pathway of the reflected to itself as that which reflects
is, however, still blocked by the irremovable externality of the
signifier. According to Derrida, "a langage has preceded my self-
consciousness.1""
This thesis, and here I come to the real object of my discus-
sion, is prefigured in Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre and Dialektik.
As far as I know, he was the first to draw the semiotic consequences
(consequences that crystallized as he pursued the project for the
Hermeneutics) from the failure of the reflection model. It is the fact
15

that he did not abandon the theorem of a meaning-creating (though
semiologically humbled) subject that makes his position so attractive
for contemporary methodological debate in linguistics and literary
studies.
In the above mentioned texts, Schleiermacher demonstrates
that the concept of the "subject" appears inappropriate as a
philosophical starting point: even in the highest of all syntheses, that
of thought and volition, it exists as a relation, that is, as a virtual striv-
ing apart of the mutually referential. Yet the fact that the subject
nevertheless possesses knowledge of the sameness of the relata is
an achievement the fundamental reality of which the subject cannot
attribute to itself. Thus, the epistemological ground of self-
consciousness, its immediate self-transparency, slips into a peculiar
belatedness in relation to its ontological ground. Schleiermacher
writes that the absolute interiority of this feeling of identity only oc-
curs "in the subject," it is not produced "by the subject.'12
Thus, the subject does possess a consciousness of a unity
which pervades it, and also knows immediately that it cannot be the
originary source of this knowledge. It is conversant with itself only
because it reads the hallmark of its "transcendental determinacy"
(transzendenten Bestimmtheit),13 as a suggestion of an identity that
"supplements" the indication provided by the "defect" inscribed in
reflection (Dial O, 287, 290, 295-96). In rough outline, this is the result
of "the analysis of self-consciousness in relation to the correspond-
ing presence of an other" (GI, 24). In terms of religious attitude, this
necessitates a renunciation of the desire to call on the self as the
basis for one's sense of being absolutely determined.
Schleiermacher speaks of a "crisis of the subject"; this occurs
as soon as the subject can only testify to (bezeugen), and no longer
engender (erzeugen) its constitutive truth. When "its power is broken"
(GI, 27) on the fictitiousness of its unconditional self-mediation, the
subject may no longer be considered the locus of a supra-historical,
self-present truth that contains, bound up within itself, all the facts of
a historical world, facts that it could then reveal in a series of deduc-
tive steps.
11
This theoretical premise bars Schleiermacher from using a
sequence of argumentative strategies typically employed in
transcendental philosophy. Above all, the appeal to the authority of
self-consciousness no longer guarantees the possession of an
"absolute" truth present to itself in a trans-historical perspective.
This option eludes Schleiermacher insofar as self-consciousness is
defined as relational (and, thus, bound in time), and also as "a general
consciousness of finitude" (GI,? 8, 2), that is, as a consciousness of
"dependence" which is absolute in regard to its being per se and
relative in regard to its "existence in the world" (GI,? 2; see GI?? 3-5).
Reflection on the crisis of the subject has hermeneutic conse-
16

quences: "Since [the subject's] power is broken on the factitiousness
of its unconditional self-mediation it no longer comes into question as
the locus from which judgements (judgements independent of in-
dividual experience) about the realm of being in the historical world
can be reached by means of a monologic series of deductions. Rather,
the transcendency of the ground of knowledge forces the subject to
verify the evidence of its perceptions in the field of interpersonal
understanding. That is the concern of the dialectic, which Schleier-
macher defined as "the delineation of the first principles for an artful-
ly conducted conversation in the realm of pure thought,""4 The goal of
the dialectic is "knowledge," that is, the production of a state in
which theory is "inalterable and general" (HuK,414). The partners in a
discourse must be in accord with respect to the establishment of this
goal, because without the "presupposition" of such a knowledge-idea
(no matter how unattainable), there would be-when one considers
both the irreconcilable disparity of the opinions that confront each
other as well as the inadequacy of a "truth"that holds sway over the
conversation from above-no guarantee of the intersubjectivity of the
then sought after discursive agreement.
Another presupposition for the dialectic, one implied in the
postulate of an ideal unity of knowledge, is the selfsameness of the
object to which the divergent predicates are assigned. Only this
allows the collision of dialectically sublatable "contradictions" (HuK,
426ff). Obviously, their conflict is not "objectively" resolvable (i.e.,
through some external authority), since one cannot decide by simple
exclusion between the appropriateness or inappropriateness of
unreconcilable judgements about a self-contained intended "being"
(A) or a specific sector of being (A'). The lack of a transsubjective
criterion for the "true" predication of a being forces the partners in
the conversation to take into account in the formation of their poten-
tial consensus every predicate genuinely granted to it. In other words,
the partners must acknowledge that the object of judgement is not in-
different to the individual interpretations drawn up for it by the totality
of subjects. The predicated sphere expands continuously with each
investiture of meaning. The breakthrough to truth is, as it were, made
as soon as the relative nature of one's own standpoint is perceived.
This does not take place in order to allow the positive fixing of a
material expression (which would be relative, of course, since it would
rest on a provisional consensus; it could even become an error as
soon as it claimed to exhaust the potential meaning of being), rather,
it occurs in the shape of a forever incompletable movement toward
truth that totalizes each individual perception.
Now the notion of a simultaneous relativity and universality in
interpreting being, through which a group of subjects defines itself as
a particular "thought community" (HuK,417), has the structure of a
language, that is, of a historical-"empirical" and "speculative" ap-
paratus of communication-enabling catagories (HuK,234, 467). There
is no thought-community that has not ipso facto sedimented its
dialectical consensus in the grammar of a "language nexus" (HuK,
420ff.), that is, as a context of references or signs through which it
17

perfects its social synthesis. "Thought" is, according to Schleier-
macher, nothing but the immediate self-elucidation of "action" (cf.
Dial O, 70). Because of its dependence on each particular grammar,
the dialectic participates in the particularities and disinformation of
the historical world (that is, in each particular tradition, historically or
biographically induced givens that are precipitated in conventional
speech patterns and are, at the time of their acquisition, internalized
as various practices). The dialectic can never completely free itself
from this dependency, since the truth constituted by it can never go
beyond the status of an individual and historical interpretation of be-
ing founded on intersubjective unanimity. For this reason, the dialec-
tic freely renounces "any claim to universality" (HuK,422, 424)-in the
sense of an objectivity independent of subjects-and recognizes that
'the particularity of a language" is not only traced in the thought pro-
cess of the individuals "socialized" within it, but also contributes to
the apprehension of each and every other" (HuK,421). The irreducible
non-universality of "relativityof thought" (HuK,410) points the dialec-
tic to the "art of interpretation" or "hermeneutics." Hermeneutics
considers utterances primarilyfrom the perspective of to what extent
they validate that which is individual;the dialectic on the other hand,
stresses the notion that even the most private expression of meaning
results in part from a priorawareness of an "idea of knowledge" com-
mon to all thinking beings and, further, must be formulated
linguistically for the sake of its possible communication: "Thus, it is
clear that both [hermenutics and dialectics] can exist only in mutual
relation" (HuK,411).
III
One can see that it is an intrasystematic consistency that pro-
vides the framework within which Schleiermacher's hermeneutic
theory will unfold: the transcendence of being in opposition to mean-
ing, through which every linguistic community simultaneously
discloses and disguises being, immediately forces the recognition of
the concept of an individuality that cannot be considered simply a
deduction of or an imputation of the semantico-syntatic system. Yet,
from one end of the historical universe to the other, there is no univer-
sality whose economy is unlimited and whose structure would not ar-
rest the unity of this particular movement, of which the gesture of an
individual disclosure of meaning would expose the exact structure at
this moment in historical time. In this respect, what Schleiermacher
considers to be the individual is never simply the implied of a univer-
sal cohesion of signs, but always also its boundary and potential
challenge from the side of subjects who, in the use of signs, bring into
play their "particularity"as an "untranslatable" quality. There cannot
be a "universal language" because "agreement about [such a
language] is itself dependent on individual languages" (HuK, 461).
Schleiermacher sees through the scientific utopia of a non-individual
universal. A use of reason, with the mark of universality, encoded as
18

"language" within a language (the concern of dialectics/grammar)
stands in fundamental opposition to knowing with the mark of in-
dividuality, i.e., its untranslatability (the concern of
hermeneutics/rhetoric). The latter is not immediately reducible to the
former, just as the former can never reproduce a totally determined
"speech act." It is a mistake to think that language speaks of its own,
as a few structuralists, in the wake of the symbolists and Heidegger,
have done. (This talk of the autonomy of language is unmasked as a
metaphor that hypostatizes the signifier as an objective force.) As
Charles S. Pierce has shown, language never alludes to the interpre-
tant who, in context, individualizes the meaning of signs. Nor can in-
dividual meaning ever find expression (because of its untranslatabili-
ty), that is, achieve the ontological status of a linguistic sign (insofar
as "language, as a general system of designation" achieves the
mediation of the social quality of thought [HuK,458, 76f.]), unless it
makes use of "thoughts . . . that already have a designation in the
language" and restricts its capacity for individuation to the (of course
not once again rule bound) symbolic overdetermination of the codified
sign in conformity with "style" (HuK,78; cf. 168).
Now, Schleiermacher maintains that every lingusitic expres-
sion (Rede), is doubly marked. On the one hand, it manifests the
system of the totality of the language (HuK,458ff., 364, 380, passim),
which prescribes to all participant speakers the syntax and semantics
(the "Grammatik")of their utterances: "Language . . . [conditions]
the thinking of all individuals . . . , if one considers the individual as
merely a locus for language" (HuK, 79; cf. 78). On the other hand,
however, "language comes into being only . . . through speech" in
as far as 1) it has its origin in the totalized disclosures of meaning in-
itiated by the speakers, and insofar as 2) every individual speaker
"works in and on the language: He brings out something new in the
language . . . and in part preserves that which he repeats and
carries forward" (HuK, 167, 78f.).
One sees immediately that these differences are determined
by a predominence or retreat of specific functions. "Grammar"
(although only a virtual system, it formally determines the corpus of
utterances) represents the first aspect, "rhetoric"the second, since it
provides a theory of the art of speech. This does not mean, however,
that it should be construed narrowly as the technique of producing
artful (artificial) speech (HuK,76).
IV
This "double relation" (HuK,77), this field of tension in which
speech resides, obeys a dialectic whose law is yet opaque. For one
thing, the mechanism which discloses the linguistically codified sign
as a function of an "intransferable" project of meaning (and also
makes the historicity of taxonomies understandable) is not yet
understood. Neither has it been demonstrated how the individual act
of thinking-even if it, in a certain fashion, escapes "linguistic
19

law"15-nevertheless should be able to be constituted linguistically.
As far as the thesis of the irreducible linguistic nature of
thought is concerned, it stands in opposition to the classical notion
that the linguistic sign is only the external re-presentation of
something internal which is capable of avoiding the detour of the
signifier, indeed is only authentically preceived in its absence. The
theoreticians of a rationalistic universal grammar supposed in this
sense that empirical languages reflected more or less completely
through the catenation of words in sentences the ideal judgements-
syntheses of an eternal order of ideas, a logic. In an analogous
fashion, one might interpret Kant's apparatus of categories and prin-
ciples as the model of a transcendental semantics, whose repertoire
is accessible before it is available through signifiers, and which only
in a second stage moves toward the sensible world-through a
system of schemata concerning experience. As he had against
Fichte, Schleiermacher raises the objection that even a non-sensible
thought, should it wish to be "clear," i.e. distinct (cf. HuK, 77, 367,
passim), must inscribe itself in an oppositional structure of a
linguistic type, because "every concept is rooted in difference."'16
Even the meaning of "ideas" or intelligible principles can delineate
itself only by means of a "system" of "conditioned differences among
the units of meaning" (HuK,365). And the difference between a (non-
sensible) thought and a speech act (led through the straits of the
signifier) reduces itself to the commonplace difference between a
spoken and an unspoken use of signs (HuK,77; cf. SW 111/9,pp. 126,
703). The thrust of this extraordinary thesis, which Saussure was to
expand, is that insofar as one thinks at all (i.e., insofar as distinct
meanings or "speech values" are at all coherently concatenated
(HuK,107,135,137, 141, passim), one must presuppose the "totality of
a language" as a differential system by means of which from the
outset an identical schematization of a speech community's ex-
perience of the world, thus, communication as a fait social
(Saussure), is assured (cf. GI, ? 42).
Here a second problem surfaces which needs clarification:
doesn't the subversion of the subject by the signified (Lacan) imply
the loss of the subject's individuality? And if such is not the case,
where is the intermediate stage to be found which holds the dialectic
of "linguistic law" and "linguistic usage" in flux without either
degrading thought to the status of the active organ of the structure
itself or releasing it from its bonds to language?17
An essential support for the claim to universality embodied in
Schleiermacher's hermeneutics is the proof that no linguistic ut-
terance (level of rhetoric) discloses its meaning (HuK,75), that is, is
"understood," on the basis of a purely grammatical reconstruction:
"Nor is it understood as a modification of language, unless it is
understood as a fact of the spirit [of thought], because there lies the
basis for any influence by the individual on language which comes in-
to being through speech" (HuK, 79). Thus, the reconstruction of a
grammatical sequence and its concatenated elements of significa-
tion becomes a hermeneutic operation at the moment meaning is
20

derived for the sequence; this by means of the elements, and not
through them.'8 If one concededs that individual "significance," by
dint of its sensitivity to context, i.e. the effect of the "immediate en-
vironment,"'19 also constantly renews the description of the unity of
the codified "values of language," then it is necessary to define anew
the concept "language" through the differential between the gram-
matical and the rhetorical functions.
Following the Kantian tradition, Schleiermacher employs the
term "schema" to designate the realm of play in which a linguistic
sign's "unity of meaning" (HuK,104, 106) stretches between the strict
identity of the concept (its unity as a linguistic value or paradigm),and
the variability of its individual combinations and applications in the
syntagmatic combine. The (empirical) schema is the "unity in the
determination of meaninghfulness" seen from the point of view of
contemplation (Critique of Pure Reason, A 140/B 179). Its origin in the
resources of the contemplative capacity (imagination) permits the
production of synthetic acts whose noematic correlate, despite the
schema's unified organization, remains in principle open to new
initiatives for constitution by the subject. The unity of a "linguistic
value" differentiated in the network of language, is obviously of this
type. The universality of a pure concept cannot be accorded to the
meaning of a sign because no one of the sign's usages can ever cor-
respond to this meaning completely (with regard to a universal being,
moreover, it is hard to see what transformation its extension would be
able to expand). Neither can it be a question of an individual perspec-
tive (which would not be translatable). The only option is a unification
of the stuff of contemplation in such a manner that the conditioning
of its noema results from a glance forward towards a concept without
thereby permanently falling under its tutelage. A change in the syn-
thesis of the imagination instantaneously modifies the extension of
the corresponding schema. It is, says Schleiermacher, a perception
"which shifts within certain limits,"20 and comparable to Wittgen-
stein's "language game," which he defined as concept with fuzzy
borders.21 The standard measure for the admissability of a word's use
is granted speakers of a language by intuition of the rule,22 according
to which the designative competence of the speaker works so as to
produce the appropriate verbal schema within the flexible unity his
context-variable referents of meaning.
In no way does Schleiermacher confine his discussion of the
schema to singular termini (to "Subjektsbegriffe"); he considers all
categorematic expressions, thus all "notions of predicate" as well, to
be schematizable (Dial O, 340ff.). A "floating unity" mediates between
the two (Dial O, 342). Thus he does not consider "the unity of
meaning" exclusively semantic; it is just as much a "structural" prob-
lem which he discusses very clearly and at length in his lectures on
hermeneutics.23 He is barred in principle from an abstractive sepa-
ration of semantics and syntax by his ingenious discovery of the law
of the double determination of every act of speech, namely, by the
"total linguistic domain" through paradigmatic exclusion and by the
speech act's "immediate context" through "syntagmatic determina-
21

tion (HuK, 101ff., 116ff.).24 Just as paradigmatic selection fixes the
meaning of a word (its linguistic value) in all contexts, its syntagmatic
determination tests the breadth of the momentary individual implica-
tions of the word in specific contexts (the "local value" of the schema
(HuK, 195ff., 141ff.) Both operations refer to each other. The lexical
paradigm is never anything other than an abstraction produced from
the plenitude of its contextually variant usages by means of com-
parison and differentiation. Conversely, syntagmatic concatenation
presupposes the linguistic value of a word as that which has to be
modified by its immediate surroundings.
The essence of all notions of predicate and subject is thus "a
floating unity between the general and the particular" (Dial O, 342),
between distinctness and mutability, between concept and judge-
ment, between intellectual and organic functions or whatever other
terms Schleiermacher employs to frame this dialectical relation.
This detailed, intelligently formulated theory of the linguistic

schema provides Scheiermacher with a plausible explanation of both
the relationship between language structure and language change
and that between ordinary and metaphorical usage.
Just as the concepts of a language do not take possession
once-and-for-all of its predicates (recruited from sense perception and
acknowledged by judgement), but rather remain modifiable in their
semantic substance through changes in the direction of their organic
function (their unity of meaning is defined in relation to the basically
inconclusive judgements made about their semantic substance), so
must the language system in general also be regarded as an instable,
i.e., historically open, "parasemic context" (Saussure)25 whose world
view changes according to the interpretive judgements made by in-
dividuals and which never attains the mode of being of an ultimately
active idea which shakes off interpretation and comments from out-
side. Every individual communication presupposes the unity of the
world as its noematic correlate toward which the exchange of
messages points. This unity is, however, only the inert reflex of that
schematic unity of speech as totality by means of which a particular
community seals its practical synthesis. "The identical construction
of thought codified in language" thus offers "no complete guarantee
for the correctness of that thought" (HuK, 460). "Communications
about external objects are a steady continuation of the test as to
whether all humans construe identically" (HuK,460).
Thus language is an individual universal. It subsists as a
universal system principally on the basis of revocable agreement
among its speakers. It changes its total meaning with every act of
speech and at every moment, insofar as this semantic innovation suc-
ceeds in entering the grammatical repertoire-something that hap-
pens continually in conversational acts. Saussure described this
phenomenon of "analogic" or "parasemic transformation" in quite
22

the same sense as Schleiermacher and thereby contradicted the
deductivism with which his supposedly orthodox pupils tried to de-
fend the relationship between langue and parole. There is an indeter-
minable (or, at least, not determinable on the basis of a pure potential
such as langue) "activit6 crdatrice," even a "libert6 individuelle" for
the speaker which is precipitated as "incessant daily creation within
the langue" and as such cannot be thought, even if one could an-
ticipate it from the point of view of the langue.
Schleiermacher sees the purest expression of the meaning-
creating potential of language in the poetic use of language.26The
metaphoricity of the symbolic use of language undermines the con-
ventional meanings (schemata) of words through a well calculated
semantic shock which challenges the reader's "free productivity in
the language" (HuK, 143, 450f.). When the ordinary meaning of an ex-
pression (the schema sensu stricto) is cancelled out (cf., HuK,105f.),a
new description (re-assignment is the term used by Mary B. Hess; an
"image," says Schleiermacher) of the intentionality of the expression
is tendered and with it the possibility of a new vision of its designated
content matter surfaces. This designation of content matter is, accor-
ding to Scheiermacher, a hermeneutic function of speaking ("correct"
objectivication corresponds to the grammatical correctness of the ex-
pression and the material content inscribed in it by the schemata of
experience). If the originally simply individual image is appropriated
by the recipients of an act of speech (HuK,407f.), then this image has
thereby ceased to be exclusive or private and exists as a virtual
universal schema or possibly as a rule for language use (among
others) in the totality of a language (cf., HuK,410f.).
VI
At this point the fundamental argument of Schleiermacher's
theory of language comes to light, that aspect of his theory which has
been fraught with the worst sort of misunderstanding throughout the
history of its reception: the theorem of divination.
Contrary to the assertions of Gadamer and the majority of
Schleiermacher's exegetes, the theorem does not originate in the
historical dimension which bridges the time-gap between interpreter
and interpreted, in no way is "divination"to be translated by empathy
(Einfuhlung),a term which never appears in Schleiermacher's work.
"Divination" appears within the framework of Schleier-
macher's theory of style (HuK, 169). (In the following remarks I will
confine myself to its linguistic dimension.) By "style" Schleiermacher
means the "manipulation of language" from the point of view of the
degree to which the speaker introduces his "personal way of conceiv-
ing the object in his application and, thus, in his treatment of
language" (HuK, 168). Here we are obviously dealing with an event
essentially identical to the metaphorical "new description" in as far
as stylistic modification challenges the general schematic posture of
language with a speakers initially untranslatable "thought." The
23

poetic "image," which is superimposed on the general schema, is
layed down as a "purely singular entity," thus ipso facto as
something which, in contradistinction to language, is irrational"
(HuK, 408). Poetry (Dichtung), which is merely the extreme case of
everyday language use, has something to give in the linguistic
medium "that cannot really be given through language, since
language only expresses the general" (HuK,401). The speaker, acting
in a literally "poetic" manner (producing new meaning), forces his in-
dividuality onto language, an individuality which has not yet been
codified and is in this sense ineffable (HuK,403f.). The speaker does
this by the manner in which he "weaves these [words] together" (HuK,
401). The "particular combinatory structure" of style, in which "the
essence of individuality" leaves its trace ex negativo (HuK, 370,
passim) must, however, be differentiated from the combining of words
according to a syntactical rule. A sentence or a speech act modeled
on universal regularities (be they generic, social, or grammatical in
nature) is an "object for grammatical interpretation" and only invokes
"language as a general concept," that is, as the transcendental ap-
paratus for generating all "necessary forms for subject, predicate and
syntax" (HuK,171). These forms are not, however, "positive means for
explaining" real instances of language use (of style), "rather,they are
negative means, because whatever contradicts them . . . cannot be
understood" (HuK,171f.). It is true that syntax, semantics, and-as far
as it formulates its own rules-pragmatics constitute the conditiones
sine quibus non of language use, but none of these instances is
thereby the cause per quam of the individual cortbination through
which the free thought of the speaking subject manifests itself in its
individuality-which is never necessitated and thus never completely
schematizable (HuK, 173). This combination can be constructed a
priori (HuK, 172). Indeed, "grammatically, one cannot allow any in-
dividuality with a concept. . . . Style cannot be organized in con-
cepts." Therefore, all models which seek to appropriate style as a
rule-governed or multi-coded process in a generative apparatus are
condemned to failure. Not because style brings an extra-verbalquality
into play or contradicts any existing rule (Schleiermacher maintains
that style presupposes such rules), but simply because style original-
ly locates universal signs in relation to an actual meaning, the light of
which illuminates the signs in this particular combination (in distinc-
tion to all others, even those which can be analytically paraphrased).
Post festum, that is, as soon as the sense is understood, i.e. has
become "meaning," one recognizes its rule in the abstract, yet, in rela-
tion to future speech acts, this meaning has no authoritative power.27
Schleiermacher says that in every individual design of meaning there
remains "something indescribable . . . which can only be called har-
mony" (HuK,177). This harmony is not an attribute of any single sign
or all signs and their laws of concatenation, rather it is something like
the synthetic unity of its invisible scansion or like the effect of those
differential "brisures" (Derrida)on the places which commemorate
their articulation-by means of which they are disclosed as variable
schemata and reminded of their permanent capacity to always ex-
24

press something other than that which they mean in this actual
context.28
However, it is then impossible to characterize the "complete
understanding of style" with expressions which are oriented toward
the metaphorics of decoding (HuK, 168). There is no continuous
passage from a system to its application in as far as one can never ex-
clude the possibility that the signs employed have provided a new
semantic interpretation for the codified totality of the language
(which assigns every signifier its and only its signified).29 A meaning
first produced in the act of speech (a "creative act," HuK,325)-i.e., a
meaning which is first defined at the moment of speech as the ap-
propriate interpretation of its chain of signifiers-cannot be describ-
ed with the means of the repertoire, whose boundaries have just been
crossed. (This objection is especially pertinent to the hermeneutic
conservatism of the genre-theory in E.D. Hirsch's Validity in Inter-
pretation.) Thus the "comparative method," which measures a new
description of a sentence's meaning comparataively, in terms of the
usual meaning of its consituent signs, can tease out such an in-
dividual meaning only under the circular presupposition that it is a
singular instance of meaning which the act of "divination" has
previously labeled untranslatable.
In Schleiermacher's rhetoric the concept of "divination"
stands for precisely this insight, namely, that language systems on
their own never disclose in advance a particular interpretation of an
actual use of language and that the individual meaning (priorto the
codified semantics/syntactics of the sign chain which bears it) cannot
be derived on the basis of discovery procedures of a deduc-
tive/decoding type.
The attempt to leap from a differential procedure of determina-
tion which operates on the basis of comparison and opposition to a
description of style leads of necessity to an infinite regress ("this
leads to an infinite regression," HuK, 176). What is made commen-
surable by the "comparison" cannot be the "new" (HuK,167), the as-
yet incomparable of a phrase just heard, unless a conjectural
hypothesis ("divination") had already made the meaning, the in-
dividual combinatory manner of the author, commensurable or
possibly open to divination, by a leap of the imagination or an
originary "guess" (HuK,318; cf. 326,passim).
The most striking evidence for the everyday reality of such
divination is language acquisition in children. They must literally
"understand primordially"what is said to them,30since "they don't
possess language yet (and thus have no rules to apply), rather, they
seek to discover them. . . . They have absolutely no points of com-
parison; they acquire them gradually as the basis of a comparative
process which develops faster than one would expect" (HuK,326).The
decisive question, which cannot be answered by any code model of
language, is; "How do they concretize that first understood entity?"
(loc. cit.). That is, how do they make the leap from the pure capacity
for language to the comprehension of a meaning which can only first
be recognized during the act of guessing itself (in other words, by
25

divination)? The question can only be answered by granting children
the "same divinatory boldness" that, in smaller measure, permeates
adult understanding of meaning (HuK,327).
We need to be aware of the fact that the universality that
Schleiermacher's theory of language opens up for us is the recogni-
tion that the universality of semiological systems (a thesis which
Schleiermacher helped found)31doesn't close the gap of "diff6rance"
in which, according to Derrida, something like sense and meaning
first come to be, that is, that every spoken word is wrapped in a
silence that ipso facto slides past the precepts of the code a silence
that Mallarm6 termed the condition et d6lice de la lecture.32 This
seems to me to be the almost forgotten insight to which Schleier-
macher's theory of language gives us access. The fact that its recep-
tion distorted this theory even more than other theoretical pro-
nouncements of German romanticism and the fact that Schleier-
macher's own pronouncements surface as so many intruders to mar
the tranquality of contemporary linguistics and literary studies speak
for the possibility that the romantic model is by no means antiquated
and not merely in the sense that its richness hasn't been completely
recognized, much less exhaustively exploited.
University of Geneva
NOTES
1 Originally published in Po6tique 2 (1970), 141-55.
2 See Manfred Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine (Frankfurta.M. 1977) and
Norbert Altenhofer, "Geselliges Betrage-Kunst-Auslegung. Anmerkungzu
Peter Szondis Schleiermacher Interpretation,"in UlrichNassen, ed. Studien zur
Entwicklung einer Materialen Hermeneutick (Munich, 1979), pp. 165-211.
3 See, however, T. Todorov, Th6ories du symbole (Paris; 1977), p. 218, where the
author announces a hermeneutic oriented toward Schleiermacher under the
title "Strat6gies de I'interpr6tation".
4 Jacques Derrida, "Avoir I'oreille de la philosophie, Entretein avec Lucette
Finas," in: Ecarts. Quatre essais a propos de Jacques Derrida(Paris, 1973).
5 FriedrichSchlegel, Kritische Ausgabe seiner Schriften, (hereafter:KA),ed. Ern-
st Behler (Paderborn,1958) vol. 12, p. 192.
6 Jacques Derrida,Positions (Paris, 1972), p. 38f.
7 Jean-Paul Sartre, L'dtreet le n6ant (Paris, 1943), p. 130.
8 H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheitund Methode (TObingen,1965), p. 432ff.
9 Jacques Derrida,Marges de la philosophie (Paris, 1972), p. 13.
10 J.G. Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre [Nova methodo] (1798), in: Nachgelassene
Schriften, ed, Hans Jacob (Berlin, 1937), vol. 2, p. 355ff.
11 Jacques Derrida,La diss6mination (Paris, 1972), p. 378.
26

12 F. D. Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube, seventh edition,ed. Martin
Redeker (Berlin, 1960), vol. 1, ?3, p. 3. (hereafter: GI;citations from the body of
the text will be presented with section, and paragraph reference, Schleier-
macher's marginal notes will be refered to by page number.
13 F. D. Schleiermacher, Dialektik, ed. Rudolf Odebrecht (Leipzig, 1942), p. 290
(hereafter:Dial 0).
14 F. D. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik,ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt

a.M., 1977), p. 412 (hereafter:HuK).
15 F. D. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik,ed. Heinz Kimmerle(Heidelberg, 1959), p.
39. This edition gathers together in critical formatall of Schleiermacher's notes
including the early hand-writtenones, and remains an essential tool for an in-
depth study of his work.
16 Ibid. cf. Monologen, "Because only through opposition is the individual
recognized." In:Kleine Schriften und Predigten 1800-1820,eds. H. Gerde and E.
Hirsch (Berlin, 1970), vol. 1, p. 38.
17 Ibid.
18 Hermeneutik,ed. Kimmerle,p. 154 (my emphasis, M.F.).
19 Ibid, p. 65, passim.
20 Ibid., p. 47, 57ff. Cf. Huk, p. 106, 109, 437.
21 LudwigWittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurta.M, 1977), p.
50 (= ? 71).
22 Schelling says, "Sense perception (Anschauung) of the rule." In: Samtliche
Werke,ed. K.F.A.Schelling (Stuttgart, 1856-61),vol. 3, part 1, p. 508. Schelling
had otherwise worked against Schleiermacher's transferral of the Kantian
schematic to the act of designation in language.
23 Hermeneutik,ed. Kimmerle,pp. 60, 93.
24 Ibid., p. 42.
25 "Parasemic" means positing one sign next to, on the basis of, another, thereby
mutually delimiting both.
26 "Thus, poetry (Po6sie) would be an extension and new creation within
language. This possibility is basic to language itself, yet it is only in the poetic
that it appears, either in pure or attendant form"(HuK,p. 405).
27 Thus, one can comprehend the style of an individual and designate its rules,
but one can't derive a law of his future praxis. Everyrule carries an index of its
own antiquated, past nature.
28 Cf. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris, 1966), p. 505.
29 In his often overlooked Essai d'une philosophie (Paris, 1968) Gilles-Gaston
Granger was able to show that this applies even for systems such as
mathematics.
30 Hermeneutik,ed. Kimmerle,p. 61.
31 In addition, Schleiermacher introduced into our discipline the concepts of
structure and meaning understanding as they are currently used. Cf. HuK,p.
139 and Hermeneutik,ed. Kimmerle,p. 60. The "extreme importance" and an-
27

ticipatory significance of this structure-concept in particular-which covers
both grammatical and textual structure-was already pointed out by Joachim
Wach in his Das Verstehen, Grundzugeeiner Geschichte der hermeneutischen
Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (TObingen,1926), vol. 1, p. 133f. Cf. also
Hermeneutik, ed. Kummerle,pp. 38, 56.
32 Stephan Mallarm6, Oeuvres completes, ed. H. Mondo and G. Aubry (Paris,
1965), p. 310.
28

Text, History and the Critical Subject
Notes on Peter Szondi's Theory and Praxis of Hermeneutics
Rainer N agele
Thought looks for a place of protection in the texts.

Absent subjectivity discovers itself in them. But they
are not it: that which is discovered in the texts does
not prove that which is left out.
Theodor W. Adorno
What is required is an openness, a receptivity

without the interference of one's own I.
Peter Szondi
It might seem that Adorno's dialectical entanglement and

erasure of the interpreting subject in the text of an other is turned by
Peter Szondi into a simple disregard of the reading subject. However,
the phrase quoted-which seems to offer itself as a motto for
Szondi's hermeneutical procedure-speaks explicitly not of a
hermeneutical text but of a poetic text: a fragmentary, unfinishable
poem by H6lderlin ("Wie wenn am Feiertage..."). The poem is un-
finishable according to Szondi becuase of the intervention of
something which H6lderlin calls "the other arrow" (H, 290).1 H61derlin
differentiates this arrow from the "ray of the father" ("Des Vaters
Stral") which reveals itself in the signs of nature and history and
which-again in Hl61derlin's words-the poets must offer to the peo-
29
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pie "veiled in song" ("ins Leid / GehCllt"). In order to interpret these
objective signs, in order to grasp them in the poetic text, the writing
"1" must disregard itself. Its intervention would doom the text to
failure.
The transference of this poetological constellation and prob-
lematic onto the critical text does include the danger of bad
psychologizing. However, instead of simply brushing that danger
aside, we enter into it with the hope to dissolve it from inside by begin-
ning with that which strikes the eye. Needless to say, this involves a
most questionable starting point, the point of immediacy, which,
because it strikes the eye, blinds it. The categories with which we
start are accordingly problematic.
Two qualities of Szondi's critical procedure seem to me most
striking: on the one hand an objectifying, distancing gesture, an in-
sistence on preciseness and differentiation coupled with an almost
pedantic avoidance of any subjective trace, and on the other hand a
noticeable, intensive presence of the writing subject in this very
gesture of objectivity, which in every phrase almost-to use a rather
emphatic term-enounces the ethos of a personal calling. Of these
two sides, the first is easier to demonstrate. It is apparent, it can be
grasped in the style, and is also expressed in Szondi's refusal to let
anything appear in print before it was subjected to rigorous rework-
ings, and in his horror of improvisation in lectures and seminars. It is
the side which in terms of Holderlin's aesthetics one could call the
"Kunstcharakter" of his writing (which means both the artistic and ar-
tisan, technical character). In the same poetological categories, the
other side would then be the "ground," that which is hidden, not
manifest, opposed to the manifest technical form of expression, but
nevertheless both its effect and its cause. The erased subject is there
in its erasure. This differentiates Szondi's writing from any form of im-
pressionistic literary criticism which in its proud and self-assured
demonstration of 'individual sensitivity' falls blindly prey to the codes
which it pretends to transcend with its individualism. But Szondi's
writing is equally distant from that kind of academic discourse which
pretends to speak in the name of pure scientific objectivity and hides,
in its faith in the free, autonomous scientific subject, that which con-
stitutes its own historical, institutional and personal contingencies
and interests. (The role which the terms 'scientific' and 'scholarly'
play in institutional power struggles would, by the way, be worthy of
intensive historical and deconstructive investigation.)
Because of its form of negativity, critical subjectivity cannot
be grasped immediately, but only circumscribed by tracing its medi-
ations. This circumscription can start with that which we encounter
as recurring object and theme of Szondi's critical studies. It is a point
we have already touched upon. What was indicated in the paradigm of
the "other arrow" is a prevailing theme in Szondi's writings. If Szondi,
in his lectures on hermeneutics, did not come explicitly to the discus-
sion of the subject-object-problematic in the hermeneutical pro-
cedure, it is nevertheless the implied theme and center of his many
and diverse studies.
30
Szondi's earliest book-publication, The Theory of Modern
Drama, begins with the notion of the awakening of man to self-
consciousness ("des zu sich gekommen en Menschen")2 The concept
of the awakening man might, at first glance, seem nothing more than
the common clich6 of the Renaissance; but with Szondi, this awaken-
ing to self-consciousness in the dramatic form of post-medieval
drama immediately develops a particular dialectic. Szondi's self-
constituting man does not appear in that firmly shaped, muscular
figure in which the popular clich6 likes to picture Renaissance man,
but rather in the fragmentation of intersubjective relations. This man
does not find himself in himself, but finds his essential existence in
the sphere of the "in between" (MD,14). In this exteriorization, the
historical subject constitutes itself as the subject of drama. As such it
is a subject that makes decisions ("Entschlusse"). Szondi, who usual-
ly was very critical of the kind of etymologizing practised (too often in-
discriminately) by Heidegger-students, makes here an exception and
takes the German word "Entschl[ss" (decision) literally as Ent-
Schluss=dis-closure, opening-up: insofar as the dramatic person
makes a decision for the intersubjective world ("sich zur Mitwelt ent-
schloss"), his inner self reveals itself and becomes dramatic
presence. Only through dis-closure and ex-pression can the subject
constitute itself; it has interiority only in its exteriorization. The
dramatic form of this exteriorization is the dialogue, the intersubjec-
tive, mutual expression where subjects constitute themselves in their
pronouncements and are sublated in their speech acts. To the same
degree in which the drama closes itself as a genre-form in its de-
cisions and dialogues it excludes another subject: the writing subject.
"The playwright is absent in the drama," Szondi says, "he does not
speak, he has constituted enunciation" ("Aussprache gestiftet"
MD,15). And the third category of subjects, the viewers, are seized too
by the dialectic. The drama, while it unfolds itself in its decisons/dis-
closures, closes itself up also against the viewer from whom it is
removed as a closed world in itself. "Just as the drama is not an ex-
pression of the author it is not an address to the viewer. The viewer is
rather an onlooker from another world: silently, his hands tied back he
sits there, paralyzed by this impression from a second world"
(MD,15,f.). But this is not all. The power of this paralysis, of this im-
pression turns around into another activity in which the viewer
becomes the transcendental subject of the drama, identical with it in
his exclusion from it: the viewer becomes himself a speaking subject,
speaking through the mouth of all dramatis personae. "The relation-
ship viewer-drama only knows complete separation and complete
identity, but never the intrusion of the viewer into the drama or an ad-
dress by the drama to the viewer" (MD,16).
Again the temptation is great to read in this last sentence an
implicit articulation of the position of the hermeneutical subject. But
caution is advisable, because Szondi speaks of a particular text
genre, of a particular historical form of the drama, just as the initially
quoted sentence speaks of a specific lyrical form, the Holderlinien
ode. But nevertheless it is striking how a very similar constellation
31
emerges from two completely different textual forms: a constellation
in which the problematic and dialectic of the subject takes shape,
more precisely: the problematic and dialectic of a reading, viewing,
understanding, interpreting subject. But before I venture into further
generalizations, I will try to trace some other variations of this con-
stellation in Szondi's critical procedure. It is not by chance that a
large part of Szondi's critical work deals with German idealism and its
philosophy of reflection as articulated in the theory and literature of
the time. I will touch only upon two topics within this context: one con-
cerns the relationship between antiquity and modernity in the age of
Goethe, the other the oeuvre of Hdlderlin.
The relationship of antiquity to modernity in the 18th century
presents itself specifically as a self-realization in the other, as a
genesis of subjectivity in objectification. Szondi traces the phases of
this subject-object-dialectic from the texts of Winckelmann to
Schlegel, Schelling and Jean Paul. The lectures on Schiller's notion of
"naive" and "sentimental" are paradigmatic for this problematic.
Szondi comes to the provocative, paradoxical formula which also
became the title of an essay: "The naive is the sentimental".3 This title
articulates programmatically the inscription of the other, the foreign
(Greek naivet6) into that which we consider to be ours (modern sen-
timentality). And the dialectic of subjectivity comes into play here in
yet another way. What Schiller's essay presents in the form of
historical and aesthetic categories was developed in the context of a
very personal intersubjective tension between Schiller and Goethe, a
veiled struggle against the other in the recognition of the other.
Scholars have of course for a long time noticed the relation between
the essay on the naive and the sentimental and Schiller's famous
birthday letter to Goethe of August 23, 1794 with its precarious
balancing act between approachment and distancing. Generally how-
ever, the letter has been harmonized too much or the relationshp to
the essay has been reduced to a purely psychological and
biographical level. Szondi points out the relation and quotes the letter
extensively, but at the same time warns against an incautious, undif-
ferentiated grounding of aesthetic categories in biographical context.
This leads to a dimension of the problematic which moves
more and more into the foreground in Szondi's H6lderlin-lectures and
essays. Particularly Holderlin's letter to his friend Bohlendorff-a text
which has become the object of intense debate and which also is a
central text for Szondi's H6lderlin-lectures-stands under the con-
stellation of discourse about oneself in a discourse about another.
This speaking about oneself becomes the point of a most intensive
hermeneutical labor in Szondi's work. In a first move, Szondi detaches
this 'self' from any psychologistic or existentialist misunderstanding
in order to save it as a poetological category. This is a strategy which
turns specifically against a certain tendency of interpretation among
H6lderlin scholars: "When Holderlin speaks of the conditions and
possibilities of his writing, his interpreters make him speak of his mis-
sion" (P 1,198). Moreover, the Bohlendorff-letter in particular has
become the scene of the ideological appropriation of H6lderlin in the
32
name of a misunderstood notion of "patriotic reversal/revolution"
("Vaterlindische Umkehr"). Against such tendencies, Szondi
postulates critical sobriety, and in doing so he posits himself within a
relation of which H6lderlin's text also speaks: the relation between
"sacred pathos" and "sobriety", between "precision", "solid virtuosi-
ty" and "warmth".4
The fact that HOlderlin speaks of himself "as an artist of the
conditions and possibilities of his writing" prevents an existentialist
ontologizing of this 'self', which disappears in the objectivity of a
poetic technique. The imaginary disappears in the symbolic order.
That this is well founded in H6lderlin's poetics is demonstrated not
only by the central position which craftsmanship, technical virtuosity
and even rigid calculation have in his poetics, but also in the
transcendental poetological categories of his essay "Wenn der
Dichter einmal des Geistes machtig.. ." (often translated as "Of the
procedure of the poetic spirit"). In this essay, Holderlin speaks ex-
plicitly of the "poetic I", which can appear only "in the character of a
positive nothing" ("nur im Karakter eines positiven Nichts"), because
it can not have itself through itself without dissolving itself, or, to put
it another way, because it can constitute itself only by externalizing
itself and by entering into a freely chosen objectivity.5 I will not enter
at this point into the problematic status of such a "freely chosen
objectivity".
Szondi does not explicitly discuss this essay, but the same
dialectic of poetic subjectivity crystallizes for him in a specific term of
H6lderlin's, the discussion of which concludes the lectures on the
B1hlendorff-letter. It is the German word "Geschik" which, according
to H6lderlin, antiquity and modernity have in common. The semantic
field of this word actually comprises two qualities and meanings
which one could very well characterize in Holderlin's terms as lofty
and sober. On the one hand the word means "fate"-a favorite word
of German profundity-, on the other hand it denotes simply a tech-
nical ability. Szondi translates and interprets the term with the greek
word techne and supposes the Bohlendorff-letter as a whole "under
the sign of this word". This is not a reduction of H6lderlin to a shallow
formalism, but once more the emphatic but sober insistence that
poetic substance is to be grasped in its exteriority. Form is the mode
of appearance of content.
In the lectures on the theory of genre, Szondi again directs his
attention to H6lderlin, and again one of the major themes is
HOlderlin's speaking of himself "not as a person but as a poet"
(P 11,164). As much as this is well founded in H6lderlin's texts as well
as in modern poetics, where the differentiation between poetic I and
empirical I, between textual subject and real subject has become a
common clich6, there appears at the same time a defensive strategy
in the emphasis on this differentiation, which utters itself in a gesture
of radical distancing. In this gesture the interpreting text meets the
interpreted text and, at the same time, holds it at a distance.
Characteristic for this double movement is the way Szondi ap-
proaches Holderlin's late work (and thereby the "other arrow" whose
33
intervention is a theme of the H6Iderlin-lectures). He begins with a
text which in a certain sense lies beyond the late work-with one of
HOlderlin's last poems, from the time which is usually labeled as the
time of madness. Together with the poem, Szondi quotes a text which
describes the writing of this poem: how the poet, asked by a visitor to
write something, steps to the desk, and scanning the metre with the
fingers of his left hand, writes verse after verse. In this text and in its
mechanical production Szondi finds the most radical form of distanc-
ing embodied: the distancing of the writing subject from its writing
and from that which it has written: "the artifical, immense distance
which Holderlin sought to create against the outside world as well as
against himself and against his texts, the sober pose of an artisan
(...),the dread of closeness and of identity with himself" (H,197).
At this point there is some danger of fixing in positive terms
that which has been circumscribed as absent subjectivity. That would
mean a falsification of the negativity which is emphasized in the
opening epigraph: "that which is discovered in the texts does not
prove that which is left out". Szondi's text marks the borderline and
the point where when the question of the relationship between
H6lderlin's latest texts and his madness comes up, his critical
discourse, too, could glide into the zone of psychologizing, "This rela-
tionship", Szondi writes, "can only be timidly denied, if one tries to ap-
propriate Holderlin as a model or leader figure for one's own religious
or political program. If, however, one approaches Holderlin's late work
without such egotistical intentions, it is possible, beyond all
biographical and psychological curiosity, not to close one's eyes in
the face of that which literary criticism often tends to leave with proud
negligence to pathology" (H,206). Recognition and exclusion come
together. The text recognizes its own borderlines, but in doing so,
acknowledges that which is beyond the borders. The shyness in
regard to the private and personal sphere does not serve critical blind-
ness and false piety, but, to the contrary, has the effect not to close
one's eyes.
Szondi speaks here explicitly of the critical I and of the danger
of its intervention (the phonetic echo of the open eye, the capital "1" of
the preceding sentence might be considered a fortunate coincidence:
truth revealed in the tricks of the signifiers). And not fortuitously, the
similarity to the poetic I of H61derlin has a striking parallel in the syn-
tatic form. H6lderlin's condition for the poetic I is articulated in the
poem "Wie wenn am Feiertag...":
For if we are only of pure hearts

Like children, and guiltless our hands,
The ray of the father, the pure one, will not burn it.6
It is in this text that Szondi finds the "other arrow". Translated

into the critical discourse, the condition for the critical subject is ar-
ticulated by Szondi in the phrase quoted above: "But if one ap-
proaches Holderlin's late work without such egotistical intentions, it
34
is possible
more ... if
evident " The similarity
one follows of the
Szondi's two conditions
convincing becomes
interpretation even
which
understands the "guiltless" hands as those of the poet whose I and
personal suffering have not contaminated his text and who is there-
fore able to interpret and articulate the "pure ray" of the father: the
text of the other.
Does this, then, mean the negation of the critical subject? Ap-
parently not. A simple negation would be nothing but a represssion in
which the power of that which is falsely negated would be all the
stronger. Already the parallel with Holderlin's poetic subjectivity
speaks against such a false negation. Holderlin's texts do not simply
negate subjectivity, but constitute it in a determinate negation (to use
Hegel's differentiation), and Szondi's own critical praxis is clearly not
a simple negation of critical subjectivity, but continuously accom-
panied by a reflection on the critical act. What has been said of
Holderlin's discourse is, however, mutatis mutandis true also for
critical reflection: the critic speaks of him/herself not as a person but
as a critic. Critical reflection is reflection upon the critical interest,
his/her inter-esse, the inscription of the critic in the text of which he
speaks. Critical subjectivity is nowhere else than in the critical writing
and speaking, in the specific form of a discourse which is structured
by a specific historical and institutional praxis.
Therefore, the problematic of the subject becomes for Szondi a
problematic of the historicity of texts and speaking subjects. It is not
by chance that his critical interest leads him again and again to that
transitional phase in the eigthteenth century when normative poetics
moves towards historical poetics and philosophical aesthetics. In a
remarkable way, historicization is tied together with the act of reflec-
tion. More precisely, the act of reflection turns the latent historicity of
texts into their manifest expression and into textual understanding.
Historicity is, according to its reflective character, of double nature: it
is itself a historical event, which transforms poetics and aesthetics,
and at the same time a transcendental category of consciousness
through which 'pre-historical' aesthetics also appears on the horizon
of historicity.
The invasion of historical thinking is seen by Szondi as an in-
cisive line of demarcation. Even Kant, who might with good reason be
considered the father of German philosophy of reflection (I prefer this
description to the standard label "German Idealism"), appears as a
'prehistorical' thinker separated by "a wall" from the historical think-
ing of the age of Goethe (P 1,15). The violence of the historical reversal
and revolution articulates itself in military metaphors otherwise utter-
ly foreign to Szondi: "From historical thinking comes the power with
which the storm-and-stress-movement wages its war against the en-
lightenment; the general's name was Johann Gottfried Herder" (P
1,16). The site of rupture is, however, at the same time a site of media-
tion: a "mediation of the general with the particular, of idea with
history" (P 11,11).
Once the power of historical thinking has taken over it must
also incorporate all prehistorical thinking in the horizon of historicity.
35
The absence of history cannot exist anymore, only its denial or repres-
sion. This can be seen paradigmatically in Szondi's sketch of the
history of hermeneutics. The two major hermeneutical traditions,
grammatical interpretation and allegorical interpretation, are
presented under the aspect of a denial of the temporal gap that
separates the reader from the text. Grammatical interpretation seeks
to conserve the original meaning explaining a signifier which has
become ununderstandable or difficult to understand by substituting a
new signifier. For allegorical interpretation meaning itself has
become problematic, if not meaningless, and it tries to solve the prob-
lem by shifting the signifier into a new horizon of meaning. It seeks
the negation of historical distance through a new interpretation of the
old sign.
Remarkable and for Szondi's notion of history of great conse-
quences is the form in which historicity appears here: not only is it
erased by a negation through denial, this denial itself is based in a
negative experience, the experience of a discrepancy and of a lack of
understanding. History appears as a rupture in the reading.
Here we have the paradigm for the position and structure of
history in Szondi's hermeneutics. The introduction to the Theory of
Modern Drama already places history in crevices: "History is banned
in the crevices between the poetic forms; only reflection upon history
is able to bridge these crevices," Szondi writes (MD,12). Paradoxically
the movement of reflection here is forced into the cleavage in order to
bridge it. In the lectures on the bourgeois tragedy (bOrgerliches
Trauerspiel), in which Szondi comes closest to an explicit theory of
the relation between social history and literature, contradictions are
the points where understanding opens its eyes. Szondi differentiates
two kinds of contradictions: contradictions within the texts, between
intention and actual articulation, for example, and, on the other hand,
contradictions between texts and socio-historical facts, for which the
bourgeois tragedy offers particularly striking examples. Szondi
refuses to rationalize away such contradictions, he neither denies
them nor neutralizes them by explaining them as failures of individual
authors. And it is because of this that Szondi could develop a reflec-
tive form of literary sociology which gives full recognition to the in-
dividual text.
The introductory lecture to the lyrical drama of the fin de si cle
offers important additional aspects to Szondi's theory of text and
history. The text-immanent contradictions and discrepancies are
specified here as concretizations and at the same time a critique of an
abstract form-content-opposition. In the place of this "false opposi-
tion" we find three oppositional pairs which together structure the
text and give it its tension:
1) between intention and the condition of their

realization
2) between form tradition and actual material
3) between past and present
36
The text is an attempt to mediate these contradictions, but, as Szondi
remarks, it cannot fully succeed. It is this very imperfection, this last,
so to speak transcendental rupture of the text, which opens the binari-
ty of its temporality towards the future and towards a temporal trinity:
"each work of art inhabits three temporal dimensions, or more
precisely, these three dimensions participate in the work, constitute
its inner tension which is its historicity" (LD,17). Thus, history does
not appear in the texts simply as a positively denoted signified but as
an immanent temporal iifference within the signification process
itself.7
This foundation of the historicity of the text in its immanent
temporality becomes the explicit theme of the lectures on
hermeneutics, where Szondi refers to three theoretical texts which of-
fer similar textual models: "If the movement of time is not just the
theme of the work (narrated time) nor just a means of expression ex-
ternal to its intentionality (narrative time), but if instead the idea of the
work finds its realisation only in its exteriorization, in its move out-
wards into temporal differentiation, it can only be interpreted as a pro-
cess in which each part must be interpreted in regard to its positional
value. This relationship between textual structure and temporality
belongs to the problematic of an historical methodology of literary
forms for which there are only beginnings-for example Lukacs'
Theory of the Novel, Benjamin's book on the origin of the German
Trauerspiel. Furthermore, Adorno's Philosohy of Modern Music con-
tains important hints in this direction" (H,129 f).
It is this conception of history which informs Szondi's
hermeneutical praxis and which marks his particular historical po-
sition within literary criticism. When Szondi started his academic ac-
tivities in the fifties, West German literary criticism was dominated by
so-called 'textimmanent' interpretations, practised under various
names (New Criticism, Stilkritik, Art of Interpretation). In the last
years of Szondi's life the situation at German universities and else-
where had radically changed. The student movement of the sixties,
the social and political changes of the time had shaken the com-
placent illusionary closure of the academic institutions. Their social
and political entanglement was brought to consciousness, and with
that the reassuring closure of the text was broken too. Its social and
political entanglement was now questioned as much as that of the in-
stitutions whose structure and discourse had shaped the notion of
the text. The return of texts to their historical and political context
was now considered a progressive act against a tradition of interiority
protected by the status quo and subservient to established power.
Textimmanence appeared to be identical with ahistorical formalism.
The particularity of Szondi's critical position is marked by the
fact that he undermines a dichotomy which not only temporally
bracketed his academic activity, but which till today frequently struc-
tures critical discourses. Szondi's theory and praxis are at once an at-
tempt to mediate history and textimmanence and a critique of their
common use. This position is particularly clearly formulated in the in-
troduction to the lectures on the lyrical drama of the fin de siecle,
37
which Szondi gave in the winter semester 1965/66, shortly before the
student movement emerged. "Immanent interpretation", he says in
his introduction, "today should no longer mean that history is
abstracted for the sake of a work blissfully calm in the luminosity and
appearance of its closure ("um eines selig in sich scheinenden
Willen").8 Textimmanence should mean that history is not conceived
of as a transcendental category in regard to the work of art through
which it manifests itself (... .), but rather as something which is imma-
nent in the work and has to be disclosed by the interpretation in this
immanence" (LD,17). This formulation, as much as it speaks of textim-
manence, is a radical critique of immanence as understood in the fif-
ties and frequently still today. It is a critique of the unreflected
assumptions hidden in the metaphors "intrinsic" and "extrinsic",
which tend to fixate beforehand what is supposed to be intrinsic or ex-
trinsic to a text. Instead of developing the immanence of texts reflec-
tively out ot them, traditional textimmanence tends to discard any-
thing uncomfortable as external to the text. The ideological function
of such a procedure is particularly evident in Germanistic studies
after the war: textimmanence became a welcome means of banishing
to exteriority all that which have forced some uncomfortable re-
flection upon an academic tradition which was politically badly com-
promised in the preceding years.
Szondi's method is, however, also a critique of a literary-
historical procedure in which the text is degraded to a simple case
and for which the dimensions of intrinsic and extrinsic are no less fix-
ated than the notion of history itself, a history all too often taken for
granted. Szondi's historical procedure also undermines historicism to
the degree that he subjects the concept of history itself to subversive
reflection. The overcoming of historicism, he says in a short sketch on
problems of literary hermeneutics, would also have to clarify "the
question of the historical conditions under which the theory of the
historicity of knowledge came about" (H,408).
Szondi's concept of literary criticism is not so much crystalliz-
ed in a detachable 'theory,' but rather concretized in the form of a
reflective hermeneutical praxis, which slowly moves forward into the
text looking backwards on its own act. In this process, the pro-
blematic of the subject and that of history are entangled in an act and
a condition which in Szondi's vocabulary appears as "immersing" and
"immersion" ("versenken" and "versenkt sein"). The text is not only
immanently structured by temporality, but also by the particulars of
history; the historical-biographical facts "are not to be considered as
simply interesting circumstances for the genesis of the text, but are
immersed in the text as its foundation from which it emerges in order
ten to transcend them" (H,259). Analogously, historical cognition
demands of us as hermeneutical subjects, "that we immerse our-
selves completely (... .) into the details" (H,195). The "immersion into
the individual work" corresponds to "a notion of literature which no
longer allows one to write about the work as in traditional literary
history instead of writing with it by tracing it as a written text" (LD,16).
This last aspect is particularly important, because it detaches the act
38
of immersion from any psychologistic misunderstanding. The goal is
not empathy with the text, not identification with a psychological act,
but the tracing of the work's 'litterality', its litteracit6. The place of the
hermeneutical identity is not the imaginary, but the symbolic order.
However, it is a paradoxical identity, an identity of difference.
The hermeneutical text attempts to trace the interpreted text as close-
ly as possible, but in doing so it runs the danger of occupying its place
and displacing it. To understand does not mean to appropriate the
other text, but to understand it as the other, i.e., to understand the
specific difference. To constitute and articulate that difference is the
ultimate and unfinishable hermeneutical act, the infinite, but strictly
limited, interpretation. The closeness of this hermeneutical constella-
tion to Walter Benjamin's conception has been expressed by Szondi
himself: "Benjamin," he says, "expects the historian, including the
literary historian, 'to give up his cool contemplative pose towards his
object in order to become aware of the criical constellation in which
this particular fragment of the past finds itself joined to this particular
presence' " (H,407).
Szondi posits himself here-as elsewhere-in a tradition of
German critical theory which one could somewhat imprecisely iden-
tify with the Frankfurt school. To be sure, such an identification
abstracts from many differences. However, it does point, at least
metonymically, to a tradition of thinking which has its roots in Hegel
and Marx, but has also exposed itself and has been deeply marked by
the thinking of Nietzsche, Freud and to a certain degree also of
Heidegger. It is not so much a particular theory, but rather a mode of
thinking-sometimes crystallized in theoretical figurations-whose
essential mark is the reflective labor itself. Reflection, however, is ac-
cording to its innermost law a movement towards an ordo inversus,
towards reversal, revolution, deconstruction.9
To point out this context seems to me at this time particularly
urgent. The texts and names which have marked this discourse seem
to offer a basis for a dialogue between those French impulses which
have deeply shaped the discourse of the Humanities in recent years
and the kind of reflective mode I have sketched in the example of
Peter Szondi. The fact that such a dialogue so far has hardly taken
place is all the more curious as a substantial part of recent French
writing has been informed by a re-reading of German texts such as
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger.
I am certainly not advocating an arbitrary, non-commital, vapid
eclecticism. The question to be asked is, whether there exists a field
or a common problematic where the most advanced forms of reflec-
tive labor can join forces. This is not only a theoretical question, but
also one concerning the communicative praxis of our academic in-
stitutions.
If I said before that reflective labor is tendentiously revo-
lutionary and deconstructive, this should not be taken in a too
sublimated and spiritual sense. There are enough indications that
such a discourse is widely felt as a threat. Those who engage in it can
tell many stories of a widespread and often aggressive hostility
39
towards any kind of theoretical reflection. However, to avoid another
misunderstanding: I am not actually speaking in behalf of theory,
knowing very well the false privileges theoretical discourses tend to
claim for themselves. Szondi's work, as I mentioned before, is not so
much a detachable theory but rather a reflective praxis of inter-
pretation. The same can be said of French poststructuralist thinking.
Derrida's work is a radical decentring, deconstruction and deprivilegi-
zation of theoretical discourse; Lacan's work is the staging of a
discourse emerging from and grounded in analytical praxis. The con-
trast of theory and praxis is, at least within the context of academic
discourses, itself the phantasmatic product of a deeply rooted fear of
the deconstructive labor of reflection. Reflection, which reflects upon
the foundations of ritualized institutional discourses, becomes a
threat to them. The deepest fear perhaps concerns the fact that the
French post-structuralists have undermined-partly through their re-
reading of Freud and Marx-the most sacred cow of bourgeois con-
sciousness: the autonomous subject. And this might very well be the
most crucial point where deconstructivists, structuralists and marx-
ists, who already often appear as one threatening ghost to the scared
imagination, could coordinate their reflective labor in order to actually
become a subversive force on the institutional level.
However, one must not overlook a number of difficulties which
stand in the way of a dialogue-particularly between structuralist and
poststructuralist modes of thinking and the marxist tradition, in-
cluding the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt school.'0 There are
obstacles to be overcome which lie partly in historically developed
conditions of discourse. One of the most deeply inscribed problems in
this tradition is the issue of formalism. That is why the expressionism
debate still plays such an important role in theoretical discussion
within the German left. This paradigm is evident even today in the ob-
jections and polemics which are raised against 'structuralism' (with
which the French theories are widely identified). This should not be
surprising, for the same epistemological structure informs both what,
in the widest sense of the word, is called modernism in art and
literature and theavant-garde of reflection.
It is this common epistemological structure with its radical
shift to the signifier which generates the common discomfort that has
become negatively fixed in the notion of formalism. Structuralism and
poststructuralism are seen to practice everything that Marxists have
criticised regarding formalism in art: concentration on form instead of
content, on the signifier instead the signified, on the text instead of
the objective world. The terms of oposition could be extended, but
they all come together in a single movement which apparently
reverses and inverts a basic Marxist principle; the relationship of base
and superstructure. Formulated in those terms, the dispute is locked
in a hopeless dichotomy. The central issue of the expressionism
debate will continue to repeat itself as long as it is not reformulated
as a problematic and crisis of representation.
And indeed, it is in the problematics of representation and sub-
jectivity, both closely interrelated, that I see the common ground for a
40
productive dialogue for those interested in the conditions and con-
stellations of the texts of which they speak and write as well as of
their own speaking and writing. Peter Szondi's work is an important
step in this direction. And that is why the presentation of this work
here and at this historical juncture is not merely narcissistic ar-
chaeology or necrophilology, but part of that-as I hope-subversive
labor of reflection.
Johns Hopkins University
NOTES
1The following abbreviations are used for citations from Szondi's texts: MD :
Theories des Modernen Dramas, Frankfurt a.M., 1964. T : Die Theorie des
bOrgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jarhundert (Studienausgabe der Vorlesungen
Bd. 1), Frankfurt a.M., 1973. P I : Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie I
(Studienausgabe der Vorlesungen Bd. 2), Frankfurt a.M., 1974. P II : Poetik und
Geschichtsphilosophie II (Studienausgabe der Vorlesungen Bd. 3), Frankfurt
a.M,1974). LD : Das Lyrische Drama des Fin de siecle (Studienausgabe der
Vorlesungen Bd. 4), Frankfurt a.M., 1975. H : Einfuhrung in die literarische
Hermeneutik (Studienausgabe der Vorlesungen Bd. 5), Frankfurt a.M., 1975.
2 The German word "Mensch" implies both men and women and avoids thus the sex-
ist reduction of the English "man". However, the position of the German signifier is
no less marked by the tradition of a patriarchal discourse for which the subject of
self-consciousness is eminently male.
3 "Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische. Zur Begriffsdialektik in Schillers

Abhandlung", in: Szondi, LektOren und Lektionen, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1973.
4 All these are terms used by H l61derlin in the Bohlendorff-leter. It is one of the fun-
damental premises of Hl61derlin's poetics that that which constitutes the ground
and deep structure of the text appears in opposite form: "sacred pathos" for exam-
ple as "precision" and "sobriety", that quality which marks Szondi's critical pro-
cedure above all.
5 Holderlin, Simtliche Werke (Stuttgarter Ausgabe) Bd. IV, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer

1961, pp. 253ff.
6 The German text (according to the Stuttgart Edition):

Denn sind nur reinen Herzens,
Wie Kinder, wir, sind schuldlos unsere Hande,
Des Vaters Stral, der reine versengt es nicht
7 The concrete consequences for the understanding of structures of signification in

their temporality and historicity are most evident in Walter Benjamin's still unsur-
passed study of baroque allegory in his book on the origin of the German
Trauerspiel. Paul de Man's essay "The Rhetoric of Temporality" points in a similar
direction.
8 This phrase is an allusion to a poem by Eduard Morike: "Auf eine Lampe" ("To a
Lamp") which ends with the verse: "Das Schone aber selig scheint es in ihm
selbst". This verse has to a certain degree become the motto for an understanding
of the work of art as total closure in itself. The verse has also become a point of
dispute between Emil Staiger and Heidegger who, in a now published exchange of
letters, debated the meaning of "scheint" which can be translated both as "ap-
pears" or "seems" or, on the other hand, as "shines".
41
9 Cf. M. Frank and G. Kurz, "Ordo inversus. Zu einer Reflexiionsfigur bei Novalis
H6lderlin, Kleist und Kafka", Geist und Zeichen. Festschrift for Arthur Henkel,
Heidelberg 1977, pp. 75-92.
10 This and the next paragraph are a slightly modified extract from my essay: "The
Provocation of Jacques Lacan", in: New German Critique 16 (1979), pp. 5-29.
42
FranklNoigele Discussion
translated by Kimberley Nemec
MANFRED FRANK: If someone were to ask me to comment on what,
initially, I see in common between Rainer Nagele's intention and my
own observations on Szondi's work, I would say that it is the manner
in which the subject is dealt with as both absent and present in the
text-in Szondi's texts and in those of German literary critics who
aspire to historical abstinence through textual immanence, in order to
avoid taking into account a horrible past. This latter effort has been
seriously under way in German studies only during the past ten years.
Prior to this, historical abstinence resulted in a traumatic loss of sub-
jectivity and an aphasia that one can detect everywhere, even in
Szondi's works, and that proved all the more loquacious in other ter-
rains-an aphasia on the subject of which Adorno, as we well know,
did not cease to reflect: he did not want to speak the language of the
multitudes, since this so-called popular language had just concluded
that Devil's pact of which Thomas Mann spoke. I think that allusions
framed by this traumatic history can be found throughout Szondi's
work (for obvious reasons), and that they have been rediscovered by
our generation. However, Rainer NWgele has added that this absence
(in what has been written) of the subject that makes the history
(significant, I believe, as well, though in a different manner, in the
literary criticism of the GDR, without, however, being a direct reflec-
tion on the social situation of the subjects concerned) does not in-
43
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dicate that subjectivity does not exist, or that we must leave the field
open to technicians, as Foucault has stated in several emphatic
declarations-for example, in the May 1966 interview with Madeleine
Chapsal: briefly, that we should, as it were, leave parole to a world
emptied of the subject, to machines, to apparatuses, to rules; but that
we should call upon the subject much more cautiously, eliminating
false identifications and focusing on the manner in which the text is
textualized, woven: its fissures, joints, its fractures; as Nagele in-
sisted, its immanent temporality (to work in this temporality also
signifies to be different, to be distinct) so as to succeed-working
with the utmost prudence, without directly explaining it (for the direct
expression of the subject has not proven particularly effective in
twentieth century German history)-in having a subject which one
can still name. And I fully understand, in thinking about it, why in fact
Szondi turned to Schleiermacher. One of the reasons for his interest is
that Schleiermacher too, examines a subjectivity which is never
grasped directly, which one uncovers only in the stylistic traits of a
text. This theory has not founded a real tradition in Germany, it ap-
pears almost as a heresy in the context of German philology. Keep in
mind, also, Szondi's treatise, "Uber philologische Erkenntnis," in
which Schleiermacher already plays a role. One sees there that Szon-
di polemicizes against a philology which hopes, by establishing
universal rules, to arrive at an understanding, drawn from these rules,
manifest in genres, philological procedures, methods of exegesis,
steps of immanent interpretation, inferences about socio-economic
conditions, etc. Szondi states that such positions obscure and distort
the singularity of all works, and that in every text, the universal and
the most particularly singular are related. And this particularity is
never directly comprehensible; it appears in the fissures, in the faults,
in the fractures, in the displacements, in the slippage, in the non-
identity of the text with itself. This is also Schleiermacher's position,
not the Schleiermacher of which Szondi speaks, but the one that reap-
pears in Szondi's practice; this point of view, in my opinion, links my
observations very closely to those of Rainer Nagele.
JEAN BOLLACK: Rainer Nagele has emphasized the role of subjectivi-
ty. What is essential is that the persistence of subjectivity, that of
which you have spoken at the end of your study, which is the
historical perspective of a subject, allows for the maintenance of "in-
tention," which is one of the terms from which the dialectics of the
work develop during its genesis. As opposed to the adequacy, the self-
satisfaction of the immanent reading (which Staiger represents in
paradigmatic fashion), the introduction of the subject is a demystify-
ing act; a prior necessity. One can no longer, under these conditions,
"objectify," that is, hypostasize the work, since it is reunited with the
problems of its becoming. It can no longer be reduced to a message,
or to an "Auftrag." Second point: the relationship between the subjec-
tivity of the critic and the subjectivity objectified in the work; the care
which Szondi takes to preserve his own independence is a correlative
of the act which links him to others. Subjectivity therefore represents
44
something else. It is not only that which hinders reification and abuse;
embodied as freedom, it is at the base of the conflict which, in the
dialectic between inherited form and the particular actualization is
constitutive of the work. Third point: there are, for Szondi, two grand
and essential moments in criticism-the critique and the discovery of
the historical dimension. His major preoccupation is in fact to deter-
mine the position of the critic and the author, that which he
deliberately refers to as "Standortgebundenheit." This relativization
of principle led him to state, for example, in his course on Hegel, that
all of the philosophy of history, all of Hegel's aesthetics, has no value
in itself, because it can only be explained from a specific position,
"Standortgebunden". So, (I refer here to what Frank has just said) one
may wonder why this was not systematized by him; why didn't he take
the first step? With regard to H1ilderlin, he catalogues opinions, a dox-
ology of errors, but it is rare for him to do so for other authors. It is
worthwhile to keep in mind that Szondi was not properly speaking as
either a philologist or a theorist. Theory is essential for him, but as a
means to an end, creation in a particular literary form: the essay.
There is little theoretical that is not consciously borrowed, but bor-
rowed just the same. His originality is not there, and it is not in the
philological work either. Szondi became a philologist chiefly with
regard to Holderlin. In that case, he thought the state of the discus-
sion demanded an analysis of existing errors for whatever ideology
they might contain, and it is not a coincidence if one finds, precisely
there, on this meeting ground between philology and theory, the
beginnings of an objectivization of the positions taken in the field of
Holderlinian studies.
AVITAL RONNEL: A point of clarification. Although you both dwell in
the same critical language, I perceive a difference insofar, as for ex-
ample, you, Mr. Nagele, seem to maintain a rigorous distinction bet-
ween the empirical subject/self and the transcendental type of self
that speaks in the work. I wonder if you would agree with my percep-
tion, and how finally would you situate Szondi within this difference?
RAINER NAGELE: I wouldn't see it so much as a rigorous distinction,
but rather a problematisation of subjectivity and its constitution in
general. There is no such thing as an unmediated "empirical subject,"
it is always already in some form of mediation, and it is that particular
form of mediation in the text which Szondi is concerned with and
which permeates all his critical reflections, although he never for-
mulated the problem in an explicit theory.
That brings me to Mr. Bollack's response, particularly the last
point: the lack of ultimate objectivization in a consistent theory, the
seemingly "impressionistic character" of Szondi's work. You seem to
see there someting that is unfinished, the lack of a step Szondi should
have taken. I see the absence of a fully articulated theory much more
as an inherent and essential part of Szondi's hermeneutical pro-
cedure, based on a certain distrust of "pure" theory as a privileged
discourse. Szondi, I think, is afraid that, at the moment when the
45
reflective hermeneutical praxis turns into a separable theory, the
danger arises that the theory assumes an independent force against
the text and violates it. Therefore, theory for Szondi exists mainly in
the form of a reflective move, in the constant probing of one's own
procedure as it arises from the reading of the text. Szondi's method is
not so much a "theory" but rather, what I would call a reflective
praxis. A reflective praxis, however, which does not fall prey to those
dangers of the reflective philosophy Mr. Frank has criticized in his
paper: a reflective move which believes in its full self-appropriation.
Szondi's reflective moves constantly point towards their own limits,
that difference, that negativity which is the center his texts cir-
cumscribe.
BERNHARD BOSCHENSTEIN: Frank is entirely correct in saying that
there is, in Szondi's work, a dialogue with a German era of immediacy,
a political and philological dialogue, present by negation. Szondi is in-
finitely more discreet than the texts to which he refers. When one
reads the sources to which he refers as a critic-and it is important to
read them in their entirety, for example, Heidegger or everything done
by the generation of Wilhelm Michel-one better understands the
silence, which goes so far as to not say why one doesn't say
something with regard to these sources, why one is often content to
quote a short phrase which carries little weight: the word "Auftrag" is
now the most innocent, the palest element in the ideology of Auftrag,
which contains incredible military images, conquering images, a
Hitlerism before the fact, which goes much farther than all that was
written during the Nazi era, and that in 1919. Szondi knew this, since
he cites the book. He says nothing about it and thus asks us to reflect
on the reason for his silence. You were correct in saying his silence is
a response to a practice which Szondi overturns with his
own-without admitting that he has done so.
GLENN MOST: I will put one question to the two speakers. It par-
ticularly concerns your remarkable paper on Schleiermacher, but it
also affects Szondi. With regard to Schleiermacher, I would like to
touch on the problem of universality and, with regard to Szondi, on the
problem of the scientificness of hermeneutics. You have
domonstrated, very well and very clearly, to what point the
hermeneutics of Schleiermacher is derived from a universalist aspira-
tion, and I wonder what exactly this universality means. I will first con-
sider the word in its etymological sense. It is not simply a question of
saying that hermeneutics encompasses all linguistic expression, that
everything should be understood by hermeneutics, but that everything
should be understood in a single hermeneutic manner (uni-versus).
This would indicate then that there exists a hermeneutics which
serves for all modes of linguistic expression. That is a point which,
following Kant, must be understood as a transcendental argument
and I wonder if ultimately this aspiration to universality can be
separated from a transcendental subject, from a hermeneutic subject
that is determined, hypostatized, that could, in its relation to the
46
texts, serve to guarantee the universality and the general value of
hermeneutics. In your remarks on Szondi, there is something which
you have in part left out-precisely the question of science, which is
so important to Szondi. The resort to objectivity is not only a strategy
aiming to leave parole, in the most effective manner, to the moi itself,
but also a means of founding a science of hermeneutics more
adapted to its object. The evidence which Szondi always invokes
when he speaks of the value of an interpretation seems nevertheless
to me to pose the same problems as the universalist claim in
hermeneutics. I quote from the treatise "On Philological Knowledge":
"Evidence is, however, the adequate criterion to which philological
knowledge must submit. In evidence, the language of facts is neither
ignored nor misunderstood in its reification, but perceived as subjec-
tively determined and subjectively mediated within knowledge, thus
first and foremost in its true objectivity" (Schriften, I, p. 280). The con-
sequence seems to me to be that the remarks of the critic are only
valid from the moment at which he himself becomes paradigmatic, as
it were, that is, when he can place himself in the situation of the
transcendental reader of the text, and it is possible for them to join
him in this condition. I wonder if you would both agree, though I doubt
it, that, in the final analysis, one can do without, in these two authors,
Schleiermacher and Szondi, a concept of the transcendental subject,
a concept on which both have cast serious doubt, as we know, but
which it seems is nevertheless indispensible to their theories.
MANFRED FRANK: The universality of which Schleiermacher speaks
simply means the following: there is nothing in the heavens or on
earth which cannot be thought of in two ways: nothing human, of
course. On one hand, all develops according to traditions, which we
interiorize simply through our education, going from infants to fans.
On the other hand, we never interiorize individually what one instills in
us by training; as Sartre says in his Flaubert, the system is never simp-
ly itself, but it is always surpassed by the means, always determined,
through which it discloses itself; and it is only this aspect that
Schleiermacher says is universal. Nevertheless, he never supported
an order, or called it a universal (not in politics either, where, as com-
pared to Hegel, Schleiermacher was always the incorruptible
defender of the rights of the subject against the State), where one fail-
ed to take into account the individual. It cannot be said that Schleier-
macher loved the idea of order; he conceded that it existed and must
exist, and he affirmed that universality does not consist of abstract
order, nor of the transhistoric duration of a transcendental subject
which conveys it, but of the constant interaction of the individual and
order: this aspect alone is universally valid. And with regard to the
evidence (it would be more accurate to speak of validity), he would say
that hermeneutic evidence consists of this: that the interpretation is
only valid as a hypothesis and is maintained by the (revocable) accord
that it receives throughout the community of interpreters. If it is not
successful there, the evidence is null and void. To this extent the
evidence is not a case that refers us to a transcendental subject, in-
47
dependent of the action of the interpreter. Naturally, when one con-
siders that the theory is necessarily linked to the question of a
transcendental subject, then it can be said of Szondi as well as of
Schleiermacher that they were not true theoreticians. In that case, I
would say, nevertheless, in agreement with Rainer Nlgele, that this
judgement is implied in the style of theory which is theirs, in their
theoretical practice.
RAINER NAGELE: In principle, I am inclined to agree with Manfred
Frank. I do not believe, as does Glenn Most, that one must hypostatize
a transcendental subject. Precisely the quote which Glenn Most took
from Szondi's treatise leans in the other direction. When Szondi wrote
the phrase which you quoted it seems to me that he did not imply that
the critic becomes "paradigmatic" in the sense that he put himself in
the place of the transcendental reader. Szondi, if I am not mistaken,
says on the contrary that the subjectivity founds the objectivity of the
action of the reader in two ways. In Szondi's precise language, the
division establishes itself between "subjectively determined" and
"subjectively mediatized in the consciousness." This subtle dif-
ference seems to me to correspond exactly to what Manfred Frank
defined as "two-sided." On one hand, the act of interpreting is "sub-
jectively determined", in the sense that the reading is executed
through its specific, unique, individual positions, the field of specific
experiences of the individual who reads. The interpretation which
obscures this position, this condition of his reading, loses its objec-
tivity. On the other hand, this individual field is precisely a field, a con-
text of actual historic experiences, established within a symbolic
order which does not begin to speak until it represents a con-
sciousness, subjectively mediatized as an interiorized order. Within
this second aspect, it is easy to distinguish a transcendental moment,
but as Manfred Frank said, it is not a matter of a transcendental sub-
ject which would survive in the trans-historic duration.
LOUIS MARIN: I would like, above all, to direct several questions to
Mr. Frank, stating first of all what my situation was in listening to his
paper, for which, if I may venture to say so, I had the code, constituted
by his summary, but about the whole of which my very unreliable
knowledge of the German language has confined me to conjecture.
So, I would like to pose a first question which has less to do with a
theory, let us say, of the reading or writing or a theory of interpreta-
tion, than with the practice of reading or of critical writing. In order to
introduce this queston, I quote from memory two fragments from
Pascal. The first is the following: "I cannot judge my work while
writing it. I must do as painters do, step back a little, how far you must
guess." And the second is this: "When one is too close to his work, he
is taken in by it, infatuated-when one is too far, one never gets back
into it. Such is the case with paintings viewed from too far away, too
high, too low or too near. There is an indivisible point which the
science of perspective sets for the art of painting. Who then will
assign it in relation to truth and ethics?" So, my question, which the
48
whole background of these texts of Pascal indicates, is the following:
What is the relationship between this theory or this approach to inter-
pretation and, to put it bluntly, a negative theology which appears to
me to be pinpointed in the second fragment from Pascal by the "who."
Who, then, will designate it in truth and ethics this correct position
from which I can judge. If we were to define this point, as I believe I
understood it in your presentation, as the position of the subject,
whether creator subject-"I cannot judge my work because it is in the
process of being written"-or a subject reader, who "receives" the
work, according to Pascal, this point is not definable in a theoretical
discourse, with the sole exception of a theoretical discourse on that
vain art, painting, whereas for truth and ethics, it cannot be defined,
we must guess. It is on the problem of guessing the point that I raise
the question.
When we say: there is no "science" of this place of judgement,
there is no science because the personal is by definition incom-
municable, undecipherable on the basis of an inviolable code, etc.,
therefore, in your practice, or in a practice derived from your
theoretical discourse, would it be acceptable to consider texts, for ex-
ample literary texts, as contrivances that are more or less "closely
followed," which would appear (in a way) more or less "closely fol-
lowed"? And are there procedures by which to define this more or this
less, to describe them in some way ? You see what is at stake in such
a description, since it concerns nothing less than the subject, the
subject within the text, whether it be the reader subject or the creator
subject. Consequently, could not, for example, the whole elaboration
of a semantics of enunciation, of different modalities of the structure
of enunciation and the enunciative marks in the enunciated allow one
to approach in some way this place of the subject which is incom-
municable? Or, to put it another way, in the practice derived from your
discourse, could one consider the poetic text a text that, if I may say
so, cheats? (Here I used a term related to games, that is, to one who
observes a number of rules, rules of skill, rules of the code, but who
cheats on certain points with regard to these rules.) To cheat then,
means to not observe one or two or several of the rules of a system of
rules. However the poetic text would be a poor cheater, in the sense
that it would leave evidence of its cheating. Through them, the reader
could guess the rules, guess these other rules that the text invents. I
believe that perhaps there are techniques for analysing a text which
would permit such an approach. The task of any science of the text
that still feels linked to this ethics will be to transgress the fetish for
the words of the language by referring them to the activity of in-
dividual creation of meaning. It is about the term "transgression" that
I wonder and about this ethics of the transgression. You know as well
as I that to transgress a rule or law, is, if I may venture to say so, to
negatively reaffirm it, it is, at its limit, a reinforcement of the law by
this very transgression. And I wonder if, after all that has been said
with regard to these oscillations or displacements of metaphor, of
unstable deficiencies, it is not necessary to look towards a critical
ethics of displacement, displacement which would not at all be a
49
transgression, but, in the critical writing or reading, an art which the
seventeenth century philosophers called imperceptible transitions,
that is, displacements which are not easily identified and which never-
theless exist just the same. These, to sum up, are my three questions:
the first with regard to the negative theology, the second concerning
the approaches, the techniques, one could say the procedures of ap-
proaching the place of the subject in the text, based on the proble
matics which you yourself have defined, and finally the question of
transgression-the critical activity as transgression or as an action of
displacement.
MANFRED FRANK: To be truthful, I would have to speak for quite
awhile about what you have said, and I don't want to do that. What
strikes me most is the suggestion that Schleiermacher's theory con-
tains a negative theology and that a subject which breaks the rules
must first have acknowledged them. However, I ask you the following
question: Of what value is the rule if it is always displaced? Schleier-
macher's intuition, his, as it were, original intuition, to speak as
Henrich von Fichte might, is that there just is no semantic identity
established by the rules. Moreover, we must take into account the era
in which Schleiermacher lived: it was round 1804 that he began to jot
down this kind of reflection, and of course, he speaks, as his
hermeneutics proves, the language of his class, of his era, of his
education, in this case the language of German Idealism. It is his
language. And within this language, he struggles with an intuition
which is fairly anachronic, "untimely" in the sense of Nietzsche's
"untimely considerations." This intuition is precisely that there exists
no semantic identity for an expression, that there is a displacement,
an "unceasing slippage of the signified under the signifier," and that
when communication is established despite all, this cannot be
explained unless one assumes that there are also codified structures
of communication. However, to assume a linguistic code does not
mean that one must also call for a precise, stable subject, even if it is
absent as with the god of Pascal. Nevertheless, it must be said that
the text does not create itself, the text does not speak on its own,
because to say that is to say that the text is a subject itself, possess-
ing the spontaneity which makes it change and that, since it can
reflect, it can also reflect upon itself and thus decide to speak dif-
ferently than it spoke yesterday, etc. That is why, says Schleier-
macher, it is useless to make an abstraction of the subject, since
critics of the subject cannot prevent this repressed concept from
reappearing in their theories. This seems fairly obvious to me, for ex-
ample, in Levi-Strauss and Foucault. In them, one always
stumbles-in the tradition of poetic symbolism-on expressions
which lend an autonomous structure to speech.
But who is this author who causes speech to explode, how
does it happen that language speaks on its own? There we have
Schleiermacher's question. To be sure, no one doubts that language,
in order to allow an exchange of messages, must have on the one
hand, a fairly stable composition similar to a structure. On the other
50
hand, we nevertheless know that comprehension is not restricted to
decoding meaning according to chains of signifiers following fixed
rules of decipherment. Put another way: we also understand someone
if he gives us to understand something extraordinary, something
which we have never before known-and that could be owing to the
way in which he forms linguistically something already heard. How is
this possible, asks Schleiermacher, and he responds: due to divi-
nation. Now divination is not a specific ability of the reader (or the
listener), but the author also "guesses" constantly, he continually
creates in his language, dealing with the linguistic material in a way
which is his alone. I, for example, learned German from my parents, a
fairly historically loaded German. Our generation had to hold to a
theory which allowed the breaking of the law, of a tradition which
behaved as a destiny, by turning to the creative forces which harbor
the change of tradition. To speak means to change the sense which is
deposited in signs through the speech of others (locutors and past
generations of locutors). Contrary to what has happened in France,
linguistic theories in Germany, it seems to me, have this interest in
common, and you should show some understanding for the
resistance which Germany manifests against evading the ethical
dimension in structural theory. Think of the fact that we have no Jean-
Paul Sartre in Germany, that on the contrary we have to shatter the
ontologisations and the reification of process which we have been
taught are independent of subjects. Sartre, whose influence in
Germany was perhaps greater than it ever was in France-I take him
for a Schleiermacher "redivivus" in hermeneutic topics-his
philosophy reminds us of the possibility of sincerely doing
philosophy, which would prove difficult within our own tradition. What
I have just said is not directly related to your question, but will
perhaps help to broaden the basis for a better mutual understanding.
51
For Theatre,the Dramais the Libretto
Gert Mattenklott
translated by Kristine Glerlow
The International Visual Theatre, a theater of the deaf, is play-

ing in Paris at the present. They present a howling Gale by violently
shaking a cloth: a storm tossed sea is silent. Stillness is figured by a
pearl sinking in the waves. The deaf audience follows it with their
eyes. For them, silence is the drapery that finally covers them as well.
They only lip-read a small portion of what the deaf actors say to one
another. Their idiom is "American Sign Language," the modern means
of communication for the deaf.
What would be left of our communication if the spoken text
were screened out? Alfredo Corrado, the director of the International
Visual Theatre makes the outcome clear: "When we observe the con-
versation of people who can hear, it looks very strange to us: we have
the impression that two people are communicating from the neck up-
wards."'
Indeed, for educated people, concentration on the speech act
in communicating with one another is often assumed to be self-
evident. The cultural precept of verbalizing is so strong and so rein-
forced through habit, that the distinction between speech act and
pragmatic context, as it is made by modern linguistics, retains only
53

the value of a theoretical construction. Nevertheless, it allows for a
description of the situation: the subordination of educated com-
munication to rationalism's precept of intelligible verbal intercourse
with one another, to such an extent that even the pragmatic context is
affected by this verbal droning and made textual. Our awareness of
non-verbal speech seems to diminish with increased education.
Recent developments in the theater show a strong affinity to
the gestural acting on the stage for the deaf. After some small ex-
perimental companies recently gathered in Hamburg, one spoke of
the "flight of the theater from language." (FAZ,May 12, 1974). This is
at the very least a methodological provocation, not only for theater
criticism, but indeed also for the scholarly description and analysis of
drama. But communication "fromthe neck upwards" has always been
central to both of these for a different reason. The object of philology
is the text as the embodiment of all possibilities of interpretation, but
also as their limit. The exegencies of the handing-down of
theater-the fact that literary history from the complex institutional
context of theatrical processes has left us only the texts-causes
philology to display all its virtues. Even if it proceeds with the greatest
powers of discrimination, philology still deals only with literature. In
principle then, it doesn't have its object under control; at best it can
infer about this object from the left-over texts that remain. Recently
Rainer Warning also came upon this state of affairs in reference to
some observations on the passion plays of the Middle Ages: "One can
briefly describe this situation of relative powerlessness as follows: we
have only texts left, where it is actually a matter of institutions. A
reconstruction of these institutions from the preserved texts won't be
able to go beyond certain set limits. We know that these texts repre-
sent only relics of institutional productions, and that it would
therefore be inappropriate to treat them as what we understand by
literature. But, ever since there has been a study of literature, all
scholarly discourse has been bound precisely to this concept of
literature. For Dilthey it was indubitable that the verbal manifestation
of the "Geist" always represented its perfect manifestation. And, as
much as modern structuralism may have distanced itself from the
romantic metaphysics of the objective "Geist," its trust in the "text"
remains just as great. Only in the last few years have we become in-
creasingly aware that this text is only the linguistic manifestation of a
speech act. As an act, as an action, it stands in institutional contexts
of action, and any theorizing about it therefore demands that such
pragmatic contexts be taken into account.'"2
For philology to make literature out of drama is inappropriate
in principle, not only in view of the recent development of a theater of
gesture or of action, but also, fundamentally, in terms of the historical
forms of drama, since the spoken text fixes only one of several levels
of signification that are superimposed in the dramatic action.3 Drama
is falsely defined as literature.The printed text is an abstraction of the
play which favors its literary elements; worse-it threatens to prune
drama down to the literary. It is only the unexplicit assumptions of our
culture, so predominantly shaped by the literary, that allows us to
54

overlook this state of affairs. The presumptuous exaltation of the
spoken word as the only actual language is to be understood,
together with the interiorization of expression, as part of that process
that has been described as the "bourgeoisification" of culture. This
process unfolds at the expense of action, gesture, choreography,
vocal modulation, in short, all the non-literary modes of signification
that are not inscribed, but only alluded to in the printed text.
No approach will do justice to the theater if it sees direction,
dramaturgy, decor, costuming and lighting as only the conditions
necessary for the animation of literature. The theater is a cultural in-
stitution with its own dynamics that arise from the dialectical inter-
actions of the audience, culturo-political authorities, authors and
many other artists. Each of these makes its own ideological or
aesthetic demands on this institution at any given time. In this
respect theater is qualitatively different from the other genres, lyric
and epic, even though genre theory insists on mentioning them in the
same breath over and over again. Both the novel and the lyric are
realized in reading, that is, as literature. The lyric admittedly still
allows one to recognize in a few of its forms reflections of distant
times when its verses were sung. This may hold true as well, in an
analogous way, for the truly narrative forms of the modern novel,
which likewise continue to exist there as residual forms. Lyric and
epic are literature;drama, strictly speaking, is not-or perhaps only in
historically antiquated forms, such as the so-called "drama for
reading". The limitations of a philology that is simply literary or only
oriented towards genre theory become obvious here, if anywhere. The
novelist and the lyric poet write for the reader, the dramatist for the
theater. I therefore agree with Ferruccio Rossi-Landi when he writes:
"The theatre is not a literarygenre at all. The complex synthesis of the
theatre is realized as a communal procedure, as a social action."4
Szondi's Theorie des modernen Dramas, his first scholarly
work, was published in 1956. The theoretical environment in which we
deal with it today, more than twenty years later, has changed,
especially through the acquisition of socio-historical and semiotic
knowledge. There is one reason above all why this work must now
seem objectionable to us: it claims to explain the social semantics of
the development of drama since the Renaissance, thus, to present the
aesthetic object in its social significance. Yet the theoretical
vanishing point of this theory is the hypothesis of an "absolute
drama," the specificity of which Szondi defines from a strictly literary
point of view, explicitly rejecting all the characteristics Rossi-Landi
sees as defining the social nature of drama. Everything Szondi says
about modern drama is silhouetted against the background of
classical drama. In classical drama the model was developed to
which modern drama still remains related, to the extent that it lacks
the former:the "absolute drama." Its most important characteristic is
that its significance comes into being in dialogue and only there.
Szondi synchronizes the recent history of drama with the history of
bourgeois society, which is essentially described, from the standpoint
of its tendencies in the history of ideas, as a process of increasing
55

"alienation" and "reification". The disolution of the drama cor-
responds to this in the decline of dialogue. Szondi finds the literary-
historical examples of the "absolute" model in Renaissance tragedy
and French Classical tragedy, the examples of dissolution since
Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Maeterlinck and Hauptmann.
The opposition present here can only be described as one be-
tween the aesthetic immanence of meaning, and allegorization. For in
Szondi's definiton of the "absolute" drama, it is a matter of historico-
philosophical delimitation from dramatic forms that carry referential
character. Thus, the mystery play refers to the Passion as the mean-
ingful horizon of its action. This historical play points to history as the
context of meaning without a knowledge of which it could not be
understood. The monologistic psychological play refers to an in-
expressible psychic element as what is actually meant, for which the
dramatic play is only one expression.5
What is described here as the classical drama since the
Renaissance coincides with the concept we are familiar with in the
normative poetics of those like Gustav Freytag, a fact that surely did
not escape Szondi. Still, he insisted on the "objective" historical
validity of the historical model until late in the 19th century, even
though he himself objected to a normative enchantment of the model.
The very tenacity of normative dramaturgy becomes for him an index
of a situation that remained, from a historico-philosophical point of
view, fundamentally stable until late in the nineteenth century. Szon-
di's laconic discourse is silent on the question of how to justify such a
continuity and how to explain the drama of Beaumarchais, Storm and
Stress, Victor Hugo and the Romantics in that light. Hence the follow-
ing remarks.
I am indeed of the opinion that the expression "absolute
drama" is well-chosen as a constitutive basis for bourgeois
aesthetics since the Renaissance and, even more so, since the
Enlightenment. I mean the idealistic illusion that rational reality must
sooner or later necessarily arise out of the absolute emancipation of
linguistic rationality. "Once the realm of the imagination (Vorstellung)
has been revolutionized, reality will not endure", as Hegel was to write
later.6 Achieving linguistic competence therefore seemed to be the
most important condition for liberation from the state of dependency
grounded in religious orthodoxy and political despotism. In the
drama, the reasoning, verbally masterful intellectual receives recogni-
tion as an institution of bourgeois society. The habits of the raison-
neur stamp his inner form as that of speech doubled, as that dialogue
in which language continually interrupts itself. This is the form of
Lessing and Diderot. The insistence on the objectivity of rational
language, which is in a position to methodically control itself, on its
own, in dramatic dialogue, is to provide the critical spirit (Kritizismus)
with an equivalent to that authority which the ruling class of the an-
cien r6gime had monopolized. The decline of sensuality in favor of the
sense of language, the "communication from the neck upwards" men-
tioned above, is a consequence of the distrust of sensuality's decep-
tion. The old society administers the realm of the senses at a high
56

cost. A leading question in the development of bourgeois aesthetics
concerns the circumstances under which sensuality can be appealed
to in bourgeois art as well. Every increase demands complicated
justification (the discussion of taste). Where the revolution does not
take place, the senses automatically arouse the suspicion of counter-
revolutionary intrigue. There is yet another reason for this suspicion.
The bourgeois aesthetics of thrift-and isn't the reduction of
theatrical production to dialogue an economic measure of extreme
thrift?-symbolically opposes the waste of productive powers, a
reproach which every rising class has made against the ruling class.
The "absolute" drama, the spoken drama of fate-determining
dialogue, stands against everything theatrical. Thus the characters
submit themselves unconditionally to what they say. Often, the
dynamics of language and word play replaces the progress of the
action, with strict subjugation of the character to the word. The fate of
the characters is accomplished in language. Speaking, they come to
their happy end or to their death, and it is seldom necessary, as in
Lessing's Emilia Galloti, that poison or dagger must still bring to an
end what language has set up.
The bourgeoisie established its theater in opposition to the
theater of its time, as a tribunal of language instituted against the
seduction of the senses. George Lukacs-one of Szondi's authorities,
with his early book, Die Soziologie des modernen Dramas-has
already commented on the fact that the first bourgeois drama of the
Enlightenment constitutes a separation between drama and theater.
"Whatare the reasons for this separation? We have seen that the mat-
ter here is not really one of a divorce, but rather of not being able to
grow into one another. Two different creations, arising from real
psychological needs, cannot come together-although for artistic
reasons, they should. We have seen that drama was didactic and
tendentious, one of the weapons for the ideological class struggle of
the bourgeoisie, ready for battle, striving upwards, vigorously rebel-
ling: a means of inspiring, encouraging, admonishing, attacking and
teaching. And theater-there is no falsification in the brief expres-
sion-merely amusement. The masters of ceremonies of the festive
and the religious-the two main forms of this amusement stood in the
service of the old society. In the new society they were replaced by
critics.
Domination by the court of language allows rational dialogue
to subjugate aesthetic arbitrariness to the representational culture of
bourgeois laws; "absolute drama" as the counterposition to aesthetic
absolutism. Thus, the Enlightenment granted art its autonomy, but it
also dispatched the arts to the far side of its own theory and official
culture. At first the liberal arts, those arts that were not tied to any
specific goal, still counted among themselves just about anything
that demanded theartistic skill. But when art had swelled itself up into
grandeur at the peak of its idealistic self-conception at the end of the
eighteenth century, the harmless arts and the artistic skills of dancers,
jugglers and fire eaters, clowns and sword swallowers, tight-rope
walkers and castrati disappeared into the twilight of subcultures,
57

despised if not unnoticed by the offices of aesthetic organization and
control in Weimar, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere-one symptom among
many of the history of the relationship of sensuality and rationality in
the century of the Enlightenment. In the beginning was the word, out
of which should come light; in aesthetics, the decrees of the critics.
Everythingthat was merely playful or expressive, whatever was mere-
ly enjoyable was supposed to become meaningful and significant, or
else disappear. The Enlightenment is-in accordance with its origins
in philosophy-enlightenment from within its language, and language
is subordinated to the logic that philosophy makes binding for in-
telligible communication about things. Here lies the origin of
dramatic dialogue in the "absolute drama".
The theorists of imitatio naturae in drama established the pre-
cept of rationality against the magicians of the senses of the old arts
of the theater, as if to protect the bourgeoisie from being bewitched.
Transformed into the formal structure of the works themselves, this
precept acquired almost unquestioned authority. Since Lessing there
has existed the concept of inner form in German poetics, by which is
meant the rational economy of the constitutive elements in the
strategy of the whole. Its model is the logic of argument. When he
wrote about the logic of composition in painting in his "Essays on
Painting," Lessing's intellectual brother Diderot defined it in the ratio
of Cartesian demands on art: "it must be simple and clear. It follows
that there can't be one figure too many, nor any superfluous ac-
cessories. It can have only a single subject."8 And yet he does stand
up for pantomime as the art of bodily eloquence (on which Lessing
also planned a lengthy treatise). The condition under which bodies are
here still recognized as carriers of expression is the same as that
under which French anthropologists rediscovered Lavater's
Physiognomien at the end of the 18th century: "If one found an exact
and scientific agreement between the feelings and the corresponding
physical expressions, the soul could be examined in its natural em-
bodiment to see which dimensions it possessed. That would also
mean (. . .) that the voice of the soul, unintelligible and inaudible until
now, could be contained and read and analyzed in a text which obser-
vational and experiemental science could carefully examine".9
Only confined, defined expression enters the field of ob-
servation here, and the interest is in the regular, in the typical. That ex-
pression in art comes about through deviation from the type, and
precisely not through fulfillment of it, escaped Diderot as well as
Lessing. Even the most comprehensive and promising work of their
time on the language of the body, Ideen zu einer Mimikby the German
philosopher J.J. Engel (2 vol., 1785/86), aims at inscribing the body. It
tries less to bring the body to speech, than to let it "accompany and
support language."'1
Verbal language takes first place in the hierarchy of linguistic
abilities. Verbal discourse is the privileged if not the monopolized
authority for settling individual and social claims. The illusion that
man, the master of his rational faculty, has already advanced to being
master of his history entitles drama, a methodically organized con-
58

figuration of this discourse, to a place of honor in the society of
genres (until it is replaced by the novel). The dramatic genre propa-
gated the production of fate out of dialogue as a form. People alleged-
ly make their fate out of words. Historical catastrophes can arise from
suppressed or stolen letters (Don Carlos, Wallenstein). As a
pedagogic tool, drama should help to define, standardize, and func-
tionalize the newly discovered subjectivity, this risky factor of un-
certainty, for the programs and plans of the bourgeois economy. Even
the language of the heart is subjected to linguistic discipline. Drama
and dialogue build on man's cognitive abilities. Losses in the area of
sensitivity are characteristic. The only bodily excretion that retains
aesthetic license is the tear-the expression of suffering. Otherwise,
the characters are monads with oral orifices for language. All ad-
vances in bourgeois enlightenment have to be paid for with some
limitation. Thus the dictatorship of verbal rationality runs the danger
of leaving behind the concrete sensuality of human beings, and all
their non-verbal wishes, hopes, and fears.
However, this primacy of verbal language collapses in the
historical moment when upwardly mobile social classes do not have
any license to share their wishes and idiosyncrasies in speech. Social
control of thought rules more strongly over spoken sentences than
over the language of bodies. As theoretical logic, as grammar and
syntax, as healthy human understanding, it has been internalized in
language and has become a normative regulation of social inter-
course. Thus, in the marginal areas of large social structures, we
always find strong populist impulses against the domination of
spoken language. It may even be a recurring symptom of transitional
societies that in them verbal and non-verbal levels of meaning find
themselves in opposition in their production of ideology. They overlap
in so far as, on the level where argumentation proceeds expressis ver-
bis, enlightened rationality appeals to the conventions, while
gestures and mime-populist, subversive elements opposed to the
discursive logic-to some extent interrupt verbal discourse.
This overlapping of levels of meaning with frequently different,
indeed, even contradictory messages, seems to be constitutive for the
drama of Beaumarchais and that of Storm and Stress. While the
verbal text ultimately accepts the reigning order conciliatorily, the
noise of revolutionary rhetoric in the accompanying context almost
rises above the official version. It is corrected, if not revoked
altogether by the aesthetic gesture of revolution. The ideological-
political consciousness of the artistic intelligence-wherever it is
bound to language as its mode of representation-seems tendentially
to lag behind the gestural anticipations of human beings in their
development. Possessed by the historical possibility of possessing
oneself, furiously moved by the historical mission of an ever-
broadening anti-feudal movement, the avant-garde customarily
speaks ecstatically, passionately in the language of the body (the
authors' stage directions), but without illusion or resignedly in terms
of the literary language at the end of the play. If the language gets
rebellious here, then there it is already revoked in advance by the con-
59

stellation of speakers and the distribution of roles in the dramatic
structure.
Thus in Schiller's Rduber, the robber chief's humble sub-
mission to the autority to the ancien regime is the last word of the
play. Its meaning is not exhausted in this humility, however. Granted,
humility is the last word, but it is not the dominant gesture. For the
literary sense of the words is humble, but, according to the gesture
there is someone there who says "1".The gesture signifies pride and
the absolutism of moral sentiment in which the revolutionizing of sub-
jectivity under the banner of its absolute self-determination, as begun
by Rousseau, is completed. Schillers Rauber is conformist according
to literary argumentation in the sense of the ideology of feudal ab-
solutism. But not everything is discussed under the license of this
political-ideological concession or rather, not everything comes into
theatrical play through argumentative language. Until very recently,
performances have given special attention to the non-verbaltexture of
the play-and with perfect right. From Piscator to some productions
that are still in the repertoires of West German theaters, background
and foreground noises above and below the text have been greatly
emphasized. Karlbecomes an anarchist, Spiegelburg Trotzkyavant la
lettre. For good reasons. Accordingly, I consider entirely correct even
Piscator's addition to the play of the shooting of the robber chief by
someone from his own band as he sets out to turn himself in to the
authorities. No word needs to be added here, none deleted. This shot
is nothing more than a pointed reminderof the gesture of revolt, which
we would have almost been inclined to forget after Karl's humble
words at the end. For our habit of taking words for what is actually in-
tended in drama, of seeing them as the authentic carriers of meaning,
is all too strong.
Our stubborn Protestant insistence on the literal meaning, our
distrust of actual appearance, has always gladly supported philology
ex officio. In interpreting after the fact, it attempts to produce that
unequivocal meaning that the authors themselves have often artfully
tried to displace. Philological criticism rightly suspects more than
just some doubt about this or that content in the renouncing of verbal
univocality. Indeed, the denial of verbal communication in favor of
stronger, more expressive appeals helps articulate energies which are
a frontal attack on the dominion of the discourse of verbal rationality
itself. This is at the root of the suspicion that the increasing potential
for irrationality in society has long been hidden in language as well.
Hence the exodus of rationality into non-verbal expression.
My attempt at reconstructing some important statements from
Szondi's Theorie des modernen Dramas from the perspective of its
theoretical actuality has also allowed for a rediscovery of the "ab-
solute drama" from angles other than those chosen by Szondi. In
what relation does my claim for the flight from language in populist
movements during periods of social upheaval stand to Szondi's
description of the "crisis of the drama"? I call attention to this as it is
explained in the transitional section of his theory. Here the classic,
the "absolute drama" is threatened with dissolution by a deep-seated
60

change in its thematics at the end of the 19th century. Instead of the
pure present, the past dominates in Ibsen's work, and not as
remembered events, but rather thematized as evanescence, as the
passing of time. As in Strindberg, the characters are introverts in-
stead of embodying human camaraderie as the condition for the
essential nature of the dialogue. Finally, instead of plots, there is
reflection in monologue on the conditions of existence, in the face of
which are all equal, and all actions equally vain: Maeterlinck's "drame
statique" in the face of death, before the reality of which dramatis per-
sonae are robbed of their individuality, but also made incapable of
inter-personal relationships. But the recurring character of the pre-
sent, interpersonal relations,and events together constitute that ab-
solute that Szondi attributes to classical drama. For him, the dissolv-
ing dynamic is always the same: a dissociation of subject and object.
Present and past are related to one another as the unveiler and the
unveiled (Ibsen). Humanity becomes an object in Maeterlinck's
fatalism, a set of individuals in Strindberg's dramas. While the form
coming down from tradition assumes a dynamic merging of subject
and object such as is achieved in the dialogue of the dramatis per-
sonae, the content of dramas since the end of the 19th century at-
tribute a "static separation" to subject and object. Szondi formulates
the crisis of drama that he sees growing from this inner contradiction
of form and thematics in a mere hint at a sketch of a theory of stylistic
change "which distinguishes itself from current understandings of
the succession of one style by another. For it places between the two
periods a third, inherently contradictory one and thus sets the stages
of development in the triad of the dialectic of form and content" (TMD,
p. 72). This is altogether the figure I attempted to outline earlier, the
figure of formal structures, self-contradictory on the semantic level,
during transitional periods-with one considerable difference, to be
sure. Szondi's crisis-model stands at the end of the 19th century,
whereas my historical indications concerned drama one hundred
years earlier, the drama of the late 18th century. In actual fact, each of
the three kinds of damage caused by erosion of the classical drama
that the Theorie des modernen Dramas attributes to 1880-1900 also
appeared earlier-everywhere, for example, where Shakespeare's
theater was instrumental in constituting a tradition: the interruption
of interaction through dialogue by lyrical monologue; the replacement
of human comaraderie with individual characteristics contrasted from
the outside (epic); or even the representation of boredom and
dissociation. Szondi's critics have presented prominent examples for
this, from Shakespeare and Goethe's Storm and Stress to B(ichner
and Musset.
However, this difference does not essentially concern the prob-
lem of dates. Szondi's proposed theory of the transitional drama un-
questionably finds its object in the fin de siecle theater. It is equally
unquestionable that the crisis at the end of the 19th century cannot
simply be interpreted as that of the late Enlightenment prolonged by a
century. However, this probably raises the question of whether or not
the crisis-model considered here has a characteristic significance
61

that allows for the recurrence of its structure even under greatly
changed social and aesthetic conditons. Thus a few more observa-
tions.
The changes that avant-gardes from Lillo, Diderot and Lessing
to Wilson, the Theatre du Soleil and Peter Stein have proposed for the
drama always concern above all its relationship to the audience, and
are also always aimed at validating in the drama that device whose
seemingly ideal counterpart in the novel helped the genre to such a
sudden victory over the drama: art as opposed to the artificial. All
things theatrical stand here in opposition to the verbalization as well
as the textualization of the drama, always. The same procedure that
means crisis, danger and dissolution from perspective of the "ab-
solute drama" appears under the rubricof the device directed against
artifice as liberation from ritual ossifications which threaten to suf-
focate real life. Where dialogue is perceived as a stiff, unreal ritual in
which the inner self of the characters no longer appropriately
represents itself, skepticism about the appropriateness of verbal
language in general is quick to surface, so that both come to a crisis
together: the "absolute drama" as a form that uses dialogue, and ver-
bal theater. The social contexts are mostly vitalistic movements, as in
European pre-romanticism and the finde siecle. The retreat of verbal
theater leaves room for scenery and staging, action and pantomime.
Thus the opposition Szondi sees between "absolute drama" and his
epic-lyric forms of dissolution seems to me to be subsumed in the
more encompassing opposition between drama as the speaking
stage, and theater."
Is the position of the text in drama, and therefore its
literariness not, in the final analysis, also dependent on society's at-
titude toward the professionalism of the author, asserting, in the case
of the theater, the importance of the serious writer as opposed to an
institution that it continually derrogates as dubious? Rossi-Landi had
already anticipated this when he wrote: "In many literary over-
evaluations of the play-as-written-text a bourgeois and meritocratic
conception of the author is still expressed. Namely, of the writer as
one who belongs to the ruling class in his right to use the work of
others instrumentally, to demand and to assert that a social
machinery put itself into motion and bring in an artistic profit for him,
simply because he invests it with the capital of his writings. Accord-
ing to this conception, all others who work on the play are only
members of the lower classes"(54). With this fits the fact that the op-
position of the avant-gardes against the literary theater that rests in
verbal dialogue is often close to dilettantism. Protesting against pro-
fessionalism, it makes the demand of life in the face of an all too
outspoken artifice. When Lenz and Mercier bring the life of everyman
into play against the ceremonial drama of stilted speech, their
demands are cross related, social and political, but they also reveal
the resentment of the dilettante against professional expertise, which
is referred to only with derogatory, belittling words: smoothness, stiff-
ness, coldness. And can the emphasis on creature-like life and death
and the recourse by Maeterlinkto aesthetic forms found in nature not
62

also be read as a strong amateurish protest against classical subju-
gation?
Today we are more aware of these correspondences than was
possible twenty years ago. We have become more aware through the
return in recent years of the ideological Jugendstil, which propagates
once again "natural" art as opposed to over-refined "bourgeois"
stylistic forms.
Art as opposed to artifice, and amateurish self-help against
professionalism-to these simplified descriptions of dramatic crisis
in transitional periods we can add yet another one: action therapy as
opposed to speech therapy. One of the most important manifesta-
tions of the crisis model in Szondi's theory is the I-dramaas Strind-
berg initiated it: "the drama, the art form kat'exochen of opening and
openness in dialogue, is given the task of representing hidden
psychological events. Drama solves the problem in that it withdraws
upon a central figure and either confines itself entirely to that figure
(Mono-drama),or else captures everything else from its perspective
(I-drama),though then it admittedly ceases to be drama" (TMD,p. 43).
In any event, with this model, Strindberg founds a tradition that has
lasted for decades, a remarkable stability for a formal manifestation
of crisis.
The basis of Szondi's Theorie des modernen Dramas is the
figure of a story of decline. Thus here as well he stresses the replace-
ment of the unity of plot by the unity of the subjective I, as well as the
displacement of a concert of voices in a dramatic dialogue through
voices brought forth in epic monologue. But why could this I-formbe
constitutive of a tradition, despite all of the verdicts against the
singularity of such art forms, as Szondi demonstrates in relation to
Wagner, Stendahl, and the corresponding chief dramatic witnesses?
Why can it appear as a classic form to contemporary theatrical avant-
gardes? Because it remains firmly grounded in the tradition of verbal
theater. For the conviction that is constitutive of form is that of the
possibility of self-therapy through language. Granted, that human
camaraderie and therefore dialogue are impossible; granted, that the I
itself has become object and thereby a gap between subject and ob-
ject has been opened, which is for Szondi the reason why "absolute
drama" deteriorates. Yet the possibility of self therapy is retained in
this trust in language. Rather than lose its head through talking, the I
can even here talk its way back into life again. Dialogue may be im-
possible, but not anymore and not just yet, and thus it remains the
normative energy for this self-analysis in monologue for which
psychoanalysis is the godfather. I therefore think it consistent that
from the perspective of contemporary avant-garde theater, both
analytical and I-theater are regarded as belonging to the classical-
cum-literarytheater, theater under the sway of language. In line with
this opposition one may refer to action, primal scream, and Gestalt
therapy as opposed to classical psychonalysis.
The stage of theatrical action has been erected opposite the
drama of dialogue. And its wild noises, sometimes soft, sometimes
63

louder, are interrupting the literary cadences of verbal theater. Right
now, the verbal sounds timid.
Phillips University
NOTES
1 From Georg Hensel. "Fluchtwege des Theaters aus der Sprache. Beobachtungen
beim Theater der Nationen in Hamburg."In:FrankfurterAI/gemeine Zeitung (May
12, 1979). Hereafter cited in the text as FAZ.
2 RainerWarning,"Das geistliche Spiel zwischen Kerygmaund Mythos" In'Aspekte
des Religiosen Dramas, I, ed. Heimo Reinitzer (Hamburg,1979), pp. 13-16.
3 This has already been noticed, when Julius Bab said in his description of the part
the language of the body plays in the theatrical transposition of drama:"Theactor
has indeed no material in which he can retain evidence of his inner feelings, and
which can then affect others in his absence. Neither the word that can be mediated
by writing and printing, nor the tone that can be captured by sheet music, not the
canvas and color of the painter, nor the marble of the sculptor: nothing belongs to
him other than his own body. And his violent emotions only become visible through
the transformations that occur through his body." Thereforethe artistic act is con-
cluded only when actor and audience come into bodily contact. (J.B. Das Theater
im Lichte der Soziologie. Leipzig 1931, p. 34) Attempts at a systematic description
have nonetheless only recently been undertaken, e.g., by BernhardWuttke (Nicht-
sprachliche Darstellunged des Theaters. Kommunikations- und zeichen-
theoretische Studien unter besonderen Ber0cksichtigung des satirischen
Theaters. Diss. phil. Munster,1973)and EkkegardKaemmerling("Theaterbezogene
Lekture und pragma-semantische Dramenanalyse," in Sprache in technischen
Zeitalter 18 (1979) Heft 70, p. 171-87).
4 Ferruccio Rossi-Landi,Azione sociale e procedimento dialettico ne/ treatro (1968).
Germanin F. R-L.,Semiotik, Aesthetik und Ideologie (Munich,1976),p. 54. Georges
Gurvitchand Jean Duvignaud had previously spoken of the ceremonial character
of the theatre in a similar way. (G.G.:"La sociologie du th6atre" in: Les lettres
nouvelles 35 (1956) p. 196-210;J.D. "Le th6atre dans la soci6t6: la soci6t6 dans le
th6atre." in: Sociologie du th65tre. Paris 1965, pp. 7-25).
5 Peter Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas 1880-1950 in: Schriften I (Frankfurt
a.M., 1978), pp. 9-148. Especially pp. 16-20 and 69-76. Hereaftercited in the text as
TMD.
6 Hegel to Neithammer on October 28th, 1808.

7 Georg LukAcs,"ZurSoziologie des modernen Dramas"(1909)in: G. L.:Schriften zur
Literatursoziologie, selected and edited by Peter Ludz.(Neuwied, 1963), p. 365.
8 Denis Diderot, "Essais sur la peinture," in Ouvres Esthetiques (Paris, 1959), p. 711
9 Sergio Moravia, La Scienza dell' Uomo nel Settecento German trans. (Munich,
1973), p. 59.
10 Johann Jakob Engel, Ideen zu einer Mimik, I (Berlin, 1804), p. 33 rept. Frankfurt
a.M., 1971.
11 In his "VersuchOberdas Teater"(1908),Thomass Mann,a prominentcontemporary
of this dissolution, characterized the kind of theater outlined here with the sharp-
sightedness of a decided opponent: "Thetheater is a social matter in a much more
tangible way than are other types of art""Far removed from providinganything of
64

the highest or ultimate kind, the theater is rather the most naieve, childish and
popular type of art imaginable..." "I understand more and more that everything I
have to say against the theater leads back to its essential sensuality: it is not least
of all the sensual-social aspect of the theater audience that puts me off, that I hate.
Why,what we call audience is only the reciprocal interchange of the sensual, and a
"man of the audience" is of necessity a man of the market,of the assembly room,
of the haze of humanity! Enough! It is quite clear that the entire bourgeois
audience in which optics, acoustics, physical humanity reign, that the courtroom,
the national assembly, the theater with its thick and foolish atmosphere, that the
sensual audience is a vile, stupid, inadequate audience. The audience that I intend
is a different one, a more delicate, purer,farther removed."The theater is a real in
which writers "are guests and in which this writing becomes the basis and text-
book for a productionthat is charming in its way. The book, unfortunately,does not
stand in the same relationship to the production as the full score does to the sym-
phony, but rather much more as the libretto does to opera. The production is the
workof art, the text is only a support. It is the markof every real theatrical play that
it cannot be read-just as a libretto cannot be read,"Ges. Werke,v. 10 (Frankfurt
a.M., 1960). The quotes are pp. 20-41.
65

Further comments
Remarks in lieu of a discussion
translated by Marilyn Gaddis Rose
Due to lack of time it wasn't possible to open discussion of Gert Mat-

tenklott's theses immediately. When at our request he went back to
his presentation he specified his thoughts on two points.
Gert Mattenklott: In the first place, as to what I mean by "bourgeois,"

I didn't have in mind in what I said any other sense of the word besides
that which emerged in the discussion of bourgeois drama; thus
"bourgeois" was used to designate drama not essentially in its
sociological aspects in the narrow sense, from the point of view of the
sociology of literature, but in the sense which traces back to the
bourgeoisie, to the contents defining its function, for example, in the
rise of the class which is defined economically as bourgeois. The con-
cept is already implicit in Szondi in his theory of bourgeois drama, and
he tried subsequently to explain it in the sense of Max Weber. That's
the sense I gave it. As for what is the function of language, I think that
the emphasis on gesture, choreography, etc. in the ensemble of all
that comprises theater, as distinguished from drama, receives its
meaning only if we connect it to repressive language. Thus, it is clear
that this gestural language furnishes in itself an idiom proper to itself,
which can carry the same repressive attributes as determined forms
of rational language are likewise capable of producing. It is therefore
only in this relationship (to wit: what is repressed in rational language
67
and what is expressed in counterpart in gestures), that the insistence
placed upon the language of gestures and in general upon anything
which is theatrical has a truly emancipating signification. If the
theater detaches itself-and at this moment we are experiencing
precisely the degree which this detachment can reach-then the
transformation of this emancipatory function into repression is
observed in the same way. Thus, it is not in a uniquely emancipatory
sense that I wanted to invoke the language of gesture when placing it
in opposition to that of words.
68
Dramaand DramaticTheory:
Peter Szondi and the ModernTheater
Michael Hays
Because the form of a work of art always

seems to express something unquestionable, we
usually arriveat a clear understanding of such formal
statements only at a time when the unquestionable
has been questioned and the self-evident has
become problematic.
Peter Szondi
Theorie des modernen Dramas
In the light of contemporary structuralist and semiotic en-
deavor, these words may not seem very revolutionary. Some of you no
doubt even caught the reference to Hegel's, or should I say Minerva's,
owl in this formula. If so, Peter Szondi might, at first, appear to be
little more than a recent avatar of the "old" Hegelian aesthetics. His
work has, in fact, brought new life to this tradition, but it also marks a
difference which defines Szondi's historical position and his contribu-
tion to modern criticism and hermeneutic theory. I hope I can do
justice to part of this contribution today by discussing the nature and
implications of Szondi's work on the drama.
There is no question about the fact that Szondi drew his early
inspiration from Hegel and from Hegel's followers, Lukacs and
Adorno. This is obvious in the opening sections of his book, Theoryof
69
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the Modern Drama, where he first establishes the idea that dramatic
form is not an abstract entity, independent of time and place, but
rather inextricably tied up with the content it informs. "Context," he
quotes Hegel as saying, "is nothing but the inversion of form into con-
tent and form nothing but that of content into form." He also cites
Adorno's use of a chemical metaphor to express the same idea. Form
is "precipitated" context. By borrowing in this fashion Szondi is able
to quickly establish the theoretical starting point for his own analysis
of the drama: formal structure is as important to the process of
signification in a play as is content. There is, for Szondi, no such thing
as a form which exists beyond the moment of its use. There are only
particular sets of form-content relationships and form, like content
must be "read" as a statement about the nature and significance of
the aesthetic enterprise as a whole: dramatic form codifies assertions
about human existence.
Szondi proposes a "structural" model for the drama, then, but
unlike the structures which Levi-Strauss had in mind, those
discovered by Szondi are not "fundamentally the same for all
minds-ancient and modern, primitiveand civilized.... ", They are, in-
stead, inextricably bound to the historical and ideological situation in
which they develop. This historicization of the idea of form eliminates
the possibility of any systematic, normative poetics as such. The
formal distinctions which have traditionally been used to designate
the "universal" characteristics of each of the major genres are trans-
formed into historical categories. One cannot discuss genre outside a
specific historical context and, therefore, it is useless to discuss, for
example, Greek or medieval drama in the same terms that one would
use to deal with eighteenth-century drama or modern drama.
The significance of this historicization of drama and criticism
is obviously rather profound. There is no longer any possibility of
positing a simple continuity of either literary or critical tradition. The
"history" of literature ceases to be history at all in the sense of a
diachronic series of cause and effect relationships. Szondi again
seems very close to proposing the same kind of non-linear structure
that Levi-Strauss has been accused of propounding-literary history
at this point would be nothing but a series of juxtaposed, synchronic
moments, each with its own systems of structure and meaning, each
independent of that which temporally precedes or follows it.
Szondi's theory avoids this a-historical pitfall in two ways.
First of all, he demonstrates in his own work that it is not only possi-
ble, but sometimes necessary to examine one form, one moment in
relation to that which immediately preceded it. History then manifests
itself in the demonstration of difference. This as I will show later, is
what Szondi does in his work with the modern drama when he
analyzes it in terms of its failure to sustain the old drama's form-
content relationship: the modern playwright tries to resolve the con-
tradiction between a new social content and a form which, because it
is historically conditioned, is no longer able to inform the statement
of the content. History and the process of change appear here as
"technical contradictions," as "technical difficulties internal to the
70

concrete work itself."'2 This point is extremely important for an under-
standing of Szondi's method. It shows that unlike other historically
oriented critics, Szondi assumes that the social problematic of an age
does not simply manifest itself in the content of the work of art. It ap-
pears as part of the formal signifying process: social contradictions
present themselves as aesthetic problems which the work of art itself
attempts to resolve. Thus, as Szondi indicates in his essay on Diderot,
the movement of the hermeneutic circle must be from the "text" out
into the social context and then back into the text. Exactly how this
"text" should be defined is a problem I will discuss later. For the
moment, I simply wish to point out the way in which Szondi organizes,
successfully as far as I am concerned, the process of investigating
the interrelationship between language, text and history.
The second source of diachronic movement is to be found in
the critic's relationship to the object of his study. Szondi reminds us
that criticism and critical models are also historically bound
phenomena and, therefore, have the tendency to isolate and fix that
which may in fact be part of a process. Such model building may be
quite successful when the critic turns toward the past. Critics in fact
prove their own historical distance from this past through their ability
to define and close out earlier formal processes. But the critic also
marks his historical position by his inability to stand outside his own
historical-conceptual frame of reference. Critics including Szondi
himself enable us to understand socio-aesthetic process and perceive
what is fundamentally new to their age through their inability to ade-
quately account for these new artistic structures. History manifests
itself in what is left out, in what the critical rhetoric cannot name.
Despite these limitations, the critic can try to establish what
Szondi calls a "semantics of form," which can be used to analyse the
form content relationship of a given historical period. What Szondi
has in mind here seems to be the possibility of a semiotic analysis of
the signifying structures which organize the dramatic performance as
a whole. If he did not say precisely this, it is undoubtedly because
these terms were not yet available to him. Szondi's language and
choice of focus-as his own theory predicts-depend on his situa-
tion. The terms he uses are nonetheless adequate for his analysis of
the forms and dramatic theory of earlier drama. If they work only par-
tially for the modern drama it is because Szondi cannot escape his
contemporaneousness with the object of his investigation. As I will
try to demonstrate later in this paper, a further historical remove is
necessary to deal with the formal principles of the modern as such.
Szondi could anticipate this problem, but he did not live long enough
to overcome it. Thus we must look at his work in two different lights:
first of all in terms of his successful description of prior dramatic
forms and then in terms of his method and what it offers us in our own
encounters with more recent drama.
When analyzing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama,
Szondi sets about showing the homologies between the signifying
properties of acting space, decor, language and gesture. He
demonstrates how these systems work together to create a single
71

conceptual "perspective". I have borrowed the term from painting, but
it seems most appropriate to the ideologically-bound image-making
process Szondi describes. The drama of these periods presented a
"picture" of a world in which life was defined solely in terms of the
structure of interpersonal relations and their products. As Szondi
says, "the verbal medium for this world of the interpersonal was the
dialogue. In the Renaissance, after the exclusion of prologue, chorus
and epilogue, dialogue became, perhaps for the first time in the
history of the theater, ... the sole constitutive element in the
dramatic web. In this respect, the neo-classical drama distinguishes
itself not only from antique tragedy, but also from medieval clerical
plays, from the baroque "world theater" and from Shakespeare's
histories. The absolute dominance of dialogue, that is, of inter-
personal communication, reflects the fact that the drama consists in
the reproduction of, is onPy cognizant of what shines forth in this
sphere. Most radical of all was the exclusion of that which could not
express itself-the world of objects-unless it entered the realm of
interpersonal relations.3
This then was a world the limits of which were determined by
the actions of self-conscious individuals, individuals who created
their own "presence". There were no external causal factors which
might imply the existence of other worlds or other creative forces. The
singularity of this condition was reproduced and reinforced by the
formal requirements of the drama as a whole as well as by the pro-
scenium stage and its decors. The unities of time, place and action
created an absolute linear sequence in the present. Nothing existed
outside this sequence-no other place, no other time, no other possi-
ble action. The decors in perspective which enclosed this action
added to its exclusiveness and, as Jean Duvignaud has pointed out, to
its psychological depth.' Thus, the "picture-frame"stage is quite pro-
perly named. It enclosed and organized performance systems which
indeed produced a "picture" of the world. This picture provided a per-
spective which incorporated the spectator and his role as well. It
operated to exclude all perceptual possibilities from his line of vision
that did not correspond to the stage image perported to represent or
reflect the real "nature" of things.
As Szondi so aptly shows, the specific function of this signify-
ing process depends on the historical situation in which it unfolds. In
his discussion of Diderot and middle class drama, he demonstrates
the manner in which the "picture" of the world is organized in terms of
the ideological stance of this class. Although Szondi does not, in this
essay, deal with all the coded systems he introduces in his discussion
of earlier drama, he nonetheless builds a model analysis, one which
will serve both as a demonstration of his method and a way into my
critique of Szondi's discussion of the modern drama.
In Tableau und coup de theatre which is subtitled Zur
Soziologie des burgerlichen Irauerspiels bei Diderot,5 Szondi il-
lustrates his method of analysing language and context as a means
of describing the socio-historical situation of an author and his texts.
He wants to show that one cannot define a text or a literary genre
72

from the outside, simply by applying knowledge of the historical
epoch to the text. The movement of the circle must be from text to
history, not from history to text.
Cases in point are George Lukacs and Arnold Hauser. Both
assert that the bourgeois theater provides the first example of a
drama which took as its goal the direct presentation of social conflict
and openly played a role in the class struggle. Szondi quickly alerts
his readers to the fact that such assertions simply do not correspond
to the actual early development of middle class drama in eighteenth-
century England, France, and Germany. None of the earliest of these
plays show any overt conflict between the bourgeoisie and the
aristocracy. In fact, Lessing's and Diderot's heroes come from the up-
per class. What then, asks Szondi, is bourgeois about these early
plays? To what degree are the conditions of their composition deter-
mined by the social and political situation of the rising middle class?
In order to answer this question Szondi turns first to Diderot's theory
of the drama since, as will be seen, this theory, like neo-classical
theory before it, naturalizes the ideological perspective of the domi-
nant group in terms of certain formal requisites of the drama itself.
The most important motive for Diderot's theory of bourgeois
drama, that which leads Diderot to break with the tradition in which
tragic heroes are princes or kings can be inferred from a few
sentences in the "Entretiens sur le fils naturel". The lines that Szondi
focuses on are the following:
Si la mere d'lphig6nie se montrait un moment reine
d'Argos et femme du general des Grecs, elle ne me
paraitrait que la derni're des creatures. La v6ritable
dignite, celle qui me frappe, qui me renverse, c'est le
tableau de I'amour maternel dans toute sa v6rit6.6
Tableau and verit6 are the two key words here. They appear again in
the same conversation when a poor peasant's wife is mentioned. In
both cases it is the private emotional response of the individual that
Diderot focuses on. This personal response is deemed "true," true
that is in the sense that Diderot assumes the existence of "natural"
human responses which are true to a situation, not simply to a class.
But the feelings naturalized here are of a specific kind. They do not
come from nature as Diderot's theory suggests, but from the middle-
class drawing room-as his plays show. This contradiction reveals
the real thrust of Diderot's effort-his desire to naturalize middle-
class emotional economy. In his plays Diderot focuses on a category
of feelings, not on action, and the formal homologue to this turning
away from action towards situation is found in Diderot's interest in
the tableau.
Thus, the opening tableau in Diderot's Pere de famille testifies
to a social change. This change consists not so much in the ap-
pearance of a new social class as in a change in the organizational
form of the drama and the way in which the spectator views society.
The formal coding of the life led by the characters Diderot brings on
73

stage signals the bourgeois perspective. It illustrates the notion
which is the socio-historical center of the domestic tragedy: the
patriarchal, nuclear family. This transformation demonstrates within
the drama itself the restructuring of society that JOrgen Habermas
and, more recently, Richard Sennet have attempted to describe in
terms of objective changes in social and family practice.7
According to Szondi, the opposite of the tableau in Diderot's
theory is the coup de th6atre-the unexpected event which entirely
transforms a situation. It is proscribed by Diderot, no doubt because
the coup de theatre belongs to the conventions of the court drama
and to the family intrigues which surround the king. In its place Szondi
shows that Diderot proposes a stable picture of a different kind of
family life:8
Ajoutez a cel&,toutes les relations: le pbre de famille,
I' poux, la soeur, les freres. Le pere de famille! Quel
sujet, dans un siecle tel que le notre, ou il ne parait
pas qu'on ait le moindre id6e de ce que c'est qu'un
pere de famille!9
The virtues of the bourgeois social order as represented in this
drama did not correspond to experienced reality of the public
however:
C'est en allant au th6etre qu'ils se sauveront de la
compagnie des m6chants dont ils sont entoures;
c'est la qu'ils aimeront Avivre; c'est Ia qu'ils verront
I'espece humaine comme elle est, et qu'ils se recon-
cilieront avec elle.'0
Seeing virtue embodied in the theater serves the function of allowing

people to flee their real but evil environment. The world of illusion, the
world of the theater is proposed as "reality". And the spectator who
flees out of pernicious reality into the theater finds reality trans-
formed into illusion. Thus the audience is reconciled with the condi-
tions it experiences outside the theater. The middle class fled from
the coups de theatre of real life into the verite of the tableau, the for-
mal aesthetic ideal.
Szondi has done more here than expose the internal, technical
problems which Diderot had to confront in producing his version of
middle class drama. He has successfully delimited the formal-
ideological nexus of this drama. As I suggested earlier, Szondi's po-
sition in the middle of the twentieth century places him outside the
cultural systems which generated the formal structures he describes.
He stands at a point where he can not only question the validity of
these formal statements, but also determine their historical and
ideological grounds.
When Szondi turns his attention to the modern drama, he re-
applies the formal model of middle class drama as a structural tool in
analyzing the works of several early modern dramatists. He does so
74

primarilybecause he has no other organizational set available to him.
Since, at the time he wrote his book on the modern drama, he stood
within the modern himself, he could not develop an analysis of con-
temporary drama in its own terms. It had not yet, could not be fixed.
Therefore, Szondi had to analyze this theater in relation to what
preceded it. He marks the advent of the modern not in terms of what it
is, but in terms of its difference from what was. "It is in this light," he
states in Modern Drama, "that the drama will be dealt with here-in
terms of what impedes it today-and the idea of the (earlier) drama
will be examined as a moment of inquiryinto the possibility of modern
drama." Here again we see the relevance of Szondi's historically
based hermeneutics. Within the body of his own critical work we see
the tension between his historical position and the object of his in-
vestigation, between his method and its content. If he is successful at
first in dealing with the modern drama, and he is, it is because the
early plays themselves, as Szondi shows, also came to grips with the
problem of nineteenth-century formal structure. If he is unable to deal
with modern drama as a whole, the problem lies less with his method
than with his historical situation.
In Theory of the Modern Drama, Szondi begins with a
demonstration of the way in which the thematic content of the plays
by Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Chekhov and others militates
against the stable formal constructs of earlier drama. Szondi begins
with Ibsen because it is traditional to do so but I should like to add
that the process Szondi describes can be traced in the dramatic works
of other less fashionable playwrights such as Daudet as well. Inthese
works, the formal requisites of nineteenth-century dramatic theory
(e.g., act structure, dialogic form) were rigorously applied, but this
"well made" world was subverted from within. The characters in these
plays could not create an active world through their language. They
describe a situation which is static, in which the past, though ir-
revocably lost, is at the same time more "real," more amenable to pro-
ductive acts than the present. All that remains is the presence of what
might have been, but this "presence" is in fact absence-the im-
possibility of unified action or understanding.
Strindberg's and Maeterlinck's work carries the process of the
formal destruction of the old dramatic world one step further.The in-
dividuals in their plays no longer seem able to define their world;they
endure it; they wait, they speak past each other in monologues that fill
up time but give no center, no logos to the community and space in
which they exist.'2 This space, finally, is as fragmented as the social
world and the psyche of each of the characters. As subjects they are
no longer able to objectify themselves in dialogic interaction with
their fellow human beings. This breakdown is paralleled by several
other transformations in dramatic form: the logical, linear develop-
ment of the act structure is fragmented, as are the systems of spatial
and temporal representation. Because the characters can no longer
create their own presence, the drama itself is in jeopardy. Szondi
shows us here then how the early modern dramatists, in trying to
solve this problem in fact demonstrate its existence. Their characters,
75

far from reestablishing the internal perspective of the old drama, are
actually incapable of controlling or defining their worlds. They are
locked inside their subjectivity and their metaphysical helplessness.
On the plane of formal organization, this leads to the appearance of
the "epic" in the dramatic and the epic narrative figure as a necessary
formal principle to bind the dramatic movement together.
There is no question about the fact that Szondi's analysis of
early modern drama provides rewarding insights into its formative
problems. His method gives new insight into the formal experi-
mentation which marks the advent of the modern drama. It must be
added, however, that his critical model also obliges him to ignore or
merely hint at the significance of other fundamental aspects of
modern theater practice. As is the case with many other historically
oriented analyses, Szondi's decision to use the pre-modern as a
model for demonstrating "difference" in the modern drama has led
him to deal only with those aspects of the drama for which there is
adequate terminology within the old model-a model developed out
of a modern critical perception of the inactive forms which preceded
it. Szondi's success with the early modern drama stems in great part
from the historical position which they hold in common. Ibsen, as
Szondi demonstrates so brilliantly, focused primarilyon a lost past, a
past in which there existed the possibility of creating an active com-
munal presence. His drama is, in effect, a statement about the loss of
this past and its unity, both of which earlier drama had produced in its
systematic representation of the middle class perspective. In other
words, Ibsen's early plays announce in their own terms the historical
and aesthetic movement which Szondi later rephrases in the language
of critical analysis. He doubles Ibsen's dramatized nostalgia for
unified systems of social and dramatic representation with a critical
nostalgia of his own. As a modern critic Szondi can only describe the
art and the world of the modern as a dis-ordering of the stable
systems of signification which the past offers him once he has
mastered the formal structures of its art. This is evident not only in his
critical focus, but also in his terminology, which reflects the modern's
concern with metaphysical, and spiritual unity as well as the modern
critics' dependence on traditional aesthetic and its categories-lyric,
epic and drama. Szondi equates the "epic" with the modern in con-
tradistinction to the "dramatic" which serves to designate the formal
properties of middle class drama.
Because of his interest in locating the "epic," that is,
non-"dramatic" features in the modern drama, Szondi fails to notice
that this "epic" quality is really part of a larger formal process.
Because of this failure he makes distinctions between Brecht's
theater, for example, and that of Pirandello, Wilder and Miller,which
are distinctions only in terms of the earlier drama not in the formal
terms which the modern drama itself generates.
Szondi was at least partially aware of this problem I am sure,
since he indirectly raised the question by including a discussion of
Piscator and his work as a director in a book that is otherwise devoted
to dramatic texts. Why was a director included along with these
76

critical readings of the works of practicing playwrights? In order to
answer the question we must return to Szondi's description of the
birth of the modern drama. This theater was generated out of the col-
lapse of a unified perspective based on the production of the world
through interpersonal activity.13 Earlier drama contained the formal
assumption that language, space and time were ordered according to
a single point of view which allowed these conventions to be seen as
reflections of common experience. The modern drama, however,
seems to deny the existence of any uniform perspective or signifying
system, such as which would unite the experiencing subject with the
world around him. It is precisely this absence which, in Szondi's eyes,
calls forth the epic narratorin the theater. He serves as a coordinating
device or figure to provide that background necessary for minimal
comprehension of the characters situation. His function within the
tests is to prevent a collapse into silence and immobility. But the epic
figure is more than just an internal coordinator/communicator. This
personage and his function are also symbolic referents for that new
figure who makes his appearance in the modern theatrical event; the
director.
If we apply the method suggested by Szondi's analysis of
dramatic production in the Renaissance we are led to an investigation
of the total process of semoiosis in theatrical practice. This is a step
that Szondi could not take at the time he wrote his book on the
modern drama, because his terminology and his method were limited
by the traditional literary demands of the modern. A later essay en-
titled "Der Mythos in modernen Drama und das Epische Theater," in-
dicates that Szondi was in the process of moving beyond these limits
at the time of his death." To return to the drama, though, when we
begin to analyse the signifying process of the modern theatrical
event, it is immediately obvious that the dramatic text is, in fact, a
sub-text in the total system of signification. The destruction of the
socio-linguistic nexus which Szondi describes as the hallmark of the
modern drama in fact functions on several other semiotic planes
besides that of the text. There are also de-structions in the perform-
ance space, in the system of decor and lighting and in the rapport be-
tween the house and the stage: In the modern theater, when the house
lights are shut off, the audience is left in much the same situation as
the characters which figure in the play text. They are left "in the dark."
Thus, the public sees its own experience in the theater objectified in
an encoded explanation represented by the stage event. The meta-
text of performance, then, adumbrates a fragmented world which
(re)presents the powerlessness of the individual, the impossibility of
interpersonal communication and the futility of trying to comprehend
the forces which exist in and outside the subject. This is the new
"perspective" provided by the modern drama.
But is not a perspective which, like that of the earlier theater,
authorizes any action, any conceptual ordering or decision making on
the part of the individual, be that individual a character in the play of a
spectator. This might lead us to conclude, along with some recent
critics, that contemporary drama only offers disorder and mean-
77

inglessness as its meaning. In fact, the formal structure of play and
performance suggest that this discomfiting possibility only
represents a partial decoding of the dramatic message. If we look at
the performance a whole, we find that the director/interpreter(like the
epic narratorin the text) mediates between the helpless individual and
the unknown, disjointed world. The problem of the fragmentation of
personal and social existence is not resolved by this intercession,
however. It is overcome only insofar as it is removed to a higher level.
The director's interpretation provides an "order" which is abstract
and formal. This ordering simply replaces the objective problems an-
nounced in the play with the problem of understanding the interpre-
tation which has been put forth as the meaning of the dramatic ex-
perience. And so, the modern theater posits a world in which there is a
"director" who stands at the head of a highly codified informational
structure. Characters/spectators only have access to the "meaning"
disseminated through this structure if they submit to its ordering
principles. They must, therefore, negate (or have negated) their own
capacity to understand and generate meanings. In order to be en-
closed within a "significant" perspective, they must give up their
freedom to act.
This condition is at once evident when one enters the modern
theater. One is engulfed by the bureaucratic structures which the
place and the event represent. As Donald Kaplan has put it, the
theater has institutionalized the executive function.'5 The dynamic
kinesthesis which had been part of the performance in earlier
centuries has been overwhelmed by a sense of complacency
generated by the knowledge that the event is under the control of so-
meone else. This is the key to understanding why so many different
kinds of plays, from avant-garde to classical can be staged one after
the other in the same house to essentially the same audience. The
metatextual signifying process is the same for all of them and for all
of the modern. The uncoded code of the ideological context asserts
the need to submit to the authority of the director in order to belong to
a reality (mythic or intellectual) which has "meaning."
In 1906, Paul Souriau announced this condition in the following
manner:
The experiencing subject should have very little will
and a great deal of imagination. Little will in order to
give in without resistance to all impulses he receives
from the exterior. Lots of imagination- in order to
quickly and painlessly give in to the illusions toward
which he is led and dream, as it were, on command.
Verbal, graphic or musical suggestion does not pro-
vide us with finished images; it only orients our
faculties in a predetermined sense...the work of art is
not really perceived, it is imagined. It is a dream
which the artist offers us and which he directs.'6
A comment made by Henri Bergson and quoted by Souriau is worth
78

adding here as well. "The object of art[ modern art that is] is to put to
sleep the active and rather the resistant forces of our personality and
to so lead us to a state of perfect docility where we realize the idea
which one suggests to us."'7
This then is the function of the director. His social and
aesthetic role in the modern period is to complete the incomplete, to
overcome the lack of a common base in the culture of the modern
which he himself represents. This is also why Piscator must appear in
Szondi's book-not as Piscator the man, but as representative of the
directorial function which Szondi's method allows him to sense but
not describe.
Had Szondi recognized this initial condition of the modern
drama, his discussion of Brecht and other, later playwrights would
also have been different. I only have time to sketch out some of these
differences, but I hope that my suggestions will illuminate the formal
development in and the historical movement of recent drama.
Brecht and Pirandello represent dialectically opposite
responses to the condition of the modern, though each in his own way
codifies its formal process. Pirandello's plays assert the impossibility
of establishing a common and meaningful order whether on the level
of language, dramatic form or social interaction. Plays like Henry IV
and Six Characters in Search of an Author represent the ideological
position of the modern which Pirandello attempts to naturalize in his
texts on dramatic theory. He propounds a theory of the necessary
presence of the author/director as receiver and transmitter of ordering
perceptions into the unmanagable world depicted in his plays. Brecht
too was in the forefront of the movement towards a radical fragmenta-
tion of the dramatic world. But his dramatic theory attempts to
naturalize a somewhat different explanation of this world. By doubl-
ing the fragmentation of the formal structure of the drama through his
alienation effects, he creates a "dis-disorder" which implies that the
apparently disjointed and incomprehensible experience of life in fact
has a social and historical explanation. In the metatext of perfor-
mance, his alienation effects establish a semiosis which signifies the
return of interpretive control to the audience. At the same time the
fragementation depicted by the stage set is revealed as illusory, light
once again shines forth from the house onto the stage. The stage no
longer sheds its light on spectators sitting in the dark.
Brecht never completely broke out of the dramatic structure of
the modern however-indeed he could not. He could only symbolical-
ly assert the possibility of a reunified socio-aesthetic practice. His
theory of codes, if one can call it that, was of necessity more intuitive
than scientific and his plays remain within the same modern frame of
reference as Szondi's early dramatic criticism. They share a nostalgia
for the order and community implicit in the form and dialogue of
earlier drama and a utopian desire for a world in which the bits and
pieces of the modern would be rejoined. At the same time, their work
demonstrates the absence of any such unity.
The process of the modern drama of which this absence is a
sign has been carried to its logical conclusion in the works of recent
79

playwrights like Beckett, Handke and Genet. Szondi refers to
Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a conversation piece about the desire
for immanence in a world without God. If this reading falls short of the
original goal of Szondi's work and of the thematic material in the play
itself, one can again ascribe this shortcoming to a critical model
which was not yet fully developed and could not completely analyse
modern formal signifying practice. Beckett and his contemporaries
did not create a new or "absurd" drama either, despite what critics
since Esslin have been fond of suggesting. Their works, as did those
of the early modern dramatists, deal with the collapse of the systems
of signification which had given rise to and ordered the conceptual
world of the immediate past. The problems of language and action
which confront Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot are, in a
sense, only magnified versions of the social and metaphysical pro-
blems faced by the characters who await the inexplicable in
Maeterlinck's The Blind and Interior. Beckett's works are, in effect,
ironic restatements of the thematic material found in these and other
plays of the turn of the century. If his plays no longer take this
material seriously, that is because the form of the modern drama
itself embodies an assertion of the meaninglessness of the cultural
paradigms on which it draws. It consumes the past as material for the
present. Thus, every aspect of the early modern drama has, like the
drama of the nineteenth century, become fair game for the author and
director. Their "play" exposes the conventions of the modern at the
same time that it employs them.
The works of Genet and Handke also deal selfconsciously with
the form and conventions of the modern, but, unlike Beckett's, their
plays do not remain in the realm of the abstract and the playful. They
instead attempt to demonstrate that the conventions of language and
action in the theater are grounded in the cultural conventions of so-
ciety at large and that all these conventions are bound up in the
developments of contemporary history and ideology. Their works em-
body the disorder of the modern as a social as well as aesthetic
phenomenon and thereby take a step that Brecht was unable to make.
By exposing the formal patterns which have organized the modern,
they have marked its historical limits and, in so doing, put an end to it,
much as Cervantes did to the romance when he wrote Don Quixote.
Genet and Handke do not signal the end of dramatic representation,
however. Instead they announce the coming of a new formal-
ideological construct which as yet can only be referred to as the
"post-modern."
Thus, it seems we have once again reached the point at which
"the unquestionable has been questioned." A clear understanding of
the formal properties of the modern, as Szondi demonstrated earlier
with the nineteenth century drama, can only come when one is in a
position to mark off a distance from those forms and use their
fragments as the building blocks of a new theater. That is the job of
the dramatist. The role of the critic is to shed light on this process
both in terms of text and context. Once again the importance of
Szondi's contribution is obvious. His critical hermeneutics allows for
80

an analysis of the drama that comprehends the situationalness of the
critic as well as that of the work of art. Therefore, although his con-
crete discussion of the modern drama may now seem incomplete, his
theoretical work both explains this incompleteness and provides the
methodology with which to investigate the modern theater and what
comes after. In the very act of going beyond Szondi we see the scope
of the critical field he has opened for us.
Cornell University
NOTES
1 Claude LUvi-Strauss,StructuralAnthropology(GardenCity, New York,1967), p. 21.
2 Theorie des modernen Dramas (Frankfurta.M., 1956), p. 12.
3 Theorie des modernen Dramas, p. 14
4 See Spectacle et soci6t6 (Paris, 1970), pp. 67-82.
5 Lekturenund Lektionen (Frankfurta.M., 1973), pp. 13-43.
6 Denis Diderot, Oeuvres Esth6tiques (Paris, 1965), p. 91; Szondi, p. 15.
7 JOirgenHabermas, Strukturwandelder Offentlichkeit (Neuweid, 1962) and Richard
Sennet, The Fall of the Public Man (New York, 1977).
8 There is a striking similarity between this transformation in the structure of
theatrical performance and that social transformation which Michel Foucault has
identified in the transition from public execution to penal incarceration. See M.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, 1977).
9 Oeuvres Esth6tiques, p. 154; Szondi, p. 25.
10 Oeuvres Esth6tiques, p. 192-93;Szondi, p. 30.
11 Theorie des modernen Dramas, p. 13.
12 See Theorie des modernen Dramas, pp. 40-62.
13 Compare this with Foucault's discussion of the collapse of a unified field of
representation in Les mots etles choses (Paris, 1966).
14 "Der Mythos in modernen Drama,"in Lekturenund Lektionen, pp. 185-91.
15 "TheaterArchitecture as a derivation of the Primal Cavity,"in The Drama Review,
Spring, 1968.
16 La Suggestion dans /'art (Paris, 1909), pp. 66-67.
17 Essai sur les donn6s imm6diates de la conscience, fifth ed. (Paris, 1906), cited in
Souriau, p. 66.
81

Hays Discusson

Michael Hays: Someone asked earlier if the model which I pro-
posed-the active role of the director and the essential passivity of
the audience-could be extended to contemporary society and the
model be used as a sociological basis for analyzing the way in which
people are affected by television. I would hesitate to make the leap
directly into television as such. I haven't really thought about this, but
it seems to me one would have to make a much more complex
analysis of the ordering process of television: of programming and
emission as well as reception. It's situation is completely different
than that in the theater where you have spectators and actors, and
often, at the first performance, the director in the house. They are
enclosed by the same building. One can read that structure in a way
that's different than reading the whole system, "television", as
representation. Putting the television event in the studio with cameras
controlled and with the choice of when a program is to be aired, and,
in the United States at least, the added factor of who supplies the
money through publicity for the production creates a different situa-
tion. I'm sure one could try to make transformations in the model
which would make it work. However, I cannot immediately say how.
Clearly I think that there are relationships.
William Spanos: I think you suggest in your talk that Szondi is locked
83

within a modernist mode. Do you suppose that might have something
to do with his failure to come to terms with what some people call
post-modernist thought?
Michael Hays: The book was written within the modern period itself,
or if you will, when the moderns were beginning to organize them-
selves on the level of theory. But it is not possible, historically speak-
ing, to operate within this system and stand outside of it and be post-
modern as well. His later texts, his texts on Celon, clearly show his
trajectory as a modern critic. In the beginning, by talking about the
modern drama book, I wasn't discussing the whole of Szondi's critical
activity. Szondi could only do a "modern" critique of the modern, as
long as he was not operating within the post-modern. What I tried to
do here, is suggest my own post-modern reading (based on Szondi's
methodology) of that drama which he does not deal with. As a matter
of fact, in his little comment to the 1963 edition of the Theory of the
Modern Drama, he said that if he were to write the book at that point,
in '63, he would choose different texts, and would say something dif-
ferent about them. But he hastens to add, and I would like to too, that
he didn't change the text, because he wants it to stand as a historical
representation of a particular perspective. In other words, it seems to
me he was quite conscious himself of the kind of manipulation that
would be involved in later going back and changing everything, so that
it looked as if he had written this book within the modern, but with an
awareness which surpassed it.
Manfred Frank: The Theory of Modern Drama, for example, is often
summarized or paraphrased in university seminars as if Szondi regret-
ted the disappearance of an order and its replacement by disorder. I
find in your text itself expressions aiong these lines, for example: "his
own nostalgia for the unified dramatic whole of earlier centuries
seems to be showing through here." Then you follow Szondi's steps,
his remarks on Poscator and on Pirandello especially, and you begin
to talk about the director, and you say, "this is the uncoded code, the
ideological structure which is at the center of the modern drama and
informs its operation." I think the opposition is somewhat off here be-
cause it's not a question of an "uncoded code" but of a structure, as
you yourself say subsequently, of an "ideological structure" which is
completely organized and entirely reproducible, which is even extra-
ordinarily rigorous. And so the opposition is not between order and
disorder, but between an order which makes communication possible
(that of preceding centuries) and an order which precisely because it
is so severe, prohibits communication. And when you speak, correct-
ly, I think of Szondi's "nostalgia," I see there a salutory aspect of what
I would call conservatism, which is present in all of Szondi's work. To
wit: he accords advantages to an epoch when communication,
however deformed it might have been, could nevertheless be repre-
sented in a drama, preferring such communication to another order
which is expressed in a loss of language at the interior of a form. The
latter, far from being "uncoded," is rather a repressive, rigorously
84

codifiable order, a machine order, so to speak.
Michael Hays: I'll try to deal with the question of nostalgia first, be-
cause that may simply involve a problem of the use of words. First of
all, when I said that Szondi's nostalgia doubles Ibsen's, I was trying to
point out that they both make reference back to this world of unified
communication. That is the sense of doubling that I mean. Szondi
does, in his text on the modern drama, turn back to a model from
which he can distinguish the modern as something which is not
unified. That's what I meant by nostalgia, and, therefore, I would
agree with what you suggest. To put it in your terms, there is an
"ordered"disjunction in modern social structure and communication.
I would like to go back to the question of the uncoded code.
You said it wasn't a code. I think the difference is one of terms, so I
should give that a larger explanation. What I was trying to point out in
my paper is the ideological ground. That's what I was referring to as
the uncoded code. That is what allows for a doubling up of the codes,
a multiple system of codes, an ordering of the manifestations of
disorder.
Christian Hart-Nibbrig:To move beyond this value judgment, forming
part of "nostalgia," I am of the opinion that Szondi describes instead
of the history of the genesis of modern drama, the history of the aging
of dramatic drama. Although he says in the introduction that the
history of literature is not a history of ideas, but the history of their in-
carnation in form, and that what interests him is the overthrow of the
form in the content and vice versa, the historical innovation that he
has in mind is more often found at the level of the theme; it is more
often a concern of the substratum ("fond"). And that is pure
Hegelianism, the object for reprsentation being a condition of the
manner of reprsentation. Genetic comprehension, which is based on
Schleiermacher, here-as in Szondi's studies on the theory of
genres-brings with it the danger of a historical construction which
hides beneath the continuous unfolding of a history of geneses or
declines. That powerful history which is central to his introductory
courses in lyric drama. We will return to these crevices in the work, to
these fissures of failure where hope and the future can infiltrate,
although they were left behind in the past like neglected possibilities.
In insisting on the immanent historicity of the work, Szondi has in ad-
dition acted in the Theory of the Modern Drama so as to leave the
social context obscured, and I think that in a study like "Tableau et
coup de theatre", he took a decisive step since he begins by referring
implicitly to Benjamin's concept of ostention-the show given before
sad people, the show which induces sadness-to include the point of
view of the poetics of effect, without explaning himself on that, as to
method. In turning to the problems of identification and compassion,
he takes on the question of the public and representation.
This is no longer Hegelian, but much closer to Adorno, in the
sense of the theses on Silbermann, it being a given that the work of
art, instead of an example of social history, is in social history. Szondi
85

accomplished here the process, evoked by Bollack, leaving im-
manence in order to enter it anew.
Michael Hays: I agree with your description of the transition in
Szondi's work, but would like to point out that, even in the modern
drama book, Szondi announces his awareness of the "social".
Patrice Pavis: Could we explain on the basis of the model Szondi pro-
posed, new dramaturgical forms in the same way, by a new relation-
ship between form and content? In other words, is his model extensi-
ble?
Michael Hays: No, I don't think so. That is precisely what I wanted to
show: that his historical theory of the critical moment prevents the ap-
plication of this model to late theater. It would be necessary-this is a
bit of what I tried to do-to create another model which would take up
the question at a later moment.
Patrice Pavis: But what is the criterion which determines that the new,
contemporary forms can no longer be grasped by means of Szondi's
models?
Michael Hays: What Szondi suggests is that the esthetic forms of the
theater cannot be grasped at the moment they appear. We must wait.
That is precisely what the epigraph at the opening of my paper sug-
gests. We are obliged, if we really want to understand them, to come
later, and to construct a model based on these "dead" forms. More
precisely: when the codes which organize the social and artistic forms
of an epoch no longer furnish sufficient significations to explain ac-
tual practice, new models must be created for art and criticism at the
same time, in line with socio-historical change.
Glenn Most: I have difficulty with one of your claims, which is that
Szondi's problem, when he comes to speak about modern drama, is
very different from the problem of dealing with drama of the 18th
century, because he is writing now about something which is occurr-
ing at the same time. You try to explain that with reference to Szondi's
notion of the historical situation of the interpreter, but that seems to
me to apply no less to the discussion of texts that were written cen-
turies before, than to contemporary texts. The fact that every inter-
preter has a particular historical and social situation must mean that
his interpretation of any text will undergo the same kinds of dif-
ficulties, the same kinds of problems. I wonder if there are other possi-
ble explanations for the differences you were trying to work out than
that one. When Szondi talks about the interpretation of texts
theoretically, he doesn't differentiate between earlier and more recent
ones. Everytext for him is present, must be bound to the present, and I
don't think that is a question of whether it was written now or written
two centuries ago.
86

Michael Hays: In the Theoryof the Modern Drama, he certainly makes
a distinction. That's the whole point of the book-to show the dif-
ference. So I don't know why you would say that. But to go back to
your original statement and respond to that: my own reading of
Szondi, and my own critical position is that, yes, the historical situ-
ationalness of a critic would require that his model building take a
certain form at a certain time with regard to all prior dramatic forms,
that is, he would have a point of view. I suppose that is what you are
saying. He would look at earlier drama in a specific way, whatever
terms he might use. I think I said that in effect; I would disagree with
you though at the point where you suggest that contemporary critics
dealing with contemporary literature confront the same kind of prob-
lems. And that's precisely what I think Szondi demonstrates in the
book. That is to say that when the forms which constitute a dramatic
model are no longer dynamic, when they are in effect dead, you can
build a model which can be used to analyse a totality of dramatic
events; he does this very successfully with the drama of the
Renaissance. It's not possible, I think Derridahas said this on several
occasions, to stand outside of one's own period and do the same
thing with the forms of one's own period. Of course one can make sug-
gestions, but it's not possible to see the totality of contemporary
structures. That's why Szondi has begun with a model built on dif-
ferences of this particular kind. He can only talk about the modern in
terms of what it isn't. Later, some critic who comes after will perhaps
talk very clearly about those things which the modern is, just as Szon-
di did with the Renaissance.
Rainer Nigele: I think there is a real problem there in the dichotomy
you set up, and it is that problem to which Mr.Most's intervention ad-
dresses itself. You seem to imply that there are texts which are at a
historical distance to the reader/critic and others which are not. Now I
think that Szondi would definitely not support the notion that there is
such a thing as perfect contemporaneity between a text and a reader.
At the moment when the text is written the difference starts to ac-
cumulate-even to the writer himself. When I have finished a text and
look at that text, I am already in a state of difference. That difference
is a temporal one and turns immediately into a problem of interpre-
tation. It is that difference and that distance Szondi is concerned with
in his hermeneutical reflections: the impossibility of contemporaneity
between reader and text. As far as the Theory of Modern Drama is
concerned, all the texts Szondi treats are alrady historically quite
removed.
Of course, what you are implying is that the code in which
these plays are codified is closer than let's say that of the Bourgeoise
Drama of the 18th century. But nevertheless, there remains the fun-
damental problem where do you draw the line when one code ends
and another starts? The danger of a historicity based on the
dichotomy of "historical" versus "contemporaneous" is the erasure
of the fundamental difference between text and reader, even if the
reader is the author.
87

Michael Hays: In this last point you are, of course, right. To go back to
what you suggested before, I thought, although obviously it wasn't
clear in my presentation, that I was suggesting that Szondi shows
that the difference begins at the very moment of the inception of the
new form. There's no question about that. I was trying to point out the
distinction between talking about this temporal sense, and trying to
build up a quantative model of the process of the difference. Szondi
tries to do this when he brings in Piscator. He's attempting to account
for the modern. I hoped to suggest that this can't be done as com-
pletely if one is contemporaneous with the aesthetic model or the
aesthetic event. It can't be done as completely as when one is looking
back on an inactive aesthetic process. To jump out of the drama en-
tirely: Foucault can talk about hospitals and prisons, can look back
and build models about these things precisely because he stands out-
side of the activating moments for these systems. He can talk about
these models for penal reform and education, not because they are
contemporaneous, but because they are completed processes in a
sense. Which is not to say that they have disappeared. Do you see
what I mean? New codes are produced when one claims to decode the
old in a fully conscious manner.
William Spanos: I'd like to come back to the question of Szondi's
nostalgia that you speak about. I'm wondering if the reason why he
could not understand (by the way I think Beckett is preeminently
postmodern, and I will try to suggest why in a minute), isn't because
he limited his critique of the Bourgeois Drama to the political level,
failing to see that that is simply a secondary level of something much
more basic in the literature of the western tradition, i.e., the will to
power that lies behind the ontological level, which, on the analogy of
Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, also exists in literature, in the
drama especially of the western literary tradition. It struck me as be-
ing quite revealing that Hegel is one of his primarysources. What I'm
getting at is that Szondi does not seem to be aware of the fact that the
modern drama, or the incipient impulses of modern drama, Pirandello
for example, extending into Beckett, lonesco, Genet and so forth, con-
stitutes primarilyan effort to deconstruct a variety of closures which
are essentially metaphysical, which have their ground in a meta-
physical ontology inscribed by the will to power. Of course if you're
Hegelian, you cannot see that the post-modern drama constitutes a
deconstruction, not so much of the political closure, but, behind the
political closure, of an ontological closure which covers over and
eventually forgets a certain measure, which is grounded in what I
would call its occasion, and thus constitutes a probing towards a new
political organization based on an open ontology or a disclosive on-
tology, a new political measure, a new polis, so to speak. And this
takes me back to what Mr.Nagele was saying earlier this morning. It
strikes me that there is a real contradiction between Szondi's
dramatic criticism and the emergent criticism which is operative here,
because one of the points that Mr. Nagele was insisting upon is
precisely a hermeneutic that refuses to be methodological, which
88

means of course refuses to begin from the end, the way, for example,
traditional drama and criticism of the drama begins from the end. This
non-methodological interpretive method, as I see it is analogous to
precisely what the post-modern dramatists are doing in the drama
that they are writing. To summarize, isn't Szondi limiting the potential
for saying something new about drama by limiting himself to a
political critique of the dominant culture as opposed to or at the ex-
pense of that which lies below any kind of political formulation of
closure, i.e., the ontological critique?
Rainer Naigele: I would like to clarify and differentiate what you said
about the absence of methodology in Szondi. I would differentiate be-
tween methodology and a systematized theory. Szondi is
methodological and insists on methodology in the very literal sense of
the word:the constant reflection on the critical process, its movemet,
it's "way". But he refuses ultimately to stabalize that reflective,
methodological mode into a systematic theory.
William Spanos: Inthis way, he would be fundamentally different from
Gadamer, who conceives a methodological hermeneutic as covering
the truth over, rather than bringing it to light.
Rainer Naigele: Yes.
Michael Hays: I think the way you have posed your question does not
correspond to the way I presented Szondi. You see him taking a rather
monolithic and unchanging position in relation to the drama in
general. I didn't want to suggest that. I want to suggest that the
modern drama book was one particular moment in his own processes
of development. Certain other historical factors come into play to
demonstrate the history of that moment. His work on the modern
drama isn't, on the level of his actual practice, a model, a demonstra-
tion of what he does later. Also, I wouldn't say as you have that he
focusses exclusively on the political.
Manfred Frank:It seems to me that what Spanos has said is so impor-
tant that it must not be forgotten in the course of the discussion.
Szondi names Hegel, it is true, as his guarantor where theory is con-
cerned, also Adorno, the young LukAcs, and Benjamin. And yet it is
beyond doubt that Nietzsche has counted for a great deal with him.
Just think of The Birth of Tragedy which likewise provides a theory of
drama and which in its turn depended largely on Wagner's Artworkof
the Future-a work whose influence, because of the ambiguous
political situation of that author in Germany today, has never been
recognized in its true measure. However, Wagner was one of the great
deconstructors of drama. He, too, had wanted to reconstruct a history
of the decline of mythic tragedy. He, too, had done so beginning with
Euripides, and he had diagnosed the consequences of a subjectiva-
tion, a disorientation, a demythification, and a particularization of the
integrative work of art up to modern times-a decline which initiatory
89

opera was to suspend. In my opinion, we must, in the discussion,
speak also of the sources which Szondi does not mention and which
we, however, in our reflections as readers, can track down in his
writings.
Jean Bollack: Your presentation of the Theory of Modern Drama,
which certainly makes the method stand out, bring up at the same
time the question of the adaptation, validity, and interpretive quality
of that method. If you'll permit me a few remarks ... Szondi describes
a genre which, represented at a certain epoch by different creations,
presumes a traditional form, having become inadaptable. What is the
interpretive force of such a hypothesis? A first element, as we saw
this morning, is bound to an initial position-taking, fundamental with
Szondi, the affirmation of this historicity of forms. If he chose to
create this type of internal tension, between an inherited form and a
content which can no longer adapt to it, it is precisely to show the
historicity of forms. This evolution of the forms themselves coincides,
for the critic, with literary production. The second advantage that we
see is that of the interpreter making use of an ideal situation in order
to understand texts by starting with a difference from it. There we
have one of the fundamental traits of criticism as Szondi practiced it,
that of starting with a deviation, the way he shows that Kleist adapts
Moliere, or the way he studies Schlegel, always proceeding so that the
affirmation is opposed to an anterior affirmation that it goes beyond.
And this situation of going beyond makes the "intention" we were
discussing, emerge, the subjective will through the contradiction. We
can certainly understand that the duality of an inherited form and a
content which is to be expressed in a form which has become inadap-
table, is exceedingly rich in interpretive possibilities. The third ele-
ment, no less positive: his point of view is initially theoretical. I mean
that in the Benjamin tradition, and also the tradition of Lukics, such
as he understands it, i.e., young LukAcsof the Theoryof the Novel, he
holds to a type of reflection that proclaims itself
philosophical-that's an aspect which perhaps we could take up
tomorrow-looking for the universal, something more essential which
is situated beyond any particular creation. The form is like a guard
rail, and it permits him a theoretical approach. In short, there is an in-
itial will to epistemological reflection, and simultaneously, to
ideological criticism, a hermeneutic or interpretive position, and,
finally, to the affirmation of a theoretical grasp. But we could, on the
other hand, being didactic in our turn, ask questions and ask what is
missing in this sytem of interpretation. On the plane of the work's in-
ternal dialectics, can we legitimately support the idea of a content
modifying the form? Szondi never abandons the perspective of a form,
solicited by a different intention, and which because of that very fact
is called upon to modify itself, and so to historicize itself, to reveal
itself in its historicity while remaining the same, like a mold, a matrix
or a form more general than all of its incarnations, which appear as
particular without there being a subsuming, without any particularity
being subsumed beneath the general. Thus, his philosophy of art
90

reclaims the form and, by going from there, the "genre". Why? Why
did Szondi deploy so much effort to comprehend the poetics of
genres, when-we might as well be frank about this-it's not a ques-
tion we struggle with constantly to know whether we are really dealing
with the "lyric"or the "epic"? But what is genre if not the general I am
talking about, i.e., the possibility of grasping, in the domain of letters,
something which doesn't evade a definition of a philosophical
nature? We can wonder besides whether there aren't other opposi-
tions, another type of "contradiction" at the interior of the work, for
example, at the level of expression, i.e., in the text. Can this dynamism
be reduced to the conflict between the particular intention and the
form, simultaneously general and inherited, i.e., laden with earlier
deposits? The difference between what the sentence says and what it
doesn't say cannot always be related to that fundamental opposition
developed in the Theory of Drama. Next, couldn't we with as much
justification query the form independent of this modificaiton, i.e., is
there not properly creation of a form in relation with the content, and
mustn't we go beyond this artifice, which Szondi uses so effectively
and very knowingly? For him, it's a question in the first place of com-
bating the absence of historicization, as we have seen this morning,
i.e., of being opposed to any form of hypostatization, in showing that
what appears to be permanent is historical quite as well, and second,
of passing to a theoretical level where it's no longer a question of any
particular play but of what a play or theatre is, etc. Other interpreta-
tions will stick more to literalism, as Szondi himself when he inter-
prets Hdlderlin or Mallarm6. What is the function of literal explica-
tion-and not of the intrigue-for someone who is so very much op-
posed to reducing plays to their arguments? What is called "content"
has undoubtedly more to do with the intrigue than with the expression
("C6nonc6").Finally, we could still wonder whether the question in-
herited from Lukccs, Benjamin, and Adorno, to wit: the mediated
references to the social-couldn't be stated differently. Wouldn't we
have to see, for example, why plays are still written for the theater if
the theater is so inadaptable? Evidently, it's because there is a public
which goes to the theater, a public which exists and which expects
something from the theater.. This is quite a different kind of tension
still. This form of theoretical reflection is left in suspense. What is the
theater's function in relation to its public? What is cultural, scholarly,
tied to education? People have read such and such a play. They want
things completely different poured into the same mold. In this, there
are undoubtedly mediations of another type than that of the form
used as an outmoded frame.
91

Peter Szondi: "Studies on H61derlin";
Exemplarity of a Path
Bernhard Boschenstein
translated by Kristine Anderson
In order to do justice to the critical procedure that Peter Szondi

follows in his H61derlin-Studien, I am constrained to assume a
perspective distinct from his. For, according to the epigraph he placed
at the head of his book, "That which is distinct is good,"' he expects
from his reader a dialogue established in the difference which alone
permits the partner to be situated. We grew up together in a criical
school founded on identification. "Instead of embracing all you meet,
it is better to cut a path into the forest you are penetrating," as he
once said. He was one of the few people who did not identify with the
teaching he received.
The attempt to adopt a counter-reading in regard to his should
not be understood separately as an autonomous and static critique,
but as a pole opposite to his which will permit, in regard to the texts
studied, the linkage of these interventions with his own options so
that the meeting comes after the confrontation period. For does not
H61lderlin himself institute the language of dispute in the very center
of his celebration of peace?
In his first study on Hl61derlin, Peter Szondi distinguishes be-
tween the domain of the hymn and the domain of the elegy by the dif-
ference which exists between "the abandonment of the self in the
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celebration of the gods" and the lyricism of lived "experience."2 The
hymn "As on a holiday" is treated as an example of the transition be-
tween these two genres and as such, as a "defeat which ought to be a
sudden awareness and a purification at the same time," after which
"the true hymnal poetry of HOlderlin, his late work, can begin." All
Szondi's interest is concentrated on that late work. It alone obeys the
criteria that seem to him to determine a production which has given
itself laws fit to distinguish it from a personal context which never-
theless remains mingled with its creation. According to Szondi, the
"1" of the hymn no longer makes itself heard by any other voice than
that of the being touched by the god's arrow, whereas odes and
elegies mixed that voice with another voice betraying a personal
wound. This distinction reflects an entire conception of poetic pro-
duction uttered with an exemplary conciseness, but witnessing an ex-
clusiveness which explains the choice of works and genres treated by
Szondi as well as the method of his critical approach.
For in Szondi's view, just as Holderlin only fulfills himself com-
pletely by renouncing the transmission of personal conflict, his own
criticism also emphasizes the "logic of what is revealed in its law of
production," "die Logik ihres [der Werke] Produziertseins,"3 a formula
which Adorno applies to the esthetic reflections contained in the
"Rhumbs" of Val6ry.4
In the search for that "which crosses the poem from one end to
the other and which, related to the double sphere of nature and myth,
engenders all the declarations of the hymn about the poet and
poetry-with a logic that belongs only to metaphor" (PP, p.169), Szon-
di focuses on the thunderbolt, the "celestial fire". He demonstrates
strophe by strophe how "the sign" of lightening-which Hl61derlin
himself calls "the chosen sign" among all that were given him to get a
glimpse of the god5-constitutes unity in the progression of the poem.
This reading privileges the perspective of what Hl61derlin calls
"Jupiter" at the expense of the origin and the final regression that is
incarnated in "Saturn". What Holderlin is attempting-Szondi is con-
scious of this, but he does not emphasize it-is to represent, at every
instant of a text, the state of the product's emergence simultaneously
with the previous state which was its foundation, the state from which
the production was born, and the subsequent state to which it is
directed. This foundation undeflies potentially the manifest aspects
of history. The work thus does not reflect merely the permanent foun-
dation of everything that appears in historical form, nor merely the ap-
parition of history itself, but the threshold of transition between the
first and second state at the same time as that between the second
and the first.
The French Revolution does not interest this poet just because
of its consequences, but rather as a methodology for the production
of the work, as incessant movement from a plenitude of vital and
spiritual energy into a structured form. This structured form can never
be grasped in its temporal particularity, but always as a "becoming in
what passes away.'"6
To the extent that the poet abandons the Saturnian bond with
94
the infinite from which his work proceeds, and to the extent that he
forgets himself in the system of signs that he has produced in order to
make that infinite speak, he will be restored to it by the same violence
which has already detached his work from what produced it, that is to
say-in terms of myth-thrown into the abyss where Saturn was
banished by his son. The situation is paradoxical: the work of
language is detached from a still indistinct hearth and becomes an
agent that transmits a specific historical constellation. But from the
moment that this constellation is closed with metaphorical signs
chosen in order to fasten it, the filiation of the totality of what
Holderlin calls "nature" with all that acquires a temporal dimen-
sion-thus with the sphere that manifests itself in the historical
mode-is condemned to collapse in the oblivion which dethrones
knowledge.
In other words: the signs by which the poem speaks must con-
tain the significance which has established them as signs, the do-
main which exists before them and which will survive them.
Considered in that light, the sin which the false priest must ex-
piate at the fragmentary end of the first hymn is not only that of an at-
tachment to a personal wound, but also that of the poet's having
privileged his own invention in relation to the meaning it is called
upon to manifest. Thus identifying with Jupiter and not Saturn, he will
know the punishment of undergoing precisely the destiny of Saturn
contrived by Jupiter. In terms of poetics, the poet who no longer takes
into account the meaning that has produced his work is constrained
to undergo the loss of his means, that is, the signs of a language
metaphorically called Jupiter, rejoining by his death the Saturnian
foundation which he had renounced, that is to say, in annihilating
himself before the exigencies of poetic language.
The domain of the particular, of the private, is separated from
the threshold of transition between universal sense and sign and sees
itself, for that reason, engulfed by the forces which preceded the
word.
Semele is struck by a thunderbolt from Zeus because she
stepped out of her place, that of the Saturnian being, in order to see
the god in his Being-as-sign, isolating him from the totality from which
he proceeds and which he transmits. Dionysos, the fruit of that failed
union, reconstitutes forever the union of the potential Saturnian and
the actual Jupiterian, uniting what precedes him, by conferring on it a
meaning, with what constitutes him as a sign. The poem is, from one
end to the other, the act by which the passage between these two
modes of being is accomplished: the plenitude of nature remains in
Dionysos, while through him emerges the system of signs which
manifest themselves as history.
The idea of transition illuminates the initial moment of the
hymn when the peasant visits his field in the morning while still hear-
ing the sound of the thunder in the night; it also illuminates the cen-
tral action of the poem: the awakening of the forces of history's
renewal, the revolution, or yet the birth of a poem which thus reflects
its own becoming. The idea of transition links each part of the hymn to
every other part.
95
For Szondi, to look at lightning means to expose oneself to the
immediacy of fire. But lightning is the form that fire adopts when it
makes itself into a sign and separates itself from its hearth. It is the
alienation of the god in that which is other: "The more invisible some-
thing is, the more it accommodates strangeness." ("Was ist
Gott?"... "Jemehr ist eins/ Unsichtbar, schicket es sich in
Fremdes" SW, p. 389). Thus Semele isolated the sign from the mean-
ing when she "wished to see the god visible." And "the other arrow"
by which the poet himself is wounded is nothing else but imprison-
ment in an evil which is only a specific evil and does not proceed from
the universal meaning which regulates affinities between the whole
and the part.
Thus, when the poet looks at the poem in the closure of its own
operation and when he receives divinity in the visible form of the sign
of the thunderbolt, this may also signify the separation of the
Jupiterian face, particularized, historically detachable from things
with their universal conditioning.
Applied to the critical process, this would signify that it would
be dangerous to attach oneself to the calculated succession of
related signs in order to comprehend the logic of the finished product,
if the access given by these signs to the hearth of their origin and to
universal nature which reabsorbs them was not present at each state
of the analysis: "and Nature, whence it originates, also receives it
again," as Holderlin says in the prelude to the "Celebration of Peace"
(SW, p. 343).
Szondi does not pay particular attention to the text of the
metrical version, that is, to the last stage that we possess, where he
who has "approached in order to gaze at the Heavenly Being" risks
being thrown "down to the depths beneath the living, the false priest
into obscurity." All his attention is focused on the rough draft in pro-
se, in particular on this passage which completely disappears from
the metrical version, where Hl61derlin speaks of the heart which
"bleeds from a self-inflicted wound" and of "anxiety" and "want"
which "push one toward the over-abundance of the divine table."
The interest that Szondi brings to this passage is dictated by
his conception of the poetic work as a composition regulated by an
autonomous system of strict laws imposed upon the personal con-
flicts which underlie such an act of objectification. However, it seems
important to me that the metrical version of the poem entirely drops
this passage, which guided Szondi's analysis and which even gave
the title to his first study. In place of the private wound, the metrical
version treats the desire to see the gods whom I feel should be given a
different meaning than that held by Szondi.
The illumination that Szondi privileges to the extent of no
longer taking account of the disappearance of this key passage in the
finished version reveals a fundamental will to extinguish the subject,
which for him does not contradict the objectification mediated by the
subject. Where, according to him, do we find the activity of criticism?
At first sight, the path followed by the critic through the text is not
that traced by the specific historical moment in which his work is
situated.
96
What happens instead is a methodological equivalent of the
awareness that Szondi attributes to Hl61derlin when the latter con-
stitutes himself as a hymnal poet. Szondi constitutes himself as a
critic by taking as his starting point the extinction of all critical po-
sitions (prior to his own) that he assembles around a text. By
demonstrating their dependence on an a priori that remains foreign to
the problematic of the text, he restors the text to itself despite the
distortions of meaning that it had to undergo. But this restoration
risks considering the text as if it could function without requiring an
interpreter to follow its progress. Let me make this clear.
The most detailed of Szondi's studies of Holderlin's poems
that we possess is the one devoted to the "Celebration of Peace".
This hymn was interpreted about eighty times in the three years which
followed its first appearnce in 1954. For Szondi, the dismantling of dif-
ferent theses on the "prince of the celebration" represents the es-
tablishment and the confirmation of his methodology ex negativo.
Each of the interpretations that he examines is dependent upon a
regional point of view, fixed in the particular co-ordinates of a
personal space and historical place existing before the analysis of the
hymn. Each one thus usurps the deliberately unfixed, not definitively
designated status of the "prince of the celebration" by supplying the
still virgin place with an affirmation coming from a context totally
foreign to the poem: patriotic, christological, pagan, neo-classic, ac-
cording to the needs of the critic whose own deficiencies the poet
seems to supply, thus constituting the epiphany of a private messiah
and not an architecture which is regulated by instrinsic laws.
Szondi considers the hymn rather as the establishment in time
of a synthetic tableau where two successive themes are married in a
whole which corresponds to the totality of elements formerly invoked.
The image that "the tranquil god of time" has achieved is thus the end
result of previously cited presences, as if the culminating point of the
poem merely confirmed what the preceding strophes have named. The
celebration would then be the culmination in time of a successive ar-
rival of exemplary figures destined to make a distant, historic past
enter as if fulfilled into the present of the text, so that this ensemble
of signs may celebrate its own agreement, its mutual recognition with
the universal.
Again, by analogy to "As on a Holiday," H61derlin does not
allow the poem to suffice unto itself, making at its climax only provi-
sional use of a sign which would gather into visible and completed
form the result of a long evolution, from the penumbra of one of
history's thresholds towards the light of an eternal plenitude. For no
sooner is history definitively suspended and replaced by the banquet
of visible and present gods in their entirety than the last part of the
poem reverses direction as if the Jupiterian result had to give way to
the potentiality of a Saturnian expectation.
The result achieved is driven into an imminent future. The
house which had just welcomed the gods from the beginning and from
the middle of time under an illumination of the end is pushed into the
background in order to permit the gaze to move beyond. The poem
97
empties out the accumulation of synchronized presences in order to
re-install the transition to a pure state.
Szondi does not speak of that strophe, nor of the two which
follow it, perhaps because the explicators neglect them, perhaps
because the regressive movement suitable to the ending of great
hymns deviates from the poetics of progression that Szondi em-
phasizes in each of his studies. But one cannot over-emphasize that
the result accomplished in the harmony of universal correspond-
ence-translated by an equilibrium of three tones among which
H61derlin has knowingly alternated in the succession of his
strophes-is retroactively called into question, becomes precarious,
even threatened with annihilation by the refusal to cooperate with the
construction of a communal sign.
Again, by further analogy to "As on a Holiday," the particular
subjectivity which is uncorrected and unreversed but affirmed and,
thereby, refractory to its extinction in the structure of this historical
process, appears as the principle against which the celebration and
the poem which is its agent and reflection are composed. That is to
say that Hdlderlin's hymn reveals not only the principle of its own suc-
cess, but also of its negation, the disappearnce of what the comple-
tion of the text depends upon. Szondi pays no attention to this move-
ment toward potential dispute, finally vanquished. For it is not easy to
connect these last strophes to those preceding. The rigor of a linked
series in which the whole evolution of a text is functionally summariz-
ed in its culmination is threatened when a qualitative leap indicates a
complete change of perspective.
What does this change signify? And what does the silence of
the explicator signify? In the endings of the great hymns we find the
incomplete, insoluble debate which opposes the subjectivity of the
poet to the objectification of his product. The satyrs associated with
the gods recall the greedy priest who usurps divine apparitions for his
own ends. And these ends are indeed the precise quality of texts
which demonstrates the interdependence between their birth and
their unresolved conflicts. The text is far from attaining the
equilibrium which it has traced for itself, since the gaze confronted by
the truth of the word concerning the gods must struggle with itself
and reveal the fissure which has liberated the energy necessary to
writing. Peter Szondi avoids dwelling on the wound that the text has in
that very spot where the reader was awaiting the fullness of its com-
pletion. Each time that a moment of totality is attained in these texts,
they expose their deficiency as a necessary part of their becoming.
These revelations after the fact should not let us forget that the
becoming of these texts has been connected from the beginning to
the unhealed subjective wound. What Szondi has explained about the
first hymn in the Pindaric mode and what he felt he could dismiss
definitively, reappears in each later hymn as a condition necessary to
the objectification that he has emphasized and demonstrated.
"The hymn 'As on a Holiday' is located, in the fragmentary
verses of the end, at the edge of an abyss, where it must abolish
itself" (PP, p. 185), asserts Szondi. And he explains thereby why this
98
hymn could not have been completed, why the hymnal genre towards
which Hl61derlin had turned since 1799 hereafter would realize itself in
a style different from that first attempt.
But as I have outlined in "Celebration of Peace," that abyss
which menaces the poem with its abolishment remains present in the
great hymns written afterwards as one of the elements necessary to
their becoming, as one of the poles of conflict whose product will be
precisely the poem. In numerous hymns, that abyss will manifest
itself again at the end of the text; it will mark the danger which
underlies their origin and against which the response that constitutes
the text is not guaranteed to be able to maintain itself to the end. By
opening the ground on which the poem was erected, by making visible
the gap which required the labor of conciliation, the poem reveals its
foundation and calls for seizing the truth of its formation. That abyss
is particularly present in the hymn "The only One" where the "1" ex-
poses its wound which is precisely the act of imprisonment in the sign
which constitutes the text. This sign of the text-prison echoes the
mediators, themselves imprisoned in the marriage between gods and
men which is signified by antiquity and the incarnation of Christ.
By unveiling the correspondence between the imprisonment of
the poet's subjectivity in his text and the momentary incarnations of
the gods due to a transitory historic constellation, the poet reveals the
dialectic between creation and its foundation in its special relation-
ship with the text of history, represented by the gods in their actual
form and their uncreated being which precedes the sign they have
become at the time of their appearance in history and which survives
them. I doubt that one could, as Szondi argues, distinguish between a
personal wound that the poet is forced to banish from his text in order
to compose the hymn and that other wound which would be the work
of a god. I maintain that the poem can only be made because the evil
which is both a deficiency and a fault (ein "Fehl")7 connects the sub-
jectivity of the poetic word to the objectivity of his ancient and Chris-
tian themes by a hubris worthy of that which calls the gods to crush
the tragic heroes of antiquity: by giving itself a new faith in the func-
tioning of the incarnation in the form of the word-sign, the relation-
ship established by the latter with its precursors brings out the
necessity of the text's productive deficiency and its condemnation by
the same text. Here also, "the hymn is located out the edge of an
abyss, where it must abolish itself."
In a similar manner, the hymns "Patmos" and "Mnemosyne"
ought to be understood as putting into words an illicit relation be-
tween him who produces the poem and those he follows whose
emergence and disappearnce have been commanded by history. The
need to identify the "1" with the moment of the sign's presence is
there likewise submitted to the trial of a purification by the depth of
this sign that in both of these hymns can only be restored by the text
mediating itself and no longer by its mediating the god. That is to say,
the conflict that Szondi has discovered at the end of the first hymn re-
mains, in more radical and more universal form, one of the principal
motives of the great hymnal texts from which the danger of the usurp-
ing "1" is never absent.
99
Szondi invoices this danger as the principle enemy of the com-
position of a work, and on a different but parallel plane, of the work's
reception by the critic. At this point, we must turn to the study devoted
to H61derlin's criticism, to the first letter addressed to B6hlendorff in
1801, where H6lderlin sees a poetics suitable to the Germans which is
defined by its relation of contrast to the poetics of the Greeks.
The different interpretations of this letter that Szondi en-
counters concern the same problem as the one demonstrated in
regard to his own interpretation of the two hymns. If Szondi defines
the poetic text by the self-referential act that enables it to transcend
its dependence-as a composition of signs-on extratextual con-
flicts underlying the becoming of works, he acts in the same fashion
vis-a-vis the explicators of the text, whom he reproaches for having
torn out of it a meaning called to supply a deficiency rooted in the
precise historical moment that determines the interpretation in ques-
tion.
Thus in the smallest nuances that distinguish a citation from
its source, Szondi hears a background of usurping ideology flowing
out of "Zeitgeist's" tyranny over its slaves, the literary critics. Wilhelm
Michel, who makes Hl61derlin the "spokesman of the North," he who
enacts "the laws of Germanicism" and who recognizes in his destiny
"the historic mission of the guide for Germany"8 stresses the tenden-
cy that Hl61derlin attributes to the Germans of distinguishing
themselves from the Greeks by means of the beautiful passion ("in
sch6ner Leidenschaft").9
By dismissing nuanced expressions which render H6lderlin's
theses flexible, Michel makes them, as early as 1919, sound like a
declaration that connotes a national collective hysteria in which the
cult of bestialized elements is allied with that of a militarized heroism
eager to exercise direct power.'0 All this can be included in his inter-
pretationn of the word "passion". Szondi only alludes to it discreetly,
but he clearly indicates that the year 1918 appears to him heavy with
new, pernicious tendencies. Everything in the letter to Bohlendorff
that concerns the flexible equilibrium of a relation between two
dispositions which are allied in an inverse sense with the Greeks and
with the Germans is transformed for Michel and his generation, under
the influence of a facile expressionism, into a call to the identification
of the Germans with the true basis of their nature, thus diametrically
opposed to what Hl61derlin describes, when he carefully affirms the
difference which separates nations from their origins. Szondi did not
wish to go beyond the framework of a discussion of poetics, but his
refusal of the interested and engaged distortions of the critics leads
directly to an analysis of a historical exploitation that wishes to
abolish the distance between textuality and contemporary history.
For Michel and his colleagues, H61Olderlin's poem ought to be sub-
oordinated to a passionate renewal of anti-institutional nationalism,
the celestial fire thus becoming enthusiasm armed with millenary
power which leads a people to glorious actions. By revealing the
abuse that the historical critic makes of the test, Szondi limits his
reflections on writing strictly to its own self-constituted domain.
100
And if this is never said in his book, there is still no doubt that
the austere and ascetic severence of the umbilical cord between poet
and production is a response to those who have seen only the poet in
the production, by transforming the writer into an actor, the poet of
heroic tone into a conquering belligerent, the composer of an evolu-
tion which unfolds towards a utopian future into a people's guide
towards its eschatological destiny. This position, taken in 1918, sup-
plies a deficiency, that of a people on the day after defeat, that of a
nationalism thirsting for realization. If Szondi implicitly forbids the
explicator, according to the model of the poet as he grasps it, to treat
the object of his criticism as the compensatory response to a de-
ficiency of the precise historical moment, it is because he has pre-
viously perceived the abuse which that form of criticism involves.
Curiously, the same observations apply to the strictly opposite
point of view that Szondi encounters among the critics of the letter to
B6hlendorff-that of Beda Allemann who here echoes his master
Martin Heidegger. Contrary to Wilhelm Michel's emphasis on the
German duty to give oneself up to passion, to the celestial fire,
Allemann affirms that Westerners ought "to return to their orientation
towards what is proper to them, sobriety," in a "native reversal"" in
which Allemann sees a correspondence to the Heideggerian
"turning" (to the "Kehre")-H6lderlin's turning away from the idealist
metaphysic. But that affirmation of the return towards the proper,
which is not in the letter, rests on an ideology as wholly nationalist as
that of Michel, but in the inverse sense of an installation in the fixity
of a beginning, in the origin which remains permanently within itself. I
willingly concede that Heidegger is reacting against the ideology of
the orgiastic conquerors.'2 His conception of the return is an ap-
propriation of a primeval place in despite of all that has distanced it.
HOlIderlin is again reduced by a dominant tendency which finally turns
its back on a meeting with the other, with the stranger, on the progres-
sion towards a not yet expressible future, in order to recover-a
permanence in what pre-exists all human action.3 This falsification is
made by Heidegger in the form of a regression which, if it represents a
moment necessary to H6lderlin's work when it is integrated in its pro-
gressive composition, is here only the reverse of the primitively
totalitarian expansion of the critics of 1918 and joined to the former
by the same neglect of a structure sustained by "harmonic oppo-
sition"." By observing the deformation that Heidegger imposes on
Holderlin and that Beda Allemann reassumes, Szondi restores the
poetics of Ho61derlin to itself by interpreting it against the falsely
regressive emphasis of Heidegger, that is to say, by discovering in it
the system of progression by alternative tones.
Thus, the two false readings of the letter to Bohlendorff lead
the critic to the interpretation of the system of tonal alternation that
Szondi integrates into the symmetrical binary opposition of the letter.
It is thus that the fourth essay in Szondi's Hl61derlin-Studien
will follow the movement by making the analysis tones culiminate in a
reading of the Bohlendorff letter from the point of view of the analysis
of this tripartite system. Szondi succeeds in establishing a cor-
101
respondence between the cyclic and tripartite law of the alternation
of tones and the progression reflected by a philosophy of history link-
ing the structure of ancient works to that of the Hesperian works.
Then, in a second step, it is possible for him to demonstrate that
Holderlin will modify these two systems by turning, in his own produc-
tion, to the beginning of ancient literature, towards the epic whose
structure will be integrated in the hymns of a H61derlin in the mode of
Pindar, dating from the years which follow the first letter to B6hlen-
dorff, 1802-1804. This return is represented by Szondi as a new
progression within the progression and not at all as a cyclical con-
ception. It is supported by the importance that Friedrich Schlegel's
historicising poetics give to the modern, that is to say the romantic
novel.
The system of Schlegel which focuses on the modern novel
thus corresponds to the transformation that Holderlin applies to his
system of alternation of tones when he admits that lyrical poetry can
be continued by an "epic inflection", which will be increasingly the
procedure of the late poems, as Walter Benjamin and Theodore W.
Adorno have indicated in their essays on H61derlin: the first analyzing
the transformation of the ode "Dichtermut" into the late version en-
titled "BlIdigkeit,"'5 and the second by calling the style of the last
texts "Parataxis."'16 The analysis of Adorno is related to that which he
has made of Sch6nberg's "Reihenbildung" in his Philosophy of New
Music.'7 This book has perhaps been the most important of all for the
genesis of Szondi's literary criticism, as is demonstrated by his
Theory of the Modern Drama. Thus the demonstration of the epic in-
flection of theatrical works composed from Ibsen to Arthur Miller can
be read as an extension of the epic inflection typical of Sch6ngerg's
invention. The latter permitted Adorno to foreground the epic inflec-
tion of the last odes and hymns of H61derlin. Consequently, it also
permitted Peter Szondi to discover that same epic inflection within
the theory of alternation of tones according to the laws of its con-
tinuous progression.
In addition, Szondi found support in H61derlin's last theoretical
letters, addressed to his editor Wilmans, and in his remarks on
Oedipus and Antigone. But here a question arises. How does it hap-
pen that Szondi was interested in this phenomenon of epic inflexion
in the late work of Hl61derlin only around 1966 (three years after
Adorno's Berlin lecture on "Parataxis") when he wrote his fourth
essay? In June 1963, he was still totally opposed to Adorno's theses.
His three preceeding articles did not at all take into consideration that
central aspect of the Holderlinian becoming. For Szondi in 1962, the
works begun in 1799, "As on a Holiday," for example, were already
called "Sphtwerke" (PP, pp. 165-69).
Such a late change of perspective is all the more astonishing
since Walter Benjamin had already opened the way for Adorno by
utilizing the term "Reihe" (GS, p. 112), Schbnberg's very term, for the
late version of the ode studied. Szondi, so attentive to the Benjamin of
the "Origin of the Baroque Drama" did not take into consideration
Benjamin's interpretation of Hl61derlin before 1966. His first course on
102
H61lderlin, given in the summer of 1961 in Berlin, was dedicated entire-
ly to the two hymns treated in the first half of the book on H61derlin.
The meeting with these texts was not made with the aid of Szondi's
masters, but from the starting point of interpretations which provoked
his absolute opposition: Heidegger for the first text, Beissner and his
adversaries for the second. In the first case, it is a matter of inte-
grating the hymn into the path of H61derlin's own becoming, of prac-
ticing that form of "Historisierung der Formensprache durch die
Gattungswahl" which is also the principle of Szondi's courses on the
poetics of genres. In the second case, it is a matter of destroying the
a-historical perspective interpretations applied to the interpreted text
by devaluing their historical dimensions with the help a "true"
analysis of the historical situation of these distorting critiques. In this
case, such as the essay on the "Celebration of Peace," the superficial
realism of attributing meaning to the "Prince of the Celebration" is
dethroned by the nominalist perspective which functionalizes what
had been substantialized. But this exposure of the self-identifying
approaches of Hblderlin's explicators-prisoners of their historical
situation as usurping philologists enclosed in the framework of a
debate reflecting the ideological ferment of the various positions
taken between 1918 and 1957-had made it possible to grasp the
method of composition in the internal logic of its own progression
without reference to the historical foundation of the prince. The
motive for this refusal of a historical approach is given by Szondi
when he affirms that "the gulf separating the poetic reality and the
historical reality in this hymn appears insurmountable" (PP, p. 196).
However, if it was salutary to claim the "Prince of the Celebration" for
the celebration of the poem and not for a celebration of actual history
or for an eschatological hope flowing from the historical moment of
the explicator rather than from the explicated text, it remains
necessary to transcend the mere opposition of the nominalist
response to the realist error. In accord with the perspective at once
systematic and historical that Szondi notices in H61derlin's
theoretical writings, it should be possible to find a place for the
historical dimension within the systematic progression of the text as
one of the horizons to which the utilized signs refer. The presence of
this horizon is much more striking here, since its relations with actual
history are interpreted and restructured from the outset in a much
more universal sense, more contrastive and more utopian than the
viewpoint of witnesses to an actual historic present.
On the other hand, and again in contrast to the Germanists,
Szondi turns towards the historicity of the Hl61derlinian system at the
moment when he studies H61derlin's esthetic theories as one of the
evolutionary stages in poetic systems arising in the age of Goethe. If
the systematic interest attached to the two explications of poems is
connected to the hermeneutic perspective in the sense of a study of
the interdependence between the structure of the work and the evolu-
tion of its own temporality, the point of view dominating the study of
H61lderlinian theories reflects their rapport with a philosophy of
history. The result of these two studies has not been examined in the
103
light of the works themselves. Szondi did not hold himself to his own
maxim that one should reflect on the interdependence between
theoretical reflection and its practice. One can guess the reason. The
two studies on the Greco-Hesperian theory and on the theory relating
to the alternation of tones arrive at the conclusion that the gaze of the
theoretician is turned backwards, towards a bygone epoch, while it
simultaneously prepares a future which will be an antagonistic and
evolving response to the system which it establishes.
Szondi glimpses that answer in the last odes and hymns, in
what we have underlined as their epic inflection. At the moment that
H61derlin practices it, he not only replaces his system of tones by a
counter-system, but he goes so far as to utilize the contradiction be-
tween the old and the new system, perhaps so far as to separate
himself permanently from the alternation of tones. Szondi alludes to
the evolution by citing in its support the passage on "Remarks on
Oedipus": "It is an equilibrium rather than a pure succession"
(SW,p. 1162). He invites us to cast a glance beyond the threshold at-
tained before the late translations of Sophocles without, however, try-
ing to interpret a text dating from those years (1802-1804). By affirming
that these texts reveal the explosion of the system studied and are
presented as "the a-priority of the individual as compared to the
universal" (SW,464), Szondi explains at the same time why he does
not dwell on these texts. It is becaue they do not permit themselves to
be grasped on the horizon of a rigorously applied theory. If the first
hymn interested Szondi as the exemplary definition of the hymnal
genre in opposition to the resistances preventing it from being plainly
realized, if "Celebration of Peace" was chosen by him as an example
of the most balanced synthesis of the three tones and of the three
great moments of history integrated in that work, the ancient moment,
the Christian and contemporary, the odes and the late hymns resist all
attempt at systematization. Moreover, they are written against the
system previously constituted; they must be read as the criticism and
even sometimes the destruction of a philosophy of history and of a
philosophy of poetic composition. History as a process obeying the
law of a dialectical progression, and the analogy to that law of pro-
gression in the poem are replaced by the evocation of a danger which
one can no longer either foresee or avert, even while it ravages the
text which constitutes itself in defense against it. Hl61derlin is no
longer the master of an art of composition reflecting the laws of a
historical progression, he is the witness of an unequal combat be-
tween an invasion of the elementary and of words constituted as
delimiting and protective signs against the danger no longer
graspable by the word, but present in the gaps of the text. Szondi does
not privilege this evolution, one that is as much undergone as describ-
ed. For him, the complete mastery of the chosen form, starting from a
reflection on the organization of the text translated into textuality,
was a condition sine qua non for a study of Holderlin. The path of the
poet was exemplary to him only as long as the poet possessed the
means of constructing a work in the strict sense of the term.
That is why the endings of the last finished poems which ex-
104
press a retreat from an evolution begun by the text into a regression
towards the solitude of the subject, who is unveiled in the humility of
his condition as author menaced or overtaken or misunderstood, did
not attract Szondi's attention; he would have seen in them a menace
to poetic production.
His demands vis-a-vis the text are so complete that they es-
tablish a norm permitting his readers to detect the fissures in the
writing. By ripping from the texts the idea of their perfection de-
veloped in the time of the poem, on the basis of a systematic com-
prehension of its historic moment, Szondi awakens in his readers an
attention to the inadequacy which undermines, until it finally ruins the
late texts of an oeuvre which will no longer acknowledge submission
to an artistic necessity.
University of Geneva
NOTES
1 "Unterschiedenes ist I gut. . .", H61derlin, Samtliche Werke, ed., Friedrich

Beissner (Frankfurt, 1961), p. 455. Hereafter cited as SW.
2 Peter Szondi, Po6sie et poetique de I'id6alism allemand (Paris, 1975), p. 189.

Hereafter cited as PP.
3 Peter Szondi, HoIderlin-Studien (Frankfurt, 1967), p. 30.
4 Theodor W. Adorno, "Valerys Abweichungern," in Noten zur Literature, II (Frank-

furt, 1961), p. 43.
5 Letter to B6hlendorff, 4 December 1801.
6 The title of an essay by H61derlin on the philosophy of history ("Das Werden im

Vergehen"), Samtliche Werke, p. 1003.
7 "Dichterberuf", Smtliche Werke, p. 262 "Der Einzige," ibid., p. 350.
8 Wilhelm Michel, Hdlderlins Weiderkunft (Vienna, 1943), pp. 65 and 92. (Poesie et
po6tique, p. 231).
9 Letter to B6hlendorff, 4 December 1801.
10 "Hblderlin und die Sprache", in Hi/derlins Wiederkunft, pp. 6-10.
11 Beda Allemann, Holderlin und Heidegger (Zurich and Fribourg-en-Brisgau, 1954),

pp. 30, 32.
12 Cf. my article, "Die Dichtung H61derlins. Analyse ihrer Interpretation durch Martin
Heidegger," in Zeitwende (G0tersloh), 48, pp. 79-97, especially p. 91.
13 B. BEschenstein, "Die Dichtung H61derlins," pp. 84-86 on the subject of

Heidegger's interpretation of the elegy "Return."
14 A term which appears often in the philosophical essays (Harmonische En-

tgegensetzung"), especially in "The gesture of the poetic spirit."
15 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt, 1977). Vol. II, i, pp. 106,126
"Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich H61derlin. 'Dichtermut'-'BI6digkeitl' "). Hereafter
cited as GS.
105
16 Theodor W. Adorno, "Parataxis. Zur sphten Lyrik HlIderlins," in Noten zur
Literature, III (Frankfurt, 1965), pp. 156-209.
17 T. W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, First edition, (TObingen, 1949), p. 65.
106
Discussion
Manfred Frank:Your communication, which I found very stimulating

and extraordinarilyclear, gives us yet another opportunity to returnto
a subject which we might have supposed had disappeared, I mean to
the problem which Rainer NAgele has already raised in his expos6 and
which he thought distinguished Szondi's critical style-although ap-
proaching it by a kind of mimesis-from HOlderlin's,which you have
just presented. You have spoken to us about Szondi's procedure,
which consisted in relating reflection on the theory of the work to
reflection on the poetic technique-in that sense also Szondi was a
comparatist-thus measuring the work by its "idea". Holderlin is
almost the only one to show this alliance of theory and poetry and, at
the same time, these theoretical texts are among the most dense and
difficult we have, but also the richest in idealism, especially in "The
Process of the Creative Poetic Act." To recall a personal experience, I
was in Berlin during the winter semester 1966-67. This was when
Dieter Henrich was doing a seminar precisely on this text-which
Szondi students also considered important-at the Technische
Universitht. I recall that Szondi was extremely interested in the work
going on there. I am nearly sure that he got some information on it,
although we may be struck by the fact that in Poetics and History of
Philosophy there are only two footnotes bearing on the "Process,"
and there he is very cautious, very reserved, as it was his practice not
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to talk about something when he wasn't perfectly in command of it,
none of which keeps him from being profoundly interested in the
question. To return to my point, in "Process," we have a note which
treats directly the problem of the elusive subject, a note which
deduces the poetological consequences of that elusiveness. In effect,
H6lderlin says the subject is what it is by and for itself and it is in ad-
dition the unity of what it is and what it is for itself. However, the
structure of the "I-ness" demands that, by a necessity of the inner
structure, one of these three moments eludes him each time. If, for ex-
ample, he reflects on its identity, the difference is lost for him; if he
reflects on the difference, the identity is lost. The identity is opaque, it
eludes reflection, and the worst is that for a poet, identity won't let
itself be represented as such. It is the very means of the repre-
sentation which he has made disappear. Because at that very moment
where I textualize the subject-Fichte's subject-that is, where I ex-
press it or distinguish it from others, I create silence over its being.
And there we don't have a lack ("manque") or an impotence, or a
failure of method, but an infrastructural necessity of the subjectivity.
H6lderlin resolves the problem in such a way that-Rainer Nlgle
quoted the passage-he suggests that the subject breaks the limits
of its inwardness and is objectivized in exteriorizing itself freely into a
reality. It's a somewhat imagistic formulation because Hl61derlinis
looking for the exact words to designate a process that Fichte's
language cannot describe. Basically he says that the subject elects
for itself a sphere of objectivity and disappears in it (I skip over the
problem of knowing how identity, having disappeared, re-establishes
itself indirectly in a change of tone). At that moment, what you have
called the "hole in the text," which refers to that singular neologism
der Fehl (lack, "manque"), occurs. We find similar remarks in Novalis
who says, "The 'I' in the background is nothing."* Hl61derlin'sline,
"The more the one is invisible, the more it adapts to the strange,"
belongs in this context. In my opinion, this is the exact poetic trans-
lation, the poetic application of the intuition prefigured in the theory
of the "Process". We undoubtedly ought to distinguish in fact be-
tween the two ways of speaking of non-being. French has two
possibilities for designating "nothing": nothingness (neant) and
nothing (rien). Schelling affirms that "nothing" (rien) corresponds to
the Greek ouk on, to what is absolutely and in no manner there,
"nothingness" (neant) indicating non-being only in relation to another,
i.e., by comparison (Plato's me on). Hl61derlin'slack (Fehl) is also of
that sort. He doesn't want simply to say "nothing" (rien), but he
designates the non-being of something which could be thought there
(in other circumstances), thus absence in the sense of "nothingness"
(ndant)("not to be," and not "not to be"). As a consequence, H6lderlin
doesn't want to say that the subject is, so to speak, abolished, pushed
aside, or suppressed-that is a process which competitive capitalism
or Foucault's version of structuralism undoubtedly carries out better
than an idealist philosopher: Adorno has spoken of the mortal inte-
gration, of its extinction in the world of things. The disappearance of
the subject in H6lderlin does not mean therefore that it is no longer
108

valorized by its presence, but while being absent, in the manner only
in which the words are assembled, in the individual and singular com-
bination of words in the text. Hl61derlin'ssubject is not simply the sub-
ject that is lacking; it is the subjective arrangement of words
manifested by the lack which calls attention to it.
Bernhard Boschenstein: I would say this. There are, to be sure, in
H61lderlin,on one hand, in the very method of composition, these
"holes" which more and more become the very place where extinction
is made to have a voice. But there is, on the other hand, a form of pro-
cess which is the thematization, regulated by a system of hymn con-
struction, which is possible only when the hymn has been developed
earlier without that self-reflexive element. What interests us is that at
the end of each great hymn an entire triad (three stanzas) expresses
beneath an explicit form, i.e., puts back into action in the text itself,
this subject first extinguished, by a mise en scene, by a veritable
dialogue of this subject with itself. This is possible only because the
poem has first had its integral development without the subject being
present.
Pierre Bertaux:With this, I believe we are on our way to understanding
more precisely what Hl61derlincalled Process and Regress. At least
here is a proposed interpretation which holds together.
Avital Ronell: I am a little concerned by this notion of the "extinction
du sujet". Because it suggests a certain kind of divinisation of the
sacrificial movement of history within the H6lderlintext, and I want to
ask whether you conceive perhaps of different types of subjects or
selves that work in Hl61derlin.For example, this seems to be the-
maticized in Empedocles: what kind of self is extinguished and what
remains, what is the restant?
Bernhard B6schenstein: I agree with you that there is a kind of extinc-
tion of the subject and, on the other hand, the replacement by a new
form of presence of this extinguished subject. When you speak about
Empedokles, which appears in Szondi's essays often as an example
of the tribute by Hl61derlinto the poetical system of the Goethe and
Schiller Weimarian Classicism, this means that there is no distance
between the author H6lderlin and his hero as he sees him in the first
version. In the further versions you can follow the beginning of a
distance, of the opening of a gap, which is the problem we have dealt
with and which Szondi has treated in his analysis of Wie wenn am
Feiertag. But then, after the period studied by Szondi, you come to the
process which we have discussed in Patmos, in Der Einzige, in
Mnemosyne, where the gap is no longer between the subjectivity and
this kind of restitution we have explained before but the whole is inter-
sected and interrupted by what could be called I'ecran du teste pro-
duit par I'histoire, interposes itself between the contemporary and
creation. That means the crisis no longer arises through a figure like
Empedokles, but through the figures of the words themselves. This is
109

his new way to answer to the extinciton of subjectivity.
Avital Ronell: In this context, you spoke also about this notion of
histoire reelle. It seems to me this is further problematicized in
Empedocles, because the problem is history not prior to, temporally
anterior to the act of poetic enunciation. And that seems to be a prob-
lem there, the kind of self that produces itself.
Bernhard B6schenstein: In a first state of cultural unity, there is an
analogy between what could be called later nature and history. Both
are conceived as one and the same thing. But only in the moment of
creation, within the dimension of temporal progression, can history
emerge as history. Inthe former type, in the former shape, this distinc-
tion does not occur in Hl61derlin'sprocess of creation.
Pierre Bertaux: I think that the interest H6lderlin took in Herder and
the philosophy of the Enlightenment has always been under-
estimated. I have also always thought that there was in the late hymns
a very vast project on the philosophy of nature and history. The ex-
amples which struck H6lderlin in the cycles of history were Socrates
and Jesus. To be the personages they were they had to annihilate,
abolish themselves. The problem of sacrifice is fundamental with
H61lderlin.
*Syntactically, this could be translated "Basically the 'I' is nothing."
110

Fate in the Past: Peter Szondi's Reading
of GermanRomanticGenre Theory
Timothy Bahti
Paul de Man once remarked that what most interested him in
Peter Szondi's Traktat "Uber philologische Erkenntnis"-that
methodological position paper that remains, in my opinion, his most
eloquent and capacious statement-was not the general argument
about the place of hermeneutics in contemporary German literary
studies, but rather the more specific question Szondi raised of
whether a passage in Hl61derlinwas metaphorical or not, suggesting
that this question was the most important one, in Holderlin or with
any other literary text. Years after it was written, Szondi confirmed
this interest when he cited the Traktatwhile asking whether "the am-
biguity is one of the matter itself (einer der Sache selbst)."' I would
like my essay to stand under the sign of this question of metaphorics,
of the metaphorics in Szondi's work as well as in literary texts
themselves, for I believe it will appear to be a crucial aspect; just as I
would like to direct toward Szondi's studies of German romantic
genre theory2the same relating of what we know from and of his work
(Wissen) back to specific acts of knowing (Erkenntnisse) that he ad-
vocated, in the Traktat,for literary studies in general.3
What we know of Szondi's interpretations of German romantic
genre theory is certainly less here in the United States than in Europe,
for they are scarcely known at all. They can be summarized as arguing
for a progressive development of the poetics of genre, from their
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beginnings in Plato and Aristotle to German idealism, and then
specifically from Kant to Hegel, toward a dialectical philosophy of
history: oppositions between formal systems and historical changes,
and between past examples and present praxis, are increasingly
mediated in a speculative philosophy that is finally said to combine
dialectically history and system. This dialectical history of theory can
be traced across Szondi's entire career, from his earliest essay,
"Freidrich Schlegel und die romantische Ironie," written at twenty-
three, to the very late, posthumously-published "Das Naive ist das
Sentimentalische: Zur Begriffsdialektik in Schillers Abhandlung," via
his Holderlin-Studien and the now-published lectures on Poetik und
Geschichtsphilosophie (for which we all owe a debt to Jean Bollack).
Within the domain of German idealism, this dialectic takes the form of
a "crisis" in non-historicist Kantian genre poetics that is eventually
"overcome" in the "triumph" and "completion" (Vollendung)
represented by Hegel's Asthetik:4 Kant's third Kritikalready begins a
"sublation-of-itself" (Sichselbstaufhebung) of eighteenth-century nor-
mative Wirkungsisthetik,5 and the mediation of classicism and
historicism occurs across the individual theoretical projects of
Goethe and Schiller, of Schlegel, Holderlin and Schelling above all
(but also those of Winckelmann, Herder, and Moritz),as "historical
necessity" enters, most often against the authors' own intentions,
into the thinking of formal systems and dynamizes them to the point
where, in Hegel and, to some extent, in H6lderlin,this dynamic is iden-
tical with the historical process itself.6
This very brief outline of Szondi's argument cannot convey
adequately its combination of historical range and interpretative
power. While one may want to dispute individual analyses-most
especially perhaps in the case of FriedrichSchlegel, where Schlegel's
irony is understood as a mode of dialectic (and here we have the re-
cent work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy on the
one hand, of Paul de Man on the other, to help us7)-they are always
knowledgeable, informative, and highly persuasive. In the American
tradition of such works as Ren6 Wellek's History of Modern Criticism
or M.H.Abrams' study of romantic literary theory, The Mirrorand the
Lamp, there is nothing like Szondi's exegetical finesse and his rigorof
argumentation. But in surveying his interpretation of the history of
genre poetics, his history of theories of poetics, one notes the recur-
rence of certain structural terms that thereby invite a more-than-local
interrogation.
This history of a dialectical progression from Wirk-
ungsasthetik through the tensions within and between various forms
of classicism and historicism to dialectical aesthetics themselves is
continually written as if it were an instance where history acted itself
out in accord with a structure of prefiguration and fulfillment-itself
one of our culture's most fundamental and enduring structures for
making sense of events and their relations, especially those events
called texts. Already in the early essay on Schlegel Szondi could write
that "seen from the perspective of Geistesgeschichte, [the young
Schlegel's triadic Geschichtsphilosophie] prepares for the Hegelian
112

dialectic."8 Throughout the lectures on the history of Poetik und
Geschichtsphilosophie in German idealism, the position of one or
another theoretical text is said to be a first step (Vorstufe) toward or
an anticipation (Vorwegnahme) of Hegel's aesthetics, as Hegel is
regularly announced as the fulfillment (Erfullung)of the earlier trajec-
tories. When in the late essay on Schiller Szondi finds a "cor-
respondence" between the developments of Hl61derlin's and
Schlegel's poetological conceptions, and adds that "the analogy
follows from the historical logic of the matter itself" (sich aus der
historischen Logik der Sache selbst ergibt),9a critical perception of
"correspondence" and "analogy" is grounded in the "logic of the
thing itself," and history seems to mean little more than that Szondi
stands at the end of its logical story. The extent to which history is
subsumed within logic-when, as here with Hl61derlinand Schlegel,
and at many other points in Szondi's history,10the chronological
development has little or no historical causality behind it, leaving one
with sheer logical temporality, with chronos as time rather than as
history-this is even more evident at the end of the same essay,
where Szondi concludes that the relationship between Kant's
categories in his table of categories in the first Kritik(alluded to by
Schiller in a crucial note to his Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung)
"predestines them to be applied to a dialectical Geschichts-
philosophie, to its logical foundation."" The development from Kan-
tian formalism to a Hegelian Geschichtsphilosophie is itself a purely
formal and logical predestiny, residing already in the "logic of the
matter itself" and needing history only as the fulfillment of this
logical predestination.
Noting Szondi's predilection for the use of prefigural
terms-Vorbereitung, Vorstufe, Vorwegnahme, predestination -one
might ask whether his "dialectic" of the history of German romantic
genre theory is not rather more like Schelling's than Hegel's. When he
cites Schelling asserting in the introduction to the Philosophie der
Kunst that the history of art manifests "its immediate relations to that
absolute identity wherein they are predetermined (vorherbestimmt),"•2
Szondi immediately follows with a remark that summarizes his cri-
tique of Schelling when measured against Hegel:
The presentation of this predetermination of history
is the task of Schelling's Geschichtsphilosophie, in
which history is "sublated" [aufgehoben] to the same
extent that his philosophy accomplishes its task.'3
History in Schelling's Geschichtsphilosophie is cancelled, according

to Szondi, to the extent that it merely manifests what is "predeter-
mined" in his absolute Identitatsphilosophie. I would suggest that,
whatever his intentions or "task," Szondi's history of German idealist
aesthetics similarly construes history as its predetermination toward
an absolute, toward the absolute of Hegel's Asthetik if not Schelling's
"absolute identity of the universum." History's complexities and in-
trinsic character are cancelled to the extent that Szondi fulfills his
113

historico-critical task of displaying its predetermination toward the
Hegelian fulfillment of its trajectory. In another context, Szondi con-
cludes an argument by asserting that "Winckelmann [appears] to an-
ticipate a dialectical conception of the ideal of art that fulfills itself
later with Hl61derlinand Hegel."''14This structure of prefiguration and
fulfillment-is it Schelling's or Hegel's? Dialectical, and if so, a
Hegelian Realdialektik, or of a different kind of structure and opera-
tion? Szondi hints that our question has to do with the question of
Schein ("appears," scheint), of the appearance of history, which shifts
my interrogation of Szondi's "dialectical" history toward a question of
its aesthetic appearance, for Schein is in German idealism
preeminently a crucial feature of the aesthetic realm and experience,
from Kant to Hegel.
Szondi could admit several times that his history was an
"ordering"of German romantic poetics "along a path," "so that one
understands them from [the perspective of] the synthesis in which
they are all to be sublated, namely in Hegel's aesthetics," citing with
approval Helmut Kuhn's earlier effort in his Die Vollendung der
klassischen deutschen Asthetik durch Hegel.'5 While conceding that
there was "no obligatory model," "according to which" the aesthetic
systems of German idealism were "constructed," he nonetheless
asserted:
But the last great aesthetic system of German
idealism which also represents a synthesis of all the
insights and perspectives of the theory of art during
the age of Goethe, namely Hegel's aesthetics, this
system offers a view into the blueprint that-con-
sidered and realized to a greater or lesser extent-
founds the different aesthetics of the age.16
If the perspective offered from the last such system is understood as
a "synthesis" of all preceding ones, yielding historical insight into the
"blueprint" underlying their progression, and yet this perspective
denies that it is of an "obligatory model"" according to which" the
history "constructed" itself, then Szondi is here displaying his own
critical construction of the architectionics of German idealism and of
its historical fulfillment of this predetermination or predestination.
This methodological construction takes on its own aesthetic
characteristics as Szondi portrays the history of German romantic
genre poetics very much like a single literary work of art with its tex-
tual Entstehungsgeschichte: in this method of literary study, which
Szondi raised to a fine art, earlier versions of a text are understood
"as its genesis that finds itself sublated [aufgehoben], in the Hegelian
sense of the word, on the level of its completion.'7 Similarly, in the
Entstehungsgeschichte of German idealist poetics, earlier versions of
the aesthetic system-those of Goethe or Schiller, Schlegel or
H61lderlin-are the genesis of a single work and are "sublated" in the
"completion" offered by Hegel's Asthetik. Furthermore,the structure
and operation of this historical development, of this dialectical pro-
114

duction of work or system, appear very much within a conception of
German classical aesthetics: as Szondi said apropos of Schlegel's
Uber das Studium der griechischen Poesie, the "historical develop-
ment" across the particular texts is "as it were a growing system of
poetic genres."18 Indeed, one can cite a passage from this work of
Schlegel's that Szondi himself quotes, to describe Szondi's own
history:
(...) I have sought to determine for each striking ap-
pearance the right place in the great whole of the for-
mation of art. (...) the whole of ancient and modern
art history surprises [one] by its intrinsic coherence;
and it satisfies [one] totally through its perfect pur-
posiveness (Zweckmassigkeit).19
Each "appearance" of German idealist aesthetics finds its "right
place" in the "great whole" of its history leading to Hegel, and if its
"intrinsic coherence"-what Szondi calls the "predestination" or
predetermination" of its "founding blueprint"-surprises us, its
"perfect purposiveness" may satisfy us. But-as the Kantian
language of Zweckmassigkeit indicates-our satisfaction with this
history will be aesthetic, and to that extent ought to invite our
epistemological suspicion. Szondi said, apropos of Schiller but with a
broader orientation as well, that "decisive for the judgment of a
poetics should be only the extent to which it is successful in relating
essence and outer form to one another, and presenting their dialec-
tical unity."20 In his analysis of the poetics of German romanticism,
"essence" and "outer form"-or the character of a system and its
historical manifestation-are continually related to one another until
their "dialectical unity" is displayed in Hegel. And this unity of
essence and form is of course the hallmark of a classical aesthetics.
Szondi could only give his interpretation of the history of Ger-
man idealist aesthetics-which I am insisting is not only a history of
prefiguration and fulfillment, but also an aesthetic construction of
form and content, of historical or material appearance and systematic
essence-to the extent that, like the work of art in a classical
understanding, it displays a final architectonics. In other words, the
history must be understood as closed, finished, over, in the closure of
the fulfillment offered by Hegel's Asthetik. It is from this perspective
that he can speak of the "historical logic of the matter itself," and
understand the "logic," or the aesthetic structure, of the history as
having a dialectical story-line within it. But what this closure denies,
or forgets, or at least obscures, is the characteristic of this dialectic
as something that occurs or happens, as a historical activity before it
is history. Szondi described this aspect eloquently when he said of
the ostensibly "dialectical nature" of Schlegel's "relativizing of the
present toward the future," that it is negative insofar as the present is
grasped "as a prepatory exercise (VorObung),as a purely provisional
thing," but that it becomes positive as the present is determined "as a
progressive moment."21 Or again, when describing the "mediation of
115

philosophy and art" and the "collapsing of induction and deduction"
"effected" in Hegel's Asthetik, which "has its essence in mediation,"
Szondi speaks of this as "the historical vanishing-point toward which
the lines of this idealist aesthetics strive, before the threshold of
which" earlier manifestations "remain."22 Within the "dialectical"
historical progression, Hegel is an asymptotic "vanishing-point" but
also a "threshold" across which earlier moments of the progression
cannot pass; but after the historical progression is "completed" or
"fulfilled," it is the earlier manifestations that have "vanished" rather
than remained, and Hegel, the "future"that is now fully "present," re-
mains, or rather appears fully for the first time. And yet to be writing
this as a history, espcially one and a third centuries after Hegel, is to
invite the question: where's Hegel? For he, too, has "vanished" or
passed, and become history, or the past.
I would like to make this line of questioning more precise by
asking whether, for Szondi, there is any intrinsic interest or import in
those pre-Hegelian positions that vanish or are overcome in the
Hegelian system; and what, for Szondi, comes after Hegel, that is,
after the history of German idealism is history, which is after all the
position from which he himself is writing his history. Szondi con-
cluded his lectures on Schelling's Gattungspoetik by remarking that
since Schelling's Identitatsphilosophie can be comprehended as a
Vorstufe to the Hegelian dialectic, it remains "as such still contem-
porary even today," but only for a "negative dialectic" deriving not
from Kojeve, but from Adorno.23 Schelling's enduring significance is a
negative one, understood according to Adorno's "negative
dialectics." But there is another sense of "negative meaning" in Ger-
man idealism, namely, the negative Sinn of Friedrich Schlegel's
Lyceum fragment no. 69.24 As much as Szondi tried, in his early essay,
to understand this fragment as displaying a dialectical "will toward
the sublation of oppositions and toward the unification of that which
is separated,'"25 Schlegel's formulation of this "negative meaning" as
Vorgefuhl ohne Nachsatz resists such incorporation. Vorgefuhl
means "foretaste"; Nachsatz is a trickier term: it does not signify any
end or completion, but rather in grammar, a second term, in logic, a
second proposition, and most basically, a postscript. My question
thus becomes whether earlier, pre-Hegelian-and, to that extent, non-
Hegelian-positions can be understood, after Hegel, according to
such "negative meaning," as Vorgefuhl ohne Nachsatz, and
specifically without the Nachsatz of Hegel (at least a certain Hegel)
that would misunderstand the Nachsatz as completion or fulfillment.
To be able to think such meaning would significantly recast Adorno's
conception of "negative dialectics," with the accent more squarely on
the negativity than on the dialectic.
As for my second question, about history after the history of
German idealist aesthetics that "ends" with Hegel, one could im-
mediately remark that there is another, far different "post-history" to
be written than the one sketched by Szondi in his repeated references
to Lukacs's Theorie des Romans and Benjamin's Ursprung des
deutschen Trauerspiels as the heirs of German idealist poetics. This
116

different "post-history" would presuppose such different Nachsitze
(and presuppose a different, more negative understanding of
Nachsatz) as Kierkegaard's dissertation on The Concept of Irony,
which, while it is explicitly concerned with Socratic irony, is also
demonstrably involved in a critical understanding of Schlegel and of
Hegel's understanding of Schlegel, and which is nowhere mentioned
by Szondi; Nietzsche's critique of idealism, and especially of its
aesthetics and its historicism, displayed throughout his career, from
Das Geburt der Trag6die through the fragments of the Nachlass; Ben-
jamin's dissertation on Der Begriff der Kunstkritikin der deutschen
Romantik, a work that is curiously never cited by Szondi; and Heideg-
ger's explicit confrontations of idealism (as well as the implicit argu-
ment that runs throughout his work)such as his questioning of Schein
in Hegel in his essay "UberHegels Begriff der Erfahrung,"and his lec-
tures on Schelling-an interpreation that also is never engaged or
even mentioned by Szondi. But such a criticism of Szondi that pro-
poses an alternate, more "negative" "post-history" seems misplaced
to the extent that it ignores his real accomplishments in favor of
criticizing him for what he didn't do: to write such a history of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century post-Hegelian aesthetics was
simply not the task he set for himself. Furthermore,such a proposal
begs entirely the question of writing history, and of doing so from a
position understood as being after a history that is over and closed.
More relevant-because it addresses precisely this question
of one's historical location when writing history-is Szondi's very
interesting remark that to conceive of Hegel as a "completion" of
German idealist aesthetics is to conceive him as an end in the sense
that "one can go beyond [him]only when one goes back behind [him]."
He goes on to say that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one
has not so much a continuation of the Hegelian system (such as F.T.
Vischer attempted), but rather a "recourse" to "unsystematic, namely,
early-romantic geschichtsphilosophische insights" such as is found
in Lukacs's and Benjamin's works, with their common concern with
Friederich Schlegel.26 Elsewhere he identifies the accomplishment of
Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as the historical
understanding of a genre, not as a moment within the immanent
dynamics of a system, but as uncovering and revealing to
philosophical knowledge its "idea" "fWrsich," so that we have the
mediation of history and idea not in a system, but rather in a
Geschichtsphilosophie.27 If for Szondi, then, Gattungspoetik can go
beyond its idealist fulfillment in Hegel only by returning back before
Hegel, and by sacrificing the dialectical system to a
geschichtsphilosophische "idea" (that is pointedly never said to be
dialectical, or an-und-f~r-sich, but only fWr-sich),I would like to ask of
Szondi, as the historian of idealist Gattungspoetik, what it means for
him likewise to go beyond the end of his history in Hegel by going
back behind it in order to write that history as a history of the
prefiguration and fulfillment of the successful mediation of history
and system. Does this mean that in the course of displaying the pro-
gressive, historical development of the Hegelian system, and the
117

"logical", systematic-indeed, dialectical-character of this history,
Szondi himself will have to become unsystematic, or non-dialectical?
What could it mean to be a dialectical historian, or a historian of
dialectical history (these are not necessarily the same), if one had
only the "idea" of dialectic, and specifically the idea of its having a
history, rather than this idea and this history mediated in a system?
Finally, is this "going back behind" Hegel performed by the historian
of pre-Hegelian and Hegelian aesthetics an attempt to repeat in the
writing of a history a history that is understood to be the very writing
of these texts of idealist aesthetics, the Entstehung-or, more proper-
ly, the writing-of that corpus of texts known as German idealism?
And would this repetition be some sort of ewige Wiederkehr des
Gleichens, as dialectical in its characteristics as a history of writing
as the "original" writing of this history, the writing of German
idealism, is understood to be? Or rather, to the extent that one cannot
conceive of a repetition that leaves something the same, that does
not produce some difference by the very introduction of temporality,
would this difference between the history that occurs, happens, and
passes (even if, as here, a history of writing)and its history, the history
that is written about it as an interpretation of it-would this dif-
ference, finally a difference between dialectic and the non-dialectical,
remain inscribed within something that can be understood as
historical, as history (Szondi's use of thb term Rekurs reminds one of
Vico's ricorso, for whom the ricorsi remain historical, if nonetheless
only on the plane of providential history)? Or would the difference be-
tween the two histories, between event or writing and the writing
about the event, as well as the difference between the dialectical
history, history as dialectic, and the history written of this historical
dialectic, both fall out of our understandings of both history and
dialectic, and perhaps even have something to do with the
possibilities, and the conditions of possibility, of history and
dialectic?
These questions are to be answered neither easily, nor by me,
and least of all here. But they are questions that Szondi's work
demands that we ask. All that I have asked can be rephrased along the
lines of Hegel's dictum, "The thinking [Denken] of philosophy is a
Nachdenken," in which Nachdenken has the double or triple sense of
a meditation or reflection, a "thinking after" or "afterthought" (in the
temporal sense), and a "thinking according to." If, as is the case with
Szondi, one wants one's historical project to be informed by Hegel's
dialectical philosophy, our questions become one of asking how one
can write a history after Hegel-in this case, a history of the history of
German aesthetics that precede and lead up to and end with
Hegel-and "according to" Hegel. History in this case is the writing
of those texts of aesthetic theory in German idealism, of which, once
read and understood by Szondi as constituting a dialectical progres-
sion, he would write a dialectical history, namely, that history such as
we have it in his several essays and in his lectures on Poetik und
Geschichtsphilosophie. How can one write a dialectical history about
a dialectic that has been written, and that one has read as a history,
118

when one is thoroughly self-conscious of standing not before some
threshold, but long after it? More basically, how can one read, and
then write a reading of, a progression that is not toward some future
goal that is not yet there, but that is rather already past and over?
In another context, that is, in a textual exegesis of Schiller's
Ober Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung-which I owe to Peter
Szondi in the sense that his late essay on Schiller occasioned my own
interpretation-I have attempted to demonstrate how and why
Schiller's history of the naive begins in a textually explicit way, as a
"lovely idyll," and as such, as already in the mode of the
sentimental.28 As Schiller moves from his initial, theoretical discus-
sion of the naive-according to Szondi, because he wants not an
ahistorical theory but a proto-Hegelian mediation of history and
system-an idyll of history substitutes for the theory of the naive as a
"pure origin" (Schiller identifies "the pure unity of its origin" as a
"character of naive poetry"29).This occurs because if the naive is to be
located historically, in the past, the historian must be separated from
the naive, and its origin, by the very history he is beginning to write.
Thus, his history begins, and is not of its origin, but rather already of
that mode that, according to the history, can come only after the
naive, after the history of the naive was over or past. On the other
hand, Schiller says of all idylls that "unfortunately they place the goal
behind us, toward which they should rather lead us."30This applies as
well to Schiller's own historical idyll, his history as idyll, and perhaps
to all histories. Methodologically, it places "behind us" that unity, of
the natural and the ideal, of-to use Schiller's Kantian and Fichtean
terms-necessity and freedom, indeed, of an origin and a beginning,
that is, the harmony of the naive, toward which Schiller's text would
"lead us." As Schiller says that all idylls-regardless of authorial in-
tention and even with those of the "naive of ancient times"-will
eventually betray their intrinsic oppositions and become elegies,31 so
does his history discover that its end, the end of its would-be progres-
sion, is already behind it, and thereby it becomes an elegy.
Now Szondi confronts a similar problem with his attempt at a
progressive, even "dialectical" history of German idealist aesthetics
finding their end or fulfillment in Hegel. He puts behind his written
history the very goal toward which this would lead us-the figure of
Hegel, with his dialectical mediation of history and system. He
realizes at the same time that the end that must be presupposed is
also already missing at the end of the history at which he, Szondi,
stands at the moment he wants to write it. He both is at the end of his
history before beginning its writing, the writing that would repeat the
dialectical progression from beginning to end, from prefiguration to
fulfillment, and he knows that this end is lost to history, to the past, as
any progressive future. If the Entstehung or writing of the text(s) of
German idealism was a dialectical progression toward a future of the
successful mediation of history and system-indeed, of Hegel's
system as the "truth"and end of history-this future goal is no longer
available as the end of a writing the moment this writing, this text (or
these texts), is understood as written, as a text or textual history that
119

can be and has been read. As the end of history's progression is
already behind Szondi's history, his "idyll," if one can so call it, of
recovering the unity of history and dialectic becomes an elegy of the
oppositions between past and present, writing and reading-what he
called the difference between system and idea, and what I believe is
the difference between dialectic and (its) history. The hope of their
unity, which was the future of that writing, that temporal or even
chronological and progressive production of Hegel's system, is writ-
ten as a history, the meaning of which is hope in the past.
Szondi could write in one of his essays on Benjamin, in lines
that are as moving as they are accurate, that "Benjamin's 'lost time' is
not the past, but the future. His view turned backwards is of a broken
utopia, which can only still enflame the sparks of hope in the past".32
"Lost time" for the historian (Friedrich Schlegel defines the historian
as a "prophet turned toward the past" in Athenaum fragment no.
80-there's a clear allusion here) is that very future which progressive
history projects-and would produce-as a hope in and for a utopia,
and which remains then for the historian, the reader of this writing, as
hope in the past, as hope that is past and lost with time itself.
Szondi's description of Benjamin's Geschichtsphilosophie as hope in
the past is also what Szondi asserts as the "essence" of all
Geschichtsphilosophie: not merely interpreting history from a present
standpoint, but "the self-understanding of a time in the medium of
past times."'33 However truly this reflects both Benjamin's and
Szondi's historical self-understanding, given the circumstances of
their lives-by which I mean at the very least the experience of
fascism-the formulation of "hope in the past" is not specific to a
single historical time, but rather defines the time of history, that is,
the moment and situation of writing history, when for the historian the
goal of his narrative, the hope of arriving at significance and its
understanding, is always already in the past.
If, as Benjamin suggests, character conventionally appears as
something in the present and the past, fate as something in the
future, while fate is for Benjamin something that is accessible and
perceptible (erkennbar) in the present,3 here we have the characters
of Benjamin and Szondi-as self-consciously post-idealist historians,
as the historian in general, perhaps even as figures for history
itself-as being that of fate in the past: the fate of being beyond
historical "truth."Benjamin goes on to assert that both character and
fate are accessible only through the reading of signs, but that this
signification of character and fate is not "on the basis of causal con-
nections."35 More strongly than Szondi's rather timid admission of a
chronology without causality in his history of German idealist
aesthetics, Benjamin states that "a nexus of meaning can never be
founded causally, even though ... the existence of signs may have
been produced (hervorgerufen)causally by fate and character."''36The
historian, then, with his self-understanding of his character qua
historian displayed in his Geschichtsphilosophie as signifying at
once hope in the past and fate in the past, addresses these signs that
may have been produced by the fate and character of history but do
120

not therefore signify the meaning of this history in any causal way.
I would like to conclude my discussion of Szondi's history of
German romantic Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie with the "in-
terlinear" help of another passage from Benjamin, surely one of the
densest in his very dense oeuvre. In "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth
Century,"he writes that "it is precisely modernity that is always citing
primeval history (Urgeschichte)."37 I take modernity to signify not any
particular historical period, but wherever one locates oneself when
one is writing a history, and like the reader of fate and character, this
history-in order to be "citable"-is always already construed as a
written text, whether the history at hand is actually one of texts hav-
ing been written (as with Szondi's literary history) or the kind of
melange of objects that Benjamin is addressing. Citing the text of
history is giving it one's own reading, or writing one's own history. A
line later, Benjamin continues with these astonishing sentences:
"Ambiguity is the pictorial image of dialectics im Stillstand. This
standstill is utopia and the dialectical image (Bild) therefore a dream
image." This passage becomes all the more relevant and revealing if
one collocates it with Szondi's remark that with Hegel "the present
becomes the harbor in which the ship of history comes to a
Stillstand."38 For Szondi's history of German idealist aesthetics
leading to Hegel, then, history-which is dialectical history-is im
Stillstand, as a written text, at the moment he begins to cite it and to
give it his reading. And Benjamin reads this image, this percep-
tible-because written-text, as ambiguity. He also calls the moment
and image of dialectics im Stillstand "utopia";Szondi called it "fulfill-
ment" (ErfUllung).To the extent that this "present" moment is no
longer present, but in the past, it represents "hope in the past," and
its history will be an elegy, a commentary upon it melancholic.
In a stunning series of pages on Friedrich Schlegel, Szondi
traces Schlegel's Geschichtsphilosophie from being "prospective" to
being "utopian" to being "teleological," finally commenting upon it
as having an "organic" "inner teleology" (because it is founded upon
an image of Naturgeschichte) and therefore being "tautological."39 It
is in this same context that he alludes to the Hegelian Aufhebung of
Schlegel's and Schelling's Notwendigkeit and Schicksal in-to use
Schlegel's words-"the necessary genesis and progression of human
formation (Bildung)"40 which is the history of freedom, of reason, of
the absolute subject. That the necessity of the genesis and progres-
sion of freedom should also be history: this is an image of Hegel's
dialectic, but insofar as it is a historical image, it is also, to returnto
Benjamin, a "dream image"-the dream of dialectic, and of a pro-
gressive or dialectical history. And since this historical image is also
one of ambiguity, it can also be read as displaying not the necessity
of the transformation of necessity into freedom, but the movement
from freedom-the image and hope of freedom, even historical
freedom, in and through dialectic-to necessity, the necessity or fate
implied in the character of the historian of dialectic once the
character of the historical image of dialectic is identified as
ambiguity.
121

This fate is not that of "hope in the past" once the historian
returns to being (or becomes for the first time) an interpreterof the im-
age of dialectic, and above all of the figural, textual, material image.
Here, the image of this character is, to quote Schlegel again, "the
eternal, necessary character of mankind, to unite within itself the in-
dissoluble contradictions (unaufl6sliche WidersprOche)that spring
out of the combination of infinite opposites.""4 This "uniting" is not an
Aufhebung insofar as the contradictions remain "indissoluble." It is
ambiguous, as Benjamin would say, or ironic, as would Schlegel. The
"necessary character" of the interpreter of dialectic is to read a
discourse that can "combine infinite opposites" and to attempt to
understand the contradictions that "spring out" from this discursive
production. Schelgel's "irony," and Benjamin's "ambiguity,"
"allegory," and "translation" are not the only terms such an inter-
preter would have at his disposal. There are also the results of
Szondi's exegeses: the "paradox" he located in Kant and Schiller,42
the "mirrorsymmetry" which operates "crosswise" in Holderlin, and
which he thereby helps to understand as chiasmus,43 the "bridging
over" (UberbrOckung)he speaks of in Hegel which reminds one of
Holderlin's movement "passing over the abyss / On lightly built
bridges" ("Uber den Abgrund weg / Auf leichtgebaueten Brocken,"
Patmos, vv. 7,8). Finally, by remarkingthat Gattungspoetik essentially
has to do with finding a tertium comparationis," Szondi makes these
texts relevant to any understanding of dialectic that would take ac-
count of Holderlin's central structural insight that what mediates bet-
ween signification (Bedeutung) and appearance (Schein)-and thus
constitutes a tertium comparationis-is to be called not only Geist,
but also Metapher.45
Szondi wrote that "what completely comes to light with Hegel
is already to be read (abzulesen) at the beginning of the age of Goethe,
in Winckelmann."'46 This is his history of German romantic genre
poetics, his history of dialectic. But to attempt to understand dialectic
is not to "read out" (ablesen)-and write out-a history, but to read
(lesen) the texts already written, by Hegel or by Winckelmann. Instead
of reading and writing dialectical history, this is the analysis and in-
terpretation of the structure of this history-of these texts-which
just might be "dialectic." Szondi, with many others, frequently
located the beginning of this history with Kant and Fichte, with the
Ein-teilungen (the divisions of the one) of Kant's categories and
Kritiken, and with-to allude to Hblderlin's fragement, "Urteil und
Sein"-the Ur-teilung(the original division) of the subject accomplish-
ed by Fichte. While the concept of a future was demanded by both
figures for thematic reasons (as the forum for ethics, even politics, for
the working-out of human freedom), structurally the demand for a
future history is the demand for a reading of the architectonics of the
Kritiken and of the Lehre (doctrine) of the Wissenschaftslehre, for
their being read and understood as a narrative or an argument with a
trajectory and an end. That "future" which became the history of
German idealism was the writing of those readings: in Schlegel,
Holderlin, Schelling, and Hegel. To read that "history" is not to write
122

one, for it is already written. It is to read H61derlinand Hegel as such
readers, which today also means to read Benjamin and Szondi as their
interpreters.
Northwestern University
NOTES
1 Peter Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie, I, eds. Senta Metz and Hans-
Hagen Hildebrandt(Frankfurta.m., 1974), p. 201. Hereafter cited as PuG I.
2 While one might object to the attempt to give exegetical attention to certain texts
prepared not for publication but for university lectures-especially in the case of
Peter Szondi, an author who was so careful about what he allowed to be
published-one must acknowledge that, for the most part,the same positions, in-
terpretations, and histories of the Gattungspoetik of German idealism are found
throughout essays published or prepared for publication by Szondi himself:
"FriedrichSchlegel und die romantische Ironie,""Uberwindungdes Klassizismus.
Der Brief an B6hlendorff vom 4. Dezember 1801," "Gattungspoetik und
Geschichtsphilosophie. Mit einem Exkurs OberSchiller, Schlegel und Hl61derlin"
(the last two in H6lderlin-Studien),"LaTheorie des genres chez FriedrichSchlegel"
and "Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische. Zur Begriffsdialektik in Schillers
Abhandlung."Ought one perhaps to add that the typed manuscripts of the lectures
read by Szondi have much greater "authority"-in the strict sense of the
term-than the notes collected by Hegel's students under the title of Vorlesungen
Uberdie Asthetik, a text that became canonical-above all for Szondi?
3 Peter Szondi, Holderlin-Studien.Mit einem TraktatOberphilologische Erkenntnis
(Frankfurta.M., 1967), pp. 11-13.
4 Peter Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie, II, ed. Wolfgang Fietkau,
(Frankfurta.M., 1974), pp. 56, 21. Henceforth cited as PuG II.
5 PuG II,pp. 58ff., 15, 97.
6 PuG II, p. 182.
7 See Philippe Lacoue-Labartheand Jean-Luc Nancy, LAbsolu litteraire -Th6orie
de la litt6rature du romantisme allemand (Paris, 1978) and Paul de Man, "The
Rhetoric of Temporality," in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S.
Singleton (Baltimore,John Hopkins, 1969),pp. 173-209(Part2: "Irony,"pp. 191-209,
esp. pp. 201, 202). See also De Man's essay on Fichte and Schlegel (forthcoming).
8 "FriedrichSchlegel und die romantische Ironie,"in Euphorion,48 (1954), now in
Peter Szondi, Satz und Gegensatz (Frankfurta.M., 1964), p. 5.
9 "Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische. Zur Begriffsdialektik in Schillers
Abhandlung,"in Euphorion,66 (1972),now in Peter Szondi, Lekturenund Lektionen
(Frankfurta.M., 1973), p. 50.
10 Cf. PuG II,p. 80.
11 Peter Szondi, "Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische," p. 98.
12 G. W. Friedrich Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst (ed. of 1859), p. 16; cited in PuG II,
p. 248.
13 PuG II,p. 248.
14 PuG I, p. 46.
123

15 PuG I, p. 20.
16 PuG I, p. 16.
17 P. Szondi, "Uber philologische Erkenntnis,"Holderlin-Studien,p. 25.
18 PuG II,p. 111.
19 FriedrichSchlegel-1794-1802:Seine prosaischen Jugendschriften, ed. Jacob Minor
(1882), I, pp. 170 ff.; cited in PuG I, p. 119.
20 PuG II, p. 77.
21 P. Szondi, "FriedrichSchlegel und die romantische Ironie,"p. 13.
22 PuG II,p. 81.
23 Pug II,p. 307.
24 FriedrichSchlegel -1794-1802.
25 P. Szondi, "FriedrichSchlegel und die romantische Ironie,"p. 8.
26 PuG II,p. 126.
27 PuG II,p. 12.
28 Conference on "A Dialectic of Dichtungsweisen? The Case of Schiller," delivered
on 7 July 1979 at the internationalcolloquium on "Le Genre,"Strasbourg, France.
29 Schillers Werke-Nationalsausgabe, XX,eds. Benno von Wiese and Helmut Koop-
man (Weimar,1962), p. 441.
30 Schiller, Nationalsausgabe, XX,p. 469.
31 Schiller, Nationalsausgabe, XX, p. 449, n.
32 P. Szondi, "Benjamins Sthdtebilder," in Lekturenund Lektionen, p. 137.
33 PuG I, p. 433.
34 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II, 1, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhbuser (Frankfurta.M., 1977), p. 171; English in Reflections, ed. Peter
DemetZ,tr. EdmundJephcott (New York,1978),p. 304.
35 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II, 1, p. 172; Reflections, p. 305.
36 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II, 1, p. 172; Reflections, p. 305.
37 Walter Benjamin, Schriften, eds. T.W. and Gretel Adorno (Frankfurta.M., 1955), I,
pp. 406-22; English in Reflections, p. 157.
38 PuG I, p. 236.
39 PuG I, pp. 108, 116, 120, 135/36.
40 FriedrichSchlegel-1794-1802, I, p. 96; cited in PuG I, p. 121.
41 FriedrichSchlegel-1794-1802, I, p. 96; cited in PuG I, p. 121.
42 PuG II, pp. 58, 59.
43 P. Szondi, H61derlin-Studien,p. 113, and PuG II, p. 128.
124

44 PuG II, p. 18.
45 PuG II, pp. 170, 173ff.
46 PuG I, p. 20.
125

Discussion
translated by Paula Pavlovich
Manfred Frank: Your reconstruction of the text of Poetik and Ges-

chichtsphilosophie as a dialogue between Szondi and Hegel is quite
remarkable, because, among other things, you have thereby ques-
tioned along with Szondi, the historiography which was adopted since
Hegel and which he himself established. Hegel in effect wrote history
in such a way that it accommodated in its own system its closure, its
conclusion, its accomplishment and its true meaning, which
nonetheless stops history. At the moment when this takes place, of
course, this position that Hegel thought he had "eliminated" takes on
a quite special virulence, because suddenly we see the future sprout
in what is presented as its past or in its solely historical past, a future
which Hegel in no way foresaw. For with him it was a question of a
somewhat hurried attempt to stop history. Within the system of
Schelling, who, according to Hegel's construction, climbed the last
step leading up to him, there is, according to the reading that Szondi
proposes to us, not only an unfulfilled aspect, but one without pos-
sible fulfillment, something Hegel wanted violently to deny. And it is
interesting to note that Schelling's decisive argument against Hegel
was in fact confirmed as irrefutable, so that on the German side, for
several years, for several decades, there were people who wrote the
history of ideas differently from Hegel. I would remind you only of
Walter Schulz's book, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in
127
der Spaitphilosophie Schellings. It is in this tradition-such being an
historical and ideographical parenthesis-that Szondi was caught as
Benjamin before him, (or rather, Benjamin as one of Szondi's precur-
sors, though they do not attach themselves directly to Schelling but to
Friedrich Schlegel, who can be compared with them on this point),
and in the aesthetic concerning which Szondi showed that the mark of
the past in the romantic systems is in truth the guarantee of their
future, of the impossibility of their suppression. What was resistant in
the concept of aesthetics was, for Schelling as for Schlegel, the
reason for their opposition to logical imperialism and motivated their
common objections to the conceptual repression of art. Schelling
prepared, through his work, the thesis that history removes itself from
its own idea, that the signifier and the signified are not on the same
level, but there exists, as Lacan called it, an "incessant slippage of
the signified under the signifier", a sliding that cannot be fixed, which
expresses itself with more truthfulness in the undecidable, in the
polysemy, in the semantic wealth of a poetic text than in the apparent
stasis ("repos") of a philosophy which says art is surpassed, because,
with religion, it stays on this side of the threshhold of adequate
knowledge of the philosophical concept. I would simply say that
Szondi is not an original genius, but that he himself is situated in the
interior of a tradition which attempts to deconstruct German idealism;
and this reading could equally well claim kinship with philosophers
about whom, it is assumed, probably mistakenly, that they represent
Idealism itself-for example, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and above
all Schelling who for his part, did not rally at all to the Hegelian con-
struction of history, but who up to his death, if I may say so, protested
against this official ideology which thought to dispossess art in the
name of a concept. In this sense your guarantee, Timothy Bahti, is
Schelling himself, or at least could be, for Schelling already historic-
ized and freed it from the concept.
Timothy Bahti: You have summarized very well almost all of my paper
in what you have said. Although I do not believe that you posed a
question to me, I would like to add general remarks. I am not sure that
it is a question here of a double structure of reconstruc-
tion/deconstruction for as far as I know Szondi did not want-neither
in his lecutres nor in his other published texts-to reflect in a properly
critical manner upon his own Hegelian historiography. At the begin-
ning or toward the end of almost every chapter in the lectures, one
finds the terms "prefiguration" or "fulfillment"-the terms that would
give a trajectory and coherence to his history. So there is a system or
at least a thinking that is Hegelian and is evident; but as far as I know,
he does not engage himself with a Hegelian historiography in a more
profound sense. On the other hand, he cites in very striking phrases
that difference, for example, between idea and system that he notices
in Benjamin's Trauerspielbuch. And it is Benjamin, we know, who in
those excellent pages on allegory in the Trauerspielbuch, up to his
remarks upon dialectic in the Baudelaire book, Paris, Capital of the
19th Century, sketched one of the most profound critiques of the
128
Hegelian dialectic, in allowing us to see its allegorical and rhetorical
structure. So if it is not a question here of Szondi as a deconstructor
of Hegelian history, in my opinion there is already in Szondi-that is
to say, in his text itself; one can read it without any help from me-, if
not a contradiction, then at least a slippage between his insights con-
cerning Benjamin, for example, and his faithfulness or at least his
respect for Hegel and that Hegelian vision.
Another thing: It was the attempt of my paper, although
perhaps a bit timid itself, to suggest that it is not only a question of a
choice between Hegelian or non-Hegelian histories, but rather it is
perhaps a question of the problem of situating oneself at the end or
after the end of a narration (or a syntagmatic series) said to be
historical, and then beginning to write that history, and finally, finding
a relationship between the two that one could say was true. Even if
one poses a future or something "prospective" which remains without
sublation or fulfillment-and without any possible sublation or
fulfillment-in this written history, this "unsublatable" (unaufheb-
bares) element is not a truth of the text that is truer than historical
writing (say the "truth" of the historicity of texts, even the philosophic
text); and above all it is not a liberation of an element said to be
aesthetic vis-a-vis the repression that might obtain with the
philosophic concept. For the notion of the aesthetic has no
sense-and cannot have any-without a philosophic concept, and
above all the concept of philosophy, that is already inscribed and that
reinscribes itself with every gesture of a "liberation." Futhermore, a
"truth" beyond the limits of the philosophic system ought not to be
more true, but rather only more apparent, so that the "truth" of a
systematic writing (called philosophic or historical) or of some other
(called aesthetic) becomes and remains undecidable. A polarity be-
tween the aesthetic and the conceptual-or, to use your names,
between Schelling and Hegel-is false; it is rather a question of a ten-
sion between a productive and rhetorical power, and a power of narra-
tion and argumentation that would master this first power, that would
be the power of the master. This tension, which is more of an "in-
terlacing" than of a polarity, is-and here I think we agree-without
sublation, and this "unsublatability" (Unaufheblichkeit) obtains in
every discourse or text, be it aesthetic or literary discourse, or be it
conceptual or historical or even Hegelian discourse. One could call
this the unsublatability of rhetoric within dialectic. There is a question
there larger than simply the question of Hegelian or idealist history
(and philosophy of history, philosophic history), but I only want to sug-
gest it; these questions remain totally open, in my opinion.
Finally, it is very clear that I possess neither your precise
knowledge of Schelling nor an up-to-date knowledge of the current
studies of Schelling in West Germany to which you made reference.
Perhaps it is necessary to reread Schelling with more attention than
has already been done (with the exception of Heidegger), perhaps with
that attention that has been applied to Hegel for years. But my own
suspicion is that it is rather the texts of Schlegel and Holderlin, in
their "readings" of Fichte and Hegel, and the texts of Hegel
129
themselves that are going to suggest answers to or at least paths to
our question of what remains without sublation in dialectic and
especially in dialectical history. Here I refer once again to work of the
"Strasbourg group", but also to a very fine essay on Hegel by Andrzej
Warminski ("Pre-positional By-play," in Glyph 3, 1978).
Jean Bollack: If you will permit me for one moment to dwell on this
problem of reconstruction and deconstruction which leads to fulfill-
ment, I would like to settle several very simple questions. First of all,
since Szondi was very concerned with historical truth, it must be add-
ed that he intended to write the sequel, to wit, the aesthetic history of
the 19th century, which would certainly have transformed the situa-
tion. As was said this morning, it was because of the unexpected
events at the University of Berlin that this sequel was never com-
pleted.
Secondly, we must not-and I insist upon this point-put his
publications on the same level as his courses. I said, in the introduc-
tion to the courses, that we took there a liberty in giving his word a
written diffusion. In his mind, it was a question of a very different
strategy, so that, I think, you would have to add that if there was not
one sentence nor one essay on Hegel published in his lifetime, it was
because that was not an area which he believed he knew in depth, or
upon which he thought himself capable of shedding a new light.
It is important to distinguish in Szondi's case the postulation
of a theoretical basis for the science of works, in other words, literary
analysis; it is because he set this goal for himself that he does not
speak, as you said yourself, of other texts by Benjamin, using each
time only certain elements as needed to constitute an interpretive
model based on theory.
On the other hand, in your title, you speak of genre, but that is a
question which you have not really dealt with. The analysis of the
philosophy of history is subordinated for Szondi to the discovery of
the essence of the forms which are the genres; there too the finality is
determined by a particular desire which certainly is of philosophical
essence, but is not immediately so: it is so in the possibility of rigor-
ously applying reflection of philosophical order to a purely literary
object.
Next: this course which in itself is not very original-some
readings, analyses where it is interesting to note how he proceeds, by
means of what quotation or paraphrase, the dialectic movement is
organized-, we should not forget that this course responds to an
academic strategy, has scholarly origins, namely the constitution of a
canon of references. In the same manner that he takes up Benjamin,
Lukacs and Adorno, in order to found a theoretical approach, he gives
ancestry to critical reflection itself, grouping together the classics of
philosophy for literary use, defining thus a level beyond which one
should not speak; and giving value to a philosophical claim in a do-
main which is not really philosophical. In the course on Hegel to be
specific, he speaks to Germanists, not to professional philosophers.
This strategy is directed against the fatal division of labor which
130
maintains incomprehensibility-but naturally one cannot reinvoke
this same division against Szondi by applying to him a theoretical re-
quirement which was not his own, since what he formed was a system
of reference, formulated in the Romantic period by a quality and level
of reflection. The sentence which you quoted, "hinter sie zuruck
gehen," has a qualitative meaning which should not be
misunderstood. It is said with respect to people who, like Staiger, help
themselves to sub-forms of this kind of reflection.
For that which belongs to the philosophy of history, qua
philosophy-now to really focus in on the object of your paper-,
there are in the appreciation of this philosophy by Szondi two con-
tradictory aspects. On one hand, the organization of the historical
perspective in a system, like that of history, adds to the dimension of
historicity, reflection on the meaning of history, and therefore pre-
cisely the possibility of a utopia ora surpassing. But it is also certain
that Szondi applies at the same time the idea of Standor-
tgebundenheit, to determine Hegel's position and say that the con-
struction is a pure projection of the Hegelian vision of the world in
history. He applies to Hegel the dialectic of myth and emancipation
(Mythos und AufklIrung). The philosophy of history in being a reflec-
tion on evolution, on historicity as such, is also, each time it exists,
what is most arbitrary and most mythical in nature.
In the formula that you employed at a certain moment-the
dialectic reading of the dialectic-, the first use of "dialectic" has an
expositional value. I think that it is an essential trait of Szondi's
method to always establish a relationship of opposition, surpassing
the apparent identity and revealing the difference, between Schiller
and Goethe, for example. This descriptive mode is not limited to the
history of the constitution of dialectical systems: it is worthwhile in
all cases, even in the magnificent essay on the Amphitryon-Moli6re
is present in order to show that Kleist is different.
Concerning the teleological element, we can simply wonder
how and to what measure Hegel could represent for Szondi this fulfill-
ment of which you spoke. Hegel specifically represented it insofar as
the critical method, that is, the very analysis of subjectivity, the reflec-
tion on the constitution of knowledge and the postulation of
epistemological clarity, employs categories elaborated in the
systems of German Idealism. There is a positive teleology at the ser-
vice of epistemology. Szondi, as we see him above all in light of his
courses, made an immense effort at describing the theory of genres,
discovering people who had been unjustly neglected like Moritz-the
course titled Antike und Moderne is much more beautiful and much
more complete, in my opinion moreover, than the Gattungspoetik.
Why should this be when elsewhere he makes such a display of
modernism? This system of reference which he built is by all evidence
opposed to Antiquity in Germany, to Greek norms. For him, with the
eighteenth century, we enter a consciousness which we are able to
grasp, a truth which we perceive, in other words one which we can free
from myth. In addition, the concept of nature is placed in ques-
tion-Szondi was horrified by those who cailed on either "nature" or
131
"harmony," on that which Stimmigkeit evokes, as is shown by dif-
ference which he established between Goethe and Schiller. But it is
the philosophical character and the reflection on "form" in the
precise sense which he gives this term, which matter to him, since all
interpretation for him is at the same time the discovery of a specific
form.
Next, his concern is directed to transitions, where the light of
difference appears. Therefore, in each of his theories, surpassing is
the focus; the movement of demystification may be provisionally
reversed, but in reality it is not. The teleological movement is more im-
portant than fulfillment: the transitory state where the form becomes
something other.
The systems of Idealism are examined as the announcement
and foundation of another type of theoretical reflection, to which
Szondi directly links himself. Despite all, he rarely quotes Benjamin,
Lukacs and Adorno in his text. These are readings which we can
assume and which he expected his students to have completed. There
is another level of culture, constituted by authors who influenced the
former, on which he conducts his course, that is, he tries to show that
they answered to the same claims. The problem of modernity, of
Gegenwartsbezogenheit, takes on a completely concrete expression
there, and is organized within a clearly academic strategy. It is certain
that one of the most important elements in this culture is the ap-
pearance of historical thought. Szondi looks for and discovers there
elements of a critical type, epistemologically correct, so to speak.
This is particularly true for Schlegel, who is for him a precursor
sometimes of Lukacs, sometimes of Benjamin; but he is clear that the
young Schlegel is also the person with whom he identifies himself the
most willingly. These are some of the potentials in the critical posi-
tions he defends.
Finally, there is surely still another element. The poetics of
genres gives its object dignity. The difficulty of reflection, to which, in
literary studies we are not at all accustomed, has a distancing
effect-it is necessary to have heard him give his lectures on
Shelling's Gattungspoetik as a Privat-dozent at Gottingen, before
some three hundred students (mostly young women). He chose sub-
jects which were culturally valorized by their intellectual value outside
the university. These were authors 'hors cursus' in the beginning. The
students must have gotten a double benefit from it; their own
academic curriculum was of an entirely different type, and this kind of
counter-program put the material in relation to a personal reflection,
to his personal intellectual work outside the institution.
Timothy Bahti: I thank you for your remarks, they are at once ex-
tremely specific and broad. I ask that you let me choose, for my
response, among the fifteen points that you made (if I have counted
correctly).
Of course one can clear up some trajectories, emphases, and even
lacunae in Szondi's lectures through reference to his university
strategies. As legitimate as they might be, the strategies and the ex-
132
plications of Szondi which follow them remain a sociological matter.
Which is to say that might explain something about the "practical
reason" of Szondi's lectures, but it offers neither an exegesis nor a
judgment of the texts, of their productions of meanings and their
epistemological problems or values. It is as an interpreter of
philosophic and literary texts that I come to read Szondi's texts, and I
offer no apology for that.
Of course with the lectures it is not a question of a text envi-
sioned for publication, but rather of Vorlesungen-and often, not of a
specific and technical analysis, but rather of an introductory exposi-
tion and analysis. But on the other hand, one must recognize that for
the most part the same positions, interpretations, and histories on
which I have depended are found across the essays published or
prepared for publication by Szondi himself. I refer, among others, to
the two essays on Schlegel, the two essays on Holderlin's theories,
and the last essay on Schiller (see the notes to my paper). And
although he did not put forth an essay properly on Hegel, there are in
the essays that I have cited-as in the lectures-not only phrases, but
whole pages on the Hegelian dialectic. Furthermore, in the lectures
and above all in those lectures on Antiquity and Modernity that you
admire, he arrives at the texts themselves-be they of Moritz,
Schlegel's Uber das Studium der griechischen Poesie, Goethe and
Schiller's letters, or H6lderlin's letters and fragments-and there is
truly an exegesis: this was one of the things I wanted to show. It is at
that moment that it is no longer a question of giving a simple introduc-
tion, but truly of offering orginal analyses-and to that extent, it is
also a question of reapplying exegesis and criticism to the exegeses
themselves.
I was very struck by what you said concerning Szondi's thought
on the "positionally bound character" (Standortgebundenheit) of
Hegel, and on that which you called "the dialectic of myth and
enlightenment" in Hegel (although I would not call it a dialectic at all),
that is, the manner in which his reflection upon history,upon develop-
ment, upon evolution, upon historicity itself also contains, each time,
something arbitrary and even mythic. As you well know, it was above
all in the lectures on Hegel's aesthetics that Szondi made reference to
the economic background of Hegel's thought, using Lukacs's work,
The Young Hegel. But in his other lectures on the other authors of Gat-
tungspoetik, there is almost no reference to such a background
(economic, social, etc.)-with the exception of the background of
Hegel himself: the chapters are full of references to prefigurations of
Hegel or fulfillments by Hegel. References to Hegel, but not a reflec-
tion upon these references, upon that historiographical function of
the figure of Hegel. A strange thing, in that it is a kind of reversal: the
Standortgebundenheit of Hegel can be analysed, but the positions of
the pre-Hegelian authors remain without analysis of or reflection
upon their own positions (or Standortgebundenheit) in Hegel's
history.
Let us pass on then to your point concerning the "expositional"
value of the first term of dialectic in what I called the dialectical
133
history of dialectic attempted by Szondi. I am certainly in agreement
with you that in each chapter of the lectures it is a question of
establishing "a relationship of opposition surpassing the apparent
identity and pointing out the difference"-a question of what you
later called the "transition", the "surpassing", the "provisional", "a
teleological movement that is much more important than the fulfill-
ment". But we know that-at least in the lectures-this transition and
this surpassing stop with Hegel, and that the teleology always leads
to the Hegelian sublation. "There where the form becomes something
other" becomes the Other that is Hegel. It is precisely the great value
of Szondi's analyses to accent the opposition and the difference in
the specific texts and theories, but his also remains a specific value.
Although these descriptions or exegeses do not need to belong to a
history of the constitution of the dialectical system, they belong to it
nonetheless-not in a descriptive manner, but in a constitutive and
structural manner that often remains almost imperceptible. Szondi's
thesis is that there is an Entfaltung, an unfolding of dialectic across
the history of some thirty or forty years before Hegel. Thus he wrote a
history that wants, as you well put it, to accent the oppositions
amongst themselves and finally the resolutions of the oppositions. He
can perform such precise exegeses of the tests themselves, but when
it is a question of establishing a chain from these texts, a chain that
would be that dialectic that fulfills itself in Hegel, it is exactly there,
where one finds the texts in this chain, that one ought to pose some
questions of this moment of transition, now another kind of transi-
tion-the transition between an analysis of historical things, of the
texts of the history of German idealism, and a writing of that history. It
is at this point that, although it might not be his own project, I find
that one ought to reflect upon matters. Now can one say-not a single
time, but often-that this, here is a Vorstufe, that is, something that is
going to be fulfilled later on? It is precisely this gesture of linking
texts with such terms and the historiographical structures that make
that gesture possible that I want to question.
One last response: it is that question of constructing a system
of reference at once philosophic but also contemporary. One often
thinks that Szondi's project, as well as that of Benjamin, is to save
things that could be lost, that tradition that ought to be at once
rehabilitated and also perhaps in some cases rediscovered for the
first time, above all with the text of the young Schlegel, the theoretical
texts of Ho1derlin, Schelling's philosophy, etc.... If it is another tradi-
tion, neither of Platonic or Aristotelian terms, nor of Enlightenment
forms, it is this gesture of finding a proper German and philosophic
tradition that is to be useful for contemporary studies that, in my opin-
ion, ought to be reposed in relationship with Professor Nigele's
paper. Because there it is a question of what is proper and what is
foreign; this "dialectic" between the proper and the foreign is not only
a relationship between a German tradition and a traditon of Greek
philosophy; it is also that question of two historical epochs, of
idealism or the nineteenth century and its heritage on the one hand, of
antiquity itself on the other. This can perhaps offer another perspec-
134
tive on the manner in which, as Professor Nagele showed yesterday,
the criticism or the exegesis of Szondi himself, say in the case of the
H6lderlin-Studien, is a reflection of at least several aspects of his own
theory and methodology. I believe that it is here that the question
becomes more complex. Yesterday I intended to make a comment
concerning a phrase in Professor Nagele's paper: "the stepping-out of
oneself in a freely chosen objectivity". Now, the question of a free
choice of this objectivitiy in the works written by Holderlin: is this
choice of another tradition or another field of endeavour truly a free
choice? In the case of H6lderlin himself, if one reads H61derlin's
letters for example, there are the names, in the first case, of Tantalus,
of Semele, there is the image of being struck by Apollo: for my part, I
find nothing in H61derlin's letters and poetological theories that one
could call a free choice. It is concerning this aspect of a force or a
power that operates in H6lderin's texts-and not a freedom of
choice-that I want to pose the question: was this the same thing for
Szondi? Is it a free choice to choose this idealist tradition-to want to
construct or reconstruct it? No, I do not believe this either, and even
the reasons for which he chose this German idealist tradition are not
at all free.
The choice and its reasons belong to a "law of the genre." For
my part, I too am interested in genre, in "the essence of forms."
Although you are right when you say that "for Szondi the analysis of
the philosophy of history is subordinated to the discovery of the
essence of the forms that the genres are", his "discovery" presup-
poses a narration of history which is-or which would like to
be-dialectical, and which is "Hegelian." And furthermore, this
"discovery" comes to confirm the model and the philosophy of history
that it presupposes. It is precisely because Szondi did not analyse
this philosophy of history and of historiography which regulates his
thesis and even his title (Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie) that I
would like to analyse it (and there is no question here of turning a div-
sion of labour back against Szondi, or of applying a theoretical
requirement that was not his own: all that I have said and asked was
implied in his own work). And one could say that this model-that
which I have attempted to analyse-also is of a genre, that is, of a
genre of historiography. Finally, it is of a certain genre of Hegel.
Henri Meschonnic: Just one very general question which establishes

the whole problem, I think, of relationship between meaning and
hermeneutics. You spoke at length of the 6criture of history and at a
certain moment you even said that it did not imply a causality,
therefore, you have posed the question of the rationality of the work in
the 6criture of history. That implies a question about the sense of
history as well. Couldn't we follow the chain of questions like this,
saying 6criture de I'histoire supposes a sens de I'histoire which
presupposes a theory of meaning? And it seems to me that there is at
that moment a difficulty, which seems to me to be a difficulty basic to
this kind of hermeneutics. It is well known that hermeneutics is found-
ed entirely on the identification between understanding and inter-
135
pretation, so much so that everything takes place as if the work of
meaning is entirely put into the interpreter. Therefore, is this not to
overlook a theory of the mode de signifier? What happens to the mode
of signification if all the work of meaning is in understanding, since
understanding and the interpretation are synonomous? Does not the
very theory of reading risk being different depending on whether we
link the function of meaning to a theory of the mode of signification or
to a theory of understanding and uniquely of understanding? And
does not putting all the meaning in the understanding risk the melting
of historicity into historicism? For example, one of Szondi's problems
is understanding Holderlin. What does it mean to understand
H61derlin?
Timothy Bahti: I find your comment very fine and very sug-
gestive. Yes, it seems that there are two sides or two notions of mean-
ing at play here, when speaking of history: the meaning of history
considered as a mode of signifying, as a syntagm that inscribes itself
or writes itself; and the meaning of history considered as an activity of
comprehension and interpretation, as a narrative written by the
historian-by Szondi, for example. Thus, two meanings of writing.
This problem of the identity or the difference between the two mean-
ings poses itself in a particular manner in our case of German
idealism. For that history as it writes itself during the very epoch, that
is, in the texts of the "idealists" themselves, is at the same time read
by these same authors in quite different ways: in a "deconstructive"
way (I would like to use this term with caution here) by Schlegel or by
H61derlin, for example; and in another way that is much more nar-
rative, more constructive, more "dialectical", as one says, at least
more organized by the structures of prefiguration and fulfillment, by
Hegel-for him, this history leads from Kant to himself. This history
which is the writing of the texts is at once-and is unthinkable
without-this process of readings. Now, when someone later, like
Szondi, wants to write a history-his history-there is also this
moment of a constitutive reading, a reading of the texts and of the
readings that are implied within. But this doubling is not an identity
between two readings or two writings. One could say that one has
here a problem of hermeneutics in general, and not only of historicist
or historical hermeneutics. Be it a historical past that is read and writ-
ten as a prefiguration of a future that is going to arrive, or be it a text
that is read and interpreted as a mode of signification that anticipates
and governs its own meaning: that is not the same structure with the
same problems as that which is at play when a historical past or a
series of texts (the texts of German idealism) is read and written as if
it was a prefiguration or a signification that has arrived at its fulfill-
ment or its meaning. It is the decalage-a temporal decalage-be-
tween writing and reading that comes to light in this doubling, and it
is this that is one of the profoundest lessons of Szondi's works. If
hermeneutics is founded upon identification or, if not identification,
at least correspondence between writing and reading, it is a founda-
136
tion that is going to reveal itself in each case as a necessary and
governing fiction, be it of the philosophy of history or be it of inter-
pretation or of exegesis more strictly-they are, the two, two faces of
the same activity or, rather, attempt at comprehension. If my posi-
tions risk founding historicity (of texts) in historicism (of interpreta-
tions), I would not want to acknowledge this without affirming the
inverse, that is, that historicism and the philosophy of history are also
founded in historicity, which is in turn founded in temporality-as
Heidegger demonstrated in Sein und Zeit.
This question of the mode of signifying of whatever text, be it
of H61derlin or of someone else, this is at least in part exactly the
question that I wanted to pose when I made the allusion to Schlegel,
that is, to the fragment on the Vorgef(hl ohne Nachsatz where it is
precisely a question of a negative meaning. For it is, in my opinion, as
if, across Szondi's lectures, the mode of that signification called
dialectic-although he ought to be conscious of this question of
negativity-this mode of signification partaking of or across negation
is scarcely touched upon at all in a reflexive sense. Now that was not
Szondi's project, I certainly grant that. But it is now that one
can-especially with the superb work of Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy-reread those fragments that would speak, perhaps, of
another meaning, of another mode of signifying: can one use a word
like "negify" as a verb for the production of something, especially of a
meaning? At least it is more complex than only saying that there is a
position, there is a negation, and then there is a mediation between
the two. Finally, I would only want to say that the texts in this chain
that "signifies" a "dialectical" history of idealism, they also have
significations precisely concerning your question of the mode of
signification. This is above all the case with Schlegel but also with
H61derlin. But to recongize this it is necessary to think Nachsatz in a
non-Hegelian sense, as reading and writing that do not fulfill or
sublate any writing. And it is necessary to read H6lderlin-not
without Hegel, but with and within another Hegel, another reading of
Hegel.
137
CriticalRelation
Peter Szondi's Studies on Celan
Thomas Fries
translated by James G. Hughes

die wilderndeUberzeugungdass
dies anderszu sagen sei als so
In two letters written to Max Horkheimer in December of 1936
and January of 1937, Walter Benjamin confronts the offensive tactic
of the newsstand display with the defensive strategy of the strongbox:
Here you must confront head-on the fact that you
point out. To wit: what will be decisive in the long run
for the safe-guarding and transmission of science
and art will be small groups. In reality, it is not yet
time to expose on the newsstands what we believe to
have in hand (and who knows, we may not be totally
wrong); rather, it seems time to envision an absolute-
ly secure retreat (eine bombensichere Unter-
bringung). Perhaps this is where the dialectic of the
matter resides: to grant to truth, which is anything
but perfectly fitted, a secure place, shaped as simply
as a strongbox.'
139

The validity of this prophecy will escape no one-a validity which
characterizes many of Benjamin's predictions from the late 1920s on.
One might immediately object that the defensive strategy (the strong-
box), proposed early in 1937 in the face of imminent danger, seems
out of place today when, apparently, so many possibilities for free ac-
tivity are available. Today where does one find the danger which Ben-
jamin faced? Is it still the same danger, not that belonging to others,
but our own? Is the free time we are granted nothing more than a
reprieve? The identity of the rescue effort corresponds to that of the
danger: it is only if we recognize that, in the Benjamin text, it is a ques-
tion of us, that the critic's desperate battle leaves us with a remnant
of hope. From this point of view, I feel justified in opening a discus-
sion of this defensive strategy, a strategy which I consider to have
been examined thoroughly, but rarely thematized, not only by Ben-
jamin, but also by Adorno, Celan and Szondi.
In the letter dated December 24, 1936, on the occasion of
Horkheimer's essay on Theodor Haecker, Benjamin attests to
Horkheimer "the firm resolution of someone who resolves henceforth
to speak German."2 In the context of the letter, speaking German
clearly involves "the dismantling of philosophical terminology'3, the
abandonment not only of the terminology transmitted from one era to
another, but also all scientific terminology, in order to return to
"everyday language." Benjamin sees the danger that such a pro-
cedure presents to the other sciences, but, in philosophy, this pro-
cess, the materialist dialectic dictated by "tactic" seems to offer at
least a temporary advantage. Why, then, "tactic"? And why the
deconstruction which is a sort of by-product of this tactic? One is
almost reminded of the of the difficult situation of the materialist
dialectician who demands-and this demand is essential-the
politicizing of philosophical affirmation, and one is tempted to under-
stand deconstruction as secularization: an annexation of
philosophical thought to the universal thought included in "the
treasure-trove of language" (Sprachschatz), an abandonment of the
elitist position. Hence there is a new determination of positions in the
texture of this treasure which has always existed-a texture which of-
fers an immediate refuge to thought in danger.
It (materialist dialectic) thus endows thought with a
certain assurance in repartee (Schlagfertigkeit), the
consciousness of which grants a serenity and a
superiority impervious to provocation. (B, p. 726)
Thus is derived a secondary advantage for materialist thought: the ob-
vious assurance of knowing one is secure in the heart of a universal
pensee/parole.
One almost seems to hear the linguistic version of the long
familiar desire to politicize (understood as a universalization) philo-
sophical thinking-with all its well-known a priori. Benjamin, however,
insists on talking about tactics, and not strategy, tactics which seem
to contradict the aforementioned strategy of the strongbox where
140

totality can clearly only survive in isolated parcels, hermetically
sealed. This is why Benjamin in his letter of January 31, 1937, extends
the idea, basing himself on several of Horkheimer's objections:
In my last letter I touched lightly on a subject which I
should only have approached in a discussion. A sup-
pression of philosophical terminology cannot really
enter the picture... but I insist upon saying that
there is a use of philosophical terminology which
feigns a richness that does not exist. This usage ac-
cepts terminology without criticism. On the other
hand, concrete dialectical analysis of each object of
research includes a critique of the categories upon
which this object has been dependent in a prior layer
of reality and thought.
(B, p. 727)
Deconstruction of parole thus widens enough to include even the
criticism of categories; "to speak German" (see note 2) is thus
equivalent to questioning the supposed evidence of the language.
Hence, general comprehension is not a decisive criterion.
But concrete dialectical analysis of course includes
a certain transparency in details. A general compre-
hension of the whole would obviously constitute
another text. (Die Allgemeinverstandlichkeit des
Ganzen steht freilich auf einem andern Blatt.)
(B, p. 727f.)
This brings us back to the passage which served as our point of de-
parture: it will be small groups that, in the long run, will decide the
subsequent existence of the totality, the transmission of science and
culture depends on the uncertain fate of these hermetic groupings.
What Benjamin describes here is nothing other than the out-
line of a theory of esoteric discourse: restrict general comprehension
in order to avoid the effect peculiar to general abstraction-lack of
criticism, erosion and prefiguration-in order not to simulate any
totality where there cannot be one; in exchange a transparency in
details, in the individual image, a transparency which is guaranteed
by the epistemological recourse to the rhetoric of the parole. Rhetoric
is the medium of transparency, but is also the occasion of critical re-
evaluation.
However, it could be objected that what we have here is a
double strategy, since Benjamin on the one hand is aiming at a
discourse which is conscious of itself, and on the other hand, at a pro-
tagonist and guardian of this discourse: those small groups. But what
is striking is that Benjamin does not separate these two, he includes
them in the same conception, in the same speculative grid. It is also
striking that he only accords a chance to the detailed part, smooth
and resistant on the outside, transparent and full of contradictions of
141

the truth on the inside. This meshing of the epistemological/philo-
sophical/linguistic and the political/organizing characterizes what we
call "rhetoric,"even though the tendency to ignore this juxtaposition,
to consider the two aspects separately, has always marked the
history of rhetoric. That is why we may comfortably speak of a single
rhetorical strategy. It must be called defensive, provisionally at least,
because it rejects two postulates (general comprehension and align-
ment with a mass movement), the strongbox can no doubt subsist as
such (survive catastrophe)-but will there be anyone to open it? Will
its internal transparency have any meaning for the others? This ques-
tion is as necessary as it is insoluble, its feeling of bitter uncertainty
belongs inevitably to esoteric discourse. We can even wonder if a
strategy that remains so uncertain regarding its desired effect is
really worthy of the name; clearly, only if, faced with this uncertainty
at the time of reduction to cellular units, it succeeds in including the
fate of the totality in itself by the strength of memory.
A Celan poem is surely a reduced unit of this type: a dialogic
unit originating from larger entities (the images in the poem for ex-
ample), but also a unit "under way" towards a small group (for exam-
ple, the dialogic relation between Szondi and Celan which manifests
itself in the interpretation). In the Bremen Discourse, Celan says
about this poem:
Insofar as it is, yes, a form of apparition of the
language and therefore dialogic in essence, a poem
can be a bottle thrown into the sea, abandoned to the
hope-often frail certainly-that it can be, one day,
somewhere, picked up on a beach, the beach of the
heart perhaps. In this sense, the poems are also
under way: they are moving towards something.
Towards what? Towards some open place, a place to
occupy, towards a you which can be invoked,
towards a reality to be invoked.'
The image of the bottle at sea that Celan uses for the poem recalls
Benjamin's strongbox: the hermetic seal, a certain situation of
distress encountered by the person who closes the receptacle (the
sender), the complete uncertainty as to the future destiny of the
message, the solidity of the seal which can decide this destiny, the
radical temporal and spatial distance between the sender and the
unknown receiver. It is in view of the latter that the poem projects a
certain reality: projection and project at the same time.
Does this image leave space for the critic? Is he, the unknown
"future receiver"? Will it be he who opens this hermetically sealed
receptacle? Probably not. When we read Szondi's Studies on Celan,5
we have rather the impression that he must share the situation of
distress and that he can only, while shedding light on its inner
transparency, close and seal the message of the poem more firmly.To
tell the truth, Celan's poem seems to need illumination, seems to de-
mand it, and since a posteriori it seems almost impossible for us to
142

examine Celan's poem without evoking Szondi's commentary at the
same time, we have to ask ourselves what the nature of this unity be-
tween the text and the commentary is. The context developed from a
"defense of parole" seems to me to be very profitable in this respect.
Thus I would like to draw inspiration from the themes which
Szondi's three Studies on Celan note in exergue in the epigraph: Con-
stancy (Bestandigkeit), Intelligibility(Verstandligkeit), Indifference (In-
differenz). What strikes one immediately is that Szondi avoids any
precipitous generalization of these three notions, even though the
subtitles of the essays might suggest something of the sort (poetics
of constancy, intelligibility of the poem)6 and even though we can easi-
ly allow ourselves to be tempted, these notions are rigorously inte-
grated in the constellation of the poem and are never treated other-
wise. The poetics of permanence is not a program which could arise
from an analysis of the translation of a Celan poem (although this
analysis does give us certain suggestions).7 The intelligibility of the
modern poem is in no way demonstrated through the reading of
"Engf0hrung" (although obvious reasons for this are presented), and
"Celan's fundamental experience.., of an indifference" (S, p. 397)
can in no way be separated from the poem "Du liegst im grossen
Gelausche" (although it might seem familiar to us in many respects).
Constancy
In his analysis Szondi emphasizes that Celan's translation of
Shakespeare's sonnet 105 does not so much celebrate constancy but,
instead, is itself constant.8
Constancy is not simply signified here (kein bloss

Gemeintes), it is a property of the verse itself. To that
extent, Celan's language speaks not about some-
thing, but itself speaks. In speaking, it speaks about
things and language, by the manner in which it
speaks (Insofern spricht Celans Sprache nicht von
etwas, sondern selbst. Sie spricht von den Dingen
und des Sprache, indem sie, durch die Art in der die,
spricht). (S, p. 332)
While Shakespeare celebrates constancy and presents it in different
lexical variations, Celan's translation is "the realization of constancy
in verse."
However the description of this realization leads to various
complications. On one hand, the unchanged flow of the verse is an ex-
pression of constancy, just as the metric form excludes straying ("[er]
schweift mir nicht umher", 1.8); on the other hand, the return of the
identical, repetition, expresses a constancy which suspends the flow
of the river,stops it. And yet even this returnof the identical, as Szon-
di shows, is the identity of what in reality is non-identical-created
identity, rediscovered by the poem-constancy therefore as the indif-
ference of the different: "my verse. . .leaves out difference" (11.7-8).
143

In both senses of the word, what we have is constancy of the non-
constant, the identity of the non-identical. The strength of these op-
positions is fully maintained in Celan's poem; and only the realization
of these oppositions oepns the possibility of critical discourse. The
concentration, the dissimulation of these contradictions in the parole,
in the verse, in the juxtaposition of different voices, however, gives the
poem the polished surface which protects it from meprise-even if
well-meaning-and defines it as a reality existing in itself.
This constancy also presents an intertextual aspect. It not only
leaves an imprint on the Celan text, it also, in a way, unites Celan's
translation with Shakespeare's original. Here, Szondi rightly invokes
the Benjamin essay "TheTask of the Translator"with its key notion of
intentio (which is best left untranslated).9
Between the translation and the original lies the
modification of what, in Benjamin's treatise, is called
"die Intention auf die Sprache," that in which a trans-
lation not only can, but must differ from the original,
in the way it signifies (die Art des
Meinens)."8
(S, p. 325)
Thus, necessarily, translation is also interpretation; it explains-and
this specifies Szondi's commentary in an impressive manner-by its
own procedure the different procedure of its precursor, of the original.
The relationship between the translator and the author of the original
text thus resembles the somewhat strange relationship which, in the
Shakespeare sonnet, exists between the poet and his unknown friend
W. H., the subject of the poem. The qualities already presented (of the
friend celebrated) correspond to the qualities sought for the act of the
poem itself, and this transformation is evidenced in the line which
constitutes the main axis of the poem (1.7):
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence,
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
(11.5-8)
It is interesting to note that Goethe, for his part, in his discourse Zum
Schakespears Tag (October 14, 1771) reduces his reading of
Shakespeare to a similar denominator: "We bear in ourselves the seed
of the merits which we know how to appreciate." Thus, it would cer-
tainly be ludicrous to want to seek out this W. H. among
Shakespeare's circle of acquaintances; but neither is it enough to
qualify him simply as the author's subject, in which case the irredici-
ble elan of the message would be neglected, an 6lan which is within
the seed. It is evident that this friend may be a friend still to
come-and it is within this expectation that the Celan translation is
inscribed, which, for its part, opens out into the Szondi commentary.
Hence, this poem of Celan's is, in the proper sense of the Benjamin
144

essay, "the translation" of Shakespeare's sonnet; it is close to that
almost impossible "uniting into one" (in Eins bringen), of what in truth
can only be separated:
'Schdn, gut und treu' so oft getrennt, geschieden.

In Einem will ich drei zusammenschmeiden. (11.
11.13-14)
Thus it achieves, paradoxically, a relationship with the other whose
name remains opaque (W.H.)-or is only too clear (Shakespeare). This
relationship is named constancy. Three qualities are within it as if
"welded together"-indiscernibly associated-three qualities which
we in fact can only consider when separated: aesthetics,
epistemology, and morality. And yet only their association protects
the poem and the relationship with the other, the relationship created
by him. In it Celan's verse knows itself to be secure: "in constancy, its
there my verse remains secure" (1.7).
Must one call this relationship with the other "friendship"-
and seek in this friendship the cement which binds the little group?
One hesitates, because the expression is worn, imprecise, dangerous.
Nevertheless, Celan introduces it ("my friend," 1.5)in his poem. Cer-
tainly, he avoids everything which could recall a certain person, and if
it is possible to think friendship in this same impersonal way, outside
of time, the expression can very easily maintain its true power of ir-
radiation.
Intelligibility
What is striking in esoteric discourse is the unintelligibility
which obviously must prevent the unauthorized access of the profane
to the work. At first glance, even the Celan poem gives the impression
that it is only addressed to an initiated elite. It is quite different in the
Szondi study. That seems entirely graspable, and thus, through it the
Celan poem attains unsuspected intelligibility-that which Szondi an-
nounces in the sub-title-program of his essay on "Engf0hrung."'0Is
esotericism then a barricade which the interpreter can once again
push aside?
Szondi does not mean the intelligibility of the modern poem in
the sense of general intelligibility, but the particular intelligibility of
this poem. He shows that in the texture of "Engf0hrung," there are
precise indications related to his own reading, and that in the textual
landscape, we must orient ourselves with the help of these indica-
tions. This orientation is not (or not only) what we imagine while
reading, because, from the beginning of the poem, the cognitive and
imaginative speculation inherent in each reading is put in question:
Lies nicht mehr-schau! Read no mote-look!
Schau nicht mehr-geh! Look no more-go!
(1,2)
145

"Engfuhrung"thus becomes a poetic reality in itself, a text "which no
longer subjects itself to reality, but which conceives and establishes
itself as reality." (S, 348-49. Cf. above.) Szondi stresses that we must
not inquire about the "sense" of certain precise notions, but that we
should "read their functions" in the poem. This functional reading
also becomes a dialogic discourse, since Szondi wants to abandon,
(in a consequential manner), all interpretation at a higher level. The
different voices of "Engf0hrung"are therefore qua voices completely
preserved, polysemy is not reduced-rather, in its meticulous un-
folding is founded the basis for what is called the precision of the
poem (S, 389. Cf. above). The polysemy produced by language
therefore unveils, but only through a radical antimony, a certain con-
stellation of meaning, a constellation which Szondi's commentary
does not thematize, and with good reason, but which here, by a return
to quotation, he only reinserts in a reinforced way, in the poem, as pro-
ject.
Szondi's commentary follows the Celan poem very scrupulous-
ly, line by line. He exposes himself totally to the poem's text-
landscape and-wholly in the sense of Benjamin's letter-concen-
trates on the transparency of detail, tries to assemble at least the
elements elucidated as fragments of discourse. This commentary
thus resembles the inter-linearversion (of the sacred text) which Ben-
jamin poses as the ideal image at the end of his essay on the
translator." It is the particular quality of a text to be translatable, that
is, to contain in potential the possibility of its translation which, in the
commentary, is called intelligibility. The poem itself is in search of
this commentary; but neither in the sense of a canonical exegesis, nor
in the sense of an "approximation". With the nature of the signifying
act transformed, the elan of intentio retains all its importance, and it
follows that the commentary must maintain its distance, must realize
itself as something autonomous, "meaning differently" (anders
Meinendes), beyond the illusion of an ideal interpretation (that is why
the commentary, the possibility of commentating, can only find its
final element in a non-mediated returnto the text). This does not mean
that the commentary could enjoy an arbitrary liberty. The measure
which it is granted is the intelligibility of the poem as it has been
developed. Through it alone-a truly narrow passage-and through
its transposition, critical discourse can legitimize itself.
Up to this point we have understood the poem as a reality
which is self-conceiving and self-founding, and we have discussed in-
telligibility in rapport with the relationship between the poem and the
reader, an intelligibility which is applied in the poem itself. Commen-
tary, in this description, is what "springs forth" from the poem. Is the
intelligibility of a poem then relative only to the commentary which
follows it? By no means. It is precisely by thinking this way that one
would misconstrue the Celan poem as well as the Szondi commen-
tary, and would express a weak, misplaced optimism.'2 The in-
telligibility of the Celan poem begins in fact, in the first place, else-
where; it turns towards those whom the poem addresses only as
"they," from whom only a cry "hosanna," is transmitted and for
146

whom, in a vague and uncertain manner, it poses the word "hope".
For them, in the poem, it is a question of intelligibility.
Der Ort, wo sie lagen, The place where they lay,
er hat it has
einen Namen-er hat a name-it has
Keinen. Sie lagen nicht none. They did not lie
dort Etwas there. Something
lag zwischen ihnen. Sie lay between them. They
sahn nicht hindurch. did not see through it.
Sahn nicht, nein, Did not see, no

redeten von spoke of
Worten. Keines words. None
erwachte, der awoke
Schlaf sleep
kam Ober sie. came over them.
Ich bins, ich, It is I, I

ich lag zwischen euch, I lay between you,
ich war I was
offen, war open, was
hdrbar, ich tickte euch audible, I ticked at
zu you,
eure Atem your breath
gehorchte, ich obeyed, it
bin es noch immer, ihr is I still, and
schlaft ja. you sleep.
The entire poem struggles, through all the barriers, towards this in-
telligibility-for them, for this "they," to let them as well as us speak.
The texture of the poem shows this again and again; the finger which
touches the contours of a traumatic past (IV), the question "Who
covered it up?" (IV-V),the word which came through the night to shine
and which is sent on to the moist eye (V),the significance of what we
read in the book (VI),etc. This struggle is a result of the knowledge
that everything is still present in the most particular element of the
poem, in the language. Non-existence, the catastrophe is preserved in
the language, and fidelity to this trace liberates a hope, "driven
through narrow straights": the poem suggests that this hope is
perhaps nothing at all, but also that perhaps nothing is lost.
also so
stehn noch Tempel. Ein there are temples yet. A
Stern star
hat wohl noch Licht. probably still has light.
Nichts, Nothing,
nichts ist verloren nothing is lost.
(Vill)
147

It is impossible for the poem to abandon this hope; in the total uncer-
tainty which it feels, "it is abandoned to hope". The effort to save the
past, which Benjamin imposes on the true historian, takes place here
on the level of an obligatorily defensive struggle for speech;
everything is in the language, but covered by verbiage, illusory in-
tegrations "saturated with poison," of narrative discourse.'13 The
poem, like a glove, through its "saying differently," turns its interior
towards the exterior-but in such a way that only one who has passed
through the infinite contraction traced by imminent loss will have ac-
cess to it.
The importance of the Szondi commentary is that its move-
ment is inscribed precisely in the field of this almost impossible
hope-by reducing its own despair to a single sentence. It thus con-
firms that the effort to comprehend the poem cannot be separated
from the search, in the poem itself, for the intelligibility of its own ex-
terior. This exterior refuses to accept any name-unless one wishes
to abide by the final version (VIII)which is related-also-to the
historical past which we profess to know. But this ultimate version, a
pure negativity, also marks the place of the final rejection of reading,
of almost absolute non-intelligibility.'4What remains is "smoke-soul"
(VII),the atrocious reduction of the last obstinate wish of the con-
demned (to leave a trace), degraded by the executioners to an ab-
solute minimum ("tomorrow, like smoke, you will snake from the
chimney into the air") (S, pp. 390-98). Only identification with the
search for this soul of smoke justifies the commentary.
In-difference
Contraryto the two essays which deal with Celan's translation

of Shakespeare's sonnet 105 and "Engf0hrung," the study, "Eden"
(apparently unfinished), on the Celan poem "Du liegst im grossen
Gelausche," raised violent protests.15 In the first part of this work,
Szondi explains the somewhat biographical basis of the poem to
which the first edition seems to allude to by an indication of the time
and place (Berlin, December 22/23, 1967).16 Known to Szondi alone,
this "biographical connection" (S, p. 395) is presented as a necessary
condition of the interpretation which Szondi furnishes in the second
part. Such a procedure, and there the criticism began, recalls the
positivistic reductions and the biographical machinations against
which Szondi, as well as the tradition of which he acknowledges
himself to be the heir, continually fought. This attitude is all the more
remarkable since Szondi suggests that a relationship of this type
could be valid for other Celan poems as well (S, p. 395). This
biographical encoding, which personifies the exterior, seems in fact
as unacceptable as much for the poet as for the interpreter.
The Szondi text foresees these questions, but it can only-of
necessity, I believe-answer them partially. It seems to consider
above all as its duty the communication of this relationship, while re-
jecting the presumed consequences that the latter might suggest:
148

This biographical report ... must not be the basis
for.., any interpretation of the poem. It would be
better to ask whether it could in any way serve as a
foundation for it.... One should ask whether the ex-
ternal influences (Fremdbestimmungen), the connec-
tions with the real are not counterbalanced by an
auto-determination: an interdependence of the in-
dividual moments in the poem which does not leave
those references to the real unaffected. (S, p. 395)
It is also true, however, that recognition of this interdependence is
more or less impossible without the biographical information. I don't
think it is worthwhile to argue about other possible deductive connec-
tion as Gadamer does. But it is certainly true that "the poem, for its
part, wants us to know everything, to learn everything that it
knows-and never forget it."'7The poem therefore needs a commen-
tary of a very extrinsic sort; it should be able to rely on the
biographical report.
Now the fact that Celan gives an indication of place and time
in the first edition18 could mean that the poem is only addressed to a
single reader. But, according to the testimony of Szondi, who by the
way never makes a display of his personal friendship with Celan, it
also arises, at least partially, from a dialogue which, without Szondi's
voice, would remain incomplete. In the poem itself we hardly find any
traces of this dialogue. Thus, the "you" at the beginning of the poem
in no way refers to the dialogue; it moves off and loses itself in the ob-
jectivity of the poem. After the original incomprehension, the voice of
the poem now seems to lock itself in a solitude understood, but
definitive. Szondi's thesis would appear to corroborate this, namely
that the "determination of the poem by the background experience
had to give way to an autonomy constituted by the immanent logic of
the poem (Appendix to "Eden," in S, p. 430.)
The fact remains that this reading flagranty contradicts the
methodological instructions of the "Engf(hrung" interpretation (the
poem which "produces itself," containing virtually all the elements
necessary to its reading). I shall refrain from trying to explain this
seeming contradiction which is not philological in nature: the space
which separates "the immanent logic of the poem" from "the
background experience" is found again in the heart of the poem, in a
question which is not asked and whose extreme solution could fill the
gap.19This gap is the double blank space at the end of the poem:
Nichts Nothing
stockt. stops.
(11.13-14)
In a subsequent fragment Szondi comments, "that nothing stops
makes the poem stop (S, p. 429, Appendix). Opposed to this stop is
the violence of two isolated sentences:
149

Der Mann ward zum Sieb, The Man became a sieve,
die Frau the woman,
musste schwimmen, die had to swim, the
Sau sow,
for sich, fOrkeinen, for herself, for no one,
for jeden- for everyone-
(11.9-11)
These two lines are detached from the biographical discourse (which
refers us to the figures Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and
made unrecognizable as quotations,20 but they do contain-precisely
in this isolation-the event in all its concentrated and unused force.
The replacement of the biographical discourse (narrative)by the im-
mediate impact of isolated speech characterizes here the decisive ef-
fort of the poem (this is also why it is necessary, for the poem, to com-
prehend its elements from the position of the individual; thus, the
poem will always depend on a certain "rapport").
It is precisely this violent individualization which is, according
to Peter Handke, at the base of poetic thought. It gives this poetic
thought its deconstructive force and, thus, its power over the future
("seine begriffsauflosende und damit zukunfstmichtige Kraft"). It
necessarily places poetic thought in opposition to the discourse "of
routine dialectics" and explains "the inability to lead a political ex-
istence."21
This movement is repeated in the poem. Beginnning with "the
intense listening" (das grosse Gelausche), fragments of sentences
are suddenly articulated up to the lines already mentioned: "The man
became a sieve, the woman, had to swim, the sow." The violence of in-
difference is concentrated here, on the back-drop of the events of
1919. It is still a question of the indifference of people, that speech
which makes the same event repeat itself continually: for her, for no
one, for everyone. If in fact Rosa Luxemburg had to swim for
everybody, it is the task of the poem to give back to her her own death,
to "stop" this intolerable repetition. The different meanings of the
name Eden deployed by the poem suggest, in fact, what Szondi
established without commentary: a scandalous connection between
the Christmas holiday and the subject of assassination, which cer-
tainly comes from the repetitive character of the holiday, where the
thoughtless promise of an Eden-that doesn't take into account
those who died for everyone (for no one, for them), which forgets them
in an indifferent repetition-is connected to a murderous action. The
new Eden building, which was the antechamber of Rosa Luxemburg
and KarlLiebknecht's hell, is still only a caricature of this post-factum
violence.
In this indifference-and thanks to it alone-is also contained
the slightest possibility of not losing loss, of bringing it, on the con-
trary, within reach. This can explain why Celan, contrary to so many
others, emphasizes the enrichment of language arising from its
passage through "the thousand profound obscurities of murderous
discourse":
150

Accessible, close and safeguarded, among so many
losses, there remained this alone: language.
It, language was safeguarded, yes, despite
everything. But it then had to traverse its own lack of
responses, had to traverse a terrible muteness,
traverse the thousand profound obscurities of
murderous discourse. It crossed, and did not find
words for what was happening, but it did cross and
was finally able to reappear in the light of day, enrich-
ed by all that.22
The "terrible muteness" of this quotation is found once again in the
double white space of the poem which we spoke about already. The
impact is thus achieved precisely in this void. This void reminds us, as
does the permanence of the language in the passage just cited, of the
white stone in "EngfOrung"on which falls the shadow of grass-
letters, but which does not cut off the course of speech and which has
no response for what it contains. The configuration of the poem
makes this void "speak," but the speech which comes out does not
open out onto the prospect of another discourse: it stops what has
forever been said.
Thus, it must be admitted that we find ourselves in an impasse
from which it seems difficult to escape. The fact that Szondi, in a hid-
den way, joins to this end, where his last text stops, to a kind of con-
fession23 which is not found elsewhere confirms it, for this confession
is born from loss and identifies with its object via the dying subject.
The poem itself must remain indifferent to the aporia. It cannot simply
open itself to the reader if it wishes to offer itself at the same time as
a shelter for the speech of the lost. It must necessarily put the reader
at a distance. Szondi has indeed respected this distance-even in his
description of Celan's stay in Berlin-and if there is something which
fully justifies his position as privileged reader, it is his own procedure,
enclosed in the poem itself, his identification with the defensive
action of the poem.
University of Zurich
NOTES
1 Letter of January 31, 1937, in Briefe, II, ed. G. Scholem and Th. W. Adorno
(Frankfurt,1978), p. 728. Hereafter cited in the text as B.
2 "To speak German" in the sense of "speaking in a clear and simple manner,
without beating around the bush, openly expressing one's criticism" (B, p. 726).
3 The expression is quoted by Benjamin in his letter.
4 A "Speech on the occasion of receiving the literarypraise of the Free Hansa City of
Bremen" in Ausgewahlte Gedichte (Frankfurt,1968), pp. 127-29.
5 Celan-Studien (Frankfurt, 1972), reprinted in Schriften, II (Frankfurt, 1977),
pp. 319-98. Hereafter cited in the text as S.
151

6 See, for example, Szondi's essay on "EngfOrhung"reprinted in this volume
pp. 231. The subtitle of the German version of the essay is, "Onthe Intelligibility
of the Modern Poem." [ed. note].
7 Szondi's original essay on "Engf0hrung"was in fact written in French and ana-
lyzed a French translation of Celan's poem (Strette in the French verson) [ed. note].
8 "Poetry of Constancy-Poetik der Bestandigkeit: Celan Ubertragung von
Shakespeares Sonnett 105, Schriften, II,pp. 320-44. First published in Sprache im
technischen Zeitalter, 37 (1971), 9-25.
9 "Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers, Vorwortzur deutschen Ubertragungvon Charles
Baudelaire Tableaux parisiens," in Gesammelte Schriften, IV/1,(Frankfurt,1971),
pp. 9-21.
10 "Durch die Enge gef0hrt: Versuch Ober die Verst&ndlichkeit des modernen
Gedichts, Schriften, II,pp. 345-89. The French version of the essay was published
in Critique,288, p. 387.
11 "Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers," p. 21.
12 In this respect, HarmutEngelhardt's critique ("ZurMethode der Celdn-Studienvon
Peter Szondi," Neue Rundschau 84, 1973, pp. 166-68),which reproaches Szondi for
subscribing to the "work immanent (Werkimmanenz)theory, seems to base itself
on a very limited reading. A more striking naivetd is revealed by John E. Jackson's
judgment that, "the attempt to decode on the extra-linguistic level of the poem has
been abandoned a priori; this leads to an analysis which is hardly satisfactory
although methodologically pure ("ZurCelan Forschung," Text und Kritik,53/54,
1977, p. 82).
13 See Harold Weinreich, "BruderCelan," FrankfurterAlIgemeine Zeitung, Nov. 15,
1975.
14 Th. W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt,1973), p. 355.
15 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Was muss der Leser Wissen? Aus Anlass von Peter
Szondis 'Zueinem Gedicht von Paul Celan' [Eden],"Neue ZOricher7?eitung,5 Nov.,
1972, p. 53; reprinted in Wer bin ich und wer bist Du, pp. 123-29; Hartmut
Engelhardt, op. cit.; Wolfgang Drews, "Intention auf die Sprache: Peter Szondis
Studien zu Paul Celan's Lyrik,"SOddentsche Zeitung, 2/3 Dec., 1972; Dorothea
Rapp, "Du leigst im grossen Gelausche," Die Drei (43), 1973, 454.
16 Hommage fOrPeter Huchel, zum 3. April 1968 (Munich, 1968), p. 16.
17 Neue ZOricherZeitung, 5 Nov., 1972.
18 "Thus it is not the suppression of this indication [in the later edition] that is worth
noting, but its retention in the Huchel-Festschrift.... So this omission, by which
access to the text is made more difficult... should not be interpreted as an
erasure of traces which would allow the rediscovery in the text of the cir-
cumstances of its origin. But, in fact it is." (S, p. 391).
19 "Yet,his death cannot possibly be understood by completely separating it from his

work ... ,this abandonment to objectivity. Szondi's passion for the work had con-
sequences in his biography",Dieter Heinrich,"Elegie und Einsicht:ZumTode von
Peter Szondi," Die Zeit, 19 Nov., 1971;cf. Rudolf Hartung,"Mitihnen den Tod teilen:
Peter Szondis Celan-Studien, FrankfurterAlIgemeine Zeitung, May 12, 1973.
20 Der Mord an Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht:Documentation eines

politischen Verbrechen,ed. E. and H. Hannover(Frankfurt,1967), pp. 99, 129.
152

21 "Die Geborgenheit unterSchddeldecke." A speech on the occasion of the award of
the BOchnerprize. Given before the Akadamie f(OrSprache und Dichtung in Darm-
stadt. SOddeutsche Zeitung, Dec. 27/28, 1973.
22 Bremen Discourse, loc. cit.
23 "Finally,the connection [between the Christmas and assassination themes] is ex-
panded by the triple signification of the adjective of color associated with the ap-
ple stakes: they are red because they are so painted (along with green, silver and
gold-the main colors of a Christmas decor). But red is at the same time the color
of blood; meathooks turn red as do stakes after an execution and red is the color of
the flag for which Rosa Luxemburgand KarlLiebknechtgave their lives" (Schriften
II,p. 398).
153

Discussion
translated by James G. Hughes
Jacques Derrida: A few brief and scattered remarks. First, it is dif-

ficult to speak in a colloquium, and also it is difficult to speak after
having heard what was said about Celan. I shall hazard only a few,
scattered remarks about what was said at the end, about the stop. It
remains very puzzling and very necessary. I shall compare it (and I
think this parallel is not, will not be shocking, regarding Celan) with
what Blanchot, a great reader of Celan, says about the stop; not what
he says about it, but what he recites about it in a story entitled
"L'arrdtde mort," where precisely "arrdt"(stop/decree) plays between
its current meaning in "arrotde mort," which signifies a sentence that
decides upon death through an act of langage and the non-stop (non-
arret), for, in the text story, one sees that "arrdt de mort" also
means-but I do not want to go into it-the non-stop-of life, death
stopped, that is to say, suspended in order that life continue or begin
again, in order that a certain resurrection take place. The paradox of a
stop which stops without stopping and which only stops on the condi-
tion of not stopping, being of value here for language, for what you
said about langue perhaps introduces us to a significance of the text
or the poem which hesitates or rather, which doesn't hesitate, which
overflows the alternative between permanence, non-permanence, dif-
ference, non-difference, etc., in such a way that this stop doubles, car-
155
This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 03:58:36 UTC
ries away with it this very opposition-with which you began and
which builds the whole classical problematic in which we are often
enclosed, that which you evoked in the beginning, between, let's say,
the structure of the strongbox and that of the newsstand. If a text
must be either a strongbox, a bottle in the sea if you prefer, or a
newsstand, at that moment a series of paradoxes, reading im-
possibilities, etc., follows. Finally the whole critical problematic is
ultimately inscribed in this alternative. But if a text in its textual struc-
ture is something on the order of a stop, of what I would call the
resistance of a stop, it would be a newsstand and a strongbox at the
same time. If it is at the same time hermetically sealed (something
that is not something, a residue which is nothing, something that has
no content, which is not a substance, which does not allow itself to be
understood in the categories of classical anthology), a
residue-which doesn't exist-if this residue is at the same time
hermetic like a strongbox, secreting itself like something to be
preserved, if it has the structure of preservation (because behind all
this problematic, there is the problem of preserving that you evoked at
the end in the same sense that Heidegger uses it), if it is something
which in order to be preserved must be sealed like a bottle cast into
the sea or like a strongbox, but at the same time, offered for a reading,
carrying in itself the advertisement of the reading act, that is, the
newsstand, if it must be both at the same time, at that moment, in the
reading operation (f don't know if that is the correct word here or not,
but in any case, in this word I would neither place or understand any
critical, hermeneutical, or philosophical operation), something is put
in relationship with that-and this is probably what Szondi wanted to
do with these last poems by Celan-with that in the text which is both
strongbox and newsstand at the same time. At once hermetically
sealed around its secret, and possibly its biographical secret (we will
come back to this in a little while), and offered, open to a certain
reading. At that point, what engages itself in the opening would not
desire the breaking open (effraction) of the strongbox, that is, an
opening such that afterward the key is given and anybody at all can
get in, but rather the desire for another thing which would amount, in
fact, to opening the strongbox, but in a way that would leave it closed.
Well, what I'm saying doesn't make any sense!-an opening that
would leave the hermetic structure intact, without sinking into
obscurantism, etc., that would carry out all its philological, critical
work, etc., that would go as far as possible in opening the strongbox,
while taking into account the fact that the very structure of the text, of
the residue of the text, is a strongbox. He [Szondi] wanted a strongbox
to remain, wanted to leave a bottle in the sea. At that moment, the
respect, the violent respect, if we may call it that, the violent fidelity
regarding the strongbox consists in leaving the strongbox intact as
strongbox, at the very moment when we have not yet ceased opening
it. That means, and this is why I hesitate to call it reading, that I write
another strongbox. I lock this strongbox in another strongbox which
will hold the key to the first one, but a key which can only be made use
of if, in a way, the other strongbox preserves this key, if the combina-
156
tion, if ciphers are added to ciphers in the movement of deciphering.
When you said (I jotted down the formulation then) that the critical
operation might run the risk of sealing in the secret more securely,
etc.... I wonder if this operation which consists in sealing more
securely should be recorded as a failure of criticism? In some cases
obviously, but that would be a weak operation. By reading, one can
make the text more obscure than before, add nothing, in other words,
lose it, do nothing for its preservation, but there can be, in reading, the
strongest sort of writing, that which at once preserves, does
everything to open and preserve the text, to make the largest news-
stand and the largest strongbox possible, because I don't believe in
the strongbox-newsstand opposition. At that point, the operation is
not necessarily a failure; perhaps it's not a success either. Is it evalu-
ation in terms of failure/success which will furnish the criteria? And
what institution will decide what is a success or a failure? What tradi-
tion? Here we are engaged in an operation, a very, very puzzling story.
If one begins in this direction (I am only pointing it out vaguely and
obscurely), I wonder if, for example, what you said at the end about
Celan indicating a locus in a poem must immediately be situated in
relation to the exterior of the poem. This is the question I have tried to
pose for a while now: where and how is this opposition between the
poem's interior and exterior going to function? Are we just going to be
content to say, basically, there is the interior of the poem, which is
that thing written there, and that everything in life that seems to be a
secret, for example, between Celan and Szondi, etc. is the exterior of
the poem? There, I believe that if the consequences are rigorously
drawn from what we have begun to think concerning "restance"
(residue), the interior and exterior of the poem is something very dif-
ficult to determine, which is not without consequence for the entire
classical problematic that organizes itself according to this division.
When a poet inscribes the date or place of the poem, and even his own
signature, the topos of this inscription is very difficult to fix. It is very
difficult to say whether it is inside or outside the poem, and at this
point the biographical, a theory of dating, of signature, etc., of localiz-
ing this hard-to-place topos, such a theory must naturally consider
what is commonly called the biographical as part of the text (in its
own manner, a heterogenous manner, obviously, a specific manner).
From that point on, the secret which Szondi could claim to know
about such and such a Celan poem, and on the basis of which he
begins a reading, etc., should not cause scandal. There is always an
address in each poem, a poem is dedicated in one way or another. And
this address is at one and the same time secret, it is always secret in
every way, and its secret offers something to read, it turns away from
itself, that's what langue is. As soon as this secret is inscribed in the
langue, it remains secret and it offers something to read. Therefore, I
didn't understand what was meant by this "you" (tu) that you said (I
don't know if I properly understood you at that point) functions like a
monologue. How can a "you" act as a monologue in a poem? How can
a "you" function in a poem? Basically, this is the question I would
have wanted to raise.
157
Thomas Fries: Thank you for referring to the Blanchot story. Still, I
wonder if you don't conceive "arrdt"in a manner which is too concilia-
tory. The problem is that the poem in question tells us that the stop
doesn't take place-which is intolerable-and yet it seems to take
place, in the stop of the poem. Thus, the act of the poem, its own stop-
ping, suspends the fatality of which he speaks-which could confirm
your point of view. Nevertheless, I don't see how this double negation
would result in the resurrection to which you alluded. The end of the
poem-of which we are still speaking-is not a rigorous stopping of
the current (of water); while seeking this stop, the poem can only pro-
ject it into the deep silence of this empty space which opens up just
before the end of the poem. Inorder for this stop to take place, there is
need of a kind of supplement: to "realize" the void, to plunge into the
heart of this silence.
That is why the question of the "biographical relationship"
seems important, troublesome to me. This question was first raised
on the methodological level (quasi-illegitimate information, etc.), and
if it were only that, I would happily admit that there is no need to at-
tribute too much importance to it. The fact remains that Szondi does
try, very clearly, to put this relationship aside in order to progress in
what he calls true interpretation-and that this interpretation brings it
back-this wasn't foreseen-to a biographical closure. Therefore, the
question of the biographical relationship (I don't think that it is an ac-
cident if it appears in the context of this Celan poem and this Szondi
commentary) should not be separated from this closure; it explains
the necessity of the relationship. Obviously this conclusion leads us
to an impasse, but one must also note that Szondi's methodical effort
strenuously opposes this biographical intrusion.
The newsstand-strongbox opposition, which you don't believe
in, leads us in the same direction. It was not my intention to solve the
secret of the esoteric text or to find a model which would allow us to
control it. But I wanted to show, with the two Benjamin letters, that
the hermeticism of this discourse comes from a public necessity, and
that it justifies the gesture of the discourse. All justification requires
criteria; in the case of Benjamin, this criterion is furnished by the de-
liberate exclusion of all who don't share his defensive position: the
adversary must not be able to use our discourse in any possible way.
It is this exclusion which confers on the text its resistant force, which
makes it a strongbox, and it is this which defines the small group. The
negative gesture of this exclusion, inscribed in the text, creates the
small group (and not a common ideology, a mutual comprehension). It
is from this point of view that the defensive strategy I spoke about
must be understood. I do not want to dispute the idea that the
strongbox justification can be replaced by a display of its
hermeticism-the strongbox as newsstand, if you will-but it is
precisely this integration that I wanted to attack.
Jacques Derrida:It was neither an objection to you or Benjamin. I was
saying that this opposition, which is in a way inevitable, is at the same
time not an opposition, in other words, in every text, there is
158
something of the newsstand and something of the strongbox and the
discourse about the newsstand and the strongbox constitutes itself
as a newsstand/strongbox. Yours or mine, for example. Thus, the
newsstand is not attacked or the strongbox is not attacked without
recreating this newsstand or strongbox effect. This strongbox effect
and the newsstand effect are distributed differently according to the
texts, the corpus, the situation. There one will find a group, a small
group, a whole sociopolitics of the thing, but what I mean is, that, in
the last instance, they cannot be opposed, they cannot be
dissociated. The structure of a text (in the general sense that I would
attribute to this word, which would obviously not be the same as writ-
ten, or verbal langue) in general, the structure of the text is both
newsstand and strongbox, and in any case does not finally suffer this
opposition. This was my hypothesis.
Jean Bollack: I would raise two questions. Taking the term eluci-
dation, by beginning from the concept of elucidation, we would have
on one hand-this is what you describe and which is certainly,
perfectly correct-tension, inherent in the text, between the eluci-
dated and the non-elucidated, or the non-elucidability. Don't you think
that with that a distinction can be introduced? I am trying to see if
there is room for it or how you would accept it. Apart from this in-
trinsic tension, there is the act of elucidation which belongs to the in-
terpreter, to him who tries to understand and elucidate, as Szondi
does, to systematize and to ground the act in theory. Elucidation
would render the strongbox itself, or show that there is a strongbox,
that there is something locked up. This possibility of explanation is
necessary to the constitution of hermeticism. Szondi was very much
interested in the hermeneutics of hermeticism, the latter not only be-
ing the limiting case, but the absolute case, where the problem can
truly be raised, but for him it is a question of something other than
what your description evokes. This would be my first question: what
did Szondi do, or what do I do when I explain an "obscure" author,
whose obscurity is a call to elucidation, given that experience shows
us that the part we consider opaque is simply the unthought, inten-
tional or otherwise?
Next I would ask about biographical fact, namely, about the
inside-outside opposition. Szondi has successfully shown in his
treatise on knowledge in philology and again apropos of Hblderlin,
that the lived is not less intellectual, is not less marked by transform-
ation than literary creation itself. The example he gives is the peace of
Lun6ville, which is, in descriptions prior to the poem taken as
documents, not less transformed than in the poem. He tried to show
that each element of lived place or time is already no longer what it is
at the moment of perception, so much so that a relationship is
established between what the thing becomes in the poem and an act
of perception, which is not naturally objectifiable, which is already of
an intellectual nature. It is precisely this that he shows in "Eden," but
at the same time he poses the problem of intelligibility, that is, the
possibility of going beyond the opposition between coded back-
159
ground and explanation. He thought-and he is certainly not com-
pletely wrong-that beginning with a certain moment in Celan's work,
which is situated at about this time (between 1966 and 1967), and that
the poem "Eden" can represent, composition starts with biographical
elements, transformed, put in such a way that the poetry remains ir-
reparably hermetic. He often said that he could no longer explain the
last texts as he did "Engffihrung".The demonstration tends therefore
to exceed the problematics which you have just described. The ques-
tion-which I will not respond to-would be to know if the distinction
that he established is justified or not. He thought that, in the last
poems, it was not easy to open up the newsstand.
Jacques Derrida: When a poem is in a langue, you have the news-

stand. The difference, the opposition between hermetic poetry and
non-hermetic poetry is very secondary, I feel, in comparison to an
open/shut or an essential hermeticism in the structure of the poem.
The poem is not a strongbox which contains something. The poem,
even in its most inner interior, is a strongbox, it is and has the struc-
ture of a strongbox. It's visible; a strongbox is very visible, and at this
moment, the distinction which can then operate afterward, elsewhere,
in a derivative manner, between hermetic poetry and limpid poetry is,
let's say, secondary in comparison with its structure which is neither
hermetic nor esoteric.
Jean Bollack: But I'm not only contrasting limpidity and hermeticism:
hermeticism is susceptible to being limpid, even if obscurity is a man-
ner of expression: elucidation never eliminates closedness. It is not
this sort of text of which Szondi speaks.
Michel Deguy: Before leaving the floor to Martine Broda and Henri
Meschonnic who have requested it, I would like to read a few lines
which might be related to that, to the "you", a few lines taken from
"Meridian" by Paul Celan. "The poem becomes, upon what condi-
tions, the poem of someone who is in the midst, still in the midst of
perceiving. Whoever is turned towards what is in the process of ap-
pearing and whoever questions this apparition, speaks to it, this
becomes a dialogue, often a desperate dialogue. First of all, it is
necessary to have the space of this dialogue in order to constitute the
thing to which the parole is addressed and which at that moment
assembles itself around the me who speaks and names. But in the
present which opens up there, that which speech names and which
then becomes a you, so to speak, also brings with it its other being.
Likewise in the here and now of the poem, the poem itself never has
any present, but this unique, timely; even in that immediacy and close-
ness to itself, the poem also lets speak that which the other
possesses most irreducibly-its time. When we dialogue with things
this way, we are always also in a question which bears on origins and
their destination, a question which remains open, which does not end,
which signals towards the open, the void, the open field; we are far
outside. The poem, I believe, is also in search of this place."
160
Martine Broda: What I'm going to say is going to in part double what
Michel Deguy has just said, since I want to emphasize that Celan in
"Meridian,"citing BOchner's Lenz, (Lenz departed for the mountains
one January 20) insists on the fact that the modern poem keeps its
date inscribed within itself, a date which is in fact its "I"-here-now.
I want to say something else also. In that part of the paper which con-
cerned Szondi's work on the poem "Engf0hrung,"l felt the reading
was somewhat off the mark. One of the levels of meaning was miss-
ing. Certainly there is this hope of reading, led through the narrows,
which is the hope that a poem's meaning will be received by its
unknown addressee, but there is also a whole aspect of hope, which
finally, is political. You read a passage from "Engfehrung," the one
where "something" is "between them," "gives alarm," etc.... This in-
tersects with the poem "Anabase," in the Rose de personne: "written
narrow between the walls,/ impracticable-true/ this/ climb-and-return/
in the future light-heart./ Over there/ breakwaters/ of syllables, color/
sea, far/in the unnavigated./ Then:/ espaliers of bouys,/ bouys sorrow,/
with,/ beautiful as seconds, leaping/ reflections of breath./ sounds/ of
the luminous bell(dum-,/ dun-,un,-/ unde suspirat cor); repeated,/
redeemed,/ ours. Of the visible, of the audible, the word-tent/ which
frees itself:/ together." The hope opened up in the narrows is also
what leads to a "we", a "together," which is a "word-tent," and the
alarm sounds of the "luminous bell" (the lighthouse) are also sounds
of salvation.
Jacques Derrida:There is no dialogue with a determinable individual,

with an empirically determinable addressee or correspondent, which
does not mean that there is no dialogue.
Thomas Fries: What struck me is the contrast between what is
described in the report and the reality of the poem itself. Szondi
names the Academy's entourage and he says that the date and place
disappeared later on. That is, in the first edition, Celan had left the
place and date, later they were to disappear, and Szondi explains this
is an obscuring which was perhaps not desired, but an obscuring all
the same. Concerning hermeticism, I wanted to say that the hermetic
poem is not hermetic, that it opens up, but perhaps in an unexpected
way, because I don't believe, as far as intelligibility is concerned that
it can be separated from that which the poem itself is seeking. And, it
is with Szondi's theory that I am having the most trouble. How do you
integrate these three studies into one theory? If he develops his
theory on the intelligibility of the modern poem in the study of
"Engf0hrung," he does not any less constantly accept the conse-
quences of what he himself says. I even sometimes feel that he
refuses to give explanations that he could provide. There I see some
desire to keep a secret. In "Eden" as well. He says that a relationship
exists between the assassination theme and the Christmas holiday.
He simply states it and that's all..He draws no conclusions.
Henri Meschonnic: I would like to return to this double metaphor of
161
the strongbox and newsstand, which has been successively neutral-
ized; I think that at a certain point Jacques Derrida very rightly said
that he didn't believe in this strongbox-newsstand opposition. And
yet, later on, he came back to it saying that the poem does not contain
a strongbox, that it is, as a whole, a strongbox. I would simply ask the
following question: do we need a metaphor here to think what the
poem does, and what the effect of metaphors is? Is not the first result
of the metaphors to place a strongbox in our hands which afterwards
we don't know how to deal with?
Jacques Derrida: I never said they were metaphors.

Henri Meschonnic: No, not you of course, but you do neutralize them
very well, and what does the poem do if not show that there is neutral-
ization, in other words, that we are dealing with something which is
both at the same time; then it has no meaning really, as you were say-
ing before. I wonder whether this idea doesn't follow: that if the poem
puts this double metaphor in jeopardy, it's perhaps because it is not
necessary to think in terms of metaphor, that it can be thought of
without metaphors. Then, if something infinitely more simple were
proposed, something exactly like the purloined letter, in other words,
in front of everybody, the poem functions, I would say, like all langue
in general, that is to say, it functions like "I",like the word "P".Inother
words, it is a figure (my suggestion is only hypothetical), the poem
would be an image (figure) of the "P".At that moment, it is that which
makes the private pass into a neutralization of the psychological. It no
longer functions within the opposition the private/public or inside/out-
side. Can we not say that if it is this specific discourse which
neutralizes the private-public, which makes it appear that the most
private, the immodesty of the "/," etc..., becomes, in fact, the im-
personal itself (in other words, the most impersonal person is I(Ue)not
it (il), then and without paradox, since there is no referent for I and I is
the one who says I, the poem as a discourse in its entirety and there-
fore independently of personal pronouns used, says I or figures the/).
A certain number of consequences arise then. One might propose that
these metaphors which are necessary in order to think the poem are
the very metaphors which the metaphysics of the sign proposes. And
the inside-outside opposition is surely the corollary of the private-
public and, finally, the signifier/signified, thus a transfer of the meta-
physics of the sign onto the functioning of the poem. If we take the
question of hermeticism, actually hermeticism is not an inside with
respect to an outside, we could think of it as an open-closed opposi-
tion, without referring again to an inside-outside, except when
hermeticism is in certain historical situations (not necessarily to be
confused with modern poetry), the initiatory, that is to say actually a
figure of the symbolic which can very easily be formed either in re-
lation to the symbolic in the world, or in relation to signifiers, for ex-
ample, certain allusions to the Cabala. Then if the poem is a whole
"I,"what does it do with respect to the problem of elucidation or non-
elucidation? I wonder if it could not be said, and this only seems a
162
paradox in comparison with the academic attitude vis-a-vis the poem,
that a poem need not be elucidated, no more than it has to be made
obscure. Obviously both can be done, anything can be done, but it's
not pertinent, it does not necessarily teach us anything about the
poem. Can it not be said that the poem is, in comparison with the
reigning metaphysics of the sign, precisely that mode of signifying
which endangers the metaphysics of the sign the most, that imposes
a theory of modes of signifying and, in any case, a plurality of modes.
Then I wonder also if there is specifically a theory on the modern
poem, I don't really know. A little while ago someone said that the
modern poem carries with it its date. Could it not be said that every
poem like every discourse bears its date? But one must work out the
play between date and historicity, chronology and historicity: they are
not the same thing. It should suffice to think of the symbolic dates
which Hugo attaches to his poems. Every date is symbolic.
Michel Deguy: Why emphasize the date? That can be a modification,
as if an epithet had been removed later. Why HOlderlin's
signatures. ...
Jacques Derrida: Furthermore the date remains. You must see that
the first poem, with its date, is archived. In other words, the date
which will be erased remains, and that, as every erasure of a trace, the
trace doesn't have to be erased or not erased, the trace is something
which bears the structure of erasure within itself. As a result, when
one erases part of a poem which was published-you must begin with
the fact that it was published-this erasure does not erase absolute-
ly, it transforms-in what is referred to as another version, which is
going to be archived, which is going to transform the corpus-it trans-
forms the poem, but the structure of the erasure is inscribed, it's
another inscription of something which is, which belongs to (but I
don't mean is a part of, because that seems to leave it in the interiority
of a poem, in opposition to what is believed to be its exterior, etc.), in
any case which belongs to general corpus, which includes both that
which in current usage is called the poem, the published text, and
also the general field of biographical and other traces. I was in full
agreement with what Henri Meschonnic said a little while ago, in
agreement until the moment he proposed to call all that the "mode of
signifying," because, if the reference to the metaphysics of the sign is
kept, given the word signification, the multiplicity of modes changes
nothing in the structure of signification neither does it change the
reference to general signification. That is why I would not use the
word "signifying," even when pluralizing the modes, I would refer to
another structure that I would call a structure of residue (reste). Then
one no longer needs to bear in mind, in the last instance, all the op-
positions which adhere to signification in general, with the sign of
signification in general. That's why I began by speaking of the "arret"
inasmuch as it motioned towards "restance," a restance which no
longer exists, of which thought is not demanded or demandable by all
the classical oppositions in ontology, hermeneutics and critical
theory.
163
Thomas Fries: It still remains that the poem "Engf0hrung" contains
indications which, as Szondi has demonstrated, offer possibilities for
understanding. That allows us, or allowed Szondi, to make a very
clear, line-by-line commentary on the text. Whereas with "Du liegst im
grossen Gelausche," this no longer works. What interests me is not
so much the question of the date per se, but this difference itself. I
wouldn't say that it is a failure, but you can plainly see that the two
analyses don't fit together. In a way, one excludes the other.
Jacques Derrida:There is neither success nor failure. I think that, in

the first instance, dating allowed Szondi to advance a certain wave of
reading, which went to a certain point, like all reading which is neither
nil or exhaustive; and, the erasure of the date produces not another
text, but a transformed text which makes it evident that the initial
reading, as pertinent as it was, was limited, stopped somewhere, and
there, this limit was marked by the possibility of a subsequent trans-
formation of our corpus. All this will have to be said differently, after-
ward, a new wave of reading will have to be launched, etc., which will
also not be a failure or a success, but which will naturally present dif-
ferences of force.
Jean Bollack: The opposition between elucidated obscurity, which
restores obscurity to itself through elucidation, and opaqueness, that
is, non-elucidable obscurity, this difference which for the hermeneut
is fundamental, you don't find pertinent?
Jacques Derrida: No, if opaqueness means a hidden content which

resists. I think obscurity is not a type of opaqueness in that sense.
Jean Bollack: Szondi would have spoken of opaqueness in the case of
Paul Celan's last poems.
Jacques Derrida: I don't know what Szondi thought. Perhaps he said

to himself, there is something there which still remains opaque to me,
and if I knew more about it...
Jean Bollack: But you yourself, before a poem, while leaving the struc-
ture you traced intact, you can understand the process of trans-
formation-the dense can be aerated and become more trans-
parent-or not see it.
Jacques Derrida: Of course, there are opaquenesses, effects of
opaqueness, and scientific work, university work, critical work must in
fact try to break down the opaqueness, and it is often confronted by
opaquenesses which cannot be reduced. But, when all is said and
done, whatever the progress made or that must be made, if one is not
an obscurantist in the deconstitution of the opaque, there will be
neither opaque nor clear. It is this structure that I call "residue,"
which is not just simply the poem or the langue, although the langue
may in fact be of this order.
164
Bernhard B16chenstein: I would like this to be more specific. We now
have a complete edition of Schneepart in which the place and date are
indicated under each poem. What we have here is a "clean copy"
which is also a masterpiece of mise en page. These definitive pages
therefore contain dates as well. And when the relationship between
the dates and the poems are questioned, we note, for example, in the
other Berlin poems that the date is an element necessary for compre-
hension. There is a poem that is dated, Christmas, in which there is an
allusion to the theme of the Crucifixion, to Good Friday, a sort of
Easter in reverse. If the Christmas date is not there, an important ele-
ment escapes us.
Jacques Derrida:And who put the date there?

Bernhard B6schenstein: Celan himself, in the definitive manuscript;
but in the first publication, posthumous moreover, there were no
dates. The poem which follows had been composed after his return
from Berlin, January 2, 1968. This poem deals precisely with the op-
position between the coming of the new year and the reference to the
elapsed year. Death and resurrection are reconsidered here. Given
that these dates were integrated into the composition, it was perhaps
the poet's intent that one day the entire text would be published with
dates. If, in special cases, there was early publication of a dated
poem, this was certainly in relation to the homage to Peter Huchel
which is completed by the date which comes at the end of the poem.
Homage and date announce the symmetrical structure of the text,
which, moreover, is very striking here, since it is one of those rare
poems where there are rhymes, assonances and renvois from the
beginning to end, for example, Gelausche/rauschen;-flockt/stockt.
Thus there is a sort of brusque reversal. I am sure that if Szondi had
written the second part, devoted to the "act of crystallization," he
would have shown precisely that this poem turns around the word
Eden, which forms its middle: er biegt um ein Eden. That's to say the
first part brings the overture, furnishes the different gifts (Gaben),
whereas the second part, on the contrary, retrieves them through the
holes in the sieve, by the disappearance of the Sau in the Land-
wehrkanal and finally through nothingness: Nichts/stockt. This is pro-
bably the work Szondi had in mind for the second part. He would have
perhaps proceeded approximately in the same way as in his study of
"Engfuhrung," reflecting on this reversal, this opposition.
Wolfgagn Fietkau: While listening to you, I felt, at a certain moment, I
don't know when, a malaise which kept on growing, and now I'mgoing
to formulate it. As we know, following Szondi's interpretation,
Gadamer drafted a response;' what profoundly shocked Gadamer is
that it's not properly a question of biographical fact; but those are ob-
viously realities that play a big role, it's a question of the story of a
massacre at the beginning of "Eden". To begin by your question as to
why Szondi didn't actually write this second part and was he inter-
rupted-it's the last manuscript that was found on his desk. This
165
reversal is, thus, one he no longer made. The poem "turns around"
something, but what is this turning? It's an "avoiding". The poem
avoids an Eden, that's why there no longer can be any reversal. Since
this reversal cannot take place, the real facts remain there, abandon-
ed in this brutal manner in the poem. And the second problem, the
relationship between signifier and signified, I wonder if it's a question
which concerns the metaphysics of the sign. This new relationship
which is established naturally in one way or another between the sign
and the signified doesn't concern exclusively the history of designa-
tion, it also includes a political significance, which requires as much
reflection as the relationship itself. For when Celan wrote: "The man
was a sieve, the woman/ was made to swim, the sow," it was not his
words, it's a quotation. It's obviously a quotation from press reports of
the time. And there, finally we are again confronting a connection with
the politics of language, silence and the new way of naming and
designating. It is sufficient to think of Brecht-Brecht said in order to
speak about things every language today is basically euphemistic,
because every language implies an enormous silence, the silence of
crime. Celan reversed that, since today we should be silent, since la
langue officialle, in other words, the langue of newspapers and the
press hushes crimes by speaking about them. Last, I would ask if a
history of the relationship between the signifier and the signified ex-
ists which binds these dimensions: oblivion, memory, erasure and
trace.
Hans Hagen Hildebrandt: I would like to make a supplementary
remark.It's about an observation that Peter Weiss made in Auschwitz,
where he went with the court at the time of the Auschwitz trial in
Frankfurt.He noticed-Derrida spoke of traces-that the bare feet of
the Jews who went down into the crematories only left traces on the
stairs and I think that it is those traces which are crying out for inter-
pretation. It seems to me this is addressed in Celan's poem. And I
believe this is also what Fietkau meant by "being silent."-what
language in Germany cannot convey. It is the silencing or breakdown
of language in the face of this event.
Jacques Derrida:I don't believe there is incompatability between what

was said about the metaphysics of the sign, briefly, and then what you
said about a political reading, not at all, on the contrary, the corndi-
tions of your political reading can be liberated much more easily by
freeing oneself from certain constraints of the theory of the sign. I
don't think there is any incompatability between the two.... I think it
is possible in principle. It's difficult to delve into that right now, but I
feel that a critique of the metaphysics of the sign-in this expression
are obviously included things which need differentiating-, not only
does not limit, but on the contrary, librates a political reading of the
kind which you have indicated.
Henri Mischonnic: Neither do I wish to delve into problems which
would require hundreds of pages. But can it not simply be said in a
166
word that if the poem is the discourse of a subject and if it is the entire
discourse which is a subject, specific to itself alone, it is already a
political enemy of the sign, because what does the metaphysics of
the sign do if not give the primacy to langue and form the theory of
langue in such a way that there can be no subject there? In other
words, the subject is no more than a grammatical effect: at that mo-
ment, we in fact have a political effect, there are political effects from
the metaphysics of the sign, instrumentalism, etc.... Thus it is in-
deed linked and in this sense, poetry is a political contestation of the
sign.
NOTE
1. H. G. Gadamer, Werbin Ich und wer bist Du (Frankfurt,1973).
167
Theory and Practice of Philology; Reflections
on the Public Statements of Peter Szondi
Karl Grob
Translated by Therese Araneo
If, during the 60's, a student of German literature at the Uni-

versity of Zurich had been asked what he knew about Peter Szondi,
perhaps he might have cited the Theorie des modernen Dramas, but it
is above all for his political position that the author, whose reputation
was already international, would have been known. Szondi seems to
us one of those rare professors who didn't simply fade away in front
of the questions raised in the second half of the sixties; he was willing
to commit himself to the defense of a cause when others contented
themselves with interpretation. He seemed ready to personally con-
tribute to the changes to come. Today it would be difficult for me to
give the exact reason for Szondi's reputation. It was the result of a
general fama, and, as we know, the antiauthoritarian movement also
had some strong authoritarian aspects. Szondi was important for us,
but his importance wasn't owed, or was owed at best, indirectly, to his
works, which few had studied; more important was the rumor cir-
culating about his position at the Free University of Berlin, according
to which he was one of the most progressive professors in his field.
Since 1973 it has been possible to check this rumor. That is
when, under the title Uber eine "freie (d.h. freie) Universitat" ["On a
Free (that is, truly free) University"],' were published, Szondi's inter-
ventions dealing with the most critical phase of the debates on uni-
169
versity politics in Berlin, with commentaries giving all the necessary
facts. If we read these texts with the hope of finding a teacher taking
the students' side in these debates, as the rumor had it, we will be
disappointed. To be sure, these texts breath a spirit of liberality which
is not very widespread; Szondi, however, never espouses the general
objectives of the student movement, whose tendency may very
roughly be classified as "radical socialist." His frequent statements
more or less explicitly condemning the methods and also the objec-
tives of this revolt, and the four aphorisms published at the end of the
volume under the title "StoBseufzer eines Professors" ("Deep sighs of
a professor") are the clearest evidence to the contrary. One of them
says: "Intolerance too can be repressive." This affirmation, which in-
verts Marcuse's dictum on "repressive tolerance," makes it obvious
that the motivation for Szondi's interventions must be sought else-
where than in the paternal support of his students by a professor. If
here it were only a matter of knowing who could claim to be, as they
say, Szondi's legitimate political heir, my remarks would be of very
little interest, for, thank God, Szondi has not yet become a classic in
terms of this question. The irritation that these often very brief texts
seem to elicit is based precisely upon the fact that, in decisive places,
they are not the reflection of any resolutely political behavior. It's not
the same as with Lukacs, where a position is first taken and can then
be formally developed when the need arises. His refusal to constantly
open his passport for anyone to use-Adorno's expression-is tied to
the position of Szondi the philologist.
From the point of view of immediate political effect, one of his
most important statements, the report written at the time of the
Langhans/Teufel trial, where it was a question of knowing if three
"Kommune I" pamphlets contained an incitement to arson, has,
according to Szondi himself, its origin in his philological Ethos. The
same applies to the long debate concerning the report of the Senate
of Berlin's Free University, which discusses the student program for
Critical University. At that time, the term, "critical university" meant a
kind of program which sought to enlarge or even replace the structure
of higher education such as it existed. Seminars were to have been
organized and papers given about subjects touched on rarely or not at
all by ordinary instruction. Concepts varied according to whether one
envisioned a real counter-university with fairly well-defined political
tasks, or a simple complement to the institution, a sort of enrichment
of its programs. This all combined in the project of submitting the
courses and the exercises practised in a so-called normal university
to an open critique. This last point was undoubtedly responsible for
the attitude of categorical rejection assumed by the majority of the
teaching body. In fact, everyday experience shows that, except in real-
ly exceptional cases, massive political agitation doesn't greatly effect
the teacher; in contrast, precise and detailed criticisms are capable of
disrupting the regulated course of things. Szondi himself seems to
have in no way feared the prospect of a continual scientific critique: in
fact, he posted signs to rally others to his own "Critical University."
Imitating Brecht's "Stories of Herr Keuner," under the title of
170
"Egoism" he wrote:
Professor S., questioned about what he thought of

the "Critical University," answered, "I think highly of
it. That's why I'm making it myself.
(From the "Stories of Professor S.")2
No other text from this small collection could better introduce

the singular dialectical tension inherent in most of Szondi's state-
ments on university politics. The "Story of Professor S." takes
seriously the demands of the "Critical University" project, and in so
doing makes possible a critique of the project itself. If the project for a
counter-university had been maintained, there would have been no
room for an Ordinarius (full professor) of the Freie Universitat of
Berlin. But by taking it upon himself to create a "critical University,"
Szondi implicitly demonstrates that an institutional separation must
necessarily suppose the attitude criticized by the project itself. Thus,
for Szondi, the point of departure remains the unity of science, or bet-
ter, of the ratio. The object criticized must be taken seriously, in other
words it must be met on its own ground. Not only is it absurd, but it is
also the sign of a great narrowmindedness-a narrowmindedness
against which the students rose up violently at the time-to simply
want to open a shop across the street which sells the same goods
under a different name. The result would be that criticism, in itself
legitimate, would degenerate finally into a duel between loud-
speakers. The "Story of Professor S." therefore implicitly claims to
understand the project of the "Critical University" better than its pro-
moters. And it is only here that I come to my real subject matter, the
question as to whether, in the realm of political discussion, there can
be a better understanding of the adversary, if, therefore, under-
standing already implies criticism; or, on the contary, if under-
standing can become criticism only on the basis of a previously given
theory, without which it would forever be condemned to conservatism.
Szondi did not detail his own position in this struggle, but he seems to
me to take up the claims of hermeneutics with regard to the uni-
versity. This is the position clearly defended in the last sentence of his
essay in French entitled "L'hermeneutique de Schleiermacher au-
jourd'hui" ("The hermeneutics of Schleiermacher today");
"Hermeneutics, taken in this sense (namely, like that of Schleier-
macher), is an instrument of criticism." This obviously does not mean
that understanding must precede criticism, but, rather that criticism
succeeds through comprehension, i.e., by means of the latter.
As I have already mentioned, Szondi tied two of his most fully
developed presentations to his "philological Ethos." Thus it seems
justified to take these two texts as the conducting link, and to ask our-
selves in what way Szondi allows philology to intervene in the case of
statements that are obviously political. The initial situation, as com-
plex and volatile as it was in its time, today seems very simple to us. I
will first examine his expert's report in the Teufel/Langhans trial.
There it's a question of the significance of the pamphlets written by
171
the "Kommune I" group which the prosecutor, following a private
complaint, decided contained a call to arson. The case aroused
remarkable interest then; it was looked upon as one of the state's
major attempts to have the student movement fall under criminal
jurisdiction. In particular, Fritz Teufel's appearance before the court
went down in the history of German jurisprudence. Szondi of course
said nothing about it, because his statements preceded the case's
celebrity. It is more astonishing, though, that he was not interested in
the interpretations which were given to his support of particularly
vulnerable students. He simply writes:
Although upon first reading them, I myself con-

sidered the pamphlets criminal, and would not have
objected at all to a jail term for creating a public
disturbance, for example, I was shocked by the pro-
secutor's indictment, which rested entirely on inter-
pretive error. When I learned (the information, it was
later revealed, was incorrect) that the minimum appli-
cable sentence was several years imprisonment, I
considered it my duty as a philologist to expose the
prosecutor's error. The accused were acquitted in
1968. Now, following the arson which occured in
Frankfurt and elsewhere, when people speak about
reports written by "credulous professors," most of
the time they overlook the fact, at least as far as my
text is concerned, that it dealt neither with the plans
of the "communards," nor with the possible conse-
quences of their pamphlets. I sought only to de-
termine what had been said, and wherein lay the er-
roneous interpretation found in the indictment
(p. 151).
From a philological point of view that's an everyday occurence,

in so far as it's a matter of text in hand, criticizing faulty compre-
hension. Here, the event's importance is not simply due to its context,
that is, because of the political climate of the period, but rather to the
philologist's appearance as an expert before the court. The legal
philologist is a rarity, although comprehending taxts as a discipline is
in no way foreign to the judicial machinery, and not only in the case of
understanding and applying legal texts. It even happens that texts
are entirely or in part the object of procedures, and in this case only
rarely does one call on a philologist's expertise. That several
philologists-Szondi wasn't the only one-appeared at a trial con-
stitutes an exceptional event. Three experts came to speak as
philologists, and in essence they did nothing more than closely ex-
amine the prosecutor's misunderstanding. I will confine myself to
Peter Szondi's report, which in many respects is more prudent that
that of Eberhard Lammert, for example, where it is also a matter of the
effective consequences of the text. Perhaps, for the benefit of those
who are unfamiliar with this period, we should perhaps add that the
172
subsequent burning of a Frankfurt supermarket by Andreas Baader
and Gudrun Ensslin could rightly be consiered the debut of the new
German terrorism such as we know it. That is precisely why I deem it
highly advisable not to confuse the different aspects of the matter,
and to treat here only the aspects which Szondi focused on. The pro-
secutor's failure in comprehension sufficiently proves how difficult it
is to judge from a text its empirical effects.
Szondi helps the court as legal expert, but the court remains
responsible for its decisions. Where psychiatric expertise is con-
cerned, that can be a nice little fiction, but philologic expertise may
not leave this impression; everyone immediately has the (often
legitimate) conviction that he is sufficiently intelligent to be able to
read and understand a text. In any event, reading is not generally
recognized as a special art. Moreover, we could mention here that the
court's decision to acquit only seems to agree with the experts. In
fact, the court didn't follow the experts; it recognized that there was
indeed incitation to arson, and simply repudiated the intentional
aspect, which means that it upheld the opinion that it understood the
accused better than they understood themselves. For if the accused
had understood themselves, it would have been senseless to make a
distinction between objective and subjective fact. The critical in-
stance in the trial is thus the court and not the expert. The task of de-
termining whether or not one is dealing with a crime in the legal sense
is not incumbent upon the latter. So he does not directly critique the
prosecutor's legal judgement, only the understanding of the texts on
which it is based. Thus he offers no judgement to the court, but only
brings his expertise in questions of textual comprehension. That's
why legal expertise, in its typical ideal form, seems the very model of
non-critical comprehension: it is indeed up to the court to determine
whether or not the case in question falls under the norms of the law. A
norm which it seems to me legitimate to compare to on external
critical norm was thus to be applied to the incriminating text, this
leads us to a relationship that could be termed one of technical ration-
ality. The court has to correctly apply a norm to a case, a procedure in
which comprehenson of the norm and the case are presupposed. I
think that in this way I have sufficiently clarified the fundamental
aspect of Szondi's report. The expert's comprehension is constantly
included within a larger context, formed by the court, and which
fundamentally transcends the understanding of the accused, in that
both the comprehended object and the accused are, after the fact,
submitted to a subsumptive norm.
Szondi later explained the motivation for his action. A concern
that could be called humane involved wanting to avoid the severe
punishment which was threatened; the means was a critique of the
prosecutor's erroneous interpretation. His motive is thus defined on
one hand by its humane aspects, and on the other by its philological
aspect, and it is not by coincidence that Szondi spoke about a
"philogical ethos." To aid the accused it was necessary to dispense
justice, in the original sense of the word, in opposition to misunder-
standing. This also means that justice had to be dispensed with
173
regard to the accuseds' true intention. But that is where the alter-
native between Humanism and Philology disappears, for what could
be more humane in respect to the accused than to reconstruct the ac-
tually expressed concept? The legitimacy of the punishment also
depends upon this. Thus, humane interest is from the start based on a
pre-comprehension of the incriminated texts and the prosecutor's in-
tentions, and comprehension reveals itself as the sole purpose of the
report. The report should give the accused a comprehensible voice
before the court, and is nothing else but a translation with commen-
tary made necessary by the prosecutor's deplorable philology.
The result is that it cannot be a question of the political con-
cepts defended in the accuseds' pamphlets, but only a matter of
understanding them. In no case should one confuse the accuseds'
rights to make themselves adequately understood with an approval of
the style and content of the phamphlets. One of Szondi's first remarks
thus concerns both distance and method:
For methodological reasons, in the analysis we

should ignore the fact that I myself condemn the in-
sults, the tastelessness and the obscenities coin-
tained in this "Kommune" pamphlet, as in most of
the others (p. 38).
The first step towards understanding is thus accomplished:

the well thought-out parenthesizing of the individual himself. This
maxim is none other than the philological form of the democratic prin-
ciple according to which liberty always belongs to those who think
otherwise. The method to which is used here lends itself to the task of
seeking the author's intention behind all prejudice, and thus to under-
standing what the other says, even if that comes into conflict with
what I myself would say about the maker. According to this method,
the author or authors are, therefore, taken seriously. This is where the
first problem arises, one ignored by the prosecutor: the question of
the author of a text. It always seems simple to respond when the
author allows himself to be recognized as "1" in the text. The text's
subject is then given in the text, and it seems that a deeper investi-
gation is unnecessary. In truth, the idea that an author representing
himself in the form of an "1" could be a fiction is one of the relatively
old acquisitions of the poetics of genre. For example, in the first pam-
phlet an attentive reading would discover that the characters created
are fictitious. We are confronted by the fiction of a newspaper article
which takes a stand in respect to real events, but which as a whole re-
mains a fiction. The intention of such a text can only be analysed in
terms of the context. It is only the historical reconstruction of a text in
its context which allows fiction to be recognized as such, and to have
its content clarified. Such a reconstruction is nevertheless almost
always superfluous in the case of contemporary texts, for their em-
pirical content is discovered spontaneously by the attentive reader. In
this case, which is that of a parody, it is a question of reconstructing
the parodied object, namely the language of the Berlin journalists at
174
that time - the end of the sixties.
Since it would hardly be useful to talk in detail about the other
pamphlets and their analysis (moreover, interest would be minimal
without precise knowledge of the texts involved), I will limit myself to
the general doctrine which can be drawn from Szondi's procedure.
The purpose of the report is to lead to comprehension. Its goal is to
make possible a reading of the pamphlets by the court, a reading
which conforms to the art of reading or philology. These rules of com-
prehension relate primarily to the realm of the faculty of speaking and
of thinking. Schleiermacher formulates this general point of view in
the following manner:
The statement must be understood to be extracted

from language, and it must be understood as con-
structed in the individual who thinks.
"Extracted from language," in the case of the first pamphlet,

would mean to understand its parodic nature in relation to the
language of newspapers, and "constructed in the individual who
thinks," the intention of the authors. The hierarchy of the two modes
of analysis, grammatical and psychological, plays no part, for the only
thing that matters is that the two points of view converge in their
result.
Szondi's report can at best be understood as criticism with
regard to the prosecutor. By understanding his comprehension, which
led to the indictment, as a failure of comprehension, it is transformed
into an indirect defense of the accused. As already stated, here
defense means that the accused, thanks to the report, are furnished
with an understandable voice. All this precedes the verdict and sub-
sumption under the norm, for the court remains free in its judgement
of the report, that is to say it cannot avoid a personal interpretation of
the accused texts. But, as it is precisely the interests of the
philologist and not those of the judge which have concerned us, this
procedure leaves us dissatisfied. In any event, the example of legal
philology seems insufficient to justify its claim to be the organon for
criticism. If we want to maintain philology's claim, even in this case
we must be able to name the place at which the philologist sacrifices
his own critical claim to the normative function of the court. That
place is found in the passage quoted earlier where, for
methodological reasons, Szondi underscores his own distance in rela-
tion to the style of the pamphlets. This passage contains more than
that which I extracted from it. This abstractly posed distinction is not
only undialectic, relinquishing understanding of the other as stranger,
but the reference it makes to good taste is not up to the philological
level of Szondi's other writings. The need to abstract his own taste in-
dicates an argumentative weakness induced by the normative con-
text. If this retreat is taken rigorously-which I will do for the sake of
brevity-one can easily show that it corresponds to the position of
normative poetics. Historically, Szondi's philology would thus remain
at the level of Gottsched's. At this juncture it merely remains to be
175
noted that the report only pushes comprehension to the point that the
prosecutor's indictment finds itself shaken by it. From the real point
of view of understanding it should be said that the report is much
more to be read as an understanding of the prosecutor's lack of com-
prehension than of the comprehension of the accused. From this
angle, the report reveals itself to be quite equivocal; it restores speech
to the accused before the court in so far as it had been obscured by
the prosecutor, but goes no further than that. In particular it does not
raise the question as to whether a meaning may be ascribed to these
texts, i.e., whether they have an author, or whether sufficient analysis
might have put the content, the intention and the style into internal
contradiction-which certainly would have opened the pamphlets to
criticism.
We enter a whole other constellation in broaching the problem
of the "Critical University." Here, no one must be defended in the legal
sense. Exactly what is it about? In the Spring of 1967, the project,
developed by the students of the Freie Universitat in Berlin, a "Critical
University" as it was called, was advanced enough that they could
propose a provisional program. The project led to the intervention of
the Rector. He asked for a report on the program, the object of which
was to determine if such a "Critical University" was to be considered
as a part of the Freie Universitat. As often the case in this period, the
truly important question was rather to know if classrooms should be
allocated to this university. Szondi's response arose from this report,
requested by the Rector and compiled by Professors Knauer and
Borinski. It is hardly necessary to mention that, independent of the
question raised by "The Story of Professor S." about the real
significance of such an institution, at issue was an attempt to limit
the freedom of science through administrative measures. It is useful
to know that the internal constitution of the Freie Universitat rested
upon the principle of representation, which meant that not all the pro-
fessors were part of the Senate to which the Knauer/Borinski report
was addressed. This question was important for Szondi because he
didn't want to share the responsibility for such a text by remaining
silent, and because he no longer considered himself represented in
the Senate. I will return later to the fundamental aspect of this ques-
tion of representation. The report itself particularly reproached the
authors of the "Critical University" project for representing only one
political tendency, and for proposing a university of solely political in-
clinations. It was understood as a matter of a seizing of power and
destroying the university and society. From this point of view, the ex-
pression "Machtergreifung," the taking of power, aligned the
students with the Nazis, for whom this expression is reserved in
German usage. After a twenty-minute session, the Senate barely ap-
proved the report (by hardly more than a single vote). ASTA, the of-
ficial student body, withdrew, and accused the [faculty] specialists
[who wrote the report] of having preferred a theory of conspiracy to
serious debate. Shortly afterwards, Szondi published his own text.
There, under twelve recapitulative headings, he reported these
specialist's errors, all of a methodological nature. That's why the
176
document is entitled, "Concerning the method of the Knauer/Borisnki
report on the pamphlet 'Critical University'."
The titles under which Szondi assembles his criticism of their
methods concern different outrages to the law of hermeneutics. I will
try to show here that all of Szondi's accusations must be understood
in these terms. If I succeed in at least one case, I will have exemplified
the idea that comprehension is criticism in itself, which would mean
that political texts are also to be understood in a critical way. To give
at least an idea of the text, which I do not want to quote in extenso, I
permit myself to mention the theses, which Szondi establishes in
detail. The general axis of these theses furnishes a first proof of my
argument.
1. The report quotes what supports its thesis and

ignores what contradicts it.
2. It uses the sources in a non-critical fashion.
3. It does not test the demonstrative nature of its
evidence.
4. It contains false affirmations.
5. In favor of its affirmations it advances examples
which are not appropriate.
6. It is based on false premises.
7. It interprets on the basis of personal conceptions
which are not questioned.
8. It fails to question the motivation and justifica-
tion of the arguments and demands submitted to in-
vestigation.
9. It has recourse to insinuation.
10. It uses terminology and a way of quoting which
are demagogic.
11. It contradicts itself.
12. It is both judge and interested party.
You will have already recognized by this simple list that this
criticism is eminently methodological, but that it is in no way built on
a system of interpretative rules. By this two things are meant: on one
hand, the absence deplored by Szondi himself of an elaborated
literary hermeneutic which has until now prevented the birth of a well-
founded canon of interpretation; and, on the other hand, the highlight-
ing of the public which Szondi addresses, and to which the objec-
tions' systematicity is undoubtedly less important than their veracity.
However, allow me to attempt a brief outline of such a systematicity.
One of the first points that the philologist will want to test
surely concerns the authenticity of the text read, thus the realm of
what is called "text criticism." It is itself an integral part of the
process of understanding, and not a preliminary. In fact, it doesn't
play much role in the appreciation of a contemporary text, and this
also applies to what are corruptions of detail. We can therefore ignore
it. Of course, the question presents itself a little differently when it's a
matter of the authenticity of political texts, and thus a question of the
177
unity of the author. The expert will have to be sure that he separates
accurately texts issuing from different authors, and that he does not
hastily ascribe to them an identical purpose. Szondi's first two theses
are about this kind of carelessness. The specialists made no dis-
tinction between different student political groups. They confused
ASTA (the students' official representative) with other groups that op-
posed it. On the level of the editing and publishing texts, such
behavior would correspond to including texts by alien authors among
authentic ones.
The difference between the definitive text and an outline also
belongs to the problematic of textual criticism. One of Szondi's points
is that an unsanctioned resolution, unambiguously entitled "Sketch
of a Resolution," had been treated like the faithful reproduction of a
debate. On the level of editorial work that would amount to not
distinguishing between the definitive version of a course3 and the
manuscript project, a relatively common problem in the editing of
philosophic texts.
The best resume of the entire problematic is furnished by the
second thesis: the philologist's work depends on a critique of
sources. The latter implies a concept of the ensemble, which it con-
stitutes as well, as in the hermeneutic circle. Criticism of the text thus
puts in motion the ensemble of the process of understanding, and it
would be naive to think that such details, particularly when dealing
with political texts, have no effect upon the content. (One of the most
famous historical illustrations of this aspect is the Ems dispatch,
when Bismarck's subtly truncated transmission contributed to trig-
gering the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.) Text criticism gives a quan-
titative response to the question of the textual whole; it thus material-
ly constitutes the whole and can consequently attribute false limits to
the text. The quantitative side of the text's make-up belongs then to
the textual critique, its qualitative side to the understanding of its
meaning. They mutually condition one another. The fact that the
specialists paid no attention to this mutual conditioning means that,
in so choosing the texts to be scrutinized, they renounced comprehen-
sion; they did not even distinguish between direction and opposition
in the student population.
As soon as we return to the issue, and no longer ask ourselves
whether or not a text, from a quantitative point of view, belongs to the
corpus, the really pressing question of whether or not the texts
basically follow the same intention arises. The issue of the validity of
the evidenceinishis
explained partarticle
of this"Uber
reg.!ster. As Szondi had
Philologische already adequately
Erkenntnis" ("On
Philological Knowledge"), verbal identity is in no way sufficient to
make one passage evidence for another. Each passage must first be
analysed in itself for its validity to be proven. Naturally this applies
particularly when words like "autonomous student organization" and
"free organization by students" must furnish proof of the identical in-
tellectual origin and meaning of the texts in which they appear.
Especially biting is Szondi's comment that the students were not the
only ones to talk of the university as if it were a factory-which they
178
did with critical intent. This was presented as evidence of the intellec-
tual identity of two of the texts, but the same metaphoric was used
not surprisingly with a positive meaning in other texts which had been
edited with the help of one of the [faculty] specialists. In any event, the
following rule has general validity: each piece of evidence must first
be proven to be evidence.
So much for Szondi's methodological objections, which for the
most part are concerned with the grammatical aspect of understand-
ing. Just as textual criticism already endangers the unity of the
author, comprehension also questions the unity of the interpreter. To
this register belongs the requirement that one not use in dogmatic
fashion the material that is the object of criticism. However, the
Rector's report assumes on one hand that the term "critical" in the ex-
pression "Critical University" already in itself signifies a position
taken against existing universities, but then uses the same word to
characterize these universities, without pointing out the resulting con-
tradiction (as Szondi did in his "Story of Professor S."). The
specialists claimed that the existing universities constantly accept in-
ternal and external criticism, without noticing that their own report
was the best available proof to the contrary. The last thesis also
belongs to the problematic of the unity of the interpreter. It accuses
the report of being judge and interested party at the same time. This is
the case for any report written in a similar context, to the extent to
which it concerns the work place of professors and students. More
generally it could be said that all comprehension is also a process of
self-comprehension, and for that reason it would be naive to assume
that we could talk about someone else without implicating ourselves
in one way or another. It is not this difficulty that Szondi has in mind.
What matters to him is that the "expert," as president of the "commis-
sion on questions of curricular reforms," finds himself sharing the
responsibility for a situation, the appraisal of which is one of the ob-
jectives of the report, and which is the object of dispute between the
experts and those whom the experts' report concerns. Of two
divergent opinions which can be thought of as defined by their respec-
tive interests, one is suddenly to evaluate the other; therein lies the
methodological error.
Here we have reached a point where the text's content must be
included in the debate, even if it remains methodological. The difficul-
ty at this level stems from the fact that a critique of the report cannot
put itself in a position that would cause reproach for contravening the
twelfth thesis. The sixth thesis, for example, refers exclusively to the
application of legal norms. Szondi criticizes the specialists' faulty
comprehension of the legal form of the envisioned institution, and he
commits an error in that he does not content himself with referring to
other possible concepts. This would suffice from a critical point of
view, but by affirming his own position Szondi himself here falls into
dogmatism. Here, in this juridical examination of a given situation we
have precisely a hermeneutic problem. That's why comprehension
cannot dogmatically stop debate. In a different way the same applies
in the eighth thesis, where it can be noted that the report implicitly
179
assumes what it doesn't mention, namely the existence of political
divergences, so that it can impose its own concepts. Two other prob-
lems appear here, first that of prejudice and correlativity, that of the
concept of science defended by these specialists, and then that of
insinuation, which the ninth thesis formulates. Since a discussion of
the concept of science will allow me, in outline at least, to deal with
the entire question of the rapport between comprehension and
criticism, I will limit myself here to the question of insinuation. There
is no more difficult methodological question. Insinuation destroys
debate, for it wants to hear something other than what is said. It is im-
possible to discuss in the face of such assumptions. But this is not
the concrete situation. The question as I present it here will be
dogmatic. A non-dogmatic presentation should ask the question:
"How do I recognize such insinuation?" The answer can only be: by
the fact that one comprehends something that has not been said.
However, such a characterization is insufficient, for then every
misunderstanding would be an intentional action. By the latter is im-
plied that such acts show the wish to comprehend something which
has not been said, hence the intentionality. But therein lies the dif-
ficulty, for it is no longer enough to seek recourse in debate: the latter
will always appear to be a confrontation between two dogmatic opi-
nions. To know a partner's intention it would be necessary to unders-
tand his desire to not understand. This is where it becomes clear that
there is actually a prerequisite to comprehension which, once shat-
tered, can give it a dogmatic appearance: the disposition to discuss,
in other words, precisely the desire to comprehend. If debate is relin-
quished, comprehending itself must take on a dogmatic appearance.
To conclude this examination of Szondi's critique of method in a
political light, I will move to the part of his text where the relationship
between understanding and criticism is itself more or less thematiciz-
ed. This happens in the seventh thesis: "The report interprets on the
basis of personal conceptions which are not questioned." Of course,
it's not immediately apparent that here it's a matter of a more or less
explicit discussion of this issue. I must come back to this point later,
for Szondi has in fact responded to the specialists position, not only
in the texts that I have quoted, but also in his introductory course in
hermeneutics. In my opinion only the last text is sufficiently explicit. I
will confine myself first to political intervention: at start, Szondi
blames the definitional process-one doesn't ask what a concept
means in a given context and the concept's possible meanings are
established a priori, before asking which of these meanings is present
in the text. Thus do the specialists proceed with the word "criticism".
Szondi's paragraph ends as follows:
By assuming that the students' criticism of a con-

cept of science held by many of their professors
already constitutes "taking a stand against the ex-
isting university," the report sustains a point of view
according to which, first, the student critics do not
belong to the university and, second, that the idea es-
180
tablished science has of itself can no longer be ques-
tioned critically (p. 77).
These experts act as if they had a monopoly in matters of

critical science, and as if their concept of science was unanimously
recognized. The second paragraph in the development of the thesis is
directed against the latter pretension. The supposition of a unique
concept of science in fact leads these specialists to designate the
student proposition as a "scientific regression of more than 150
years." In contrast Szondi points out to them that the expression that
they attack must be understood in the context of a debate
[Horkeheimer, Adorno, Habermas vs. Popper, etc.] which still made
waves in 1962, at the time of a symposium of the German Society for
Sociology. But the Rector's report subsumes it under "The Struggles
of Positivism" and thus bluntly denies its current validity. Szondi cites
the position the specialists reject as follows:
The relationship of the procedures and perspectives

of scientific investigation to a political finality sup-
poses a concrete representation of this finality which
ensues from a certain concept of man, a concept
which is in no way the natural product of experience,
but whick takes root in a decision (p. 77).
In all good faith one can ask if this position can be assimilated
to that of the Frankfurt school, as Szondi claims. But this does not
mean the procedure of the specialists, who had blatantly presented
their positivist point of view as the only existing one, is legitimate.
However this formulation is important for us in so far as it could easily
give the impression that Szondi espouses the point of view of de-
cision, though we know that he was more often inclined towards "dis-
tinction." Here we must refer to the treatment of the same point in the
course that Szondi gave right after this event.4 Before returning in
detail to Schleiermacher's concept, a part which corresponds basical-
ly to the text published in French under the title L'hermeneutique de
Schleiermacher, he discusses Ast's hermeneutic concept. We know
that Friedrich Ast and Friedrich August Wolf are the objects of
Schleiermacher's critique in his two academic discourses, the only
fully developed texts by Schleiermacher on hermeneutics. Szondi in-
sists that Ast's merit consists in having introduced the concept of the
"spirit" into hermeneutic debate. Here is what he writes:
[In the hermeneutics of the Enlightenment] it was a

question of the meaning and utilization of a passage,
of the author's intention and the thing to which he re-
ferred-rational objects, psychological effects, reali-
ty. In the hermeneutics of the Goethe era, it is above
all a question of the spirit, the Greek spirit sensed in
the wake of Winkelmann and Herder, and its bene-
ficial effect in a terrifyingly modern world. It is a
181
question, an idealistic synthesis between aesthetics
and ethics unknown during the Enlightenment; a syn-
thesis which lays claim to the name of humanity, and
which bears heavy responsibility for the ever greater
estrangement of the ideas of the princes of the spirit
from political reality, which the authors of the En-
lightenment never lost from sight, an estrangement
which, finally, led to the advent of barbarism (p. 139).
Thus, to the concept of the harmonising mind, Szondi ad-

dresses a critical which goes so far as to attribute to it part of the
historical responsibility for the appearance of National Socialism.
Nowhere is it a question of in this way criticizing the movement
toward concept of spirit (Geist); Szondi simply reproaches Ast for hav-
ing lent it a harmonizing function:
He must only be reproached for having made it too

easy for himself with this discourse, for having be-
lieved himself capable of eliminating all questions
and contradictions by invoking the spirit, instead of
making the problems of hermeneutics appear before
the court of philosophy, instead of giving philological
questions more importance by developing their philo-
sophic implications, and instead of being more de-
manding of their solutions. He must be reproached
for having ascribed to the spirit a harmonising func-
tion. This distinction is important because, with the
rise of positivism, the philology of the Goetheen era,
as represented by Ast, fell into disrepute. Today,
when a philologist diagnoses a scientific regression
of more than 150 years, he is expressing an idio-
syncratic view counter to the philological program
established by Ast 160 years ago. According to this
program, the philologist "should be not only a
language teacher and antiquarian, but also a philoso-
pher and aesthetician; he must not only be able to
divide the letter he is given into its components, but
also study the spirit which gave form to the letter, in
order to penetrate its higher significance, and now
how to evaluate the form that the letter has taken as
a revelation of the spirit." Without this superior
scientific life, says Ast in his introduction, "philology
is only simple formalism or simple materialism: the
former a one-sided study of language, the latter
simply antiquarian erudition." Nowadays we could
still subscribe to almost all the terms of these pro-
gramatic sentences when it is a question of
liberating philosophy [undoubtedly it must be read
"philology," K.G.] from a century and a half of self-
inflicted blindness, which led it to behave righteous-
182
ly, like blindfolded justice, though it was only
selfrighteousness (p. 140).
This is the non-critical part of the explanation of Ast's position.

It shows how much Szondi, as philologist, was affected by the
positivist shackles in which the report tried to imprison the university.
He expressly approves the main element of Ast's contribution, the
reference to the spirit, and with deeply felt words uses it as an argu-
ment against the specialists. Now these specialists do not repudiate
the fact itself, and a simple denial is not enough. We must examine
Szondi's own concept to question once again the rapport between
criticism and comprehension. But in fact precisely this demand en-
counters a difficulty for, as the editors of his course inform us, Szondi
resolved, under the influence of the criticism of his lectures, not to
complete the intial project, which would have taken him into the
modern period. I will not discuss the article, "Uber philologische
Erkenntnis," which (according to Szondi himself) was outmoded on
the issue of the division between natural sciences and psychology. I
will content myself with a few bits of evidence which for the most part
are taken from his criticism of Ast. Szondi criticizes Ast in the follow-
ing terms (these lines immediately follow those quoted above):
Of course, only almost every word. For... a philo-

sophically based philology must in fact avoid con-
sidering anything involving the spirit as ipso facto
superior to the letter; it is precisely such a philology
which must inexorably ask if spirit expresses itself in
the letter, and, if so, which one, instead of always
turning it into an expression of the spirit. And in fact
an aesthetically based philology (or an aesthetics
proceeding philologically) will not simply accept the
Astien thesis that "the ultimate or the highest, which
joins matter and form in a living unity, soaring over
and dominating both, is 'the spirit', the eternal for-
mative principle of all life." For its task must be the
analysis of the relationship which exists between
matter and form in a particular work, instead of hasti-
ly postulating their relationship as a living unity and
letting the interpretation be determined by this ideal.
Concerning the concept living unity itself, we could
ask if it must be free of all internal contradiction, ' la
Schelling rather than Hegel or Hdlderlin; and if this
concept of unity does not appear as harmonizer for
the simple reason that unity is already conceived of
as necessary to the empirical, instead of, as in
Hegel's dialectic and in Holderlin's poetics, on the
basis of real oppositions, as their mediation.
It is obvious-and this appears even more clearly in the re-

mainder of the course-that the almost absolute privilege that Szondi
183
accords philosophy leads him out of the realm of hermeneutics. His
concern, which is to save the historical moment of the work from the
spirit's claim to unity, seems to make him forget that the Hegelian
dialectic can certainly be of some assistance to him in a historical
perspective, but only by sacrificing the hermeneutic nature of his
criticism. For, as we read in the beginning of Hegel's "Introduction to
the essence of philosophic criticism in general, and its rapport with
the current state of philosophy in particular" of 1802:-
Criticism, in whatever realm of art or science it is

practised, demands a standard which is as in-
dependent of him who judges as of what is judged,
which is taken neither from the singular fact, nor
from the subject's particularity, but from the im-
mutable and eternal model of the thing itself. Just as
the criticism of art does not begin by creating and in-
venting the Idea of Art, but simply presupposes it, so
in philosophic criticism the Idea of Philosophy itself
is the condition and presupposition without which it
would forever confront subjectivities with subjec-
tivities, and never the absolute with the relative.
To be in accordance with this requirement, philosophy must

not only affirm the unity of the ratio in so far as the latter is the condi-
tion of all comprehensibility (in a sense which remains to be de-
termined), it must formulate the laws of this ratio itself. For this
reason Hegel is a rather inadequate witness in matters of defining a
hermeneutic dialectic that does not allow itself to be reduced to an
aesthetic, as Szondi knows and says himself. For "Analysis of com-
prehension" one cannot suddenly substitute "Philosophic analysis of
the comprehended object"; and the unity of the latter, as Szondi con-
firms in another text, derives not from the meaning found in the frame-
work of a philosophy of history, but indeed from its mode of produc-
tion. You see the difficulty: when Szondi tries to criticize the unity of
the Astien 'spirit' by way of Hegel (here I allow myself to not take the
reference to Holderlin into consideration), keeping in mind the inter-
nal contradiction of the work, he must necessarily depart from the
hermeneutic perspective. That, simply because Hegel is not at all in-
terested in discussion, but in the thing of which it is a question.
Nonetheless, the criticism which Szondi addresses to Ast remains
legitimate in so far as his concept of spirit is, from the hermeneutic
point of view, a "forced reconciliation." Still, the fact remains that,
starting with Hegel, the primacy of theory and its tribunal in the field
of criticism can no longer be avoided. Even if the Szondi's intention in
the quoted passage is clear and legitimate, it puts him in contradic-
tion with his own concept of hermeneutics; and I am inclined to think
that Schleiermacher's dialectics, in place of Hegel's, would have
resolved both difficulties at the same time. There, comprehension of
the other is not simply subordinated to that of the thing.
Reference to Szondi's reaction in his own course on
184
hermeneutics has allowed us to progress, in so far as it has become
clear to us that his conception of hermeneutics as criticism leads us
off on the byways of several historical examples, which allow us to
prove the opposite of the defended opinion. No detailed text exists
which unambiguously exposes his own conception. In such a case,
the philologist attempts a reconstruction, where he formulates what
really should have been the doctrine of the other. Rigorously speak-
ing, I certainly couldn't fulfill this program. All the same, I think that
my attempt to find a solution by analysing the practice followed by
Szondi in his political statements-and not only there-could at least
correspond to Szondi's basic intentions. Allow me, therefore, to return
once again to these statements.
Most of them take the form of a critique, and this is particularly
true of the two that I have placed at the center of my analysis, since in
both cases it's a question of the reading of a reading. In the first case,
that of the special judicial reports; this aspect is, of course, im-
portant, but does not deeply touch the functioning of justice. In the
second statement, which concerns the Knauer/Borinski report, it's a
question of the critique of an interpretation in so far as a text is con-
fronted by its reading. We may now ask ourselves if Szondi's criticism
of this report must necessarily take a theoretical position as a point of
departure. Entering the discussion between Habermas and Gadamer,
is it necessary to identify the concept of tradition with that of conserv-
ativism, which, stripped of theory, must take from the exterior the
norms which allow it to be criticized? Is it not rather that Gadamer's
comprehension of tradition, against which Habermas sought the aid
of the critical norm, mixes tradition and authority, authority and
meaning to the point we can no longer recognize that, behind this mix-
ture stands a comprehension of history which in itself is not inscribed
in hermeneutics? To experience oneself as having become in the con-
tinuum of becoming can in no way signify without also giving ap-
probation to the conditions of this becoming. But the conditions of
this becoming are also a part of the tradition to be comprehended and
it is only when it remains clear that history (which must in a sense
always be understood as a continuum) owes the continuity of its
becoming to the ruin of what has not become, that the concept of
tradition receives its true significance. Tradition does not involve ap-
proving behavior, nor is it simply conservative. But precisely this way
of exposing the problem seems made for giving comprehension a
critical nature on the basis of a philosophy of history.
As I said, comprehension is always immediately critical when
it associates itself with an incomprehension which can be examined
critically with the help of the text to be comprehended. This is nothing
other than the hermeneutic circle, for already in Schleiermacher one
reads that "incomprehension produces itself." Thus we must keep in
mind that comprehension is always first incomprehension, and that
the process of comprehension sets out to suppress this incomprehen-
sion. This takes place, as we know, when comprehension confronts
the text. I begin with that aspect of comprehension that Schleier-
macher called grammatical. I interpret a text grammatically when I
185
relate it to the langue it speaks. (I am giving the most general formula-
tion possible.) Now la langue is the medium of communication, and
even of mutual understanding; in other words, la langue does not exist
as does a text. It is not comprehensible as such. It is the 6nonces that
are comprehensible. But, if we push Schleiermacher's grammatical in-
terpretation to its limits, la langue as such is the general backdrop for
comprehension. If I become foreign to myself to the point that each
one of my intentions becomes lost, I become langue. That means that
each 6nonc6, as far as it is linguistic, bears in itself the requirement of
universality. Comprehension makes reference it is true, to this re-
quirement, which, however, still does not guarantee comprehension.
But this background is vital to our question of the relationship be-
tween comprehension and criticism; for along with la langue comes a
demand for universal transparence-a requirement which denies the
6nonc6 or the text, insofar as they are the first to limit universality
(which is universality
to obscure the light. conceived [pens.e]),each
Since, however, to disturb transparence
text wants and
to be com-
prehended, it demands without being transparency, to become so. In
this way the perspective of grammatical interpretation makes of the
text a clouded transparency, thus an obstacle.
The problem presents itself differently when it is a question of
psychological interpretation. Here, we ask ourselves about the inten-
tion that gave birth to the text, about the "will which is at the origin of
the execution." Now, an alien subject is just as little given in itself as
a langue in itself. Thus I am constrained in regard to the psychological
or, as Schleiermacher as well says, the technical aspect, to rely on my
similarity with the other individuality. The divinatory method, that is,
the fact that alterity can be guessed, thus the immediacy of the unity,
here merges with the combinatory method by which alterity is posed
as a universal. I can only reproduce the other's intentions provided
that I experience them as capable of being my own. To this extent,
writing and reading are not basically different activities, for in both
cases "a singular universal"-to quote Manfred Frank-is realized.
Comprehension thus is found at the core of a polarity, of which
one term is formed by the Idea of la langue, the transparency of the
different subjects, and the other by the Idea of the unity of mankind,
that is, in last resort, of the spirit. This concept has the advantage of
allowing a position such as Hegel's to be described as the appropri-
ation of dominion over the Idea of la langue by the spirit. It involves for
us the difficulty of leaving the text suspended in the middle like an ob-
ject which is finally incomprehensible-it is precisely a disturbance
of transparency, an obstacle. Simple reflexion suffices in order to see
that this is precisely the reason why comprehension is always also
criticism-because comprehension can always rely on the fact of the
disburbance. The critic therefore always touches the incomprehen-
sibility of a text, namely his relative failure in the face of the idea of la
langue. The merit of Schleiermacher's position is exactly that of not
letting himself be lured into turning the horizon into a point of view,
drawing the specific from the general. He thereby restored the value
to the actual work of comprehension and mutual accord. No media-
186
tion exists without comprehension, which is the goal of hermeneutics,
nor without tangible agreement produced by the task of mediating,
which is the goal of dialectics.
You will have already noticed that a usurpation other than that
of Hegel is made possible by this systematic, i.e., that of la langue
with respect to ratio; and, if we wish to avoid remaining in generalities
on the question of criticism, we must still briefly develop this point. In
the beginning I mentioned that Szondi was very strict on the question
of political representation. The desire to turn against those represen-
tatives who were not true representatives reappears several times;
and this can only be done by standing up and declaring, "You no
longer represent me." The question of representation played a role in
the university itself; it was also very important in the political life of
the Federal Republic. Here I must briefly mention that one aspect of
post-war German reality was an attempt to eliminate the possibility of
plebecite from political life. It was thought that real lessons could be
drawn from what was called "the failure of the Weimar Republic." As
in most of the states of western Europe, moreover, one had more faith
in their representatives than in the people themselves. Perhaps I
should mention here that Szondi might have had a different ex-
perience in Switzerland. I would'nt go so far as to claim that he con-
demned all forms of representative democarcy; this would undoubted-
ly be untrue. On the other hand, his translation of a part of the article
"Repr6sentants" from the Encyclopedie, written at the time of the
debate on emergency laws in Germany, shows that he had a very
direct comprehension of representation. The editors of the text em-
phasize that Szondi presented this translation as a means of taking a
stand. One finds it in the following:
A representative cannot arrogate to himself the right

to make his constitutents speak a language opposed
to their interests; the rights of the constituents are
chosen by the nation, they are imprescriptible and in-
alienable.
and, a little further:
No man acquires the right to represent another

against his will.
If this last sentence is pushed to its conclusion, one is immediately

led to Rousseau's basic criticism of representative politics in general.
If each citizen must constantly be represented, representation itself
as a practical principle of expression of the will of the people is of
itself pushed to the absurd. It can immediately be replaced by direct
democracy. The arbitrary appearance of my statement comes from
the fact that the problem of representatives contains that of the ex-
pression of the general will. Rousseau writes:
Sovereignty cannot be replaced for the same reason
187
that it cannot be alienated; its essence is the general
will, and will cannot be represented: it is either itself
or it is other, there is no intermediate possibility. The
deputies of the people, therefore, are not nor can
they be its representatives, they are only its commis-
sioners; they can conclude nothing definitively.6
Although here there is a fundamental rejection of representa-

tion, unlike the article in the Encyclopedie, the two texts are still
almost identical; for that which in the latter is called representative is
called agent by Rousseau. In other words, Rousseau has clarified a
difficulty that the Encyclopedie article left implicit, and has in part
resolved it. All political effort must be directed towards the preser-
vation of the general will. To this extent, Rousseau is conservative.
But this conservatism also corresponds completely to Szondi's
tendency to "take seriously the will of the constituents," thus that of
the people, and to take into consideration its precise comprehension.
It's a question of respecting the general will, which, in the end,
representative theory cannot do without either. Now the general will
has precisely the structure that we encountered in the problem of
comprehension. It is the ultimate touchstone of all law; and, though
popular referenda in no way function to answer the question of the
conformity of laws to the interest of the majority, they are the conven-
tional form for testing the accord between the laws and the social
contract. This convention is based on the supposition that, in a state
which rests on a social contract, the general interests which it
defends must also unite the majority; for, in the opposite case, the
state would crumble de facto and the majority principle would also be
null. Balloting rests therefore on a comparison, and the question is
always posed in the following way: "Does the proposed law agree
with the social contract?" If it does not agree, this means that it pur-
sues special interests. This is the usual case, and it provokes
criticism. But the comparison itself puts before us the question of the
legislator. One could say that the legislator is the people, but this ex-
pression is metaphorical, for the people do not write laws; they vote
on texts and make laws from them. The legislator, in the form he has
been known since antiquity, is an individual, and his position is, in any
case, usurped, even when the law is afterwards submitted to a vote.
Indeed, how could he look at things from the point of view of the con-
tract, since the contract is characterized precisely by its total
absence of point of view? In Rousseau, the briefest formulation of the
contract is as follows: "the total alienation of each associate, and all
his rights, to the whole community."'7 Here, one demands nothing less
than the whole, which must constitute itself as subject in an act of
alienation, originating in the individual subjects. In his turn, the
legislator must occupy this place as an individual, which can only
happen if he manages to hide himself behind a god, whom he allows
to speak for him. The construction of intersubjectivity, described by
the contract, the production of a "moral body," is nothing other than
the basic condition of all mutual agreement. Now the latter has
188
always been la langue, and just as the individual expresses himself
through la langue, and raises the demand to become universal, that is,
comprehensible, the legislator must also be comprehensible, com-
prehensible to everyone. For it is only in so far as everyone has the
potential to comprehend a text that the latter is universal. This
assumes that we get rid of the notion that ideological criticism con-
sists of understanding a comprehension as specific. It is rather the
case that an ideological text which as such provokes criticism is in-
comprehensible. Ideological criticism is consequently the com-
prehension of a specific incomprehensibility. Objections will justly be
raised that a law which goes against the general rights of the citizen
can be perfectly understood as going against these rights. This may
be true in a limited sense, and according to common language. But
strictly speaking, it can be countered that to a law also belongs its
potential application, and though I can well comprehend a law that
goes against the citizen's general rights as a text, I cannot com-
prehend it as a text of its genre, that is as a law. At that moment, I also
no longer comprehend the text in so far as it wants to be a law. If I
seek to comprehend it as such, its requirements of universality will
enter into conflict with the content of legal decisions. The law
becomes incomprehensible as such, in other words it becomes in-
comprehensible that it could be a law under these circumstances,
because the special interests which seek to impose themselves are
only too manifest.
The comprehension to which I agree signifies in the sense that,
since I agree to take the other seriously, I listen to him. Consequently,
I reflect on my own position in relationship to him, and we evolve on
the basis of a langue which, ultimately, is common. That is why the
mastering la langue is the prerequisite and the result of comprehen-
sion: a result as far as I can reconstruct the langue of the other, a
prerequisite insofar as this reconstruction supposes a common
langue according to the idea. This idea of a common langue is in-
herent in each attempt at comprehension as the will to produce it.
Each law, each normative prescription attempts to usurp this com-
mon langue as a given, and it is obviously not by chance that
totalitarian states feel the need to regulate usage of the langue. The
fear that hermeneutics must fail in the realm of political criticism is
unfounded. However, I would still like to briefly indicate that, even if
the idea of la langue makes criticism possible, a text may certainly be
considered devoid of all normative demands. For this reason I will be
careful not to assert that every text actually makes possible its
criticism. This would be a far too hasty mixing of aesthetics and
ethics. In addition, it would be legitimate to ask, with Nietzsche in
mind, if the langue actually spoken can agree with this idea of la
langue, and if the originally figured nature of these langues does not
immediately conflict with any attempt to attain transparency in them.
All this is no longer part of my subject, and I would like to conclude
with the one text from the little book which I used as a point of de-
parture, whose object is not the university situation in a more or less
strict sense, but rather an attempt, after the murder of the Jews by the
189
Nazis, to make a statement on the rapport between Jews and
Germans. With Scholem, Szondi asks what langue could achieve the
reconciliation of that which has been broken. With the help of a cri-
tique of the discourse of a German politician since forgotten, Eugen
Gerstenmaier, who in 1967 was the president of the Bundestag, and
thus held one of the highest offices in the Federal Republic, Peter
Szondi explains what such a langue cannot resemble. He denounces
the scruples that some people have about naming things by their
names, the tendency to take up the langue of the Nazis even while
claiming to condemn them and he concludes by expressing his own
hope that one might "help prepare the way for the language of this
future reconciliation through the sober resolution to let men and
things have their names, without any mixing of terms" (p. 67).
University of Zurich
NOTES
1 Peter Szondi, Uber eine "Freie (d.h. freie) Universitat." Stellungnahmen eines
Philologen (Frankfurt, 1973).
2 P. Szondi, Uber eine "Freie (d.h. freie) Universitat," p. 83.
3 The word "course" is used here in the sense of Saussure's Cours de linguistique
g6n6rale or Lacan's Seminars [Ed. note].
4 Peter Szondi, Einfuhrung in die literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt, 1975).
5 Hegel, Werke, II (Frankfurt, 1970), p. 171.
6 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, III, 15, in Oeuvres Completes, III (Paris,
1964), pp. 429-30.
7 J. J. Rousseau, Social Contract, I, 6, Ibid., p. 360.
190
Theory of the Modern Drama, Parts I-II.
Peter Szondi
translated by Michael Hays
Introduction
Since Aristotle, theorists of the drama have objected to the
presence of epic features in dramatic works. But anyone who at-
tempts to describe the development of recent drama can (for reasons
he ought to clarify for himself and his readers) no longer feel free to
make such judgments.
In earlier dramatic theory, the expectation that one adhere to
formal rules was justified by a particular notion of form, one which
recognized neither a historical nor a dialectical relationship between
form and content. The assumption was that a pre-existing form was
objectified in dramatic art through its union with a subject matter
chosen with this form in mind. If the pre-existent form was not ade-
quately realized, if the drama possessed any forbidden epic features,
the error was attributed to the selection of subject matter. In the
Poetics, Aristotle insists that the poet must remember not to "write a
tragedy on an epic body of incident (i.e., one with a plurality of stories
in it), by attempting to dramatize, for instance, the entire Iliad."' Even
the effort made by Goethe and Schiller to distinguish between epic
and dramatic poetry had as its practical goal the avoidance of faulty
subject matter.2
191
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This traditional view, which is based on an initial separation of
form and content, admits of no historical classification either. The
pre-existent form is historically indifferent, only subject matter is
historically bound. By conforming to this pattern, which is common to
all non-historical theories, the drama appears to be the historical em-
bodiment of an eternal form.
That dramatic form is conceived of as existing outside history
also means that such drama can always be written and can be called
for in the poetics of any age.
This connection between an ahistorical poetics and an un-
dialectical conception of form and content is restated in that
culminating moment of dialectical and historical thought-the works
of Hegel. In his Logic, he states that "the only true works of art are
those whose content and form prove to be completely identical."'3This
identity is dialectical in nature: earlier in the same discussion Hegel
asserts the "absolute correlation of content and form, (...) their
reciprocal transformation into one another, so that content is nothing
but the inversion of form into content and form nothing but that of
content into form."4 Identifying form and content in this way destroys
the opposition between the timeless and the historical found in the
old conceptual relationship. The result is the historicization of the
concept "form" and, ultimately, of genre poetics (Gattungspoetik)
itself. The lyric, epos and drama are transformed from systematic into
historical categories.
After this change in the fundamental principles of poetics,
three paths remained open to critics. They could conclude that tradi-
tional poetics' three primary categories had lost their raison d'etre
along with their systematic character-thus Benedetto Croce exiled
them from aesthetics. In diametrical opposition to this view stand the
efforts made to flee from a historically based poetics, from concrete
literary modes, back to the timeless. E[mil]Staiger's Poetik (along
with R. Hartl's rather unrewarding Versuch einer psychologischen
Grundlegung der Dichtungsgattungen) bears witness to this effort. In
Staiger's work,the genres are anchored in mankinds various modes of
being and, finally, in the three "ecstasies" of time. That this redefini-
tion alters the nature of poetics in general and particularly the rela-
tionship of poetics to literature is evident in the unavoidable replace-
ment of the three basic concepts, "lyric," "epos" and "drama," by
"lyrical" "epic" and "dramatic."
A third possibility existed, however-to remain within the
historical perspective. This led, among Hegel's followers, to works
which elaborated more than a historical aesthetics for literature:
G[eorg] LukAcs's Theory of the Novel; W[alter]Benjamin's Origins of
German Tragic Drama; Th[eodor]W. Adorno's Philosophy of Modern
Music. Hegel's dialectical notion of the form-content relationship was
turned to productive use here. Form could be conceived of as
"precipitated" content.5 The metaphor points to both the solid and
lasting nature of form and to its origin in content-thus its capacity to
state something. A valid semantics of form can be developed along
these lines, one in which the form-content dialectic can be viewed as
192
a dialectic between the statements made by form and content. The
possibility arises thereby, that the statement made by the content
may contradict that of the form. If, when there is an equivalence be-
tween form and content, the thematic [the subject of the content]
operates within the framework of the formal statement as a problem
contained so to speak within something unproblematic, a contradic-
tion arises, since the indisputable fixed statement of the form is
called into question by the content. It is this inner antinomy that
causes a given literary form to become historically problematic. The
following is an attempt to explain the different forms of recent works
for the stage in terms of efforts to resolve such contradictions.
This is also the reason the discussion remains within the realm
of aesthetics rather than branching out into a diagnosis of the period.
The contradictions between dramatic form and the problems of con-
temporary life should not be set down in abstracto. Instead, they
should be examined as technical contradictions, as "difficulties," in-
ternal to the concrete work itself. Of course, it seems natural to want
to define that displacement in modern theatrical works which arises
from the growing problem of dramatic form in terms of a system of
genres. But we will have to do without a systematic, that is, a nor-
mative, poetics-not out of any desire to avoid the inevitably negative
evaluation of the epic tendencies in these plays, but because a
historical-dialectical view of form and content eliminates the possibli-
ty of a systematic poetics as such.
The terminological starting point for this analysis is simply the
concept "drama." As a concept bound in time it stands for a specific
literary-historical event, namely, the drama as it arose in Elizabethan
England, but above all as it came into being in seventeenth century
France and was perpetuated in the German classical period. Since the
concept provides evidence of the assertions about human existence
which were precipitated in dramatic form, it identifies this form as a
literary-historical phenomenon, as a "document" of human history. It
serves to expose the technical demands of the drama as reflections of
existential demands. The totality which it outlines is not of a
systematic, but of a historic-philosophic nature. Since history has
been ostracized to the gaps between literary forms, only by reflecting
on history can these gaps be bridged.
The notion "drama" is historically bound in terms of its origins
as well as its content. But because the form of a work of art always
seems to express something unquestionable, we usually arrive at a
clear understanding of such formal statements only at a time when
the unquestionable has been questioned and the self-evident has
become problematic. It is in this light that the drama will be dealt with
here-in terms of what impedes it today-and this notion of the
drama will be examined as a moment of inquiry into the possibility of
modern drama.
Therefore, only a particular dramaturgic form will be
designated "Drama"in the following pages. Neither the clerical plays
of the Middle Ages nor Shakespeare's histories belong in this
category. Working within a historical frame of reference also
193
eliminates Greek tragedy from consideration, since its being can only
be examined in terms of a different set of conditions. The adjective
"dramatic," as used hereafter, will have no qualitative meaning (as it
does, for example, in E[mil]Staiger's Grundbegriffeder Poetik).6 It will
simply express the idea "belonging to the Drama" (a "dramatic
dialogue"= dialogue in the Drama)."Theatrical works," in contrast to
Drama, will be used in the largest sense to designated anything writ-
ten for the stage.* If "drama" is at any time used in this sense, it will
be •placed within quotation marks.
Since modern theatrical works develop out of and away from
the Drama itself, this development cannot be considered without the
help of a contrasting concept. "Epic" will serve here. It designates a
common structural characteristic of the epos, the story, the novel and
other genres-namely, the presence of that which has been referred
to as the "subject of the epic form"'7or the "epic /."8
Preceding the [five] essays in which an attempt is made to ap-
prehend recent developments as they manifest themselves in specific
texts is a discussion of the Drama itself. All that follows will refer to
this analysis.
*"Die Dramatik,"the term Szondi uses here, has no equivalent in English. It means any
work written for the stage and also the corpus of plays written in a given time or place. Ed.
note.
I. The Drama
The Drama of modernity came into being in the Renaissance. It was
the result of a bold intellectual effort made by a newly self-conscious
being, who after the collapse of the medieval world view sought to
create an artistic reality within which he could fix and mirrorhimself
on the basis of interpersonal relationships alone. Man entered the
drama only as a fellow human being, so to speak. The sphere of the
"between" seemed to be the essential part of his being, freedom and
obligation, will and decision the most important of his attributes. The
"place" at which he achieved dramatic realization was in the act of
self-disclosure. By disclosing himself to his contemporary world, man
transformed his internal being into a palpable and dramatic presence.
The surrounding world, on the other hand, was drawn into a rapport
with him because of his disclosure and thereby first achieved
dramatic realization. Everything prior to or after this act was, had to
remain, foreign to the drama-the inexpressible as well as the ex-
pressed, what was hidden in the soul as well as the idea already
alienated from its subject. Most radical of all was the exclusion of
that which could not express itself-the world of objects-unless it
entered the realm of interpersonal relationships.
All dramatic themes were formulated in this sphere of the "be-
tween"-for example, the struggle of passion and devoir in the Cid's
position between his father and his beloved; the comic paradoxes in
"crooked" interpersonal situations, such as that of Justice Adam; the
tragedy of individuation as it appeared to Hebbel: the tragic conflict
between Duke Ernst, Albrecht and Agnes Bernauer.
194
The verbal medium for this world of the interpersonal was the
dialogue. In the Renaissance, after the exclusion of prologue, chorus
and epilogue, dialogue became, perhaps for the first time in the
history of the theater (excluding the monologue, which remained oc-
casional and therefore did not constitute the form of the Drama),the
sole constitutive element in the dramatic web. Inthis respect, the neo-
classical Dramadistinguishes itself not only from antique tragedy but
also from medieval clerical plays, from the baroque world theater and
from Shakespeare's histories. The absolute dominance of dialogue,
that is, of interpersonal communication, reflects the fact that the
Drama consists only of the reproduction of interpersonal relations, is
only cognizant of, what shines forth within this sphere.
All this shows that the Drama is a self-contained dialectic, but
one which is free and redefined from moment to moment. With this in
mind, the Drama's major characteristics can now be understood and
described:
The Drama is absolute. In order to be purely relational, that is,
to be dramatic, it must break loose from everything external. It can be
conscious of nothing outside itself.
The dramatist is absent from the Drama. He does not speak, he
institutes discussion. The Drama is not written, it is set. All of the
lines spoken in the Drama are con-clusions. They are spoken in con-
text and remain there. They should in no way be perceived as coming
from the author. The drama belongs to the author only as a whole, and
this connection is in no way essential to its working reality.
The same absolute quality exists with regard to the spectator.
The lines in a play are as little an address to the spectator as they are
a declaration by the author. The theatergoer is an observer-silent,
with hands tied, lamed by the impact of this other world. This total
passivity will, however (and therein lies the dramatic experience), be
converted into irrational activity. The man who was specator is pulled
into the dramatic event, himself becomes the person speaking
(through the mouths of all the characters, of course). The relationship
specator-Drama is one of complete separation or complete identity,
not one where the spectator invades the Drama or where he is ad-
dressed through the Drama.
The stage shaped by the Renaissance and the neo-classical
period, the much maligned "picture-frame"stage, is the only one ade-
quate to the absoluteness of the drama and bears witness to it in each
of its features. It is as little connected to the house (by steps, for
example) as the Drama is connected (stepwise) with the audience. The
stage becomes visible, thus exists, only at the beginning of the play,
often, in fact, only after the first lines have been spoken. Because of
this, it seems to be created by the play itself. At the end of the act,
when the curtain falls, the stage is again withdrawn from the spec-
tator's view, taken back as if it were part of the play. The footlights
which illumninate it create the impression that the play sheds its own
light on stage.
Even the actor's art is subservient to the absoluteness of the
Drama. The actor-role relationship should not be visible. Indeed, the
195
actor and the character should unite to create a single personage.
That the Drama is absolute can also be expressed in a different
manner: the Drama is primary.It is not a (secondary) representation of
something else (primary);it presents itself, is itself. Its action, like
each of its lines, is "original," it is accomplished as it occurs. The
Drama has no more room for quotation than it does for variation. Such
quotation would imply that the Drama referred to whatever was
quoted. Variation would call into question the Drama's quality of
being primary ("true")and present it as secondary (as a variation of
something and as one variation among many). Furthermore, it would
be necessary to assume a "quoter" or "varier"on whom the Drama
would depend.
The Drama is primary. This is one of the reasons historical
plays always strike one as "undramatic." The attempt to stage a
Luther the Reformer requires some reference to history. If it were
possible, in the absolute dramatic situation, to show Lutherin the pro-
cess of deciding to reform the faith, the Reformation Drama could be
said to exist. But at this point a second problem arises: the objective
conditons which are necessary to motivate the decision demand epic
treatment. An interpersonal portrayal of Luther's situation would be
the only possible foundation for the Drama, but this account would be
understandably alien to the intent of a Reformation play.
Because the Drama is always primary, its internal time is
always the present. That in no way means that the Drama is static, on-
ly that time passes in a particular manner: the present passes and
becomes the past and, as such, can no longer be present on stage. As
the present passes away, it produces change, a new present springs
from its antithesis. In the Drama, time unfolds as an absolute, linear
sequence in the present. Since the Drama is absolute, it is itself
responsible for this temporal sequence. It generates its own time.
Because of this, every moment must contain within it the seeds of the
future. It must be "pregnant with futurity."'2This is posible because of
the Drama's dialectical structure, which, in turn, is rooted in interper-
sonal relationships.
From this point of view, the demand that one adhere to the uni-
ty of time acquires new meaning. Temporal fragmentation of the
scenes in a play would subvert the principle of absolute presence and
linearity, since every scene would have its own antecedents and
results (past and future) external to the play. The individual scenes
would thus be relativized. In addition, only when each scene in suc-
cession generates the next (the kind of progression necessary to the
Drama) can the implicit presence of a monteur be avoided. The
(spoken or unspoken) "three years later" presupposes an epic I.
A comparable set of conditions leads to the demand for unity
of place. As with time, the spectator should not be conscious of a
larger spatial context. Only then can an absolute, that is, a dramatic
scene arise. The more frequent the change in scene, the more difficult
this is to accomplish. Besides, spatial fragmentation (like temporal)
assumes an epic I. (Clich6: Now we'll leave the conspirators in the
forest and return to the unsuspecting king in his palace.)
196
It is generally agreed that Shakespeare's plays differ most
markedly from the French neo-classical form in these two areas. But
his loose and multiplace succession of scenes should be examined in
conjunction with the histories (e.g. Henry V) in which a narrator,
designated Chorus, presents the individual acts to the audience as
chapters in a popular history.
The insistence on motivation and the exclusion of accident are
also based in the absoluteness of the Drama. The accidental enters
the Drama from outside, but by motivating it, accident is
domesticated; it is rooted in the heart of drama itself.
Ultimately, the whole world of the Drama is dialectical in
origin. It does not come into being because of an epic I which
permeates the work. It exists because of the always achieved and,
from that point, once again disrupted sublation of the interpersonal
dialectic, which manifests itself as speech in the dialogue. In this
respect as well, the dialogue carries the Drama. The Drama is pos-
sible only when dialogue is possible.
II.The Drama in Crisis

The [following] five essays focus on Ibsen (1828-1906),Chekhov
(1860-1904), Strindberg (1849-1912), Maeterlinck (1862-1949) and
Hauptmann (1862-1946), since the search for the initial situation in
which the modern theatrical work arose begins, of necessity, in a con-
frontation between works from the late nineteenth century and the
phenomena of the classic Drama described above.
Of course, it could well be asked whether this kind of reference
might not subvert the historical purpose of the analysis and lead one
to fall back into the kind of systematic normative poetics rejected in
the introduction-especially since that which was tentatively de-
scribed in the preceding pages as the Drama arising in the
Renaissance coincides with the traditional conception of the Drama.
It is identical with that which handbooks on dramatic technique (e.g.,
Gustav Freytag's) taught and against which modern plays were at
first, and sometimes still are, measured by critics. But the historical
method, applied here in an effort to glean information from the form
and on the historicity of this "normative" Drama, is in no danger of
becoming normative itself-even if theatrical works from the turn of
the century are examined in terms of the Drama's historical image.
After all, this form for the Drama, ca. 1860, not only was the subjective
norm of the theorists, but also represented the objective state of the
works of the period. Whatever else there was at hand that might have
been played off against this form was either archaic in character or
tied to a specific thematic. The "open" Shakespearean form, for ex-
ample, which is constantly compared with the "closed" neoclassical
form, cannot really be detached from Shakespeare's histories.
Whenever it was successfully employed in German literature, it serv-
ed the purpose of historical fresco (G6tz von Berlichingen, Danton's
Death).
The connection established in what follows is, therefore, not
197
normative in origin; rather, it will deal with objective-historical rela-
tionships conceptually. To be sure, the relationship to neoclassical
dramatic form is different for each of the five dramatists discussed
here. Ibsen did not take a critical stance vis a vis traditonal dramatic
form. He won his fame in great part because of his mastery of earlier
dramatic conventions. But this external perfection masked an internal
crisis in the Drama. Chekhov too adopted the traditional form. He no
longer had any firm commitment to the pi6ce bien faite (into which the
neoclassical Drama had alienated itself) though. On this inherited ter-
rain he constructed a magical, poetic edifice that nonetheless has no
autonomous style, gives no guarantee of a formal whole, and instead
continually exposes the bases of its construction. Thus, he revealed
the discrepancy between the form he used and that demanded by his
thematic. And if Strindberg and Maeterlinck came upon new forms,
they did so only after a conflict with the tradition. Then again,
sometimes this conflict remained unresolved and visible within their
works-a sign post, as it were, on the road to the forms developed by
later dramatists. Finally, Hauptmann's Before Sunrise and The
Weavers allow us to see the problems created for the drama by a
social thematic.
I. Ibsen
Access to the problems of form in a play like Rosmersholm has
been hampered by the idea of an "analytical technique," which has
led Ibsen's work to be compared with that of Sophocles. If, however,
one is aware of the aesthetic connections in relation to which
Sophocles' analysis was employed and how it was discussed in the
correspondence between Goethe and Schiller, the notion ceases to be
an obstacle and, in fact, turns out to be the key to Ibsen's late work.
On October 2, 1797, Schiller wrote to Goethe that
For the past few days I have been very busy
trying to find a tragic subject which would be of the
same sort as Oedipus Rex, one which would provide
the poet with all the same advantages. These advan-
tages are infinite, even if I name only one: the most
compound of actions, though it militates against the
tragic form, can nonetheless be its basis if the action
has already taken place and so falls entirely outside
the tragedy. In addition, that which has happened,
because it is inalterable, is by its very nature much
more terrible. The fact that something might have
happened affects the spirit quite differently than the
fear that something might happen-Oedipus is, as it
were, merely a tragic analysis. Everything is already
present. It is simply unfolded. That can be done with
the simplest of actions and in a very short time, no
matter how complicated the events were or what con-
ditions they depended on. What an advantage for the
poet!f-But I am afraid that Oedipus represents a
198
genre all its own and there is no other like
species ...
Half a year earlier (on April 22, 1797) Goethe had written Schiller that
the exposition was hard work for a dramatist "because one expects
him to produce an eternal forward movement, and I would call that
dramatic material best in which the exposition is already part of the
development" To which Schiller responded on April 25, that Oedipus
Rex approached this ideal to an amazing degree.
The starting point for this thought process is that the form of
the drama exists a priori.The analytical technique is pressed into ser-
vice in order to permit inclusion of the exposition in the dramatic
movement and thus remove its epic effect, or permit use of the "most
compound" of actions, those that at first do not seem to fit the
dramatic form, as subject matter for a drama.
This is not what happens in Sophocles' Oedipus, however.
Aeschylus' earlier, lost trilogy had already provided a chronological
account of the Theban king's fate. Sophocles could forgo this epic
presentation of widely separated events because it was, for him, still
less a question of the events themselves and more exclusively of the
tragic qualities they embody. This tragedy is not tied to details
though, it rises above the temporal flow. The tragic dialectic of sight
and loss of sight-that a man loses his sight through self-knoweldge,
through that one eye "too many" that he has'-this peripeteia (both in
the Aristotelian and Hegelian sense) requires only a single act of
recognition, the anagnorisis,2 in order to become a dramatic reality.
The Athenian spectator knew the myth, it did not have to be acted out
for him. The only person who has yet to experience it is Oedipus
himself-and he can do so only at the end, after they myth has
become his life. Exposition is unnecessary here, and the analysis is
synonymous with the action. Oedipus, blind though seeing, creates,
so to speak, the empty center of a world that already knows his fate.
Step by step, messengers who come from this world invade his inner
being and fill it with their horrible truth. It is not a truth that belongs to
the past, however. The present, not the past, is revealed. Oedipus is
his father's murderer,his mother's husband, his children's brother. He
is "the land's pollution"'3and only has to learn of what has been in
order to recognize that which is. Thus, the action in Oedipus Rex,
although it in fact precedes the tragedy, is nonetheless contained
within its present. The analytical technique is, in Sophocles' case,
called for by the subject matter itself, not in terms of any pre-existing
form, but rather to show its tragic quality in its greatest purity and
depth.
In differentiating the dramatic structures created by Ibsen and
Sophocles, one is led straight to the formal problem which confronted
Ibsen, a problem which exposes the historical crisis in the Drama
itself. There is no need to prove that for Ibsen the analytical tech-
nique, rather than being an isolated phenomenon, is the mode of con-
struction in his modern plays. It should be sufficient to remind the
reader of the most important of them: A Doll's House, Pillars of
199
Society, Ghosts, The Lady from the Sea, Rosmersholm, The Wild
Duck, The Masterbuilder, John Gabriel Borkman, When We Dead
Awaken.
The action of John Gabriel Borkman (1896) "passes one winter
evening, at the manor house of the Rentheim family, in the
neighborhood of the capital." For eight years John Gabriel Borkman,
"formerlymanaging director of a bank," has lived in almost complete
isolation in the "great gallery" of the house. The drawing room below
is occupied by his wife, Gunhild. They live in the same house without
ever seeing one another. Ella Rentheim, her sister and owner of the
house, lives elsewhere. Once a year she comes to see the estate
manager. During these visits she speaks neither to Gunhild nor to
Borkman.
The winter evening on which the play opens reunites these
three people, who are chained together by the past, but are at the
same time profoundly estranged from each other. In the first act Ella
and Gunhild meet. "Well, Gunhild, it is nearly eight years now since
we saw each other last."4The second act brings a discussion between
Ella and Borkman. "It seems an endless time since we two met,
Borkman, face to face" (JGB, 113). And in the third act, John Gabriel
and his wife stand opposite one another. "The last time we stood face
to face-it was in the Court, when I was summoned to give an ac-
count-" (JGB, 125).
Ella, who suffers from a terminal illness, wants Borkman's son,
who had lived as her foster child for many years,to come and stay with
her again so that she will not be alone when she dies. This wish
motivates the conversations in which the past of all three characters
is brought into the open.
Borkman loved Ella but married her sister, Gunhild. He spent
eight years in prison for theft of bank deposits after his friend Hinkel,
a lawyer, exposed him. Ella, whose fortune was the only one in the
bank that Borkman left untouched, bought back the family estate for
him and his wife when it was auctioned off. After he was freed,
Borkman withdrew to the house and the gallery. During this period
Ella raised his son, who was almost an adult when he returned to his
mother.
Those are the events. But they are not recounted here for their
own sake. The essential is what lies "behind" and "between" them:
motives and time.
"But when you, of your own accord, undertook to educate
Erhartfor me-what was your motive in that?" Mrs. Borkman asks her
sister (JGB, 84).
"I have often wondered what was your real reason for sparing
all my property? That and that alone?" Ella asks her brother-in-law
(JGB, 114).
And thus the true relationship between Ella and Borkman,
Borkman and his wife, Ella and Erhartis revealed.
Borkman gave up Ella in order to get Hinkel, who was also
Ella's suitor, to back his career at the bank. Though he did not love
Gunhild, he married her instead of Ella. But Hinkel, who was rejected
200
by a despairing Ella, thought Borkman's influence was the cause, and
took vengeance by exposing him. Ella, whose life was ruined by
Borkman's unfaithfulness, now loves only one person-Erhart,
Borkman's son. She had raised him to be her own child, but when
Erhartgrew older his mother took him back. Ella, whose terminal ill-
ness was caused by that "spiritual shock," Borkman's faithlessness,
now wants Erhartback during the final months of her life. But Erhart
leaves both his mother and his aunt in order to be with the woman he
loves.
Such are the motives. On this winter evening they are dragged
out of the ruined souls of these three people and held up to the glare
of the footlights. But the essential has not yet been mentioned. When
Borkman, Gunhild and Ella speak of the past, it is not individual
events that stand in the foreground, neither is it their motivation, but
time itself which is painted by them:
"I shall redeem myself . . . redeem my ruined life,"
says Mrs. Borkman. (JGB, 83)
When Ella tells her she has heard that Gunhild and her hus-
band live in the same house without seeing each other she replies:
Yes; that is how it has been, Ella, ever since they let
him out, and sent him home to me. All these long
eight years. (JGB, 86)
And when Ella and Borkman meet:
Ella: It seems an endless time since we two met,
Borkman, face to face.
Borkman:(gloomily) It's a long, long time. And terri-
ble things have passed since then.
Ella:A whole lifetime has passed-a wasted lifetime.
(JGB, 113)
A bit later:
From the day your image began to dwindle in my
mind, I have lived my life as though under an eclipse.
Duringall these years it has grown harder and harder
for me-and at last utterly impossible-to love any
living creature. (JGB, 118)
And in the third act, when Mrs. Borkman tells her husband she
has thought more than enough about his dubious past, he responds:
I too. Duringthose five endless years in my cell-and
elsewhere-I had time to think it over. And during the
201
eight years up there in the gallery I had still more
ample time. I have retried the whole case-by myself.
Time after time I have retried it ... I have paced up
and down the gallery there, turning every one of my
actions upside down and inside out (JGB pp. 125-26).
I have skulked up there and wasted eight precious
years of my life! (JGB, p. 140).
In the last act, in the open space in front of the house:
It is high time I should come out into the open air
again...Nearly three years in detention-five years in
prison-eight years in the gallery up there-(JGB,
149).
But he has no time to get used to the fresh air. His flight out of the
prison of his past does not bring him back to life. It leads to his death.
And Ella and Gunhild, who on this evening lose both the man and the
son they love, take each other's hand, "two shadows-over the dead
man."
Here the past is not, as in Sophocles' Oedipus, a function of
the present. On the contrary, the present is rather an occasion for con-
juring up the past. The accent lies neither on Ella's fate nor Borkman's
death. No single event from the past is the thematic of the play either,
not Borkman's rejection of Ella, not Hinkel's vengeance, nothing from
the past. Instead, the past itself, the repeatedly mentioned "long
years" and the "wasted lifetime" is the subject of the play-a subject
that does not lend itself to the dramatic present. Only something
which is temporal can be made present in the sense of dramatic ac-
tualization, not time itself. Time can only be reported about in the
Drama, its direct presentation is possible solely in an art form which
includes it "among its constitutive principles." This art form-as
G[eorg] LukAcs has shown-is the novel.5
"Inthe drama (and the epos) thepast either does not exist or is
completely present. Because these forms know nothing of the
passage of time, they allow of no qualitative difference between the
experiencing of past and present; time has no power of transforma-
tion, it neither intensifies nor diminishes the meaning of anything."'6In
Oedipus the analysis transforms the past into the present. "This is the
formal meaning of the typical scenes of revelation and recognition
which Aristotle shows us; something that was pragmatically unknown
to the heroes of the drama enters their field of vision, and in the world
thus altered they have to act otherwise than they might wish to act.
But the force of the newly introduced factor is not diminished by a
temporal perspective, it is absolutely homogeneous with and
equivalent to the present."7 Thus another difference becomes clear.
Truth in Oedipus Rex is objective in nature. It belongs to the world.
Only Oedipus lives in ignorance, and his road to the truth forms the
tragic action. For Ibsen, on the other hand, truth is that of interiority.
There lie the motives for the decisions that emerge in the light of day,
202
there the traumatic effects of these decisions lie hidden and live on
despite all external changes. In addition to the temporal present,
Ibsen's thematic does without presence in this topical sense as
well-a presence which the Drama requires. The thematic does arise
out of interpersonal relationships, but it is at home only in the inner-
most being of these estranged and solitary figures, as a reflex of the
interpersonal.
That means it is impossible to give it direct dramatic presenta-
tion. This material has need of the analytical technique, and not
simply in order to achieve greater density. As the subject matter of a
novel, which is basically what it is, it can only be staged thanks to this
technique. Even so, the thematic ultimately remains alien to the
stage. However much the thematic is tied to the presence (in both
senses of the word) of an action, it remains exiled in the past and the
depths of the individual. This is the unresolved formal problem in
Ibsen's dramaturgy.8
Because his starting point was epic in nature, he was forced to
develop an incomparable mastery of dramatic construction. Because
he achieved this mastery, the epic origin of his plays was no longer
visible. The dramatist's dual enterprise-to give his material presence
and function-was an inexorable necessity for Ibsen. But he never
quite succeeded.
A great deal of that which serves to create presence is rather
surprising when examined on its own-the leitmotif technique, for in-
stance. It is not used, as is the case elsewhere, to indicate sameness
in change or to make cross-connections. Instead, the past lives on in
Ibsen's leitmotifs, conjured up by their mention. In Rosmersholm, for
example, Beate Rosmer's suicide becomes an eternal presence
because of the millpond. Symbolic events are used to link the past to
the present: the tinkle of glass in an adjoining room (Ghosts). The
motif of genetic inheritance serves more to make the past present
than it does to embody the antique notion of fate. Captain Alving's
conduct while alive reappears as his son's illness. Only by way of this
kind of analytcal analysis is it possible, if not to present time
itself-Mrs. Alving's life at the side of this person-at least to
establish it through an awareness of time lapsed and a difference in
generations.
And making the material dramatically functional, which would
otherwise serve to work out the causal-final structure of a unified
action, here serves to bridge the gap between the present and the
past, a past which cannot be presented objectively. Ibsen seldom
achieved an equality between the action in the present and the
thematic action which the play conjures up. They are often only rough-
joined. In this respect, Rosmersholm again seems to be Ibsen's
masterpiece. The topical political theme can hardly be separated from
the internal theme of the past. This past is not hidden in the depths of
the characters' souls, but lives on in the house itself. Furthermore,the
former makes it possible for the latter to maintain a twilight presence
appropriate to its nature. They are completely united in the figure of
Rector Kroll. He is both Rosmer's political enemy and brother of a
203
woman driven to suicide-Mrs. Rosmer. But here too Ibsen fails to
motivate the end of the play sufficiently in terms of the past. He fails
to demonstrate its inevitability. The tragedy of a blind Oedipus led
back into the palace is not accorded to Rosmer and Rebecca West
when, summoned by the dead Mrs. Rosmer, they plunge into the mill-
pond.
Here one also sees the distance from tragic fall that the
bourgeois world in general enjoys. The immanent tragic condition of
this world does not originate in death but in life itself.9 This life, Rilke
said (in direct reference to Ibsen), "had slipped into us, had withdrawn
inward, so deeply that it was scarcely possible to conjecture about it
anymore."'1 Balzac's comment belongs here too. "Nous mourrons
tous inconnus.""1 Ibsen's work stands wholly under this sign. But
because he tried to reveal this hidden life dramatically, to enact it
through the dramatis personae themselves, he destroyed it. Ibsen's
figures could only survive by burrowing into themselves and living off
the "life-lie". Because he did not enclose them in a novel, because he
did not leave them within their life but instead forced them to speak
out, he killed them. So it is that, in periods which are hostile to the
Drama, dramatists become the murderers of the creatures they
themselves have created.
2. Chekhov
In Chekhov's plays, the characters live under the sign of renun-
ciation-renunciation of the present and of communication before all
else, renunciation of the happiness arising from real interaction. This
resignation, in which passionate longing and irony mix to prevent any
extreme, also determines the form of Chekhov's plays and his posi-
tion in the development of modern theater.
To renounce the present is to live with memories and utopian
dreams; to do without human interaction is loneliness. The Three
Sisters, perhaps the most fully realized of Chekhov's plays is ex-
clusively a presentation of lonely individuals intoxicated by memories
and dreaming of the future. Their present, overwhelmed by the past
and future, is merely an interim, a period of suspended animation
during which the only goal is to return to the lost homeland. This
theme (around which, moreover, all romantic literature circles)
becomes concrete in The Three Sisters in terms of the bourgeois
world at the turn of the century. Thus, Olga, Masha and Trina,the Pro-
sorov sisters, live with their brother Andrei Sergeovitch in a large gar-
rison town in east Russia. Eleven years earlier they had left their home
in Moscow to go there with their father, who had taken command of a
brigade. They play begins a year after the father's death. Their stay in
the provinces has lost all meaning; memories of life in Moscow
overflow into the boredom of their daily existence and grow into one
single despairing cry: "To Moscow!"' The wait for this return to the
past, which is also supposed to be a wonderful future, absorbs the
three sisters completely. They are surrounded by garrison officers
who are consumed by the same fatigue and longing. For one of them,
204
though, that moment in the future which is the intended goal of the
Prozorov sisters has expanded into a utopian vision. Alexander Ig-
natyavitch Vershinin says:
And then, in another two or three hundred years, life
on earth will be beautiful and wonderful beyond
anything we can imagine. Man needs such a life and
while we don't have it yet, we must become aware of
its impending arrival, wait for it, imagine it, and
prepare the way for it. (TS, 44).
And later,
It seems to me that everything on earth is bound to

change, little by little, and in fact it's already chang-
ing right before our eyes. Two or three hundred years
or a thousand years from now-it's immaterial how
long-a new happy life will come about. Of course,
we'll have no part in that life, but nevertheless even
today, we live for it, work for it, well yes, suffer for it,
and thus we are bringing it about. And that alone is
the purpose of our existence and, if you like, in it lies
our happiness. (TS, 57)
we're not meant to be happy... we won't be
..
happy.... We must just work and work and work and
someday our descendents will be happy. If I can't be
happy, at least my grandchildren's
grandchildren .. . (TS, 57)
Even more than this utopian orientation, the weight of the past and
dissatisfaction with the present isolate the characters. They all
ponder their own lives, lose themselves in memories and torment
themselves by analyzing their boredom. Everyone in the Prozorov
family and each of their acquaintances has his or her own problem,
one which preoccupys him or her even in the company of others and
which, thus, separates that individual from his or her fellow beings.
Andrei is crushed by the discrepancy between a longed-for professor-
ship in Moscow and his actual position as secretary to the rural
district council. Masha married unhappily when she was seventeen.
Olga has felt her "strength and youth draining away drop by drop"
since she began teaching school (TS, 34). And Trina,who has plunged
into her work in order to overcome her dissatisfaction and sadness
(TS, 47) admits:
I'm going on twenty-four already; I've worked for
years now and my brain's all dried up. I've grown old
and thin and unattractive without having ever found
anything the slightest bit satisfactory or rewarding
and time goes by and I feel I'm going farther and far-
205
ther away from a real, beautiful life, slipping down in-
to some sort of an abyss. I've lost all hope and I don't
even understand how it is that I'm still alive and
haven't killed myself yet ... (TS, 77)
The question is, then, how does this thematic renunciation of the pre-
sent in favor of memory and longing, this perennial analysis of one's
own fate, fit with a dramatic form in which Renaissance creed of the
here and now, of the interpersonal was once crystalized? The double
renunciation which marks Chekhov's characters seems inevitably to
necessitate the abandonment of action and dialogue, the two most
important formal catagories of the Drama, and, thus, dramatic form
itself.
But one only senses a tendency in this direction. Despite their
psychic absence from social life, the heroes of Chekhov's plays live
on. They do not draw any ultimate conclusions from their loneliness
and longing. Instead, they hover midway between the world and the
self, between now and then. So the formal presentation does not have
to reject completely those catagories necessary for it to be dramatic.
They are maintained in a de-emphasized, incidental manner which
allows the real subject negative expression as a deviation from tradi-
tional dramatic form.
The Three Sisters does have the rudiments of a traditonal
action. The first act, the exposition, takes place on Trina's name day.
The second presents transitional events: Andrei's marriage, the birth
of his son. The third takes place at night while a great fire rages in the
neighborhood. The fourth presents the duel in which Trina's fianc6 is
killed-on the very day the regiment moves out of town, leaving the
Prozorovs to succumb completely to the boredom of provincial life.
This disconnected juxtaposition of active moments and their arrange-
ment into four acts (which was, from the first, thought to lack tension)
clearly reveals their place in the formal whole. They are included,
though they actually express nothing, in order to set the thematic in
motion sufficiently to allow space for dialogue.
But even this dialogue carries no weight. It is the pale
background on which monologic responses framed as conversation
appear as touches of color in which the meaning of the whole is con-
centrated. These resigned self-analyses-which allow almost all the
characters to make individual statements-give life to the work. It
was written for their sake.
They are not monologues in the traditional sense of the word.
Their source is not to be found in the situation, but rather in the sub-
ject. As G[eorg] Lukacs has demonstrated,2 the dramatic monologue
formulates nothing that cannot be communicated otherwise. "Hamlet
hides his feelings from the people at court for practical reasons.
Perhaps, in fact, because they would all too readily understand that
he wishes to take vengeance for his father-that he must take
vengeance."3 The situation is quite different in Chekhov's play. The
lines are spoken aloud in front of others, not while alone. They
themselves isolate the speaker. Thus, almost without notice, empty
206
dialogue turns into substance-filled monologue. These are not
isolated monologues built into a work structured around the dialogue.
It is through them, rather, that the work as a whole departs from the
dramatic and becomes lyric. In lyric poetry language is less in need of
justification than in the Drama. It is, so to speak, more formal. In the
Drama, speech, in addition to conveying the concrete meaning of the
words, also announces the fact that something is being spoken. When
there is nothing more to say or when something cannot be expressed,
the Drama is reduced to silence. Inthe lyric, on the other hand, silence
speaks too. Of course no word is "let fall" in the course of a conversa-
tion anymore, instead all is spoken with a naturalness that is inherent
in the nature of the lyric.
This constant movement from conversaton into the lyrics of
loneliness is what gives Chekhov's language its charm. Its origins
probably lie in Russian expansiveness and the immanent lyric quality
of the language itself. Loneliness is not the same thing as torpor here.
What the Occidental experiences most probably only while intox-
icated-participation in the loneliness of the other, the inclusion of in-
dividual loneliness in a growing collective loneliness-seems to be a
possibility inherent in the Russian-the person and the language.
This is the reason the monologues in Chekhov's plays fit com-
fortably into the dialogue. It also explains why the dialogue creates so
few problems in these plays and why the internal contradiction be-
tween monologic thematic and dialogic declaration does not lead to
the destruction of the dramatic form.
Only Andrei, the three sisters' brother, is incapable of even this
mode of expression. His loneliness forces him into silence, therefore,
he avoids company (TS, 43). He can only speak when he knows he will
not be understood.
Chekhov accomplishes this by making Ferapont, the watch-
man at the district council offices, hard of hearing.
Andrei: How are you old friend? What can I do for

you?
Ferapont: The council chairman sends you a book

and some papers. Here... (Hands him a book and a
packet.)
Andrei: Thanks, that's fine. But why did you come
over so late? It's after eight already.
Ferapont: What say?

Andrei: (louder) I said, you came over very late. It's
after eight.
Ferapont: That's right. It was still light when I got

here, but they wouldn't let me in to see you... (Think-
ing Andrei has said something) What?
207
Andrei: I didn't say a thing. (Looks over the book)
Tomorrow's Friday and I'm off, but I'll come over
anyway and do some work. I get bored at home.
(Pauses) Ah, old fellow, how life changes; what tricks
it plays on us! Today I had nothing to do so I picked
up this book here-it's an old collection of university
lectures-and I felt like laughing. Good lord, here I
am, secretary of the RuralCouncil, the council, mind
you, of which Protopopov is chairman, and the most I
can hope for is to become a member one day. Im-
agine, me a member of the local council, when every
night I dream that I'm a professor at Moscow Univer-
sity and a famous scholar of whom all Russia is
proud!
Ferapont: I wouldn't know... I don't hear so good.
Andrei: It's just as well, because I hardly would've
spoken to you like this if you could hear. I need some-
one to talk to, since my wife doesn't understand me
and I'm afraid that my sisters would laugh in my
face.... I don't like bars but let me tell you, old man,
right now I'd give anything to be sitting at Testov's or
in the Great Moscow Inn.
Ferapont: And me, I heard some contractor over at

the Council telling them that he'd seen some
merchants in Moscow eating pancakes. And there
was one of 'em ate forty, and it seems he died. Either
forty or fifty, I can't say for sure.
Andrei: You can go into a big Moscow restaurant
where you don't know anyone and no one knows you,
and yet you feel perfectly at home there. Now, here,
you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet
you feel like a stranger among them-And a lonely
stranger at that.
Ferapont: What (Pause). Well, that same contractor
was saying that they're stretching a big rope right
across the whole of Moscow-but maybe he was
lying at that! (TS, 52-53)
Though this passage appears to be dialogue-thanks to the
support given by the motif of not hearing-it is really a despairing
monologue by Andrei. Ferapont provides counterpoint with his own
equally monologic speech. While elsewhere there is the possibility of
real understanding, since there is a common subject, here its im-
possibility is expressed. The impression of divergence is greatest
when the speeches simulate convergence. Andrei's monologue does
208
not arise out of the dialogue. It comes from the negation of dialogue.
The expressivity of this speaking at cross purposes is rooted in a pain-
ful, parodistic contrast with real dialogue which it removes into the
utopian. But dramatic form itself is called into question at that point.
Because the collapse of communication is motivated in The
ThreeSisters (Ferapont's inability to hear), a returnto dialogue is still
possible. Ferapont is only an occasional figure on stage. But
everything thematic, the content of which is larger and weightier than
the motif which seves to represent it, struggles toward precipitation
as form. And the formal withdrawal of dialogue leads, of necessity, to
the epic. Ferapont's inability to hear points the way to the future.
3. Strindberg
With Strindberg began what was later called "I dramaturgy,"

which determined the image of dramatic literature for decades to
come. In Strindberg's case it was a dramaturgy rooted in
autobiography. This is obvious in more than the thematic continuity of
his plays. His theory of the "subjective drama" itself seems to coin-
cide with that of the psychological novel (the history of the develop-
ment of one's own soul) in his outline of the literature of the future. A
comment made during an interview concerning the first volume of his
autobiography, The Son of a Servant, also sheds light on the new
dramatic style which emerged a year later with The Father (1887). He
said,
I believe that the complete portrayal of an
individual's life is truer and more meaningful than
that of a whole family. How can one know what goes
on in the minds of others, how can one be aware of
the hidden reasons for someone else's deed, how
can one know what one person has said to another in
a moment of confidence? One makes suppositions,
of course. But the study of the human species has
not, up to now, been helped much by those authors
who have used their limited psychological
knowledge in an attempt to sketch the life of a soul,
something that, in reality, remains hidden. One
knows only one life, one's own...'
One could easily read into these lines, written in 1886, a rejec-
tion, pure and simple, of the dramatic. In fact, they present the basic
preconditions of a developmental process which extends from The
Father (1887) to To Damascus (1897-1904), A Dream Play (1901-02),
and, finally, to The Great Highway (1909). How far these developments
actually lead away from the Drama is central to the problem of analyz-
ing Strindberg's work.
The first play, The Father, is an attempt to blend subjective and
naturalist styles. The result is that neither can be fully realized, since
the goals of naturalist and subjective dramaturgy stood in radical op-
209
position to one another. Naturalism, however revolutionary it acted or
wanted to be in style or "world view," actually took a conservative
position in questions of dramaturgy. Preservation of the traditonal
dramatic form was central to Naturalism. Behind the revolutionary
desire to give a new style to the Drama lay, as will be seen, the conser-
vative idea of saving the Drama from intellectual-historical jeopardy
by shifting it into a realm, as it were, both archaic and yet contem-
porary though untouched by recent developments.
At first glance, The Father seems to be a family drama similar
to those countless others written at the time. The father and mother
collide over the question of the daughter's upbringing: a struggle of
principles; battle of sexes. But one does not need to keep the remarks
quoted above in mind in order to see that the work is not a direct, that
is dramatic, presentation of this poisoned relationship and its history.
It is constructed solely from the standpoint of the title figure and un-
folds in terms of his subjective point of view. An outline of the play
only hints at this: The father is in the middle, surrounded by
women-Laura, his nurse, the mother-in-law and, finally, the
daughter-who form, so to speak, the walls of the female hell in which
he believes himself to be. More important is the recognition that the
battle waged against him by his wife usually achieves "dramatic"
realization only as a reflection of his own consciousness. Its main
features are even established by him. He himself hands over to his
wife her most important weapon-the question of paternity. And his
mental illness is attested to by one of his own letters, in which he
"feared for his sanity."2 The lines his wife speaks at the end of the
second act, which lead him to throw the burning lamp at her, are
believable only as a projection of the thoughts the Captain himself
suspects his wife of having. "Now you have fulfilled your destiny as a
father and family supporter.... You are no longer needed ... and so
you must go!" If naturalist dialogue is an exact reproduction of con-
versation as it might take place in reality, then Strindberg's first
"naturalist" work is as much at odds with it as is the tragedie clas-
sique. They differ in their principium stilisationis. The neo-classical
Drama posits its principle as an objective ideal. In Strindberg's play it
is determined by the subjective perspective. The Captain's fall, which
Lauraprepares with the straitjacket, is transformed into a profoundly
internal process because of its connection with his childhood and
because of his magico-psychoanalytic identification with the
memories contained in the words the nursemaid speaks as she puts
him into the straitjacket.
Because of this displacement, the three unities, which are
rigorously observed in The Father, become meaningless. Their func-
tion in genuine Drama is to raise the purely dialectical-dynamic flow
of events above the static situation caused by the isolation of internal
and external worlds, thereby creating that absolute space which the
exclusive reproduction of interpersonal events requires (F, 10-11).
Here, on the other hand, the play depends on the unity of the I of its
central figure, not on that of action. The unity of action is not essen-
tial to the presentation of psychic development and may even in-
210
terfere with it. Not only is there no need for a flawless action, there is
no necessary correlation between the unities of time and place and
that of the psyche. That much is made clear in the few scenes where
the Captain is not on stage. There seems to be no real reason why the
spectator, who sees the family's reality through the father's eyes,
should not follow him on his nightly walks and, later, be locked in with
him. To be sure, even the scenes from which he is absent are
dominated by the Captain. He is present as the sole subject of conver-
sation. Laura's intrigues are only indirectly visible, in the foreground
stands the picture she paints of him for her brother and the doctor.
And when the pastor learns of his sister's plan to hospitalize the Cap-
tain and have him judged incompetent, he even becomes the
spokesman for his brother-in-law-a man he had otherwise always
"regarded ... as a weed in our family pasture," (F, 45), because of his
free thinking.
You are a strong woman, Laura! Unbelievably strong!
Like a fox in a trap, you would rather gnaw off your
leg than allow yourself to be caught! Like a master
thief, you have no accomplice-not even your own
conscience! Look at yourself in the mirror!You don't
dare!
*00
Let me look at your hand! Not a sign of blood to

betray you-not a trace of insidious poison! An inno-
cent murder that cannot be reached by the law-an
unconscious crime-unconscious mind you! A
clever scheme, a master stroke! (F, 45)
And at the end, after speaking for his brother-in-law,the pastor con-
cludes for himself,
As a man, I would gladly see you hung! As your
brother and a pastor, I give you my compliments. (F,
45)
The last lines spoken by the Captain echo here too. These few points,
all of which show the growing problems of character portrayaland the
unities in the realm of subjective drama, indicate why Strindberg's
naturalist and autobiographical intentions go their separate ways
after The Father. Miss Julie, written a year later and not conceived in
perspective, became one of the most famous of all naturalist plays
and Strindberg's forward to it a kind of naturalist manifesto.
His efforts to place the ego of a single individual, primarilyhis
own, at the center of a work led farther and farther away from tradi-
tional dramatic construction, however (Miss Julie had remained fully
within this tradition). First came experiments in monodrama, such as
The Stronger. That seems to be a logical result of the idea that one
211
can only know "one life, one's own." It should be added, though, that
the single role in this play is not an autobiographical portraitof Strind-
berg. That is understandable when one remembers that subjective
theater arises less out of the notion that one can only describe one's
own psychic existence (since that is all one can know) and much more
from the prior intention of bringing this mostly secret psychic ex-
istence to life dramatically. The Drama, the art form par excellence of
dialogic openness and frankness is given the task of presenting
secret psychic events. It accomplishes this first by withdrawing into
the central figure and then by either limiting itself to this character
(monodrama) or enclosing the others within his frame of reference
(I-dramaturgy).At which point it ceases to be drama, of course.
The one-act, The Stronger(1888189),is probably more important
in relation to the inner problematic of the modern analytical technique
in general than it is to Strindberg's dramatic development in par-
ticular. It should, in this case, be looked at in terms of Ibsen's work,
since in this monodrama of six pages can be found something akin to
the core of the three-or four-act play by Ibsen. The secondary
action, the one in the present, which serves as a backdrop for the
primary action exists only in embryo: "On Christmas night, Mrs. X,
actress, married," meets "Miss Y, actress, unmarried," at a corner
table in a tea house. And the internal reflexes, the memories of the
past-which Ibsen intertwines dramatically in such a masterful yet
dubious fashion with actual events-is presented here by the married
actress in a grand epic-lyric monologue. At this point one sees more
clearly how undramatic Ibsen's material was and the price Ibsen had
to pay because he held fast to dramatic form. The hidden and the
repressed appear with incomparably greater power in the density and
purity of Strindberg's monologue than in Ibsen's dialogue. And their
revelation does not require that "unparalledled act of violence" which
Rilke saw in Ibsen's work.3Far from turning into mere reportage, this
self-revelation even manages to produce two peripeties which could
hardly be more "dramatic," despite the fact that, because of their pure
interiority, they move beyond dialogue and, therefore, the Drama as
well.
In 1897, after a five year pause in his work, Stindberg created
his own personal form, the "station" drama, with To Damascus. Four-
teen shorter pieces from the years 1887-92 and the long hiatus in the
years between 1893-1897 separate this play from his last major work,
The Father. The one-acts from this period (eleven in all, counting The
Stronger) push into the background the problems of dramatic action
and role construction which appear in The Father. They do not solve
these problems, instead they bear indirect witness to them-through
their efforts to avoid them.
The station drama, on the other hand, provided a formal
equivalent to the thematic intent of that subjective theater which The
Father had already hinted at. The internal contradiction which subjec-
tive dramaturgy had created within the dramatic form was, thereby,
eliminated. The subjective dramatist is most concerned with the isola-
tion and elevation of a central figure who most often represents the
212
dramatist himself. The dramatic form, the basis of which is a con-
stantly renewed balance in personal interplay, cannot satisfy the sub-
jective dramatist without destroying itself. In the "station drama" the
hero, whose development is described, is separated in the clearest
possible manner from the other figures he meets at the stations along
his way. They appear only in terms of his encounters with them and
only from his perspective. They are, thus, references to him. And since
the "station drama" is not constructed around a number of more or
less equally important characters but, rather, has one central I, its
space is not a priori dialogic, the monologue loses the exceptional
quality it necessarily has in the Drama. And the limitless unfolding of
a "secret psychic existence" becomes formally possible.
Subjective theater also leads to the replacement of the unity of
action by the unity of the self. The station technique accounts for this
change by replacing continuity of action with a series of scenes.
These individual scenes stand in no causal relationship and do not, as
in the Drama, generate one another. On the contrary, they seem to be
isolated stones strung out along the path of the onward moving I.This
static, futureless quality of the scenes (which makes them, in
Goethe's sense of the word, epic) is tied to a structure which is de-
fined by the perspective from which the self faces the world. The
dynamics of the dramatic scene arise out of an interpersonal dialec-
tic. The scene is driven forward thanks to the moment in the future
which is contained in this dialectic. In the "station drama," on the
other hand, there is no mutual rapport.The hero does encounter other
people, but they remain strangers.
When this happens the very possibility of dialogue is called in-
to question and, in his last station drama (The Great Highway), Strind-
berg, at certain moments actually shifted from a dialogic structure to
that of an epic for two voices:
The Hunter and the Wandererare seated at a table,
outside, each one with a glass before him.
Wanderer: It's peaceful down here in the valley.
Hunter:A little too peaceful, thinks the miller...
Wanderer: ... who sleeps, no matter how hard the
water runs ...
Hunter: ... because he is always on the alert for

wind and weather...
Wanderer: ... which useless pursuit has awakened

in me a certain antipathy to windmills...
Hunter: ... just as it did in the noble knight Don
Quixote of la Mancha...
213
Wanderer: ... who never, however, became a turn-
coat because of the way the wind blew...
Hunter: .. .but rather the opposite...
Wanderer: ... which is the reason for his getting into

perplexing situations ...4
This kind of scene cannot provide a transition into another

scene. Only the hero can internalize and take with him its traumatic or
healing effects. The scene itself is left behind as a station along his
way.
When a subjective trajectory replaces objective action, the
unities of time and place cease to be useful categories. This has to be
the case, since only isolated turns along a basically internal pathway
are presented on stage. In the "station drama" this pathway is not, as
is the action in genuine Drama, shown in its entirety. The hero's
development continues between times and between places and, thus,
by constantly going beyond the objective boundaries of the work,
makes it relative.
Since no organic rapport exists between the individual scenes
and because they only represent segments of a development which
extends beyond the work (they are, so to speak, scenic fragments
from an Entwicklungsroman) their composition can even arise out of
an external schema that further relativizes the scenes and makes
them more epic. Unlike the dramatic model constructed by G[ustav]
Freytag, where the pyramid he postulates arises of necessity out of
the organic growth of the acts and scenes, the symmetric construc-
tion of To Damascus I follows a mechanical pattern of organization
which, although understandable, is alien to the work.
By presenting the interpersonal as mere juxtaposition, the
"station drama" seems to contradict Strindberg's "expressionism,"
according to which the characters, as in the Damascus trilogy (the
Lady, the Beggar, Caesar), are projections of the Stranger's own
psyche, and the work as a whole, therefore, located in the subjectivity
of its hero.5 But this contradiction represents the paradox of subjec-
tivity itself: self-alienation in reflections, the reification of the self
through self-contemplation, the sudden transformation of energized
subjectivity into the objective. That the conscious I (that is, the I as it
becomes aware of itself) views the unconscious as a stranger is quite
clear in psychoanalytic terminology. The unconscious is the id [it].
Thus, the isolated individual, fleeing from the world into himself, is
confronted once again by someone unknown. The Stranger
recognizes this at the outset of the play.
... I have no fear of death. It is loneliness I am afraid

of-for the loneliness of life is peopled.... I don't
know whether it is someone else or myself I
sense-but in loneliness one is never alone. The air
becomes dense, the atmosphere thickens, and
214
spirits that are invisible and yet have life can be
perceived, hovering about...6
He meets these beings in what follows at the stations along his way.
They are usually himself and a stranger at the same time; they seem
most alien when they are himself. This meeting between two aspects
of the self leads once more to the abolition of dialogue. The Lady in
the Damascus trilogy, who is appartently a projection of the Stranger,
can only tell the latter what he already knows.
Lady:[To the Mother]he is a little eccentric; and there

is one thing I find rather tiresome: I can never men-
tion anything that he doesn't already know. As a con-
sequence we say very little to each other...
The relationship between the subjective and the objective
manifests itself temporally as a rapport between the present and the
past. In thought, the remembered, internalized past reappears as an
alien present: the others whom the stranger meets are often signs of
his own past. Thus, the Doctor is a reference to a childhood
schoolmate who, though innocent, was punished in his stead. The
meeting with the Doctor objectifies in the present the source of the
mental anguish which had never left him since that moment (a motif
from Strindberg's own past). And the Beggar he meets on a street
corner bears the scar he himself carries as a result of the blow he
once received from his brother.
The "station drama" and Ibsen's analytical technique con-
verge here. But, like the self-alienation of the isolated individual, the
alienation of one's own past acquires adequate form without
dramaturgic "violence" in the separate encounters of which Strind-
berg's work is constructed.
The meeting between the isolated I and the alien, objectified
world is the foundation for the formal structure of two later works by
Strindberg:A Dream Play (1901-02) and The Ghost Sonata (1907).
A Dream Play, written the same year as To Damascus /ll,differs
in no way from the "station drama" as far as its formal conception is
concerned ([Itresproduces] "the detached and disunited, although ap-
parently logical, form of dreams"-Strindberg, in his preface). Strind-
berg also refered to To Damascus as a dream play, which is to say
that he did not conceive of A Dream Play as a dream for the stage. He
only used this title to indicate the dream-like composition of the work.
Indeed, dream and "station drama" are alike in structure: a sequence
of scenes whose unity does not reside in the action but in the un-
changing psyche of the dreamer and, perhaps, hero.
If the accent is on the self in isolation in the "station drama,"
in A Dream Play it is the world of human activity that stands in the
foreground as an object of observation for the god Indra's Daughter.
This is the notion that constitutes the play and that determines its
form-Indra's Daughter is shown "what human life is like" (Strind-
berg). The loosely connected scenes in A Dream Play are even more
215
like those of a review from the Middle Ages than those of a dream.
And the review is-in opposition to the Drama-essentially a presen-
tation that unfolds for someone who is not part of it. Because of this,
A Dream Play, which encompasses the observer as the real I of the
play, has the epic structure of a confrontation between subject and
object.
Indra's Daughter, who in the original version (without prologue)
seems to be a dramatis persona co-equal with the others, formulates
her epic separation from mankind in her leitmotif-like remark,"human
life is pitiable." The content of the remark indicates pity; formally,
however, it expresses distance and can, therefore, become the magic
phrase which Indra's Daughter, even during her deepest involvement
(in Strindberg's eyes) in things human, in her marriage with the
Lawyer, can rise above human existence.
Daughter: I am beginning to hate you after all this.

Lawyer: Alas for us then! But let us prevent hatred. I
promise never to mention untidiness again, although
it is torture to me.
Daughter: And I will eat cabbage, although that is a

torment to me.
Lawyer: And so-life together is a torment. One's

pleasure is the other's pain.
Daughter: Human beings are to be pitied.8
In accord with its review-like structure, the work's most
characteristic gesture is that of showing. In addition to the Officer
(who represents Strindberg), the figures Indra's Daughter encounters
are primarilythose who have, as it were, a concrete sense of mankind
because of their professions and can, therefore, serve best to present
it. Thus, for example, the Lawyer (the second incarnation of the
author) says:
Look at these walls! Isn't the wall-paper stained as if
by every kind of sin? Look at these documents in
which I write records of evil! Look at me! ... Nobody
who comes here ever smiles. Nothing but vile looks,
bared teeth, clenched fists, and all of them squirt
their malice, their envy, their suspicions over me.
Look my hands are black and can never be clean! See
how cracked they are and bleeding! I can never wear
my clothes for more than a few days because they
stink of other peoples crimes [...] Look at me! Do
you think, marked as I am by crime, I can ever win a
woman's love? Or that anyone wants to be the friend
of a man who has to enforce payment of all the debts
216
in town? It's misery to be human. (SPS, 213)
The Poet (Strindberg's third incarnation) hands Indra's

Daughter a "petition from mankind to the rulerof the universe, drawn
up by a dreamer," (SPS, 246) that has as its subject the condition
humaine. He also shows her this condition as embodied in another
person.
(Enter Lina with a bucket)
Poet: Lina, show yourself to Miss Agnes [Indra's
Daughter]. She knew you ten years ago when you
were a young, happy, and, let me add, pretty
girl.... Look at her now! Five children, drudgery,
squalling, hunger, blows. See how beauty has perish-
ed, how joy has vanished in the fulfillment of
duties... (SPS, 226)
The Officer, too, takes an epic stance on occasion.
(An elderly man walks past with his hands behind his
back).
Officer: Look, there goes a pensioner waiting for his
life to ebb. A captain probably, who failed to become
a major or a Clerk to the Court who was never pro-
moted. Many are called, but few are chosen. He's just
walking about waiting for breakfast.
Pensioner: No, for the paper, the morning paper!
Officer: And he's only fifty-four. He may go on for
another twenty-five years, waiting for meals and the
newspaper. Isn't that dreadful? (SPS, 230)
In other words, A Dream Play is in no way a work in which
mankind enacts itself-a Drama-but rather an epic play about
mankind. This presentational structure (though hidden both
thematically and formally) defines the Ghost Sonata as well. In A
Dream Play, the structure mainfests itself thematically in the visit
Indra's Daughter makes to earth and formally in the review style ar-
rangements of the scenes. In the Ghost Sonata, on the other hand, the
structure is hidden behind the facade of a traditional salon Drama. It
is not used as an all-encompassing formal principle. Instead, it func-
tions as a means of achieving certain ends; for the Ghost Sonata
presents the same formal problem that Ibsen's late work did: how to
reveal dramatically a secret and deeply internalized past, how to pre-
vent it from escaping dramatic presentation. In Ibsen's work discovery
is made possible by intertwining the past with a topical dramatic ac-
tion; in Strindberg's one-act The Stronger, by the use of monologue. In
217
the Ghost Sonata both these methods are employed to a certain
degree-the monologic / of subjective theater appears in the midst of
the other characters dressed as an ordinarydramatis persona, whose
function it will be to unroll the secret past of the others. This role
belongs to the old man, Hummel. Through him, as through the Lawyer
and Poet in A Dream Play, mankind is seen as an object, from the out-
side. In response to the Student's opening question as to whether
Hummel knows the people "who live there" (that is, the people Hum-
mel will later unmask), he answers,
Every one of them. At my age one knows

everybody.., but nobody knows me-not really. I
take an interest in human destiny. (SPS, 274)
Just as this line gives a thematic basis for Hummel's formal role and
special position, the following statements explain why these people
need an epic narrator.
Bengston: [The butler in the house (a figure parallel

to Hummel) describes his employers to Hummels at-
tendant]. The usual ghost supper, as we call it. They
drink tea and don't say a word-or else the Colonel
does all the talking. (...) And they've kept this up for
twenty years, and always the same people saying the
same things or saying nothing at all for fear of being
found out. (SPS, 284)
And in the third act:
Student: ... Tell me. Why do your parents sit in there

so silently, not say a single word?
Young Lady: Because they have nothing to say to

each other, and because neither believes what the
other says. This is how my father puts it: What's the
point of talking, when neither of us can fool the
other? (SPS, 297)
These lines mark one source of modern epic dramaturgy. They
locate the moment when middle-class salon Drama, which had taken
over the formal principles of the neo-classical Drama, was trans-
formed, of necessity, into the epic because of the form-content con-
tradiction which had arisen in the course of the nineteenth century.
Within this process, Hummel's presence may well be the first example
of the epic / itself appearing on stage, albeit disguised as an ordinary
dramatic character. Inthe first act, he describes the inhabitants of the
house to the Student. They, devoid of all dramatic independence,
show themselves at the windows-objects to be presented. In the
second act, during the ghost supper, it is Hummel who unmasks their
secrets.
218
It is difficult to understand, however, why Strindberg remained
unaware of this character's formal function. In the second act, he lets
the traditional unmasking of the unmasker end in Hummel's suicide.
The work thereby looses in content the formal principle on which it
was built. The third act had to fail, because, with no epic support, it
could not generate dialogue of its own. In addition to the episodic
figure of the Cook, who, surprisingly enough, carries on Hummel's
thematic role as "vampire" without taking over his formal role, the
Young Lady and the Student are the only characters capable of carry-
ing a dialogue, but they can no longer free themselves from the spell
of the ghost house sufficiently to create one. Their desperate, wander-
ing conversation-interrupted by pauses, monologues and
prayers-ends the play. This tormenting, failed conclusion to a
unique work can only be understood in terms of the transitional
dramaturgic situation to which it belongs. The epic structure is there
but still thematically bound and, thus, subject to the unfolding of the
action.
While in Ibsen's plays the dramatis personae had to die
because they had no epic narrator,Strindberg's first epic figure dies
because he is not recognized as such-he wears the mask of a
dramatis persona. More than anything else, this demonstrates the in-
ternal contradictions in the Drama at the turn of the century and
precisely designates Ibsen and Strindberg's historical position. The
former comes just before, the latter just after the sublation of these
contradictions throughout the conversion of the thematic epic into
epic form. Both, then, are on the threshold of that modern theater
which can only be understood in terms of its own form problematic.
4. Maeterlinck
Maeterlinck's early work (it alone will be discussed here) is an

attempt to dramatize existential powerlessness-mankind's
dependence on a fate which is forever obscure. Greek tragedy had
shown the hero in conflict with destiny. Neo-classical Drama took the
conflicts arising out of interpersonal relationships as its subject.
Here only a single moment is dealt with-the moment when a
helpless human being is overtaken by fate. Not in the manner in which
this took place in Romantic Schicksalstrag6die, however. It focused
on human interaction within the sphere of a fate which was blind. The
mechanics of destiny unfolding and a concomitant perversion of
human relations were its themes. There is none of that in Maeterlinck.
For him, human destiny is represented by death itself, and death
alone dominates the stage in his works. But not as any particular
figure, not in any particular tragic connection with life; no action
brings on death, no one is responsible for it. From the dramaturgic
point of view, this means that the catagory "action" is replaced by
that of situation. The genre which Maeterlinck created should, in fact,
bear this name, since the essential in each of these plays does not
reside in the action. They are, therefore, no longer "Dramas" as long
as the Greek word is understood in this manner. It is this distinction
219
that lies behind the rather paradoxical term, drama statique, which
Maeterlinck coined for his work.
In genuine Drama, situation is only the starting point for the
action. Here, on the other hand, the possibility of human action has
been eliminated for thematic reasons. The individual waits in total
passivity until death's presence penetrates his consciousness. Only
the attempt to verify his situaion permits the individual to speak.
When he becomes aware of death (the demise of someone close to
him), which, because of his blindness he has not seen standing in
front of him the whole time, he has reached his goal. This is the sub-
ject of L'Intruse, Les Aveugles (1890) and Interieur.
The stage, as set for Les Aveugles (The Blind) presents an
"ancient Norland forest, with an eternal look, under a sky of deep
stars. - In the centre and in the deep of the night, a very old priest is
sitting wrapped in a great black cloak. The chest and the head, gently
upturned and deathly motionless, rest against the trunk of a giant
hollow oak. The face is terribly pale and of an immovable waxen
lividness, in which purple lips fall slightly apart. The dumb, fixed eyes
no longer look out from the visible side of eternity and seem to bleed
with immemorial sorrows and with tears [...] On the right, six old
men, all blind, are sitting on stones, stumps and dead leaves.-On the
left, separated from them by an uprooted tree and fragments of rock,
six women, also blind, are sitting opposite the old men. [...] It is
unusually oppressive, despite the moonlight that here and there strug-
gles to pierce for an instant the gloom of the foliage."' The blind men
are waiting for the return of the old priest who had led them to this
place, and he is sitting in their midst-dead.
Even the detailed stage directions, which have been quoted
only in part here, show that the dialogic form is insufficient as a
means of presentation. Or,vice versa, what there is to say is an insuf-
ficient basis on which to build a dialogue. The twelve blind men pose
anxious questions about their fate and thereby slowly become aware
of their situation. Conversation is thus limited and its rhythm deter-
mined by the exchange of question and answer.
First Blind Man (blind from birth): He hasn't come
yet?
Second Blind Man (also born blind): I hear nothing
coming. (PMM,266)
Later:
Second Blind Man: Are we in the sun now?
Third Blind Man (also born blind): Is the sun still
shining? (PMM,277)
Often the statements move parallel to one another and sometimes
even in opposite directions.
220
Third Blind Man: It's time to go back to the home.
First Blind Man: We ought to find out where we are.

Second Blind Man: it has grown cold since we left.
(PMM,267)
Whatever symbolic content blindness may have,
dramaturgically it saves the work from the silence that threatens it. It
represents human powerlessness and isolation ("Voila des annees et
des ann6es que nous sommes ensemble, et nous ne nous sommes
jamais apergus. On dirait que nous sommes toujours seuls! ... 11faut
voir pour aimer."'=)and thereby calls into question the possibility of
dialogue. At the same time, it is solely due to this blindness that there
is still cause for speech. In L'Intruse, which presents a family
gathered together while the Mother lies dying in the next room, it is
the blind Grandfather whose questions (and premonitions, since as a
blind person he sees both less and more than the others) generate the
conversation.
The verbal exchanges in Les Aveugles move away from
dialogue in several directions. They are mainly choral. The little in-
dividualization which was given to the twelve blind men is gone from
the "responses" in this play. Language cuts itself free, its essentially
dramatic ties to position disappear. It is no longer the expression of
an individual awaiting a response; instead, language expresses the
mood which reigns in all the characters' souls. The fact that this
language is divided into individual "responses" in no way makes it
synonymous with conversation in genuine Drama. It simply reflects
the nervous glitter of uncertainty. It can be read or heard without pay-
ing attention to who is speaking. The essential is the language's inter-
mittence, not its relation to an immediate /. All this finally says that
the dramatis personae are far from being causal agents or subjects of
an action. They are, quite simply, objects of an action. This single
theme in Maeterlinck's early work-the individual, helpless in the face
of destiny-calls for an equivalent formal statement.
The manner in which he conceived Interieur (1894) shows the
results of this need. Here, too, a family will experience death. The
daughter, who had left in the morning to look for her grandmother on
the other side of the river,has drowned herself and is brought back to
the house dead. Her parents are not expecting her yet and are passing
a calm, carefree evening. Just as these five people (to whom death
comes unexpectedly) are speechless victims of destiny, so, too, for-
mally they become the mute epic objects of the person who has come
to inform them of their daughter's death. The Old Man, before he
undertakes this difficult task, talks to a stranger about them in front
of a brightly lit window through which the family is visible. Thus, the
body of the drama is split in two-into the mute characters in the
house and those in the garden who speak. This division into thematic
and dramaturgic groups illustrates a subject-object separation which
turns human beings into objects and which is fundamental to
221
Maeterlinck's fatalism. It creates an epic situation inside the Drama
which had been possible only on occasion before-in descriptions of
off-stage battles, for example. Here, however, it forms the whole of the
work. The "dialogue" between the Stranger, the Old Man and his two
grandchildren serves almost entirely as an epic description of the
silent family.
The Old Man: I would like to see first, if they are all in
the room. Yes, I see the father sitting in the chimney-
corner. He waits with his hands on his knees; ... the
mother is resting her elbow on the table.3
There is even a certain amount of awareness of the epic
distance which arises because the narratorknows more than the ob-
jects of his narration.
The Old Man: I am nearly eighty-three years old, and
this is the first time the sight of life has struck me. I
don't know why everything they do seems so strange
and grave to me.... They wait for night quite simply,
under their lamp, as we might have been waiting
under ours; and yet I seem to see them from the
height of another world, because I know a little truth
which they don't know yet ...4
Even the most animated conversation is really only description which

has been divided up between the speakers.
The Stranger: Just now they are smiling in silence in
the room...
The Old Man: They are at peace..,. they did not ex-
pect her tonight...
The Stranger: They smile without stirring, ... and
see, the father is putting his finger on his lips.
The Old Man: He is calling attention to the child
asleep on its mother's heart.
The Stranger: She dares not raise her eyes lest she
disturb its sleep . . .
Maeterlinck's decision to dramatize the human situation as he
saw it led him to present his characters as silent, suffering objects in
the hands of death. He did this within a form which had, until then,
known only speaking, active subjects. This caused a shift toward the
epic within the concept of the Drama itself. In Les Aveugles, the
characters describe their own situation-their blindness is sufficient
motivation. In Interieur the hidden epic quality of the material is still
222
more evident. It creates an actual narrativesituation in which subject
and object stand facing one another. But even this remains thematic
and requires further motivation inside a now meaningless dramatic
form.
5. Hauptmann
What was said in reference to Ibsen in the first of these studies
is, in part, also valid for Hauptmann's early work. Das Friedensfest
(1890), for example, is a typical "analytical drama." It lays out the
history of a family on Christmas evening. But even Hauptmann's first
play, Before Sunrise (1889), contains a perspective not found in
Ibsen's work. The play's subtitle, "A Social Drama"announces the dif-
ference. Critics have usually accounted for this difference by con-
cluding that Hauptmann had had another teacher as well: Tolstoy and
his play The Power of Darkness. However powerful Tolstoy's influence
might have been, an analysis of the internal problems of Hauptmann's
"social drama" has to be carried out without reference to it, since
Tolstoy's play poses none of the sociological-naturalistic problems
found in Hauptmann's work. Furthermore, Tolstoy overcomes the
formal difficulties of the Drama through the same Russian, lyric
qualities found in Chekhov's plays.
The social dramatist attempts to dramatise the politico-
economic structures which dictate the conditions of individual life.
He has to show factors which are larger than those of a single situa-
tion or a single action, factors which, nonetheless, define such situa-
tions and actions. This kind of dramatic presentation requires another
sort of work first: the transformation of the alienated and reified world
into interpersonal actuality; in other words, the conversion and disper-
sal of historical process in the aesthetic that is supposed to reflect it.
The dubiousness of this attempt becomes absolutely clear when one
looks closely at the manner in which form evolves in this case. To
transform an alienated, reified world into interpersonal actuality one
must find an action that will permit the presentation of this condition.
This action, which functions as a subsidiary mediating between the
social thematic and the pre-existing dramatic form, proves to be prob-
lematical from the standpoint of subject as well as form. An action
which represents is not dramatic: the events in the Drama,absolute in
themselves, can stand for nothing beyond themselves. Even in the
philosophical tragedies of Kleist or Hebbel, the plot has no
demonstrative function. It is not "meaningful" in the sense that it
points beyond itself to the nature of the universe as conceived by the
author in a personal metaphysics. Instead, it focuses on itself and its
own metaphysical depths. This in no way limits its capacity to make
meaningful statements. Quite the contrary, the world of the Drama
can, thanks to its absoluteness, stand for the real world. The relation-
ship between signifier and signified resides at most in the symbolic
rapportmicrocosm-macrocosm and not in that of pars pro toto. This is
precisely the rapport in the "social drama," however. In every sense it
works against the requisite absoluteness in dramatic form: the
223
dramatis personae represent thousands of people living in the same
conditions; their situation represents a uniformity determined by
economic factors. Their fate is an example, a means of "showing"
that implies not only an objectivity which transcends the work but
also a subject which stands above the play and does the showing: the
authorial I. In the work of art, tension between the empirical and
creative subjectivity-open reference to something external to the
work-is the formal basis for the epic, not the Drama. The "social
drama" is, therefore, epic in nature and a contradiction in itself.
To change from an alienated, reified world to one of interper-
sonal actuality also contradicts the thematic intent of the play. Its
goal is to show that the determinant forces in human existence have
been transferred from the sphere of the "interpersonal" to that of
alienated objectivity; that, fundamentally speaking, there is no
present, so much as it is akin to what has always been or will be; that
an action which outlines the present and thus lays the basis for a new
future is impossible as long as these crippling forces hold sway.
Hauptmann tried to resolve the problematics of the social
drama in Before Sunrise and The Weavers. Before Sunrise undertakes
the description of those Silesian farmers who, having become wealthy
because of the coal discovered under their fields, through idleness
drift into a licentious and diseased way of life. A typical example is
chosen from this group-the family of the farmer Krause. He passes
his days in drunkenness, while his wife has an affair with the fianc6 of
his daughter from a previous marriage. Martha, the elder daughter,
married to an engineer, Hoffmann, and about to give birth, has also
become an alcoholic. Such characters cannot found a dramatic ac-
tion. The vice into which they have sunk places them beyond interper-
sonal relationships. It isolates and lowers them to speechless,
screaming, inactive, vegetating animals. The only person in the family
who does anything, Krause's son-in-law, accommodates himself to
the family's decadence and tries to exploit it and the neighborhood as
well in whatever little ways he can. But he, too, thereby escapes the
open, decision-filled present demanded by the Drama. And the life of
the only pure individual in this family, the younger daughter, Helene,
is one of quiet, misunderstood suffering.
The dramatic action that is to present this family must,
therefore, have its source outside the family. It must also be an action
that leaves these characters in their thing-like objectivity and does
not falsify the monotone, timeless quality of their being through a for-
mally determined, taut development. Furthermore, this action has to
expose the condition of the Silesian "coal farmers" as a whole.
This explains why a stranger, Alfred Loth, is brought into the
play. A social researcher and a childhood friend of Hoffmann, he visits
the region to study the conditions in which the miners live and work.
The Krause family can, thus, be given dramatic presentation by
gradually revealing itself to the visitor. The reader or spectator sees
the family from Loth's perspective-as an object of scientific
research. In other words, Loth's role is a mask worn by the epic I. The
dramatic action itself is none other than a thematic travesty of the for-
224
mal principles of the epic: Loth's visit to the family reproduces in the
subject matter that movement of the epic narratortoward his object
which is the formal basis of the epic.
This happens more than once in the plays written at the turn of
the century. The presence of an outsider whose appearance motivates
the action is one of the most commonly observed characteristics of
these works. Most critics, however, fail to see the conditions which
necessitate his appearance and assign him a function parallel to that
of the classical raisonneur. They have nothing in common though. Of
course the outsider reasons, but the raisonneur who could have freed
him from the stain of the modern was no stranger. He was part of the
society which, through him, achieved ultimate transparency. The ap-
pearance of the outsider, on the other hand, expresses the incapacity
of the characters to whom his presence gives dramatic life to achieve
this life on their own. His mere presence is a sign of the crises in the
Drama, and the Drama he makes possible is no longer really Drama. It
has its roots in an epic subject-object relationship in which the out-
sider stands facing the others. The action unfolds because of the
steps taken by a stranger; it is not determined by interpersonal con-
flict. Dramatic tension disappears. This is the basic problem with
Before Sunrise. External tensions, the nerve-rackingwait for Frau Hof-
fmann to give birth, for example, have to stand in for real tensions an-
chored in interpersonal relationships. Even the audience attending
the premiere noticed the extra-artistic and the contingent nature of
these practices. From the midst of the spectators, according to one
well-known anecdote, a gynecologist raised his forceps aloft, no
doubt as a sign that he wanted to offer his help.
Another undramatic moment occurs at the time the stranger
appears. Real dramatic action does not present human existence as if
it had some specific occasion. If it did, the action would point beyond
itself. Its presence is pure actuality, not the making present of a con-
ditioned being. The existence of the dramatis personae should not
reach beyond the temporal borders of the Drama. The notion of occa-
sion, however, is only intelligible within a temporal context, and as an
artistic means it belongs to the epic and epic theater as it existed in
the Middle Ages and the baroque period. In this theater, the occasion
in the thematic corresponds to the moment of performance in the for-
mal structure, a moment eliminated from the Drama. Here, on the
other hand, the play is openly announced as play and refers to the ac-
tors and spectators. Before Sunrise has none of this in its form,
though. It takes up the epic principle itself as its plot line, but retains
a dramatic style that can be no more than partially successful.
Even the end of the play, which has always been considered in-
comprehensible and a failure, can be explained in this light. Loth, who
is in love with Helene and wants to save her from the swamp in which
she lives, leaves her and flees from the family when he learns of their
inherited alcoholism. Helene, who had seen in Loth her only chance to
escape, commits suicide. This "loveless and cowardly dogmatism" of
Loth has never been understood, especially since the spectator,
without ever having seen his formal function as on stage epic nar-
225
rator, connects Loth with Hauptmann himself. The role was deter-
mined by the form, though. What distorts Loth's character at the end
is the result of his formal, not his thematic function. Just as the for-
mal movement of the classic comedy requires that the maze of
obstacles which hinders the lovers' engagement be overcome before
the final curtain falls, the form of a Drama made possible by the ar-
rivalof a stranger will require his departure from the stage at the close
of the last act.
Thus, the same thing occurs in Before Dawn that happens in
the Ghost Sonata with Hummel's suicide, but in reverse. During this
period of crisis in the Drama, epic formal elements appeared as part
of the subject matter. The result of this doubling in the function of a
role or a situation can be a collision between form and content. And if
an internal event in the Ghost Sonata destroyed its hidden formal
source, here, in contrast, a formal requirement causes the action to
slide into the incomprehensible.
Two years later (1891), Hauptmann completed his other "social
drama," The Weavers. It is supposed to show the suffering of the
population in the Eulen mountains in the mid-nineteenth century. The
source of the work-as Hauptmann writes in his dedication-was his
father's "stories of [his] grandfather, who when young sat at the loom,
a poor weaver like those depicted here." These lines have been quoted
because they also lead the way into the formal problems of the work.
At its origin is an indelible image: weavers behind their looms and the
knowledge of their misery. That seems to call for a figurative presen-
tation, like that in the Weavers' Uprising cycle, which Kathe Kollwitz
completed ca. 1897-inspired by Hauptmann, to be sure. For a
dramatic presentation, however, the same question must be posed
here about the possibility of dramatic action as was raised in relation
to Before Dawn. Neither the life of the weavers, who have only known
work and hunger, nor the political-economic situation can be
transformed into dramatic actuality. The only action possible, given
the conditons of their existence, is one against these conditions: an
uprising. Hauptmann attempts to present the weavers' uprising of
1844, and as motivation for the revolt an epic description of condi-
tions seems susceptible to dramatization. But the action itself is not
dramatic. The weavers' uprising, with the exception of one scene in
the last act, lacks interpersonal conflict; the action does not develop
through the medium of the dialogue (as does, for example, Schiller's
Wallenstein), but rather from an explosion in people whose despair is
beyond dialogue. And the uprising can, therefore, only be that con-
flict's theme. Thus, the work becomes epic once more. It is con-
structed of scenes in which various elements of epic theater are used.
This means that the relationship between the epic / and its object is
built into the scenes thematically.
The first act opens in Peterswaldau. The weavers are turning in
their finished webs at the home of the manufacturer Dreissiger. The
scene reminds one of a medieval review, except that the introduction
of the weavers and their misery is thematically motivated here by the
delivery of their work:the weavers present themselves along with their
226
wares. The second act takes one to the cramped room of a weaver
family in Kaschbach. Their misery is described to an outsider, Moritz
Jager, who after long years of service as a soldier is estranged from
the hometown to which he has returned. But it is precisely as an out-
sider, someone who has not succumbed to the living conditions there
that he is able to spark the fire of rebellion. The third act again takes
place in Peterswaldau. It is set in the inn, where recent events are
reported and discussed from time to time. And so the weavers' situa-
tion is first discussed by the local craftsmen, then further described
by a second outsider, the Commerical Traveler. The fourth act, in
Dreissiger's house, brings with it-after another dialogue about the
weavers-the first dramatic scenes of the work. The fifth act, finally,
takes one to Langenbielau and into the workroom at Old Hilse's. Here
the events which have transpired in Peterswaldau are described.
Then, in addition to a description of what is happening in the street (in
the meantime the rebels have arrived in Langenbielau), comes the
closing dramatic scene-the dispute between Old Hilse (who, having
turned away from the events of this world, refuses to participate in the
uprising) and his entourage. We will return to this scene later.
The multiplicity of epic situations: review, presentation for an
outsider, reports, description carefully anchored in the choice of
scenes; the manner in which each act begins anew; the introduction
of new characters in every act; the way in which the uprising is fol-
lowed as it spreads (in fact, in the last act a scene even opens one
step ahead of the rebels)-all this points to the epic basis of the play.
It shows clearly that the action and the work are not, as they are in the
Drama, identical; the uprising is rather the object of the work. The
play's unity is not rooted in the continuity of action but rather in the in-
visible epic / that presents the conditions and events. That is why new
figures can keep appearing. The limited number of characters in the
Drama serves to guarantee the absoluteness and autonomy of the
dramatic whole. Here, new figures are regularly brought on stage, and
at the same time the randomness of their selection, their represen-
tativeness, that which points to the collective, is expressed through
their appearance.
The epic /-paradoxical as it may seem-is a prerequisite for
the "objective" naturalist language found in The Weavers and more
especially in the original version, De Waber. It is precisely in those
places where dramatic language foregoes the poetic in order to ap-
proach "reality" that it points to its subjective origins-to its author.
The voice of the scientific-minded dramatist is continually audible in
this naturalistic dialogue (which anticipates the recordings made
later for oral history archives): "This is the way these people talk, I've
studied them." in terms of its aesthetics, what is usually considered
objective becomes subjective here. A dramatic dialogue is "objective"
when it remains within the limits defined by the Drama's absolute
form without pointing beyond it, either to the world of experience or to
the empiricist author. In other words, Racine's and Gryphius' alexan-
drines can be called "objective," as can the blank verse used by
Shakespeare and during the German classical period or even the
227
prose in Buchner's Woyzeck, in which there is a successful transfor-
mation of the dialectal into the poetic.
But the epic form, denied though it may be, has its vengeance
at the end of The Weavers, just as it did in Before Sunrise. Old Hilse
condemns the uprising on the basis of faith.
Old Hilse: ... Why else would I have sat here-why
would I have worked this treadle here for forty years
until I was almost dead? And why would I have sat
here and watched him over there living in pride and
gluttony, making himself rich on my hunger and
misery? Why? Because I had hope.... We've been
promised. The day of judgement is coming; but we
are not the judges: Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord
our God.,
He refuses to move from his weaving stool in front of the window.

Here is where the Heavenly Father has placed
me.... Here we will sit and do what is our duty,
though the snow itself catch fire.2
There is a volley of fire, and Hilse collapses, mortally wounded, the
only victim of the uprising Hauptmann shows on stage. One can see
why this ending was found strange both by the public at contem-
porary performances for workers and by bourgeois literary critics.
After the opening of the final act, where Hauptmann's sympathy for
the rebels seems to give way to an acceptance of Hilse's religious
convictions, comes this second reversal, which transforms a Drama
about revolution into the almost cynically presented tragedy of a mar-
tyr. How is this to be interpreted? Certainly not from a metaphysical
point of view. It is rather the contradiction between the epic subject
matter and the dramatic form Hauptmann refused to abandon that
again seems to be at the source of the problem. An unaccented stop
would seem to best correspond with the desire to give no further
presentation of the uprising and its suppression. But such a conclu-
sion would also be epic in nature. Because the epic / never completely
separates its work from itself or from experience, it can stop its
presentation. After the final line of the narration comes not nothing
but, rather, that no longer narrated "reality,"the hypothesis and sug-
gestion of which belong to the formal principles of the epic. The
Drama, however, since it is absolute, is its own reality. It has to have
an end that stands for the end as such and raises no further ques-
tions. Instead of breaking off with a look at the suppression of the
weaver's revolt, thereby sticking to the presentation of their collective
destiny and at the same time confirming the epic theme in the formal
structure, Hauptmann tried to satisfy the demands of dramatic
form-even though it had from the very beginning been cast into
doubt by the subject matter.
228
NOTES
Introduction
1 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. I Bywater, in The Students Oxford Aristotle, VI, ed.,
W.D. Ross (Oxford,1942), 1456a.
2 See Goethe, OberEpische und Dramatische Dichtung (in Werke,XII(Hamburg,
1953), pp. 249-51) and Schiller's letter to Goethe, December 26, 1789.
3 Hegel, Samtliche Werke,Jubilaumsausgabe, VIII(Stuttgart, 1939), p. 303. (For
an English version of this text, see The Logic of Hegel, trans. W. Wallace, 2nd
ed. (Oxford,1892), p. 243.
4 Werke,VIII,p. 302; Logic, p. 242.
5 T.W.Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tubingen, 1949), p. 28. (Translated
as The Philosophy of Modern Music (New York,1973).
6 Zurich, 1946 (8th ed., 1968), see p. 12.
7 G[eorg] Lukics, Die Theorie des Romans (Berlin, 1920), p. 36. (Trans. Anna
Bostock, The Theoryof the Novel (Cambridge,Mass., 1971), see p. 50).
8 R. Petsch, Wesen und Formen der Erzlhlkunst (Halle, 1943),[no page reference
given].
I. The Drama:
1 In relation to the following discussion, see Hegel, Vorlesungen Ober die
Asthetik, Werke, XIV,p. 479 ff. (The Philosophy of Fine Art, IV, trans. F.P.B.
Osmatson [1920, rpt. New York,1975], p. 249 ff.).
2 See the discussion of dramatic style in Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik
Poetik, p. 143 ff.
II.The Drama in Crisis
1. Ibsen
1 H6lderlin,Samtliche Werke,Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, 11/1(Stuttgart, 1951),
p. 373.
2 Aristotle, Poetics, 1452a-1452b;see P. Szondi, Versuch Oberdas Tragische, p
213 ff.
3 Oedipus the King, trans. David Grene (Chicago, 1942), p. 353.
4 This and all further citations of John Gabriel Borkman are taken from the
William Archertranslation (1907, rpt. New York,1959), p. 81 (hereafter cited as
JGB).
5 Lukics, Theoryof the Novel, p. 121.
6 Lukics, p. 126.
7 PP. 126-27.
8 See R.M. Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Leipzig, 1927),
pp. 98-102. Translated by M.D.Norton, The Notebooks of Malte LauridsBrigge
(New York,1958), pp. 74-76.
9 See P. Szondi, Versuch uber das Tragische, p. 108 ff.
229
10 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, pp. 75-6.
11 Cited in G. LukAcs, Zur Soziologie des modernen Dramas, Archiv fur
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XXXVIII(1914). See also Schriften zur
Literatursoziologie,ed. P. Ludz(Neuwied, 1961), pp. 261-95.
2. Chekhov
1 The Three Sisters, trans. A. MacAndrewin Twentieth Century Russian Drama
(New York, 1963), p. 67 (hereafter cited as TS).
2 Georg Lukacs, Zur Soziologie des modernen Dramas, p. 678 ff.
3 LukAcs,Zur Soziologie des modernam Dramas, p. 679.
3. Strindberg
1 Strindberg, Samalde Skrifter, Vol. 18. The English text can be found in C.E.
Dahlstrom, Strindberg's Dramatic Expressionism (Ann Arbor,1930), p. 99.
2 The Father, trans. ArvidPaulson in Strindberg,Seven Plays, (New York,1960),p.
29 (hereafter cited as F).
3 Rilke, Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 101. English version, p. 76.
4 The Great Highway, trans. Arvid Paulson in Strindberg, Eight Expressionist
Plays (New York, 1972), pp. 414-415.
4 See Dahlstrom, p. 49 ff, p. 124 ff.
5 To Damascus, trans. ArvidPaulson in Eight Expressionist Plays, p. 141.
7 Paulson, Eight Expressionist Plays, p. 177.
8 A Dream Play, trans. E. Sprigge in Six Plays of Strindberg(New York,1955), p.
220 (hereafter cited as SPS).
4. Maeterlinck
1 Les aveugles, (Brussels, 1910). The Blind, trans. R. Hovey in The
Th6etre I-Il
Plays of Maurice Maeterlinck(Chicago, 1894), p. 65 (hereafter cited as PMM).
2 Les aveugles, p. 104; English text, p. 292.
3 Interieur,in English version, entitled Home, in The Plays of Maurice

Maeterlinck,Th6etre;
second series, trans. R. Hovey (Chicago, 1896), p. 168.
4 Home, p. 182.
5 Home, p. 174.
5. Hauptmann
1 Die Weber,Gesammelte WerkeI,(Berlin,1917), p. 375. English by C. Muellerin
Masterpieces of ModernGerman Theatre, ed. R. Corrigan(New York,1967),p.
211.
2 Die Weber, p. 384. English text p. 219.
230
Reading "Engfuhrung":
An Essay on the Poetryof Paul Celan'
Peter Szondi
translated by D. Caldwell and S. Esh
[I,1] VERBRACHTins DRIVENinto the

Gelande terrain
mit der untrOglichen Spur: with the infallible trace:
Difficulties in understanding begin with the opening words of

the poem, which Celan wrote in 1958, but at the same time so does the
possibility of recognizing the inadequacy of traditional methods of
reading. Traditional approaches, especially when applied to texts con-
sidered obscure, falsify both the reading and the words being read. In
this type of reading one would of course, yet unjustifiably, begin with
the first lines of "Engf0hrung"and ask the meaning of "terrain I with
the infallible trace." As a start one might be tempted to draw parallels
between this passage and others, a procedure whereby one would
compare the lines "terrain/with the infallible trace"-the sense of
which is yet unclear-with other lines from Celan's work one believes
to have understood, and in which one of these expression appears.
Even if one assumes a phrase to have the same meaning in varying
contexts-and this is a questionable supposition at best-and even if
the meaning established for the phrase in a particular passage were
231
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to illuminate to some extent the sense of the lines under study, these
lines should nevertheless have been made clear without being
understood; for the meaning of the words is revealed only by that par-
ticular use which at first eluded comprehension. Thus, the question of
what is meant by the "infallible trace" is of less importance than the
observation that in the first three lines, the meaning of the "infallible
trace" is not given, though the repeated use of the definite article
presumes that the reader already knows which "terrain" and which
"trace" are meant. For this reason then, at the beginning of
"Engf0hrung,"the (possible) sense of the wprds employed is of less
importance than the fact that the reader is led into an unfamiliar con-
text, one in which he is nevertheless treated as someone who knows it
or, more precisely, as one not permitted to know. From the outset the
reader is "driven" into a strange and unfamiliar landscape. Whether
this place is the "terrain I with the infallible trace" is unknown, is not
yet known. But this much is already manifest: were these lines to
specify exactly what they are about, the reader would not be in a posi-
tion to ask whether it might be himself that is referred to. Thus, once
again, in lieu of a question that asks who it is that is "driven into/the
terrain/ with the infallible trace" must come the recognition that this
is not stated, and, therefore, since it remains unsaid, the reader can
assume that the lines (also) refer to him. So, from its beginning,
"Engf0hrung"allows the reader to understand that he is not being ad-
dressed by the poet (as is so often the case), and also that he is not te
object of the poem: rather, he is transplanted to the interiorof the text
in such a way that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the
one reading and that which is being read; the reading subject coin-
cides with the subject of the poem being read.
The three lines which compose the first stanza end with a
colon. The reader is therefore prepared to meet, in the lines that
follow, something he doesn't yet know, and also something which is
not to be known, something which, as the not knowable, becomes the
content of a reading of the opening lines of "Engf0hrung."
[1,2] Gras, auseinandergeschrieben. Die Steine, weiss,
mit den Schatten der Halme:
Grass, written asunder. The stones, white, with the
shadows of grassblades:
A grammatical reading would be possible, in which the grass
itself, this "Grass, written asunder," is "driven into the/terrain/with
the infallible trace." This possibility is unlikely but it exists
nonetheless: again because of an ambiguity, the connection between
the two first stanzas is re-established. "Grass, written asunder"-is
this the "terrain / with the infallible trace" or is it that which was
"driven"there? The ambiguity is not a defect nor mere stylistic con-
trivance, it is the structure of the poetic text itself.
The reader, in lines 4 and 5, is confronted by a description of
the "terrain / with the infallible trace": "Grass, written asunder. The
stones, white, / with the shadows of grassblades." The scene is a
232

landscape, but one described as if written: the "Grass" is "written
asunder." A traditional textual explication, one bound to traditional
rhetoric, would no doubt say that the grass of the landscape is being
compared to letters, and that the analogy between the two (in accor-
dance with the Aristotelian definition of metaphor) allows the poet to
write: "Grass, written asunder," and the reader to understand this
grass as shapes dissolved into letters. And yet, it is not "literally"a
question of letters-and what is the poetic text if not the texture of
words-but rather, distinctly of grass. It is grass that is "written
asunder." In other words: the blades of grass are also letters, and the
landscape is text. Only because the "terrain / with the infallible
trace" is (also) text can the reader be "driven" into its interior.
One might wish to know more about the character of this land-
scape, or, perhaps more simply, what it looks like. The second
sentence of the stanza appears to offer the answer: "The stones,
white, I with the shadows of grassblades." It is a terrainof whiteness
and emptiness, yet also of stones and shadows. Whether these
stones are gravestones or only those hard, lusterless, dense bodies,
those at once diminished and protective forms of star and eye which
play a significant part in Celan's "imaginary world,"2 we do not know,
which means precisely that we are not meant to know. Only the text of
the terrain is seen and known. If we read the grass as letters, then the
white of the stones becomes the white of the page, becomes white in
general,3 cut across only be letter-grassblades or, more exactly, by
their shadows. This text is a terrain of death and sorrow. One could
say that the reader has been "driven" into a landscape where death
and shadows prevail-the dead and their remembrance. Yet such an
interpretation founders once again on the textuality of a landscape
that is not the object of what is being read, but is itself that which is
read. For this reason the instructions the poet gives-to himself? to
the reader? probably both-function differently from those in a cer-
tain kind of poetry, and not as an introduction. These imperatives can
be perceived and followed only after one has been "driven" into the
text-"terrain."
[1,2] Lies nicht mehr-schau! Read no more-look!

Schau night mehr-geh! Look no more-go!
Reading and looking stand in relation to the ambiguity of the

terrain, which is at once text and scene. Because looking replaces
reading, the first intruction appears to transcend textuality, appears
to draw the landscape as such into consideration. Yet the second im-
perative, which contradicts and sublates the first (through, as will
become clear, a rhetorical figure essential to "Engfuhrung"),
substitutes movement for sight. Does this mean that the read text and
the observed image are to yield to a reality which enables the reader-
spectator to "go"? Yes and no. For in no way is the fiction of textuality
forfeited in favor of reality. It is not the receptive passivity of the
reader-spectator that is to disappear in the face of supposedly real ac-
tion, in the face of engagement. On the contrary, the text as such
233

refuses to serve reality and longer, refuses to play the part assigned it
since Aristotle. Poetry is not mimesis, is no longer representation: it
becomes reality. Poetic reality, of course, text which no longer sub-
mits to reality, but frames and establishes itself as reality. That is why
this text cannot be "read," nor can the image it describes be "looked"
at. The poet desires that be and the reader, "go" forward into the "ter-
rain" which is his text.
How, and for what reason?
[I,3]
Geh, deine Stunde
hat keine Schwestern, du bist-
bist zuhause. Ein Rad, iangsam,
rollt aus sich selber, die Speichen
klettern,
klettern auf schwartzlichem Feld, die Nacht
braucht keine Sterne, nirgends
fragt es nach dir.
Go, your hour
has no sisters, you are-
are at home. A wheel, slowly,
rolls out of itself, the spokes
climb,
climb on the blackish field, the night
needs no stars, nowhere
are you being asked about.
The hour that has no more sisters is the last hour, death. Whoever is
there is "at home." With Celan this trope takes on new meaning.
Death was the harbor to which one returned, because life is con-
sidered a journey; now it is so because Celan's poetry has its origin in
death, in memory of the dead, in "remembrance." If his poetry no
longer describes reality, but itself becomes reality, then the "blackish
field" is no longer the object of the poem's description, but rather that
which comes to exist through it. Over the field, across which the
poetry, writing itself, "goes," the reader also passes. But the fact that
text-representation (which is supposed to serve reality) is replaced by
text-reality in no way points toward aestheticism; rather, the will of
the poet announces itself as determined not to meddle in the reality of
death and the extermination camps, and not to act as though a poetic
image of them could be created. At the same time, however, he allows
the aesthetic reality of his poetry to remain, a reality dedicated almost
exclusively to the memory of the dead.
This reality is characterized by a movement which has no
mover but itself: the "wheel . . . rolls out of itself." The place where
one is "at home" can apparently exist without the one who ap-
proaches it: the spokes of the wheel "climb" through the advance of
the poet-reader. But this is not to say that the subject, whether author
or reader, is pushed aside, replaced by an object, the wheel. Rather,
234

the subject ceases to be a subject when it is "at home," and enters
even more radically into the text than at the beginning. Thus, the
spokes, and not the subject, advance: having become a wheel it has
ceased to be reader or observer, of anyone but itself. And "nowhere"
in this kingdom of death, in this night which, if illuminated by stars,
would no longer exist, "are you being asked about."
These last words of the first section of "Engfihrung" reappear
at the beginning of the second (the poem is composed of nine parts),
but in a special way. Here, as in every other "transition" between sec-
tions, the final line(s)-varied in opposition to its first usage, newly
combined, or, though this occurs only once, expanded-is(are)
printed on the otherwise empty right side of the page, immediately
preceding the actual beginning of the following section:
Nirgends
fragt es nach dir-
[ I ] Der Ort, wo sie lagen, er hat

einen Namen-er hat
keinen. Sie lagen nicht dort. Etwas
lag zwischen ihnen. Sie
sahn nicht hindurch.
Sahn nicht, nein,
redeten von
Worten. Keines
erwachte, der
Schlaf
kam Obersie.
Nowhere
are you being asked for-
The place where they lay, it has

a name-it has
none. They did not lie there. Something
lay between them. They
did not see through it.
Did not see, no,
spoke of
words. None
awoke,
sleep
came over them.
The "rise"-"reprise" which on first reading might seem to be an
echo, appears in a new light if the exact significance of the musical
term Engfuhrung is considered. Engfuhrung means "temporal con-
striction," i.e., bringing together the themes of a composition in the
235

most simultaneous contrapuntal manner possible. In the narrowest
sense, the Engf0hrung (English: stretta) is the third (last, part of a
fugue, in which the rapid succession of the canonic entry themes of
the different voices produces an especially intense, interlaced con-
trapuntal pattern" (Der Grosse Brockhaus).4 Thus, to resume at the
beginning of each section the concluding lines of the one preceding is
not pure "prise"-"reprise". Rather, the words printed on the right
side of the page merge with the entrance of the next voice. Their
typographical arrangement expresses a near simultaneity, which is
essential to the musical Engf0hrung and gives it its compressed
character.
However little this definition of Engf0hrung does justice to the
poetic text, the composition of Celan's poem is nevertheless only to
be comprehended through it. The principle of composition called
Engf0hrung discloses on the one hand, the function of the repeated
lines, and, also explains the tight, self-constricting relationship of the
nine sections of the poem. On the other hand, it presents these sec-
tions as so many voices, as voices in the literal as well as musical
sense of the word:
the first section, in the present tense, assumes a subject that speaks
to another: it gives him instructions ("Read no more-look!/ Look no
more-go!"); It tells him: "Nowhere!are you being asked about."
In the second section the past tense predominates. The
description, which implies no "speaking" subject, is directed toward
a "they": thus the third person plural is decisive for the "voice" of the
second section.
Among the further fragments of voices distributed through
parts Ill to IX,the third is in the present and past tenses and uses the
direct discourse of the first person ("It is 1,1, /I
I lay between you").
The fourth, however, also in the present and past tenses, is similar to
the second, except that time, not people, is spoken of, time through
which these people pass or which was once their past
("Years, / years, a finger / feels down and up"). The fifth section, is
preceded by the end of the fourth (or rather, begins at almost the same
time as that ending), which reappears in reverse form ("who/ covered
it up?" becomes 'Covered it/ up-who?"). The temporal sequence of
present to past (from Ito IIand within IV),the opening direction, which
corresponds to the act of memory is reversed as well in the fifth. At
this point the poem proceeds from the past ("Came, came./ Came a
word . . . "), making its way into the present-first into the present
of a specific time ("Night./ Night-and-night"),and into the present of
someone being commanded ("Go/to the eye, to the moist one"). From
this it can be established that the "transition" from part IVto V marks
the turning point in "Engf0hrung" (the transition comprises,
moreover, the poem's center, since the final, parenthesized section is
in fact a reprise of the poem's opening). The sixth and longest section
of the nine, in contrast to the poem's opening). The sixth and longest
section of the nine, in contrast to the poem's first half (I-IV),in-
troduces an "1"as the speaking subject which not only addresses a
236

"you" ("you/ know it"), but also speaks of itself and those addressed
as a "we" (" . . . we/ read it in the book, [ . . . ] How/ did we
grasp/each other-each other with/ these/hands?"). This "we" reap-
pears again in the eighth section ("near/our fled hands"), while the in-
tervening section (VII)of description and report makes no use at all of
the personal pronoun ("Nights, demixed. Circles,/ green or blue, red/
squares: the/world puts its innermost play into play with the new/
hours."). In contrast to the first half of the poem (characterized by a
sequence moving from second person singular to third person plural
to first person singular), the second half, which also repeats the new
order of tenses, from simple past [VI]to present [VIII])is determined by
the first person plural.
Of course the sense of this composition as Engf0hrung is not
yet fully grasped here. This will be possible only after the connections
between the individual stanzas have been understood, that is, when
they have been read; "read," although the connections are made ap-
parent only through the interpretation, and are not the object but the
result of the reading. Not only is there no object (none to be read)
without a reading subject, without a reading-though it may not be
necessary, it should be pointed out that this in no way implies that the
reading can produce its object at will-but since the text is the tex-
ture of words, the interpretation introduces nothing that is alien to the
text when it attempts to describe the verbal weave. This weave in
"Engf0hrung" is most precisely the composition of the various voices
which are the various parts of the poem. A simple consideration of the
relationships between these voices (thus the individual parts of the
poem) does not complete our understanding of this weave; it is also
important to note that these textual connections are realized in a
musical rather than discursive fashion: in the form of anEngfuhrung.
Further, this title must be understood as a name (and not merely a
musical reference), if one hopes to create a-necessarily
open-reading of the poem "Engf0hrung,"since the connections bet-
ween the individual sections determine the poem's progression;
since, in addition, they are dependent on a construction which im-
itates music; and finally, since the musical construction has been
transposed into the medium of language and has become
recognizable, by name, in the poem's title.
The first section of "Engf0hrung" "drives" the subject, author
and reader, into a "terrain"that is at once both death and text. This is
the point from which he proceeds, without anyone asking about him.
The end of the first section ("Nowhere/ are you being asked about-")
blends with the beginning of the second, the first stanza of which,
once again, reads as follows:
[11,1] Der Ort, wo sie lagen, er hat

einen Namen-er hat
keinen. Sie lagen nicht dort. Etwas
lag zwischen ihnen. Sie
sahn nicht hindurch.
237

The place where they lay, it has
a name-it has
none. They did not lie there. Something
lay between them. They
did not see through it.
The composition of a poem on the model of an Engf0hrung (or,
to be more general: a musical form), requires at least a partial
avoidance of discursive speech. For this reason a reading must con-
sider not only the words and sentences, but also, especially, the rela-
tionships produced by repetition, transformation, and contradiction.
In "Engf0hrung"this is especially true for the "transitions," where the
voices dissolve into one another. The relationships cannot be
established with certainty since the idiom of the poem, unlike the
language of the reading into which it is translated, is not discursive or
tied to words. Yet if the language of the reading wishes to avoid
adulterating that which is read, then it must avoid presenting its ob-
ject in unequivocal or certain terms, since it neither issues from nor
ends in such a reality. In considering the relationship between sec-
tions I and II,one would therefore presume that the subjects spoken
of in the past tense in IIare those about whom it is "nowhere" asked,
and, thus, some "other"; in that case the past which is spoken of is a
past of which the person is reminded (or it by him), which advances in-
to the "terrain" which is the poem. But this also implies that to ad-
vance is equally to return home: "you are-/ are at home" (I). The
segmentation of the lines functions to characterize not only the sec-
tions (this is of marginal importance), but also the lines themselves,
and indeed, Celan's poetry as a whole. The division at this point, inten-
sified by the repetition of the verb form "are," characterizes nothing
other than what is experienced in the process of reading. "You are-"
it remains unclear whether additional information might be expected
which would connect and explain either what "you are," or whether it
is question of an existential declaration, of the fact that "you are."
"Areat home"-at this point the reader posesses the additional infor-
mation; he knows that it is a matter of being-at-home. Yet he knows
equally (more precisely, he reads) that existence as such is also being
considered, and (this he experiences only through the additional infor-
mation) that his being-at-home, that existence, according to
"Engf0hrung,"is only attained when one has returned (to the origins?
to the Mother?-to what was for Celan the indelible memory of his
mother's death in a concentration camp). Real existence unites itself
with non-existence-more exactly, is existence only when it remains
true to non-existence, remembers it.
Since advance is return,the second section signifies a "place"
belonging to the past, "where they lay." The "place [ . . . ] has/ a
name-it has/ none." While investigating this figure, in rhetoric called
"correctio," and one which, as already mentioned, is characteristic of
"Engf0hrung," it must not be forgotten that here, once again, the
reading subject is provided with no indication of the motive and basis
for the correction (one affecting an immediate association with
238

musical composition and its language). It might be said then, that if
the place which has a name has no name, and if they do not lie in is
the place where they lie, this must be so for a reason: "Something/lay
between them." This "something," of which we as yet know nothing
except that it prevents their seeing (themselves?), begins to speak in
the third section, where it reveals its nature. This is the sense of the
second "transition" (between II and III).
Before the self-presentation of that which "lay between them,"
we must read the second stanza:
[11,2] Sahn nicht, nein,

redeten von
Worten. Keines
erwachte, der
Schlaf
kam uber sie.
Did not see, no,

spoke of
words. None
awoke,
sleep
came over them.
"Spoke of/ words" indicates that the deficient mode of existence in

this place, where "something/ lay between them," is simultaneously
verbal (expressed through the medium of language), and the deficien-
cy the word itself. Indeed, these three meanings can be viewed as
separate, yet none has precedence over the others: only in their col-
lective sense, here, as throughout, does the texture of Engf0hrung"
arise. Furthermore, the pronoun "none" can just as well refer to the
words as to those who spoke of them. This ambiguity becomes even
more significant when it is "refuted" in the following lines "sleep/
came over them-")-our quotation marks indicate that this double
sense is both refuted and not refuted, since, after all, the dynamic of
the correction is characteristic of Celan's language. Of more impor-
tance, however, is the fact that in "none [of the words]/ awoke," defi-
ciency characterizes not only these creatures and their existence, but
also their language, which in "Engf0hrung,"is always, both existence
and reality: linguistic reality, text. Because "None [of the words]/
awoke, sleep came over them."
In the third section, that "something" which "lay between
them" speaks':
[111] Ich bins, ich,

ich lag zwischen euch, ich war
offen, war
h6bar, ich tickte euch zu, euer Atem
gehorchte, ich
bin es noch immer, ihr
schlaft ja.
239

It is I, I
I lay between you, I was
open, was
audible, I ticked at you, your breath
obeyed, it
is I still, and
you sleep.
First, instead of unchanged repetition of the end of part II

("Sleep /came over them"), on the right side of the page we find:
"Came, came. Nowhere / asked anyone." Thus, the voice of that
which "lay between them" (11)does not begin by identifying itself with
the "sleep' that "came over them," it presents itself simply (if we
"read" the musical "transition") as something which "came." This
might be sleep and yet might also be something else. The abbreviated
"reprise" of the close of IIat the "beginning" of Ill leaves undisclosed
the identity of the "something" (corresponding to the ambiguity of
"None awoke" is that the words or people?) Following the Engfohrung
model, the "transition" indicates that that "something" which "lay
between them," and that begins to speak, is something which comes,
whose essence is arrival, an arrival on a "blackish field" where-in
keeping with the second part of the does
anyone ask about the one to whom "something""reprise,"--"nowhere"
will speak.
What is this "something"? Without violating the thesis pro-
posed for the reading of this text, we might attempt to identify
"something," and do so without dispensing with interpretation (to do
this is impossible), avoiding, however, mere association, or a purely
personal reading. This "something," then, calls itself "open" and also
"audible." Only at this point does the "report"in the second section
become clear: those, "between" whom "something lay, spoke of
words," from which "non awoke" (11).The words lie sleeping because
they do not speak. Those who "spoke of words" did not know how to
use the audibility of that which "lay between them." They experienced
this "something" only as a partition-"they / did not see through
it"-instead of recognizing that this was something which would have
preserved accessibility, a new field, where being is always also word.
This "something" "ticked at you." The action of "something"
was ticking, and yet this action is directed at those of whom it is said:
"I ticked at you." Today the meaning of ticken is more limited than it
was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it had the addi-
tional, gentle significance of "to touch with the fingertips." As an im-
passioned reader of dictionaries-he listed all those words of Jean
Paul which are presently obscure, and kept them in a notebook (so, for
example, Sprachgitter, the title of the volume which "Engf0hrung"
closes)-Paul Celan must have known the meaning of ticken, and
must have chosen it specifically for its double significance. Ticken in
this verse means both what it signifies today and "touching"; the
word imparts both meanings simultaneously, because both at this
point become one. That which touches and ticks is at once an emblem
of time, the clock, time itself, and temporality. What "lay between
240

them," "open" and "audible" in this final hour ("your hour I has no
sisters," I), is nothing but time, which comes, which "ticks" to those
to whom it speaks, those whom it would take forcibly with it. Does it
succeed?
"Yourbreath I obeyed": Thus, this "audible something" is not
really perceived yet nevertheless, it can "touch" (with the finger) that
activity which is undisturbed by sleep-breathing. Though it controls
their breathing, this "something" has certainly not yet achieved its en-
tire purpose, otherwise "and/ you sleep" would not have been added.
And yet "sleeping" means more than "sleeping." Used euphemistical-
ly it also means "to be dead," and here it has also a further connota-
tion of "not hearing." Read correctly, this can, indeed must mean that
"living" and "hearing" are the same-this supposition is thoroughly
confirmed by the equation of "existence" with "word," and by the
"textual" nature of the reality which is dictated to the reader from the
beginning ("Grass, written asunder" 1,2).
Therefore that which "lay between them," could have given life
to those lying, could have led those sleeping on a "blackish field"
(this is death, non-time) back into existence. Because of the double
significance of ticken, the something which "lay between them" ap-
pears to be time (or a certain time, a certain temporality), and, at the
same time, the word which could have become "audible" to them, and
could have awakened them. This goal was not achieved: "you sleep."
And yet the "something," a time-word Zeit-Wort("word" in the em-
phatic sense) that was audible, has a calming effect: "It / is I still." In
anticipation of the next to last section of the poem it could be said,
then, that "nothing / is lost." And with the assurance, which recalls
the end of section III,the fourth section in fact begins on the right side
of the page:
[IV] Bin es noch immer-

Jahre.
Jahre, Jahre, ein Finger
tastet hinab und hinan, tastet
umher:
Nahtstellen, fthlbar, hier
klafft es weit auseinander, hier
wuchs es wieder zusammen-wer
deckte es zu?
It is I still
Years.
Years, years, a finger
feels down and up, feels
about:
seams; palpable, here
it is split wide open, here
it grew back together again-who
covered it up?
Whereas in the third section that "something" (which is at
241

once time and word, and which begins here with the consolation that
it "still is") speaks, the fourth section supplies a description, or
rather, the actualization of that which is time, and, further, of the
nature of the relationship between human begins and time. "Ac-
tualization" is the best expression, since the character of time, as
well as the relationship human beings have to time, is not merely
described, but also and especially expressed in the syntax. The verbal
structure actualizes continuity and infinity in more than a semantic
sense, and it also actualizes memory, the caesuras of inner time
which the past introduces to human beings.
"Years./ Years, years"-one must read that nothing is being
said of this time-duration, that the poet only names it. And in the
second line, we must read the repetitions as a form of iteration in
which the name itself and the repetitions actualize permanence as its
essential quality. Because time, as soon as one attempts its descrip-
tion (always, but especially in "Engf0hrung"), becomes space, the
"terrain" of memory becomes surface, a no-man's-land with eleva-
tions and depths, but no vanishing points (Fluchtpunkte). Here man
does not move by going, but by feeling: as though he were nothing but
a finger. Perhaps at this point we could resort to the conventional
language of textual explication, in this case to an "as if," in order to
demonstrate the extent to which such a reading falsifies the written
and that which is read. The passage makes use of synecdoche; the
part (a finger) represents the whole (he who remembers). The essential
point here, however, is that the knowledge of that which is
represented by "finger" is irrelevant, and that nowhere in the entire
passage is there a reference to what it might represent, that at base
the there is no representation. The finger feels, nothing more. Feeling
can be interpretated as the act of memory, but this interpretation,
once again, fails, for it overlooks the fact that the text refers to "feel-
ing" not "remembering."The "finger," which reminds us of those im-
plied in ticken (touch with the fingertips) establishes an affinity be-
tween human beings and time, between those whose sleep (111)and
that which "ticks at" them, the opening of inner time. Time, as "lost,"
wanted to become "audible" to them, setting them in search of it. The
fact that the return home to the past has not yet taken place can
perhaps be attributed to the special nature of this past: "seams,
palpable, here/ it is split wide open, here / it grew back together
again"-a traumatic past, a past full of wounds. For this reason time,
which calls itself "open" (111),is also "covered up" (IV).The two con-
tradictory statements appear in two distinct voices: in that of the
"something"-of-time (Zeit-"etwas") in the third section, and in that
other, where those beings who only feel with their fingers are not yet
willing to abandon themselves to the opening of memory (fourth sec-
tion). To avoid a misreading through interpretation (and in the follow-
ing the difference between reading and interpretation will become
even clearer), we should recognize that in the fourth section there is
no reference to "something" covered (indeed, that not once is the "ob-
ject" in IVdescribed as that "something" which "lay between them,"
II).Only the question, "who / covered it up?" is posed.
242

The reappearance of this question in reverse order prepares
the entry of the next section:
[V] Deckte es
Kam, kam. zu-wer?
Kam ein Wort, kam,
kam durch die Nacht,
wollt leuchten, wollt leuchten.
Asche.
Asche, asche.
Nacht.
Nacht-und-nacht.-Zum
Aug geh, zum feuchten.
Covered it
up-who?
Came, came.
Came a word, came,
came through the night,
wanted to shine, wanted to shine.
Ash.
Ash, ash.
Night.
Night-and-night.-Go
to the eye, the most one.
This section is central to "Engfuhrung" (the division of the
poem as a whole can be represented by the formula 4+1 + 4); it is the
turning point on the path of that movement begun in the first section,
the advance of the self-writing text as well as that of the reader whom
it conducts. That it is question of a turning point here is already evi-
dent in the use of tenses, from present to past in Ito IV,and, then from
past to present in V to IX.This change in direction is anticipated in ab-
breviated form in the fifth section: the first of the two stanzas is in the
past tense, but the second in the present, corresponding to the
evocative naming at the beginning ("Ash. / Ash, ash. / Night. / Night-
and-night") and the final command, separated from the preceding
passage by a dash ("Go/ to the eye, the moist one").
Having "read" the "transition" between IVand V and the struc-
ture of V as a musical score-that is, by way of analysis and not
translation-one finds, at the center of the renewed question
(Covered it up-who?), the rent and the chasm which separate the two
strophes introduced by the question. The break is indicated by syntac-
tical inversion ("who/ covered it up?" becomes "Covered it/
up-who?"), by the prosody of the enjambement ("covered it/ up,")
and by the orthography of the dash, posed precisely at the point of the
break ("Covered it / up-who?"). To enquire concerning the meaning
243

of this break would be to abandon the principle of musical reading.
Because the text under study is poetic, such a question is possible,
however, and even the present reading does not claim to follow the an-
nounced principle completely. But here it seems advisable to retain it,
since the break needs no interpretation. The entry is prepared for by
the fragmented question, or, more exactly, the connection between
question and entry clarifies the function of the break. (The "function"
and not the "meaning," because "meaning" is a concept of seman-
tics, while here "syntax" is discussed in the broader sense of the
word as composition.) In this entry ("Came, came. / Came a word,
came, I came through the night . . ."), the function of the break
within the question becomes clear to the extent that it can no longer
be understood as the response to the question: "who/ covered it up?"
Yet it seems implausible that the word comes of its own accord-it
comes because it wants to shine in this night of sleeping words
("None/ awoke" II)-and "covers up" the opening of memory. If one
assumes this is untenable in order to draw some conclusion about the
break, then one should also maintain that the pronoun in the question
in the reprise is not the same "who?" as that of the closing question
in IV("who/ covered it up?").This pronoun is no longer the subject of
the predicate. This thesis is certainly neither out of the question nor
erroneous. It would be erroneous, though, if one assumed that this
"who?" in spite of everything (in spite of inversion and the dash),
stands as the subject of a predicate which is not its own. What has
been described, thanks to a method which derives more from musical
analysis than textual explication, strongly resembles a particular
possibility of musical composition, that of enharmonic change. To
conceive of the "who?" in "Covered it/ up-who?" as the subject of
the question, but also as separated from the rest ("Covered it/ up-")
and posing a question which is to be answered by the subsequent
lines ("Came, came. / Came a word"), is to postulate two separate
functions, as well as a transition from one function to the other, in
other words, precisely that which is designated by the musical term.
This result only confirms the premise of our reading-that the poem
requires less a consideration of literal meaning than of function.
To return once again to the gap separating the two stanzas of
the fifth part, we should note, above all, that it exists, and recognize
its function, instead of translating a structural moment into the
language of communication and meaning. The gap between the two
stanzas, the radical opposition without mediation,5 is clear at first
reading. Between the world of the word that "comes through the
night, to shine," that is arrival ("Came, came. / Came a word"), and
the world of "ash," the absolute "night" which knows only itself, that
is "Night-and-night,"there is pure opposition, caesura. But the func-
tion of this caesura is recognizable only after a consideration of the
poem as a whole, which requires an advance that is both a departing
and a returning home (from present to past and from past to present),
an experience made conscious by memory. Of course, this experience
returns to its point departure, yet the place itself is changed by the ex-
perience-by the event that is nothing but the text itself on its way to
244

realization. Midway on this path which is not described, but rather,
taken, traveled, or, more exactly, is opened by the poem, there is a
turning point on either side of which the two worlds stand opposed.
Through this opposition alone, experience becomes a necessity. It is
resolved only by that arrivalwhich is the action the poem, which is the
poem itself. Nothing could be so foreign to Celan's language as to
speak explicitly of this opposition. In "Engfuhrung"it is simply realiz-
ed in the juxtaposition of these two stanzas in section V (this is not a
limitation, but a transcendending of the traditional modes of
language, which up to Mallarm6 remained represential). Since the
poem's center itself enacts the opposition (the section is both pre-
ceded and followed by four others), the poem shows itself to be one
that is its own progression, rather than thematically a description or
representation. The command, separated from what precedes it by a
dash, concludes the second stanza of V, and is taken up again in the
"transition" from Part V to VI in unchanged form, but with the rhythm
of a ritartando (of the three lines in which it unfolds):
Zum
Aug geh,
zum feuchten-
Go
to the eye,
the moist one-
This command seems directed at the word, of which was said,
at the beginning of V, it "came, came." But as command it also seems
to recall part 1:
[1,2] Lies nicht mehr-schau!

Schau night mehr-geh!
Read no more-look!
Look no more-go!
Instead of the traditional alternative, in which the command is
directed at either the word or the poet-reader, here the two posibilities
are not merely reconcilable, but identical, since the text is not just the
progression of the poetic act, and the reading not merely that of the
text, especially since progression coincides with the arrival("And/it
came," VI)which is realized in the poem.
This identity, that, paradoxical as it is, is an outcome of the
poem's logic, finds expression in the sixth section, the lengthiest by
far in the poem. There we are faced with an almost bewildering verbal
profusion, and a line by line reading of the sort conducted earlier
becomes impossible. And yet, to simply note this abundance, or, even
more, to criticize it is not enough, instead the reason behind it must
be discovered. Once more, though in a different form, the question
arises as to what role the word is given in
"Engf0hrung."
245

Sleep "came over them" (11,2).This, to borrow from Hegel, is a
"malefic" non-being ("schlechtes" Nicht-Sein), one which prevents
them from hearing what approaches to speak to them and lead them
to the opening of their past-which is also a non-being, but one
without which, and without whose memory there is no existence. For
this is the goal which "Engf0hrung"reveals. The word, too, comes (V).
It crosses through the night, wants to "shine." The "moist" eye, full of
tears-to which the word, at the end of V and in the "reprise" follow-
ing the sixth section, is to go-is, so we think, that of those creatures
of which it is said, at the beginning, "Something /lay between them.
They / did not see through it //IIDid not see, no, I spoke of I words"
(11).The sixth section describes what becomes of them when the word
arrives, or rather, what they do when they are awakened and prepared
to do what is required of them: follow their way back through the past
to a reality that is no longer speechless non-being.
This movement does not shape the poem's content, but its pro-
gression, and the poem is not the representation of a reality, but reali-
ty itself. Thus, the sixth section concerns itself with nothing but the
creation of the world and its recreation through the word. So it is not
by coincidence that the first stanza actualizes, with two citations, the
cosmogony of Democritus and the theological structure of the world
found in Dante's works.6
[VI,1] Orkane.
Orkane, von je,
Partikelgestaber, das andre,
du
weissts ja, wir
lasens im Buche, war
Meinung.
Gales.
Gales, from the beginning of time,
whirl of particles, the other,
you
know it though, we
read it in the book, was
opinion.
According to Democritus, the world, as well as individual
things and creatures, issues from the "whirl"of atoms. Along with the
void this forms the foundation of the cosmos, "all else is mere opi-
nion."7 For Celan, this "opinion" becomes the aforementioned
"malefic" non-being, the "speaking of words" (11)which produces
nothing. In reading this stanza it becomes clear how the prosodic in-
terruption created by the separation of the lines accents those words
whose importance first becomes recognizable in the second stanza of
VI:"you," "we," "was," and even "opinion." Only the merging of these
elements in the second stanza provides a basis for a more precise ar-
ticulation of the supposed sense of "was / opinion.":
246

[VI,2] War, war
Meinung. Wie
fassten wir uns
an-an mit
diesen
HAden?
Was, was
opinion. How
did we grasp
each other-each other with
these
hands?
That which was only opinion, word without reality, stands op-
posed to the physical reality of grasping hands, of two bodies-some-
thing unexplained if not inexplicable, since the voice asks how it was
possible. And yet this stanza indicates the role these two creatures
have in the creation of the world through the word and through
memory. In the course of reading, this creation'becomes more clearly
an obligation, which devolves not merely on those two, but on the
poem itself. The poem no longer speaks of particles (V,1),but atoms. It
is, nevertheless, hardly comforting when the voice at this point asks
how this grasping of hands occurred: it reminds us of the "finger"
which "feels" down and up, "feels/ about" (IV)in that traumatic past,
out of which the "hands' which grasp each other wish to create a new
cosmos. That path taken by the word on its way "to the eye, the moist
one" (V), the path taken by those who, with moist eyes, faced up to
that obligation, was not the path which should have been taken:
[VI,3-4] Es stand auch geschrieben, dass.

Wo? Wir
taten ein Schweigen dar0ber,
giftgestillt, gross,
ein
gr0nes
Schweigen, ein Kelchblatt, es
hing ein Gedanke an Pflanzliches dran-
grun, ja,
hing, ja,
unter hAmischem
Himmel.
An, ja,
Pflanzliches.
And it was written, that.
Where? We
draped a silence over it,
stilled with poisons, great,
247

a
green
silence, a sepal, an
idea of vegetation attached to it-
green, yes,
attached, yes,
under a mocking
sky.
Of, yes,
vegetation.
The sky is mocking because they failed to reach the goal. In-
stead of gaining possession of the word (but this means existence),
instead of creating a new world in this final hour, this hour which has
"no sisters" (I)they composed a "silence." Once more the past is re-
pressed. The poet gives no explicit reason for this, and the poem at
this point, as the reading of these three stanzas indicates, appears, in
contrast to the preceding, to revert from musical composition to a tra-
ditional, hermetic language-and with it the reading, against its will,
practically to an exercise in paraphrasic text to a textual explication
performed by paraexplication. Nevertheless, the text alone provides
the means for finding the reason for this failure-precisely that con-
stellation in which the "idea of vegetation" and the "green silence" to
which it was "attached" are arranged. The following two stanzas of
section six indicate another possibility, one contrary to vegetation-
silence.
[VI,5-6] Ja.
Orkane, Par-
tiklgestdber, es blieb
Zeit, blieb,
es beim Stein zu versuchen-er
war gastlich, er
fiel nicht ins Wort:Wie
gut wir es hatten:
Kdrnig,
k5rnig und faserig. Stengelig,
dicht;
traubig und strahlig; nierig,
plattig und
klumpig; locker, ver-
Astelt-: er, es
fiel nicht ins Wort, es
sprach,
sprach gerne zu trockenen Augen, eh es sie
schloss.
248

Yes.
Gales, whirl of par-
ticles, there was time
left, time
to try it out with the stone-it
was hospitable, it
did not interrupt. How
good we had it:
Grainy,
grainy and stringy. Stalky
dense;
grapy and radiant; kidneyish
flatish and
lumpy; loose, over-
grown-: he, it
did not interrupt, it
spoke
spoke willingly to dry eyes, before closing
them.
The "stone" stands opposed to "vegetation," as do "dryeyes"

to "moist," word to "silence." And still we do not know why the stone
acquires a capacity absent in the organic world-a poetic denial of
what natural science expounds. But it is already clear in these two
stanzas that the advance of the text and of the two creatures with
whose actions it coincides at the beginning of the fifth stanza now
lead to another attempt to establish a cosmogony: the beginning is
the same ("Storms, rush of / particles," VI,5)as in the entry to VI.This
beginning is said to join the progression of the text, to have a part in
the efforts which are not thematic, but are the poem itself: "there was
time / left, time / to try it out with the stone." This pausing by the
stone becomes a new attempt, but one that appears to succeed:
[VI,7] Sprach, sprach.

War, War.
Spoke, spoke.
Was, was.
These two lines return to the dry, laconic speech of the earlier
sections, which not only describes the object, but also expresses it in
the form of its composition; they seem to confirm and strengthen the
success of this new attempt at a cosmogony. As an abstracting
repetition of that which was just said (i.e., "he [the stone], it I did not
interrupt,it/ spoke, /spoke willingly to dry eyes, before closing them,"
and the "stone was hospitable"), the double predication-itself
doubled ("Spoke, spoke./ Was, was")-confirms that the "audible" (111)
"something" (11),the "something" into which the "finger," feeling
249

"down and up" and "about," attempts to penetrate, has finally
reached its goal: all that which has been referred to thus far and
which, as has become increasingly clear, is the same. Even though
these lines are themselves the repetition of two verbs (from VI, 5-6),
they still corroborate the achievement by introducing the words to
speak and to be, and reinforce it through the iteration. At the same
time this two-line stanza, which consists only of two verbs repeated,
establishes the identity of word and being, and points to the accord
between poetic reality and poetic text. The last two stanzas of part VI
turn back to accomplish this creation of world in the word, this
achievement which can explain why the creation of the new world and
its cause are actualized by way of a bewildering profusion of words.
Before attempting this explanation it would be appropriate to
note the relationship, if not identification, of the "stone," which "did
not interrupt," which "spoke to dry eyes," and the one to whom it
spoke, and those who, before they "tried it out with the stone," with
"moist" eyes chose a "green silence," a "sepal" (VI,3).In contrast to
silence stands the word, spoken not by them, but by the stone. This
stone, then, is related to the "dryeyes" to which it spoke "before clos-
ing them," while the "moist" eye (V,1),the reason for failure, stands in
relation to the moist cosmos of vegetation, to which "silence" also
belongs, "a sepal, an/idea of vegetation attached to it" (VI,3):thus, an
opposition like that between the "stones, white" and "grassblades"
at the poem's beginning. Both the white of the stones and the light of
the word, which "came through the night" and "wanted to shine,
wanted to shine" (V,1), stand in contrast to night's darkness. As the
word "through" intimates, light and darkness do not stand in fixed op-
position; rather, only in its passage through darkness does light
become: this mediation is equally the lesson of stanzas VI,5-6.
Of all the adjectives that one might at first feel obliged to apply
solely to the stone (their gender is not established)-even if the im-
mediately preceding lines seem to prepare for a clearer definition of
"how good we had it"-a few in fact are related to stones ("grainy,"
"flatish," "lumpy," "loose"), others recall the plant world ("stringy,"
"stalky," "graphish," "overgrown"),while those remaining can refer
to both the stone and plants ("dense," "radiant," "kidney-like").This
piling up of unusual adjectives serves once again as a mediation, one
also expressed in the transition from "he" (the stone) to "it" in the
lines "he, it/ did not interrupt"(VI).This kind of fusion was already pre-
sent at the beginning of the poem in the proximity of "stones, white,"
of "grass, written to asunder," and of "shadows of grassblades" (1,2).
Both stone and grass, as opposite as white and black, become script
and text only when united. In this way additional light is shed on the
opposition of the word, on the one hand, which "came through the
night" and "wanted to shine" (V,1) and, on the other, the "ash" of
"Night-and-night" (V,2). The significance of the caesura for the
composition of the two stanzas is thus evident, but the opposition be-
tween the two stanzas also serves to prepare the contrary: a media-
tion which is realized not only in the stanza admitting a blend of adjec-
tives (VI,6), but throughout the entire poem.
250

In the two last stanzas of the sixth section we find enunciated
what was stated only implicitly in the two preceding lines ("Spoke,
spoke./ Was, was."): the creation of a world.
[VI,8-9] Wir
liessen nicht locker, standen
inmitten, ein
Porenbau, und
es kam.
Kam auf uns zu, kam
hindurch, flickte
unsichtbar, flickte
an der letzten Membran,
und
die Welt, ein Tausendkristall,
schoss an, schoss an.
We
would not let go, stood
in the midst, a
pore-structure, and
it came.
Came at us, came
through us, patched
invisibly, patched
away at the last membrane,
and
the world, a millicrystal,
shot up, shot up.
Whereas the last line, in diction not unlike that of VI,7contains

merely an assertion and a substantiating iteration, in the other lines
numerous passages from preceding parts of the poem appear to be
refuted; in the meantime, since the poem unfolds within its own tem-
poral dimensions, there is also an indication that the movement has
concluded: there are signs of arrival.The world has now been created.
Those "over" whom "sleep" came (II)would not let go"; those, "bet-
ween" whom "something lay" that prevented their seeing "through,"
are themselves now "al pore-structure," "through" which something
"approached" them, that now, with them, causes the world to shoot
up. With time recovered, with re-created reality, with language arrived
at speech, the author-readerappears to have reached his goal: "and/it
came" (VI,8).But what is the essence of this newly found time, this
regained reality, this newly achieved existence? And what lends the
dry eyes their power, and the stone its unusual force, how can one ex-
plain the strange relationship, the identity of stone and creatures, of
the night and those who cross through it? Without an answer to these
questions, the poem remains an hermetic image within the tradition
251

of symbolism, a further example that in poetic creation one is free to
invent at will. But in "Engf0hrung"this is not the case, regardless of
how radically Celan departs from representation and Aristotelian
mimesis. The final sections of the poem show this clearly.
The "reprise" in the "transition" from the sixth to seventh sec-
tions is the first and only one in the entire poem in which a completely
new word is added. The re-presented expression is expanded in order
to announce this novelty:
[VII] Schoss an, schoss an.

Dann-
Nachte, entmischt. Kreise,
grOnoder blau, rote
Quadrate: die
Welt setzt ihr Innerstes ein
im Spiel mit den neuen
Stunden.-Kreise,
rot oder schwartz, helle
Quadrate, kein
Flugschatten,
kein
Messtisch, keine
Rauchseele steigt und spielt mit.
Shot up, shot up.
Then-
Nights, demixed. Circles,
green or blue, red
squares: the
world puts its innermost into
play with the new
hours.-Circles,
red or black, bright
squares, no
flight-shadow,
no
measuring table, no
smoke-soul ascends and joins in.
The (re-)creation of the world through the creatures remember-
ing and through the arrival of the word-the event pointed to by the
repeated words ("shot up, shot up")-resounds in the introductory
"then" (dann), which rhymes with the preceding word. The rhyme ac-
centuates the event which is to appear. Taking up once more the
"whirl" of word-"particles" of VI, section seven describes the event
whereby it replaces adjectives, half belonging to the organic, half to
the inorganic worlds, with geometric elements and colors out of
which the millicrystal is constructed, in keeping with the end of sec-
tion six, is identical to the upward shooting world. The diction of the
seventh section further distinguishes itself from that of stanza VI,6,
252

through the clauses which introduce or interruptthe sequence of col-
ored, geometric figures, in which the poem, after the "whirl,"definite-
ly recovers its original language. The ambiguity and polysemy are
essential. Even more than previously, this language makes use of allu-
sion, made possible through a multiplicity of meanings, rather than
direct statement, a language in which the poet has left the initiative to
the words themselves, which, it is said. "s'allument de reflets recipro-
ques comme une virtuelle trainee de feux surs les pierreries.'"8 Thus
"shot up," a phrase expressing the manner in which the world is
created, has echoes of "to shoot," which, in the eighth section, reap-
pears in significant fashion in "target."
The circumstances of the seventh section, prepared for by the
"Then" in the "reprise," are different in that they present "Nights,
demixed." How this occurs is not stated. The expression stands im-
mediately after the emphatic "Then";this word order (in keeping with
a musical reading) shows these "Nights, demixed" are antithetical to
that other, the "Night./ Night-and-night"(V,2)through which the word
that "wanted to shine" came (V,1).With the word arrivedand the world
reestablished, nights are by no means replaced by days, for the path
in "Engfihrung" does not lead from darkness to light. Up to this point
the poem's progression, one completed by the reading, has achieved
nothing but a surmounting of the malefic non-being of sleep and
night, which are only sleep, "silence . . . stilled with poisons" (VI,3),
and "night," which "needs no stars" (1,3).The opposition between this
new cosmos, with its "Nights, demixed," and that other cosmos
which precedes the arrivalof the word and the arising of this "world"
as "millicrystal," is substantiated by the second piece of information
offered by this stanza: this world of crystal "puts its innermost into/
play with the new/hours." The hour at the beginning of the poem,
which "has no sisters" (1,3),is made "new" (VII):the going which was
begun in that final hour, the path, which was paradoxically entered
upon in the moment of being-"at-home," leads to a new time. Yet
what characterizes this time of "demixing," of crystalline purity, is
also, probably the distance from the point of departure (which is also
the place of return),the forgetting of them, whose remembrance the
poet has taken upon himself, and this last the real source of strength
for the poet's creativity. The negative definition of the cosmos of
"Nights, demixed," in the final lines of the stanza supports this
assumption: "no / flight-shadow,/ no / measuring table, no / smoke-
soul ascends and joins in." The triple negation demonstrates the emp-
tiness, the "deficiency" of the "millicrystal (VI,9)"this newly created
"world" whatever the "value" of that which is deemed absent.
Indeed,the exact identities of this "flight-shadow," this "measuring
table," this "smoke-soul," are not given. But because it is a question
of a rhetorical obscuritas, that is, intentional obscurity, it should not
be the task of this reading to propose hypotheses that fully explain
them. Instead, we should observe the obscurity and try to comprehend
its particularities, without overlooking that which nonetheless
becomes apparent because of it.
The obscurity here is distinct from that which begins
253

"Engfuhrung":"Driven into the / terrain / with the infallible trace."
There, the use of the definite article presumes a knowledge of the ter-
rain, but this possibility is undercut by the line's position at the begin-
ning of the poem. Here, however, there is no evidence that the reader
ought to know exactly what is being discussed. That is not to say the
poet should be reproached for inexactitude. Not long before writing
"Engf0hrung," Celan said that the language of his poetry seeks
"precision within all the unalterable many sidedness of a given ut-
terence"9 Renouncing the desire to closely define the possible mean-
ing of "flight-shadow," "measuring table," and "smoke-soul" in no
way casts doubt on the precision of the language in "Engf0hrung,"
since such an "explanation" would necessarily be founded on per-
sonal and, thus, coincidental associations, and on only approx-
imating hypotheses. Obversely, since it is precisely a concern for
precision that urges restraint, it may be best to say merely that the ac-
cent in these lines is on negation and absence; the word no twice con-
cludes a line and in one instance is the entire line: ". .. no/ flight-
shadow,/ no / measuring-table, no, I smoke-soul ascends and joins
in." Furthermore, the first and last of the three ("flight-shadow" and
"smoke-soul") express a movement which mediates between heaven
and earth, while the second ("measuring-table") belongs to the world
of humans as they arrange their lives on earth. But this is to say that
the world, "a millicrystal," with its "Nights, demixed," even if it does
put "its innermost into / play with the new I hours," is not the
ultimate goal of "Engf0hrung." Perhaps something essential is miss-
ing. However, the eighth section of the poem makes clear how this
result is to be achieved, in order to satisfy the requirements contained
in the negative definition ("no / flight-shadow, I no / measuring-
table, no, I smoke-soul ascends and joins in." But our reading can
already assert movement and mediation, the moment of the earthly
and the mixed are absent from that crystalline world of pure forms
("circles," "squares") and solid colors (Circles, I red or black, bright /
squares").
Moreover, in the seventh section it becomes necessary to con-
sider the ambiguity of the expressions "flight-shadow" and "smoke-
soul," an ambiguity which transcends the boundaries of the signifier
(there is more than simple polysemy at stake here). Celan takes fre-
quent advantage of the possibility that exits in German for unlimited
new word combinations; this is one of the hallmarks of his language.
It is not a matter of pure stylistics, however (if such a thing could
exist). Through the use of these composites, Celan succeeds in ex-
pressing himself in condensed syntagmata, while confining the
discursive element to isolated words without eliminating it. Thus, the
predication achieves a degree of freedom that, given the limits of syn-
tactical ambiguity (which, as we know, is the basis of Mallarm6's
language ), it does not have on its own. Precisely this fact, that the
combined words are produced through a condensation of syn-
tagmata, renders unnecessary any decision concerning which and
how one of the (two or more) elements of a word determines the other.
It follows that "flight-shadow" can just as easily mean the "shadow of
254

flight" as "flying shadow" (or, more exactly: it means one as much as
the other); and "smoke-soul" means not only "the soul turned to
smoke," but also "the soul of smoke:" thus, smoke as soul, and soul
of smoke. This essential ambiguity, containing at once both signifier
and signified, allows us to understand why that world, "a
millicrystal," composed of geometric elements, will not suffice; this is
also the reason it is as inappropriate to use Saussures model of the
sign in an analysis of Celan's poetry as it is to apply it to Mallarme's
work.10The world, being demixed, lacks the differentiation on the
basis of which it is mixed, and being mixed mediates itself. This world
is too pure. On the other hand, the quasi-musical composition of
"Engf0hrung" allows one or possibly both meanings of each com-
posite, "flight-shadow" and "smoke-soul" (i.e., one of the associa-
tions which unite the parts of each composite), to prepare for the
poem's eighth and culminating section. Once again, an "enharmonic"
change prevails, for the last subject of VII-even if unnamed-is
taken up once more in VIII.In fact, it is announced in the "reprise" the
"transition" between the two sections, in two lines which have a
predicate but no subject:
[VIII,1] Steigt und

spielt mit-
In der Eulenflucht, beim
versteinerten Aussatz,
bei
unsern geflohenen Handen, in
der j0ngsten Verwerfung,
Oberm
Kugelfang an
der versch0tteten Mauer:
Ascends and
joins in-
In the owl-flight, near
the petrified scabs,
near
our fled hands, in
the latest rejection,
above
the targets on
the buried wall:
The entry to this section is preceded by a predicate without
subject, whose subject is in fact the "smoke-soul" of part seven. This
means-if one "reads" the "transition"-that the predicate remains
valid for what is stated in the eighth part, even if it receives a new sub-
ject, or another element appears in place of the subject of the
seventh. At first one seems forced, in light of VIII,1,to adopt the latter
construction, since it consists of only adverbial determinations of
place and time. Furthermore, these are not always distinct modes,
255

and from this uncertainty arises then a further ambiguity, one in
which the profound identity of time and place is revealed.
The entire stanza consists of these temporal and locational
determinates-that are not used attributively, but as predicates. The
fact that the predication of this stanza, one of the most decisive in the
composition, unfolds in the form of situational determinates, in-
dicates the important function these conditions have within the com-
position. In a figure similar to the correctio (the importance of which,
for Celan, is already clear), these situational determinates replace
and dissolve the pure, sharp, radiant elements of that crystalline
cosmos in which the creative power of the word-that came-and the
creatures which opened themselves to the word seemed to find com-
pletion ("We 1 would not let go, stood / in the midst, a / pore-
structure, and I it came" VI,8).The path of memory leads to a goal
where that "world, a millicrystal," of nights "demixed," yields to
another. Not only do each of these predicative determinates of situa-
tion contribute to the realization of this other; at the same time this
other itself, as well as its relationship to other parts of the poem, is
more precisely defined. And this is what must now be "read":
"In the owl-flight"-the compound Eulenflucht is antiquated
today, but it is nonetheless rich in meaning, since, as a composite, it
is, necessarily, a "motivated" sign. According to Grimm's lexicon,
Eulenflucht stands for dusk, the time when owls take flight." Through
this reference alone a new hour, a new light, is introduced to the
poem. It is not the night which "needs no stars" (1,3),nor the night of
those who, because "sleep came over them," "did not see through it"
(11),nor is it, finally, the "demixed" night of the world which "puts its
innermost into / play with the new I hours" (VII),that world of "bright/
squares." It is, rather, the hour of the transitory, the intermediary, the
hour at which day passes into night. At the same time, however, it is
the hour of flight-with the substantive "flight" suggesting "to flee"
as well as "to fly." The third of the adverbial determinates emphasizes
the former.
"Near / our fled hands"-the meaning of the finger ("a
finger I, feels down and up, feels I about," IV) and of the hands
("How I did we grasp / each other-each other with / these I
hands?" VI,2)has already been discussed: their function is not merely
"thematic" (should such a possibility exist); it might instead by called
"rhetorical" if it were not a question of going beyond synecdochal
figures. Here, "finger" does not stand for another word that would
designate a whole of which the finger in "reality"would be only a part,
it is a "finger" feeling the uneven and unfamiliar surface of the
traumatic past. Therefore, the place described in the eighth section of
the poem is no longer the place of creatures fled, but rather that of
"our fled hands"-those hands referred to by the question in VI,2
("How / did we grasp / each other . . .")-and whose contact with
the resurrection of the past does not lead to memory. On the contrary,
"We draped a silence over it, ./I . . /a /green / . . . asepal, an /
idea of vegetation attached to it-" (VI,3).The location of these fled
hands is contrasted with that non-place which is "the world, a
256

millicrystal" (VI),a pure and radiant, a new world, but a world whose
creation is ever more clearly shown to be deficient-however much it
may also be a part of the event for which the poem provides a basis
and in which it has its own basis. And, since this poem is a progres-
sion, the contrast indicates that this world must be surpassed. This
creation, too, is deficient because it remains reduced to the
crystalline, inorganic, and unmixed-a structure of geometric forms
of circles and squares, and unmixed colors: "Circles, I green or blue,
red / squares (VII)- a pure, "demixed" world, but one that cannot
mediate, one with no connection between plant and stone, such as an-
nounced by that row of adjectives (Grainy, I grainy and stringy.
Stalky, I dense . . . " VI,6)and by the change from "he" to "it" ("he,
it I did not interrupt").Such connection however characterizes exact-
ly the place described in the eighth section:
"Near / the petrified scabs"-the expression is initially
obscure, since it is not known why "scabs" have become a point of
reference, nor what the significance of their being "petrified" might
be. At the same time, however, this same expression is a clear "sign"
of that connection binding the organic to the inorganic. The scab has
become stone. Still, the two questions just posed demand an answer.
Here "scab" not only signifies the disease [leprosy, (Aussatz)], it is
also an allusion to casting out (aussetzen), the treatment inflected on
those with the disease. Even if Aussatz is used today only in reference
to the disease, in this context (where the words "s' allument de reflets
r6ciproques," to cite Mollarm6 once again) it actualizes something
else as well. In poetry, of course, actualizing, or bringing to mind,
always means characterizing or more exactly realizing. Precisely what
is meant by this Aussetzung is made clear in another line from this
same stanza, one that is, again, a situational determinate:
"In / the latest rejection;;-the "latest rejection" can
characterize nothing other than the fate suffered by millions of Jews,
including Celan's parents, during the Nazi era, the latest of the rejec-
tions suffered by Israel since the beginning of its history. The loca-
tion, fixed in time and space by the various determinates of situation
in this stanza, is certainly the place of the "final solution": the exter-
mination camp. The Jews, "rejected" so often by the peoples among
whom they lived in their long history, treated as "outcasts," are this
time truly "cast out, driven"- to use the word that, with reason,
began the poem."
"Above / the targets on / the buried wall"-it is these last two
allusions that define the place which, is burdened by a past that is not
past and never will be. The "targets" are attached to the "buried wall"
and the wall buried, probably because the present in this part of the
poem seems to belong to another, later epoch. The "targets"
designate the upper boundary of the extermination camp. That which
is reported in the eighth section occurs "above I the targets on I the
buried wall." While the other "situational determinates" introduced
by "in" or "near," and not "above," refer to a place and time on this
side of that boundary, the expression introduced by "above" indicates
precisely that which, upon arrival,passes beyond its limits. The colon
257

at the end of the first stanza ("on / the buried wall:") indicates that
what has arrived will now be named.
[VIII,2] sichtbar, aufs

neue: die
Rillen, die
visible, once
again: the
grooves, the
What arrives at and goes beyond the place of rejection, of
casting out, and of death, is epiphany. Not that of a god, but the ap-
pearance of "grooves," or, "traces," to recall once again the poem's
beginning. What is meant by these "grooves"? "Engf0hrung," the
poem that does not deal with progression and advent, but is them and,
simultaneously, the movement of a knowledge developing towards a
recognition of that which is advent, has, now, reached a stage where
such questions can no longer go unanswered, where, in fact, the
answers are made possible because of the advent. Having placed the
words "the / grooves" after a colon (that promises the appearance of
that which is become, "above once / again visible," the poet pro-
ceeds: "the /grooves, the." Then, after a very brief but expressive
pause between the article and the noun it designates, a pause which
marks not only the line's but also the stanza's end:
[VIII,3] Chdre, damals, die

Psalmen. Ho, ho-
sianna.
Choirs, at that time, the

psalms. Ho, ho-
sanna.
As we know, the deported Jews, face to face with death, often
began to pray and sing psalms. "Hosanna" is the Hebraic "O, help!"
or "O, save me!" This prayertranscends the upper limit created by the
"targets". With it those who speak it go beyond the place of their last
torment: the prayer is itself like a target. Their salvation is the word.
Of course, the poet says nothing of this. What he expresses is, rather,
the lesson learned from the comportment of those on their way to
death. The poem itself completes the evocation of facts from
historical reality, and this evocation constitutes its end (in the double
sense of the word) and shapes its lesson.
[VIII,4-5] Also
stehen noch Tempel. Ein
Stern
hat wohl noch Licht.
258

Nichts,
nichts ist verloren.
Ho-
sianna.
So
there are temples yet. A
star
probably still has light.
Nothing,
nothing is lost.
Ho-
sanna.
That what we have here is a lesson, that there is a conclusion
to be drawn, is already indicated at the beginning of the fourth stanza
by the word "so." If temples are still real, and still exist, then this is
true because prayers were spoken (there where no temple stood), and
even more because of these words: "the// choirs" and "the/ psalms"
from "that time" are visible, once/ again" in the form of "grooves" et-
ched forever into the memory of mankind by those who sang them in
the "latest rejection." If there is memory, remembrance, it is thanks to
the traces left behind by the victims remembered. It is because of the
word. Memory testifies to the creative power of the word, that is, to
the linguistic origins of reality-at least of the reality that matters.
Only this capacity produces memory, and makes of it not merely a
task, but a poetic obligation and necessity. Thus, the actualization of
the extermination camp is not only the end of Celan's poem, but also
its point of departure. "Engf hrung" is a very precise refutation of the
all too famous assertion by Adorno that "after Auschwitz . . . it
become impossible to write poems."'12 Adorno, who for years wanted
to write a longer essay on Celan, whom he viewed, with Beckett, as
the most important of the post-war poets, was well aware of the kind
of misunderstanding his assertion made possible, and that it was
perhaps wrong.'3 Poems are no longer possible after Auschwitz,
unless founded on Auschwitz. Nowhere has Celan shown so well and
so convincingly as in "Engf0hrung" how well-founded the hidden cur-
rency of his poetry, its essentially non-denominational, impersonal
character. For this reason the creative word is not that mysterious
word referred to in V,1, that "came, I came through the night, I
wanted to shine, wanted to shine." Rather, it is the word spoken by
deported Jews face to face with death, whose once again "grooves"
become "visible" at the end of the poem. This perspective makes
clear the radical opposition between the two stanzas of the fifth sec-
tion. The first, devoted to the word that "wanted to shine," collides
with the second: "Ash. / Ash, ash. / Night. / Night-and-night.-Go /
to the eye, the moist one." The reality of ash, of the death camp and
its crematories, only seems to prevent the advent of the word, of the
259

re-creation of the World through language. This is so because "the
world, a millicrystal," which "shot up" (VI),and which stood opposed
to the other world whose creation was, through expulsion, shattered
against that "silence . . . I stilled with poisons, great, I a / green /
silence, a sepal" (VI,3), is not the world which "Engf0hrung" will
create, is not the world "Engf0hrung" is: "no / flight-shadow / no /
measuring-table, no / smoke-soul ascends and joins in" (VII).The
poem is not this world because here one world opposes another,
because something contradictory is present-an opposition between
word and silence, stone and vegetation, dry eyes and moist eye. But
the song ("the //IIchoirs, at that time, the / psalms") and the reality
("there are temples yet) and the light ("A / star / probably still has
light) only come into being when the opposition is sublated. It arises
out of the "petrified scabs" and by crossing over the nothingness
which is the "rejection:" "Nothing, I nothing is lost" (VIII,4).
And yet one cannot say this without reservations, reservations
that indicate the fragility and the flaw, the painful doubt in it all, for
without them our read would be unfaithful. Essential facts remain
unmentioned. Thus, the divided line, the caesuras: ". . . Ho, ho-/ san-
na" (VIII,3),"Nothing,/ nothing is lost" (VIII,4),"Ho-/sanna" (VIII,5).The
voice that speaks, that of the poet or those whose memory he invokes,
is hindered in speaking. There is no immediate "hosanna". After the
first syllable the word, its prayer, breaks off. That which wants to ad-
dress God is initially a profane, even vulgar cry: "Ho. ho-." Likewise,
the "star" only "probably" has light. And if the break between the
following lines ("Nothing,/ nothing is lost") is finally, "read,"one finds
it by no means certain, not initially at least, that nothing is lost. At
first only the word "Nothing" is read. It does not claim that nothing is
lost; it is not the first word of a sentence that attempts to say this.
"Nothing" means nothing. Only, perhaps, after "Nothing" is said, or
rather, is asserted, can the next line assure us that "nothing is lost."
Here these can be existence only when it transforms itself into
memory, into the "trace" of non-existence. Thus, even though the
word probably does not occur in the following lines ("Nothing,/
nothing is lost"), the break and the doubt return:"Ho-/sanna" (VIII,5).
At the close of the eighth section, the end of the poem, its func-
tion in the poem as a whole remains in question.
A reading of the musical moment in the "transition" at the en-
try to the section-"Ascends and I joins in"- indicates the relation-
ship of the eighth to the seventh part. It becomes clear precisely
because of the "transition." As already noted, it consists of the
predicate of the preceding sentence, whose prior subject ("smoke-
soul") is absent. The reasons for this are provided by our reading of
the eighth section, and this at the same time makes clear how the
subject remains present with its predicate in this section. One cannot
know the meaning of "smoke-soul" simply by reading the seventh sec-
tion, where the expression first occurs; only the eighth section pro-
vides this knowledge, since the location of the "targets" is also the
place of the crematories, whose ash was evoked in an earlier passage
(V,2).This is not the only connection produced by the negations of the
260

seventh in conjunction with the affirmations of the eighth sections:
"no / flight-shadow" becomes active again in "owl-flight,"the hour in
which day passes into night, and earth into sky. This "mixed" hour,
which stands in contrast to the "nights, demixed" (VII)of a world too
pure, without mediation and communication, in which "no / flight-
shadow, I no / measuring-table, no / smoke-soul ascends and joins
in"-this hour of twilight rises once more at end of the eighth section,
just before the poem takes up again, in parenthesis, the lines with
which it began:
[VIII,6] In der Eulenflucht, hier

die Gesprtche, taggrau,
der Grundwasserspuren.
At owl's flight, here
the conversations day-gray,
of the groundwater-traces.
The "groundwater-traces" speak, as do the "grooves," "above
the targets." Heighth corresponds to depth; the "light" of a star"
(VIII,4)to the "day-gray" of the earth. But what is meant by corres-
pond? If "Engf0hrung" writes itself as a progression, and if, in
reading, it is a question of accompanying this progress (rather than
reproducing it), then the "groundwater-traces" do not correspond to
those heavenly grooves of prayer, but follow them. And in fact, they
follow them in three senses of the word: 1) the poem puts the
"groundwater-traces" in the place of the higher "grooves" 2) the "con-
versations . . / of the groundwater-traces" are, today, what
"the /grooves, the //IIchoirs, that time, the/ psalms," were before; 3)
the "groundwater-traces" speak during the same hour," "at owl's
flight" (VIII,Iand VIII,6), as did the "grooves . . . // that time": today
the "traces" succeed the "grooves" of the past, "visible, once/again"
(VIII,2).The conversations, day-gray,/ of the groundwater-traces" arise
from the "choirs," the prayers from the time of the "latest rejection."
The memory of them that one maintains determines what one is and
does today.
But do these "groundwater-traces," really represent here
(VIII,6)that which was sought from the beginning, even if their "con-
versations," their exchange of words, is counterpoised to the
"speaking-of-words" in the second section? The repetition of the
poem's opening line in parenthesis at the end, after the close of the
stanza just discussed, indicates that this is so:
[IX,1-2]
(- -taggrau,
der
Grund-
wasserspuren -
Verbracht
ins Gelande
261

mit
der untr0glichen
Spur:
Gras,
Gras,
auseindergeschrieben,)
(- -day-gray,
of the
groundwater-
traces-
Driven
into the terrain
with
the infallible
trace:
Grass,
Grass,
written asunder.)
That does not mean the poem describes a circle, and returns to
its point of departure. The parentheses alone indicate the inaccuracy
of such an interpretation. They suggest the lines be read sotto voce,
with a ritardando of the altered line division. The lines are recalled on-
ly to shed additional light on the preceding ones: "the conversations
day-gray, I of the groundwater-traces." In this way the reprise of the
first lines at the close of "Engf0hrung" functions in a way that cor-
responds to that of the "reprise" in the "transitions." Here it
establishes a relationship between the "conversations . . . I of the
groundwater-traces" and the "terrain / with / the infallible trace."
However, the "infallible trace" and the "groundwater-traces" are one
and the same: word.
"Driven into the / terrain / with the infallible trace (1,1), the
reader could not and was not permitted to know what the "infallible
trace" was. Now, at the end of this progression, that is, after reading
that which is itself progress, he can understand. For this reason
nothing is explained. Once again the reader might disregard the prin-
ciples of musical composition and ask what the "conversations day-
gray, I the groundwater-traces" mean. And once again a comparison
to other passages in Celan's work (encouraged, no doubt, by the ap-
pearance a few years ago of a concordance) would provide no answer.
But while at the beginning of the poem the reader needed to come to
terms with the fact that he was obviously not yet supposed to know
what it was talking about, now the assumption is that the reader
already knows that the "groundwater-traces" are the "grooves, the //II
choirs, that time, the / psalms," and also the "infallible trace" which
was used to designate that "terrain"into which he has been displac-
ed since the beginning of the readying, without knowing where he is.
262

The beginning is repeated so that he can now experience it. The "con-
versations . . . I of the groundwater-traces" and their communica-
tion through the word appear at the end, in place of the non-
conversation of those who lay and did not lie, because "something lay
between them" (11,1).That "silence . . . I stilled with poison which
the words had "draped . . . over it" (VI,3),as well as the isolation
which permitted words to be spoken of, "none" of which "awoke"
(11,2),has been overcome.
In contrast to the world of silence and expulsion, and the
"demixed" non-world which is the world of the "millicrystal," the
"groundwater"is mediation, and, thus, the negation of the two oppos-
ing elements, the negation of negations. Like the "petrified scabs"
(VIII,1),the "groundwater-traces" speak; they become discourse
because they are word, water below ground, water within ground (in
stone), the trace of one in the other, as "shadows of grassblades"
unites the "stones, white" with the "grass," and so creates the script,
the "grass, written asunder" (1,2).An underneath, a ground (ground-
water-traces): the conditon for the possibility of the textual reality of
"Engf0hrung,"for the continued life of human beings today, "at owl-
flight, here" (VIII,6)of a humanity that has survived Auschwitz-no
one knows how-and that continues to survive it-no one knows how.
A further remark.The title, "Engf0hrung,"can be explained by
an analogy between that part of the fugue which bears this name and
the particular composition of Celan's text. This connection has been
discussed in detail. And yet this explanation is necessarily in-
complete. As a "motivated" sign (as a composite) necessarily in-
complete. As a "motivated" sign (as a composite) the word
Engf0hrung is of course a technical expression, yet even so it remains
a designation which makes itself clear, and which contributes to an
explanation of the poem whose title it is (as it is, also, explained by
the poem). That is, it is also a name. The substantive formed of eng
and fihren refers not only to a principle of musical composition which
corresponds to that selected by the poet, but indicates-beyond the
division of "parts" and "voices" which converge in the "reprise" in the
transitions-that the poem is a progression; and more, that a path
exists which the text makes accessible, which becomes a path for the
reader to follow. The movements the reader and the text being read
takes place in the contact between the sections, which are led into
each other by the "transitions." This progression takes place along a
path which leads in strict and narrow fashion through memory of the
death camps. Remembrance becomes the basis for the poets "speak-
ing."
"Engf0hrung" passage through the narrows-does the title,
which is also a name, refer to the strict development of the poem, or to
the narrowness of the path along which the reader must accompany
the poem in his reading; or finally, to the experience of remembering
the straits of that "latest rejection"? Anyone who has learned to
"read" Celan's text knows that it is not a question of deciding on any
one meaning, but of realizing that these are not different, they are one.
Ambiguity having become the means of awareness, makes visible the
263

unity of that which only appeared to be difference. It serves precision.
NOTES
1 [This essay, which first appeared in French as "Lecturede 'Strette,' essai sur la
pobsiede Paul Celan in Critique(May,1971), pp. 378-42, can also be found in a
Germantranslation under the title, "Durchdie Enge gefuhrt. Versuch Oberdie
VerstAndlichkeit des modernen Gedichts," in Peter Szondi, Celan-Studien
(Frankfurta.M., 1972). In order to simplify the translator's task of rendering
Celan and Szondi in English, the German text of Szondi's essay has been
prcferred throughout. Footnotes in brackets have been added by either the
German or American editors of Szondi's text.]
2 [Theexpression, "imaginaryworld,"refers to the title of the book by Jean-Pierre
Richard, L'universimaginaire de Mallarm6(Paris, 1961).]
3 Cf. Jacques Derrida,"La double s6ance, Tel Quel, 42 (summer 1970), p. 20 ff.;
rpt. La dissemination. Paris; 1972, p. 198 ff.
4 [The musical term Engf0hrung,in French, is strette (fromstrictus). Szondi con-
solidates a definition from Littr6:"the part of a fugue in which only fragments
of the theme appear, and which is expressed as a forced and violent dialogue,"
and from Robert:"the part in which the theme and its response are resolved in
ever intensifying entries."]
5 [The German editors of Szondi's essay note at this point that the Germantext,
since it follows the French original, leaves unmentioned the rhyme scheme of
Celan's poem (leuchten, feuchten, etc.) and that Szondi, before his death, in a
discussion with a student, had indicated his German revision of the essay
would take this type of mediation under consideration.]
6 Cf. Dante, Inferno, canto V, I. 138: "quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante"
("that day we read no further").Celan has repeatedly drawn attention to this as
the "source" for the line in "Engf0hrung":"we / read it in the book."
7 Diogenes Laertius, IX,44.
8 St6phane Mallarme,"Crise de vers," Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1945), p. 306.
("igniting in reciprocal reflections like the possible trail of lights across
jewels")
9 Almanach de la LibrairieFlinker(Paris, 1958), p. 45.
10 Cf. Jacques Derrida, "S6miologie et grammatologie," Information sur les
sciences sociales, 7(3), 1968 (Recherches s6miotiques).
11 One of the few examples provided by Grimm's lexicon is from the novelist
Celander (1685-1735).
12 [Theodor W. Adorno, "Kulturkritikund Gesellschaft" (written 1949); in
Prismen-Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft Frankfurta.M. 1955), p. 31.]
13 See TheordorW. Adorno, Negativ Dialektik (Frankfurta.M. 1966), p. 353.
Translators' note: Michael Hamburger's translation of "Engfohrung," in Paul
Celan: Poems. A Bilingual Edition (New York,1980),pp. 216-221, has been refered to and
used in part.
264

CONTRIBUTORS
Timothy Bahti is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative

Literature at Northwestern University. He has published essays on
European romanticism, and is currently completing a book on
Allegories of History: German Literary Historiography after Hegel.
Jean Bollack is director of the Centre de recherche philologique at the

Universite de Lille II. He has frequently published articles on
classical literature and philosophy in Actes de la Recherche en
Science Sociales and other journals. His books include Herac/ite ou
la separation (co-authored with Heinz Wismann) and La pensee du
plaisir, which examines epicurean thought.
Bernard Boschenstein has been Professor of German language and

literature at the University of Geneva since 1964. His major publica-
tions are: H6oderlins Rheinhyme; Konkordanz zu H6lderlins Gedichten
nach 1800; Studien zur Dichtung des Absoluten; Leuchttorme. Von
H61derlin zu Celan, Wirkung und Vergleich. He has also published
studies on HOlderlin, Jean Paul, George, Hofmannsthal, Celan:
Rousseau in Germany and the reception of Greek tragedies in Ger-
many. He is currently doing research on Kleist, Robert Walser, Kafka
and Musil, and has been co-director of the H61derlin-Jahrbuch since
1967.
Manfred Frank is currently Professor of Modern and Contemporary

Philosophy at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. In addition to
numerous articles on the theory of German Idealism, he has published
Das Individuelle AI/gemeine. Textstrukturierung und interpretation
nach Schleiermacher, as well as several books on modern literature
and on the rapport between German Hermeneutics and French
Neostructuralism. He recently completed a book entitled Was ist
Neustrukturalismus? and is working on the first complete edition of
the works of Ludwig Tieck.
Thomas Fries lives in Zirich, where he completed his PhD, after study-
ing Germanistics, French, Comparative Literature and Philosophy in
Berlin and Paris. He has published Die Wirklichkeit der Literatur: Drei
Studien zur literarische Sprachkritik and articles on Ludwig Tieck,
Choderlos de Laclos and Heinrich von Kleist. Fries is currently prepar-
ing studies on the theory of language, on modernity and typology and
on the dialogic text.
Karl Grob received his doctorate in Comparative Literature, German

linguistics and literature from the University of Zurich. After further
research in Paris, he began teaching at the University of Ghent,
Belgium. His most recent position is with a banking firm in Zurich. His
publications include, Ursprung und Utopie, Aporien des Textes. Ver-
suche zu Herder und Novalis; "Demokratische Theorie und
Literarische Politik. Zu Gottfried Kellers 'Fghnlein der sieben
265
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Aufrechten';" and "Zur Deutung von Ludwig Tiecks Erzahlung, 'Der
Runenberg'."
Michael Hays teaches theater history and theory at Cornell University.

His most recent publications include, The Public and the Perfor-
mance. Essays in the History of French and German Theater,
1871-1900; "Peter Handke and the End of the Modern;" and "Sugges-
tions about the Social Origins of Semiotic Practice in the Theater." He
is currently preparing a book on dramatic form in the modern and
post-modern theater.
Gert Mattenklott is professor of German and Comparative Literature

at the Philipps-University, Marburg, Germany. He lives in Berlin and
Frankfurt. His publications include Melancholie; Bilderdienst; Grund-
kurs 18. Jahrhundert; Karl Blossfeldt Fotograph and Der Ubersinn-
liche Leib. He edited Literatur im historischen Prozess, vols. 1-15
(1972-80), and has also published articles on literary history (18th and
20th centuries) and essays on themes of cultural philosophy.
Rainer Nagele teaches German Literature and Critical Theory at the

Johns Hopkins University. His publications include books on Fredrich
H6lderlin (Literatur und Utopie: Versuche zu H6/derlin), Heinrich B611,
and Peter Handke. A second Book on H6lderlin is scheduled to appear
in 1983 (Unessbarer Schrift gleich: Zur Konstellation von Text,
Geschichte und Subjektivitat in Holderlins Dichtung). He has pub-
lished articles on Goethe, Hblderlin, Kafka, Freud, Lacan, Habermas,
Handke and on general problems of Modernism and Critical Theory.
He is presently working on a book on allegory and parable in modern
literature.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors of boundary 2 wish to express their gratitude to the

Translation Research Institution Program of SUNY-Binghamton,
recently named one of the two sites for the Department of Education
National Resource Center for Translation and Interpretation, for
undertaking the translation of the original German and French texts
of this volume, specifically to its director, Marilyn Gaddis Rose;
Kristine Anderson, Broome Community College, N.Y.; Therese
Araneo, Norwich, N.Y.; David Caldwell, University of Northern Col-
orado; Sylvan Esh, Temple University; Richard Hannah, Wayzata, Min-
nesota; Michael Hays, Cornell University, N.Y.; James G. Hughes,
language specialist for a French Shipping Co. in Manhattan; Kristine
Gjerlow Johnson, CUNY N.Y.; Kimberly Nemec, Berlitz, N.Y.; Paula
Pavlovich, University of West Virginia; Marylin Gaddis Rose, SUNY-
Binghamton, N.Y. (With the exception of Caldwell, Esh and Hannah all
the translators are former students in TRIP).
The editors of boundary 2 would like to thank the University of

Minnesota Press for permission to publish parts of Michael Hays'
translation of Peter Szondi's Theory of the Modern Drama.
266
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V - A - Boundary 2 - The Criticism of Peter Szondi

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V - A - Boundary 2 - The Criticism of Peter Szondi

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JEAN BOLLACK, Opening Remarks / 7

RAINERNAGELE Text, History and the Critical Subject.

Discussion of Frank and

Further comments in lieu of a

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THOMASFRIES Critical Relation. Peter Szondi's Studies

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Theorie des modernen Dramas (Frankfurta.M., 1956), 3rd revised ed.

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Satz und Gegensatz. Sechs Essays (Frankfurta.M., 1964). Essays on

EinfOhrungin die literarische Hermeneutik (1975). A discussion of the

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translated by Paula Pavlovich

I wish first to thank on behalf of all participants, the parents of

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This detailed, intelligently formulated theory of the linguistic

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14 F. D. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik,ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt

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Thought looks for a place of protection in the texts.

What is required is an openness, a receptivity

It might seem that Adorno's dialectical entanglement and

For if we are only of pure hearts

It is in this text that Szondi finds the "other arrow". Translated

1) between intention and the condition of their

Johns Hopkins University

3 "Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische. Zur Begriffsdialektik in Schillers

5 Holderlin, Simtliche Werke (Stuttgarter Ausgabe) Bd. IV, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer

6 The German text (according to the Stuttgart Edition):

7 The concrete consequences for the understanding of structures of signification in

translated by Kimberley Nemec

MANFRED FRANK: If someone were to ask me to comment on what,

initially, I see in common between Rainer Nagele's intention and my