Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
111
2023
562-3
Band 56 Heft 2-3 Harald Höbus ch, Rebeccah Dawson (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten. Abonnementpreis pro Jahrgang: € 138,00 (print)/ € 172,00 (print & online)/ € 142,00 (e-only) Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 101,00 (print); Einzelheft € 45,00 (jeweils zuzüglich Versandkosten). Bestellungen nimmt Ihre Buchhandlung oder der Verlag entgegen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, Postfach 25 60, D-72015 Tübingen, Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 · eMail: info@narr.de Aufsätze - in deutscher oder englischer Sprache - bitte einsenden als Anlage zu einer Mail an hhoebu@uky.edu oder bessdawson@uky.edu (Prof. Harald Höbusch oder Prof. Rebeccah Dawson, Division of German Studies, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA). Typoskripte sollten nach den Vorschriften des MLA Style Manual (2008) eingerichtet sein. Sonstige Mitteilungen bitte an hhoebu@uky.edu © 2023 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0010-1338 INHALT Heft 1 Themenheft: The Virulent Violence of Football in 20 th and 21 st Century German Cultural Production Introduction: Football and Violence in 20 th and 21 st Century German Literature and Culture Rebeccah Dawson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1 kanonen kicken köpfen � Fascism’s Violent Victory in Ludwig Harig’s “Das Fußballspiel” Rebeccah Dawson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 5 East Germans Rehearse the Uprising: GDR Football Stadiums as Testing Grounds for the 1989 Revolution in Ernst Cantzler’s … und freitags in die “ Grüne Hölle ” Oliver Knabe � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 27 Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Football Fandom and Coming-of-Age in Philipp Winkler’s novel Hool Bastian Heinsohn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 51 The Refusal to Sing: Affective Demands on Athletes of Color in German National Football Kate Zambon � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 69 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 91 Heft 2-3 Themenheft: Below Genre: Short Forms and Their Affordances Gastherausgeber: innen: Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn Introduction Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 93 Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius Gabriel Trop � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 111 Mayröcker’s Drama of Association Florian Klinger � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 133 Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 Jasper Schagerl � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 155 Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism Florian Fuchs � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 179 Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia David Martyn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 197 Dashing Expectations Jan Mieszkowski � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 223 Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis Erica Weitzman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 243 Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures Vanessa Barrera � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 261 Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung Jodok Trösch � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 273 “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle Arne Höcker � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 295 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 309 II Inhalt BAND 56 • Heft 2-3 Themenheft: Below Genre: Short Forms and Their Affordances Gastherausgeber: innen: Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn Inhalt Introduction Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 93 Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius Gabriel Trop � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 111 Mayröcker’s Drama of Association Florian Klinger � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 133 Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 Jasper Schagerl � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 155 Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism Florian Fuchs � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 179 Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia David Martyn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 197 Dashing Expectations Jan Mieszkowski � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 223 Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis Erica Weitzman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 243 Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures Vanessa Barrera � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 261 Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung Jodok Trösch � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 273 “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle Arne Höcker � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 295 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 309 VI Inhalt Introduction Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn Johns Hopkins University, Freie Universität Berlin, Macalester College Our expectations of a “large form” are not the same as of a small form: depending on the size of the construction, each detail, each stylistic device, has a different function, a different force, and a different load is laid upon it. (Tynyanov 32) To say a lot with a few words, “mit wenig Worten viel sag[en]”: such is the art of brevity, explains Julius Wilhelm Zincgref in the preface to his collection of proverbs, the Apophthegmata teutsch from 1626 (Zincgref 7). 1 “A lot” with “few,” much with little: this is the essential paradox that the present volume proposes to explore. When words are reduced to their minimum and the salient qualities of an utterance or a text become its shortness and rapidity, this does not imply, Zincgref insists, that a small form like the proverb results from shortness of time. On the contrary, like “gemstones” ( Edelgestein ), proverbs require ages for their formation; they are the product of a “langwierige prob und erfahrung” (10), of a long period of trial and experience in which the false and the superfluous have been painstakingly eliminated. It is because “life is short, while art and experience are long and grueling [lang und weitläufig]” (10—11) that short forms are needed - they render it possible, within one span of life, to assimilate what can otherwise only be attained in a period vastly greater than any one life� At the same time, their shortness does not mean per se that they can be digested more rapidly than longer texts - perhaps even on the contrary. Put differently, the shorter the form, the more time may be consumed by its gestation and its reception� Short is what results from an inverse relation to long� Taking its cue from this early modern reflection on the nature of forms of brevity, this volume approaches short forms from both a new and an old perspective. New because it understands literary shortness not, as is often the case, as a particularly modern phenomenon, but rather as a text form that has existed for as long as writing itself and that fulfills different functions at different times. Old because the volume aims at elucidating what happens when brevity is not only associated with swiftness and velocity, momentariness and presence, but also or at the same time with slowness and history, processuality and intensity. 94 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn Zincgref ’s explanation of the proverb is but one of several such configurations of short with long that are explored in the essays that follow� Our volume contributes in multiple ways to a large field of current research on short or small forms� Limiting ourselves to recent collected volumes within the field of German, we should note Einfache Prosaformen der Moderne (Borgstedt, Wübben 2009), Kleine anthropologische Prosaformen der Goethezeit (Košenina 2011), Kurz & Knapp: Zur Mediengeschichte kleiner Formen vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Gamper 2017), and more recently Barock en miniature - kleine literarische Formen in Barock und Moderne (Müller, Ritter, Selbig 2021). The DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 2190 on “Literatur- und Wissensgeschichte kleiner Formen” at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (since 2017) as well as past and current research initiatives in Germany and other countries further attest to the level of interest in small and short forms� 2 While earlier approaches tended to focus on the “Selbständigkeit der Kleinsttexte,” die sich “isolieren lassen” (Haug 3), more recent contributions tend to focus either on the different functions of small forms, or on what is often called “format” and which includes the medial and material aspects involved in publication, collecting, and distribution. Other contributions that include considerations of small forms of writing such as Kulturen des Kleinen (Autsch et al� 2014) or Verkleinerung ( Jäger et al. 2021) explore processes of “Komprimierung und Konkretion” (Autsch et al. 10) or the “Operationen der Verkleinerung” through which diverse aesthetic, epistemic, and pragmatic goals are achieved ( Jäger et al. 2). The essays in this volume engage with the more recent of these approaches to short forms while stressing a key aspect of the textual phenomenon in question. “Short,” as we use the term, should not be understood as an attribute of mere quantity, as though it would be possible to qualify texts as short on the basis of a material threshold, a certain number of words or pages� 3 Aside from the arbitrariness of any such set limit, a quantitative determination fails to account for the complexity of determining any text’s size. Here, the attempt is made to grasp shortness not as a quantity but as an often paradoxical relation or as a configuration of short and long� Short Genres, Short Forms . - To be sure, while eschewing a strictly quantitative standard may avoid the arbitrariness of any set limit, it does not in itself solve the problem of determining what texts qualify as “short.” One strategy has been to focus on genres - the aphorism, the anecdote, the exemplum - whose very definition entails shortness as a seemingly essential attribute. While this helps to delineate the object of study, it makes the study of short forms into a subfield of genre studies and misses the opportunity to focus on the functions of shortness itself, rather than of those genres that tend to be short vis-à-vis others. The essays in this volume, while they often engage with the theory of genres, do not Introduction 95 rely on it. Instead, the endeavor is to find ways of approaching and describing shortness, its effects and functions, for itself, without assuming that the question of what constitutes “short” has been settled by genre categories� Surprisingly, it is precisely within the field of genre theory that a conceptual basis for such an approach can be gleaned� A case in point is the work of Yury Tynyanov, who focuses directly on the question of how a text’s length figures into genre theory. A novel or a poema, Tynyanov insists in “The Literary Fact” (1924), are, when it comes to the question of their evolution, clearly characterized by their “largeness�” What constitutes a genre over the breaks and discontinuities of its protean history are not specific constitutive generic qualities but seemingly coincidental characteristics, such as length: It then becomes obvious that a static definition of a genre, one which would cover all its manifestations, is impossible: the genre dislocates itself; we see before us the broken line, not a straight line, of its evolution - and this evolution takes place precisely at the expense of the “fundamental” features of the genre: of the epic as narrative, of the lyric as the art of the emotions, etc. The sufficient and necessary condition for the unity of a genre from epoch to epoch are the “secondary” features such as the size of the construction� (Tynyanov 32) Tynyanov’s shift in focus from the purported fundamental features of the genres to the seemingly outward or superficial question of length deessentializes genre while allowing for a new perspective on what Tynyanov calls the “literary fact�” Tynyanov means to question the idea that something like a history of literature or literary genres could be written at all. Instead, what can be observed are changing configurations among textual elements. For example, what was at one time considered a quotidian mode of writing (such as the letter) can at some point in history become literature or part of the literary system� The center and the periphery of what is considered to be literary are in constant flux: At a period when a genre is disintegrating, it shifts from the centre to the periphery, and a new phenomenon floats in to take its place in the centre, coming up from among the trivia, out of the backyards and low haunts of literature. (Tynyanov 33) Now, what is remarkable in this approach is that forms of writing that seem small and trivial in one epoch can shift into large forms at another time, and vice versa. Hence, the relationships between short and long, minor and major, trivial and literary become or could become more relevant in this approach than the outcome itself. Viewed this way, there is no more need to speak of genres that are per se or essentially small, and of others that are large. Rather, there are shifts and fluctuations at work in history that make it more relevant to focus on the relationships themselves than on preconceived or allegedly static forms� 96 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn We can observe a similar conceptual reorientation in another theoretical source whose potential for the study of short forms has yet to be exploited, namely Susanne K. Langer’s Feeling and Form (1953)� Langer advances the idea that the epic, for example, might be considered as a “hodgepodge of literary creations” (304) in which all kinds of different artistic devices can be employed at different moments for different purposes. If the epic, a long form, is a conglomeration of other, shorter forms, then long and short enter into a relationship that is not simply quantitative, but rather functional or constitutive. At the same time, Langer proposes that this relationship can be historicized. It is not enough to say that the epic contains such varied elements as “lyric verses,” “romantic quest,” “ballads,” “praises of the gods,” and “riddles and proverbs”; one must also account for the historical processes in which these different “poetic practices” were discovered and used to produce different literary forms: “Each separate means of poetic creation could be exploited and gave rise to a genre of smaller scope but more organized form” (Langer 305)� This historical hypothesis is all the more noteworthy as it gives us a useful and far-reaching mode of observing and describing short forms� Instead of considering particular genres of brevity as ready-made forms, we are asking with Langer for practices or “devices for creating forms” (280) that can serve a particular purpose at one time in one context, but acquire other functions in other environments, while these themselves are also constantly changing (281). For example, certain poetic techniques that had their specific functions in the context of an epic can gain independence from that context, in the process emerging as a “more organized form” of what they had been initially� They can appear as a text type or mode of writing of “smaller scope,” exploiting their former functions and at the same time acquiring new ones. What is already suggested in Tynyanov gains a more tangible profile in Langer: length and shortness of texts are not only interdependent traits, but they are also related to potentially qualitative shifts of forms that depend on their level of organization, their place in both their sociocultural and their textual environment� This at least is a lesson one can take from Tynyanov and Langer, and one that is at the core of this volume’s approach to the question of short forms. Short in Long. - This shift from short genres to the ways in which shorter and longer elements enter into dynamic relationships that themselves generate texts and text forms resituates the study of short forms in fundamental ways. For one, the focus moves from quantity itself to the processes that take place within a quantitative frame. Techniques of abbreviation or ellipsis; of embedding and encompassing; of redeployment; of fragmenting and remaindering - to mention just a few of the processes that figure prominently in the essays collected Introduction 97 here - all play out within this dimension of quantity as relation rather than as a stable feature or characteristic� Rodolphe Gasché has delineated a notion of minimal things as what marks a limit beyond which quantity no longer obtains, as “the point where the relations with a quantity’s others […] manifest themselves” (Gasché 6). Similarly, in the essays collected here, the focus on the short frequently serves to problematize the very notion of quantity, to show, for example, the various ways in which texts can foil any attempt to determine their length - to show how quantity is not a stable attribute when applied to texts. Second, as has been recently noted, any study of short texts must account for the simple fact that they seldom if ever appear singularly but typically within the frame of long texts, such as magazines of case studies, compilations of aphorisms, or anthologies of short stories. Short, in this regard, appears as a function of how a long text (or format) is perceived as consisting of discrete elements - Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher , for example, as a catalog of small texts rather than as an organic whole, Rahel Varnhagen’s Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde as an aggregation not only of letters but also of a variety of brief and aphoristic statements rather than a structured collection that orders its elements according to an overarching principle. Even if, in these two cases, this seems more than evident, it is equally clear that the individual “short” elements contained within the larger whole are not without relation to one another - that viewing them in isolation, while always possible and frequently advisable, is a decision made by the reader, making “short” a function of the reception as much if not more than of the text’s actual constitution. Conversely, if short texts typically appear within long ones, the opposite is also true: long texts can be read as composed of short ones� 4 When Karl Philipp Moritz isolates the letter of 10 May from the rest of Goethe’s Werther and reads it as a “poetische[s] Gemählde” (142), he treats this excerpt as a microformat; the same has been done with the short essays in Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften . Separable episodes, short chapters, vignettes, diary entries, glosses, and quotations figure prominently in novels from Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre to Arno Schmidt’s ZETTEL’S TRAUM , and all of these “segments” of long forms offer themselves to treatment as short forms. Here again, the distinction between short and long hinges not on any determination of length, which presupposes set units, than on something else, in this case: the principles of composition and segmentation that allow the components of long formats to be seen as separate units. These include practices of compilation, anthologization, and serialization� Form and Affordance � - Short texts? Short genres? Short formats? How exactly should one name what is at the focus of the essays collected here? If what this 98 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn volume addresses are not exactly texts or text elements, not any kind of entity that one could isolate and describe for itself, but rather relations, text-generative processes and interactions that play out between short and long, then we need a robust conceptual framework that will allow us to think relation independently of any prior determination of its terms, of the entities that enter into it. The terminology too must fit these needs. “Form” suggested itself in view of a strain of 20th-century thought, particularly in the theory and philosophy of perception, in which “form” is used to designate something of an irreducibly relational nature. We are thinking here first of the work of the Gestalt theorists, whose initial and essential tenet was that perception bears from the very start on articulated wholes, the complex but primary ensembles for which they used the term Gestalt or form� 5 The movement shares a lineage with phenomenology; Max Wertheimer, one of its primary founders, was profoundly influenced by philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, like Husserl a disciple of Franz Brentano (Ash 17—102; King and Wertheimer 73—75). The later reception of Gestalt theory by French phenomenology drew out the consequences for a fundamental rethinking of form� If the primary data of consciousness were not individual sensations, but relations or wholes, then there was no longer any need to explain the process by which these individual data come together to constitute thoughts or judgments as the result of a separate act of forming or ordering� The hylomorphic model that since Aristotle had grasped form as the opposing partner of matter no longer needed to be relied on in order to explain the process of individuation or of becoming� As Merleau-Ponty was already pointing out in his very earliest writings on the philosophy of perception, what these thinkers called “Gestalt” is not like a form imposing itself upon a heterogeneous matter; there is no matter without form; there are only organisations, more or less stable, more or less articulated. […] In general, it must be said that primitive perception bears rather on relations than on isolated terms - visible , not conceived relations. (Merleau-Ponty 13—14) Merleau-Ponty’s student Georges Simondon, writing in the 1960s, drew on advances in a number of other sciences to develop conceptual tools that could escape the form/ material or form/ content binarisms� The concept of field , for example, can help to understand how form is not reducible to entity: the bodies in a gravitational field are not simply subject to its laws, not passive matter on which form is imposed from without, but are themselves, in their interaction, constitutive of the very field in which they are located (Simondon, L’individuation 546). Drawing on chemistry and the physics of crystallization, Simondon adds to the concept of field those of “metastability” and “supersaturation”: Introduction 99 In order to think individuation, we must consider being not as substance or matter or form, but as a tense, supersaturated system above the level of unity, as not merely consisting in itself […]. (Simondon, Individuation 4) As crystals can form in a solution when a substance which has been dissolved into it surpasses a certain concentration, putting the solution into what is called a “metastable” state, so might we think the process of becoming that Aristotle had tried to explain by means of the dualism of form and matter� In such a supersaturated, metastable, pre-individual state, neither unity nor identity applies. By thinking what had always been called “matter” or “substance” not as an inert mass, nor as what strives toward form in a process of mutual attraction, but as a metastable state, Simondon hopes to arrive at a new and powerful conceptual tool for understanding the emergence of form - and to do so on both the psychological and the social level: It seems to me that what is most in need of explanation in the psycho-social domain is what happens when one is dealing with metastable states: it is the emergence of form [prise de forme] accomplished in a metastable field that creates configurations. (Simondon, Individuation 4) Simondon’s inquiry into formation or morphogenesis thus allows us, first, to think relation prior to or independent of any distinction between form and matter, form and substance, genre and exemplar, prior to any kind of entity; and second, to put the operations of thought, of what occurs on the level of the intellect or psyche, on the same level as moral, social, political, as well as “material” phenomena� Similarly useful for the need to prioritize relationality, lastly, is the concept of affordance that we have included in our title. It, too, can be traced to the work of the Gestalt theorists� The term was coined by the psychologist George Gibson to describe the complementarity of the perceiving animal and its environment in the framework of an “ecological psychology.” An affordance is what the environment “affords,” provides or furnishes, to the animal. Not a quality or attribute of an object, nor a (cognitive) interpretation of an object by a subject, an affordance is something that “points two ways, to the environment and the observer” (Gibson 132) - a relation that is irreducible to either of its elements� It thus cuts across the dualities of subject and object, substance and attribute, physical and psychological, nature and culture, as Gibson himself emphasized (see especially 125—26). The term was later popularized in design theory (Mace xxvi; Norman 9—12); the literary scholar Caroline Levine, in a highly influential study (2015), put it at the center of her work on forms (6—11; we are indebted to this book for first drawing our attention to the concept). Since then, “affordance” has been 100 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn adapted for use in literary studies (Cave, Davidsen) and in rhetoric and writing studies (Khost). It should be pointed out that the more radical implications of Gibson’s concept do not always figure in later adaptations, where it is sometimes flattened to mean simply the various contingent uses to which an object is put by a subject - thus reinstating the very subject/ object, physical/ psychological dualisms it had been designed to escape. An affordance is not what a subject does with an object; rather, it is a relation that is as constitutive of the subject engaged in the object’s “use” as it is of the object itself� Gibson himself had already pointed out that what he calls “environment” includes cultural artifacts, and that images, pictures, and writing provide affordances of staggering complexity (129). Our use of “affordance” exploits the ecological dimensions of Gibson’s use of the term. Not only are what we call short forms always encountered within a larger frame, but this framing itself is instrumental to what they are. Put differently, short forms have an impact on their environments - their textual and material surroundings, their social and political engagements - but also vice versa; they are what they are by virtue of what surrounds them, of their environs. The essays collected here do not isolate their object from its milieu, nor do they treat its milieu simply for the purposes of contextualization. Rather, the object at hand is graspable only as a relation; as an affordance, the relation is primary, antecedent to its terms. Below Genre . - Discussions of form in literary scholarship frequently assume a semi-equivalence of form and genre; at the very least, genre is consistently seen as a kind of form, perhaps the most salient one as regards literature. However, if one wants to exploit the potential of a focus on form for moving beyond dichotomies of form and material or form and theme, one would do well to distinguish more systematically between form and genre. Paradoxically, it was André Jolles who provided perhaps one of the most effective means of doing this in a book commonly seen as classic in the study of genre� Based on lectures Jolles gave at the University of Leipzig in 1927-28, Jolles’s Simple Forms identifies a catalog of nine specific forms - legend, Sage , myth, riddle, proverb, case, memorabile , fairy tale, joke - many of which bear the name of literary genres. But what Jolles had in mind with his “simple forms” were not in fact genres, but something situated below genre, on an intermediate level between the literary elements of language (syntax, style, rhetorical figure, etc.) and the consummated literary work. Jolles refers here to what we might call a different aggregate state - forms explained not by stylistics, nor by rhetoric, nor by poetics, perhaps indeed not even as a matter of “writing”; forms which, even though they are artistic, still do not become a work of art. ( Jolles 8) Introduction 101 The essential insight is that the medium or material in which authors do their work is not simply language, not just words, figures, stylistic devices, etc., but rather something that is already complex, “a different aggregate state.” That the word Jolles uses for these complex building blocks between grammar and work - Gestalt - is the same that the Gestalt psychologists put at the center of their theory of perception is not mere coincidence. In both cases, what is envisioned is an elemental complexity, an articulated aggregate or whole, a relation that cannot be reduced to single elements, be they linguistic units (words, morphemes, phonemes, phones) or individual sense sensations. A Gestalt is thus like an articulated whole; but, as Jolles applies the term to his simple forms, it is nevertheless below the level of the finished whole, the literary work that exists in or exemplifies a certain genre. The simple forms, as Eva Geulen puts it, are “Formen, die noch keine Formen sind” (Axer et al. 332) 6 ; or, in Peter J. Schwartz’s formulation, “structuring principles operative in language before their ‘actualization’ in specific legends, sagas, fairy tales, and so on, or as components of more complex narrative types” (xxi; see also Martyn)� Jolles’s study is exemplary for the way in which form - and short or small forms in particular - can be observed in its emergence and as a generative principle, prior to or rather outside of what is graspable as genre� 7 To be sure, while Jolles’s nine simple forms were clearly not genres, his intent was nevertheless to establish an exhaustive system of such forms by naming and defining them. This would seem to sacrifice one of the main potentials his innovation opened up, namely to counter the deeply ingrained tendency in literary studies to define forms and genres. It is just such a tendency that, we believe, has hindered our ability to gain a clear understanding of the affording nature of short forms. Canonizing some forms but not others, genre definitions have determined the history of literary forms since antiquity, and especially those picked out of the multitude of short forms. Such definitions describe a particular genre in its features often by distinguishing it from others, and hence install discursive use values by ascribing a certain form-semantic meaning to a genre� What’s meant to create analytic or writerly tools can counterintuitively come to outweigh the actual particularities, behaviors, or other specific phenomenalities of the short form in question. A prime example is the Aesopic fable� While Aristotle is usually credited for having accepted the Aesopic fable into the canon of literary genres and for making use of its exemplary value in his Rhetoric , he is also the one who introduced and spread the term logoi , i.e., “tales,” as a designation for them. In the centuries that followed, this act of definition effectively suppressed a whole tradition of pre-Aristotelian storytelling of Aesopic and other similar stories, fables, and tales that had not been defined clearly. Literary scholars and classicists, 102 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn however, have attempted to recover the prehistories of the fable genre and were able to retrieve an older notion for the Aesopic fable, a non-defined quasi-genre simply called ainos in various texts, translatable only as “small story”: a brief narrative told not just to inform, entertain, or communicate the story itself but specifically to elicit an active response from the listener(s). Ainos is hence not merely a genre capable of being decoupled from its situative existence, such as setting, context, listeners, speaker etc.; rather, as ainos the story is seen as always already part of a larger interactive and dynamically changing event or happening. Aristotle’s definition of the story’s use value in speeches, on the one hand, allows for the transfer of the idea of the story to meta-contexts, for example its systematic use in pedagogy, its occasional use in speeches, or as social entertainment. On the other hand, however, the genre definition forever overwrites a vague idea shaped by practice with a concept defined by a rationale� The dynamism of the fable’s lived embeddedness in telling and acting is lost and can only be revived against the weight of its long conceptual history (Locke; Nagy; Blumenberg). This rudimentary sketch of the fate of the fable illustrates the condition of practically all short forms� What was originally a brief speech act that developed its quality while being acted out is recast, when defined as genres, into more clearly comprehensible, intellectually processable formations, lacking many implied functions and mute respective affordances. Our interest in this issue is to counter this loss of the thick descriptions short forms demand in the process of their emergence by reassessing those qualities that have passively or actively been left out of their genre definitions. This suggests the need to look for short forms not only underneath existing genres, but also outside of any specific genre systematization in general. If the relationality and the containment of short forms should come into view, one has to look for short forms in their pre-genre state. Not yet defined aspects and undefinable phenomenalities that have escaped literary scholars in their drive to ordering frequently remain below the thresholds of their “generity” or Gattungshaftigkeit � This is not surprising because short forms are especially active and functional in places, situations, and contexts that cannot be defined or described� We can very well assume a multitude of short forms in use in daily practices everywhere that have neither been identified nor described by literary scholars. Rather, this invisibility against conceptualization is essential to the nature of short forms. They emerge, exist, and disappear before a literary scholar may capture them “in actu.” As a 2013 volume has shown, genres should be understood as concentrations of specific contextual or other forms of knowledge, and in consequence may exist wherever knowledge can be shaped into poetical, literary, or other semiotic formations (Bies et al.). This applies all the Introduction 103 more to short forms, which are constantly emerging anew to suit specific and contingent occasions. At this proto-stage of genre formation, vignettes, shorthand expressions, occasional poetic devices, or similar short forms are already fulfilling their function and recur independently of any conceptual recognition. This dynamism of the “short form” shows itself perhaps most saliently when one remains attentive to these not-yet-genres� An example of such a barely recognized or described short form could be the vignettes drafted by anthropologists in their field books, whose particularity lies in the tension between the real-time intensity of their realistic descriptions and their potentialist prose that must anticipate future use for research� Another example might be the category of place-specific regional toponyms, that is, dialectal notions for natural phenomena unique to the dialect’s regions, such as the Gaelic “peat glossary” of the Outer Hebridean Islands described in Robert Macfarlane’s 2016 book Landmarks . Neither strictly genre, nor strictly format, these and many other examples demonstrate that short forms first and foremost dwell below genres by fulfilling functions deeply rooted within quotidian life and its constant application of poetico-linguistic formations to different uses. Moving away from understanding short forms either as literary genres or as media-theoretical formats renders sensible “the range of potential actions and uses latent in [them],” (Levine, “Narrative Networks” 517) that is, makes sensible their affordances. While the papers collected here approach the topic of short forms from a variety of perspectives and each with its own specific research aim, they all share a common concern for short forms in their emergence and relationality� Forms are not observed as stable entities, but in their processes of formation; they are of interest insofar as they transform and inform� The papers are loosely organized into four sections designed to allow for cross-historical connections and resonances� These are not arranged according to historical chronology; on the contrary, each section brings together papers focused on widely different epochs or individually engaged in reading texts across centuries� In the first section, “Openings,” processes of formation come into play in various figurations of openness. Gabriel Trop’s “Epigrammatic Paradoxicality” focuses on epigrams of the baroque poet Angelus Silesius. While the epigram, particularly in a religious context, is commonly associated with a certain fixity, in Silesius, as Trop shows, the form becomes elastic. Trop locates the key to the functioning of Silesius’s epigrams in the way the first-order surface of the text succeeds in blocking any kind of secondor third-order recuperation which would harness the paradoxes to a set dogma� “What comes to light is not an aesthetics of reason, but an aesthetics of the paradox” - understood as “a specific form of attunement, a state of suspension between ‘correct belief ’ (orthodoxy) 104 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn and ‘divergent belief ’ (heterodoxy).” The result are variously structured “zones of indifference” that are impossible to contain and thus fundamentally open, or “an emergent property extending out from a text, […] transforming the reader.” Short forms are shown here in their uncontainable effects, breaking the very boundaries that epigrams are meant to mark� In “Mayröcker’s Drama of Association,” Florian Klinger explores another way in which a short text, Mayröcker’s poem “My Mother with the Open Arms,” resists containment and the closure of its mode of address� Where a conventional reading of this poem would identify its thematic content (maternal love; filial piety and its failures; the loss of a mother) in order to then relate this content to the poem’s form (the series of discrete scenes of encounter; symmetry; repetition; the “homology of its stanzas”), here, we are shown that these “two articulations are two sides of the same act”: that what occurs between mother and child (the content of the poem) and what occurs between the poem and the reader (who sees its “form”) are mutually dependent� The “action form” that the poem operates is uncontainable to the point that its very openness remains an open question; in ending with this question, the article could be said to instantiate the very structure its reading of the poem points to. Closing this section, Jasper Schagerl’s “Case and Circumstance” endeavors to demonstrate how, circa 1700, a new and historically concrete form emerged: the circumstantial case� This adds a conjectural aspect to the casus , of which Jolles, in Simple Forms , had perceived only the normative aspect� Cases are “transformed into ecologies of events, to be unfolded in their complexity,” and hence require weighing and judging as new practices of knowledge. In this process, the very application of the norm to the case leads paradoxically to an opening of the norm, as the judging of the case necessarily requires paying attention to its circumstances. In order to make the cases narratable, Thomasius develops a new, circumstantial style of storytelling which takes account of the diversity of “operational fields and forms of knowledge.” The two articles in the second section, “Traveling Forms,” both examine ways in which a short form can reemerge in another age or context, taking on new functions and acquiring new capabilities. In “Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism,” Florian Fuchs contrasts the use of the proverb in Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s 1642 The Seeing=Play of German Proverbs with Gottfried Keller’s use of the same form in the Seldwyla novellas. In Harsdörffer, proverbs are exploited for the project of establishing German as a literary language: with their rootedness in the vernacular, they serve to warrant the genuineness and specificity of German. But in the process, their transformation into “high” literature vitiates the very qualities for which they are prized, relegating them to the lower regions of unrefined speech from which they had been only temporarily summoned. In Keller’s novellas too, prov- Introduction 105 erbs gesture toward preor extraliterary reality as residues of a pre-industrial, bygone world� But it is not some kind of folkloristic rootedness that interests Keller in the proverb, but rather its affordances: the purely structural or formalistic capabilities and the lifeworld effects it can produce. From the original vessels of language and common life, proverbs now become a device for the production of Keller’s “formulaic realism.” David Martyn’s “Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia ” examines what happens when a short form, the anecdote, reemerges under conditions that would seem least conducive to its use: in the age of what Adorno calls “damaged life�” For Adorno, as is well known, the ability to have experiences - the very stuff of anecdotes - has been lost to reification and false consciousness. As Martyn shows, Adorno finds a way out of this impasse by making use not of actual anecdotes, but rather of textual elements, such as descriptive details and truncated narratives, that can be seen as the remnants of what might, in another time or in another context, have taken the form of an anecdote. The remnants of the anecdote, a genre that has lost its footing in social reality, are shown to be the form that best fits the decimation of experience. The third section, “The Long and the Short of It,” brings three papers together that explore different and paradoxical ways in which the quantity or length of short forms escapes any simple determination� In an extended analysis of two aphoristic sentences by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Friedrich Nietzsche, Jan Mieszkowski’s “Dashing Expectations” pursues the paradoxical logic underlying the very notion of the short form to its shortest extreme - the dash� In Mieskowski’s probing reading, the use of this infamously unruly punctuation mark manifests an abyssal play of expectation and surprise, of fulfilment and disappointment that confounds any simple notion of “shortness” or indeed any attempt to plausibly determine the length of any text� A dash can either say nothing or, as a mark pointing to what has not been said, can stand in for what surpasses what any text, however large, could ever say. The dash is at one and the same time the ultimate short form and the ultimate long form, “so extensive that it literally overwrites all other characters.” In this, it reveals a potential that may be a near ubiquitous characteristic of literary texts: each sentence would have the power “to go rogue” as it “eclipses the surrounding material by threatening to say more in one or two lines than will be imparted by the rest of the work�” The ways in which short and long forms can assume their places in a wide variety of relational constellations is also a focus of Erica Weitzman’s “Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis�” The article explores the dynamics of a specific kind of shortening or abbreviation, namely the “gloss” or parodistic summary of weighty works of literature in two authors circa 1900, the language skeptic Fritz Mauthner and Robert Walser. On 106 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn the one hand, the gloss can amplify the status of the “long form” as its other, and it can do so, surprisingly, precisely by profaning or even demeaning the work it abridges. For by casting miniaturization as by nature parodistic, Mauthner’s glosses tacitly affirm “the transcendent status of great literature and its distance from ordinary life�” While Mauthner’s abridgements thus solidify the association of the trivial with the comic, Walser’s glosses upset this simple equation and in the process the hierarchies that normally obtain between “small” and “great” forms. The last contribution to this third section, Vanessa Barrera’s “Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures,” approaches the relationality of quantity from yet another angle, namely that of time. Focusing on Kafka’s odd time management - using the night hours, rather than the free afternoons his position at the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungsanstalt afforded him; he regularly got off work at “2 oder 2⅓” - Barrera inquires whether the very limitations that seem to leave no time to do what one most wants to aren’t in fact the best possible condition for that very pursuit. The unique fecundity of stolen time depends on the very mechanisms that it challenges: Kafka needs the tiresome work at the office, which seems to prevent him from pursuing his career, to pursue his career. Drawing on Nietzsche and Adorno to help explain this temporal structure, Barrera reads Kafka’s short text “Die Prüfung” as revealing the workings of an alternative temporality, a time that cannot be clocked according to the measure of what otherwise occupies our lives� The last section, “Short in Long,” demonstrates what the study of short forms can gain from an examination of how they function as components of long texts� In “Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung ,” Jodok Trösch examines the intricate ways in which a long satirical work incorporates into its prose excerpts from popular songs and other elements that are in verse� In a meticulous examination of Geschichtklitterung ’s composite composition, Trösch shows how the verse of the short forms is seamlessly woven into the prose of the encompassing work, altering the nature both of the component elements and of the prose into which they are integrated. Here, short forms are not simply “elements” that are combined to make up a long form� Hidden in the prose, the verse and rhyme of the popular songs and short poetic forms take on an entirely new function: no longer attributes of poetry alone, they now serve to throw the entire distinction between poetry and prose into disarray� Arne Höcker’s “‘Minutendinger’: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle ,” finally, explores the complex relationships that a certain writing praxis, that of the internet diary, entertain with a literary form, the novel. The momentary, short, rapid, and seemingly formless praxis of Goetz’s daily jottings - ranging from fragmented poetological reflections to descriptions of quotidian routines to shopping lists - would seem to be the antithesis of the quintessential long form, Introduction 107 the novel. But in Höcker’s reading, diary entry and novel, short and long form reveal a tight and paradoxical reciprocal dependence� Höcker’s article opens up new perspectives on the novel as the genre that raises formlessness to the level of its own formal principle, thus vitiating any simple opposition between form and its other. Goetz’s novel is no simple compilation of diary entries, the small forms are not parts that combine into a large whole; rather, the practice of the small form is constitutive of the novel as a form itself� Both papers in this final section provide evidence for two of the central concerns of the volume: first, that short forms and the long text encompassing them are not simply altered by their mutual interaction, but are themselves constituted by their relationality; and secondly, that there is no simple opposition between short and long form� Notes 1 Quoted from Druck A , 1626. Translation here as elsewhere by editors. 2 We are indebted to the collegial exchanges with members of the mentioned Graduiertenkolleg� 3 As is often done in research on microfiction - a designation sometimes seen as applying to texts of at most one page - that has recently seen an impressive number of contributions� See Ette 2� 4 See Tynyanov� 5 See Koffka 542. For a useful general overview of the Gestalt psychologists, see Watson and Evans, Ch. 23. 6 Quoted from the section of this article attributed to Eva Geulen� 7 This potential of Jolles’s conception should be seen alongside others that have been in the focus of recent scholarship� On the temporality of Jolles’s simple forms and its implications for concepts of history outside of linear chronology, see Axer as well as Axer, Geulen, and Heimes. Axer draws out the specificity of the simple forms’ temporality in the context of other concepts of form in coeval literary and cultural theory� Works Cited Ash, Mitchell G. 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Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 111 Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius Gabriel Trop University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Abstract: The origin of the epigram as an inscription on a tombstone or votive object establishes an attractor toward brevity that persists throughout the history of the genre. The seventeenth century, however, witnessed the cultivation of an epigrammatic practice - epigrammatic paradoxicality , as exemplified in the work of Angelus Silesius - invested with a counter-aesthetic potential to the one that would emerge in Lessing’s later Enlightenment aesthetic theory. Angelus Silesius, who compares epigrams and their constitutive elements to points, lines, and circles, uses the epigram to multiply different perspectives, albeit in such a way that these perspectives never fully coalesce into a whole, akin to a textual pointillism held always on the cusp of resolution into an image� Angelus Silesius’ practice of epigrammatic paradoxicality releases a dynamizing, heterodox energy by occupying a point of bifurcation between correct belief (orthodoxy) and divergent belief (heterodoxy)� The epigram thereby sets readers into permanent motion and productivity, refusing to allow them to settle into normative finality; the generative power of the epigram depends upon the irresolution of this constitutive tension� Keywords: Aesthetics, Paradox, Epigram, Baroque, Enlightenment To read a book of epigrams is to wander among gravestones and monuments� The wanderer in a book of epigrams - in a cemetery composed of paper, ink, and imagination - does not seek out a specific person, a singular or intimate departed, but moves from one monument to the next, from one marker of mortality to the next. Letters originally chiseled on stone, later written on other surfaces and gathered in series, provide an intimation of worlds to which the wanderer has limited access: for a brief moment, the wanderer enters into proximity with these worlds, watches words emerge and recede, perhaps pauses to reflect, and 112 Gabriel Trop then moves on to another inscription, another monument, another inflection in the order of beings� The analogy between the book of epigrams and the cemetery can be maintained only if the epigram retains the residue of its ancestral form: the epigramma or the inscription above a tomb or on a votive object� When Lessing examined the form of the epigram in his Zerstreute Anmerkungen über das Epigramm (1771), he had this image specifically in mind as a primordial scene: “das Epigramm in seinem Ursprunge” (181). In its origin, the epigram cannot be dissociated from its specifically graphic quality ( epi-gramma ); it conjures forth the history of what Sybille Krämer would call the “notational iconicity” ( Schriftbildlichkeit ) of the letter, a form of visualization that in turn produces a “place value” or a “place-within-a-configuration” (525). The visuality of writing, rather than its semantic or referential operations - the fact that one letter can only be differentiated from another by occupying a discrete space, for example - posits space as a relational concept, one in which a place enters into configuration with another place: here, not there. In Lessing’s notion of the “epigram in its origin,” however - as shall become clear - it is not only the act of writing that makes visible such processes of differentiation, but the object on which writing is inscribed. This object (the tombstone, the column that indicates “here lies…”) functions as a limiting condition for epigrammatic form, establishing the generic attractor toward brevity that persists in epigrammatic literature� 1 For Lessing, the brevity of the epigram reveals the extent to which the traces of its original spatial condition continue to shape its generic history� Only in relation to this origin can the aesthetic potential of the epigram be properly grasped� This paper, while inspired by Lessing, will depart from Lessing by turning towards the past rather than towards the future; it stages an encounter with Lessing in order to ultimately take leave of him� The focus of this paper will come to rest on a particular form of epigrammatic practice prevalent in the seventeenth century, one that does not cohere with Lessing’s attempt to “epistemologize” the epigram or to link the aesthetic form of the epigram to processes of sensate knowledge production� This particular epigrammatic practice can be found in its most concentrated form in the epigrams of Angelus Silesius ( Johann Scheffler), in his Cherubinischer Wandersmann (1657)� Rather than reducing epigrammatic form to the genesis of knowledge - one in which the “end” of the epigram would find its fulfilment in a resolution of tension, in the solidity of the norm or the establishment of a singular or stable transcendent point - these epigrams mobilize a dynamizing, heterodox energy. They willfully suspend the discursive operations that would otherwise guarantee the cosmic and divine order that they would seem so ardently to seek� To uncover the implicit counter-aesthetics of this form of writing practice - as epigrammatic paradoxicality - is the Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 113 primary purpose of this paper� This counter-aesthetics arises from a particular geometry of the epigram associated with its brevity; Angelus Silesius, who compares epigrams and their constitutive elements to points, lines, and circles, uses the epigram to multiply different perspectives, albeit in such a way that these perspectives never fully coalesce into a whole, akin to a textual pointillism held on the cusp of resolution into an image� Epigrammatic paradoxicality harnesses this power of divergence in the construction of its textual cosmos� This paradoxical epigrammatic practice also develops out of the conditions latent in the generic history of the epigram� As the epigram underwent a series of transformations, above all in the works of Martial, brevity drifted into wit, albeit a form of wit infused with a deviant force (thus becoming constitutive of the traditional dyad, brevitas and argutia , in discussions of the epigram). 2 The intensification of the deviant force in brevity becomes one of the defining characteristics of the Baroque epigram. Opitz, who had called the epigram “eine kurtze Satyra,” writes: “die kürtze ist seine eigenschaft / und die spitzfindigkeit gleichsam seine seele und gestallt” (21). The subtlety of the epigram’s brevity, its refinement or spitzfindigkeit , has the sharp or piercing quality of the satire, making the sense ( Sinn ) of the Sinngedicht , which was more or less synonymous with the epigram, into a pointe or a punctum . Logau, in his note to the reader introducing his Sinngedichte , draws attention to the isomorphism between Sinn-Getichte and Stichel-Getichte (“Sinn-Getichte” are “kurtze Stichel-Getichte” and “Stichel-Getichte” are “lange Sinn-Getichte” [3]). The Sinn of the Sinngedicht was thus first and foremost a disruption of sense. The pointe or textual barb of epigrammatic form introduces a counter-force in thought to the pull of habit; if thinking tends through expectation or habituation to travel in a certain direction, the pointe introduces a countervailing tendency, initiating a lateral movement toward the unexpected� The ending of an epigram lands, according to Opitz, “anders als wir verhoffet hetten” (21). The generic tendencies of epigrammatic form in the seventeenth century, thus described, lay the groundwork for Lessing’s account of the epigram as the near simultaneity of anticipation ( Erwartung ) and an unforeseeable resolution ( unvorhergesehener Aufschluß ), condensed in one and the same aesthetic cognitive act. The seventeenth century also witnessed the birth of a novel epigrammatic genre: the “spiritual epigram�” 3 The spiritual epigram, as practiced by Daniel Czepko von Reigersfeld in his Sexcenta Monodisticha Sapientum and Angelus Silesius in his Cherubinischer Wandersmann , functions as a crucible for what Yuk Hui calls “cosmotechnical” thinking, or the unification of “cosmic order and moral order through technical activities” (19)� One of the central technical achievements of the spiritual epigram as an art form (as techné ) consists in the construction of matrices uniting poetic form (signs, genres, topoi), the sensate 114 Gabriel Trop cognitive and affective movements that accompany poetic form (attention, cognition, judgment, retention, desire), and metaphysical, ontological, or as the case may be, “theo-logical” order. The spiritual epigram, its arrangement of letters on a page ( epi-gramma ), explores operations binding together text and mind, poetic form, cognition and ontology. The coordination of these operations were codified later by Baumgarten in the discipline of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, which brought together the formal structure of the work of art, the perfection of sensate cognition stimulated by the work of art, and the ethical production of a certain ideal human type (the felix aestheticus ), each of which were in turn analogical archetypes of the rational structure of the cosmos ( analogon rationis )� The resonance between operations internal to epigrammatic form and those that will later be explicitly theorized in Baumgarten’s aesthetic paradigm - a resonance that Lessing will thematize and make explicit in his thoughts on the epigram - authorize the construction of the epigram as a proto-aesthetic object, or an object whose very form opens onto the production of metaphysical truth. According to Niklaus Largier, the mystical tradition to which Angelus Silesius was indebted paved the way for a “poetics or poiesis of experience” - a poetics that flowed into the birth of aesthetics inasmuch as “in early modern times mystical tropes come to be increasingly projected into a new epistemological space” (39)� Lessing’s turn to this proto-aesthetic genre, or a genre whose own formal potential is inextricably linked with aesthetic operations (understood as the binding of sensate cognition, poetic form, and ethical and cosmological truth), owes perhaps more to the brevity of the object than to its sacrality� He constructs the fable as a similarly proto-aesthetic object; in both the case of the fable and the epigram, Lessing draws attention to the way in which the sudden apperceptive unity of an object is concentrated in a singular, temporally compressed and tightly circumscribed act of cognition� Although Lessing interprets the epigram through the lens of the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics, the seventeenth-century spiritual epigram operates according to a logic that cannot be subsumed under the Enlightenment aesthetic tendency towards the streamlining of cognition. In particular, the formal potential of the spiritual epigram (or “Formpotential” as David Wellbery writes in reference to the tragic form of Faust I [8]) must pass through zones that suspend the rules ensuring the smooth functioning of cognition, often differentiating what seems identical and making identical what seems distinct� The formal potential of the epigram, however, should not be limited to an analysis of its generic features or to its innovation within the history of the genre. Rather, the formal potential of the spiritual epigram contains within itself Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 115 an ethical exercise value, ultimately seeking to produce a specific human type. For Angelus Silesius, this human type is the cherubinic wanderer , a designation that could be applied not merely to the author of the epigrams, but also to its readers. More to the point: if the epigram must be inscribed on a surface, an epi-gramma ( Aufschrift ), the human being - its body and its consciousness - becomes that being on whose surface these letters are inscribed� The formal potential of the epigram is realized through the potential of the being who receives it� Silesius’ final epigram articulates this imperative: “So geh und werde selbst die Schrifft und selbst das Wesen” (285). The words following this epigram - ENDE - thus mark a barrier to be overcome rather than an end to the text� The terminus of cherubinic epigrammatic production - the inscribed surface that readers themselves would become, were they to infinitely reproduce epigrams in their own being - makes the human being into a dynamic process, a being constantly dissolving and reforming itself in the light of the attraction of the divine� The cherubinic wanderer, moving from one epigram to another, must pass through a reconfiguration of knowledge, tarrying with a form that repositions its constitutive elements in particular constellations� Epigrammatic form thus both sustains and reconfigures the system of differences underlying what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine” (35). It does not, however, break the anthropological machine, but sets it into an eccentric motion: animals become human, humans become angels, and angels God. Angelus Silesius calls this process “over-formation”: Die Überformung Dann wird das Thier ein Mensch / der Mensch ein Englisch wesen Und dieses Gott / wann wir Vollkömmlich seynd genesen� (129) The salvation of the community of epigrammatic readers ( wann wir Vollkömmlich seynd genesen ) becomes co-extensive with a process of transformation and potentiation from the animal to the divine, folding each of these terms into the one that follows. In this process, the human being becomes a fleeting mark on an epigrammatic surface, a vanishing element in the passage towards a divine telos� Over-formation ( Überformung ) designates this dynamic decomposition and recomposition of relations that both fixes the human as an element in a chain and dissolves the boundaries of the human in the process of its transformation toward a final state of perfection. It also names the implicit aesthetic dynamic that subtends epigrammatic paradoxicality� In light of such epigrams, it is not difficult to see why Leibniz assimilates Angelus Silesius’ mystical thought to Spinoza’s notion of “one substance […] of which individual souls are fleeting modifications” ( une seule substance […] dont 116 Gabriel Trop les âmes individuelles ne sont que des modifications passagères [Leibniz 55]). That Angelus Silesius could be read (or misread) as a pantheist is not specifically relevant to the operations of epigrammatic form; the epigram can move in and out of the orbit of pantheism, and it is the attraction to pantheism, a form of “setting into motion” that occurs through the temptation of heretical thought, that is constitutive of paradoxical epigrammatic form� 4 Similarly, it is not the challenge of Angelus Silesius’ poetry to the principle of sufficient reason that concerns Leibniz. Heidegger draws attention to this challenge in his reading of the rose “without why” (“Die Ros’ ist ohn warumb / sie blühet weil sie blühet” [69]); while the rose still refers to a ground, it discloses a being that does not seek its own ground� 5 Thus the rose implies a principle of reason ( Satz vom Grund ) that does not demand to be spoken or articulated in the language of logic. However, the freedom of the rose from seeking a ground is itself an articulation, a modification in a larger textual cosmos. If the rose in one epigram is indifferent to its being-seen (“sie achtt nicht jhrer selbst / fragt nicht ob man sie sihet” [69]), in another epigram, it takes up a different relation to the ground precisely as something to be seen. In “Die Rose,” Angelus Silesius writes: “Die Rose / welche hier dein äußres Auge siht / Die hat von Ewigkeit in GOtt also geblüht” (43), adding “idealiter” in an asterisk. The rose in this instance functions as a copula between the sensible and the ideal; it is no longer a rose “without why�” It is thus inaccurate to write about the rose of Angelus Silesius; there is not one rose in his epigrams. Keeping the hetereogeneity of the rose in mind - the multiple metaphysical operations that it can gather around itself - it is possible to understand Leibniz’ comparison of Angelus Silesius and Spinoza in another way. Every epigram constructs its own particular cosmo-technical relation, as if each were a monad - albeit not windowless, as they are gathered together in a contiguous series - that generates resonances and frictions, each opening up onto a slightly displaced cosmic order constituted by degrees of difference and similarity. While it is primarily the “quietism” of Angelus Silesius that draws Leibniz’ explicit criticism at the level of philosophical content, Leibniz nevertheless generates an insight of a different sort when he sets the epigram in relation to Spinozistic individuation as a series of fleeting modifications ( modifications passagères )� Angelus Silesius’ own poetic persona as a wanderer through cosmic orders ( Cherubinischer Wandersmann ) emphasizes the principle of movement� For Angelus Silesius, reading and writing is wandering: always on the move, never standing still� “Stille stehn ist zurücke gehn” (257) reads one of the titles of the epigrams. Even this statement, however, cannot be axiomatic; in another epigram (“Was die geistliche Ruh ist”), one must be “begihr- und willen-loß / Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 117 gelassen innig” (182)� One epigrammatic point of entry enters into tension with another, setting thought in an opposite direction: always still, always moving; free of desire, full of desire; realizing one’s will, free of will. Although one can find such tendencies in Czepko’s epigrams as well, and indeed, in the corpus of mystical writings, it is Angelus Silesius who articulates and develops epigrammatic paradoxicality as a generative poetic practice� Just as the sense of the Sinngedicht is in fact a disruption of sense (in the barb or pointe ), introducing a counter-tendency to the pull of habituation and harboring a deviant force, so too does the momentum of the spiritual epigram increase through paradoxicality as thinking outside common opinion ( doxa ) . 6 In the “Erinnerungs Vorrede an den Leser,” Angelus Silesius frames the epigram as a potential temptation: the “vil seltzame paradoxa oder widersinnische Reden” could encourage readers to attribute to the epigram “wegen der kurtzen Verfassung leicht einen Verdamlichen Sinn oder böse Meinung” (13)� While one may almost always resolve the paradox of the epigram to ultimately be consistent with dogma, it nevertheless unleashes a disorganizing and disruptive force, one that sets the hermeneutic machine into motion, and like the pointe or punctum of the satirical Sinngedicht, one that, by wounding, cures. In what follows, I will attempt to describe the specific aesthetic operations of Angelus Silesius’ epigrammatic practice� What comes to light is not an aesthetics of reason, but an aesthetics of the paradox. Paradox in this context designates neither merely a rhetorical strategy nor a strictly logical operation (which is how the paradox has tended to be received: belonging to the twin domains of rhetoric and logic). Instead, paradox becomes a specific form of attunement, a state of suspension between “correct belief ” (orthodoxy) and “divergent belief ” (heterodoxy)� Epigrammatic paradoxicality is situated at a point of bifurcation between these two poles. Its efficacy depends upon its capability to be pulled in either direction: toward the norm or away from it� The function of epigrammatic paradoxicality is to enable acts of imaginative wandering: it becomes operative when one is not fully immersed in a stable normative discourse (orthodoxy) nor fully detached from this discourse (heterodoxy)� Such paradoxicality is not limited to what can be found within a single epigram, but also characterizes the movement between epigrams� As I have previously suggested, each epigram produces a “micro-cosmos” saturated with sense and non-sense; epigrams that follow one another may open onto another dimension of the same cosmos or set of terms, or they may linger in another cosmos, another framework of intelligibility altogether. The relation of the various epigrams to one another - epigrams that necessitate stepping inside and outside of imaginative worlds with different forms of sensuous organization 118 Gabriel Trop - designates the movement of the paradox, rather than its localization within a specific epigrammatic object. In order to approach the aesthetics of the paradox as it comes to light in Angelus Silesius’ cherubinic epigrams, a poetic form dedicated to train the mind to go wandering, I will draw upon Lessing’s remarks on the epigram as a guide. This gesture may elicit accusations of anachronism� 7 Lessing’s remarks can nevertheless function as a heuristic lens through which the particularity of Angelus Silesius’ experimentation with poetic form can be drawn out of its latency� I embrace this temporal discontinuity in order to better uncover the specificity of the cherubinic epigram, which ideally will emerge more clearly in contrast to the concept of the epigram operative within the framework of Enlightenment aesthetics� Lessing’s reflections on the epigram dynamize what otherwise might appear as a static poetic form� Lessing’s focus on dynamic operations binding sensate experience and poetic form - rather than his attempt to isolate normative or invariant features of the genre - can be used to understand the epigram as an aesthetic exercise intending to incite cognitive and affective responses. A genre becomes useful in relation to its specific formal potential to activate semiotic, cognitive, ethical, and imaginative tendencies (“What operations can the form of the epigram enable ? ”) rather than in relation to the construction of typologies (“What is the generic form of the epigram and its invariant features? ”)� Lessing explicates the aesthetics of the epigram in three domains that will become relevant for an understanding of epigrammatic paradoxicality. First, the epigram functions as a differential marker of spatial coordinates, tending toward operations that position, reposition, or transgress boundaries; second, the epigram excites contrary imaginative tendencies collapsed into a single and unified cognitive event; third, the mimetic basis of the epigram - its relationship to a singular “thing” or entity - initiates a process of orientation binding spatial and temporal unity and meaning ( Sinn )� First, the most primordial function of the epigram consists in the force of demarcation itself. In the origin story told by Lessing, or “das Epigramm in seinem Ursprunge,” the power of the epigram can be traced back to an indexical function that carves out and apportions space: Wenn Theseus , in der Landenge von Korinth, eine Säule errichten, und auf die eine Seite derselben schreiben ließ: Hier ist nicht Peloponnesus, sondern Attika ; so wie auf die entgegenstehende: Hier ist Peloponnesus, und nicht Attika : so waren diese Worte das Epigramm, die Aufschrift der Säule. (181) Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 119 The mythological origin of the epigram inscribes the history of the genre into cultural techniques of boundary demarcation. The inscription on the column marks out discrete spatial zones and performatively converts the object of its indexical force into a defined field. Open land becomes territory; objects become property; buildings become monuments or commemorations of an event; the words “here lies” make ground hallowed, sacred, a site of memory and visitation� The power of the epigram is thus linked to its ability to performatively mark a boundary, define an object, constitute a determinate spatial field with effective properties� Ritualized practices gather around this demarcated zone; the indexical field associated with the epigram is concomitant with the force of law. Not all epigrams harbor this performative force, but something of this power surfaces in later variants of the epigram, where it becomes akin to an archaic vestigial structure� The introductory epigrams of Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien - alluding to Martial’s 13 th book of epigrams, which are inscribed on gifts given to guests (although they are, in the words of Frieder von Ammon, “ungastliche Gaben” [142]) - take place at a border crossing. The state apparatus appears here in the guise of the aesthete and the aesthete in the guise of the state apparatus, staging a scene of interpellation that coheres with Joseph Vogl’s comments on the simultaneous “Ästhetisierung der Policey” and the “Verpolizeilichung der Ästhetik” (615) in the eighteenth century� In the initial epigrams of the Xenien , a border is being enforced at one moment and transgressed in another; the aesthetic police seeks to establish boundaries, while poetry leaps over them. 8 Der ästhetische Thorschreiber. Halt, Passagiere! Wer seyd ihr? Weß Standes und Characteres? Niemand passiret hier durch, bis er den Paß mir gezeigt. Xenien � Distichen sind wir. Wir geben uns nicht für mehr noch für minder, Sperre du immer, wir ziehn über den Schlagbaum hinweg. (199) Movement and counter-movement make up this prologue to the Xenien : enforce the boundary, transgress the boundary. On the one side, articulate the law, establish differentiation (the “estate” or Stand ), fix character, regulate passage; on the other side, disarticulate the law, efface differentiation, dissolve identity in a self-declared structure of recursivity� The Xenien themselves, as personified epigrams, take control of their own identity (and here one is tempted to read metonymically the Xenien for the work itself, although there is a difference between these personified Xenien and the Xenien as a whole): we are distichs and do not present ourselves as more or less than that; we do not have an estate or a fixed character. The indexical force of these Xenien , taking charge of their own lyric identity, becomes self-referential in the declaration of autonomy from 120 Gabriel Trop state authority. At the same time, the Xenien - the text as a whole, rather than the personified epigram - incorporate a moment of resistance to this autonomy (via the police) into the lyric corpus. The dynamic of the form of the epigram, as presented here, is essentially agonistic: the epigram is not pure transgression, but characterized simultaneously by enforcement and transgression� If the first operation of the epigram is to articulate space, or to transform space into place, the second operation applies to the landscape of the mind. For Lessing, the central characteristic of the epigram consists in the simultaneity of a cognitive movement and a counter-movement: it excites an anticipation ( Erwartung ) and offers a resolution ( Aufschluß ) in one unified mental event. The aesthetic formula is described as follows: the epigram “muß über irgend einen einzeln ungewöhnlichen Gegenstand, den es zu einer so viel als möglich sinnlichen Klarheit zu erheben sucht, in Erwartung setzen, und durch einen unvorhergesehenen Aufschluß diese Erwartung mit eins befriedigen” (188)� The successful epigram must simultaneously stimulate desire (via a seeming disruption of the norm, something extra-ordinary that stimulates anticipation) and bring about satisfaction (via an unexpected restoration of the norm, an Aufschluß )� Although Lessing may seem here like an “aesthetic gatekeeper” himself, the very articulation of the norm becomes a condition for the refined play with genre as it manifests itself in Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien . “Der ästhetische Thorschreiber” (emphasis on Thor , also a fool) ironically does not conform to Lessing’s definition of an epigram, as there is neither anticipation nor resolution, but the mere form of a distich; the very representative of the law, der ästhetische Thorschreiber , is, according to Lessing’s classical definition of the genre, a poor manifestation of the generic law. The third operation characteristic of the epigram is to reproduce a particular form of mimesis� The epigram does not imitate the form of the object on which it is written, but imitates the phenomenology of the encounter with this object� Lessing describes this scene as follows (to which I alluded at the beginning of this paper), which I cite at length: Wenn uns unvermutet ein beträchtliches Denkmal aufstößt, so vermenget sich mit der angenehmen Überraschung, in welche wir durch die Größe oder Schönheit des Denkmals geraten, sogleich eine Art von Verlegenheit über die noch unbewußte Bestimmung desselben, welche so lange anhält, bis wir uns dem Denkmale genugsam genähert haben, und durch seine Aufschrift aus unserer Ungewißheit gesetzt worden; worauf das Vergnügen der befriedigten Wißbegierde sich mit dem schmeichelhaften Eindrucke des schönen sinnlichen Gegenstandes verbindet, und beide zusammen in ein drittes angenehmes Gefühl zusammenschmelzen. - Diese Reihe von Empfindungen, sage ich, ist das Sinngedichte bestimmt nachzuahmen; und nur dieser Nachah- Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 121 mung wegen hat es, in der Sprache seiner Erfinder, den Namen seines Urbildes, des eigentlichen Epigramms behalten. (187—88) The epigram imitates not the object, but the perception of the object� The epigram thus provokes a second-order perception, the perception of a perception that makes explicit the phenomenology of attention: an embodied anticipation, dis-organization, and resolution that takes place at the site of the epigram. From a certain point of view, the epigram recapitulates the genesis of thought itself. Merleau-Ponty describes attention as a “knowledge-bringing event”: “This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this recasting at every moment of its own history in the unity of a new meaning, is thought itself ” (35—36). The epigram reawakens a primordial attentiveness to objects that is the sensate condition from which knowledge emerges� Perceptually, the epigram is thus situated at a liminal state between the known and the unknown; it represents a compressed medium of what Eric Downing, in another context, calls Schwellenkunst � 9 Following Lessing’s description, the epigram lays bare a phenomenologically nested structure of thresholds, since the epigram fuses three sensations that are themselves threshold sensations: 1) the pleasure of surprise ( angenehme Überraschung ) fused with the embarrassment ( Verlegenheit ) of unconscious determination ( unbewußte Bestimmung ); 2) the fusion of the satisfaction of knowledge ( befriedigte Wißbegierde ) and delight of the sensate object ( der schmeichelhafte Eindruck des schönen sinnlichen Gegenstandes ); and 3) the fusion of these two sensations held together at once� This latter fusion is emphatically not a second-order operation, since each sensation must be co-present on a plane of sensuous immanence, belonging to a series of sensations, eine Reihe von Empfindungen � The pleasure of the epigram, as derived from this primordial scene, stages a simultaneous differentiation and dedifferentiation in liminal forms of spatiality, temporality, and sense: it captures a transition from distance to proximity, while retaining the perceptual character of both; it operates both according to the temporality of succession ( eine Reihe von Empfindungen ) and simultaneity (the fusion of two successive moments in ein drittes Gefühl ); and it describes the emergence of sense from uncertainty� The epigram imitates this act of perceptual orientation, both suspending and bringing to an end the state of hesitation between the known and the unknown, lingering within the potentiality of ambiguity - foregrounding what Frauke Berndt and Klaus Sachs-Hombach call “constitutive” ambiguity - even after disambiguation has supposedly taken place� 10 These three operations can function as a heuristic through which the aesthetic particularity of Angelus Silesius - that of epigrammatic paradoxicality - can be brought into relief: the epigram as the drawing of distinctions, or the 122 Gabriel Trop performative marking of spatial and conceptual boundaries; the epigram as the sudden and unexpected resolution of desire into norm while simultaneously preserving a moment of irresolution; and the epigram as the recapitulation of processes of perceptual orientation that simultaneously preserve and efface spatial, temporal, and epistemological oppositions (between distance and proximity, succession and simultaneity, the unknown and the known). In Angelus Silesius’ preface to Cherubinischer Wandersmann , paradox, or “widersinnische Reden” (non-sensical speech), raises the threat of a heterodox sense that must ultimately be held at bay� The function of the preface is to prevent readers from automatically associating the non-sense of paradoxa with damnation or heterodoxy, “einen Verdamlichen Sinn” or “böse Meinung” (13). At the same time, the preface understands such paradoxicality as a constitutive feature of the attractive pull of the epigram; in order to move into orthodoxy, or correct opinion, one must pass through the disorganizing field of the paradox. Epigrammatic paradoxicality unfolds according to operations that cohere with and diverge from those that Lessing discovered as intrinsic to the epigram� In addition to drawing distinctions and constituting a distinct field of differences - Hier ist nicht Peloponnesus, sondern Attika ; Hier ist Peloponnesus, und nicht Attika - Angelus Silesius’ epigrammatic paradoxicality explores equally prevalent zones of indistinction : Die Gleichheit. Jch weiß nicht was ich sol! Es ist mir alles Ein / Orth / Unorth / Ewigkeit / Zeit / Nacht / Tag / Freud / und Pein. ( Wandersmann 55) While the zone of indistinction, above all between God and creature, plays a central role in mystical thought - and, as Angelus Silesius notes in the preface, can be found in the works of Tauler, Ruysbroek, Lois de Blois - epigrammatic paradoxicality compresses such zones of indistinction into proximity with one another and generates an oscillation� The epigram above thus brings two different operations into the same textual and imaginative space: the indistinction of identity ( Es ist mir alles Ein ) and difference ( Ort / Unorth , etc.); and the distinction of identity and difference. These two operations take place in turn both sonically and graphically, albeit with each domain (sonic and graphic) inverting the operations of the other. Sonically, there is a marked difference between the first line, in which poetic rhythm coheres with grammatical syntax - Jch weiß nicht was ich sol! / Es ist mir alles Ein - and the second line, in which oppositional terms are compressed and collide with one another: OrthUnorthEwigKeit / ZeitNachtTagFreudundPein� The rhythm of the alexandrine blends and dis- Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 123 torts the syntactical order of differences in this second line, swiveling around the caesura between eternity ( Ewigkeit ) and time ( Zeit )� The graphic signs of the poem, however - the slashes inserted between oppositions ( Orth / Unorth , Ewigkeit / Zeit ) - react against this blending in the second line by emphasizing each term as marked and oppositional to its other� The graphical slash is not, however, a mere mark of opposition or differentiation. At the end of the first line ( Est ist mir alles Ein / ), the slash exhibits a different function. Unlike the slashes in the second line, which signal oppositionality, this slash simultaneously marks difference and indistinction: a separation between the first line and the second as well as their identity, the alles Ein as the overarching set under which the oppositions that follow are subsumed� Syntactical markers here become vehicles for operations of epigrammatic paradoxicality, simultaneously establishing and dissolving the distinctions that otherwise would stabilize a textual, ontological, and theological order. Epigrammatic paradoxicality also distorts the second main operation of the epigram as elaborated by Lessing, namely the transition from anticipation ( Erwartung ) into resolution ( Aufschluß )� Lessing’s understanding of the epigram is modeled on an explicitly epistemological form of aisthesis : the emergence of sensate knowledge from the confusion of perceptual experience� The pointe of epigrammatic paradoxicality does not always coincide with the transition from obscurity to clarity, but often suspends such transitions, unfolding in a contradiction whose resolution lies outside the confines of textual space: Das Vermögende Unvermögen. Wer nichts begehrt / nichts hat / nichts weiß / nichts liebt / nichts wil; Der hat / der weiß / begehrt / und liebt noch jmmer vil� ( Wandersmann 34) Epigrammatic paradoxicality does not refer to the knowledge encoded in the epigram, but rather, to the effect of its aesthetic form. The paradox of the epigram as a form of knowledge, after all, can be grasped by the semantics of the mystical tradition to which it owes its intelligibility� 11 To love nothing is to love many things : emptying the will of differentiated images becomes the condition for the receptivity of divine plenitude. The very incapacity of the epigram itself, its “Unvermögen,” becomes a source of potentiality (to think with and against Agamben, there can be no “pure” potentiality or impotentiality that could not become differentially generative, re-distinguished after entering into a zone of indistinction). In this manner, the “senseless” proposition - to desire nothing is to desire much - produces sense� It is thus always possible to recuperate the paradox for knowledge, or at the very least, for a form of knowledge constituted discursively through the production of further differentiating, communicative acts. Peter-André Alt, 124 Gabriel Trop following Luhmann, writes: “Paradoxien sind nicht nützlich, vermögen aber ‘Anschlusskommunikation’ herzustellen” (183). Paradoxes are generative inasmuch as they can be explicated or unfolded ( Paradoxienentfaltung ). However, if the paradox is to be brought in relation to knowledge, it gestures at a form of knowledge that is unconditioned , knowledge to which conditions are attached only in the process of unfolding: according to Luhmann, “Paradoxien sind […] die einzige Form, in der Wissen unbedingt gegeben ist” (132)� There is thus a discontinuity between the “unconditionedness” of the knowledge generated by the paradox and the “conditions” that facilitate its explication� This understanding of the paradoxicality of the literary text as a medium of knowledge, however, only becomes possible by occupying the position of a second-order observer� Epigrammatic paradoxicality is supposed to block precisely this position. “Erfahrung ist besser als wissenschafft,” writes Angelus Silesius (204)� Moving to a second-order observational standpoint transforms communicative acts into knowledge through their capacity for connectivity; from such a perspective, Erfahrung becomes yet another differential term that produces knowledge, namely via the opposition Erfahrung / Wissenschaft. However, once the movement to the second-order observational stance has taken place, one is no longer within the attractive orbit of the epigram’s particular paradoxical power. This power extends beyond the mere logical form of the paradox (i.e., the bare “contradiction”), seeping into the way in which words and letters themselves are arranged. In “Das Vermögende Unvermögen,” the paradox becomes a pretext for chiasmatic imbrications, a tapestry of asymmetrical lines of force. The first verb in the first line, begehrt , becomes the third verb in the second line, which generates the following pattern - 1-3; 2-1; 3-2; 4-4 - all the while producing oppositional lines of force in the tension between the repeated “nichts” and the singular “vil�” A diagram of these lines of force could be constructed as follows: Wer nichts begehrt / nichts hat / nichts weiß / nichts liebt / nichts wil; Der hat / der weiß / begehrt / und liebt noch jmmer vil. (Wandersmann 34) The only verb from the first line that is not repeated in the second is the verb “wollen”; the extinction of the will in the first line occurs to such an extent that it no longer registers as a difference in the second. The epigram does not merely show how one may “will nothing,” but rather, makes willing itself into a nothing, annihilates its specific difference-generating capacity. Epigrammatic paradoxicality thus draws upon an unconditioning power to reshape the field of differentiation, making inoperative what was previously operative. This un- Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 125 conditioning power dissipates in second-order observation, which is why the epigram invests its paradoxical force in first-order experience ( Erfahrung ): an attraction to the vibrating textual surface, the site of inscription. The surface of the poem, first and foremost, initiates a heterodox movement, a momentum towards an “other” sense than that of common sense and everyday appearance, the doxa � The paratextual apparatus - footnotes that allude to the writings of the mystics, for example -continually draw the epigram back into the orbit of normative thought when it threatens to spin off into heresy: GOtt lebt nicht ohne mich. Ich weiß daß ohne mich GOtt nicht ein Nun kann leben / Werd’ ich zu nicht Er muß von Noth den Geist aufgeben. ( Wandersmann 28) Just as it is possible to recuperate the paradox for operations of knowledge, so too is it possible to draw the heterodox thrust of the epigram back into the sphere of orthodoxy, or right belief. The surface of the poem travels toward its disruptive pointe: the unconditioned (God) as attached to a condition (the creature); the constraint by necessity of that which cannot be constrained (without me, God must necessarily “give up the ghost”); and the provocation of the death of God that would accompany the death of the particular individual (if I dissolve into nothing, God dies with me). However, it is precisely this heretical surface that the epigram holds at bay� It activates an entire apparatus of theological and depth-hermeneutic reading technologies to steer the poem away from the implications of the surface; paratextual queues attached to this epigram (“Schawe in der Vorrede”) assure readers that the heterodox velocity of the poem is directed towards the stability of the norm, the fixing of the creature and the divine in their proper places after they seem to have been dislodged from their dogmatic positions� The interpreter thus folds the poem back into the received wisdom and normative comfort of Catholic orthodoxy. After a moment of brief anxiety, order is restored. However, the restoration of order depends upon an extratextual event. It is thus that the epigram “epigrammatizes” its readers, turns them into textual surfaces onto which its particular truth is then inscribed as a potential to be explicated in turn� The epigrammatic paradox thus lies precisely in the vibrating surface of the poem, not in the depth of the knowledge that it encodes: its function is to contravene orthodoxy so that depth-hermeneutic reading technologies can be stimulated to repair the seeming wound inflicted on divine order. The epigram must be held in a state of suspension between heterodox velocity and orthodox stability, as it is only by being thus suspended that the imagination can move actively into the norm� 126 Gabriel Trop Thus far, the aesthetics of the paradox has been limited to a dynamic within individual epigrams. However, more significant is the heterodoxy of form that emerges from the epigrammatic cosmos of the Cherubinischer Wandersmann as a whole� Heterodoxy of form designates the way in which the formal organization of the text itself - the way each epigram relates to every other, for example, in a serial structure or in a kaleidoscopic shifting - uncouples readers from the tendency to lead textual appearances back to some form of “correct opinion,” a dividing up of space and time that would culminate in a final transcendent point, a dogma. In the heterodoxy of form that governs its textual cosmos, the Cherubinischer Wandersmann may be regarded as a semiotic counter-paradigm to that which one finds in Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises � According to Roland Barthes, Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises respond to the divine essence not with ineffability or with a via negativa , but with assemblages, instances of articulation, fields of exclusion, the establishment of topics, rules for what counts as an element, arborescent models of signification whose growths and outgrowths allow the codification of experience such that the encounter with the divine becomes structured like a language: “the theophany [Ignatius] is methodically seeking is in fact a semiophany, what he is striving to obtain is more the sign of God than knowledge of him or His Presence” (53)� Underlying the epigrams of the Cherubinischer Wandersmann one may discern a different principle of organization. Like the Spiritual Exercises , the epigrams are concerned not merely to approach an ineffable transcendent middle point (that is, not a via negativa ), although they can be, as Derrida argues, “contaminated” by operations of negative theology (69). Instead, the epigrams experiment with geometrical figures (points, lines, circles), modalities (possibilities, actualities, impossibilities), spatialities (operations demarcating and blurring inside and outside), differentiation and dedifferentiation, jumping from one point of entry into a cosmic totality to another� The “middle point” thus does not describe an ineffable center, but a vantage point, a horizon that makes visible the periphery - and thus a via positiva : Jm Mittelpunct sicht man alles. Wer jhm den Mittelpunct zum wohnhauß hat erkiest / Der siht mit einem Blik was in dem Umbschweif ist� ( Wandersmann 75) What sort of a grammar emerges from the cherubinic wanderer that attends to the circle from the point of view of the midpoint? Instead of arborescent models of signification and fields of exclusion or distinction - Lessing’s form of the epigram that initiates a process of spatio-temporal orientation, or the emergence of thought from confusion - the cherubinic epigram simultaneously Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 127 organizes and dis-organizes space; the “resolution” of the epigram ( Aufschluß ) is only a resolution inasmuch as it becomes a hermeneutic problem (the gears of orthodoxy slam into action); the epigram is no longer a self-contained unit or a single monument, but a cosmos of dynamic thought� In the relation between epigrams, the transcendent point of one epigram becomes a mobile element of another� This strategic reconfiguration of spatial terms depends upon language as something that can be dis-articulated� Prepositions are detached from their grammatical function and become conceptual operators, placing the cherubinic wanderer in a state of pre-positionality: “Zwey wörtlein lieb ich sehr; sie heissen Auß und Ein / Auß Babel / und auß mir / in GOtt und JEsum ein” (102)� This same mobility of individual elements or points takes place in a play with geometrical figures. When Nicolas of Cusa, in De docta ignorantia , makes the line and the circle coincide in an intuition of the infinite - God as a coincidentia oppositorum - he provides the impulse for an aesthetics of geometry as a source of paradoxicality� 12 Angelus Silesius extends this paradoxical aesthetics of geometry to forms of desire that could readily be designated as queer. In one epigram, God is “Der Kreiß im Puncte,” the womb as a point that enfolds a circle within it (“Als GOtt verborgen lag in eines Mägdleins Schoß / Da war es / da der Punct den Kreiß in sich beschloß” [115]). In another epigram, this very geometry is internalized, relativized, and eroticized when the human being invaginates the phallic divine midpoint (“wenn ich Ihn in mich schlisse”), only to invert these sexual positions when the speaker becomes phallic, flowing out into a divine principle that has now become yonic, womb-like: GOtt is mein Punct und Kreiß. GOtt ist mein mittelpunct wenn ich Jhn in mich schlisse: Mein Umbkreiß dann / wenn ich auß Lieb’ in ihn zerflisse. ( Wandersmann 134) Desire disrupts geometric order, and geometric disorder queers desire. Every word, every epigram, every series of epigrams, can at any moment become centralized or de-centralized, ordered and re-ordered; points, lines and surfaces become simultaneously distinguishable and indistinguishable; one attractive point is displaced by another (love is a magnet that draws the creature to God, or God into death, or the human heart is iron and magnet that pulls God down into its depths 13 ); the utmost impossible is possible (“das Überunmöglichste ist möglich” [270]). Paradox exercises the sense of possibility, a modality whose power it expands and intensifies. Possibility becomes here commensurate with a form of impossibility that transcends even the grammar of the superlative ( das Überunmöglichste )� Angelus Silesius’ epigrammatic practice thereby erects zones of indistinction and asymmetrical relations through which exchanges 128 Gabriel Trop take place: between God and creature; possibility and super-impossibility; point, line, circle, and surface. In so doing, it assures the kaleidoscopic shimmering of the word� Epigrammatic paradoxicality is less the property of a text than an emergent property extending out from a text, drawing the reader into its attractive pull and aesthetically transforming the reader into yet another paradoxical surface, infinitely generative. One may speak of an “aesthetics” of epigrammatic paradoxicality when ontology, sensuous cognition, and textual order are fused within an open horizon suspended between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The final epigram in the Cherubinischer Wandersmann points precisely to this dynamic: Beschluß� Freund, es ist auch genug. Im Fall du mehr wilt lesen / So geh und werde selbst die Schrifft und selbst das Wesen. ( Wandersmann 285) This final epigram is not an end, but simultaneously beginning, middle, and end of a potentially infinite series of acts of reading and writing. It fuses three domains: ontological order, generic form, and the subject itself. The logos ( Schrifft and Wesen , ontological order) produces of a form of textuality (textual form as Schrifft ) and a subject (the implied thou ) who simultaneously writes and reads the text that the subject has become� An ambiguity emerges in the last line that perfectly embodies the ideal of epigrammatic paradoxicality: go and become yourself the text and yourself the essence� 14 Does the reader become the holy writ that precedes the subject, embodying the divine logos as an originary donation outside the subject, or does the reader become the source for an entirely new textual practice, a life lived as text? The logos ( Schrifft and Wesen ) in this instance can be self-producing, self-receiving, no longer “canonized” or capable of “canonization” (hence heterodox), but at the same time, it can be an ethical imperative grounded in a pre-existent textual body and essence (therefore capable of being led back to orthodoxy, back to the “canon” of the holy writ): go and become yourself the text and yourself the essence� What is the written text that one becomes? If every reader becomes the text and the essence, then there are as many texts and essences as there are individual bodies and minds. To be sure, some of these bodies and minds will act in concert, and the texts that they live out will come to resemble one another closely� Epigrammatic paradoxicality lays bare the way in which a reader can always willfully re-embrace orthodoxies or sink into them almost reflexively and automatically after the crisis of their disruption has taken place. Equally possible, however, is the becoming of texts that refract themselves through the prism of singular beings, expanding outward uncontrollably, painting the cosmos with infinite nuance. Such is, perhaps, the final manifestation of epi- Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 129 grammatic paradoxicality: the genesis of a textual form that, even when it calls for orthodoxy after orthodoxy, nevertheless leaves open the possibility for a text and an essence that is irreducibly multiple, as if the fate of all right opinion were to become heterodoxical in spite of itself� 15 Notes 1 Peter Hess links the brevity of the epigram to its object-relational character, its Objektbezug ; see Hess 11� 2 See Hess 9� 3 For a recent account of this genre, see Wierzbicka 23—30. 4 See above all Hillenbrand 609—10. 5 See Heidegger 55—60. 6 Wilfried Barner, for this reason, still sees the structure of the pointe or argutia as central to the spiritual epigram; see Barner 350—71. 7 Although the Baroque attraction to paradox and Enlightenment rationalism seem to be at odds with one another, according to Peter Hess, “Erst Herders Theorie bricht eindeutig mit der barocken Epigrammkonzeption” (51)� 8 According to Frieder von Ammon, these epigrams represent a cycle within the logic of the work; they begin with a “Grenzüberschreitung” which is at the same time “eine poetische Transgression, ein Verstoß gegen literarische Normen und Regeln” (96). 9 See Downing 69—86. 10 See Berndt und Sachs-Hombach� 11 The paradox thus plays a role in the “cultures of knowledge” ( Wissenskulturen ) of this time; see Alt 182� 12 Nicolas of Cusa was a critical figure linking aesthetics and mathematics, which has an afterlife in Early German Romanticism; see Smith 67—69. 13 “Die Lieb ist ein Magnet / sie ziehet mich in GOtt: / Unnd was noch grösser ist / sie reisset GOtt inn Tod” (72); “Mein Hertze weil es stäts in GOtt gezogen steht / Und jhn herwieder zeucht / ist Eisen und Magnet” (132)� 14 As Niklaus Largier writes, “This very act (“become yourself the writ”) now stands outside the medieval hermeneutical framework and its claims� It takes shape as an application of mystical tropes that produces ever new forms of experience on the basis of rhetorical experiments” (50)� 15 I am indebted to Aleksandra Prica and Eric Downing for their generous comments on an earlier draft of this paper� 130 Gabriel Trop Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 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Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1885. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Zerstreute Anmerkungen über das Epigramm � Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden . Ed. Klaus Bohnen. Vol. 7. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2000. 180—290. Logau, Friedrich von� Salomons von Golaw Deutscher Sinn-Getichte Drey Tausend. Breslau: Caspar Klossmann, 1654. Luhmann, Niklas. Die Religion der Gesellschaft . Ed. André Kieserling. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 131 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans� Colin Smith� London: Routledge, 2002. Opitz, Martin. Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey � Ed� Richard Alewyn� Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966. Smith, John H. “Religion and Early German Romanticism: The Finite and the Infinite.” Brill’s Companion to German Romantic Philosophy . Ed. Elizabeth Millán Brusslan and Judith Norman. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 60—96. Vogl, Joseph. “Staatsbegehren. Zur Epoche der Policey.” DVjs 74 (2000): 600—26. Wierzbicka, Krystyna. “Das geistliche Epigramm im Barock.” Wege der Lyrik in der Moderne . Ed. Gunter Martens. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003. 23—30. Wellbery, David. Goethes Faust I : Reflexion der tragischen Form. Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2016. Mayröcker’s Drama of Association Florian Klinger University of Chicago Abstract: Friederike Mayröcker’s My Mother is a dramatic poem in which the drama consists of transforming the speaker’s natural and conventional association with their mother into a performative association with the reader� The drama staged in the poem between speaker and mother and the drama staged by the poem between speaker and reader are unified in a peculiar way: through an act of transference, the poem’s internal drama is projected toward the reader such that, ultimately, the reader comes to stand in as the recipient toward whom the drama is performed� The drama staged by the poem reaches out to the reader in an action that is indeterminate insofar as it leaves behind the established (natural and conventional) terms of relating that inform the poem’s internal drama. No longer authorized by those terms, the poem projects itself toward novel authorization in a bond with the reader� The poem thus not only turns from a determinate relating to an indeterminate one, but through the act of transference it stages this turn, renders explicit the distinction that lies in it, and establishes itself as the action form through which the turn is achieved� Keywords: aesthetic action, Friederike Mayröcker, phatic communion, indeterminacy, poetic transformation MY MOTHER WITH THE OPEN ARMS when she greeted me when I came to see her my mother with the tender words when I called that I couldn’t come my mother with the face turned away as she still wanted to speak but couldn’t anymore 134 Florian Klinger my mother with the closed eyes as I came too late to embrace her one last time MEINE MUTTER MIT DEN OFFENEN ARMEN wenn sie mich grüszte wenn ich zu ihr kam meine Mutter mit den zärtlichen Worten wenn ich sie anrief dasz ich nicht kommen könne meine Mutter mit dem abgewandten Gesicht als sie noch sprechen wollte aber es nicht mehr konnte meine Mutter mit den geschlossenen Augen als ich zu spät kam sie ein letztes Mal zu umarmen Friederike Mayröcker [drama of association] Friederike Mayröcker’s My Mother (Mayröcker 632; my own translation, F.K.), I argue, is a dramatic poem in which the drama consists of transforming the speaker’s natural and conventional association with their mother into a performative association with the reader� This transformation is brought about, I argue further, as the drama staged in the poem between speaker and mother and the drama staged by the poem between speaker and reader are unified in a peculiar way: trough an act of transference, the poem’s internal drama is projected toward the reader such that, ultimately, the reader comes to stand in as the recipient toward whom the drama is performed� The association in which the reader comes to take the mother’s place visà-vis the speaker is built entirely from the channel of communication, a bond between the performers that is put to work in two different ways. While the drama staged in the poem manifests the bond as an established inventory of determinate formulae or gestures of relating, the drama performed by the poem manifests the bond to reach out to the reader in an action that is indeterminate insofar as it leaves behind the established terms of relating that inform the poem’s internal drama. No longer authorized by those terms, the poem projects itself toward novel authorization in a bond with the reader� The poem thus not only turns from a determinate relating to an indeterminate one (as every poem might), but through the act of transference it stages this turn, renders explicit Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 135 the distinction that lies in it, and establishes itself as the action form through which the turn is achieved� My claim that to account for Mayröcker’s drama of association is to account for the piece’s action form is part of a larger research agenda that conceives the aesthetic in action theoretical terms. I cannot argue this here, but this much should be said to clarify the stakes of the present essay: while non-aesthetic communication relates us determinately, on shared terms, such that the determination says something about who we are, in the aesthetic communication undertaken by Mayröcker’s poem, no shared terms are available, which relates us - speaker and reader, sender and addressee - through an indeterminacy that renders open who we are vis-a-vis one another� This is not given to us (by nature or by convention) but always still to be figured out. What such aesthetic communication offers its reader is something altogether unobtainable elsewhere in the realm of human performance� [the act of the poem] The stanzas of the poem coincide with a sequence of scenes of encounter between a non-gendered first-person speaker and their mother. Syntactically, there is no demarcation or connection between the scenes but a fourfold beginning not separated by interpunction; each scene consists of a main clause that stays incomplete for the lack of an active verb, and a subordinate clause introduced by “when” ( wenn ) or “as” ( als ). Narratively, there is no unifying substrate of interconnected main clause action; each time, “my mother” seems to take the position of the grammatical subject, but then, as the clause is discontinued, comes to be an entity resting in itself - an image of the mother hovering in suspense. In the absence of a grammatical or narrative connection, the scenes appear held together by something simpler and more effective in the display of unity - the form of the series� The second time establishes a series by constituting the previous time as the first time, thus dissociating causality (what constitutes what) from succession (what follows what): there never was a first time as a first time is only retroactively constituted, and there never can be a last time as the series cannot out of itself shut down; initiation or closure are not part of the series as such, its formal makeup. A series of this sort can be considered a single action only if it involves the repeated performance of the same concept� In its fourfold invocation starting with “my mother with” ( meine Mutter mit ), Mayröcker’s poem intimates such a performance; we may say that it calls its structure onto the scene� While the structure is then abandoned in each case, the effect of its initial display is that the temporality of exercise, of prayer, of ritual is brought to bear on the series of invocations, such that this poem, in its brevity, opens up access to an expansiveness without beginning or end as it appears to participate in an indefinite ongo- 136 Florian Klinger ingness of performance. At the same time, however, in each of the invocations the serial structure is broken up by a variation that renders the performances different from each other rather than repetitions of the same. To describe the action form of the poem, we thus need to locate the concept that is constitutive of the whole not on the level of a single stanza and its indefinite reiteration, but on the level of the act that constitutes the internal unity of the stanzas. To focus on this unity concerns the action of the poem, its doing, its pragmatic articulation, which largely is a matter of the relationship between speaker and reader. To focus on the performances that are referenced, talked about, concerns the action in the poem, its saying, its semantic articulation, which largely is a matter of the relationship between speaker and mother� We account for the poem’s form if we can say how these articulations are two sides of the same act. As we seek to understand how both hang together, we first consider the action described in the poem, and later get to the action of describing that is the poem� [speaker-mother: the phatic] Due to the absence of active verbs and acting subjects on the level of main clauses, there is a sense that nothing happens in the poem. At the same time, the poem seems to describe nothing but doings. This is possible as the doings are relegated either to the qualifying actions in the subordinate clauses, or to the implicit actions contained in the images of the mother. As such, the doings function as the qualification of a main clause that never materializes� The result is a manifest contrast between the abundance of doings on the one hand and the lack of action on the other: instead of having subjects perform actions to some consequence, the sequence of scenes focuses on who turns and attends to whom - the open arms, tender words, turned face, closed eyes, the greeting, coming, calling, not being able to come, wanting to speak, not being able to speak, coming too late, embracing. All this refers to what linguists call the phatic function of communication, the establishing of contact between interlocutors ( Jakobson 355—56), which includes inconsequential chit-chat, small talk about the weather, or any behavior that sets performers in touch with one another. Malinowski, the first proponent of the term, speaks of a “pure sociability” in which the aim of the action is not this or that, but the making of the channel as such: a “ phatic communion […] in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words. […] It consists in just […] the fact of the personal communion […] achieved by speech […]. Each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker” (Malinowski 314—15). The phatic offers itself as a category of accounting for Mayröcker’s poem because there are, grammatically speaking, no acting subjects and no actions proper� What we have instead is a pre-agential relating of speaker and mother� Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 137 Perhaps the most important way in which the phatic, while at work in every action, differs from an action is that it is a strictly relational category that concerns what lies between agents, the way sender and addressee are constituted only through one another; it can therefore not plausibly be conceived in terms of individual performances but requires the concept of a shared performance. We cannot develop this here, but only note that it is this stratum of communication, the establishing of a “phatic communion” that in Mayröcker’s poem appears isolated, performed by itself, and submitted to a quasi-experimental exploration in a sequence of scenes with combinatorial character. What such combinatorics selects or deselects is, first of all, a performer’s availability for the phatic relation: mother attending to speaker speaker attending to mother mother attending to speaker speaker not attending to mother mother not attending to speaker speaker attending to mother (implied in the mother’s face being “turned away”) mother not attending to speaker speaker not attending to mother In short + + + - - + - - [phatic dramatization of scenes] Beyond thus marking availability, the phatic attending between speaker and mother is attitudinal in that each time its shape is specifically determined from each side. An attitude in the relevant sense is the shape of attending that manifests the phatic function; joined in a relation, attitudes articulate the terms that establish performers through one another. We therefore note a modulation or qualification of the channel by attitudes - which extends the channel’s linguistic conception beyond a pure relating - and call such a modulation its dramatization (for the phatic as drama, see Klinger 103—10). As we then consider the sequence of scenes of encounter in its full phatic dramatic articulation, we can account for their unity in the act of the poem as a whole� The phatic communion staged by the first scene (++) displays as little drama as such an encounter may ever contain, even as we maintain that a phatic relationship as such is dramatic. The mother’s open arms and greeting, and the speaker’s coming toward the mother may be considered acts of “pure sociabili- 138 Florian Klinger ty” in Malinowski’s sense “in which ties of union are created” to constitute “just […] the fact of the personal communion�” The second scene (+ -) dramatizes this fact by staging the onset of a disappearance of the communion, but it brings this onset late� All of “My mother with the tender words / when I called” can be read as a mutual attending, especially as ‘calling’ ( anrufen means both phoning and calling on someone ) here is strictly parallel to the first stanza’s ‘greeting’ - and it is only with “that I couldn’t come,” tagged on to the end of the stanza, that the encounter starts taking a dramatic turn� The third scene (- +) enacts an overt disruption of the encounter, it shows the communion in full crisis: the speaker’s attending and the mother’s will to speak, on the one hand (fostering communion), are overridden by the mother’s turned face and her inability to speak, on the other (obstructing communion). As the last scene (- -) stages a definitive failing of the communion, it doesn’t dramatize such failing in the form of a last embrace or a last exchange of looks� On the contrary, it dramatizes the fact that a “last time” never happens: the mother’s eyes are closed forever and the speaker’s arrival is too late for a last embrace. The drama of this scene doesn’t lie in a failing relationship, but in one that never even has a chance to begin� As a whole, the sequence of scenes manifests a gradual dissociation of the relating between the protagonists� While initially both are turned toward and present to one another such that a shared actuality is achieved, they become less and less so, until finally both are turned away from each other and absent to one another such that any sense of a shared actuality has been lost� The shift in attitude from open and tender to turned away and closed is based in a shift in temporality of the verb where infinite forms (“when…”) are increasingly replaced with finite ones (“as…”), such that the poem moves from the ongoingness of an actuality shared by speaker and mother to the performance of single conclusive deeds that manifest definitive change: “as I came too late to embrace her one last time�” [interpersonal work of mourning] What thus gets staged by the poem is the drama of the loss of the mother, of the detachment from the mother, of the loss of the phatic communion with the mother� But we must be careful to put this the right way. Surely there is a loss at the center, but the poem is neither about the mother’s death nor about the speaker’s grief� As a series of incapacitations (performances working toward finite ends) is introduced to disrupt the initial phatic communion (a performance working toward an infinite end), what intrudes into the latter’s ongoingness is not the finality of death - the fact that the mother dies and death is a finite performance that disrupts the infinite performance that is life. At stake is the phatic communion between speaker and mother, and what Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 139 in a formally relevant sense gets extinguished is only this communion - even as of course, the mother’s death seems to play a role in this extinction. At the same time, the poem is not about the speaker’s situation either: it doesn’t exhibit grief, voice a lament, express any affect at all. As the speaker remains opaque in a way that doesn’t allow for identification (more about this shortly), we as readers move through these scenes with the mother without being acquainted with her, being prompted to have feelings about her, or taking part in a mourning of her loss. If the sequence of scenes between speaker and mother performs some version of the work of mourning, this work appears transposed from the personal realm to an interpersonal one, the shared register of a phatic communion: instead of gradually severing one’s cathectic ties to the person mourned, the process here is one of gradually severing the ties of communion, sharedness as such. That the work performed here is interpersonal and even impersonal doesn’t mean that somehow it is not performed by persons - clearly there is no attempt at a defamiliarization of this kind - but the personal is not in the focus, it is not that which this communication is about. While the individual scenes, due to their gestural detail and simplicity, may appear basic and perhaps even intimate in their familiarity, together they display a spectrum of attitudinal configurations in which any concern with the mother or the speaker is replaced with the drama of communication as such - the shared actuality we called with Malinowski a “phatic communion” - and the closure toward which it tends� [the channel speaker-reader] But what are we to make of the fact that a “last time” is missed - the last moment is not had together, there is no communion in parting? Of the fact that the finite performance that is supposed to interrupt the communion for good instead fails to do so - and thus inadvertently turns out to be not an incapacitation to establish performance, but an incapacitation to disrupt performance? In whatever way we put this fact, it seems that conclusion is replaced with openness, or rather, that the conclusion produces out of itself an openness. With all its structural tightness, the poem presents itself as an integrated effort of closing, yet it opens up again at the very point where it was meant definitively to close down. We can understand this point as the place of a farewell that never happens, such that something about the parting between speaker and mother remains forever unredeemed� The failure of a last encounter leaves a void of communion precisely at the moment of the completion of its loss� Or we take the fact that a “last time” is missed to manifest the opposite: that the loss itself can never be completed. After all, if the last stanza fails to establish completion, the communion must still be on. What is more, it 140 Florian Klinger can never end, for the failure to build the channel one last time here is a failure to end the channel, and thus establishes the channel indefinitely. Our discussion of the phatic drama, the communication staged in it, has lead us to an impasse marked by the question whether the fact that a “last time” is missed means that communion is definitively shut down or sustained indefinitely. Yet the question hardly manifests itself from within the speaker’s exchange with the mother, but its consideration is ours, the reader’s, as the addressee for whom the drama of communication is performed. In taking up the question, our discussion has crossed the line from accounting for the communication staged in the poem toward an accounting for the communication of the poem, that is, of what the poem itself does or is as a communicative act� The communication we then consider as we seek to move past the impasse is not between the speaker and the mother but between the speaker and the reader� If a voice needs a channel, the staging of the phatic drama by the voice cannot take place in the channel that is therein transformed; the phatic relation between speaker and mother must somehow depend in its rendering on the phatic relation between speaker and reader� Overall, my claim will be that the poem is voiced by performing two operations in one: the address to the mother that starts with an invocation and constitutes a phatic dramatic scene of encounter between speaker and mother in each stanza, and an address to the reader for whom, toward whom, and with the participation of whom this encounter is staged. (Technically, we refer to the speaker in the poem and its implied reader, in distinction from its author and actual reader.) Saying that these operations are one act of the poem, one performance, is not to say that they somehow converge with one another as separate communications: the perhaps common and established idea that the channel between speaker and mother and the other channel between speaker and reader are related orthogonally - the reader overhears the drama, the drama is staged in front of them - will have to be abandoned for the other, more unusual idea that both channels are in an important sense one and the same, such that the reader is addressed as a participant in the drama, and by an act of transference takes the place of the mother� [unity of invocation] To assume the level of analysis that corresponds to this act, we first need to account for the unity of the poem as a whole. Under the semblance of serial organization we described in our opening, such unity consists in a rough homology of its stanzas. To name a first element of such homology, each invocation starting with “My mother” doesn’t merely represent the mother discursively, but calls her onto the stage, makes her present, and therein does something more fundamental that concerns the identity of the speaker, Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 141 the possibility from which having a voice in this situation is conceivable at all: it constitutes the speaker’s phatic relationship with the mother each time, thus performatively establishing the mother in her availability as an addressee� Without such addressee, there is no channel for communication, one is in no position to say anything; invocation is one way to establish such a channel and thus the very possibility of communication� As a second element of homology between the scenes, an epithet is added to “My mother” - “my mother with the open arms,” “my mother with the tender words,” “my mother with her face turned away,” “my mother with her eyes closed.” This turns the invocation into an image, a strangely self-enclosed and inert image due to the lack of an active verb, which lends the first line of each scene, taken by itself, the character of a vignette, of a devotional picture perhaps, that - especially when we think of the serial temporality of the exercise - hovers alongside the others without direction. More importantly, adding a qualifying epithet turns the invocation of the mother into a description: the very moment the mother is invoked, the address turns into a description featuring the particular phatic attitude that characterizes the mother in the respective scene� As a third element of homology, each scene responds to the phatic attitude of the mother presented in the first line with a second line that features the phatic attitude of the speaker. A narrative second line is added to the first image line, such that a phatic dramatic scene of encounter is staged, in which the speaker turns from their role of invoker in the first line (largely connected to a presentational activity) to their role of narrator in the second (largely connected to a representational activity). In adding the second line, the scene is clearly not pronounced toward the mother but toward the reader - about the speaker’s relationship with their mother. Of course, the second line only expands on the character of description we found in the first line’s use of epithet which already turned the mother into a character talked about , thus preparing us for the narrative-representational turn in the second line� It is mostly this toward us by which we as addressees of the piece are projected, in which the channel of the piece’s communication calls for us� [invocation: two sides] As the scenes are strung together by homology in this threefold way, the channel works in two directions at once, manifesting a communicative situation toward the mother and toward the reader simultaneously. Thus, the operation of invocation amounts to a triangulation between the invoking voice, the addressee invoked, and the reader for whom the invocation is performed. If we noted that the scenes of encounter are staged, and if we left it unsaid so far in what medium or on what stage, then it has become clear now 142 Florian Klinger that the medium of the staging, if it is allowed to talk this way, is the channel between the speaker and the reader, which is needed in order for the drama of the phatic to be manifested� Let us now take these two sides of the operation apart� According to its first side, we saw, an invocation is a calling of someone absent onto the scene, the production of a channel, a phatic relation that puts the addressee opposite one and thus enables one to speak� According to its other side, we then observe, an invocation stages the first side for an audience. Whether it is a public speech, a funeral, or a theater play - no invocation can be without an audience that provides the phatic medium in which the establishing of an address comes about. To simplify, we may also say that the discursive action of invocation constitutes a channel with the invoked addressee and in doing so constitutes a channel with the audience for whom this is done� Even as this may remain implicit, it is still an indispensable part of the communication. Mayröcker’s piece renders explicit its address of the audience through a situation of overhearing modified by triangulation. Just as the phrase “My mother” is at no point a mere staging of something for the reader, but genuinely rooted in the mother’s address, it is also at no point only an address to the mother, but always already pronounced for the reader� This means that the involvement of the reader is not casual and external to the communicative situation (the scenes of encounter, the drama) between speaker and mother, but internally its part and in this formal sense constitutive of it� While the dramatic scenes don’t thematically involve or address their reader, they depend on the latter as they perform for them, they are staged, which is another way of saying that they are sustained phatically by the channel cast toward the reader� And the involvement of the reader in turn depends on the drama, as the channel established with the mother is deflected toward us, the watching public, who are - through one and the same act of summoning - summoned to watch the summoning of the mother� [unity of the sides: transference] In this act, the address to the mother and the address to the reader - the performance in the poem and the performance that is the poem - seem to coincide� Does this mean that the phatic communion with the reader is directly a part of the phatic communion with the mother and vice versa? To understand how the channel between speaker and mother and the channel between speaker and reader are constituted in a single unified act of summoning, we cannot keep holding on to the triangulation model of communication proposed to us by the structure of invocation� As long as we conceive of the channels as intersecting orthogonally, they will remain separate, and the reader will merely overhear, not participate in the drama. As a lead to a more productive response, we observe that both channels take their departure from Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 143 the speaker. And we observe further that if the channels cannot coexist in unity, unity may still be found in their successive arrangement� Following these leads, I propose to conceive the unity as an exchange of the mother as addressee with the reader as addressee, through an act of transference in which the reader comes to stand in for the mother: the speaker’s address to the mother is carried over to the reader. In psychoanalysis, the concept means that the analysand projects a primary relationship from their childhood, paradigmatically a parent, onto their present relationship with the therapist (Breuer and Freud 302—03). While the poem enacts such transference as a whole, this whole takes the shape of four discrete acts in each of which the mother is invoked and this invocation is then carried over to the reader. Each time, we have a single operation that involves both the address to the mother and to the reader, as is already highlighted by the initial phrase “My mother” with its irresolvable unity of both: the discursive acts of invoking someone, drawing them onto the scene, and of describing them are irreconcilable operations; performing these in unity is the most succinct formula for transference anywhere in the poem� What does it mean to abandon a triangulation model of poetic communication for a transference model? First, and most importantly, it means that representing is replaced with presenting, accounting with acting out. The content of transference lies first of all in its act, which is either a reliving of features of a past relationship, or the latter’s transformation into something productively different, its recasting in light of the present situation - the emphasis in both cases being on performative constitution, such that the present is not merely remembering, signifying, or even actualizing a past, but the only form in which the latter is available under the circumstances (Freud, “Fragment”; Freud, “Remembering”). In this sense, the speaker’s casting themselves toward the reader is the form their past relationship with the mother takes in the present� Instead of receiving a report, the reader is asked to participate. While every poem can be said to be an action, this poem, qua transference, explicitly presents itself as an action that requires action in response. This action - the action of transference that the poem as a whole performs - gains special saliency against the backdrop of the fact that no action takes place in the poem insofar as there is no active verb on the level of a main clause� That the speaker addresses the reader in the place of the mother means that everything the speaker says is directed toward them� It does not mean that the reader is required to respond the way the mother does - after all, the mother’s response is part of the speaker’s rendering of the relationship which, as a whole, is their own projection� This projection is one side of the channel the speaker endeavors to establish with the reader, while the latter’s response to it, solicited by the poem but cast from outside the poem, is the other side. Not only is 144 Florian Klinger the reader not bound to replicate the mother’s response, which is strictly the speaker’s projection, but they could not even plausibly venture to do so, for the obvious reason that they are not the speaker’s mother. Overall, the communicative situation cast by the poem is the following: as the speaker relates to the mother, so the speaker’s account of this relating relates to the reader - speaker : mother = speaker (speaker : mother) : reader. As the transference is thus cast toward the reader, the latter abandons any sense that the phatic drama is staged and unfolds in front of them, but they are directly addressed by it, are its participant in that it is for them to take up the role of addressee, to constitute and uphold the channel together with the speaker� This says something about their relationship with the speaker� For it implies that responding to the act of transference in which the speaker projects their phatic relationship with the mother as their relationship with the reader is not a matter of identification. The latter belongs to the sphere of an orthogonal relating of the reader’s channel with the channel of the drama the reader watches, in which they might get invested qua identification. They don’t engage with the speaker by sharing in the loss of the mother or empathizing in any other fashion - we noted this already in our analysis of the mourning� What is demanded of the reader is not identification but participation, which is a way of saying that the reader finds themselves not through identification in the place of the speaker but through transference in the place of the mother� This is an important, quite uncommon emphasis. As readers, we don’t relate to the speaker by identifying with them� We are not close to the speaker the way we perhaps are used to empathize with the protagonist of a story; they remain opaque to us in this sense. We relate only and precisely as we stay opposite them, an other juxtaposed to us by means of the channel. Precisely as it formally constitutes our speaker and reader positions through one another, the channel is an in-between that remains external to both of us in the sense that it excludes the sharing of a viewpoint or thought content, affective or psychic states, or any other personal determination� This is why it does not constitute a problem for this operation that the mother is familiar to the speaker whereas the reader is not. This difference - the strangeness of the reader - is built into the original concept of transference that demands that the therapist remain strange, or otherwise the notion of carrying over would hardly have an application: it is not despite the fact that the recipient is strange that something is carried over, but because of it, for carrying over requires that the acting out actually manifests itself in a different context. So, transference is an operation supremely suited to describe the address to a reader who is by default not personally known to the speaker, unpredictable, and in this sense indeterminate. But, considering the premise of such strange- Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 145 ness - what then is it that carries over from the address to the mother to the address to the reader? [from natural/ conventional to performative communion] We can answer this question as we consider the larger point of such transference. In Mayröcker’s poem, I propose, transference is the transition from one order of belonging to another: from a communion based in nature or convention to a communion based in performance� If we conceive of the drama between speaker and mother as a part of a larger drama that involves us readers as addressees, this larger drama consists of transforming the speaker’s natural and conventional association with the mother into a performative association with the reader� We have reason to expand our initial talk of a drama between speaker and mother to this larger arena that involves the participation of the reader, for the operation of transference showed itself to be an acting out, a doing of the poem, that constitutes a deeper or more basic drama articulated in the very language of the first. Without changing a word of the first, this more basic drama recasts the pragmatic stakes of the situation such that, as we will see, nothing less than the identities of both the speaker and the reader are put under construction� The relationship with the mother is commonly understood as a given, a bond genealogical and social at once that one cannot choose to have or not to have� When through transference the reader comes to take the place of the mother, this natural-conventional communion is replaced by a performative one� It is not replaced by a conventional one, as there is no sense yet of which reader is going to be addressed, of novel terms of relating that are to take the place of the established terms that ground the relating with the mother. We find such terms outlined in the phatic drama: practices of greeting, welcoming, talking, calling, hugging, coming to visit - all these, regardless of their phatic qualification to communication for communication’s sake, manifest actions that give the child’s natural relationship with the mother a conventional shape� In the relation of transference, in turn, there are no such established terms, no naturally or conventionally marked preference: whoever the reader happens to be comes to serve as a participant in such performative communion� The address is universal� As the act of transference suspends the established term of association, it opens up a realm the terms of which are yet to be worked out� Having entered this relationship by the plain fact of being a reader of the poem, we participate in the speaker’s exchanging their given affiliation - practical terms of performance (conventional) as well as innate belonging to a life form (natural) - with another affiliation that consists of the performatively constituted belonging in a community of a different kind, one that takes place here and now only, and 146 Florian Klinger that for this reason cannot be anticipated or controlled from the position of the speaker who voices the poem� If in the context of natural and conventional relations, the speaker’s language use was authorized in terms of its affiliation to these orders, in the novel relation underway to be established now, no such authorization can yet be claimed; it is a matter of an order to come� [what carries over] If transference means for the reader the impossibility of identification, then this shuts off access to an inside perspective to the speaker’s relationship with the mother. The repertoire of phatic attitudes, between speaker and mother manifesting a communion based in natural and conventional affiliation, doesn’t open up to the reader as well, it remains impersonal and in this sense mute. To be sure, the poem addresses its reader in the same act in which the drama of phatic attitudes unfolds; the reader, moving through their full spectrum, may consider themselves initiated into the practice of making contact, building a channel, sustaining communion. But precisely as this is so, and by the force of the very address that summons the reader and draws them in, there seems no way they can engage in the drama. This - that the drama launches itself toward the reader in the same act in which it seals itself off from them - receives additional emphasis by the way the speaker introduces themselves. In “My mother,” the speaking subject is present only in the possessive pronoun, by grammatical implication in the mother, as it were; the speaker is present insofar as the mother is theirs� The mother in turn is present only qua filial implication in the child; she is present insofar as the child is hers. While the phrase, as we saw, is part of a narrative projected toward the reader, the fact that speaker and mother are only present through mutual implication makes them appear as a unit from which the reader is excluded� The following drama of the phatic is not an overcoming, but an extension and further manifestation of this initial reciprocal implication of speaker and mother� That is, it is part of the reader’s role cast by the poem that the phatic attitudes are not available to them to build their own relationship with the speaker by whom they are addressed. This, then, is the content of transference: the speaker projects a repertoire of phatic attitudes toward the reader in which the latter cannot recognize themselves� They are alienated in the same act that addresses them and solicits their engagement. The content of transference is negative, or rather, it consists of the negativity of being cut off from established terms of performance. Through such negativity, the transformation of the relationship from a natural and conventional affiliation, established ways of acting, to another relationship the terms of which are still to be worked out, is initiated. If the reader, in being addressed, could somehow make out the terms of relating Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 147 with the speaker by looking at the latter’s relating with the mother, such terms would not initiate but preclude transformation� Still, is the phatic drama really needed to account for transference - would not any established kind of action do just as well? Hardly, as only the phatic is impersonal, and in not allowing for identification excludes the reader, thus actively manifesting the fact that their relating to the speaker is bound to be different in the strong sense of outside established terms. Perhaps this holds for any relationship between a poem and its reader, but in the present case the poem works to actively clarify this fact, to manifest it in performance - which appears to be motivated by the premise that this poem enacts a transformation from an established to a performative affiliation of its speaker. Such clarification is achieved by the phatic drama staging the whole repertoire of performances that transference leaves behind, thus making explicit the negativity involved in the transformation� The poem doesn’t merely cast a channel toward the mother by also casting a channel toward the reader, but, in doing so, it clarifies - by having the reader encounter the fact - that the second channel is nothing like the first. [indeterminacy of speaker and reader] What then is the second channel like? Since the address is universal, the only thing that can be predicted about an encounter with a stranger is this: it must involve contact, an interpersonal relation not yet belonging to anyone in particular; strictly between agents, it cannot be conceived in terms of individual performances but requires the concept of a shared performance that constitutes performers through one another� What the poem thus casts toward the reader is not some action that, by virtue of being an action, involves a channel, but an action of building a channel, a phatic action - which, since we found the phatic to be pre-agential, cannot be an action in the normal sense� Such an action alone can be undertaken without knowing what is to come, for its sole purpose is communication as such. Revolving around its own taking place, it doesn’t require a wider sharing of purpose yet - a concept of what one is doing together - on which any normal action depends� But given that the reader’s response is not determined by established terms of performance - could it not consist of any kind of action, personal or impersonal alike? Here the poem limits the reader’s options� For once access to established terms of performance has been cut off in transference, the reader cannot be sure on what grounds to respond; deprived of an established identity as a performer, there is no personal register available to them at this point. This is not merely the uncertainty with which one encounters something never encountered before, but the more corrosive uncertainty of encountering something 148 Florian Klinger that eradicates - explicitly, by a manifest act of negation - one’s previous ways of encountering, thereby leaving it indeterminate who or what one might be. The same can be observed on the side of the speaker� If identity is constituted by casting a relation with an addressee, the speaker’s indeterminacy must directly reflect the indeterminacy the reader bears in this relation, the former’s lack of personal identity matches the lack on the side of the latter� As the executor of an act of transference that abandons established terms of performance such that natural and conventional affiliation is replaced with a performative affiliation, the speaker doesn’t relate as anyone specific; they carry an indeterminacy that is due to the fact that this is a novel relationship, one that is cast toward someone whose affiliation is not yet established, and is only to be established in this very performance� What thus is offered to the reader is a phatic communion with the speaker, a mutual attending about which nothing is known except that, by virtue of transference, it negates the repertoire of phatic attitudes developed in the drama between speaker and mother� It is a communion in which nothing personal is done or said, featuring no determinate identity on either side - for as much as the position of the addressee is under construction, so is the speaker’s who in their formation depends on the addressee in return� The poem uproots both from their established affiliations and seeks to connect them in a novel affiliation the terms of which are an open project. As the addressee of transference, the reader is a participant in the drama, and in this sense subject to the same transformation as the speaker - same not through identification but through taking part in an emergent communion and the task of a mutual constitution as performers� [transference as action form] If, as we said, our accounting for the drama of association is ultimately an accounting for the poem’s action form, we have yet to say how the sides - the drama speaker-mother and the drama speaker-reader, the action in the poem and the action of the poem, the action described and the action of describing - relate in a single unified act. But we found the unity of the sides a troubled unity, one that appears instable from within. The overall action’s running stable, its proper functioning, would require what we called an orthogonal relating of both sides of action that we also identified as the semantic (the action described) and the pragmatic (the action of describing) side of the performance. In such relating, semantics is the way pragmatics is performed, the phatic drama in the poem is the way the basic drama with the reader is cast - or, highlighting the explanatory priority of pragmatics over semantics: what the poem says can be explained in terms of what it does� Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 149 But transference, in casting the action in the poem as the action of the poem, upsets such stability: instead of performing both levels in mutual inclusiveness - having the semantic fulfill the pragmatic aim such that there is no mutual interference of the sides - there is an exchange of one side for the other, such that the pragmatic appears cast in place of the semantic in a succession of both� For an action to relate its sides qua transference means that its semantic side doesn’t contribute to its pragmatic side in the proper way, that they are detached from each other by the nothingness of the transport: if the carrying over between the sides is negativity, we have here the form of an action the pragmatics of which is not supported by its semantics� The expectation - as old as the Western institution of poetry - that the poem may assist us in engaging with it by having its saying and its doing elaborate one another reciprocally, is frustrated. Instead, pragmatics is built on semantics as it is the latter’s carrying over, its negativity, its casting itself toward an addressee� But of course, since the transfer is negativity, one side is determined whereas the other is not� Rather than having a semantic determination support a pragmatic one, we have a semantic determination to which nothing determinate on the other side yet corresponds, and that for this reason cannot receive its determination through the task of fulfilling a pragmatic aim. On the premise that what language means is determined by what it is doing, the semantic side too is rendered indeterminate. While it seems to present a sequence of familiar scenes of relating - stereotypes drawn from the repertoire of convention - the whole appears without a clear purpose, leaving it indeterminate to what end and on what terms the reader is supposed to take it up� This is to say that we are presented, in the phatic drama, with conventional terms of relating that are at the same time abandoned as they are deprived of their pragmatic support; they are presented as abandoned, for it has become unclear what they mean� But since it is all there is for a resemblance of determination, this is what we have. The only determination of the other side is that it is not this side, which means this side in its being shown serves precisely as it is negated as the only indication of a beyond. In their being presented, the conventional terms indicate their own overcoming together with the other side to which they refer and carry over through negation� In staging the drama in four scenes, the poem in a sense does nothing but dwell on that which is lost. Since it is lost the moment it is presented, the phatic drama bears the nostalgic air of an affiliation with nature and convention that appears under the premise of its bygoneness; that we still inhabit while already having moved past it; that is given to us precisely as it is uprooted not only by everything that’s to come, but already by the staging of its givenness. The relations in which our nature and convention consist are shown to us in the very 150 Florian Klinger act with which they cease to mean anything� As we make out these shapes of attending as our own past ways, they paradoxically unfold in front of us in the directionless present of the poem� Our familiarity with them seems of another time and order, but we are excluded from them not by some distance, but right here and now, in the act of making contact. If the whole performance has a certain weightlessness, this is due to the fact that neither side seems to be working normally: something (the thing described, the only thing presented to us) is given up for the sake of something of which it isn’t clear yet what it is, which in turn renders it impossible to tell what the thing given up was in the first place. While it might seem as if one side was determinate whereas the other side was open but indeterminate, a closer look has revealed that the assumed (semantic) determinateness of the drama is only the form taken by its (pragmatic) indeterminacy - but not in a positive relation of support where the semantic side would be manifesting the pragmatic side, but in a transferential relation where the former’s lack of support for the latter effects the latter’s indeterminacy which in turn puts in suspense the former’s assumed determination� Our established natural and conventional terms of engagement are put in suspense without there being any guarantee that other terms will successfully be worked out� This is to say that the poem is not an action, or rather, it is an action at best in the non-normal sense that through its very performance it undoes itself, renders itself indeterminate� Transference is the determinate operation by which the action constitutes such indeterminacy. While one part appears to hold up, it refers and transfers over to another part that doesn’t hold up and is undone� The effect however is not merely, as we said so far, that the first part is in turn rendered indeterminate. There is also an inverse effect: what originally seemed to hold up (the semantic side) is suspended, and the part that seemed undone (the pragmatic side) is established as the onset of something new� Only as one side is abandoned, as the established ways are left behind, can the other side come to pass. No determination gets from one side to the other, but the carrying over, the referring as such, opens up the other side. [an open form? ] Finally - how would an action form with these features be positioned to manifest the drama of transforming natural and conventional association into a performative association? While the form’s openness to one side (the address to the reader, that is, on as yet non-established terms of engagement), coincides with a closure to its other side (the address to the mother, that is, on established terms of engagement), this closure is characterized by an indeterminacy. This is significant: as one side abandons the terms of the other, it doesn’t relate to the latter by means of determinate negation, by which we Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 151 here understand broadly the leaving behind of something on shared terms� Instead, the closure is an indeterminate negation, which follows from the negativity of transference and the mutual indeterminacy of the sides it involves� Only through such indeterminacy can a transformation indeed take place, for as long as the novel association is on shared terms with the old one, it remains bound to it logically, no matter what empirical shape the negation takes. For the transformation in question to succeed, the poem needs to have this form. Rather than performing the onset of a novel order while leaving behind the old order tacitly, the poem performs the onset of a novel order together with the turning away from the old one this implies� When a patient in transference enacts things that are not explained by reference to the present situation, the communication is not expected to also reveal the situation left behind from which those things come. In the language of psychoanalysis, we might say that Mayröcker’s poem, in turn, presents the otherwise repressed underbelly of transference in plain daylight� It puts on display what would otherwise not be allowed to show, makes explicit the otherwise implicit terms of the natural and conventional alliance that it is in the act of abandoning� It is an act of abandoning that orients us not merely about the things left behind, but also about the terms abandoned� It is a transformation that doesn’t repress but stages and contemplates that which it leaves behind� Instead of stacking the sides on top of each other, as it were, the poem places them next to each other to exhibit their indeterminacy� It is precisely through this indeterminacy in the relating of the sides that the leaving behind doesn’t involve a repressive constraint� If the relating was based not in the negativity that is the content of transference and that connects the sides in mutual indeterminacy, but in determinate negation instead, the side turned to would determinately cancel out, replace, and therefore extinguish the side left behind� Whatever shape this logical relation would take in any given case, the fact that there is a logical relation at all renders the transformation repressive. An indeterminate negation, in turn, involves no such canceling out, which we meant to express by saying that the operation at work is an exchange� This leaves free, as it were, the side that’s left behind; it can be suspended without being logically extinguished; it is abandoned without constraint� Insofar as we relate the action featuring in the drama speaker-mother to the action featuring in the drama speaker-reader, this means that the natural and conventional association of the former is not logically overcome by the latter, but abandoned in such a way that it is not implicated in its own overcoming� Precisely as one association is exchanged for the other without constraint, the former must be part of the picture; as the poem shows, it must appear together with, next to the latter, even as it is not there anymore. Our natural and conven- 152 Florian Klinger tional association are left behind not by engaging them, working to overcome or extinguish them, but only by letting them be - in an act of doing something else that has no logical bearing on them� If the poem is not to obstruct a transformation to performative association, it must be such an act. When we locate these features of transformation in the relating of the sides of the poem’s action form, we arrive at a form that articulates within itself its own transgressive character, and for which this articulation is a constitutive part of its performance� Were the form merely to launch itself against the backdrop of established performance, it might either be overlooked as mere noise, or register as some determinate opposition to that performance, relating to it through a logical constraint in which the new negates the old only in order to be assimilated, in this very act, by the old. However, as the form brings with it that which it leaves behind, and lets it be rather than opposes it, we can neither dismiss the transformation as noise (it already relates to things), nor determine it logically and thus assimilate it to established performance (it offers no terms for such assimilation)� Can this performance the sides of which relate indeterminately still be called an action? Can it indeed, by negating one side without constraint, be considered to turn the other into an openness? Can it, as it outruns authorization by natural or conventional association, nevertheless be thought to be anything at all? The answer to these and related questions - questions that concern the improper and therefore instable makeup of the form under consideration - is clear, and it is that none of this can be said in advance� As an indeterminate negation of established terms of performance, the act of the poem gains authorization to the extent to which we as readers draw on it, make sense of it, take it up productively and work our way toward establishing it as an action on novel terms� The poem cannot bring about the transformation by itself, but it gets it underway and summons us to take part in it� Works Cited Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studies on Hysteria � The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud� Trans� James Strachey� Vol� 2� London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Freud, Sigmund. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud� Vol� 7� London: Hogarth Press, 1953. 1—122. ---. “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 12. London: Hogarth Press, 1958. 145—57. Mayröcker’s Drama of Association 153 Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language � Ed� Thomas A. Sebeok. New York: MIT Press/ John Wiley & Sons, 1960. 350—77. Klinger, Florian. “Kleist phatisch-dramatisch.” Kleist revisited � Ed� Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Friederike Knüpling. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014. 103—10. Malinowski, Bronisław. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism . Ed. C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards. London: Routledge/ Kegan Paul, 1923. 296—336. Mayröcker, Friederike. Gesammelte Gedichte 1939-2003. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004� Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 155 Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 Jasper Schagerl Humboldt Universität zu Berlin Abstract: Using a collection of cases compiled by Christian Thomasius as a paradigm, this paper shows how the practices of knowledge concerning circumstances ( circumstantiae ) lead to a far-reaching coupling of pragmatic legal texts with the simple form of the ‘case,’ as described by André Jolles. Not only do these texts serve as operators that transform readers into expert evaluators of clues; the case to be decided will now be the form of legal decision-making itself. Taking the material and medial aspects of case files as well as the situational context of their usage into consideration, I develop a dynamic notion of a casuistic form that relates internal and external circumstances� Keywords: Christian Thomasius, circumstantial evidence, files, cases, evidential paradigm Long before the modern disciplinary society transformed each individual into a case to be judged, the tradition of rhetorical jurisprudence and early modern casuistry constituted cases through sets of circumstances (Foucault 191)� Their narration did not allow “tiefere Blicke in das Menschen-Herz” [deeper glances into the human heart] 1 (Schiller 202), nor could one detect within them “das Innerste der Gedanken” [the inner core of thoughts] (Schiller 203). Nevertheless, like modern case studies, which increasingly have attracted scholarly interest as a form of writing independent of disciplinary and generic affiliations, 2 early modern cases are equally productive for both literary and scientific communication� Their potential for interdiscursive connectivity lies not in the registration of individual biographies and their turning points but rather in a focus on their particular circumstances - an almost obsessive scrutiny from which a ‘circumstantial style’ 3 of writing emerges in the field of law as well as in literature. 156 Jasper Schagerl In early modern Europe, circumstances were deployed in two main theaters of operations. In the normative fields of law and moral theology, following the tradition of rhetorical and dialectical topics, circumstances were considered to be “denen Dingen und Personen gemeinsame und äusserliche Zeichen” [signs common and external to things and persons] upon which legal decisions were based. With the help of these signs, the law itself could be “entweder geschärfft oder gelindert” [either aggravated or mitigated] (“Circumstantiæ,” col. 151). But they did not only define acts and modify rules; observing, connecting, and narrating them was also crucial in determining the probability of past (and future) events. Thus, in addition to their juridical and moral relevance, they had an eminently logical and forensic function within the “Zusammenhang[] der Dinge” [interrelation of things] as the “Grund wahrscheinlicher Vermuthungen“ [basis of probable assumptions] (“Umstand, Umstände,” col. 1063). Circumstances formed the premises of conjectural arguments� In forensics they took the form of clues, coming into play when either the truth of an event itself was not evident, or its subject and modalities were yet to be reconstructed. In both their legal and logical incarnations, circumstances play an important role in the development of an early modern poetics of casus � When the German literary scholar André Jolles integrated the poetic form of the ‘case’ ( Kasus ) into his system of Simple Forms (1930), he approached it from within this ‘circumstantial’ tradition of early modern casuistry. His remarks, however, touch only on the normative aspects of circumstances, ignoring their conjectural dimension. According to Jolles the poetic form of the ‘case’ is characterized by two criteria. First, the ‘case’ is a narrative that measures “norms […] against norms, in an ascending series,” realizing as form what Jolles calls “a dispersion […] from the norm” (144). The validity of norms is therefore assessed in individual cases: “With the case, the form arises from the use of a standard for judging actions, but what the actualization does is inquire into the value of the norm” (152—53). Second, the ‘case’ “asks the question, but cannot give the answer; […] it imposes the duty of judgment upon us, but does not itself contain the judgment” (153). The ‘case’ asks which norm does justice to the circumstances of a singular event without being able to resolve this question once and for all through a generally binding standard� Jolles’ morphological approach conceives simple forms ahistorically. Not only does his analysis of various ‘ Gestalten ’ [structured forms] neglect their historical development and medial preconditions, but he also ignores their pragmatic function as carriers of information and media for the accumulation and transmission of knowledge. The narration of cases, one must argue instead, assumes different forms and functions in different epistemic, discursive, and practical contexts. This paper therefore seeks to link the simple form ‘case’ Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 157 to its historical dimension and lay out some peculiarities of the poetics of the legal case around 1700. Jolles’ conception, according to which simple forms are generated from specific “mode[s] of engagement with the world” (xxiii) - what he calls Geistesbeschäftigungen [mental dispositions] -, requires a nominalistic inversion� Instead of essentializing “the act of weighing” ( Jolles 153) as the characteristic mental disposition of the ‘case,’ I consider it an effect of the historically contingent practices of knowledge manifested in the casuistic form� Using a collection of cases compiled by the legal scholar Christian Thomasius as a paradigm, I show how those practices lead to a far-reaching coupling of pragmatic legal texts with the poetic form of the ‘case.’ Not only do these texts serve as operators that transform readers into “weighing and judging” subjects ( Jolles 153); the case to be decided is now the form of legal decision-making itself� The premise of this conjunction lies in the early modern discourse on circumstances� Circumstantial considerations have always opened up the wide field of casuistry. After all, only particular circumstances give a case its specificity, necessitate casuistic decision-making and thus guarantee the autonomy and determinacy of this small or simple form� Yet it is the interdependence of casuistic form and contingent practices of knowledge that gives the Geistesbeschäftigung of ‘weighing and judging’ its specific historical character. Thomasius began to engage with circumstances in a new way� Their singularity at the same time constituted and transcended the form, compelling the actors involved to bring new knowledges and text types into play: expert opinions, medical breakthroughs, autopsies. These newly conceived circumstances call specific institutions of decision-making into being, giving the Geistesbeschäftigung of judging its historical particularity� When Thomasius published his four-volume collection of legal cases, Ernsthaffte / aber doch Muntere und Vernünfftige Thomasische Gedancken u. Erinnerungen über allerhand außerlesene Juristische Händel [Serious / and yet animated and reasonable Thomasian thoughts and memories about all sorts of selected legal proceedings] (1720-21), he had been engaged in a grand project of historicizing the law for several years� 4 In his view the legal procedures of the Kingdom of Prussia were “vom Kopf bis auf die Füsse mit dem Krebs behafftet” [afflicted with cancer from head to toe] ( Juristische Händel 2: 190), and he was eager to find the origin of their shortcomings. A product of his research, this collection of cases was intended to serve as an example “[des] grossen und allgemeinen Elendes so wohl in bürgerlichen als peinlichen Fällen” [of the great and general misery in civil as well as criminal cases] ( Juristische Händel 1: Preface)� It presents disturbing cases with which to explore the weak points of the law and lay bare the inadequacies of jurisprudence. The collection had the further 158 Jasper Schagerl function of providing lawyers with practical training� Prospective civil servants had to learn to navigate complex cases� The decision-making problems raised by these cases demonstrate a growing attention to circumstances in the form of clues ( Indizien ) around 1700, 5 which allowed an explicitly narrative regime of knowledge to infiltrate legal discourse. The material and pragmatic aspects of Thomasius’s collection, dictated by the legal practices of the inquisitorial trial, reflect the logic of circumstantial evidence, with its characteristic coupling of institutions, practices, and text types. This nexus is reenacted in the narratological idiosyncrasies of the cases themselves� The Juristische Händel are composed of extracts of case files. Thomasius’s decision to publish such files made sense on at least three levels. First, cases were materialized only in files. 6 In them each operation was registered and dated and thus given a “temporal index” with which “that act can be addressed as an event in time” (Vismann, Files 81). Second, by including the files, Thomasius could achieve a reality effect: the format signals that the cases in fact took place and were processed in a specific institutional framework. Third, files formed the backbone of Thomasius’s intended legal reform� 7 As the current statutes principally concerned cases that occurred “kaum alle hundert Jahr einmahl” [hardly once in a hundred years] (Thomasius, Cautelen 162) and were therefore practically useless, Thomasius had to comb through the “Fürstliche[] Archive[]” [sovereign’s archives] ( Juristische Händel 2: 180) for viable precedents� If the right law could not be found in the statutes, one had to look at the cases themselves. That such an extensive archive of case files existed at all was a consequence of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina , the criminal law code of Emperor Charles V from 1532� The Carolina had established the inquisitorial trial next to the old accusatorial trial, installing a public authority of inquiry to investigate ex officio even in the absence of plaintiffs. 8 On the one hand, this lead to a momentous amalgamation of accuser and judge; on the other, following the model of the Roman-canon procedure, the inquisitorial trial distinguished strictly between local investigation and centralized deliberation, with the dramatic consequence that defendants were never able to meet their judges. Instead, the Carolina established the institution of ‘file expedition’ ( Aktenversendung 9 ), a new form of written communication which circulated the circumstances registered on site through higher authorities� From now on the world would be observed through a ‘juridical filter’ (Kirchmeier, Verbrechen als Exemplum 8), constituting cases in the medium of files and doubling the world of experience with a legal imaginary� 10 In the publication of case files Thomasius found a means of representation for the legal practices of the institution of Aktenversendung � His collection enacted the documentary reality of law, 11 demonstrating for his readers the ‘weighing’ Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 159 of evidence on which decision-making was based. For Thomasius, this was the only form through which the way the legal system processed cases could be grasped. “Diese Umbstände,” he writes, “kan ich nicht besser beschreiben, als wenn ich den extract aus denen an uns geschickten Actis hersetze” [I cannot describe these circumstances better than by printing the extract of the files sent to us] ( Juristische Händel 1: 214)� 12 In these cases, the form is intrinsically tied to its material medium� 13 It is constituted through a functional arrangement of medial elements, defined by the affordances of the files themselves. Form emerges as part of a feedback mechanism between material preconditions and the pragmatics of a situated context. The medial potential of files to connect things and people, institutions and text types, and their function of transporting evidence from one site to another, are thus reproduced in the cases. Replicating the logic of circumstantial evidence, the casuistic form appears as a ‘tight coupling’ of those elements that are ‘loosely’ coupled by files as a medium (Luhmann 114—44). In this view, medium and form are inextricably linked, implying one another. The possibilities of the medium are regenerated within the process of formation: to qualify the circumstances, cases partially unravel their ‘tight’ texture to enter temporarily into ‘loose’ relations with other small forms, transforming the Juristische Händel into a series of casuistic assemblages� Still the multilayered observations of the actors through which the legal system operated posed Thomasius considerable narratological difficulties. He solves them by adding an additional narrative stratum, supplementing the particular circumstances of the cases with an extensive description of the “Umstände der dabey vorgekommenen Gelegenheit, und der erfolgten Sui ten” [the circumstances of the occasion that took place and the legal actions that resulted] ( Juristische Händel 4: Preface). In so doing, he creates a framework for observations that do justice to the complexity both of singular cases and of the judicial procedures that generate their outcomes� In seeking to make the circumstances of individual cases narratable, Thomasius allows his readers to observe the settings of juridical forms themselves, uncovering the institutional conditions of legal decision-making, forensic knowledge, and judgment-formation in general. These operations can be followed in the first case of Thomasius’s collection, Defension einer Frauens-Person, die wegen Kindermords verdächtig war [Defense of a woman who was suspected of infanticide], which takes place in 1681 and deals with a particularly controversial topic� 14 After a concealed pregnancy the fifteen-year-old Anna is said to have killed her baby and buried it in the garden with her parents’ knowledge� The family servants discover the child there and report the crime. The protagonist of this case, however, is not Anna, but Thomasius himself, who was assigned the case as a young lawyer. This narratological move has a specific function. Instead of relating the case in the form of a 160 Jasper Schagerl coherent story, Thomasius presents his readers with an extensive collection of files, composed of juridical and bureaucratic small forms: interrogation records, pleas and petitions, as well as reports and medical surveys. First and foremost, therefore, Thomasius must make his files speak. With the figure of the young lawyer Thomasius, he installs a second-order observer who guides readers through the stack of files. Through his eyes they can observe other actors in the legal system making observations. Moreover, by tracing the movements of this figure, Thomasius makes visible all those elements and actions of the legal system that are neither acts of writing nor techniques of inscription: informal communications, for example, but also power relations and chance encounters that do not enter into the files, but nevertheless play a considerable role in the decision of cases� Thomasius thus makes good on his promise to flesh out his cases with the settings in which they occurred, and the narrative framework in which he embeds his dry documents is not without entertainment value� 15 Before he accepts the case, the young lawyer travels incognito to the scene of the alleged crime where, by chance and through all sorts of tricks, he manages to get a first look into the state of the investigation - a trope that imitates the editorial fictions of gallant literature. The files are then presented to the reader in the order of the procedural steps that generate them and according to the protagonist’s current state of understanding� The protagonist thus uncovers the circumstances of the investigation itself (the caliber and approach of local officials, for example), while his actions embody the logic of circumstantial evidence, crossing institutional boundaries and bringing various text types and forms of forensic knowledge into play� This character had a specific place in legal and political discourse around 1700, in which lawyers had become the paradigmatic figures of both counsel and critique. As one of Thomasius’s most famous students writes, their function consisted in “die Richter wegen einer und der andern Unwissenheit, oder Ungerechtigkeit, zu erinnern” [calling to the judges’ attention any oversight or inequity] (Rüdiger 240). Lawyers required at least the same skill set as judges, as they were “diejenigen, welche dem Richter die Gesetze helffen gewissenmäßig applicir en, so daß, wenn etwa der Richter ein gewisses Gesetz nicht erwägte, oder aus einem Gesetze nicht recht schlösse, oder die æquitatem Jur. Nat. nicht betrachtete, [sie] ihn dessen erinnern und zu einer raisonnabl en Sentenz veranlassen“ [the ones who help the judges to apply the laws conscientiously, so that, if for example a judge does not entertain a certain law, or does not draw the correct conclusions from a law, or does not consider the equitable laws of nature, they can remind him thereof and move him to a reasonable sentence] Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 161 (Rüdiger 236—37). Lawyers touched upon sensitive issues, identified injustices and were - last but not least - experts in equitable decision-making. Accordingly, the figure of the young lawyer provided Thomasius with the perfect narratological tool for conveying practical knowledge� Before presenting the case files to his readers, he describes the protagonist’s experience at the crime scene. In an inn at an unnamed town the lawyer first witnesses the tremendous power and speed of rumors� He hears the “neue und in der ganzen Stadt bekante Zeitung / daß Hr. Hanß Heinrichs seine Tochter Anna ein Kind umbgebracht und ihre Mutter Maria darzu geholffen hätte” [the recent news, known to the whole city, that Anna, the daughter of Mr. Hanß Heinrich, had murdered a child with the help of her mother Maria] (Thomasius, Juristische Händel 1: 3). Not by chance does hearsay play such a prominent role in this case: Thomasius was an outspoken opponent of the legal institution of denunciatio , which, in the inquisitorial system, initiated the ‘General Inquisition’ (Koch 146— 52). For Thomasius, denunciation enabled “hämische und listige Feinde auch denen Unschuldigen […] durch […] dergleichen Angeberey Schaden […] [zu] thun / und selbige in die Inquisition zu bringen” [malicious and cunning enemies to do harm to the innocent as well […] through allegations of this kind and to bring them under inquisition] ( Juristische Händel 1: 107). And so, he locates the origins of the girl’s case not least in the “gemeine Geschrey” [vulgar clamor] and “fliegende Rede” [flying speech] of gossip ( Juristische Händel 1: 2, 56). With the narratological help of the lawyer-figure the case at hand thus becomes a medium for reflection on the actions and procedures by which the machinery of law is set in motion in the first place and events are transformed into cases. In order to determine the role of the lawyer as a narrator, his specific function in the casuistic form, and the type of decision-making problems he faces, it is vital to understand the range and peculiarity of the circumstances captured by his eye� A case with a hard-to-prove delictus occultus and no first-hand witnesses, like the one at hand, could be defined only through circumstantial evidence. Whereas circumstances generally served as variables to frame an event, in the absence of witnesses, they came into play as clues, bringing the unattestable onto the stage of juridical visibility� Without the operationality of clues the truth could not appear: “In each case, infinitesimal traces permit the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality” (Ginzburg 92). The deed in question would emerge only through the artful concatenation of its circumstances, guaranteeing its credibility� The facts of past events could only be reconstructed using what the 18 th century would come to call circumstantial evidence� This required a type of reasoning that, while dealing with evidential blind spots, looked for the truth in the contingent reflexes of the incident. Historical faith ( fides 162 Jasper Schagerl historica 16 ) was now defined as “præsumtionem veritates, ortam ex conjecturis circumstantiarum, qvæ non sœpe fallere solent” [the presumption of truth based on conjectures derived from circumstances which generally do not deceive] (Bierling and Patje 4). The observation, collection, and narrative connection of clues as the paradigmatic type of circumstances thus lift events out of a state of latency (Vogl 73), writing them into being by speculatively anticipating their existence and truth in a penumbra of suspicious details� No wonder that logical discourse around 1700 had refashioned circumstances into the basis of a new logic of probability� To assess the plausibility of events adequately, the Port-Royal Logic (1662) had insisted on paying “attention to all the accompanying circumstances, internal as well as external” (Arnauld and Nicole 264). While internal circumstances “belong to the fact itself,” external circumstances “concern the persons whose testimony leads us to believe in it” (Arnauld and Nicole 264): the authenticity and credibility of certifications and testimonies, the strength of their arguments, the trustworthiness and the intentions of the witnesses� 17 These operations thus called for a specific type of second-order observation, evoking new narratological figures able to make events legible. Unlike antique rhetorical and dialectical topics, still the point of departure for discussions of probability around 1700, 18 early modern logic distinguished the internal and external circumstances of events only under the premise of their reciprocal relatability. In so doing, logical discourse integrated the iudicium [judgement] omitted in classical topics, which by definition concentrated only on the inventio [invention] in its analysis of events. In topics, internal and external circumstances had diverged without any common denominator as artificial and non-artificial proof (Cicero II, 8), leaving the ars rhetorica in the mode of mere “participatory observation of the first order” (Campe 108). Now, everything would center on the possibility of a recursion from the external circumstances of observation to the internal circumstances of the event itself� An event was therefore never to be considered “nakedly and in itself ” (Arnauld and Nicole 264) but always in relation to other events. In order to do so, one had to consider every possible circumstance - including the circumstances of those circumstances - and observe “which ones have the most indications of truth” (Arnauld and Nicole 264). The Port-Royal Logic could not give exact rules for this sort of calculation, but it was crucial not to let oneself “be carried away by […] some general truth,” taking into account instead the “specific occasions” (Arnauld and Nicole 272—73). In this way, early modern logic enabled the evaluation of measurable probabilities, transforming the old notion of verisimilitude into a systematic mode of judgment� 19 The transformation briefly outlined here made possible for the first Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 163 time the paradoxical project of a science of singular instances� In Aristotelian epistemology the strict disjunction between scientia and historia - between systematic philosophy and the knowledge of singularities administered by rhetorical and dialectical topics - had always been fundamental, and the inauguration of this new project unified all anti-Aristotelians around 1700. 20 Singular events, which until now had only been accounted for in narrative form ( historiae ), now became cases for a scientific logic of conjecture. 21 Confronted with a multiplicity of singular cases, one no longer needed “unzählich viel Regeln nach der Anzahl aller vollkommenden [sic] Umstände” [countless rules according to the number of all occurring circumstances], as Thomasius writes ( Kurtzer Entwurff 60). Through the “Erkäntnüß des Wahrscheinlichen” [knowledge of probability] it was now possible to give “gleichmäßige Regeln” [consistent rules] even in those sciences whose object were human affairs (Thomasius, Vernunfft-Lehre 224—25). Potential facts were no longer to be identified by their propositional form alone. Rather, as in the Port-Royal Logic , facts would appear only against the background of a perspectival and therefore an eminently narrative arrangement in which the observation of facts displaced the facts themselves from the center of attention (Wolf 93; 259)� Such probabilities could be assessed only if the observer (unlike the orator of classical rhetoric) was not involved in the events under evaluation and was therefore able to distinguish “falsche Erzehlungen von wahren oder wahrscheinlichen” [false narrations from true or probable ones] (Thomasius , Cautelen 97). For Thomasius, who had been recommending the Port-Royal Logi c to his students since the 1680s ( Discours 14), another important function of the lawyer-figure was therefore to enable the measurement of probabilities as a second-order observer� As Thomasius’s student and collaborator Johann Friedrich Ludovici writes, a lawyer’s task is to inquire, “ob es wahrscheinlich sey / daß der angegebene Delinquent die böse That begangen habe” [whether it is probable that the designated delinquent had perpetrated the evil deed] (Ludovici 66). In order to do so, he must not only observe the multiple circumstances of the case itself, but also the observation of these circumstances by other actors. Those practices of knowledge that concerned circumstantial evidence therefore involved a new kind of weighing and judging Geistesbeschäftigung , which, in order to be institutionalized as a casuistic practice, first had to be trained properly. The pragmatic dimension of the collection, the training of lawyers through the circulation of practical knowledge, thus involved exercises in second-order observation. Because, as his students learned, “ein jedes factum seine eigene und besondere Umbstände hat” [every fact has its own particular circumstances] and since “alle Fälle insonderheit zu erzehlen unmöglich ist” [telling all cases one by one is impossible] (Ludovici 71; 95), prospective civil servants could not 164 Jasper Schagerl learn how to handle each singular case from systematic works. Instead, as the Port-Royal Logi c had stated, everything depended on situational judgment, making the proper training of the legal actors the most important task Thomasius and his colleagues faced. Such prudential judgment was not acquired “durch blosses Speculiren” [through mere speculation]; on the contrary, since it was understood essentially as a form of experiential knowledge, it depended on a specific form of exemplary teaching, which was able, “die Handgriffe zu zeigen / wie diese Regeln auf vorkommende Fälle geschickt zu appliciren / und bey einer zweiffelhafften oder duncklen Geschichte die nöthigen und zur Entscheidung dienenden Umstände wohl hervor zu suchen seyn” [to show the art of applying these rules proficiently to cases that transpire and, in a dubious or obscure affair, uncovering the circumstances necessary for a decision] (Thomasius, Kurtzer Entwurff 20—21). The Juristischen Händel provided exactly the right format for such examples. Using the published cases, the student readers were to learn how to assess situations with dubious evidential bases and to derive judgments from them� This accorded with Thomasius’s mantra that even “der geringste Umbstand das Recht verändert” [the slightest circumstance changes the law] ( Juristische Händel 1: 3)� Such casuistic exercises pinpointed a systematic problem within the inquisitorial trial itself: the impossibility of positively stating which kinds of clues constituted evidence and were therefore sufficient to initiate the next procedural step� 22 Instead, their validity had to be decided specifically and subjectively for each case: Allein / hier entstehet die Frage / welche indicia dann vor zureichend zu halten? Darauf kan ich weiter nichts zur Antwort geben / als daß es auf des Richters Ermessen ankomme. Die Rechts-Gelehrten sagen sonst: minima circumstantia variat rem, und lässet sich allhie auch appliciren / denn so manche inquisition, so mancherley indicia werden auch gefunden / dahero es eine allgemeine Regel dißfalls vorzuschreiben eine wahre Unmöglichkeit ist. (Ludovici 9—10) [But here the question arises, which clues are to be considered sufficient? I cannot provide more of an answer than that it depends on the discretion of the judge� The legal scholars say elsewhere: The slightest circumstance changes the case and this can be applied here as well, for in every inquiry some circumstantial evidence ( indicia ) is found which makes it a true impossibility to prescribe a general rule in this matter.] When dealing with circumstantial evidence, the legal decision could not be formalized. “[W]o die Rechts-Sachen auff das arbitrium judicis ankommen,” writes Thomasius, “da pfleget auch das arbitrium gar leicht bald so, bald anders zu fallen” [Where cases depend on judicial discretion, discretion is all to apt to turn out one way this time, the next another] ( Juristische Händel 1: 225). Clues, as a Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 165 specific type of signs, were thus an inherent source of instability, subverting the inquisitorial logic of decision-making as a formal process based on a systematic positive theory of proof, which tried to minimize the role of subjectivity (Stichweh)� The indeterminacy of circumstantial evidence undermined the positive common law of proof by invoking a casuistical approach to decision-making, essentially transforming continental criminal law into a case law system: “Wann nit muglich ist, alle Argkwonige vnnd verdechtliche fell vnnd vmbstende zu beschreiben,” the Carolina had stated, “Soll jnn fellenn, so darjnne nicht benannt seind, gleichnus genomen warden” [When it is not possible to describe all the clues and suspicious cases and circumstances, one shall compare cases that are not named here with precedents] (Art. 24). Unlike ‘objective’ testimonies and confessions under duress, which qualified as instruments of ‘direct’ proof, clues were seen as ‘indirect’ proof that itself had to be proven by witnesses first (Shapiro, Presumptions 155—58). Their ‘precarious status’ ( Jakob 35) thus prohibited a definite decision solely based on them. Nevertheless, where the proceedings lacked the requisite ‘full’ proof of two reliable eyewitnesses and the delinquent’s confession, and regular standards of evidence could not be applied, indirect proof in the form of circumstantial evidence came into play. In this case, however, a ‘ poena ordinaria ’ [ordinary punishment] could not be imposed. A ‘circumstantial’ system of law based on clues (instead of the bedrock of torture’s unquestionable truths) ultimately lead to the breakdown of the inquisitorial system of judgment itself (Langbein 45—69). Astonished and overworked legal scholars of the years around 1700 spoke with horror of cases, “[die] so tieff in die Umstände versincken, daß ein Richter mühe habe, heraus zu kommen und ein Urtheil ex bono & æquo zu sprechen” [that get so mired in circumstances that a judge has difficulty to find his way out and pronounce a sentence in equity and conscience] (“Casus pro amico,” col. 1397). Sometimes, as Thomasius writes, it could even happen that “solche indicia auff beyden Seiten vor[kommen], daß ein unpartheyischer Richter bald nicht weiß, auff welche Seite er incliniren soll” [such clues are found on both sides that an impartial judge does not know to which side he should incline] ( Juristische Händel 1: 186)� The potentially infinite reassessment of the circumstantial evidence, as well as the constant possibility that new evidence would emerge thus made a formal decision impossible. Instead, the end of a trial becomes incalculable: on the basis of circumstantial evidence, only a ‘ poena extraordinaria ’ [extraordinary punishment] can be imposed in the form of a ‘ Verdachtsstrafe ’ [penalty on suspicion] - a provisional (and generally mitigated) punishment that could be appealed at any time (Schaffstein). 23 This is precisely what occurred in the case of the murdered child: the guilt of the accused was merely anticipated in form of a suspicion without ever being 166 Jasper Schagerl confirmed. Thus, the trial did not come to a proper conclusion. Instead, it persisted in an almost infinite protraction, in which every sentence spoken could be revised. This is also why, as Thomasius writes, all the judgments presented in his collection can and should be revised by the readers: Nach Erwegung dieser bißhero erzehlten Umbstände kan nun ein unpartheyischer Leser unser allhier beygedrucktes Urtheil mit Bedacht lesen / und überlegen / ob wir bey diesem gleichwohl zweiffelhafften und etwas verwirrten Handel das rechte Pflöckgen getroffen, oder / wenn er nicht unserer Meinung ist / sich selber über den Handel machen, und unser […] gesprochenes Urtheil pro lubitu verbessern oder verschlimmern� ( Juristische Händel 1: 188) [After contemplating the circumstances narrated to this point, an impartial reader can now look at the judgment printed below with care and consider if we have hit the nail on the head in this withal dubious and somewhat confused case, or, if he is not of our opinion, apply himself to the case and lighten or compound the sentence we have passed at his discretion.] In the infanticide case, before revealing the lawyer’s actions, Thomasius asks his readers explicitly to evaluate the evidence that found its way into the files, that is, to consider which clues within the superabundant data set are indeed relevant: Worauff ich eben eigentlich damahlen reflectiret / würde zu weitläufftig fallen / allhier distincte anzuführen […]; indessen können curiöse Gemüther die bißhero excerpirten registraturen noch einmahl / da es beliebig / für sich durchgehen / und sonderlich die mit andern littern getruckten Worte in Acht nehmen / maßen in denenselben partim indicia contra reos, partim indicia pro illis enthalten sind. ( Juristische Händel 1: 15) [What I in fact reflected upon at the time would be too lengthy to enumerate here point by point […]; however, curious minds can review for themselves the registers excerpted thus far once more if they wish, paying special attention to the words printed in different type, as they contain evidence both for and against the defendants] Indeed, Thomasius had marked off clues ( indicia ) that could either incriminate or exculpate Anna typographically by setting them in bold� Of his own thoughts he reveals only this much: “Mein Hertze wurde mir / nachdem ich etwas attent dasjenige / was ich gelesen / betrachtete / umb ein gutes Theil leichter” [My heart became significantly lighter after I had considered more attentively that which I had read] ( Juristische Händel 1: 14)� Such an exercise was vital for law students because it prepared them for the legal steps required in the transition from a general to a special inquisition, as well as for the imprisonment and potential torture of the accused. Since the inquisitorial trial increased the evidential requirements in parallel to the intensification of the interrogation (from Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 167 the indicia ad inquisitionem to the indicia ad capturam to the indicia ad torturam ), and because there was always the possibility that “viele irrige und falsche indicia mit unterlauffen” [many false and incorrect clues slip in] (Ludovici 75), students had to learn how to evaluate circumstantial evidence and practice reasoning from manifest signs to causes� In Thomasius’s collection the facticity and interrelation of circumstances are always up for debate� Legal decision-making has “meistentheils nur mit wahrscheinlichen Dingen zu thun […] / wobey man keine gewisse und unstreitige Entscheidung geben kann” [to do for the most part only with probable things, where a certain and indisputable decision cannot be given] (Thomasius, Cautelen 216)� Dealing with circumstantial evidence meant determining which circumstances were to be considered and which of these were causally related to the event at hand� Since every fact is itself tied to an abductive chain of reasoning and an investigative conclusion, clues as a juridical and semiotic phenomenon are constituted as much on an interpretative as on a material basis (Eder 36—37). Thomasius asks his readers to decide what is decisive for the decision to be made ( Jakob 26)� They must then provisionally determine whether these indications speak for or against the suspect. How, for example, did eleven wounds end up on the body of the dead child? Were they inflicted by Anna or created postmortem by the skewer used by the cook while searching for the buried child in the garden? And how should the testimony of the witnesses and the accused be evaluated? To explore these questions, the young lawyer sets out to obtain medical opinions proving that the child did not die through a postnatal act but rather through a “harten Fall” [hard fall] (Thomasius, Juristische Händel 1: 70) that Anna took during her pregnancy. Since the usual truth tests institutionalized in the inquisition were not applicable, the contributions of other agencies of truth (like medical surveys 24 ) were necessary to qualify the clues in question, coupling forensic practices with the new experiential knowledge of the natural sciences, which shone not only “mit herrlichen rationibus, sondern auch mit guten unverwerflichen experimentis” [with magnificent reasoning, but also with good irrefutable experiments] (Thomasius, Juristische Händel 1: 70)� In the Juristische Händel , clues circulate through institutions, eliciting weighing and judging practices of knowledge which contribute to their forensic qualification. Dealing with circumstantial evidence requires the linkage of different operational fields and forms of knowledge, and this logic is reenacted by Thomasius’s circumstantial style of storytelling, which couples institutions and their specific text types as well. In the lawyers’ argumentation, the reference to Anna’s ‘ Fall ’ functions entirely in accordance with the original meaning of the Latin term casus : within 168 Jasper Schagerl judicial rhetoric, casus referred less to the contentious case itself than to those exculpatory coincidences introduced by the rhetor to preclude intentionality (Hohmann)� As part of the status doctrine, the casus was thus an element of the circumstances, which was of decisive importance for the assessment of the perpetrator’s actions. The emphatic discussion of the ‘ Fall ’ that pervades this first case plays with the multiple meanings of the term (from incident to coincidence to collapse) and in so doing raises the collection of cases into a self-reflexive register. In this way, Thomasius poses the question of how a person or an incident becomes a case ( Fall ). The effect of this self-thematization, which aims to clarify the premises of the legal process, is to disquiet the legal system itself. Thomasius’s “merckwürdigste[]” [strangest] ( Juristische Händel 1: Preface) cases make the procedures of law themselves seem strange� The same effect is achieved by another peculiar moment in the child murder case: Thomasius’s provocative use of equity ( Billigkeit )� In order to prove Anna’s innocence, the young lawyer must not only prove the improbability of the crime ( quaestio facti ), but also neutralize a particularly rigorous article of the Carolina , which was still in force at the beginning of the 18 th century ( quaestio juris ). Not only does the article stipulate the highest possible punishment for infanticides - they are to be “lebendig begraben vnnd gepfelt” [buried alive and impaled] ( Carolina Art� 131) - it also states that in the case of a dead child a concealed pregnancy is sufficient evidence that a woman has killed her child: Doch so eyn weibßbild eyn lebendig glidtmessig kindtlein also heymlich tregt, auch mit willen alleyn, vnd on hilff anderer weiber gebürt, welche on hilfliche geburt, mit tödtlicher verdechtlicheyt geschehen muß, So ist deßhalb keyn glaublichere vrsach, dann daß die selbig mutter durch boßhafftigen fürsatz vermeynt, mit tödtung des vnschuldigen kindtleins daran sie vor inn oder nach der geburt schuldig wirt, jre geübte leichtuertigkeit verborgen zuhalten� [But should a woman conceal a viable pregnancy and deliberately give birth alone and without the help of other women, such an unassisted childbirth must incur fatal suspicion, as there is no more plausible reason than that this very mother with malice aforethought intended through the killing of the innocent child, of which she becomes guilty before or after the birth, to keep her imprudence a secret.] In that case, any further extenuating circumstances that the accused women might submit were automatically disqualified as an “angemasten vnbeweisten freuenlichen entschuldigung” [presumptuous and unproven womanish excuse] ( Carolina Art� 131)� On the one hand, Thomasius seeks to demonstrate the evidential short circuit within this law, its missing “ratio connexionis” ( Juristische Händel 1: 67); on the Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 169 other, he must interpret the law in such a way as to show that the intention of the legislator and the meaning of the law do not refer to cases like the one at hand� While his hermeneutics bridge the gap between general law and singular case, the very application of the norm leads paradoxically to its suspension. In order to delegitimize the norm, Thomasius describes Charles V’s motivations in detail, referring to the specific historical context in which it was promulgated (58—60). Where the Carolina had classified concealment of a pregnancy as proof of homicidal intent because of the woman’s presumed fear of disgrace, Thomasius turns the tables, rejecting the possibility of intent precisely because of Anna’s fear of social ostracism� He refutes the remaining elements of the statutory definition given by the law as well: neither did the accused know about her pregnancy, since she learned about it only shortly before the birth, nor did the birth take place secretly, since the mother, as he argues, was present and the birth room could easily have been entered by other people� Thomasius’s arguments lend themselves to a restrictive interpretation of the statutory definition, discouraging its extension to this case by comparing it with the “Circumstantiæ facti” (97)� Discussing an event that took place behind closed doors was also a strategic move in Thomasius’s reform effort. A crime like infanticidium was usually a “ delictum occultum ,” an offence that occurred clandestinely and without witnesses. Where there were “keine andere indicia verhanden” [no other clues at hand], Thomasius argued that cases like this should be “GOttes gerechten Gerichte billig anheim gestellet warden” [left equitably to God’s righteous court] (59). In his view, equally applicable to other ‘occult’ crimes such as the practice of witchcraft, 25 a concealed pregnancy should not automatically be turned into a case. Instead, he distinguishes between law and morality, contributing to a process of differentiation that was steadily gaining momentum around 1700. 26 For Thomasius it is thus clear that “nach Gelegenheit der Umbstände, die Regulæ decori mit denen regulis justitiæ nicht zu vermischen [sind]” [depending on the disposition of the circumstances, ethical rules are not to be confounded with legal rules] ( Juristische Händel 1: 225)� The attested fact that Anna had “zweymahl in der Kinder-Stuben Unzucht […] getrieben” [fornicated twice in the nursery] (40) does not make her a criminal. Carnal sins and “süsse Gedancken von einem verbotenen Laster” [sweet thoughts of forbidden vice] are not to be confused with actual crimes: since no one is harmed by such a “Regung” [impulse], “so ist auch keinem Menschen daran gelegen / daß jemand deswegen gestrafft werde” [it is in no one’s interest that someone be punished for it] (Thomasius, Drey Bücher 518). Against the inquisitorial principle that “officium judicis consistit, in eo, ut inquirat in delicta, etiamsi nemo accuset” [the office of the judges consists in investigating crimes, even if there is no accuser] (Thom- 170 Jasper Schagerl asius and Saltzsieder 9), Thomasius argues that it is not always in the public interest to scrutinize and punish acts that left neither traces nor witnesses� 27 His written defense is an object lesson in legal hermeneutics 28 and equity ( Billigkeit 29 )� His interpretation of the law deviates from its narrow letter in order to bridge the gap between its generality and the particular case, reminding the judges to consider the circumstances “ex bono & æquo” [from equity and conscience] (Thomasius, Juristische Händel 1: 64)� While Thomasius with his equitable interpretation cannot abrogate the law itself, he can nevertheless, in the very act of applying it, temporarily suspend the original norm within the extant legal order (Moser 61—65). 30 As soon as he moves away from the letter of the law in order to apply it to the circumstances, the original intention of the norm is abandoned� What at first appears to be a familiar casuistic correction of an overly general principal thus turns out to be much more� By forcibly bending the norm of the Carolina in applying it to his case, Thomasius’s interpretation temporarily suspends a law that was in no way adequate to the contemporary sense of justice. Through this strategy the young lawyer becomes a provocateur of the law, looking for potential alternatives. Equity, as it functions here, is not only a weapon in the casuistic process of appropriating the law; it is a privileged medium for unsettling the established legal order, transcending the singularity of the child murder case to indict the unjust procedures of the trial itself� The premise of the narrative form that enfolds this trial thus lies in the historicization of the law that Thomasius had set in motion� This project had revealed the precarious basis of the law, enabling the observation of law as an historical and contingent social reality� At the turn of the 18 th century positive law and (divine) natural law were beginning to diverge, as indeed were law and morality more generally, opening up a space for a critique of the law through cases in which legality and legitimacy no longer coincided� Only then could a case like the alleged infanticide discussed here become a touchstone for legal sensibility and appear in the poetic form of the ‘case’ ( Kasus ) (Kirchmeier, Krise der Kritik 23—27) 31 � As a catalyst for a development that would have an illustrious career in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, Thomasius’s case files not only exposed the illegitimacy of certain laws; their ‘circumstantial’ framing story transformed the inquisitorial trial and the procedures of the law into ‘cases’ to be judged. This transformation, paradoxically, succeeds only by transcending the simple form of the ‘case’ ( Kasus ) in the direction of a dynamic casuistic form following its own ‘circumstantial’ poetics. In order to make the trial itself observable to his students (and thus turning the case into a Kasus ), Thomasius not only installs a figure that is himself a second-order observer, but demands second-order ob- Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 171 servations from his readers as well� The account of events and the assessment of that account therefore no longer diverge incompatibly into ‘artificial’ and ‘non-artificial’ proof, as they had in classical rhetorical topics. Instead, they can be distinguished only as relatively differentiated modes of assertion that can be interrelated by one and the same observer (Campe 108)� As part of the feedback loop between media technology, pragmatics, and an emergent casuistic narrative form, this logico-legal upheaval around 1700 had several major consequences. Cases could no longer be narrated from the vantage point of their solution. On the contrary, following a poetics of circumstance, they opened onto one of many possible decisions, taking a path which itself would be presented to the judgment of the reader� Cases were investigated and explained on the basis of their modalities, transforming them into ecologies of events, to be unfolded in their complexity only with the help of a specific circumstantial logic that coupled legal institutions, text types, and forms of knowledge� The readers’ attention was turned towards events lifted out of latency by an artful connection of their circumstances� In attempting to transform his readers into expert evaluators of clues, Thomasius thus invoked a conjectural mode of judgment that gave the Jollesian Geistesbeschäftigung of ‘weighing and judging’ a new and historically concrete form. Notes 1 Unless noted, all translations are my own. I want to thank Noah Willumsen for his invaluable help and support� 2 For the poetics of (literary) case studies around 1800, see Düwell; Pethes; Krause. For a summary of the key issues from the perspective of the poetics of knowledge, see Frey. 3 For the emergence of a ‘circumstantial style’ in English literature, see Gladfelder; Watt; Welsh; Wickman� 4 For Thomasius’s historization of the law, see Hammerstein. Thomasius outlines this massive project in his text Von denen Kennzeichen und Vorsichtigkeit eines politischen Artztes / der etwan zur Verkürtzung der langwierigen Processe nützlich zu gebrauchen [Of the characteristics and prudence of a political doctor suited to be used in the shortening of lengthy trials] in Juristische Händel 2: 161—201. 5 While Carlo Ginzburg famously located the evidential paradigm in the late nineteenth century, recent research (for example by Antonia Eder or Susanne Düwell) has traced its formation back to the so-called ‘saddle period’ around 1800. However, by shifting one’s focus to the period around 1700, as this paper does, it becomes clear that the early modern era had already de- 172 Jasper Schagerl veloped a distinctive scientific approach to circumstantial evidence, which justifies speaking of an evidential or rather ‘circumstantial’ paradigm. See Ginzburg; Eder; Düwell 34—39. 6 For the materiality of cases, see Hull 112—61, especially 115—26. 7 For Thomasius’s plans for a legal reform, see Kühnel 173—83. 8 For the procedural steps of the Carolina , see Ignor 41—128. 9 See Vismann, “Akten.” 10 For the creation of a legal imaginary, see White; Meyer-Krentler. 11 For the legal practices of documentation, see Latour, The Making of Law; Modes of Existence 357—79. 12 See also Thomasius, Juristische Händel 2: 37: “Damit ich aber auch die Sache etwas umständlicher vorstelle, kann ich nicht besser thun, als wenn ich solches acten -mäßig thue” [That I might present this matter more circumstantially, I can do no better than by making use of files]. 13 Recent discussions of form have stressed the elemental interrelation between form and material medium. See Latour, Reassembling the Social 222— 23; Levine 1—23; Hahn and Pethes. 14 Over the course of the 18 th century infanticide would become even more scandalous, becoming an exemplary case for the legal reforms of the Enlightenment. Not so much the deed as the perpetrator would now serve as the focus in the assessment of crimes� Individual guilt would be judged against the background of external causes such as social misery, disadvantageous living conditions and social factors in general (see Michalik)� For the appearance of this topic in literature, see Neumeyer; Niehaus. 15 By then Thomasius had achieved a certain degree of popularity� The entertainment value of the collection therefore also lay in the integration of “etliche Umstände […] / die zu meinem curriculo vitæ gehören” [a number of circumstances […] which are part of my biography] ( Juristische Händel 2: Preface), transforming the cases into anecdotes. 16 For the discourse of fides historica which revolved around the conditions of historical knowledge, see Völkel (for Thomasius’s take on fides juridica 128—36). 17 For a discussion of testimonials in early modern logical discourse, see Scholz, especially the section on the Port-Royal Logic (252—62). 18 See Campe, especially 118—46. Campe mentions Thomasius only marginally and with good cause: Thomasius never seriously engaged in discussions of aleatory probability� 19 For Thomasius’s logic of probability see Madonna� Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 173 20 See Shapiro, Probability and Certainty 3—14 . Thomasius addresses the new relation of scientia and historia extensively in the fifth chapter of Cautelen der Rechts-Gelahrheit � See Cautelen 82—108. 21 For the transformation of historia into a systematic mode of knowledge, see Seifert; Pomata and Siraisi� 22 For a genealogy of a clue-based evidential paradigm beginning with the legal procedures established by the Carolina , see Schneider. 23 For the place of the poena extraordinaria in the inquisitorial trial, see furthermore Koch 202—04; Schulz 184—87. 24 For the logic of early modern medical surveys, see Geisthövel and Hess. 25 See Thomasius, Vom Laster der Zauberei and the Exempel recht alberner und tummer Hexen-Processe [Examples of foolish and insane witchcraft-processes] in Juristische Händel 2: 300—39, as well as the Ungegründete Hexen-Proceße [unfounded witchcraft-processes] in Vol. 3: 221—33. 26 For the process of differentiation between law and morality, see Lindner and Ort; Titzmann� 27 For an extensive reading of these arguments to be found in the Dissertatio Inauguralis De Origine Processus Inquisitorii , see Dezza 99—108. 28 For the state of discussion of legal hermeneutics around 1700, see Bühler (for Thomasius 107—10); Schröder, Legal Interpretation (for Thomasius 94— 96, 99—101). 29 For a discussion of the problems of equity, see Maye. 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Großes vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste. 64 vols. Halle/ Leipzig: Zedler, 1731-1754. Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 179 Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism Florian Fuchs Freie Universität Berlin Abstract: This article compares two very different historical cases in which oral proverbs provided the essential linguistic material for literary writing: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s 1642 play The Seeing=Play of German Proverbs and Gottfried Keller’s 1856 novella cycle The People of Seldwyla . Harsdörffer’s use of the proverb as the crude but ‘original’ token of German vernacular that could help to construct German as a literary language from its spoken realist pieces returns in the crude formalism of Keller’s realist novellas. With subtle but constant allusions to the Baroque, Keller employs various proverbs as a scaffolding for his realist prose. As will be shown particularly for the novella Clothes Make the Man , these proverbs are responsible for rendering a realist modern world based on formulaic structures, while demonstrating at the same time that this realist world can, in consequence, be navigated by formulas alone. Keller’s use of the proverb as a foundation for realist diegesis hence echoes Harsdörffer’s attempt to ground German literature on the proverb� This implies that a decisive signature of the surface and the make-up of modern reality is its constant reliance on repeatable formulas� Keywords: proverb, novella, realism, Baroque, formula, Urszene, Keller, Harsdörffer This article approaches the nature of short forms from an early modern perspective and in a setting that is consciously counter-intuitive: How can citations of popular speech become poetic devices? How does the act of citation transform the popular and oral aspect of proverbs into the prosaic and poetical quality of realism? The first part will examine the German Baroque comedy The Seeing=Play of German Proverbs [ Das Schau=Spiel Teutscher Sprich=wörter ] that Georg Philipp Harsdörffer published in 1642 in volume two of his periodical collection Frauen- 180 Florian Fuchs zimmer-Gesprechsspiele � As the title of the Schauspiel suggests, the particular oddity of this comedy is that it is made almost exclusively from proverbs, and Harsdörffer even prefaces it with a short treatise on the nature of proverbs, “Of the Features, Distinction, and Translation of Proverbs” [Von der Sprichwörter Eigenschaften, Unterscheid und Dolmetschung]. I am particularly focusing on how Harsdörffer acquires the proverbs in this comedy through a strange and masked act of citation of popular speech, and my point will be to propose this forced citation of proverbs as an essentially necessary and at the same time impossible act, as another Urszene at the formal origin of modern German literature. Harsdörffer’s play presents the proverbs as a poetological but also violent order necessary during the constitution of a literary speech� The second part of this essay will revisit this primal scene in the 19th-century realism of Gottfried Keller. His The People of Seldwyla [ Die Leute von Seldwyla ] is heavily indebted to proverbs as initiators of realist narration. For Keller, proverbs try to encapsulate a pre-industrial, bygone world whose lifeworld becomes accessible again when the prose storyteller speaks beginning from and through proverbial speech� As a consequence, however, the mere claim that Keller has adapted proverbs by turning them into realist novellas would fall short. It will become clear that, in fact, Keller goes much further. Realist narration is for him a formulaic undertaking that must necessarily draw on existing linguistic formulas like proverbs to propel its own realism. Keller takes the proverb’s naturally missing original context, whose lack already Harsdörffer’s translations had drawn on, as an imperative for a narration that renders a realist world via proverbial formulas; a world in which, consequently, also only such kind of formulas suffice for the protagonists to proceed� In his brief introductory essay to the play, “Von der Sprichwörter Eigenschaften, Unterscheid und Dolmetschung,” Georg Philipp Harsdörffer explains that the Schauspiel is in fact his translation, or rather a rendering, of the Comédie des Proverbes , which was published anonymously in French in 1633 (Harsdörffer). He cautions that while he has tried his best, translating the Comédie des Proverbes is in fact an impossible undertaking because proverbs are among the most idiomatic expressions in any language� The goal of staying close to German proverbs forces him to come up with very inventive correspondences between proverbs and to use many German proverbs that do not have French equivalents. “With such liberty,” he declares, “everything else in this play had to be translated” [Mit solcher Befreyung hat alles andere in diesem Schauspiel übersetzet werden muessen] (Harsdörffer 323). For that matter, the Schauspiel ends up being no actual translation, but rather a German correlation to the formal idea that the French version puts forth: a comedy in which the characters speak Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 181 in proverbs. Contrary to the translation that Harsdörffer promises his readers, it is in fact the impossibility of translation that is the necessary ground of the work. This leads me to the very core of the problem that I am interested in here, namely the act of citing the vernacular as the forced grounding of a literary language� Harsdörffer was very invested in establishing German literary language, and during the 17th century took part in the so-called “Sprachgesellschaften” [language societies] movement that endeavored to install and cultivate High German as a truly national and poetical language (Campe)� Many of the publications from the members of his Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (1617-1680) tried to translate or even remake works from Latin, French, Italian or other established literary languages into German, a model that the Schauspiel attempts to follow� Generally, two categories of adaptation exist, as those works were either direct translations of a particular foreign author, or they were attempts to create new works based on already established genres� The Schauspiel and its purpose of creating a literary language solely based on proverbs, however, fits neither of those two categories, since its specific type of proverbial prose neither allows direct translation, nor provides a genre - the proverb - to be newly adapted to literary High German� Instead, the Schauspiel establishes a new literary language by turning the oral proverbs of the illiterate folk into a language for the literate reader. By definition, proverbs are not recorded in writing but only roam freely in lived speech and for that reason also cannot have authors or exist in a fixed, correct wording. For some time, collecting those folklorist oral proverbs had been the intent of humanist anthologies, such as Erasmus’s Adagia (1500-1533), yet their goal was not to acknowledge the synchronic wit and invention of the vernacular native speakers, but to establish diachronically the lost genealogies between those spoken proverbs and their Ancient origins. Harsdörffer is much more appreciative of the native speakers’ inventiveness, and in his introduction on the nature of the proverb directly addresses Erasmus� He asserts that the existence of around forty German variations of the commonplace “Erkenne dich selbst” [know thyself] shows that they were generated by German speakers within the German language and were therefore in no way derived from their supposed Greek and Latin ancestors “Gnothi seauton” or “Nosce te ipsum” (Erasmus 416—21). In this debate between humanism and vernacularism about the origins of proverbs, Harsdörffer effectively places his Schauspiel in favor of the intralingual polygenesis of idiomatic expressions. Before him, Julius Wilhelm Zincgref had already tried this by publishing the anthology Der Teutschen Scharpfsinnige kluge Spruech [ The German’s Ingenious Clever Sayings ] in 1626, which follows at least partly the synchronous model of citing contemporary sources , as op- 182 Florian Fuchs posed to Rudolf Agricola’s much earlier 1529 collection Drey hundert Gemeyner Sprichworter / der wir Deutschen uns gebrauchen / und doch nicht wissen woher sie kommen [ Three Hundred Common Proverbs / That We Germans Use / But Still Don’t Know From Where They Come ], which still follows humanism’s diachronic model. In his introduction, Harsdörffer’s view on the matter is clear when he declares: These proverbs and generally common phrases [Sprichwoerter und Landlauffige gemeine Reden] / are many according to place and vernacular [aller Orten nach jeder Mundart] / and multiply as well among the Spaniards / Italians / Frenchmen as they do daily among us Germans according to any quick consideration (Harsdörffer 314). The demonstrative intent of Harsdörffer’s Schauspiel , however, goes beyond this proverb controversy. Rather, the daily multiplication of German proverbs proves the genuineness and specificity of the German language and suggests further that a literary artwork could be compiled from proverbial language that would be in no direct lingual relation to other languages. In other words, Harsdörffer identifies the proverb as the authentic genre in which languages ‘naturally’ express themselves. Independent of translation, proverbs are an “Urform” of language, as one could put it. Besides being situated in a field of emerging early modern linguistic theory, the Schauspiel thus also serves the purpose of presenting an example of a literature that consists genuinely of the German vernacular. The proverb can acquire its status as “Urform” only after having undergone ‘literarization,’ that is, by a procedure that can disregard its original authorlessness and orality� This very procedure is the act of citation, which in the Schauspiel example becomes an act of positing the origin of literature at the exact place at which it cannot be posited. Citation is active underneath Harsdörffer’s work where it turns spoken, fluid sayings that belong to nobody into a prose written by named authors that can generate a completely new literary language� This act of citation has therefore a number of implications: (1) It eliminates the dialects of the spoken language in order to generate a neutral Early High German wording; (2) it turns the low art of folklore into a literary high art; (3) it provides the authorless commonplace with an author, and finally; (4) we can observe here the making of the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole , that is, the act of citation forces a spoken parole under the regime of a written langue � Today we would say in retrospect that all proverbs appearing in literature are by definition cited from the vernacular “Volksmund.” However, at a time when the rebirth of a vernacular language in its written form and for literary purposes is intended, citation is the necessary procedure to purge this genuinely German “Urform” of speech from its unwanted, undocumentable, and uncontrollable Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 183 conditions of orality, folklore, and hearsay. This procedure is hence located at the early modern threshold between epistemic “Litteratur” and poetic “Literatur,” within the larger transformation of mathesis and poesis as Andreas Kilcher has defined it (Kilcher). Unsurprisingly, the specific case of the Schauspiel therefore keeps the act of citation below its surface, which points to the more legal, policing, and even violent aspect of citations that I am interested in here. The complex function that citation has as the hidden ground of Harsdörffer’s play is reminiscent of the physical, forceful act of citation that is at the root of the force of law� While the analogy between the policing of citizens and the policing of language is historically far more complicated than can be developed in this article, the analogy is necessary to understand how in Harsdöffer’s case the act of citation has spilled over from the legal act of citing human subjects under the law to the lingual act of citing oral speech into a literary text. Harsdörffer cites the oral proverbs of the people to bring them under the rule of literature, that is, transform them from their natural state to the legal state of the written word. Like their citizen equivalents, the proverbs are naturally anarchic and stateless, which makes them the perfect matter whose transformation into written, scripturally fixed subjects can initiate the constitution of a new law of a written language� In line with this forceful nature of citation as the hidden ground of literary prose whose radically new print-based mediality had just fully emerged, Harsdörffer’s introduction to the play ends by calling on the readers for further help in installing the rule of the law of literature� He asks them to police German speakers for any still uncited, unwritten proverbs: Finally / the German reader may not receive the play idly [müssig], but consider and contemplate during all action and acts how the proverbs that were hastily shuffled together could be multiplied, improved, and comprehended so that similar projects in the future may be made into works with ample perfection. (Harsdörffer 324) In this regard, the Schauspiel is in fact an exercise to arrest further proverbs, that is, a training ground for furthering the identification and transcription of genuine German sayings and expressions into written format� By requesting and demonstrating how a German literary language must be not only semiotically but also idiomatically developed, the play is a means of enlisting readers to serve as observers of their own use of idiomatic German� It posits the act of citation as the birth of literature while at the same time forcing its readers to discipline their own oral language, that is, to self-discipline, and to follow the rule of the law of literature when using proverbs, whether in written or in spoken format� 184 Florian Fuchs But it would be highly desired from every German heart / that such aphorisms [Lehrspruech] would still today be diligently watched [beobachtet] by everyone / and brought to paper / like we find many of their kind / even of minor subjects / noted down among the Greeks and Romans. (Harsdörffer 316) Harsdörffer’s play is obviously left as a bare montage of proverbs, whose Baroque textual crudeness is apparently meant as a subversive plea to the reader to join in improving the stylistics of German� A truly painful dialogue example reads as follows: Philippin : Fire! Fire! The thieves are here! Just wait you nightbirds, we will make you get a move on: Help / help you honest neighbors! The right natural thieves are stealing our virgin / help / help because there is still time! Allägre : Money / or blood! Philippin : Oh! I’m doomed to die / if you cut me out of life. Allägre : Ha / ha / you scream like a tooth puller / quiet / or I will make you quiet. Florinda : Alas help / help / you kind folk / or I will be carried away like a relic� Lidia : Stolen water is Malvasier. Now away / away the birds are gutted / let’s make a bolt for it. (Harsdörffer 289) [ Philippin : Feurio! Feurio! Die Dieb sind da! wartet nur ihr Nachtvögel wir wollen euch Füß machen: Helfft / helfft ihr ehrlichen Nachbarn! Die rechten natürlichen Dieb stehlen unser Jungfrau / helfft / helfft weil es noch Zeit ist! Allägre : Geld / oder Blut! Philippin : O! Ich bin des Todts / wenn ihr mich umb das Leben bringt. Allägre : Ha / ha / du schreist wie ein Zahnbrecher / schweig / oder ich will dich schweigen machen� Florinda : Ach helfft / helfft / ihr lieben Leut / oder man trägt mich darvon wie ein Heilthumb� Lidia : Gestolen Wasser ist Malvasier. Nun fort / fort die Vögel sind außgenommen / last uns aus dem Staub machen.] It seems that here, the Baroque consciously chooses the proverb as a point of contact for high and low styles of language, making the proverb into the site of a ‘work on language’ not exclusive to educated poets. Whereas the development to refine vernacular German took off and succeeded, the proverb thus becomes a merely temporary vessel that will be left behind after 1700, sinking again into the ‘low’ regions of unrefined speech, where Kant will later find it as “language of the rabble [Sprache des Pöbels].” (Kant 327). Considering this other Urszene of literature that I have proposed here, a number of questions arise. Which epistemological, stylistic, and poetological consequences may have resulted from it? Are its aftereffects still detectable to us? Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 185 Just as Gustave Flaubert was doubtful of the proverb’s easy dismissal - after all, his Bouvard et Pecuchet project is a result of what he called The Dictionary of Received Ideas [ Dictionnaire des idées reçues ], a digest of people’s mindless parroting - so another realist writer, Gottfried Keller, recognized the Baroque’s formal appraisal of the proverb and the immediate connections it provides to a divergent multitude of styles, social strata, and genres. Keller’s intuition about ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels of prose led him to understand why proverb and literature became separated in the Baroque, namely because the requirements for a prose that combined high and low styles were not yet met� The goal of his realism was to change this� One thus has to assume that many of his novellas in The People of Seldwyla [ Die Leute von Seldwyla ] are based on proverbs, because Keller recognized, like Harsdörffer, that focusing on the proverb form would take him back to the common center of literary speech� Throughout his work, Keller’s Baroque appears; his novella cycle Das Sinngedicht is based largely on epigrams of Friedrich von Logau, and a whole passage of Der Grüne Heinrich is dedicated to the works of the Baroque mystic and poet Angelus Silesius, to name just two examples ( Werke 2: 849—52). Walter Benjamin, right after finishing his book on the ontology of the allegorical Baroque style, also points directly to the crucial relation between Keller and 17th-century literature. In his essay on Keller, Benjamin observes that “[Keller] often puts the words together with a baroque defiance [mit barockem Trotz], just as a coat of arms joins up halves of things” (Benjamin 59). However, this ‘Baroquism’ is not limited to Keller’s imagery, Benjamin argues, but the structure of Keller’s prose actually rests on the way content and form relate to each other in the Baroque. The quality of Keller’s style is to conjoin images while not losing a sense for structure, a feature Benjamin characterizes by explaining “[Keller’s] style of writing [Schreibart] has something heraldic about it” (Benjamin 59). The methods of Keller’s style can be so allegorical, heraldic, or rich in representing the world, thus Benjamin’s implication here, because Keller has trained them on the Baroque’s attempts to combine high and low, common and uncommon structures of literature. Like Flaubert, but more consciously so, Keller recognizes the proverb as a testing ground to develop new prose and genres, which are structurally based on the practical reality of language among the people� The form of proverbs promises realism, more than knowledge of the world does. The foremost example of Keller’s Baroque “Schreibart” is undoubtedly his novella cycle The People of Seldwyla , which not only originates from his study of Baroque literature of the 1850s, but the setting of which, the fictional city of Seldwyla, is itself a Baroque anachronism: “a small city [which] is still stuck in the same old circular wall like three hundred years ago, and hence continues to be the same hamlet” ( Werke 4: 11)� Three of the novellas are explicitly based 186 Florian Fuchs on proverbs� Spiegel, the Cat [ Spiegel, das Kätzchen ], to take just one, plainly explains its own origin from the Seldwylian proverb “He bought the fat off the cat” [Er hat der Katze den Schmer abgekauft] ( Werke 4: 240)� The short introduction transforms what could have been an etiology or an ethnological account into an ongoing dialectical dependency between novella and proverb: This proverb is also used elsewhere, but nowhere can it be heard as frequently as there [in Seldwyla], which might spring from the fact that an old legend [Sage] exists in the city about the origin and meaning of this proverb ( Werke 4: 240)� The telling of the “Sage” is the cause for the use of the proverb, and vice versa the use of the proverb causes the “Sage” to be narrated. According to Keller’s narrator, proverbs thus exist first and seem to originate from the experience of reality, but then etiological narratives such as Sagen [legends] become formed that help explain the circulation of the proverb, which speculatively imagine or explain the primal scene of the proverb’s invention and then, in turn, heighten the use and relevance of the proverb. From this perspective, short form narratives are speculative expansions and elaborations of existing phrases of oral speech whose origin explanations are inaccessible, for example because they have been forgotten. As a further consequence of this origin story proposed by Keller’s narrator, a proverb becomes citable when it is cut off from the anecdote of its historical origin, and hence demands a replacement story that is now necessarily fictive. However, this fictive story is bound to a residue of reality, the remainder of the scene in the lifeworld from which the original proverb stems, whose existence the etiological narrative has to assume, as diminished and unclear its traces may be in the proverb� This assumed residue thus propels a certain realism in the new fictive origin account of the proverb, one that the “Sage” that Keller evokes for the proverb “Er hat der Katze den Schmer abgekauft” carries forward, but that his own novella Spiegel, the Cat , effectively propels even further� Keller himself therefore explicitly links the realism of his own novellas back to an implicit historical realism originally contained in oral proverbs but necessarily forgotten over time. For Keller, 19th-century realism takes its realist drive from a forgotten realism encapsulated in orality that was lost during the programmatic move from orality to literacy and High German literature, respectively� What this statement about Spiegel, the Cat outlines is a direct morphological link between reality, proverbs, and realist short prose. The existence of proverbs, in other words, is the counterintuitive proof that reality is being experienced, and thus can be represented. However, this thesis that I have drawn from the novella’s narrator is obviously not reflective of Keller’s research into proverb theory but offers an unfounded projection. Rather, Keller takes the as- Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 187 sumed narratological symbiosis between proverb and legend as the necessary license for his own realist narration, perhaps even as an imperative: instances of speculatively historical but always already uprooted genres like the proverb will always look to reroot themselves in other contexts by generating realist fictions that speculate about its origins. Proverbial realism is only the logical consequence of the irreducible lack of a proverb’s origin. For developing this idea of a “proverbial realism,” that is, the idea of a realist prose fiction that is based on proverbs, and hence joins realism to the formulaic in a way the nature of which still needs to be determined, Keller’s novella Clothes Make the Man is the most important one� Clothes Make the Man , which carries its proverb like a device in its title, also appears in The People of Seldwyla , and offers two different ways of thinking about how the proverb instils realism into the novella� The novella’s plot is very simple and formulaic: The poor Seldwyla tailor Wenzel Strapinski accidentally arrives in the neighboring city of Goldach where he is mistaken for a prince because of his fine coat, a role he first ignores and then accepts with increasing success. This first half of the story is countered by the second, in which Strapinski’s true identity is revealed when the Seldwylians, having caught wind of their own humble townsman’s miraculous ascent to nobility in the neighboring city, arrive in Goldach just in time to join in the betrothal celebration for Strapinski and his Goldach bride� In an elaborately prepared canivalesque parade and dance, they perform the inversed meaning of the proverb “Clothes Make the Man.” In this act, the Seldwylians not only reveal that the tailor’s work of “people make clothes” is the condition for the costume effect of “clothes make people,” but also that the combination of these two abilities, tailoring and masquerading, make the story of Strapinski in Goldach possible. In the moralistic end of the novella, Nettchen, the bride of Strapinski, overcomes the shock of this revelation� She realizes that she did not fall for a simple tailor in prince’s clothes, but for the human in Strapinski, with whom she decides to start a family� One way the story can be conceived and has been interpreted is as a classic trickster story with a moralistic point, resembling a modern version of an episode from a 16th-century “chapbook” or “Volksbuch” such as Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dil Ulenspiegel (1515), the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), or Das Lalebuch (1597). The wit of the trickster, however, is replaced by the dreamy passivity of Wenzel. He does not willingly decide to trick, but only recognizes the role imposed on him when it is too late to quit and playing along has become easier than ending the masquerade. This explanation of the story is quite valid and helpful, but it makes the fact that its whole construction is based on a single 188 Florian Fuchs proverb into a merely accidental, ornamental aspect. The other interpretation results from shifting the focus away from Strapinski’s unmasking to the proverb and its formal, initiative function for the story. In this second perspective, which will be developed here, the trickster aspect of the story becomes accidental and does not necessarily derive from the use of the proverb, but instead illustrates the power of the proverb� With regard to the content, the proverb Clothes Make the Man contains the first, trickster half of the novella, and its chiastic inversion - People Make Clothes - is the result of a simple logical operation that produces the moral prescribed in the second half of the story. By considering not just one, but two sides of this reversible proverb, the novella signals it is primarily interested in the capabilities of the proverb form as such and touches on the narrative meaning of this particular proverb only as a side effect of its investigation into proverbial formulas. Already from the title, the central role of the proverb is obvious, but its true function becomes clear because the whole structure of the novella is based on developing the proverb and its chiasm, interrupted by the carnivalesque scene of code switching at the center. As a consequence, when the novella is read this way, its unfolding of the proverb has an exemplary status. This proverb and this story are not so much its interest, but rather the potential arising from the relation of proverbs to realist narratives in general� While Spiegel, the Cat explains the set-up for this test and reverse engineers proverb from novella as proof of their realistic roots, Clothes Make the Man provides a paradigmatic outcome on the purely structural level of narration� The proverb is still visible here both as the problem provided - clothes and persons, appearance and essence, or even content and form - and as the structure - the story’s symmetrical unfolding announced by the proverb title� This control over structure rather than over content is very much opposed to Harsdörffer’s Baroque use of the proverb in his Schauspiel , or even in the context of his story anthology The Grand Scene of Dismal Murder-History [ Der Grosse Schau-Platz Jämerlicher Mord-geschichte ]. In Harsdörffer, the proverb provides opinions or common-sense knowledge, much like an endoxon , 1 but is not adapted and structurally mirrored in the work as a whole. Keller, in contrast, uses proverbs not as common-sense facts to attract participation of readers, but as a container of narrative form. His ‘baroque style of writing’ is therefore limited to the dense realist descriptions and images also found in Clothes Make the Man , which Benjamin called “put together with defiance.” This Baroque prose does not take over the structure of the whole novella but remains to inform the diegetic level. It is most vivid in the descriptions of Goldach, the town in which the role of the prince is imposed on Strapinski, in which every house is ornamented with allegorical figures, images, and sententiae , that is, short moralistic Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 189 phrases and expressions� Goldach appears like an architecture-based ekphrasis of a Baroque emblem book. With amazement, Strapinski sees “fine, solidly built houses, all adorned with stone or painted symbols [Sinnbilder] and supplied with names” ( Werke 4: 303; “Clothes” 166)� Content and form of these allegories are one, no matter how old or new they are; they strictly stay on the descriptive, intradiegetic level, not affecting the overall structure of the novella. Whatever a house’s allegorical sign and inscription states is reflected by its inhabitants and their form of life and profession� The novella lists the house names that Strapinski reads and describes what he observes in the following manner: National Prosperity (a neat little house in which, behind a canary cage covered entirely with cress, a friendly old woman with a peaked bonnet sat spinning yarn), the Constitution (below lived a cooper who zealously and noisily bound little pails and kegs with hoops, hammering incessantly). One house bore the gruesome name Death; a faded skeleton stretched from bottom to top between the windows� Here lived the justice of the peace. In the house Patience lived the clerk of debts, a starved picture of misery, since in this town no one owed anyone anything. (“Clothes” 166) Keller’s Baroque prose is most tangible in such realistic descriptions that in fact consist of allegories rendered into naturalistic objects. The Baroque relationship between form and content makes the essence of a thing correspond to its appearance, which consequently also dictates how a thing must be ornamented, inscribed, or represented. As a Seldwylian receptive to costumes and carnival, Strapinski should have the ability to perform and detect such allegorical play, but, on the contrary, he lets himself be misled and mistakes an allegorical symbol for a kind of reality: “[H]e thought he was in another world […] that he had fallen into a sort of moral utopia” (“Clothes” 167). As a logical consequence of misunderstanding this agreement between content and form, he applies it as a principle to his own becoming a Prince at the tavern “The Scale”: Thus he was inclined to believe that the remarkable reception he had been given was related to this correspondence - for example, the symbol of the scale [Sinnbild der Wage] under which he lived meant that here uneven destiny was weighed and balanced and that occasionally a traveling tailor was transformed into a count� (“Clothes” 167) In this false conclusion, Goldach’s model of understanding the world, in which content and form must correspond, falsely replaces that of Seldwyla, where content and form are not tied to each other� The latter capability is manifested in the Seldwylian custom of carnival where the structure of the world is inversed, which allows the Seldwylians also to use disguises in order to reveal Strapinski’s disguise to himself, of course without the Goldachers being able to notice the difference between disguise and reality. Here, the story presents two 190 Florian Fuchs modes of signification: the allegorical mode of literalization in Goldach and the structural, formalist approach of Seldwyla, which causes the inversion of the story and corresponds to the extradiegetic function of the proverb� To deduce content from form or the man from his clothes is tempting, but only as long as this deduction is not turned into a universal law and remains only a particular conclusion. On the extradiegetic level, these two modes of signification therefore return, namely in the style and the structure of the novella. The Goldach Baroque is what Keller’s ‘baroque style of writing’ tries to achieve: a realism in which descriptions immediately correspond to a world� The Seldwyla awareness of formalism, however, is what the novella wants the reader to keep in mind at the same time, namely that his own realism only exists during a finite period of time during which the application of a particular structural principle is temporarily forgotten� The argument of Clothes Make the Man is therefore not a particular one about content and form, but one about the universality of how structural containers can produce specific relations between content and form - with the proverb as the crucial example for demonstrating this relation� What this novella allows the reader to observe is how someone who is conscious of the fabrication of reality experiences forgetting this fabrication: a Seldwylian going to Goldach. Or rather, how a realist text allows us to see how modern realism is based on disguises and how it has evolved from the literalizations of allegories pursued in the Baroque. For this reason, it is misleading to consider Keller’s reliance on proverbs and other folkloristic genres to be “updated poetical folklore studies [Volkskunde],” as Klaus Jeziorkowski has argued with reference to André Jolles’ folkloristic and partly even “völkische,” i.e., “ethnic-nationalist” idea of “simple forms” ( Jeziorkowski)� The point of the novella is not to reinstall the proverb of Clothes Make the Man , nor any other proverb into the common sense and collective communication of his readers, but rather to show that they have a structural potential, which can become a formative principle for 19th-century realist narrative� 2 Contrary to the epistemological poetics of the Enlightenment period and Romanticism, knowledge is no longer the shaping principle for narration in Keller, whether it is folkloristic, scientific, or historical. Instead, Keller marks structural principles as the forming basis of a literature� His relation to the Baroque shows this twofold interest, namely that the allegorical, detailed richness of Baroque prose is a crucial feature for realism, but that this alone does not suffice to make a work of literature relevant for the practice of life. Prose that is truly effective for the reader must rather shape its realist richness according to a form like a proverb, or a novella, that is itself rooted in the practice of life. Keller takes realist richness and the mix of style from the Baroque “Schreibart,” Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 191 but also identifies the proverb, left dormant since the Baroque, as the structural principle with the potential to relate life and literature� While it is difficult to set aside the surface and the structure of realist prose by relating one to Keller’s Baroque prose and the other to Keller’s discovery of the proverb’s structure, there is another, more straightforward relation of Keller’s novellas and the proverb. On the intradiegetic level, the primary function of the proverb for the novella becomes even clearer� Parallel to using the proverb as a formative principle for the plot of the story, the novella has various moments in which Strapinski uses fixed expressions, proverbs, or other commonplaces to keep up his disguise as a prince and extend it from a mere masquerade to his true persona� This plays a growing role as Strapinski crosses from passively being misrecognized as prince to actively behaving according to this role. At first, only his appearance and his mute behavior are interpreted by his environment: “Without waiting for an answer, the landlord of the Scale rushed to the kitchen and cried: ‘[…] the young man can scarcely open his mouth from sheer nobility! ’” (“Clothes” 154; Werke 4: 288). Then, however, the story explicitly marks “his first deliberate lie [selbsttätige Lüge]” (155; 290), which is behavioral and still non-verbal, followed by “his second deliberate error [selbsttätigen Fehler], by obediently saying yes instead of no” (157; 291). While the first ambiguous action might be less binding and could still be explained retrospectively as an accident, words here mark the second and less ambiguous degree of compliance� Shortly after this active affirmation to the innkeeper, Strapinski also acknowledges to himself that he is becoming someone other than himself: “‘Things are now as they are,’ he said to himself ” (157; 292). One could say that following the earlier observations about the difference between Seldwyla and Goldach, Strapinski begins to literalize his own social role: What his form appears to be - a prince - now begins to take over his content� This initiates a more engaged process of filling the role projected on him. Strapinski not only avoids objections or obeys rules but plays along by actively using his social intuition and skills. Having served in the cavalry, he is able to steer the carriage “in a professional manner [in schulgerechter Haltung]” (160; 296), impressing his new Goldach acquaintances with his skills as a coachman when they invite him to join them for a ride to the councilor’s estate for a game of cards� 3 During the card game, they try to converse with him through the usual small talk of the bourgeoisie, “horses, hunting, and the like” (161; 297), and Strapinski is again able to keep up his role because he knows the common expressions, which this time consist of the fixed phrases, proverbs, and commonplaces: 192 Florian Fuchs Strapinski was perfectly at home in this area too; for he merely had to dig out the phrases [Redensarten] he had once heard around officers and the landed gentry, and which had pleased him uncommonly even then� He produced these phrases only sparingly, with a certain modesty and always with a melancholy smile, and thereby achieved an effect that was only the greater. Whenever two or three of the gentlemen got up and stepped aside, they said; “He’s a perfect squire! ” (161; 297) When he is asked to sing something in Polish, since he is a Polish prince, he even remembers a folk song from a short time he spent working in Poland, and begins to sing these words, however “without being aware of its meaning [ohne ihres Inhaltes bewußt zu sein]” (164; 300). This use of a foreign language is completely stripped of meaning. Neither Strapinski nor the Goldachers understand the words, but they still function for both sides as intended. By including this case of the full formal functionality of an actually meaningless language, Strapinski’s role-play has reached its fullest extent. The narrator effectively comments that he is now behaving “like a parrot” (164; 300)� Only by using proverbs, commonplaces, and fixed expressions as formal props can Strapinski’s ‘empty’ acting stay in accordance with his social environment� Despite being uninterested in or even unaware of the meaning and significance of these phrases and their micro-narratives, he knows how to use them strategically. For the Goldachers, the content of Strapinski’s verbal utterances is mostly irrelevant, ignored, or even inaccessible (in the case of the Polish song), but functions as long as it conforms to its respective setting. What allows Strapinski to slowly succeed with his masquerade in society is the strategic and formal function of these devices and his intuition about how to use them� Of course, this is typical behavior for a trickster figure, but as argued earlier, the novella quality lies in being based on a proverb while showing how proverbs help a trickster� Keller’s texts are only two of many cases for the realist recognition of these structural and pragmatic aspects of proverbs� 4 Yet it wasn’t until the 1970s that theoretical research concluded that proverbs can be considered narrative structures and can influence other narrative structures. Even today, proverbs are mainly seen as containers of folk facts, traditionalist knowledge, or mythological wisdom. Within proverb studies, Gregory Permyakov (1919-1983) in particular has analyzed how proverbs are logical, semiotic structures of text for which a purely ornamental or entertaining function is never dominant. Instead, Permyakov argues that proverbs can be instructive, prognostic, negative, or even magical utterances, but they always and primarily have a “modeling” function. He defines this modeling function by explaining that “a proverb possessing Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 193 this function provides a verbal (or thought) model (scheme) of some real-life (or logical) situation” (Permyakov 141)� 5 The linguists Christoph Chlosta and Peter Grzybek, who apply Permyakov’s method, have especially noted the particular modeling function of Clothes Make the Man for its reversibility� Depending on context, the proverb matches the categories “Production-Non-Production,” “Revelation-Non-Revelation,” and “Qualitative Superiority-Inferiority of Things�” Chlosta and Grzybek conclude that “ Clothes Make the Man […] appears to be […] equally applicable for the case of assuming an imbalance between ‘external appearance’ and actual meaning, as it is for the case of assuming an equivalence between both.” Hence, they confirm the polyvalent semantic potential of the proverb on which Keller’s novella is built, as well as the chiastic reversibility that is so crucial for it to state the proverb as driver of formulaic narrativity. “For this reason, the logic modeling of this proverb,” they continue, “heavily depends on which implicit presuppositions one relates to it, and, respectively, which logical emphasis one puts on it” (Chlosta and Grzybek 189). Due to both its modeling of realism, as well as its polyvalent structure “Clothes Make the Man” is therefore a paradigm for the narrative potential of proverbs� Erasmus had already pointed this out in the entry “Vestis virum facit” of his Adagia (Erasmus 546—47), noting as well that this proverb is most commonly used (“vulgo tritissimum est”) by the people, even though his real interest is to establish it as invented by Homer and Quintilian� 6 Keller moves commonplace and proverb from the domain of disregarded chatter to that of micro-narrative, where it can ignite writing and narrating as an autonomous micro-story shaped by public discourse. This identification indicates the relation between literature and the reality in the public, as well as the demand for structural forms by post-epistemological narration. Keller then pushes the quality of the proverb one step further. He uses it to display the active role that proverbs play for daily life, even after they are no longer regarded as applicable know-how, and, at the same time, he frames this display into a novella that relies on the form of the proverb. As Permyakov showed, the logico-semiotic structure of proverbs thus always includes the potential to simulate the real-life situation it is meant to model. For this reason, proverbs also include a model of realism itself; they bear a clear indication of the mode of reality that has shaped them� Other instances of a realism written with “barocker Trotz” can be found all throughout Modernism - from Mallarmé to Woolf to Arno Schmidt - and it seems to go back to exactly the “Schreibart” that Benjamin pointed out for Keller. We are faced with an overpacked prose that asks too much from its readers and seems just as unsuccessful as Harsdörffer’s Schauspiel deutscher Sprichwörter � But of course, Woolf or Schmidt must not be seen as reactionary Baroquists, but 194 Florian Fuchs as Hypermodernists who wholeheartedly continue the Realist project of Keller and Flaubert� What these Hypermodernists retain from realism is the ability to render a world, and hence they do not bring back the generic orality of proverbs, but rather use the rhythm of their prose texts to render a world in which the crudeness of the forced origins of language become tangible again� Notes 1 See the convincing narratological taxonomy by Manns, especially chapter VI�3 “Das Sprichwort in den Schauplätzen, ” 200—13. 2 The only study that actively brings together Keller’s use of proverbs in his novellas (Mieder) does not recognize this structural relationship and merely notes that his is not a pedagogical, but a “künstlerischer” interest in the proverb� 3 Strapinski decides not to play, but rather to observe the Goldachers play, who confirm their Baroque view of the world by willingly including him in a theatrum mundi , that is, by organizing their social play so that he is assigned the only position on the Baroque stage in which pure observation is possible, namely that of the emperor: “So saß er denn wie ein kränkelnder Fürst, vor welchem die Hofleute ein angenehmes Schauspiel aufführen und den Lauf der Welt darstellen�” ( Werke 4: 296)� 4 For many other, exclusively German, examples, see Mieder. 5 For Permyakov, see also Grzyberk. 6 Erasmus relates it to a comment that Nausicaa makes about recognizing Odysseus only after he changed his clothes, which is quoted as well by Quintilian� Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “Gottfried Keller. 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Konzeption und Struktur des Erzählens in Georg Philipp Harsdörffers “Schauplätzen � ” Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013. Mieder, Wolfgang. “Das Sprichwort in Gottfried Kellers Die Leute von Seldwyla. ” Das Sprichwort in der deutschen Prosaliteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts � Munich: Fink, 1972. 152—67. Permyakov, Gregory. “Notes on Structural Paremiology.” From Proverb to Folk-Tale. Notes on the General Theory of Cliché . Moscow: Nauka, 1979. 130—59. Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia1 197 Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 1 David Martyn Macalester College Abstract: Readers of Adorno’s Minima Moralia have often asked and debated how this collection of aphorisms, many of which record Adorno’s personal experiences with American society, can claim any degree of objective or scientific validity. This article finds an answer to this perennial question in the peculiar way the book employs the anecdotal as a mode of presenting “actual experience�” After reviewing Adorno’s attitude toward the use of empirical methods in social research, the article contrasts the treatment of anecdotes in Adorno’s contributions to The Authoritarian Personality , an empirical study published in 1950, with his use of fragmentary anecdotal elements - brief descriptions of trivial occurrences, vignettes, highly condensed mini-narratives - in the Minima Moralia � I argue that these “anecdotal remains” constitute a form of empiricism� Seeing them as such allows us to better understand Adorno’s puzzling acknowledgment of empirical research as a needed corrective to traditional philosophy� Keywords: Minima Moralia , The Authoritarian Personality , anecdote as form, empiricism, everyday life, narrative, “Golden Gate” In America I truly experienced for the first time the importance of what is called empiricism� (Adorno, “Scientific Experiences” 370) Looking back from a distance of over two decades on the eleven years he spent in American exile, Adorno relates an “actual experience” in order to illustrate, without resorting to any detailed philosophical explanation, the phenomenon he calls “reified consciousness” (“Scientific Experiences” 347). Adorno has just 198 David Martyn recently arrived in New York and is a few weeks into his new job at the Princeton Radio Research Project� Among the frequently changing colleagues who came in contact with me in the Princeton Project was a young lady. After a few days she came to confide in me and asked in a completely charming way, “Dr. Adorno, would you mind a personal question? ” I said, “It depends on the question but just go ahead.” And she continued, “Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert? ” (“Scientific Experiences” 347) The interpretation follows immediately: “It was as if she was already thinking, as a living being, according to the pattern of the so-called ‘cafeteria’ questions on questionnaires, by which she had been conditioned. She could fit herself into such rigid and preconceived categories” (347). Formally, the little story exhibits many of what form criticism has identified as the typical features of a classical anecdote: the opening exposition of the occasio , the situation in the office at the Princeton Project, is followed immediately by the provocatio of a “personal question” that crosses the line between business and personal talk and is then brought to a form-perfect closure with the punch-line dictum of the young lady (“Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert? ”) (Schäfer 29—37). The commentary framing the anecdote subordinates the particularity of this experience to a universal phenomenon for which it is made to serve as an example, namely the “pseudo-individualization” of a “reified, largely manipulable consciousness scarcely capable any longer of spontaneous experience” (Adorno, “Scientific Experiences” 346). It is the same topic that Adorno had dealt with at greater length in the book that is still most closely associated with his personal experiences in America, the Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (1951). The book’s 153 aphorisms, 2 as dense and lengthy as those of Nietzsche, provide a multifarious diagnosis of the “damaged” society of the late capitalist era - the society of which America, as the world’s economically most advanced country, provided a particularly valuable case study to the critical eye� 3 Its symptoms included, along with the reification of consciousness, nothing less than a “withering of experience” / “Absterben der Erfahrung” ( Minima Moralia 40/ 44 4 ) under the weight of a totally administered world� It is thus easy to imagine that the little story about the “are-you-an-extrovert” lady could as well have turned up in the Minima Moralia. But a moment’s reflection shows that this would not have been possible after all, for a simple but irrefutable reason. It is that the Minima Moralia contains no anecdotes at all - at least, not with the level of formal completeness exhibited in the story from the Princeton Project. Instead, what we find are textual elements that produce the effect of the “actual experience” no less than an anecdote does, but which are never actually fleshed out into a full anecdote and are instead left Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 199 to stand alone, with no narrative frame. These are what I propose to call “anecdotal remains”: textual elements below the level of genre that could very well have been part of an anecdote, or that seem like they more properly belonged there, but aren’t, appearing instead like remainders, leftovers, or precipitates of anecdotes that have gone missing or been held back� Why the Minima Moralia gives us no anecdotes, but only such remains or fragments, is the question I would like to pursue here. My answer will be that the particular form of the anecdotal remains provides a unique way of incorporating experience into theory - one that avoids subordinating experience and empirical data to abstract theoretical claims, models, or arguments, and one that can continue to function in the face of the “withering of experience” in the reified age of late capitalism. The anecdotal remains are uniquely suited to the task of accounting for experience under the conditions of its very disappearance� They thus promise to provide new insights not only into the relationship of the anecdotal to knowledge, but also into the role of the empirical in Adorno more generally� With the anecdotal remains of the Minima Moralia , we discover a new dimension of Adorno’s long-ignored empiricism� Remains. - The most obvious examples of the kind of anecdotal fragments or remainders I have in mind are brief descriptions of trivial occurrences� They turn up without warning, right in the midst of some of the densest theoretical passages and the most drastic pronouncements on the state of late-industrial society, sometimes in series and with a concreteness that can produce the comic effect of bathos. Such for example are the often-cited descriptions of the mundane materiality of the everyday: Do not knock. - Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding the interior of the house which receives them. […] What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden? Nicht anklopfen . - Die Technisierung macht einstweilen die Gesten präzis und roh und damit die Menschen. Sie treibt aus den Gebärden alles Zögern aus, allen Bedacht, alle Gesittung. Sie unterstellt sie den unversöhnlichen, gleichsam geschichtslosen 200 David Martyn Anforderungen der Dinge. So wird etwa verlernt, leise, behutsam und doch fest eine Tür zu schließen. Die von Autos und Frigidaires muß man zuwerfen, andere haben die Tendenz, von selber einzuschnappen und so die Eintretenden zu der Unmanier anzuhalten, nicht hinter sich zu blicken, nicht das Hausinnere zu wahren, das sie aufnimmt. […] Was bedeutet es fürs Subjekt, daß es keine Fensterflügel mehr gibt, die sich öffnen ließen, sondern nur noch grob aufzuschiebende Scheiben, keine sachten Türklinken sondern drehbare Knöpfe, keinen Vorplatz, keine Schwelle gegen die Straße, keine Mauer um den Garten? (Adorno, Minima Moralia 40/ 43—44) We hear a lot about unhappy experiences with American hospitality: about the central heating in the hotel that never fails to wake one up in the small hours of the morning (117/ 131) or about the hectic atmosphere at the lunch counter: Guests and host are as if spellbound� The former are in a rush� They would prefer to keep their hats on� On uncomfortable seats they are induced by the outheld bills and the moral pressure of the waiting queues behind them to leave the place, still called with mockery a café, at all possible speed. Gäste und Wirt sind verhext. Jene sind in Eile. Am liebsten möchten sie den Hut aufbehalten. Auf unbequemen Sitzen werden sie durch hingeschobene Schecks und den moralischen Druck wartender Hintermänner dazu verhalten, den Ort, der zum Hohn auch noch Café heißt, so schnell wie möglich zu verlassen. (116—17/ 130) Alongside such caricatures of mundane objects and occurrences we find numerous vignette-like character portraits of persons who play no further role: a “woman, who is idolized because appetite shows in her so unalloyed” (77/ 85); “Writers bent on a career” who “talk of their agents as naturally as their predecessors of their publishers” (100/ 111); teenagers (“Halbwüchsige”) who, to show that they have no cause to show anyone deference or respect, “put their hands in their trouser pockets” (110/ 122)� In addition to such descriptive fragments we also find, interspersed in the theoretical prose, extremely short narrative elements, stories that have been abbreviated to the point that they are scarcely recognizable as stories� One such micro-narrative will be the subject of an extended examination at the end of this article� What can one say about the effect of these various fragments or remains of what might have been a full-fledged anecdote? For one, they clearly fit the topos of the “true story” that is a signature feature of the anecdote (Moser 61)� In their frequently comical concreteness, further emphasized by the glaring contrast to the abstract pronouncements on “damaged society” - the most famous dictum of the whole book and perhaps its most universal, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” / “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” (39/ 43), immediately pre- Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 201 cedes “Do not knock” - they appear as things that could not have been thought up but must have had their source in the messy contingency of daily life� That people in the technological age have lost the ability “to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly” is an idea the origin of which must have lain, thus at least the effect, in an actual observation: that a customer entering a bookshop, say, fails to shut the door behind him in the expectation that it will close automatically� This would mean that the anecdotal remains - as mediated through theory and the requirements of literary form as they may be - are based in “actual experience.” That is, they function as a form of empirical data for the theory of damaged life Adorno advances in the Minima Moralia. Empiricism. - On its face, of course, this claim will seem counterintuitive. The word “empiricism,” more than, say, “experience,” suggests a scientific ambition that one would not quickly associate with the essayistic, subjective character of the Minima Moralia . However, one of the primary aims of the Critical Theory, and not just in the Minima Moralia , was to demonstrate the incoherence, and thus untenability, of separating the domain of knowledge from that of subjective experience. The question of whether one may speak of empiricism in connection with anecdotes or anecdotal remains cuts to the core of Adorno’s entire theory of knowledge. It is tightly bound up with his critique of American positivism, but also - and this has garnered much less attention from previous readers - with his critique of positivism’s seeming opposite, namely the qualitative, humanistic analysis of social formations in the tradition of European philosophical and critical thought. But to see this, we need first, before turning to the Minima Moralia and their anecdotal remains, to gain some additional clarity on Adorno’s stance toward empiricism in general under the conditions of the “withering of experience” in late industrial capitalism� For the basic question is: what forms of experience can contribute to critical knowledge at all, for Adorno, under the conditions of damaged life - under conditions, that is, that would seem to reify or otherwise vitiate all experience, rendering it useless as a source of knowledge? For anyone with even a superficial knowledge of Adorno, the answer would seem to be obvious: the only experience that would qualify is that of art, or more specifically, the great works of art of high modernity� Only art can resist the logic of exchange which rules over everything in commodity-based societies - not just economic and social relations, but individual life itself in its most intimate nooks and crannies. As “plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange” / “Statthalter der nicht länger vom Tausch verunstalteten Dinge” ( Aesthetic Theory 227/ Ästhetische Theorie 337), art can show itself “as the other of this world, as exempt from the mechanism of the social process of production and reproduction,” 202 David Martyn as “das Andere, vom Getriebe des Produktions- und Reproduktionsprozesses der Gesellschaft Ausgenommene, dem Realitätsprinzip nicht Unterworfene” (311/ 461). Through artworks, experience is freed from “the compulsion of identity” / “Identitätszwang” (125/ 190) - thereby escaping the confines of a rationalism that can comprehend only what can be determined in relation to something else, hence only what can be submitted to the principle of equivalence that has its origin in the act of exchange. With works of art, an intimation of what must lie beyond all possible experience of such exchange rationalism can be gleaned� Adorno’s name for this is the “nonidentical” / “das Nichtidentische” (4/ 19). 5 Under the conditions of damaged society, art thus harbors the possibility of an experience that escapes its noxious instrumentalization and may thus serve as a valid source from which critical knowledge may be gained� But aesthetic experience is not the only form of experience that Adorno acknowledges as allowing for such knowledge� For despite Adorno’s profound skepsis toward the empirical methods he encountered in the US and which he criticized unsparingly, with time his attitude toward them grew more discerning, to the point that he was able, with good conscience, to serve as co-director of an ambitious empirical research project� This project reached fruition in the study for which Adorno would long be best known in the US, The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik et al.). 6 Undertaken with members of the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group and begun in 1944, the project was carried out in the same place, California, and at the same time that most of the aphorisms of the Minima Moralia were composed� Following the publication of this study in 1950, Adorno published a sizable number of articles and texts of varying lengths in which, reporting on his American experiences for a skeptical German readership, he refined his critique of positivism in such a way as to allow for a differentiated defense of the use of empirical methods in the social sciences� 7 What exactly it was in the use of empirical methods that Adorno found he could defend is not an easy question to answer. 8 Much easier to grasp, and much easier to fit into our common understanding of Adorno’s Critical Theory, is the other side of his position, his critique of the methods he encountered in America; so it is best to start there and then work back. The critique is directed against what Adorno sees as a false concept of objectivity, as he put it in 1957: “the notion that truth is what remains after the allegedly mere subjective addition, a sort of cost price [ Gestehungskosten ], has been deducted” (“Sociology and Empirical Research” 81-82/ “Soziologie und empirische Forschung” 211)� Such an objectivity is false because subject and object, individual and society are in fact always “mutually mediated” (“On Subject and Object” 246) - neither subject nor object has any kind of independent existence� Instead of bringing what is Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 203 objective to light, the attempt to purge the object under investigation of anything subjective will always be duped, blind to the indelible impact of subject on object and thus to its own subjective dimension. In the process, it will also necessarily lose sight of the social whole, which is both objective and subjective in itself. Or rather, would be a unity of the objective and the subjective, were it in fact a true whole. In reality, under the conditions of exchange rationalism, there is no whole - as Adorno puts it, famously, in the Minima Moralia , “The whole is the false” / “Das Ganze ist das Unwahre” (50/ 55). Ironically, and tragically, the division between subject and object carried out by objectivist empiricism is both a fabrication and true, because “the split between the living subject and the objectivity that governs the subjects and yet derives from them” is, under current conditions, real (“Sociology and Psychology I” 69). Given this state of affairs, any true empiricism would by necessity also be a critical one: the object it strives to reflect is incoherent in itself and cannot be grasped at all without exposing its falsehood and subjecting it to critique. Wherever empirical research strives for “objectivity” by getting rid of the subjective, all it does is to produce a double of damaged society instead of understanding it� This attack on the false objectivity to which empirical research all too often falls prey is only half of the picture, however, for it is paired with an equally radical critique of empiricism’s presumed other, namely the qualitative study of society in the European tradition. For the qualitative methods too, Adorno stresses, have lost sight of the whole. The philosophical concepts these methods rely on had meaning and value only in the context of a philosophy for which the entirety of positive knowledge was accessible, as was still the case with Hegel. When this continuity of philosophy with positive knowledge was broken up, the very same terms that had served well before, now used in isolation, lost their empirical footing. “But as concepts such as that of ‘mind’ [ Geist ] were torn from their context and their connection to the material,” declared Adorno, just recently returned from his 11-year exile, at a conference in Weinheim on empirical methods in 1951, “they were isolated, made absolute, turned into fetishes, to the tools of obscurantism” (“Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung” 480). Examples are Ferdinand Tönnies’ distinction between “community and society,” which, once it was made to serve as an all-encompassing dichotomy, fell prey to the worst kinds of ideological misuse, or concepts such as “inner connection to the soil” (481) or “the peasant mentality” (482) in the sociology of agriculture� Such concepts lacked both systematic consistency and any concrete reference to a specific “experiential content [ Erfahrungsinhalt ]” (480): they were thus neither theoretically nor empirically founded� Adorno’s affirmation of the use of empirical methods is best understood in the context of this critique of qualitative sociology. In empiricism, Adorno sees 204 David Martyn a corrective to the hypostatization of concepts that have lost their connection to social reality. It can provide an antidote to the “Platonic arrogance,” as Adorno puts it at one point (“Sociology and Empirical Research” 86), that subordinates the social to one’s own concepts� “Sociology is not in the humanities” / “Soziologie ist keine Geisteswissenschaft,” Adorno informs the colleagues who had remained in Germany (“Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung” 481). 9 To be sure, the use of empirical methods that Adorno here envisions diverges sharply from common practice� 10 Objectivity - understood as what is left over after anything subjective has been removed - is not the goal. This means that empirical findings are neither to be used as mere verification of theoretical postulates, nor to disprove them; this would only deepen the gulf between thought and reality, theory and experience� “It all depends on whether the theory is imposed onto the facts dogmatically, without mediation, as it were from on high, or whether a compelling implicative relationship can be constructed” / “Alles kommt darauf an, ob die Theorie dogmatisch, unvermittelt, gewissermaßen von oben her den Fakten oktroyiert, oder ob zwischen ihr und den Erhebungsbefunden eine zwingende wechselfältige Beziehung hergestellt wird” (“Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung” 486). It is precisely when the two sides, the theoretical and the empirical, are not made to agree, but on the contrary are exposed in their incompatibility that the hierarchical relationship between them can be overcome: namely as a telling symptom of a social reality that does not constitute a coherent whole to begin with� 11 In a society “whose unity resides in its not being unified” (“Sociology and Psychology I” 69), “die ihre Einheit daran hat, nicht einheitlich zu sein“ (“Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie” 44), in which human relationships are all ultimately subjected to the dictates of instrumental reason, no coherent identity, neither of the individual nor of their asocial society, can be so much as discerned, let alone made into an object of knowledge. When empirical methods are used to point to this incoherence, it follows that they too, although Adorno never says this explicitly, can occasion an encounter with the “nonidentical” - the very encounter, that is, that readers of Adorno generally see realized only in the domain of the aesthetic� 12 In damaged society, the data and the theory can never be made to agree, no more than the universal can ever, under the conditions of the rationality of exchange, do justice to the particular. Empirical studies can take account of individual experience only to the extent that they expose its very impossibility, thereby bringing to light all of the varied ways in which subject and object, individual and society, the particular and the universal are incompatible in today’s administered world� Anecdote . - Such, at least, is the attitude toward empirical methods that one can glean from Adorno’s methodological reflections. If we now take a look Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 205 at the way in which Adorno actually made use of empirical research himself, namely in the lengthy chapter of the Authoritarian Personality for which he was responsible, two things stand out: first, that the data, namely transcripts of interviews carried out with a variety of subjects by his Berkeley colleagues, quite frequently assume the form of anecdotes; and second, that in the relationship adopted toward the empirical findings, what we find is precisely the kind of “Platonic arrogance” Adorno himself warns against in the methodological metadiscourse� There is really no trace here of the “compelling implicative relationship” between theory and data that Adorno would later call for� 13 Rather, the little stories from their daily lives that the subjects provide in their responses - a dentistry student who tells proudly of how he once cheated a Jewish salesman of $100 (“That was a case where I out-Jewed a Jew” [Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality 636]); a young woman who wordlessly rebuffs the marriage proposal of a boyfriend who, in asking for her hand, also reveals his Jewish descent to her (“She just sat there without saying a word - and that was his answer” [642]) - are summarily diagnosed without further ado, while the participants’ own explanations are attributed part and parcel to their false consciousness� As with the anecdote about the young lady in the radio project (“are you an extrovert or an introvert”? ), the results of Adorno’s little forays into empirical evidence are always basically the same, though always in different and differently interesting variants: the damaged individual, the lack of true experience, and hence the lack of the empirical itself. In the effort to combat the dissemination of anti-Semitic ideas, Adorno writes in The Authoritarian Personality , it is of no use to confront prejudice with reality by providing non-Jews with more opportunity to actually interact with and experience Jews, for the simple reason that one would need first to provide for the very possibility of anything worthy of being called experience at all: one has first “to reconstitute the capacity for having experiences” (617)� 14 It’s not hard to see why readers have found the way Adorno uses and comments on the interview transcripts objectionable ( Jäger 203—05). The rift between society and individual, object and subject, universal and particular is observed and exposed from one side of that divide only, that of the universal, of theory� Instead of doing something to oppose the discrepancy between universal and particular, Adorno’s use of theory in these instances would seem to cement it� Such, at least, is the situation in the Authoritarian Personality . What, then, is the situation in that other book Adorno was writing concurrently, the Minima Moralia ? Given that the anecdotal plays a central role in both projects’ attempts to come to terms with “actual experience,” the question of how the latter book’s use of anecdotal remains functions becomes all the more compelling� In the dedication to Horkheimer, Adorno is at pains to defend and justify the subjective 206 David Martyn nature of the project: the intent is to “present aspects of our shared philosophy from the standpoint of subjective experience” / “von subjektiver Erfahrung her,” renouncing any attempt at “explicit theoretical cohesion” / “expliziten theoretischen Zusammenhang” ( Minima Moralia 18/ 17)� Quite the opposite stance is adopted in the remarks that Adorno had intended to preface The Authoritarian Personality . There, he faults the study for its exclusive focus on the subject, on what the participants in the study have to say, which would include, one assumes, their anecdotes. The roots of the prejudices the study aims to illuminate are to be found not in the subject itself, but rather in the “objective social forces which produce and reproduce bigotry, such as economic and historical determinants” (“Remarks” xlii); leaving the objective analysis out is thus highly problematic� 15 In the Minima Moralia , these reservations toward a focus on the subject are turned on their head� Precisely because the individual has lost its individuality, its constitutive difference to social convention - “society is essentially the substance of the individual” ( Minima Moralia 17/ 16) - its experience can contribute to our knowledge of both: In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category� In face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a bad conscience� Im Zeitalter seines Zerfalls trägt die Erfahrung des Individuums von sich und dem, was ihm widerfährt, nochmals zu einer Erkenntnis bei, die von ihm bloß verdeckt war, solange es als herrschende Kategorie ungebrochen positiv sich auslegte. Angesichts der totalitären Einigkeit, welche die Ausmerzung der Differenz unmittelbar als Sinn ausschreit, mag temporär etwas sogar von der befreienden gesellschaftlichen Kraft in die Sphäre des Individuellen sich zusammengezogen haben. In ihr verweilt die kritische Theorie nicht nur mit schlechtem Gewissen� ( Minima Moralia 17—18/ 16) The argument made here is not exactly compelling� 16 In The Authoritarian Personality the opinions, convictions and not least the anecdotes of the participants are discounted as sources of knowledge as long as they are not accompanied by insight into the determining “social forces” (“Remarks” xlii), that is, into the objective� In the Minima Moralia , by contrast, subjective experience is said to contribute to knowledge even without any kind of “explicit theoretical cohesion” (18/ 17)� Why is what is possible here not possible there too? In both cases, we are dealing with “damaged” individuals, with the individual in its Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 207 “period of his decay”; but only in the case of Adorno’s collection of aphorisms does this damage provide a source for knowledge, indeed a particularly rich source for knowledge of both the individual and society� One can’t help wondering whether Adorno is simply treating his personal case as an exception - as though he alone were capable of reflecting adequately and objectively on his own “damagedness�” 17 But another conclusion is possible. The two books differ not just in that the one concerns Adorno’s own experiences, while the other reports the experiences of others. There is also, and this is no small matter, a difference in form: where The Authoritarian Personality contains countless anecdotes, the Minima Moralia leaves us only with anecdotal remains� And that Adorno’s thought cannot be separated from the particular constitution of his writing has been convincingly shown more than once (Richter, “Aesthetic Theory”; Thinking with Adorno ). The difference in the way the empirical enters into relationship with theory in the case of the Minima Moralia may also or even primarily have to do with this particular narrative form� Anecdotal Remains: “Golden Gate.” - To further explore this hypothesis, let us examine more closely an aphorism from the third part of the Minima Moralia , one that has to date not been among those to which the many readers of the book have devoted a lot of their attention. This time, the anecdotal element that the aphorism purveys is not taken from the banality of the everyday, as in the examples with which we began, nor does it constitute a vignette-like portrait of a person or character, but rather it takes on the form of one of the micro-narratives alluded to above� The story concerns a shunned lover: Golden Gate. - Someone who has been offended, slighted, has an illumination as vivid as when agonizing pain lights up one’s own body� He becomes aware that in the innermost blindness of love lives that of which it is and must remain oblivious: the demand of the lover who is not blind� He was wronged; from this he deduces a claim to right and must at the same time reject it, for what he desires can only be given in freedom. Golden Gate. - Dem Gekränkten, Zurückgesetzten geht etwas auf, so grell wie heftige Schmerzen den eigenen Leib beleuchten. Er erkennt, daß im Innersten der verblendeten Liebe, die nichts davon weiß und nichts wissen darf, die Forderung des Unverblendeten lebt� Ihm geschah unrecht; daraus leitet er den Anspruch des Rechts ab und muß ihn zugleich verwerfen, denn was er wünscht, kann nur aus Freiheit kommen. ( Minima Moralia 164, translation modified/ 185) The story told here - to the extent there is one at all - is a perfectly unremarkable one of unrequited love. The narrative, stripped of all detail and description, is reduced to the point that it does not extend beyond two verbal nouns in appo- 208 David Martyn sition: “dem Gekränkten, Zurückgesetzten,” literally “the offended, slighted one.” Scarcely has Adorno finished off with this little story, he shifts into diagnostic mode and really lays it on� With the shamelessness that so many readers of the Minima Moralia find offensive and the abyssal structure of which is one of the main strategies of the whole project (Geulen, “Mega Melancholia”), Adorno treats subjective experience as no more than raw material for knowledge production. For the “pain” that is named in the very first sentence, and which one is tempted to attribute to the “protagonist,” the offended-slighted-one, is in fact just a metaphor, the mere vehicle of an analogy - an analogy that applies not to him, nor to his experience, but to his knowledge: what is “as vivid as when agonizing pain lights up one’s own body” is not what has happened to the shunned lover, but rather what he has learned from it, his “illumination.” The nameless protagonist of this torso of a tale is in fact offended not once but twice: once by the object of his blind love, who rejects him, and once by the aphorist Adorno, who says not a word about his personal experience but instead converts it without further ado into the currency of abstract knowledge. The offended one “becomes aware” (“erkennt,” cognizes or recognizes); and what he becomes aware of, what he learns and now knows, is something of universal significance. In the one who loves blindly - who merely imagines his love is requited - lives the demand of him whose love is not blind, who loves happily in the possession of his beloved� The right of the shunned one would thus be the same as that of the one whose love is returned� But this right is in fact no right� For what he demands - and he can deny this no more than he can deny his sense of having been wronged - cannot be compelled but “can only be given in freedom�” It is what by nature can never be the object of a claim. What the offended-one recognizes is thus a real contradiction: that of the inescapable incompatibility of a claim to love with love itself� We tend to take this incompatibility as a fact, as a kind of ontological given - for who hasn’t experienced it? - and therefore give it no further thought� Unless one is a character in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade 18 or a devotee of the “involuntary celebates” or “incels” who arrogate for themselves, out of pure masculinist resentment, a right to sex while leading a lonely existence in the internet� 19 But the abhorrent baselessness of this claim does not change the simple fact that it too, like everything else, is socially mediated and thus capable of showing us something about society if submitted to critique. (We recall the statement from the dedication to the Minima Moralia : “In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge” [17].) Adorno is neither a sadist nor an incel, quite the contrary: he insists here on the contradiction that both, in their egomania, would simply disregard� But the incompatibility of love and the claim to it is for Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 209 him no simple ontological fact, but a symptom or index pointing to an intolerable state of affairs in the erotic dimension of social life as it actually exists - and, more broadly still, in the relationship of the individual to society, of subject to object, of the particular and the universal generally. In a thematically related aphorism from Part One, “Morality and temporal sequence,” Adorno attempts to show why the kind of lovers who seem by their actions to most effectively oppose the principle of exchange - those who out of loyalty deny themselves to a third, however desirable he or she may be - are in fact the kind of lover who turns their beloved into an exchangeable, into a mere commodity. Precisely as the one who is not traded away for a third, the beloved becomes what could be exchanged - a possession: “Whatever is, is experienced in relation to its possible non-being. […] Once wholly a possession, the loved person is no longer really looked at” / “Was ist, wird in Beziehung zu seinem möglichen Nichtsein erfahren. […] Einmal ganz Besitz geworden, wird der geliebte Mensch eigentlich gar nicht mehr angesehen” (79/ 89). The more love attaches itself to the specificity of the other, to “this one unique being” (79/ 88), the more that specificity is seen within the frame of the general, the abstract - the exchangeable. As exaggerated and indeed perverse this categorical rejection of monogamy is, it creates the possibility - and this may be its sole function - to envision, via negation, a utopian state of affairs. This vision, to be sure, is no less exaggeratedly blissful as the caricature of monogamy was grotesque. It is that of a world in which no individual would have reason to fear betrayal simply by virtue of their unique difference, which puts them out of reach of comparison: If people were no longer possessions, they could no longer be exchanged. True affection would be one that speaks specifically to the other, and becomes attached to beloved features and not to the idol of personality, the reflected image of possession. […] The protection of anything quite definite is that it cannot be repeated, which is just why it tolerates what is different. Wären Menschen kein Besitz mehr, so könnten sie auch nicht mehr vertauscht werden. Die wahre Neigung wäre eine, die den anderen spezifisch anspricht, an geliebte Züge sich heftet und nicht ans Idol der Persönlichkeit, die Spiegelung von Besitz. […] Der Schutz des ganz Bestimmten ist, daß es nicht wiederholt werden kann, und eben darum duldet es das andere� ( Minima Moralia 79/ 88) The theme of erotic love retains its specificity here, but it is also the index of a characteristic of damaged life generally, namely a state of affairs that vitiates any possibility of true individuality through the omnipresence of exchange rationality. In the grotesque portrait of betrayal through loyalty one can discern the ugly and absurd features of a rationality that can only comprehend what 210 David Martyn can be measured against and thus exchanged for what it isn’t� We should not be misled by the technique of exaggeration here. 20 As inconceivable as a love may be that, secure in its irreplaceability, would not just tolerate, but see nothing that would so much as call for toleration in the beloved’s love for another, just so inconceivable is a state of affairs “in which people could be different without fear” / “in dem man ohne Angst verschieden sein kann” (103/ 114) - that is, in a truly and not just seemingly emancipated world� What Adorno confronts us with in “Morality and temporal sequence” is an equation with two unknown variables. The exaggeration, and this is perhaps its sole function, serves to mark the terms of this analogy, which reaches into utopia, as lying beyond all presently possible knowledge - in order to shield it from the pretense of understanding� 21 The description of the “slighted” one’s absurd claim to an equitable return on his love functions similarly. By means of its very non-sensicalness, it gestures toward an incomprehensible, utterly different state of affairs: In the senselessness of his deprivation he is made to feel the untruth of all merely individual fulfilment. But he thereby awakens to the paradoxical consciousness of generality: of the inalienable and unindictable human right to be loved by the beloved� With his plea, founded on no titles or claims, he appeals to an unknown court, which accords to him as grace what is his own and yet not his own� The secret of justice in love is the annulment of all rights, to which love points with a mute gesture. “So forever / cheated and foolish must love be�” In der Sinnlosigkeit des Entzuges bekommt er das Unwahre aller bloß individuellen Erfüllung zu spüren� Damit aber erwacht er zum paradoxen Bewußtsein des Allgemeinen: des unveräußerlichen und unklagbaren Menschenrechtes, von der Geliebten geliebt zu werden� Mit seiner auf keinen Titel und Anspruch gegründeten Bitte um Gewährung appelliert er an eine unbekannte Instanz, die aus Gnade ihm zuspricht, was ihm gehört und doch nicht gehört� Das Geheimnis der Gerechtigkeit in der Liebe ist die Aufhebung des Rechts, auf die Liebe mit sprachloser Gebärde deutet. “So muß übervorteilt / Albern doch überall sein die Liebe�” ( Minima Moralia 164—65, translation modified/ 185) The quotation from Hölderlin’s late ode “Tears” (“Thränen”), long discounted as a product of his incipient madness (Bennholdt-Thomsen 336), makes evident how outlandish this utopian vision must appear to those who have not yet lost their senses - the senseless sense, that is, of a reason that can only contrast and compare, reducing the particularity of everything to some combination of properties that thing has in common with other things, thereby subjecting it to the dictates of the commodity form� The absurdity of any universal that a modernity in the thrall of the logic of exchange can so much as think is reflected in that of a supposed Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 211 “human right” not just to love, but to be loved in return. Such a right would be both “inalienable” and “unindictable” / “unveräußerlich[]” and “unklagbar[],” we are told here� The latter term is as rare in German as it is in English and comprises within the span of its antithetical meanings the entire contradiction at issue: “unklagbar” means both “such that it cannot be the object of a legal claim” and “ irreprehensus, crimine carens, innocens, inaccusabilis ,” that is, innocent and above all reproach� 22 True would be only a love that is neither universal - granted to all without distinction - nor particular - denied to all except the one - but that would be exempt from the very logic, from the entire dichotomy of the universal and the particular. This, because it would join human beings that were no longer capable of being exchanged or even compared and who would thus know themselves to be loved in their inimitable difference. The little story about an unhappy love serves not just to illustrate the reification which in the era of late capitalism has colonized the most intimate corners of private existence� It shows too how this colonization has damaged thought itself� Even in its seemingly neutral logical form, the concept of the universal, and with it of the particular, is not given but socially mediated and thus subject to the movement of history� Neither universal nor particular: Adorno without Adorno. - Behind the sketchily told story in “Golden Gate,” according to Adorno’s biographers, lies an autobiographical experience� The “slighted” one is Adorno himself� “A number of aphorisms were evidently highly personal attempts by Adorno to come to terms with his own unhappy love relationships,” Stefan Müller-Doohm writes, including this one (307). A number of these affairs, which Adorno did not conceal from his friends or his wife, took place during Adorno’s time in California. Among them was a lasting romance with Charlotte Alexander, the wife of a friend with whom he stayed whenever his work with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group took him to San Francisco� The Alexanders were in the process of obtaining a divorce. The title “Golden Gate” may allude to this affair, which ended unhappily for Adorno when a rival appeared on the scene (Müller-Doohm 303)� But it is not just the biographers who have made this connection� Alexander García Düttmann, among the most astute of Adorno’s readers, finds the key to the aphorism’s cryptic title in a letter Adorno wrote to his former student Elisabeth Lenk alluding to a love affair with a woman in San Francisco. In the letter in question, Adorno, complimenting Lenk on her afterword to a translation of Louis Aragon’s surrealist novel Paysan de Paris , writes of how profoundly Lenk’s text had affected him, triggering memories of his own erotic experiences: The text leads directly into the thick of questions that for years occupied Benjamin and me in the most intense discussions; you can imagine how deeply your text moved 212 David Martyn me. Some of what I found there - the way cities, in connection with erotic experience, suddenly [ schockartig ] start to become allegorical - reminded me in the same shocklike way of my own experiences; the scene, to be sure, was San Francisco and not Paris� Traces of them can be found in the third part of the Minima Moralia � (Adorno and Lenk 163) Düttmann sees here the “answer to the riddle” posed by the title “Golden Gate” ( So ist es 58). To be sure, Düttmann is not interested in the biographical background for its own sake, but in the deliberately “obstinate” [ widerspenstig ] relationship of title to text� The title “turns on a private allusion that without knowing the circumstances will scarcely be recognized for what it is” (58)� The biographical experience remains hidden, with the effect that it can “remain the experience of an individual” while opening itself to a kind of intuitive recognition that leaves it to the reader to make their own use of it� Adorno “universalizes [ verallgemeinert ] ‘personal experience’ without universalizing it” (58). This is a fascinating result. In Düttmann’s reading, the aphorism provides nothing less than a way out of the logic of the universal and the particular, hence out of logic itself. Still, it is not easy to see why a riddle, which is the form Düttmann sees at work in this use of a “private allusion,” should have this effect. As long as it remains unsolved, a riddle is merely cryptic; once the answer is provided, the riddle loses its indeterminacy. The experience at issue becomes Adorno’s own, a particular that can attain to the status of knowledge only by means of universalization� If the aphorism does indeed show us a way out of the logic of the universal and the particular, this accomplishment is more likely due not to its riddle-like character but to another feature altogether� As we have seen, “Golden Gate” is subtended by an unmistakably narrative frame - reduced, to be sure, to the slightest of diegetic intimations, but recognizable as a story nonetheless� It is to such narrative reductionism - the “chaste compactness” / “keusche Gedrungenheit” with which the consummate storyteller expertly limits their report to the minimum - that Benjamin, in “The Storyteller,” attributes the signature accomplishment of true storytelling (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 91; “Erzähler” 446). For a story is capable of sharing experience in such a way that it becomes a common good; and what allows it to accomplish this feat is precisely the restraint of the teller: [T]he more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later. (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 91) Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 213 [ J]e natürlicher dem Erzählenden der Verzicht auf psychologische Schattierung vonstatten geht, desto größer wird ihre Anwartschaft auf einen Platz im Gedächtnis des Hörenden, desto vollkommener bilden sie sich seiner eigenen Erfahrung an, desto lieber wird er sie schließlich eines näheren oder ferneren Tages weitererzählen. (Benjamin, “Erzähler” 446) By means of a “process of assimilation, which takes place in depth” (91), the experience that is stored up and preserved in stories can become the common property of teller and hearer. Or rather: it loses its status as property, belongs forthwith by rights as much to the hearer as to the teller. Seen this way, the story is the antithesis of the commodity form that, for Adorno, lies at the foundation of reified society: it is not exchanged but shared; not sold but reassigned. The experience that is contained in and passed on through what Benjamin calls stories is thus not a particular , at least not in the sense that what is particular can only be assimilated by others through its generalization or universalization� Rather, it exists ab ovo only by dint of its changing hands� Benjamin’s “Storyteller” never explicitly mentions the form of the anecdote� The essay was written on commission for a periodical issue devoted to Russian literature (Helmstetter 295—96). But the effect it attributes to storytelling, to the narrative restraint that forgoes psychological detailing, journalistic “information,” anything that the hearer will not be able to remember and to “integrate[] into his own experience” (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 88—89), is illustrated by the example of an anecdote taken from Herodotus and its reprisal in Montaigne: “Herodotus offers no explanations. His report is the driest” (90). Pointing to the etymology of anecdotos , the “not-given-out,” Thomas Schestag has described the anecdote as the form that simultaneously relinquishes and retains, hence that gives and denies itself at one and the same time� The anecdote “does not hold back that something is being held back�” Anecdotes “reveal over and again that things and people literally go missing in the anecdotal: a disappearance about which anecdotes - they reveal precisely this - have no information to give” (Schestag)� Hence, if “Golden Gate” does in fact succeed in finding a way out of the logic of the universal and the particular, this effect may be best attributed to the way in which the aphorism tells a story: namely, by reducing it to the merest of anecdotal remains� 23 Indeed, “Golden Gate” confronts us with an extreme form of the narrative economy Benjamin describes. The fruit of this technique, here and throughout the Minima Moralia , is a text, saturated in personal, individual experience, the concreteness of which carries the unmistakable mark of things that have actually happened to the author at a specific time and place, but also so utterly denuded of characterizing detail that it allows for no personalization, 214 David Martyn no attribution to a determinate person or even literary figure. The text is as individual as it is anonymous� Of the “slighted” one in “Golden Gate” one could say at most that it is Adorno without Adorno: individual and universal at one and the same time� 24 For the Adorno we know from biographical sources most certainly did not behave like someone who has gained a new insight into the contradiction inherent in a lover insisting on his rights. In his affair with Charlotte Alexander, at any rate, Adorno was not about to renounce his claims - to the point that he enlisted a friend to obtain information about his new rival and, if possible, to introduce him to other women (Müller-Doohm 303). But all of this is entirely beside the point� The “slighted” one of “Golden Gate” is without doubt an autobiographical figure. That fits the genre of the anecdote, which acquired its literary structure in the context of autobiography (Moser)� But the empirical moment that derives from the “individual experience” (Adorno, Minima Moralia 17) at the root of this and other aphorisms in the collection is detached from and thus purged of the “false” that characterizes every life in reified society. What Adorno leaves us with here is the bear bone of a story in which any and all could play the principal role equally well (or rather, poorly). Ultimately, what is narrated here is no more than a feeling: that of the abandoned one who senses that his claim to requital is justified, and also not. The contradiction inherent in this feeling, not the pain actually experienced - for of this we know that it could not have been otherwise than thoroughly reified, without participation in the “true” - is an index of a false universal while pointing, “with a mute gesture,” to a human existence that is neither universal nor particular, neither subjective nor objective, and thus not even thinkable in the current state of affairs. Individual experience figures into this aphorism in such a way as to alter the very relationship between the universal and the particular. In this, the aphorism is paradigmatic for the function of the anecdote in the collection as a whole� The universal is neither exemplified nor documented, let alone symbolized or confirmed; rather, the concept of the universal in its existing form is shattered and thus set into motion. As difficult as it may be to imagine a love that places no claim to exclusivity, to possession, just so difficult to imagine is a society in which individual fulfillment would never curtail the fulfillment of others. Not before such a society is attained will individual experience, and the anecdote along with it, participate in the true. In the meantime - this is the stopgap measure Adorno attempts in the Minima Moralia - one makes due with the remains of what could have been true experience, true empiricism. The anecdote suffers the same fate as experience itself: it withers� Only on this condition can it contribute to knowledge of the true. What the anecdote, under the conditions of damaged society, cannot accomplish it leaves up to what is left of it: its remains. Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 215 Notes 1 An earlier version of this article appeared in German (Martyn, “Anekdotische Reste”)� 2 “Aphorism” is the word Adorno himself uses to refer to the numbered sections of which the book consists (18)� Other generic terms may certainly be used with equal justification, such as “fragment” (Abensour 349—50) or “thought-image” (Richter, Thought-Images 8—13). 3 For example, Adorno sees the exuberant vitality of American society as a particularly telling symptom of damaged life: “Adorno articulates a uniquely modern, American experience of alienation in which damaged life masquerades as exuberant health” (Mariotti, “Damaged Life” 170). 4 German-language sources are quoted in translation, followed by the original wherever doing so did not seem purely redundant� Citations give the page number of the English translation followed by that of the German original� Translations not otherwise credited are my own� 5 Two brief and lucid presentations of this aspect of Adorno’s aesthetic theory can be found in Jameson 15—24 and Hörisch 55—66. 6 Up until at least his death in 1969, Adorno was known in America almost entirely as the co-author of this empirical study, while the theoretical texts he was known for in Europe remained largely unread ( Jay, Permanent Exiles 121)� On The Authoritarian Personality , see Jay, Dialectical Imagination 219—52, as a general presentation still unsurpassed, and Gordon. On the success of the study, see Walter-Busch 127—33; on the marginalization of Adorno’s theoretical work in his earlier American reception, see Rayman. 7 Adorno’s American experiences with empirical methods have been taken up by numerous scholars� The best concise general discussion remains Jay’s Dialectical Imagination , 219—52. Jenemann (1—46) gives a judicious and discerning assessment; Rayman, too, stresses “the complexity of [Adorno’s] theoretical-practical stance, which acknowledges the importance of empirical research without accepting its autonomy, its claimed disinterestedness, or its uncritical constructions” (8)� On the impact of Adorno’s contribution to the authoritarianism study, see Jenemann 1—46. Jay sees Adorno’s contribution as decisive ( Permanent Exiles 125—26), as does Claussen; more generally, Claussen credits Adorno’s use of empirical methods with providing a means of emancipating traditional philosophy from dogma (7)� Wheatland draws on hitherto unmined sources to illuminate the historical context of the authoritarianism study (227—63); Jäger stresses the presumptuousness of Adorno’s attitude toward the study’s participants (195—205). 216 David Martyn 8 Typically, when readers finally get around to addressing this question, the answer they arrive at remains rather vague� Discussing Adorno’s 1951 address in Weinheim on the use of empirical methods, Jay states simply that “Adorno […] cautiously defended the usefulness of public opinion research” ( Permanent Exiles 124)� 9 Some have seen a certain amount of disingenuousness in the way Adorno presents himself on his return to Germany as the advocate of “American” methods. Hence, Offe sees two, incompatible pictures of America in Adorno (92)� Mariotti argues extensively against this view in Adorno and Democracy (15); Berman and Plass are also unconvinced� 10 As can be seen in the criticism of the methodology of the authoritarianism study from an empiricist perspective (McKinney). 11 This, at least, is one takeaway that can be gleaned from a careful reading of the relevant texts� See in particular “Sociology and Psychology”; “Sociology and Empirical Research”; “Zur gegenwärtigen Stellung der empirischen Sozialforschung in Deutschland”; and “Opinion Research and Publicness�” See also the posthumously published “Remarks” that Adorno had intended as a foreword to The Authoritarian Personality , which stress the shortcomings of the study’s one-sided use of empirical methods (nearly disqualifying the entire project even before it had seen the light of day)� For a brief and illuminating acknowledgment of the importance of Adorno’s critique of naive empiricism for the social sciences in the US, see Perrin and Jarko. 12 Two notable exceptions are Bernstein’s Disenchantment and Ethics , which attempts to show how everyday experience - including precisely the kind of insignificant occurrences that will be a focus of this article - can assume the same metaphysical importance for Adorno as the great artistic works of modernism (437—51), and Mariotti’s Adorno and Democracy , which also focuses on the experience of the nonidentical in the context of the everyday (60—62). 13 To be fair, the mutually implicative relationship Adorno had in mind in affirming the use of empirical methods would not necessarily preclude the kind of heavy-handed interpretation on display in The Authoritarian Personality . Adorno’s point was not that empirical findings shouldn’t be interpreted and explained in terms of the theory, but that the explanatory frame and the empirical observation should develop in tandem. Still, it’s hard to shake the impression, when reading the chapter Adorno contributed to The Authoritarian Personality , that the results were all determined from the outset and that the interviews are being made to fit. Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia 217 14 On Adorno and Horkheimer’s initial reluctance to focus on anti-Semitism as a subject of research and their gradual embrace of the topic and its importance for critical theory, see Jay, Permanent Exiles 90—100. 15 The one-sided focus on “reactions” at the expense of any analysis of the “stimuli” - for example, of the ways in which the media themselves exert an influence on the opinions being measured - is precisely what Adorno would later criticize so emphatically in recalling his experiences with American social scientific methods: “I oppose stating and measuring effects without relating them to these ‘stimuli,’ i.e. , the objective content to which the consumers in the culture industry […] react” (“Scientific Experiences” 343). On this aspect of Adorno’s critique of public opinion research, see Klingen. 16 On this passage and on reasons one might want to doubt its claim, see Norberg (402)� 17 That Adorno sees his own experience of exile as paradigmatic for damaged life in late capitalism in general is a common theme in Adorno criticism� See, for example, Jay, Permanent Exiles 137; Rosenthal 60; Geulen, “Without Example” 59; Huyssen 280—81. On Adorno’s complex stance vis-à-vis the authenticity of the self, see Jay, “On the Stigma of Inauthenticity.” 18 “S’il devient donc incontestable que nous ayons reçu de la nature le droit d’exprimer nos vœux indifféremment à toutes les femmes, il le devient de même que nous avons celui de l’obliger de se soumettre à nos vœux, non pas exclusivement, je me contrarierais, mais momentanément.” [“If, then, it is incontestably true that we received from nature the right to express our wishes to all women without discrimination, it is equally true that we have the right to oblige her to submit to our wishes, not exclusively - that would be a contradiction - but for the instant.”] (Sade 117). The fictional character in this famous text of Sade, which appeared in 1795, bases his alleged human right on the principles of the Revolution: precisely because a human being cannot be the property of another, no woman has the right to give herself to only one man. Of course, the argument only works on the axiom that the women are by nature the property of the men� It would be a worthwhile exercise to explore the relationship between the two aphorisms from the Minima Moralia at issue here with this text of Sade, on whom Horkheimer and Adorno were both working; see the second excursus on Kant and Sade in their Dialectic of Enlightenment 63—93. The (non-)concept of a “human right” in the domain of eros may very well have been suggested to Adorno by the reading of Sade� 19 See “Incel” on Wikipedia (accessed 15 July 2020)� 20 The function of exaggeration as a deliberately employed rhetorical technique in Adorno has been very illuminatingly explicated by Düttmann ( So 218 David Martyn ist es 50—55; Philosophie der Übertreibung 242—47). See also, with reference to Düttmann, Huyssen 279—80. Closely related to the technique of exaggeration is Adorno’s use of what Burkhardt Lindner refers to as “drasticness” (286)� 21 Gerhard Richter has commented helpfully on the function of utopia in Adorno as what points toward a way out of the entanglement of culture and thought in the barbarism of late capitalist society ( Thought-Images 189—90). 22 See the article “unklagbar” in Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Vol� 24: 1090)� “Unindictable,” while perhaps the best possible translation, captures only one side of this semantic polarity� 23 On the critical potential of Adorno’s focus on the “small” in the Minima Moralia , see Abensour 349—52. 24 Eva Geulen has drawn attention to the tension inherent in Adorno’s attributing an exemplary status to his own biography while propounding a theory that would disavow any recourse to examples: “Adorno presents his own individual fate as exile as exemplary, a lone example looking for others of its kind and unable to find them, insofar as Adorno’s own, contingent and unique life figures there as the damaged life par excellence ” (“Without Example” 59)� But if one disregards everything one has learned about Adorno’s life in America from other sources and sticks solely to what can be gleaned from the Minima Moralia , one is left with an Adorno so thoroughly shorn of the kind of particularities and phenomenological detail that is involved in painting a character portrait that it becomes hard to say who it is, exactly, whose life is said to be exemplary. Of course, the paradoxes of an example “without example” that Geulen sees at work in Adorno’s text and that are her main focus would seem to have very much the same effect. Works Cited Abensour, Miguel. “Postface: Le choix du petit” [1982]. Minima Moralia. Réflexions sur la vie mutilée . By Theodor W. Adorno. Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2003. 335—54. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. ---� Ästhetische Theorie [1970]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019. ---� Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1978. ---� Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben [1951]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980. ---� “On Subject and Object�” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords � Trans� Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 245—58. 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Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009� Dashing Expectations Jan Mieszkowski Reed College Abstract: This essay considers whether sentences are distinguished by how they meet expectations or by how they disappoint them� The initial focus is on an aphorism of Friedrich Nietzsche in which he describes his ambition to say in ten sentences what others need a book or more to express� The force of this boast is compromised by a suggestive ellipsis and an ambiguous Gedankenstrich , raising the question of whether syntactic and semantic paradigms can account for the vicissitudes of punctuation� It is notoriously difficult to decide whether any given instance of a dash is a stand-in for unarticulated content, a figure of interruption, or a type of grammatical conjunction or logical connector. In an aphoristic review of these problems, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg characterizes language as forever frustrating the expectations of its readers, writers, and speakers. Wishing for a thought often produces only a word; a demand for a word may conjure up a mere Strich . The result, as Martin Heidegger hints in some comments about Nietzsche’s overreliance on Gedankenstriche , is that any linguistic element is perpetually at risk of being exposed as nothing more than a stray mark on the page� Keywords: aphorisms, Gedankenstrich, Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, punctuation In der Sprache berühren sich Erwartung und Erfüllung� Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, §445 Even the most modest of sentences raises a host of expectations� We anticipate that its phrases and clauses will be organized in clearly defined hierarchies, working in tandem to impart content or effect a performance. Respecting the rules of grammar, modifiers will be correctly placed, nouns and verbs will ex- 224 Jan Mieszkowski hibit the proverbial “agreement,” and pronouns will refer to their antecedents. In speech, a sentence’s borders will be delineated by familiar rhythms and pauses, in writing by capitalization and terminal punctuation� As long as it is not an aphorism or similarly pithy statement with pretensions to discursive autonomy, a sentence will also have some discernible connection with the language that immediately precedes or follows it� Does this wealth of expectations preclude the possibility of surprise? As we reflect on the considerable conditioning power of formal and pragmatic conventions, we may have to remind ourselves of what might otherwise seem obvious, namely that our engagement with a sentence is frequently distinguished by what we do not or cannot anticipate� In imposing syntactic and semantic constraints on what can follow, the appearance of each new word, phrase, or clause necessarily forecloses on an immeasurably large number of alternative possibilities, but these eminently concrete hints about what is coming next are often incomplete and sometimes downright misleading. In fact, if we start processing a verbal formation and realize that we do know exactly where it is going, this can only mean that we have read or heard it before, that it is part of an overtly repetitive pattern, or that it is the inexorable conclusion to a proper syllogism, the dictates of logic having taken precedence over the whims of compositional freedom: “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates . . .” The tension between the predictable and the unpredictable that informs any sentence may be subtle or acute. Correspondingly, there is considerable rhetorical advantage to be won by stabilizing or upsetting the tenuous balance between the foreseen and the unforeseen. A writer or orator can, for example, choose to deliberately create expectations that are fulfilled or thwarted only a couple of phrases later, although to go too far in either direction is to risk being dismissed as “predictable” or “gimmicky�” The stakes of such negotiations are particularly high for aphorisms, riddles, and other texts that trade on their promise to provide something out of the ordinary in very short order, distilling form and content to such a degree that length and significance become inversely related. When it comes to playing on the relationship between anticipation and disappointment at the level of the sentence, Friedrich Nietzsche is notorious for leaving his readers perplexed about whether their expectations for and subsequent reactions to any given claim are well-founded or overblown. The excitement with which we approach his audaciously dynamic prose is tinged with an uneasy feeling that nothing we have been taught about acclimating ourselves to the patterns of an author’s style is going to prove helpful� Late in Götzen-Dämmerung, Nietzsche offers one of his boldest comments about his ambitions for his work: “Der Aphorismus, die Sentenz, in denen ich als der Erste unter Deutschen Meister bin, sind die Formen ‘der Ewigkeit’; mein Ehrgeiz Dashing Expectations 225 ist, in zehn Sätzen zu sagen, was jeder Andre in einem Buche sagt, - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt . . .” (153). If Nietzsche’s writing is to win the immortality he envisions for it, he maintains that it will be in virtue of both its form and its content - in fact, especially its content (“der Form nach, der Substanz nach”), albeit a content whose superiority is inextricably bound up with its status as tersely striking and strikingly terse (153; emphasis in original)� It is hard not to read Nietzsche’s boast as a slight on our own compositional powers. If ten of his sentences are worth five thousand of our own, we at the very least have to be concerned about our efficiency. Seeking reassurance on this point, we should remember that brevity is hardly the only stylistic modality worthy of praise� As much as we may laud - or envy - the incisiveness of witty one-liners, superior analyses are just as likely to be distinguished by the systematic scrutiny of detail and the sustained elaboration of a demonstration over paragraphs or pages. It is not for nothing that short forms frequently find themselves under suspicion of being short cuts, more intellectual sleights of hand than substantive interventions, aesthetic novelties rather than reliable sources of insight� In this regard, Nietzsche’s recourse to an ellipsis at the end of his sentence about doing more with less may seem like a cheap trick� A string of three dots can be suggestive, in some contexts provocative, but surely using this trio of marks should not get one credit for condensing more content into fewer words� If it were this easy, we could simply write “. . .” and declare ourselves the masters of pithiness, our preeminence open to challenge only by a writer daring enough to begin and end a text with a single period� In a sentence about saying everything in ten sentences, Nietzsche’s decision to close with a string of dots could even be read as an admission of failure, unless the ellipsis expresses what everyone else does not say, or rather, expresses what everyone else does not say by eliding it� As Wittgenstein might have said in a book - or ten sentences - but did not, “That which is not said must be ellipsed.” “Der Aphorismus, die Sentenz, in denen ich als der Erste unter Deutschen Meister bin, sind die Formen ‘der Ewigkeit’; mein Ehrgeiz ist, in zehn Sätzen zu sagen, was jeder Andre in einem Buche sagt, - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt . . .” If the overriding claim is that less is more, it is puzzling that Nietzsche provides not one but two labels for the texts he is producing: “der Aphorismus, die Sentenz.” The simplest explanation is that “die Sentenz” is not an appositive for “der Aphorismus.” In this vein, the beginning of the sentence can be scanned “der Aphorismus [und] die Sentenz,” because the two nouns are the subject of the plural form of sein (“der Aphorismus, die Sentenz […] sind […]”) and are referred to with the plural relative pronoun “denen.” 1 The problem is that for every scholar who is adamant that Nietzsche systematically distin- 226 Jan Mieszkowski guishes between these two terms, there is another eager to identify passages in which he appears to use them interchangeably� 2 There is also evidence that when Nietzsche refers to Sentenzen he has in mind the maxims of the French moralists, which he regards as a kind of aphorism, further contributing to the sense that in this particular case he could have just written “der Aphorismus” and been done with it� With this mildly verbose opening to his claim to have mastered brevity, Nietzsche has found an eminently succinct way of acknowledging the myriad problems that arise when we consider whether short forms can or should be exactingly classified and subclassified. In his book-length study of “the shortest literary genres,” Gary Saul Morson illustrates the difficulties involved in yielding to the taxonomic impulse (1). At the outset of his study, he stresses that “there is no agreed-upon definition of terms such as ‘aphorism,’ ‘saying,’ ‘apothegm,’ or ‘maxim,’” adding that “etymology rarely helps, since the meanings of terms shift radically over ages and cultures” (4)� His conclusion is not that one should refrain from developing a classificatory scheme, but that one should do so in full awareness that the decisions one makes on this front will be determined by the aims and parameters of one’s investigation. “Choose a different set of questions,” Morson writes, “and you will arrive at a different classification” (5). Quick to practice what he preaches, he goes on to present a catalogue of short forms grouped “according to their worldviews, the distinct sense of human experience that each conveys” (5)� The result is a curious taxonomy that makes no claims for the generalizability of its own genericism, as if its categories had no currency beyond the argumentative context in which they emerge and hence were not truly categories at all� Etymologically derived from the Greek aphorizein , “to mark off or divide,” the word “aphorism” designates a unit of language that somehow stands apart from the verbal constructions surrounding it, but if neither the aphorism nor its short form brethren can be regarded as well-defined genres, it is hard not to conclude that the borders separating them from “normal” formulations are anything but stable� 3 Indeed, the fact that scholars such as Morson are willing to tolerate nomenclatural compromises that undermine the very integrity of classification itself suggests that singling out pithy utterances in a crowd is no simple matter. The consequences of this conclusion may be far-reaching. If the aphoristic, the epigrammatic, or the proverbial is not a feature of a particular sub-subset of utterances but a potential inherent in any remark, then even the most seemingly mundane or innocuous statement can defy expectations by unexpectedly offering a profundity that disrupts the logical or rhetorical patterns to which it is ostensibly subordinate� Far from functioning as a dutiful cog in a larger machine, each clause of an essay or novel has the capacity to go rogue, Dashing Expectations 227 undermining the text’s organizational parameters as it threatens to eclipse the surrounding material by saying more in one or two lines than will be imparted by the rest of the work� No less troubling is the possibility that the desire to classify short forms stems from a recognition that these miniature texts never fully respect their own atomistic character� Few readers of Pascal’s Pensées or Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragmente have been able to completely resist the temptation to draw connections between the individual pieces, which often seem to comment on one another in complex ways. In one of his notebooks, Nietzsche himself allows that elaborate conceptual networks pervade his collections of aphorisms, which in this respect are not just strings of isolated statements: “In Aphorismenbüchern gleich den meinigen stehen zwischen und hinter kurzen Aphorismen lauter verbotene lange Dinge und Gedanken-Ketten; und Manches darunter, das für Oedipus und seine Sphinx fragwürdig genug sein mag” ( Fragmente 11: 579)� Is the text in which Nietzsche boasts about doing a book’s worth of work in ten sentences, itself some six sentences in length, an aphorism? In the Preface to the Genealogie , Nietzsche refers to the numbered sections of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches as a collection of aphorisms, and commentators tend to follow his lead in using the term for his short pieces� In Minima Moralia , Theodor W. Adorno pays tribute to Nietzsche’s reworking of the traditional aphoristic form, classically a sentence or two, by explicitly referring to the numbered sections of his own book, most of which range in length from half a page to several pages, as aphorisms. Ironically, the author who claims to do the most with the least is thereby credited with having altered the concept of an aphorism to include substantially longer texts. If Nietzsche boasts of being able to accomplish a book’s worth of work in remarkably few words, he not infrequently seems to need a series of sentences to do what Pascal or La Rochefoucauld managed to achieve with one� “Der Aphorismus, die Sentenz, in denen ich als der Erste unter Deutschen Meister bin, sind die Formen ‘der Ewigkeit’; mein Ehrgeiz ist, in zehn Sätzen zu sagen, was jeder Andre in einem Buche sagt, - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt . . .” Extracted from the half-page aphorism in which it appears, Nietzsche’s bold declaration has become ubiquitous on the internet, where it serves as an inspirational slogan for tweets and other pithy quips, but even this succinct boast of laconic prowess is apparently not succinct enough� In German, Nietzsche’s claim is twenty-three words long, but the English version in which the formulation is widely disseminated is pared down to an even briefer announcement: “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book�” 4 The decision to shorten the sentence in this way is hardly inconsequential, for it is far from self-evident that “what everyone else does not say 228 Jan Mieszkowski in a book” is a restatement of “what everyone else says in a book�” Semantic integrity is clearly not the overriding concern when it comes to paying tribute to the self-proclaimed master of brevity� In the search for a catchy pronouncement about catchiness, the drive to concision takes precedence over considerations of content to the point that anything and everything becomes expendable� In the end, one may well cut just for the sake of cutting. “ - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt � � �” If we pause before jettisoning this final clause of Nietzsche’s formulation and try to assess its status as essential or inessential, it quickly reveals itself to be a crucial part of what may be an even more ambitious claim than we at first realized. Having bragged that he will need a mere ten sentences where others need thousands, Nietzsche adds that he is not going to say the same thing as everyone else� The suggestive ellipsis at the end of the line underscores the indeterminate scope of this negation, whose reach may be almost boundless. Remaining within the realm of what can be said, what everyone else does not say is everything else - in the wake of Nietzsche’s ten sentences, there should be nothing not-said left to say. Even more curious is that this drive to say everything, or at least everything else, may be indistinguishable from an attempt to say nothing. Far from limiting himself to reflections on the possible and the actual, Nietzsche - always the inveterate thinker of modality - may be bragging that in these ten sentences he is also going to say what was impossible for everyone else to say, whether because they dared not say it, because they did not know it was there to be said, or simply because it cannot be said. Nietzsche will say everything unsayable. In ten sentences� To this point, we have not commented on the dash that helps coordinate Nietzsche’s penultimate and final clauses: “was jeder Andre in einem Buche sagt, - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt . . .” If the mark is easy to overlook, it is because it appears to be superfluous, doing nothing that is not already achieved by the comma, and this sense that it may be redundant introduces uncertainty about precisely how the two clauses relate� Is the dash a synonym for “and” (“what everyone else says in a book and what they do not say”), or does it signal a hesitation or qualification (“or rather”), in which case the clause that follows would specify exactly what Nietzsche’s enormous ambitions really are in a way that the prior clause did not? Insofar as it is neither part of what is said nor part of what is not said, the dash does not articulate a clear relationship between the sentential elements it ostensibly links, at best pointing to the need for yet another clause in which its ambiguous role would be elucidated� Like an offhand comment in a novel that suddenly shines forth in aphoristic profundity and obscures the surrounding passages, this dash threatens to invert the hierarchy between words and punctuation marks such that the former now exist to Dashing Expectations 229 clarify the latter rather than the other way around. “My ambition,” Nietzsche appears to be explaining, “is to say in a dash what everyone else says in a book, - whatever everyone else does not say in a book�” Nietzsche’s comma and dash are difficult to evaluate, because while the rules of grammar officially reign sovereign over sentences, punctuation is not part of this system in the same way that syntax and morphology are� 5 Organized by formal and informal dicta - largely of indeterminate origin and authority - punctuation practices vary according to the styles and conventions peculiar to specific time periods, regions, and institutions, not to mention the personal preferences of authors or their tyrannical copy editors� 6 In this changeable field, dashes are uniquely challenging, since in contradistinction to a comma or period, a dash is never mandatory, and insofar as there is always an alternative to its deployment - in this case, simply omitting it -each of its manifestations cries out to be interpreted� 7 Until the second half of the eighteenth century, dashes in Englishand German-language texts largely served as substitutes for ellipses, although they were gradually acquiring the role frequently assigned to them today of marking hesitation, a slight change in the direction of a sentence, or a shift in topic or speaker� 8 Around the time the punctuation mark was assuming these new functions, the modern German word for the symbol, Gedankenstrich , was making its first appearances� 9 Das Deutsche Wörterbuch begun by the Grimm brothers (hereafter DWB) offers the following definition of the term: “Strich in der Schrift, um dem Leser einen ausgelassenen oder unausgeführten Gedanken anzuzeigen, auch um ihn auf etwas wichtiges kommendes aufmerksam zu machen, also um ihn zum eigenen Denken anzuregen�” 10 A Gedankenstrich may let a reader know that a thought is being omitted or at least not pursued; alternatively, it may alert the reader to something important yet to come in order to prompt thoughts about it in advance of its arrival. In the first case, the punctuation mark shows what is not happening in the language at hand. In the second, it notifies the reader what is on the horizon precisely so that she can get a head start and begin thinking for herself, which is why the DWB declares that Gedankenpause is a synonym for Gedankenstrich . A sort of timeout in the discourse, a “thought-dash” interrupts what is taking place in the unfolding of a sentence, opening up a space for reflection. The idea that a Gedankenstrich is a signal that something is about to happen retroactively renders its status as a sign of omission ambiguous� On the one hand, the suggestion may be that in indicating to the reader that something is being left out, a Gedankenstrich prompts him “zum eigenen Denken,” perhaps in order to reflect on what is not there and on why it is missing. On the other hand, the implication may be that the reader accepts the omission marked by 230 Jan Mieszkowski a Gedankenstrich precisely by not ruminating on it. In this respect, the pause for thought facilitated by the mark would also be a pause in thought, a moment when the reader stops engaging with the sentence such that nothing is happening, discursively speaking, either on the reader’s part or the text’s. 11 According to both facets of the definition, a Gedankenstrich heralds a disjunction, a gap between what language could do and what it is going to do, or between what language is going to do in the future and what the reader may do in advance of that work. The simplest conceivable character short of a dot, this brief line segment thus marks both the closest proximity and the greatest distance between a reader’s processing of a text and the text’s elaboration of its own conceptual praxis. While the DWB is rarely accused of being concise, it would not be an exaggeration to say that an entire theory of thought and reading has been packed into this thirty-word definition. The entry might even meet with Nietzsche’s approval, assuming that it is the first step toward saying in ten definitions what everyone else says - or does not say - in an entire book of definitions. Turning to a contemporary dictionary, we find that the Duden agrees that a Gedankenstrich heralds a kind of interruption, terming it “eine Pause,” although the lexicographers characterize this as the simulation of a temporal break in speech, thereby sidestepping the potentially paradoxical notion of thinking about a pause in thinking: “Der Gedankenstrich wird häufig dort verwendet, wo man in der gesprochenen Sprache eine deutliche Pause macht” (“Gedankenstrich,” Duden 46). This parallel between writing and speech, however, is unconvincing� A dash is unusual because it can do the work of other punctuation marks (commas, semicolons, ellipses), but it may also do something quite different, or nothing much to speak of, and this protean quality is clearly a product of its status as an essentially written rather than oral phenomenon� After all, one cannot hear the difference between a comma, a semicolon, and a dash. 12 Possibly cognizant of the shortcomings of their definition, the Duden lexicographers add: “Ein Gedankenstrich kündigt etwas Folgendes, oft etwas Unerwartetes an” (46). This may be an instance of being too succinct for one’s own good, or it may simply be that any characterization of a punctuation mark’s duties is bound to be awkward, but the dictionary’s second account of the dash is odd. To announce the arrival of something unexpected is one thing, but to announce that something more will follow is to do no more or less than what any space between words on the page does. By this logic, there could be a dash after any and every word, in which case the punctuation mark would not merely be a thought-pause or a pause-in-thought, but a pause in or substitute for spacing itself ( eine Leerzeichenpause or ein Leerzeichenersatz ). Viewed in this light, the dash becomes a figure for the differential forces in virtue of which phonemes Dashing Expectations 231 and graphemes manifest as distinct elements of signification, dynamics of articulation that can never have a positive presence in writing or speech even as they condition every written or oral sequence. 13 Highlighting the degree to which any mark is significant only insofar as it bears the traces of all the other elements in the signifying system, the dash would be a sort of meta-mark, the mark of the fact that to be a meaningful mark is first and foremost to be marked as not-all-other-marks� 14 In bringing to the fore the play of identity and difference that makes signification possible, a dash risks interrupting the normal work of semiosis, leaving the discourse hanging by a thread, or a line, suspended on a foreign element that it cannot disavow and yet can never claim as its own, as if the Gedankenstrich heralded a permanent Gedankenpause or Gedankenstreik � Rather than clarifying the relationships between the parts of a sentence, the dash would threaten to subordinate them to a more fundamental economy of differentiation and determination. From this perspective, Nietzsche’s “ - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt . . .” would be redundant, because the dash is already a confirmation of the systemic dominance of the not-said, which conditions what is said to such a degree that all that can ever be said is that the not-said is not being said� Or to put this more succinctly: - At one moment, a dash is a benign echo of the comma that preceded it - the next, it has become a figure for the differential logics that inform all linguistic systems but can never become an object of representation in their own right� What does it mean to elaborate a discourse about a punctuation mark that lurches so precipitously between the mundane and the momentous? Should we follow Nietzsche’s lead and let what is not said about the dash predominate, thereby turning it into the ultimate short form, a verbal element so laconic that it proleptically elides any reference to itself ? In this regard, it is important to note that in their explanations of the Gedankenstrich , both the DWB and the Duden scrupulously avoid using dashes. To understand why, we need only look to Edgar Allan Poe, a champion of this particular punctuation mark who had no compunctions about indulging in its signifying vagaries� In one succinct but by no means simple formulation, Poe writes that a dash “represents a second thought - an emendation ” (cited in Crystal 152; emphasis in original)� Far from specifying what a dash does, this explanation pushes the mark’s determination a dash-length away. Is what follows the dash (“an emendation”) an emendation of the noun phrase that precedes it (“a second thought”), or is “an emendation” itself a second thought, a second thought about second thoughts, which would suggest that “a second thought” is anything but equivalent to “an emendation”? In another attempt to clarify what a dashing clarification looks like, Poe writes that a dash “stands, in general, for these words - ‘or, to make my meaning more distinct ’” (cited in Crys- 232 Jan Mieszkowski tal 153). Ironically, the dash in this sentence is doing something very different from what the sentence says it should be doing, because it introduces or frames the main idea rather than clarifying some prior version of it� In both of his explanations of the mark, Poe uses dashes that end up complicating, rendering ambiguous, or outright contradicting the claims being made about them� The problem is less his excessive reliance on this particular form of punctuation than the fact that the dash appears to be able to play almost any role one cares to ascribe to it, including that of a purely superfluous element that could just as well have been omitted. Historically, this chameleon-like power has been a source of considerable concern, because the dash’s versatility seems to put it in a position to supplant the other elements of a text with no guarantee that their meaning will be preserved in the process. Nineteenth-century grammarians feared that the dash would gradually replace all other punctuation marks, and even parts of words may not be safe from its reach, as we see in the convention dating from the eighteenth century of using dashes to abbreviate or anonymize proper nouns (Mr. W-, Lady K-). 15 The fact that no rule ever mandates the insertion of a dash does not prevent it from popping up anywhere and everywhere. In theory, one cannot reasonably expect it to be the next element in a sentence, but in practice, one may find oneself anticipating that it is never more than a character or two away. At the same time, the fact that the next dash may always be just around the corner is no guarantee that its appearance will constitute a substantive semantic event� Precisely because a dash can be a sort of meta-mark, an emblem of the differential dynamics that allow language to signify, it can also be an admirably efficient tool for pushing signification away. Potentially standing in for anything and everything, the dash may equally well stand for nothing� Perhaps the most vexing thing about this punctuation mark is that no specific instance of it is necessarily implicated in these all-or-nothing logics, which is to say that any given dash may do something entirely ordinary, e.g., indicate a pause. Small wonder that some have called the dash “an invention of the devil” (Crystal 144)� The question of whether a dash can ever meet our expectations for it, high or low as they may be, was a particular concern of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, one of the authors from whom Nietzsche learned much about short forms, as did J. W. von Goethe, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Karl Kraus, among others. In one of his stand-alone remarks, Lichtenberg writes: “Es ist als wenn unsere Sprachen verwirrt wären; wenn wir einen Gedanken haben wollen, so bringen sie uns ein Wort, wenn wir ein Wort fordern, einen Strich, und wo wir einen Strich erwarteten, steht eine Zote” (529). 16 This petite text makes some very large claims, opening with a gesture toward the story of the Tower of Babel, in which, at least in Martin Luther’s translation, the Lord “verwirrt” the language Dashing Expectations 233 of all the lands (Genesis 11: 9)� As is often the case with language about confused language, Lichtenberg’s sentence is anything but confused, unfolding as a series of tidy substitutions of nouns and verbs: we want a thought , we are brought a word ; we demand a word , we get a line or dash ; we expected a dash , and there stands an off-color joke instead. Initially, the verbs seem to intensify in the step from want to demand , but this trajectory is muddled with the advent of expect , which arguably could be either stronger or weaker than the first two impulses. Where the nouns are concerned, the sentence appears to be engaged in a sort of reduction, as a thought devolves into a word that then becomes a punctuation mark, although this trajectory is quickly compromised by the manifestation of bawdy humor, or rather, with a reference to an obscene joke whose humor value we cannot judge since we have not heard it� That we may be the butt of the joke is hardly out of the question. We were definitely not expecting the last word of Lichtenberg’s pronouncement, and when it arrives, we may suspect that we are being teased about our wants, demands, and expectations for this sentence in particular, if not for sentences in general. Goethe famously said of Lichtenberg that where he makes a joke, a problem lies hidden, but here the problem seems to be that the joke is hiding in plain sight, or in plain language. 17 In the eighteenth century, “auf den Strich gehen” and “auf dem Strich sein” were well established idiomatic references to prostitutes working the street (“Strich,” Herkunftswörterbuch 721)� 18 Lichtenberg’s sentence says that we expect a Strich but instead get a joke. In fact, we get a play on words in which the word Strich is the joke� 19 In this short text about thoughts, lines that may be punctuation marks, and risqué jokes, the real joke may be that it is words rather than marks such as dashes that have the upper hand� If it is debatable whether Lichtenberg’s sentence brings us any conceptual or humorous content, it unquestionably brings us the words Gedanken , Wort , and Zote � While there are no perfect substitutes for these terms, the same cannot be said for the other word the sentence has on offer, Strich , in lieu of which Lichtenberg could well have inserted a horizontal line segment, whether a typographically formalized Gedankenstrich or a casual stroke of the pen� 20 One cannot grow grapes by the light of the word day , but can one use the word Strich to alert the reader to what has been omitted, to what is not being thought out, or simply to what is coming next, that is, can the word dash function as a - ? Recalling the long history of anxieties about the dash’s propensity to hijack the roles of other linguistic elements, it may be instructive to think about Lichtenberg’s Strich less as a horizontal line between words and more as something with which to strike out ( ausstreichen ) portions of a text� Lichtenberg’s sentence about confusion takes us from wanting a thought to expecting a dash , so if we employ a rather long Strich to scratch out everything between the two words, 234 Jan Mieszkowski we are left with Gedanken-Strich � Whereas earlier we considered the dash as a figure for the differential dynamics that make signification possible, this editorial exercise would see it become an avatar of designification. The problem with this Strich -trick is that in contradistinction to a line used to cross out words, a Gedankenstrich does not necessarily render absent something that was formerly present. In fact, the goal of Lichtenberg’s sentence may be precisely to challenge our ability to distinguish between Striche and Gedankenstriche , especially if this means simply changing our terms� By writing the word Strich rather than the word Gedankenstrich , Lichtenberg articulates a difference that would otherwise be very hard to make manifest on the page. As any archivist knows all too well, there are many manuscripts in which it is no small matter to discriminate between a horizontal line that constitutes a codified mark and a stray stroke of the pen� Lichtenberg’s short form about a Gedanken and a Strich certainly makes us think about Striche - it puts Strich-Gedanken in our heads - but it also hints that it may be difficult for these thoughts to demonstrate that they are more than musings on idle scratches and scribbles� A Gedankenstrich is an identifiable, iterable character� A Strich may be a Gedankenstrich , or it may be an indication that someone’s pen slipped. In this sense, the dash, the shortest of short forms, is virtually indistinguishable from something equally short but with scarcely any claim to form at all� 21 “Es ist als wenn unsere Sprachen verwirrt wären; wenn wir einen Gedanken haben wollen, so bringen sie uns ein Wort, wenn wir ein Wort fordern, einen Strich, und wo wir einen Strich erwarteten, steht eine Zote.” Does this one sentence say what it might have taken someone else ten sentences to say? Or could a different author - for instance, Nietzsche - have said the same, or more, in fewer words, perhaps even with a single mark? In a list of words and phrases in one of Nietzsche’s late notebooks, we encounter a line that consists of two nouns and an abbreviation: “Interpungiren, Gedankenstriche usw.” ( Fragmente 7: 829). This text about punctuation does not have much punctuation, but it appears that its first word can be read as a general heading - “Punctuating” - and what follows as the beginning of a list of punctuation marks. Importantly, the philologist Nietzsche took some care with his spelling, or misspelling, of the opening word in order to ensure that his gerund would be suspended between the German interpunktieren and the Latin interpungere � The Latin verb originally referred to the practice of putting points or dots between words to separate them on the page, so we find ourselves back at the idea of the dash as a stand-in for the spacing that allows words to manifest as distinct signifying units. The only problem, or Zote , is that in classical Latin scriptio continua was the norm, that is, dashes were not needed because spaces between words were not needed, either. Dashing Expectations 235 Etymologies on our mind, we can rewrite “Interpungiren, Gedankenstriche” as “Punkte und Striche,” “points and lines” or even “dots and dashes.” Like the short and long signals of Morse Code or the 0s and 1s of Leibniz’s binary system, this dualistic mode of signification hints at its own expressive comprehensiveness, as if it could be used to say anything and everything. To be sure, Nietzsche immediately compromises any pretension to completeness with the addition of “usw.”, which indicates that we are dealing with an open-ended or unfinished list, no less than when he followed “was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt” with an ellipsis� That our would-be code of dots and dashes should be complemented by a three-letter abbreviation also underscores the fact that in this case Nietzsche did not put a series of points and lines down on the page any more than Lichtenberg wrote “-” instead of “Strich�” What would it mean to begin a philosophy of language with a dash or a - ? Is Nietzsche suggesting that it is impossible to pen such a mark without betraying an ambition to say in one stroke what others have said - or not said - with an entire alphabet? Or is the danger that with this ultimate short form, to say “-” is already to say all that you have to say and thus to say nothing at all? In a late letter to his sister Elisabeth, Nietzsche declares: “Alles, was ich bisher geschrieben habe, ist Vordergrund; für mich selber geht es erst immer mit den Gedankenstrichen los” ( Briefwechsel 53). For Nietzsche, things only get started once we realize that each time we pen a dash, we are potentially giving up on our old language, as if we were putting a Strich through all the marks with which we have to this point been endeavoring to write. In this capacity, the dash, the ultimate short form, is also the ultimate long form, so extensive that it literally overwrites all other characters. Like a single clause of a novel that upends the entire narrative, this one tiny line segment can spell the demise of a whole graphematic regime, not least because it may be no more than an errant pen stroke� One of the few readers of Nietzsche to have identified his vision of doing philosophy unter dem Strich is Martin Heidegger. Unlike most commentators, Heidegger largely bases his interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy on fragments from the Nachlaß . It is perhaps not surprising, then, that he appears to quote from the aforementioned letter to Elisabeth at the outset of his two-volume book on Nietzsche, albeit in a rather elliptical, not to mention incomplete, fashion: “Was Nietzsche zeit seines Schaffens selbst veröffentlicht hat, ist immer Vordergrund” ( Nietzsche 17)� The relationships between the Vordergrund , Hintergrund , and various other grounds are never a simple matter in post-Hegelian philosophy, a fact that makes Heidegger’s decision to omit the second half of the sentence he is referencing seem all the more cavalier - no less cavalier than the tendency of Nietzsche fanboys to quote their hero’s ambition “to say in 236 Jan Mieszkowski ten sentences what others say in a whole book” without acknowledging the clause that follows in the original� 22 If Heidegger is determined to eliminate the most intriguing part of Nietzsche’s statement, one wishes that he had done so by putting a Strich through the words so that they would still be legible underneath� Recalling his famous decision to write Sein under erasure, such a gesture would have been the ultimate tribute to the uncertain relationship between the word Gedankenstrich and the mark it names, for it would have allowed both to coexist uneasily on the page, each simultaneously overwriting and underwriting the other� That Heidegger did not do this may be an indication that all linguistic elements are already under suspicion of being indistinguishable from stray marks, slapdash scatterings of Striche that are the briefest and most formless short forms of all� What can we expect from a dash? Everything and nothing� With its opening words - “Es ist als wenn unsere Sprachen verwirrt wären” - Lichtenberg’s sentence reminds us that where language is concerned, we are always grappling with the appearance of a confusion whose status as real or merely apparent remains undecidable� Implicit in this observation is the suggestion that one should be able to imagine a different state of affairs in which our expectations for thoughts, words, and punctuation marks would not routinely be confounded. From this perspective, we could read everything Heidegger will go on to say about Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power as a commentary on the will to Strich , which may in due course reveal itself to be a will to Zote � The only catch - and perhaps this is finally Lichtenberg’s obscene joke - is that in scratching out Nietzsche’s account of what is involved in getting going, Heidegger pays obeisance to the authority of one discourse of Gedanken und Striche without confirming that there is a new one to take its place. We thus end right where we began, suspended on the dash between what everyone else says in a punctuation mark and what everyone else does not say in a punctuation mark, which may mean that everything that has just been said was mere Vordergrund - although surely this was to be expected� Notes 1 For a version of this argument, see Westerdale 23. 2 On these questions, see Westerdale 22—24. 3 There is a tendency among scholars to treat “aphorism” as a general term for short forms and “adage,” “saying,” “maxim,” and the like as its subcategories. On the challenges of systematically classifying short forms, including the question of exactly why one should aspire to do so, see Gray 24—36 and Grant� Dashing Expectations 237 4 A Google search turns up hundreds of instances of this quotation. 5 Inconsistency is the norm when it comes to specifying the roles that punctuation marks play in texts� Sometimes we gloss them as if they were stable props or framing devices, little tools that dutifully perform the operations assigned to them by convention. At other moments, we treat such marks as if they were words or letters, signifiers in a differential semiosis and hence polyvalent, unpredictable elements, as likely to do their own thing as anything else� 6 Situated ambiguously on the border between form and content, punctuation is not exactly a part of language, but it is not not a part of language, either. Punctuation clearly has utility, but whether it is ultimately governed by grammatical, rhetorical, logical, or semiotic forces remains something of a mystery. While we rely on punctuation to do everything we ask of it, we cannot entirely shake the suspicion that it may have its own agenda� On the curious history of these perplexing marks, see Brody, Parkes, and Watson. 7 One of the most notoriously enigmatic dashes in German letters appears in Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Marquise von O . . .”, where it initially seems to be an innocuous mark of little consequence and only retrospectively acquires significance as the reader realizes that it may signal the moment in the story when the eponymous Marquise is raped. For a recent study of two similarly vexing dashes, one at the beginning of Hegel’s Logic and the other at the end of his Phenomenology , see Comay and Ruda. 8 In “The Dash in German,” Ursula Bredel observes that in the fourteenth century, “the dash was already used as an alternative to suspension points to mark omissions,” while “a differentiation between suspension points and dashes seems to date back [only] to the eighteenth century” (136, 137). Elaborating on the gradual expansion of the dash’s expressive capacities, Bredel writes: “Beginning in the seventeenth and increasing in the eighteenth century, suspension points and repetitive dashes were used in German also in a rhetorical manner. Referring to Quintilian’s rhetoric, the stylistic usage of suspension points and dashes was newly discovered so that it then became possible to mark (and construct) stylistic ruptures. Initially, this usage referred to unfinished syntactic constructions only while it later referred to unfinished episodes as well (136).” In his 1768 Grundsätze der deutschen Sprache , Johann Jakob Bodmer does not differentiate between Gedankenstrich and Auslassungspunkte (Höchli 225)� The Gedankenstrich is discussed independently of the ellipsis in the 1775 edition of Heinrich Braun’s Anleitung zur deutschen Sprachkunst , where it is said to have been borrowed from English (on this point, see also Dalmas). Not- 238 Jan Mieszkowski ing how quickly the punctuation mark has caught on, Braun deplores German-language writers’ excessive reliance on it, which he characterizes as “der allzu häufige Gebrauch aufgrund eigenen Gedankenmangels” (cited in Menke 172)� For more on the popularity of this punctuation mark and the earliest reflections on its significance by German grammarians, see Rinas 173—77. The etymology of the English word dash cannot be reliably traced back further than its thirteenth-century Middle English instantiations ( daschen, dassen : “to beat or strike”)� The OED suggests that it “may be a comparatively recent onomatopoeic word, expressing the action and sound of striking or driving with violence and smashing effect: compare clash , crash , bash , pash , smash , etc.” (“dash, V. and N. 1”). The first use of dash as “a stroke or line (usually short and straight) made with a pen or the like” dates from the sixteenth century. The OED’s first examples of the term as a reference to a formally codified punctuation mark hail from the early eighteenth century, although already in Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) we find dashes used to show interruptions in dialogue� On the history of the ellipsis-dash relationship in English-language texts, see Toner 3—8. 9 According to the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache , the first instances of the word “Gedankenstrich” (literally a “thought-stroke” or “thought-line”) appear in the late 1730s, some 60 years before the first example of the term listed in the DWB (“Gedankenstrich,” Digitales Wörterbuch )� Google Ngram’s first example of the term is from 1771. 10 This definition dates from the 1869 edition of the DWB (“Gedankenstrich”). Earlier definitions tend to be more laconic, as in W. Hasper’s 1835 Handbuch der Buchdruckerkunst : “Der Gedankenstrich ( - ) bezeichnet eine Unterbrechung” (cited in Bredel 136n18)� 11 In a recent discussion of the dash, Thomas Glaser emphasizes that it marks a genuine break in a discourse more than a pregnant pause: “Gedankenstriche [stehen] gerade nicht für Gedankenfülle, markieren in figuraler Hinsicht nicht die Aposiopese - sondern den Anakoluth” (85)� 12 Beginning with the Hellenic grammarians, if not earlier, scholars have fiercely debated whether written punctuation marks represent distinct auditory phenomena, create patterns of language that auditory phenomena seek to imitate, or reveal the presence of structural rhythms that ground both speech and writing. On this history, see Parkes. 13 In a recent article, Gerhard Poppenberg makes this point, arguing: “Wenn Beziehung und Unterschied die Artikulation des Syntagmas garantieren, wird das Zwischen der Wörter zum Agenten seiner Bildung. Der Gedankenstrich ist die typographische Gestalt dieses Zwischen, die Figur der Relation, die in ihm als solche sichtbar wird” (90). Refining the claim, Poppenberg Dashing Expectations 239 continues: “Der Gedankenstrich ist die typographische Figur der artikulierenden Lücke und zugleich die Brücke, die der Artikulation Gestalt und Halt gibt” (91)� Other critics have also sought to characterize the meta-discursive significance of the dash. Discussing Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy , a text that may have encouraged eighteenth-century German authors in their adoption of the dash, Joseph Vogl writes: “Mit [dem Gedankenstrich] wird die Sprache zur reinen Graphik verwandelt, in ihm, in seiner Unlesbarkeit, wird die Schriftlichkeit der Schrift selbst lesbar, in ihm manifestiert sich das Rauschen des Textes” (277)� For an ambitious attempt to read the Strich of Gedankenstrich against the Gedanken of metaphysics, see Kammasch. 14 As Jacques Derrida writes: “Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present� This interweaving results in each ‘element’ - phoneme or grapheme - being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system” (26)� Working from this insight, Derrida famously declares that “différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other� This spacing is simultaneously active and passive […]. It is also the becoming-space of the spoken chain - which has been called temporal or linear; a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech and writing, every passage from one to the other” (27). 15 As David Crystal explains, the dash is “the easiest of marks to separate units of sense, whether sentences or parts of sentences, and as a result it has had a long history of antipathy from teachers and stylists who have been concerned that, if writers rely on the dash as a mark-of-all-trades, they will never master the more discriminating uses of punctuation” (144)� In his 1839 Die deutsche Sprache und ihre Literatur, Max Wilhelm Götzinger argues that the dash serves “als Stellvertreter aller möglichen Zeichen, also überhaupt, um eine Pause oder Trennung anzuzeigen” (cited in Bredel 136n19). 16 This sentence was first published in a collection of Bemerkungen � Originally an entry in Lichtenberg’s Waste Books or Sudelbücher (Lichtenberg’s own translation for the English term), it certainly could be deemed an “aphorism,” although it is not obvious that Lichtenberg himself would have embraced this label� For insightful discussions of the theories and practices that shape the Waste Books , see Campe and Wilczek. 17 “Wo [Lichtenberg] einen Spaß macht, liegt ein Problem verborgen,” quipped Goethe (cited in Mautner 39)� 18 I am grateful to Elke Siegel for suggesting this line of interpretation� 240 Jan Mieszkowski 19 In another short text in his Sudelbücher , Lichtenberg grounds his condemnation of empty stylistic innovations in a distinction between earnest language and language produced in jest: “Es gibt eine Art von leerem Geschwätz, dem man durch Neuigkeit des Ausdrucks, unerwartete Metaphern das Ansehen von Fülle gibt. Klopstock und Lavater sind Meister darin. Im Scherz geht es an� Im Ernst ist es unverzeihlich” (389)� It should go without saying that the sentence we have been discussing calls into question the very distinction between what is written “im Scherz” and what is written “im Ernst�” 20 One might suppose that this reference to a Strich is “markedly” ambiguous, since it could refer either to a Gedankenstrich (dash) or a Bindestrich (hyphen), but in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the standard German word for hyphen was Divis � Bindestrich did not emerge until the first part of the nineteenth century, with synonyms such as Trennstrich or Viertelgeviertstrich making their appearance only later still. Subsequent generations have seen the gradual development of an elaborate, by and large obscure vocabulary for different kinds of dashes, including terms almost exclusively used by typographers and typesetters: Parenthesestrich , Gegenstrich , Auslassungsstrich , Bis-Strich , Spiegelstrich , Streckenstrich , and Währungsstrich � On the lexicon of Strich -words, see Gallmann. 21 In this context, one could reflect on Jean Paul’s claim that Gedankenstriche are “Linien, für deren Bedeutung der Zufall nicht gesorgt habe” (cited in Menke 175). In another comment on dashes, Jean Paul observes: “Man durchstreicht ietzt nicht mehr Wörter, aber man durchstreicht doch dafür das leere Papier” (cited in Menke 174)� 22 Numerous commentators have followed Heidegger in discussing the first half of Nietzsche’s sentence without acknowledging the existence of the second half� For a review of this odd tendency in the critical literature along with an overview of the scholarly reception of Nietzsche’s dashes, see Hanshe. Works Cited Bredel, Ursula. “The Dash in German.” The Relation of Writing to Spoken Language � Ed� Martin Neef et al. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002. Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play . Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Campe, Rüdiger. “Vorgreifen und Zurückgreifen. Zur Emergenz des Sudelbuchs in Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs ‘Heft E’.” Notieren, Skizzieren. Schreiben und Zeichnen als Verfahren des Entwurfs . Ed. Karin Krauthausen and Omar W. Nasim. Zurich/ Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010. 61—88. 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Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1963� Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 243 Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis Erica Weitzman Northwestern University Abstract: One of Robert Walser’s most recognizable techniques in his short prose pieces is the sped-up recapitulation of works of literature: the retelling of canonical or contemporary novels and dramas in impious paragraphto pages-long abridgments. This technique of humorous abridgement, however, is in itself hardly new. In his 1878 book of literary spoofs, Nach berühmten Mustern , for example, the novelist and Sprachskeptiker Fritz Mauthner also converts the popular literary works of his day into absurdly shortened scenes, with clearly parodic intent. This article compares Mauthner’s parodies with Walser’s condensed retellings in order to complicate the idea of the critical/ comical force of condensation and the emptying out of the epic mode practiced by both authors. Ultimately, the article argues that for all their ostensible similarity, Walser’s and Mauthner’s works are fundamentally different in both substance and aim, where Walser’s condensations are less the continuation of the practice of parodic miniaturization than a wholesale reversal of its aesthetic as well as ethical and political premises� Keywords: Miniaturization, parody, Walser, Mauthner, parabasis, reception, critique Tell me how you summarize, and I’ll tell you how you interpret. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests Of course, Robert Walser would have written a gloss on glosses. Logically enough, it is titled “Die Glosse,” and begins as follows: 244 Erica Weitzman Wer etwas zu sagen habe, schreibe mit Freuden, mit ersten und letzten Kräften hin und wieder eine Glosse, möchte man meinen, und man möchte, indem man dies sagt, vor lauter Trauer darüber, daß die Glosse eine Verkommenheit bedeutet, und daß man in diesen Sumpf hineinfiel, um vielleicht nie mehr wieder daraus in die Luft und in die Lust schönerer Übungen emporzuklettern, laut lachen, wonach einen dieses wie Äpfel oder Kartoffeln rollende Lachen, diese krankhafte Gesundheitslustigkeit unsagbar traurig machen würde� (287) In these opening lines of the piece (originally published in 1928 in the Prager Presse ) Walser thematizes the proverbially parasitic nature of the gloss, which is not even an imitation of an imitation but that imitation’s pale summary: a “Verkommenheit” of secondary chatter and a dank quagmire from which one will never again be able to pull oneself back into the ethereal sublimity of long forms and high literature (even if we can also note the irony that Walser’s opening sentence manages despite itself to span the two poles of classical poetics, from tragic “Trauer” to comic “Lachen”). And yet, even as Walser laments the swampy degeneracy of the gloss qua literary form, he also presents it as the first and last product of anyone who “etwas zu sagen habe”: insofar as the gloss is the genre of diminished secondariness, forever subordinate to the loftier objects of its glossing activity, it is also the paradigmatic genre of reflection per se, a thinking and rethinking of thought itself hardly less ambitious than the transcendental-romantic project of fusing “Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie,” such that they “[sich] immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen” (Schlegel 182)� Walser already plays in the above-quoted passage on the reflexive potential or primary secondariness of the gloss with the conditional phrase “möchte man meinen”: the interpolated qualification not only embeds commentary within the commentary, but also embeds in that commentary a commentary on the commentary, etc., etc., the smaller and more self-enclosed the commentary gets, in a “progressive Universalpoesie” (Schlegel 182) indeed of infinite autoreferential regression� Naturally, the essay “Die Glosse” is not just a gloss on glosses, but also a gloss on Walser’s own activity of textual glossing� For a long time - particularly after his move to Bern in 1921 - Walser wrote little else than “glosses”: short, self-reflective commentaries on scenes or phenomena in which descriptive breadth and epic expansiveness are replaced by synopsis, contraction, and abyssal self-reference� And though Walser appears at the beginning of “Die Glosse” to mock the gloss’s middlebrow popularity and poor repute, by the end of the piece he will return to praising the gloss as something big in its littleness, great in spite of its negligible reputation� 1 In this vein, Annette Fuchs has emphasized the perfor- Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 245 mative aspects of “Die Glosse”: though Walser speaks of the gloss as a dolefully degenerate (or degenerative) genre, his opening sentence already belies the sadness that the author of glosses might experience, grammatically bracketing it with announcements of joyfulness and laughter� 2 Even if this claim is not strictly true in terms of syntax (for “unsagbare Traurigkeit” is the passage’s actual last named emotion), it is at least true in terms of the piece’s overall mood: whatever real or feigned reservations about the gloss Walser might profess, the piece itself is a paradigmatic example of Walser’s typical verbal virtuosity and flamboyant metaphorical wit, in which the ostensible object of analysis becomes merely the pretext for self-amused (and -amusing) reflection. Thus, according to Fuchs, Walser’s glosses represent a “Karnevalisierung des Deskriptiven” (Fuchs 16), a parodic play with language and subjectivity that exposes the unspoken codes of its objects and draws the reader into the diminishing game� And yet, though Walser might be, in his own words, the farcically triumphant “Feldherr der Buchstaben [der Glosse], die [er] befehlig[t]” (“Die Glosse” 288), Walser’s own glossing, both in “Die Glosse” and elsewhere, is far more complex - and more subtle - than such an interpretation would have it� Such conceptual and artistic complexity is particularly notable in what is one of the most frequent forms of Walser’s glossing activity: the sped-up recapitulation of pre-existing works of literature, in which canonical or contemporary texts are retold and remarked on in drastically condensed form� One representative example of this genre is the unpublished piece from 1926—27 “Der falsche Ganina” - likely a synopsis of the Russian naturalist author Aleksandr Kuprin’s controversial 1910 social novel The Pit 3 - which, in radically accelerated fashion, narrates the tribulations of a certain down-on-his-luck “Söhnchen von Barönchen” (Walser, “Der falsche Ganina” 434) and the woman who betrays him. Typically enough, Walser thematizes his own compositional logic in the piece’s very first sentence: “Ob ich diese Geschichte in der richtigen Manier erzählen werde,” begins the piece with characteristically cheeky modesty, “weiß ich nicht; ich weiß zunächst nur, daß es in einem ganz bestimmten Roman, der ein großer Roman ist, dessen Druckseitenzahl sich auf annähernd neunhundert belaufen mag, eine tragikomische Figur gibt, deren Wesen darin besteht, daß sie nicht sein will, was sie ist” (432)� The fact that Walser explicitly emphasizes the page count of the novel he comments on - indeed, before any other of its aspects - shows his acute awareness of the era’s equation of literary importance with narrative grandiosity, as well as the absurd disproportion he creates between the novel’s epic scope and the radical diminutiveness (although, at seven pages, for Walser comparatively long) of Walser’s own version thereof. Even before the piece gets going, therefore, the manifest incongruity between the two forms of writing produces an expectation of comic intent, as Walser flattens out the mimetic pathos of Kuprin’s 246 Erica Weitzman story into a mix of deadpan plot summary, bemused commentary, self-conscious moralizing, and fan-fictional speculation. Though Walser is an innovator, this technique is not without precedent. In fact, feuilletonistic and/ or parodistic glossing was a perfectly common activity for writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who were able to supplement their meager income by predigesting contemporary cultural products and events for the busy newspaper-reading public� 4 One potential model for Walser’s textual summaries is the novelist and Sprachskeptiker Fritz Mauthner’s 1878 Nach berühmten Mustern , a collection of parodic condensations of works by popular contemporaries such as Paul Heyse, Willibald Alexis, and E. Marlitt. The book was a bestseller, going into over 28 printings and praised by at least one of his contemporaries as a “köstliche[s] Werkchen” (Th. 141) of comedic art. Mauthner sums up his own understanding of the effects of parodic shortening in a short essay entitled “Etwas über die Parodie,” published in the cultural journal Schorers Familienblatt (where many of the pieces in Nach berühmten Mustern first appeared): “[Die] Parodie kann mit mehr oder weniger Witz hergestellt sein, aber ihre Wirkung beruht doch immer auf der gemeinsamen Lust, sich durch festhalten der Kontrastvorstellung dem lästigen Gefühl des Erhabenen zu entziehen” (139—40). Though Mauthner criticizes this technique of parody through contrast as something that “enthält immer ein pöbelhaftes, kunstfeindliches Element” (140) insofar as it may fail to recognize the actual greatness of great literature, his own parodies, as we will see, hardly diverge from this procedure, miniaturizing and distorting at least purportedly serious works of literature with the effect indeed of freeing the amusement-seeking reader from their “sublime” weight� 5 In the remainder of this article, I will compare Mauthner’s literary satires with Walser’s own book digests to ask: What is the critical and/ or comical force of abbreviation, summary, and recapitulation? What is removed in the truncation or condensation of the epic mode? And, finally: How do Walser’s literary diminutions both borrow from the parodically miniaturizing practices of his elders and constitute a critical (even parodically critical) reevaluation of such parody? For while most critics of Walser have noted his condensed rewritings of pre-existing works, almost none have gone to the trouble of placing this practice in its literary-historical context - with the result that Walser’s writing is considered precisely under the aspects of trivialization and miniaturizing mockery that it in fact works to move away from� 6 As Walser himself comments, in a sentence audibly mixing ironic self-deprecation, bohemian hauteur , and genuine cultural critique: “Bürgerliche und sonstige Leser lesen zwar herzlich gern Glossen, das steht mit Felsenfestigkeit fest, wird doch immer wieder von Zeitschriftredaktoren, von Führern in die Kulturheiligtümer hinein die höfliche Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 247 Anfrage an den kolossal bekannten, anerkannten Glossenschmied gerichtet, ob er nicht für einige Franken witzig sein möchte, wozu der Schreiner oder Schlosser meist freudig ja sagt” (“Die Glosse” 287)� Humorously put though Walser’s statement is, it also establishes the context in which it is written: the comic gloss is by no means a peculiarity of Walser’s, but a well-established minor genre of the time, enjoyed by a mass public eager for light amusement - “irgend etwas Lesenswertes, Aufheiterndes” (287) - as a break from both daily cares and the self-important ponderousness of high culture. At the same time, the statement puts the easy pleasures of the comic gloss itself into question, which indeed wittily deflates its readers’ literary monuments, but in doing so establishes their monumental status - not to mention the ideological and socioeconomic realities that go together with them - all the more firmly. Or as Walser’s forebear Jean Paul writes, “[f]olglich ist das Lächerliche das unendliche Kleine, [aber] worin besteht diese ideale Kleinheit? ” ( Vorschule 105)� As I will show, comparing Walser’s literary encapsulations to those of Mauthner will elucidate what is at stake in them beyond back-slapping in-jokes, critical ridicule, and urbane impiety. “[U]ngleich dem gemeinen Spaßmacher mit seinen Seitenhieben,” Jean Paul continues, “[hebt der Humor] keine einzelne Narrheit heraus, sondern er erniedrigt das Große […] um ihm das Kleine […] an die Seite zu setzen und so beide zu vernichten” (125). Correspondingly, my argument in this article will be that Walser’s glosses are not just examples of frivolous or subversive satire and comic diminishment - much less, of a “spannungsreiches Junktim zwischen dem Trivialen und Grotesken, das den Spielraum der exzentrischen Originalität des Ich absteckt” (Fuchs 130). Rather, they are cannily ironic interventions into the very concepts of “triviality” and “grotesqueness” themselves - together with their aesthetic counterparts, greatness, seriousness, and normativity - and thus also an implicit commentary on other, older practices of miniaturization/ glossing, which are indeed far better characterized by what Fuchs calls a “[dialogische] Lachgemeinschaft zwischen dem Ich und dem Leser” (132) 7 than Walser’s own glosses ever were or are. In short, there are glosses and there are glosses: and Walser’s glosses, I submit, not only aim higher than the belittling waggishness of bourgeois comedy, but take aim at the comedy of be littling itself� As Linda Hutcheon and others have noted, the genre of literary parody experienced a boom in the nineteenth century ( Theory of Parody , esp. 2 and 11; see also Genette 67 on the “Victorian neoburlesque”). A newly literate bourgeois public, which wielded knowledge of classical and romantic works as cultural capital, together with an exponentially increasing trade in boulevard and entertainment literature, provided ripe fodder for play with and mockery of both 248 Erica Weitzman the established and contemporary literary canon� Mauthner himself is explicit about the connection between the rise of mass-market literature and the necessity of literary parody in the introduction to the 1879 edition of his book: “Ja, sie verstehen sich auf die Massenfabrikation, die großen Herren! haben es von den Pappschachtelwerkstätten gelernt, wie denn die Büchermacherei auch ein bescheidener Zweig der großen Papierindustrie geworden ist. Und im großen Gewerbe, das nur durch Ueberproduktion die kleinen Leute vernichten und sich so zu erhalten vermag, da muß Teilung der Arbeit an Stelle der alten zünftigen Gründlichkeit und Verwendbarkeit treten” (“Aus dem Vorwort zum ‘Neuen Folge’” 15)� The deadline pressures of the book market and the debased taste of the public mean that nowadays authors are compelled to reproduce themselves as types, all the better to parody: “Muß aber das ‘Genie’ sich [dem Publikum] unterwerfen? […] Aber […] die Herren haben keine Zeit, sich selbst zu verändern und die neue Aufgabe demgemäß selbständig auszuarbeiten. Morgen soll das neue Buch fertig sein! Unmöglich, es bis dahin zu schaffen! Nun, her mit der Schablone, die dem Publikum gefällt” (14—15). Such critiques of conventionalized literary forms notwithstanding, Mauthner’s parodic abridgments have their own direct precedent in Bret Harte’s 1867 Condensed Novels , whose contents Harte describes in the brief preface to his published collection as “a humorous condensation of the salient characteristics of certain writers, selected without reference to their standing or prominence in literature” (Preface 12)� Harte’s parodies are hardly subtle; the sketch “Miss Mix by Ch-l-tte Br-nte,” for example, a broad send-up of Jane Eyre , begins, with burlesqued gothic portent, “My earliest impressions are of a huge, misshapen rock, against which the hoarse waves beat unceasingly […]. A dark sky lowers in the background, while two sea-gulls and a gigantic cormorant eye with extreme disfavor the floating corpse of a drowned woman in the foreground” (“Miss Mix” 67), and ends with the titular governess falling on the neck of “Mr. Rawjester” as the latter exultantly watches the house containing his three secret African wives burn down (“Miss Mix” 79)� Mauthner honors his model by including a Harte parody, “Der Blutsauger von Brandy-Bar,” among the literary spoofs of his own book. However, where Harte declares that his sketches “are written with no higher ambition than that of filling the ephemeral pages of a weekly paper” (Preface 12), Mauthner - as he repeatedly explains in the various forewords to the editions of Nach berühmten Mustern - has higher aims for his parodies than “einen bloßen Ulk” (Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1897] 6). As Mauthner stresses, his “Büchlein” is to be, not just silly fun, but “eine Art exemplarischer Kritik” (7), a disciplinary measure against shoddy writing and an assessment method for literary value in general: “Entweder sei der Parodierte ein ganzer Dichter, dann sei es ungehörig, Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 249 sich über ihn lustig zu machen; oder sein Dichten sei Manier, dann müsse die Parodie zur Kritik werden und die Manier ins Herz zu treffen suchen” (6). As Almut Vierhufe summarizes (in what appears to be the only scholarly monograph thus far dedicated to Nach berühmten Mustern ): “Mauthners Parodien [entpuppen sich] als aktuelles Symptom des kulturellen Zeitgeists. Seine Warnung […] gilt der unreflektierten, dilettantischen, unkünstlerischen Mache und dem unkritischen Konsum der in seiner Zeit stetig zunehmender Zahl seichter Unterhaltungsliteratur, der er jeden Anspruch auf literarische Qualität absprechen muß” (226)� (Or as Hutcheon puts it: “this conservative function of keeping modishness in line” [ Theory of Parody 2].) Thus Mauthner insists - implicitly positioning himself in the literary pantheon alongside Aristophanes and Cervantes - that his parodies aim, not at sublimity, but only at the false sublime, “ein unechtes Werk der erhabenen Gattung” (“Etwas über die Parodie” 140)� 8 Indeed, in the introduction to the 1897 edition of the book, Mauthner explains that, in the current culture, his parodic technique has become all but superfluous, for “[d]ie nachhinkenden Dilettanten der verflossenen Moden sind Parodien ihrer selbst und stellen sich freiwillig außerhalb der Literatur” (Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1897] 8). In other words, for Mauthner, bad literature effectively inflicts on itself that which the Russian formalists described as the parodic maneuver (in Linda Hutcheon’s paraphrase): “a conflict between realistic motivation and an aesthetic motivation which has become weak and made obvious” ( Narcissistic Narrative 24). And yet, Mauthner’s literary satires are less aimed at pushing literature forward than of holding it in place; transposed into the twin registers of absurdity and banality, the various literary devices and mythemes of his originals become, not just strange, but small. Mauthner illustrates - and genders - such transposition in the second paragraph of “Etwas über die Parodie”: Denken wir uns eine schlichte Frau, welche Schillers Glocke deklamieren hört und sich bei “des Feuers Macht” plötzlich an ihren Braten in der Röhre erinnert� Vergißt sie darüber die ernsten Worte des Dichters, so hat eben die eine Kontrastvorstellung die andere abgelöst, ohne das etwas neues zu Stande gekommen wäre; man würde sie zerstreut nennen. Teilt sie aber ihre Sorge um den Braten z.B. ihrem Mann mit, der noch unter dem Bann der Dichtung steht, so […] faßt [er] beide Wirkungen zusammen, er wendet die Schillerschen Worte auf den Braten an […] und die Parodie ist fertig. (140) Moldy gender stereotypes aside for the moment, what Mauthner’s example basically describes is a profanation through miniaturization� Trimmed to the housewife’s limited horizon, Schiller’s patriotic hymn becomes little more than a glorified kitchen timer, in which the immediate referentiality of the words crowds out any more elevated implications. Meanwhile, the husband, while 250 Erica Weitzman alert to the true grandeur of the poet’s meaning, is still easygoing enough to think both worlds simultaneously, laughing at the contrast between the noble aims of poetry and his wife’s circumscribed imagination� Miniaturization is the oven in which parody is cooked, reducing literary sublimity to comical bite size. Again, despite Mauthner’s professed distancing from this technique in “Etwas über die Parodie,” such a juxtaposition of sacred and profane, great and small is more or less what Mauthner does in his own crude burlesques. Here an example is no doubt in order� Mauthner’s sendup of Gustav Freytag’s historical epic Die Ahnen , “Die Vorfahren,” opens with the hunter Wlf sitting sorrowfully over a deer he has just shot down, sad that he has fresh kill but no knowledge of how to cook it� Immediately thereupon the “mannbare Jungfrau” (34) Mrl enters and, after some flirtatious banter in faux-archaic style, suggests to Wlf the workaround of raw minced meat� Just at that moment the vixenish Blsk appears and claims to be able to cook the deer by riding around with it on horseback in the hot air. Wlf picks up a deer leg and jumps on Blsk’s horse, but he soon gets bored and returns to eat his deer tartare with Mrl. Blsk falls off her horse and dies; Wlf eats the dropped wind-roasted deer leg and declares it better than Mrl’s cooking after all. Finally, Wlf and Mrl marry “in echt germanischer Ehe” (38) - “Nur selten trübte die Erinnerung an Blsk’s [sic] gargerittene Keulen den Himmel ihrer Bärenhaut” (38) - siring generations of sons (respectively: Wlf II, Wulf, Wolf, and Wolff) that Mauthner lists in a closing string of begats. Obviously, condensation or miniaturization is not the only satirical method being used here. In the words of Joachim Kühn, “übertriebenes Lob am falschen Platz, gespielter Ernst, Verbindung von Prosabericht und Verszitaten, Isolierung verstiegener sprachlicher Bilder” (131) - not to mention narrative trivialization, stylistic pastiche, non sequiturs, puns, nonsense words, unsubtly intimated Herrenwitze , and what Gérard Genette terms “anachronistic vulgarization” (67) 9 - are all also significant elements of Mauthner’s parodic technique. 10 But condensation or miniaturization is still clearly the primary factor� Instead of a six-volume saga from 357 A.D. to the beginnings of modern Germany, we get a single scene of a prehistoric love-triangle cook-off. Instead of narrative digressiveness and dialogical development, we get acceleration, ellipsis, and stichomythia. Instead of the episodic epic of the dawn of the German nation, we get style without content, character without story, archaisms without motivation or verisimilitude. Indeed, Mauthner himself highlights the act of condensation in his own rhyming epigraph to the piece: “Durch ein Mikroskop vergröbert / Wird das Zöpfchen aufgestöbert” (“Die Vorfahren” 32). In other words: examined up close and in concentrated form, Freytag’s primitive Teutons are revealed as nothing so much as masks of the modern bourgeois� But more important than the not-so-secret inauthenticity of Freytag’s novel is the fact that Mauthner’s Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 251 condensation denies Freytag’s national-patriotic epic anything that could give those masks meaning� What Freytag (through the mouthpiece of one of his modern protagonists) calls “das Höchste und Hoffnungsreichste in dem geheimnisvollen Wirken der Volkskraft,” “die Einwirkung des ganzen Volkes auf den einzelnen” (Freytag 1344), 11 disappears in the reduction of its epic sweep to a single scene� Deprived by Mauthner’s brutal abbreviation at once of historical arc, character development, and underlying conceit, Die Ahnen loses precisely that which justifies and plausibilizes its portentous anachronicity: in the absence of both context and telos , all that is left is (imitable) style. Freytag’s Die Ahnen is a dismal piece of kitsch, where Teutonic skalds transfix rebel warriors and two students celebrate a double wedding on the same day of the first issue of their newly founded patriotic journal. But Mauthner’s parody is perhaps kitschy in its own way: for in understanding miniaturization as parody, it tacitly affirms the transcendent status of great literature and its distance from ordinary life, whereby the joining of great notions to trivial concerns is always inherently demeaning and/ or comic. “Im Grunde liegt in jedem Zitat, das einen feierlichen Vers auf das tägliche Leben anwendet, etwas Parodistisches” (“Etwas über die Parodie” 140), since an art dedicated to beauty, dignity, empathy, historical destiny, and moral edification must have nothing to do with the vulgarity of the day-to-day� Great literature is to smallness what “die liebende Gemeine” (Schiller, “Das Lied von der Glocke” 69, line 400) are to their Sunday dinner. The little housewife and her roast - so to speak, the eternal parody of the community 12 - will always be incompatible with the poetic sublime� It is from here that Walser’s work takes off. Unlike Harte or Mauthner, Walser does not aim at reproducing the style of the source text to exaggerate, and thereby to isolate, its “Manier” as “Manier” (Mauthner, Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1897] 6). Indeed, the opposite is rather the case: as one can see in pieces like “Der falsche Ganina” and myriad others, Walser’s texts execute not an exaggeration so much as a leveling of style, an assimilation of every text, from Cervantes to Dostoyevsky to “Bahnhofhallenbüchlein” (Walser, “Gespenster” 335) into Walser’s own attitude and voice� The result is just as much a removal of the summarized work’s affective power and verisimilitude as Mauthner’s miniaturized parodies; and yet this is not in the sense of a broadly comic or even comic-critical diminution that contrasts greatness or pretended greatness to its trivialized caricature. Rather, it must be understood in the sense of a critical (in the romantic sense) and even a phenomenological expansion, which miniaturizes works of literature to establish an entirely different set of aesthetic criteria and form of comic relation� 13 252 Erica Weitzman One microscript piece beginning, “Sie warfen ihr abgefallene Kastanien nach,” a synopsis of a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as told from the perspective of “Antoinette, eine erprobte Mamsell” (“Kastanien” 265), presents a paradigmatic example of Walser’s summarizing procedure: Dem Macbeth steht nun zunächst sein Freund Banquo im Weg, und wie er diesen hinwegräumt, indem er sich dreier Schurken dazu bedient, wird auf folgende Art anschaulich gemacht. Der Redliche hält mitten im mitternächtlich dunklen Wald einen Monolog, worin er wegen seines Freundes Bedenken äußert. “Ich fürchte”, spricht er, “daß ich allen Anlaß habe, meinen ehrlichen und guten Macbeth tief zu beklagen”, und kaum sind ihm diese gutgemeinten Worte über die Lippen geflohen, so kriegt er dafür so viel Applaus, daß er röchelnd zu Boden sinkt und wie ein ahnungsloser, vorlauter Mensch jämmerlich verendet. Ich steckte von Zeit zu Zeit eine Erfrischung in den Mund. Mein Nachbar raunte seiner Frau voll Respekt für den Dichter zu: “Das ist großartig”. Es verhielt sich in der Tat so. (265—66) This is a miniaturization of Macbeth of a kind, but there is nothing Macbeth -ish in it, neither in soberly imitative nor in parodically exaggerated form. Similar to Mauthner’s parodies, the accelerated and, moreover, inaccurate retelling of the play deprives the tragedy of both immediacy and verisimilitude, and thus, of its affective power, presenting Macbeth ’s action not in the stirring words and bloody deeds of its characters but in Walser’s girl narrator’s banal paraphrase thereof. And yet, more crucial than the comedically incongruous banality of the paraphrase is the way in which the act of paraphrasing radically flattens out or indeed reverses the usual hierarchy between spectator and spectacle, stage and staged. Banquo is not murdered by Macbeth’s henchmen, but as it were crushed under the weight of the audience’s applause; the peanut-gallery commentary of the narrator’s neighbors carries the same weight as the words of the play; the theatergoing taking of refreshment - in classical aesthetics precisely the metaphor of what art must not be - is as much of an action as the action itself. If, according to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit , comedy happens when the actor takes off his mask to stand before the spectator in parabatic self-consciousness, then Walser does this one better by leading the spectator herself onto the stage, not merely disrupting the dramatic illusion, but placing precisely that which must remain invisible for the artwork to maintain its illusion - the scene of spectation - squarely in the foreground. 14 All this is as much to say that Walser’s “repetition with a difference” - in Hutcheon’s epigrammatic definition of parody ( Theory of Parody 6) - retells the play in condensed form as the experience of its viewing � Walser’s persona is not just watching political intrigue and murder in medieval Scotland: she is also watching Shakespeare’s rendering thereof, the actors’ performance of Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 253 that rendering, and her own and her fellow spectators’ reactions to that performance� All the layers of the play’s being exist at once in the ironic yet paradoxically absorbed distance of the spectator, who is perhaps not quite as naive as her voice would initially seem to indicate. “Was mich betrifft,” comments Walser’s theatergoer, “so wuchs ich angesichts dieses Großen immer stärker in die niedlichste Niedlichkeit hinein, d.h. das Stück, das ich von der Tribüne herunter mitansah, machte mich ganz verdutzt, geringfügig und höflich klein, und das war für meine arme Mädchenbrust nur angenehm” (“Kastanien” 266). In this creation of agreeably perplexing sensations in young girls’ breasts, art reenters the sphere of practical reason and everyday life: taste turns into tasting, free play into critique and consumption, enjoyment metaphor into enjoyment metonym, as the question is posed of how separate aesthetic seriousness and inaesthetic triviality are from one another after all� In other words, Walser’s literature summaries force the reader to understand the artwork as simultaneously itself and its reception� But this is no longer either bad or ridiculous or demeaning, as it had been for Mauthner. Rather, Walser’s summaries demonstrate that this seemingly scandalous or laughable overlap of artwork and reception is simply the fundamental experience of art as such� Indeed, in their organic interweaving of mimesis and critique, absorption and irony, Walser’s summaries evoke the classical aesthetic principle of disinterested play: the production of, in Schiller’s words, a “mittlere Stimmung, in welcher das Gemüt weder physisch noch moralisch genötigt, und dort auf beide Art tätig ist” ( Ästhetische Erziehung 76—77), i.e., a disposition toward the object suspended between pleasure and morality as the prerequisite to emotional maturity and political and spiritual freedom. At the same time, however, the principle of artistic autonomy upon which such an aesthetics is built is also undermined in the performative confirmation that art is always inherently - even if only as spectacle and play - an integral part of interested experience and real lived life� The artwork has no reality outside of its being seen or read or thought about or even parodied; the text necessarily and always already includes its paratexts� The piece “Die Tragödie,” a truncated summary of Schiller’s Die Räuber , is perhaps an even better example of this technique than “Sie warfen ihr abgefallene Kastanien nach” or “Der falsche Ganina,” insofar as it is a relatively straight and indeed un -playful text for Walser. “Ich sah einmal ein Theaterstück,” it begins, das mit der Vorführung eines sorgfältig gekleideten Stubenhockers begann, der, in dem er die gesunde Vernunft verkörperte, sich zu Hause seit etlicher Zeit zu langweilen schien, trotzdem die Zimmer allem Anschein nach herrlich tapeziert und die Möbel von talentvoller Handwerkhand hergestellt worden waren� (“Tragödie” 326) 254 Erica Weitzman Here again, the description collapses text and performance, setting the elliptical description of the play’s story on the same plane as the costuming and the mise en scène. In what follows, Walser describes the opening scene of Die Räuber in a style both condensed and at times almost bureaucratically torturous - for example, “Der umsonst seinen Zärtlichkeitsgesamtvorrat an den Sympathieherausfordernden Verschwendende trat, auf einen Stab gestützt, humpelnd, als sei er betäubt, ab, und der Solide sprach zu sich selbst oder zum horchenden und teilnehmenden Zuschauerpublikum” (326—27) - upon which the narrator comments, “Welchen unwiderleglichen Eindruck mir und gewiß auch andern sein von auffallend feiner Frisiertheit umrahmtes Racheantlitz machte! ” (327). One could read these lines as mere comic-grotesque, in which the reduced plot of Die Räuber serves Walser as a pretext for improvisation and linguistic mannerism. To do so, however, would be to ignore the fact that Walser’s improvisation is also a redescription , that is, an interpretation � 15 Walser’s quick dispatching of the middle section of Die Räuber , for example - “Einer Landschaftsszene voll gewinnender, anheimelnder Aussicht blieb es vorbehalten, die Wehmut eines Herzens, das sich in mancher Beziehung geirrt hatte, eindrucksreich darzustellen” (“Tragödie” 328) - both accurately synopsizes Schiller’s text and pithily lays bare its dramatic ploys and mood-creating techniques. In the words of Yuri Tynianov, the conversion of mimetic staging into metaliterary description “mechanizes the device” of Schiller’s drama, isolating it as a conscious authorial choice and effect-creating technique (“Dostoyevsky and Gogol” 43). But this mechanization is here not put in the service of parodically undermining Schiller’s work, on the assumption that epic grandeur and critical condensation (or analysis) are fundamentally incompatible� To the contrary: Walser’s piece demonstrates the extent to which critical condensation and analysis are integral to epic grandeur - which is to say, the extent to which the inevitable diminishment effected by critical reception is always already part of the literary work, and indeed not just in terms of Schiller’s text, but in terms of literature as such. 16 Certainly, as with Walser’s Macbeth abridgment, one can hardly say that “Die Tragödie” has the same power or effect or even meaning as Die Räuber . And yet, once again, there is no winking complicity here with a reader who delights with the author in cutting Schiller down to size� Walser is not parodying a particular style according to a certain dominant aesthetic norm (or even subjective aesthetic tastes). If he is parodying anything, it is rather the very idea of a dominant aesthetic norm that makes literary parodies possible in the first place: the idea that exposing the hidden inauthenticity or borrowed authority of certain works through satirical miniaturization is a good weapon in the (in Mauthner’s words) “Kampf[] gegen dunkle Schatten unserer literarischen Republik” (Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1878] 8). Walser retells the literature he has read Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 255 or seen in the mode of memory and multitasking - in effect, in the “distracted” mode of Mauthner’s housewife - but this is no longer a mockery of either the work or its recipient� It is rather a playfully serious representation of the fact that this fusion of pathos, performativity, abridgment, and recapitulation within the experience of art reception is both the unavoidable consequence of the “Markt für geistige Ware” (Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1897] 11) that Mauthner decries and the logical result of the “Vertiefung in die Meisterwerke unserer großen Dichter” (Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1878] 5) that he extols� Bildungsbürgertum saw miniaturization as laughable - but, as Walser’s recapitulations show, its own valorization of literary grandeur was already a contribution to the smallness it derided, insofar as it equated smallness and non -master status with derisability� “Von Bratkartoffeln zu reden, wo Werte umgewertet werden sollten, war arg,” writes Walser in another piece (marvelously titled “Ibsens Nora oder die Rösti”) (27)� Arg it may be - but, so long as one consumes books along with one’s hash browns, it is also an inevitable part of the activity of literature itself. Mauthner’s synopses, truncating the literary work’s story to emphasize its style, deprive the work of its idea ; Walser’s synopses, filtering the literary work through spectatorship and circumstance, deprive it of its privilege � The downsizing of literature emerges as either its parody - or as a critique of the very aesthetic ideology that makes such downsizing parodic in the first place. Notes 1 “Ich erkläre […], daß die Glosse, obwohl sie, streng genommen und vom bepolsterten Stuhl der schriftstellerischen Sittlichkeit aus angeschaut, eine Verdorbenheit repräsentiert, klein von Gestalt, wie sie ist, indem man sie um ihres geringen Umfanges willen bequem placieren kann, nach überallhin wirkt, und wenn sie einigen Eindruck macht, wie rührt dann ihren Empfänger ihre zarte Beseeltheit, die ihn mit stiefmütterchenhafter Großäugigkeit gefaßt anschaut” (Walser, “Die Glosse” 289). 2 “Denn die Freude am Glossologischen und am Lachen umklammern von vornherein die subordiniert vorgebrachten Einwände und Ängste” (Fuchs 141)� 3 On the allusion to Kuprin’s novel, see the editors’ note to “Der falsche Ganina” in Walser, Sämtliche Werke , vol. 19, 474—75. 4 As Walser jokingly admits: “Nein, der Glossist sitzt auf dem Rosse seines schönen und unschönen Berufes keineswegs einsam, vielmehr steht seine Figur in Reih und Glied eines Heeres von solchen eingegliedert da, die für ihre Anstrengungen im Menschheitsdienst höchstens einen, wenn vielleicht 256 Erica Weitzman auch nur flüchtigen, Nasenstüber als Belohnung eingeheimst haben” (“Die Glosse” 288)� On the feuilleton as a form of both popular literary criticism and communicative skim-reading, see Wildenhahn, esp. 34—35. 5 In this, Mauthner’s parodies as well as his parody-theory correspond to the popular description of parody offered by Schopenhauer: “Ihr Verfahren besteht darin, daß sie den Vorgängen und Worten eines ernsthaften Gedichtes oder Dramas unbedeutende, niedrige Personen, oder kleinliche Motive und Handlungen unterschiebt� Sie subsumirt also die von ihr dargestellten platten Realitäten unter die im Thema gegebenen hohen Begriffe, unter welche sie nun in gewisser Hinsicht passen müssen, während sie übrigens denselben sehr inkongruent sind; wodurch dann der Widerstreit zwischen dem Angeschauten und dem Gedachten sehr grell hervortritt” (Schopenhauer 113)� 6 Jochen Greven does connect Walser’s work to Mauthner - and more generally, to “einer Epoche von Sprachskepsis, Sprachkrise und Sprachkritik” - concluding, “Auf den epochalen Sprachzweifel waren unterschiedliche Antworten möglich, wie die literarische Entwicklung gezeigt hat. Robert Walsers war die eines bis in die Groteske getriebenen Verfahrens mit dem Zitathaften, eines parodierend-experimentierenden Spiels mit Sprache in einer metasprachlichen Dimension” (29). This connection, however, still overlooks the ways in which Walser’s play with language fundamentally differs from the parodic japery of his immediate forebears� 7 “die Glossierung [ist] immer auch ein Verfahren der Komik […], das eine Lachgemeinschaft zwischen dem Ich und dem Leser stiften will” (Fuchs 132)� 8 In the 1897 introduction, Mauthner lightly chides himself for having “geistige Führer wie Heyse und Spielhagen ähnlich [behandelt] wie den Modelitteraten Sacher-Masoch und seinesgleichen,” and congratulates himself for at least letting “meine große Lieblinge” Gottfried Keller and Ludwig Anzengruber off the hook (7). 9 As Genette comments further on: “Vulgar pastiche-makers […] like to stuff their imitations with additional comical and satirical effects: puns, anachronisms, clever allusions to the person and work of the model’s author, parodic plays on the names of characters, etc. - all of which are nonessential to the caricatural purpose but act as functional indices or signs” (89)� 10 On sexualization and linguistic nonsense as aspects of Mauthner’s parodies, see, respectively, Vierhufe 192—93 and 194—200. 11 As Freytag’s book ends: “Vielleicht wirken die Taten und Leiden der Vorfahren noch in ganz anderer Weise auf unsere Gedanken und Werke ein, als wir Lebenden begreifen. Aber es ist eine weise Fügung der Weltordnung, Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 257 daß wir nicht wissen, wie weit wir selbst das Leben vergangener Menschen fortsetzen, und daß wir nur zuweilen erstaunt merken, wie wir in unsern Kindern weiter leben. Vielleicht bin ich ein Stück von jenem Manne, welcher einst an dieser Stelle von dem Reformator gesegnet wurde, und vielleicht war ich es selbst in anderer Erscheinung, der schon auf diesem Berge lagerte, lange bevor die ehrwürdige Feste gebaut wurde. Aber meine Valerie hatte keiner von den alten Knaben, keiner saß meinem Henner am Arbeitstisch gegenüber, um liberale Artikel zu schreiben, und keiner sah wie wir von dieser Höhe hinab in die Landschaft eines großen deutschen Volkes, welches über der Arbeit ist, das Haus seines Staates zu zimmern. Was wir uns selbst gewinnen an Freude und Leid durch eigenes Wagen und eigene Werke, das ist doch immer der beste Inhalt unseres Lebens, ihn schafft sich jeder Lebende neu. Und je länger das Leben einer Nation in den Jahrhunderten läuft, um so geringer wird die zwingende Macht, welche durch die Taten des Ahnen auf das Schicksal des Enkels ausgeübt wird, desto stärker aber die Einwirkung des ganzen Volkes auf den einzelnen und größer die Freiheit, mit welcher der Mann sich selbst Glück und Unglück zu bereiten vermag. Dies aber ist das Höchste und Hoffnungsreichste in dem geheimnisvollen Wirken der Volkskraft” (1344)� 12 The reference is to Hegel’s famous phrase in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (352)� 13 As Yuri Tynianov asks, “on that knife’s edge where the comic essence of the parodic genre and the comedic elements of the work being parodied both disappear, we can ask: is the point really in the comic? ” (“On Parody” 299—300). The example that leads Tynianov to ask this question differs significantly from Walser’s works (and could be said to be more fraud than parody); however, the question itself is no less applicable to Walser’s case. 14 Hegel also co-implicates the spectator in comic parabasis, but his interest obviously lies less in what this means for the artwork than in the self-consciousness it implies and the sublation of the artwork that it should eventually enable (see Hegel 541-44)� 15 On literary summary as an act of interpretation, see Genette 242—43. 16 Thus Walser’s abbreviated rewritings are significantly more sophisticated than the parodic “process of mimicry” Valerie Heffernan has read them as, by which Walser would “call into question the power structures and institutions of authority that pervade his literary milieu” (64) conceived as monolithic cultural hegemon� 258 Erica Weitzman Works Cited Freytag, Gustav. Die Ahnen. Ungekürzte Ausgabe . Berlin: Kurt Wolff, 1872. Fuchs, Annette. Dramaturgie des Narrentums: Das Komische in der Prosa Robert Walsers � Munich: Fink, 1993. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree . Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997. Greven, Jochen. “‘Mit seiner deutschen Sprache jonglieren gelernt’: Robert Walser als Imitator, Parodist, Stilexzentriker.” Wärmende Fremde. Robert Walser und seine Übersetzer im Gespräch . Ed. Peter Utz. Bern: Peter Lang, 1994. 19—30. Harte, Bret. “Miss Mix.” Condensed Novels, and Other Papers . New York: G. W. Carleton, 1867. 67—79. ---� Preface to Condensed Novels, and Other Papers . New York: G. W. Carleton, 1867. 12. Heffernan, Valerie. Provocation from the Periphery: Robert Walser Re-examined � Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Hegel, G. W. F. Phänomenologie des Geistes � Werke � Vol� 3� Ed� Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms � Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2000. ---� Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox . Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2013� Kühn, Joachim. Gescheiterte Sprachkritik: Fritz Mauthners Leben und Werk � Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975. Mauthner, Fritz. “Aus dem Vorwort zum ‘Neuen Folge’.” Nach Berühmten Mustern. Poetische Studien. Gesamtausgabe . Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1897. 12—16. ---� “Etwas über die Parodie�” Schorers Familienblatt. Eine illustrierte Zeitschrift 9 (1888): 139—40. ---� Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern. Poetische Studien. Gesamtausgabe � Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1897. 5—11. ---� “Die Vorfahren�” Nach Berühmten Mustern. Poetische Studien. Stuttgart: Spemann, 1878. 32—38. Richter, Jean Paul. Vorschule der Ästhetik . Ed. Wolfhart Henckman. Hamburg: Meiner, 1980� Schiller, Friedrich. “Das Lied von der Glocke.” Schillers Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe . Vol. 2. Leipzig: M. Hesse, 1910-1911. 58—69. ---� Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen. Schillers Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe . Vol. 18. Leipzig: M. Hesse, 1910-1911. 5—165. Schlegel, Friedrich. Athenäums -Fragment 116� Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe � Vol� 2� Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796-1801). Ed. Hans Eichner. Munich: Schöningh, 1967� 182� Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 259 Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung � Zürcher Ausgabe. Werke in zehn Bänden . Vol. 3. Zurich: Diogenes, 1977. Th., F. v. “Unsre Mitarbeiter.” Schorers Familienblatt. Eine illustrierte Zeitschrift 9 (1888): 141� Tynianov, Yuri. “Dostoyevsky and Gogol (Toward a Theory of Parody).” Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film � Trans� and ed� Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko. Boston and Brookline: Academic Studies Press, 2019. 27—63. ---� “On Parody�” Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film � Trans� and ed� Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko� Boston and Brookline: Academic Studies Press, 2019. 294—328. Vierhufe, Almut. Parodie und Sprachkritik: Untersuchungen zu Fritz Mauthners “Nach berühmten Mustern.” Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999. Walser, Robert. “Der falsche Ganina.” Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben � Vol� 19� Es war einmal . Ed. Jochen Greven. Zurich and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. 432—38. ---� “Die Glosse�” Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben � Vol� 19� Es war einmal � Ed� Jochen Greven. Zurich and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. 287—89. ---� “Die Tragödie�” Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben � Vol� 20� Für die Katz. Prosa aus der Berner Zeit 1928-1933 . Ed. Jochen Greven. Zurich and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. 326—28. ---� “Gespenster�” Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben � Vol� 20� Für die Katz. Prosa aus der Berner Zeit 1928-1933 . Ed. Jochen Greven. Zurich and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. 335—36. ---. “Ibsens Nora oder die Rösti.” Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben � Vol� 7� Seeland � Ed� Jochen Greven. Zurich and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. 26—27. ---. “Sie warfen ihr abgefallene Kastanien nach.” Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet � Vol� 1� Mikrogramme aus den Jahren 1924-1925 � Ed� Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang� Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985. 265—67. Wildenhahn, Barbara. Feuilleton zwischen den Kriegen. Die Form der Kritik und ihre Theorie . Munich: Fink, 2008. Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures 261 Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures Vanessa Barrera Independent Scholar Abstract: More than a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche warned that calm and contemplation were going out of fashion, soon to be replaced by widespread haste and mindlessness. Confirming the diagnosis sixty years later, Adorno observed that metropolitan modernity had given rise to a nervousness and discontinuity so profound that reflection could only occur in its shadow; consequently, intellectual labor tends always to appear “abgestohlen” [stolen] from some other (pre)occupation. Proceeding from a study of Franz Kafka - whose rich creative and intellectual work took place almost exclusively on time borrowed from other tasks and obligations - this paper argues that such “stolen” moments are perhaps more fecund than we might at first imagine. Keywords: Franz Kafka, intellectual labor, modernity, occupation, minor literatures In the fourth book of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [ The Gay Science ], Friedrich Nietzsche announces the outbreak of a new disease in Europe� An import from the frenetic New World, its characteristic symptom is “athemlose Hast der Arbeit” [breathless haste in working] accompanied by “wunderliche Geistlosigkeit” [odd mindlessness] and an incapacity for sustained reflection (Nietzsche, Wissenschaft 236/ Nietzsche, Science 183). Nietzsche continues: Man schämt sich jetzt schon der Ruhe […]. Man denkt mit der Uhr in der Hand, […] das Auge auf das Börsenblatt gerichtet […]. [E]s könnte bald so weit kommen, dass man einem Hange zur vita contemplativa (das heißt zum Spazierengehen mit Gedanken und Freunden) nicht ohne Selbstverachtung und schlechtes Gewissen nachgäbe. (Nietzsche, Wissenschaft 236—37) 262 Vanessa Barrera [Already, one is afraid of keeping still […]. One thinks with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages […]. Soon we may well reach the point where one can’t give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience.] (Nietzsche, The Gay Science 18—34) The watchword of an era so afflicted is “[l]ieber irgend Etwas thun, als Nichts” [rather do anything than nothing] for constant, in the parlance of our own times, fear of missing out, and this perennial distractibility comes paired with pangs of conscience brought on by even the briefest moment of stillness (Nietzsche, Wissenschaft 236/ Nietzsche, Science 183)� If this imperative to busyness loomed large for thinkers of the late nineteenth century, the situation was only worse for those who bore witness to the ensuing decades� One recalls a certain passage of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia - another rich compendium of aphorisms, markedly different in tone from Die fröhliche Wissenschaft , but every bit as relentlessly diagnostic - in which the ferocious rhythm of modernity is once again couched in terms of pestilence and morality, this time with an even more explicit emphasis on scholarly work: Was seit dem Aufkommen der großen Städte als Hast, Nervosität, Unstetigkeit beobachtet wurde, breitet nun so epidemisch sich aus wie einmal Pest und Cholera. […] Der Schatten davon fällt über die intellektuelle Arbeit. Sie geschieht mit schlechtem Gewissen, als wäre sie von irgendwelchen dringlichen, wenngleich nur imaginären Beschäftigungen abgestohlen. (Adorno, Minimia Moralia: Reflexionen 258—59) [The haste, nervousness and discontinuity observable since the rise of the great cities, is spreading epidemically, as plague and cholera did before. […] The shadow of this falls on intellectual labor. It takes place with a bad conscience, as if it were moonlighting from some sort of urgent, albeit purely imaginary occupation.] (Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections 138) In more recent years, too, the seemingly limitless drive to industry has received increased attention within the academic sphere. I have in mind studies like Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work (2011), Jonathan Crary’s 24/ 7 (2014), and David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018), among others, which take up these issues in a broader sociopolitical context, but also certain meta-academic texts like “How Scholars Read” (2008), in which John Guillory reflects on the state of academic reading in particular, asking along the way if perhaps “the system of academic publication, as the servant of administrative demands for ever greater volumes of publication, has resulted in poorer scholarship” (Guillory 15). The question is a fair one, and I include it here as meaningful testimony to a frustration as urgent as it is familiar� But before conceding that modern time constraints Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures 263 necessarily detract from the quality of intellectual activity, we might do well to consider other paradigms� In the passage cited above, Adorno evokes a striking critical image, namely the notion of a special kind of time in which intellectual work is able to take shape, a time seemingly “abgestohlen” [stolen] from other activities. Stolen time is juxtaposed with normal hours, during which the intellectual busies herself not with prolonged reflection or knowledge production, as we might expect, but with the maintenance of a kind of compensatory frenzy: Um sich vor sich selbst zu rechtfertigen, praktiziert [die intellektuelle Arbeit] den Gestus des Hektischen, des Hochdrucks, des unter Zeitnot stehenden Betriebs, der jeglicher Besinnung, ihr selber also, im Wege steht. Oft ist es, als reservierten die Intellektuellen für ihre eigentliche Produktion nur eben die Stunden, die ihnen von Verpflichtungen, Ausgängen, Verabredungen und unvermeidlichen Vergnügungen übrig bleiben. (Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen 259) [To justify itself in its own eyes [intellectual work] puts on a show of hectic activity performed under great pressure and shortage of time, which excludes all reflection, and therefore itself� It often seems as if intellectuals reserved for their actual production only those hours left over from obligations, excursions, appointments and unavoidable amusements.] (Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections 138) This description will resonate, I think, with anyone engaged in scholarly work today, perhaps especially, although certainly not exclusively, within the academy. As a peculiar kind of labor with gestures superficially indistinguishable from those of everyday leisure activities - to say nothing of its not entirely unfair reputation for relative unprofitability - intellectual work leaves its practitioners especially vulnerable to feeling out of step with livelier sectors of the working world, a tendency which results in skewed perceptions of our own productivity� Many of my colleagues have observed that they feel more useful when, say, stockpiling materials they have only vague intentions of reading than when sitting in front of a computer for hours, immobile, in pursuit of their own thoughts. Consequently, one is tempted to engage as much as possible “den Gestus des Hektischen” [hectic activity], filling countless hours with administrative tasks and harried emailing, thereby pushing more sedate types of labor, ones requiring prolonged “Besinnung” [reflection], further and further into the marginal “Schatten” [shadow] - those fleeting moments stolen away from other preoccupations. For better or worse, however, the remarkable fact remains that a great deal of writing is nevertheless produced under these apparently inhospitable conditions, suggesting one of two possibilities: either the fruit of intellectual labor is extraordinarily resilient, or these temporal interstices are, 264 Vanessa Barrera curiously and despite - or perhaps even because of - their brevity, uncommonly well-equipped to bring it forth. The case of Franz Kafka’s literary productivity offers rich material with which to explore these hypotheses� Famously frustrated by the limits imposed by his various social and professional obligations, Kafka complained often that he had very little time to write. A long tradition of Kafka scholarship has accepted these grievances at face value, likewise insisting upon the so-called “Antinomie zwischen Brotarbeit und literarischer Produktion” (Binder, “Leben” 470) according to which Kafka’s responsibilities as an insurance official and at his family’s asbestos factory limited his writerly ambitions� Even those scholars who question the extent to which certain aspects of Kafka’s situation were as detrimental as he claimed - Peter-André Alt, for example, holds that sleepness nights were ideal for the trance-like state Kafka required to do his best writing (312—13) - have not challenged the basic assumption that his ample literary output emerged despite the circumstances of his schedule and not because of them, or, put differently, that an hour spent in the office is necessarily an hour lost for creative intellectual activity. In what follows, however, I hope to show that Kafka’s case might in fact cause us to reconsider this assumption in ways that point toward another economy of time� By his own account, the most significant obstacle to Kafka’s literary work was his professional career. After receiving his law degree in the summer of 1906, Kafka worked for one year as a court trainee before taking a temporary position at the Prague office of an Italian insurance company where the pay was low and the hours too long to allow much time for writing (Begley 29—30; see also Wagner 19). Two years later, he secured a position at the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungsanstalt [Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute], where he would remain until 1922 (Kafka, Office Writings i ). Although the hours at the institute were more forgiving, Kafka still devoted relatively little time to his craft, despite insisting in an early letter to Felice Bauer that his entire mode of life was “nur auf das Schreiben hin eingerichtet” [devised solely for writing] (Kafka, Briefe an Felice 66—67/ Kafka, Letters to Felice 21)� Diary entries from the period suggest that the relationship between his two competing careers was to blame� One example contains the following draft of a letter to Eugen Pfohl, Kafka’s immediate superior at the institute: Wie ich heute aus dem Bett steigen wollte bin ich einfach zusammengeklappt. […] [I]ch bin vollkommen überarbeitet. Nicht durch das Bureau, aber durch meine sonstige Arbeit. […] [D]as Bureau hat gegen mich die klarsten und berechtigtsten Forderungen. Nur ist es eben für mich ein schreckliches Doppelleben, aus dem es wahrscheinlich nur den Irrsinn als Ausweg gibt. (Kafka, Tagebücher 29) Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures 265 [When I wanted to get out of bed this morning I simply folded up. […] I am completely overworked. Not by the office but my other work. […] [T]he office has a right to make the most definite and justified demands of me. But for me in particular it is a horrible double life from which there is probably no escape but insanity.] (Kafka, Diaries 44) Evidently, the conflict between Kafka’s duties at the institute and his work as a writer generated an enormous amount of stress, even if the former hardly excluded the possibility of writing altogether. In fact, things may well have been easier if it had: as things stood, Kafka was writing from about half past eleven to one, two, or three in the morning, depending upon his energy and luck. Only a few hours, then, but ones quite clearly poached from sleep, which he tried, with mixed success, to recoup in the afternoons (Kafka, Briefe an Felice 67)� Between sheer exhaustion and the feeling that he was leading two irreconcilable lives, in both of which he was doomed to failure, it is hardly surprising that Kafka did not always find himself eager to greet the day. The perceived threat of being “torn asunder” by the fundamentally irreconcilable pulls of writing and office is reflected too in Kafka’s apprehensive approach to new interests (Kafka, Letters to Felice 279). Around 1911, for instance, he was drawn to philosopher and esotericist Dr� Rudolf Steiner’s work on theosophy� That spring, Steiner delivered a series of lectures in Prague, of which Kafka attended at least one (Kafka, Tagebücher 40). Two days later, Kafka met with Steiner personally and expressed concern that taking up a new pursuit would cause him undue confusion, feeling, as he did, already consumed by the tension between his calling to literature and his work as an insurance official. He described the situation to Steiner in the following way: Mein Glück, meine Fähigkeiten und jede Möglichkeit, irgendwie zu nützen, liegen seit jeher im Literarischen. […] Diesem Literarischen kann ich mich nun nicht vollständig hingeben […]. Abgesehen von meinen Familienverhältnissen könnte ich von der Literatur schon infolge des langsamen Entstehens meiner Arbeiten und ihres besonderen Charakters nicht leben […]. Ich bin daher Beamter in einer sozialen Versicherungsanstalt geworden. […] Und zu diesen zwei nie auszugleichenden Bestrebungen soll ich jetzt die Theosophie als dritte führen? (Kafka, Tagebücher 44—45) [My happiness, my abilities, and every possibility of being useful in any way have always been in the literary field. […] I cannot now devote myself completely to this literary field […]. Aside from my family relationships, I could not live by literature if only, to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character […]. I have therefore become an official in a social insurance agency. […] And to these two never-to-be-reconciled endeavours shall I now add theosophy as a third? ] (Kafka, Diaries 59) 266 Vanessa Barrera Here, Kafka lays bare the specifically temporal stakes of the conflict by attributing the impossibility of dedicating himself to intellectual work as much to the slow speed at which his literary creations develop as to their “special character�” This is particularly interesting given the shorter forms - brief stories, parables, and sometimes even aphorisms - to which he was most inclined� Smaller texts do not necessarily require less time to compose, of course - Pascal’s famous apology comes to mind: “The present letter is a long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter” (Pascal 571) - but if nothing else, Kafka’s claim forces us to acknowledge the relativity of the distinction� Eight hours hardly seems a lengthy gestation period for a text like “The Judgment” [“Das Urteil”] in the abstract; it is only by taking into account their status as stolen hours - ones traded from the realm of sleep - that we begin to understand them as a dear price to pay� In his appeal to Steiner, Kafka alludes to yet another hindrance to his creative output: his family and, we might say, other people in general. While Kafka the insurance official was engaged almost exclusively (and, it is worth noting, rather successfully) in the fulfillment of socially oriented tasks with concrete effects on his community, 1 Kafka the writer was almost pathologically committed to solitude in service of his writing. On 7 July 1913, he wrote the following in a letter to Felice Bauer: Ich kann eben das Zusammenleben mit Menschen nicht ertragen […]. Im unbeteiligten Anblick freuen mich alle Menschen, aber diese Freude ist nicht so groß, als daß ich nicht in einer Wüste, in einem Wald, auf einer Insel bei den nötigen körperlichen Voraussetzungen unvergleichlich glücklicher leben wollte als hier in meinem Zimmer zwischen dem Schlafzimmer und dem Wohnzimmer meiner Eltern. (Kafka, Briefe an Felice 423) [It is just that I cannot abide communal life […]. Seen in a detached way, I enjoy all people, but my enjoyment is not so great that, given the necessary physical requirements, I would not be incomparably happier living in a desert, a forest, on an island, rather than here in my room between my parents’ bedroom and living room.] (Kafka, Letters to Felice 287) One might be inclined to attribute this frustration to Kafka’s notoriously fraught relationship with his parents, but he was not exactly enthusiastic about the idea of his beloved’s company either. The same month, he drew up a list in his diary of all the arguments for and against his marriage to Felice� Most items speak against their union, largely for reasons having to do with “Alleinsein” [being alone], which Kafka considered essential for his work. In the third position, for instance, he writes: “Ich muß viel allein sein. Was ich geleistet habe, ist nur ein Erfolg des Alleinseins.” [I must be alone a great deal. What I accomplished was Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures 267 only the result of being alone.] (Kafka, Tagebücher 228/ Kafka, Diaries 292)� Tellingly, the final line of the list reads: “Allein könnte ich vielleicht einmal meinen Posten wirklich aufgeben. Verheiratet wird es nie möglich sein.” [Alone, I could perhaps some day really give up my job. Married, it will never be possible.] (Kafka, Tagebücher 228/ Kafka, Diaries 293)� As we know, however, Kafka neither married Felice - indeed, he never married at all, though he was engaged several times - nor willingly left his post at the institute� 2 Instead, he found time for intellectual and literary aspirations alongside these various personal commitments and professional responsibilities� Given the sheer volume of writing he was nevertheless able to produce, one might assume that Kafka was rather judicious when it came to setting aside time for his creative work, but the evidence tells a different story. In November of 1912, he describes his daily routine in a letter to Felice: Von 8 bis 2 oder 2⅓ Bureau, bis 3 oder ½4 Mittagessen, von da ab Schlafen im Bett (meist nur Versuche […]) bis ½8, dann 10 Minuten Turnen, nackt bei offenem Fenster, dann eine Stunde Spazierengehn allein oder mit Max oder mit noch einem andern Freund, dann Nachtmahl innerhalb der Familie […] dann um ½11 (oft wird aber auch sogar ½12) Niedersetzen zum Schreiben und dabeibleiben je nach Kraft, Lust und Glück bis 1, 2, 3 Uhr, einmal auch schon bis 6 Uhr früh. (Kafka, Briefe an Felice 67) [[F]rom eight to two or 2: 30 in the office, then lunch till three or 3: 30, after that sleep in bed (usually only attempts […]) until 7: 30, then ten minutes of exercises, naked at the open window, then an hour’s walk - alone, with Max, or with another friend, then dinner with my family […]; then at 10: 30 (but often not till 11: 30) I sit down to write, and I go on, depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until 1, 2, or 3 o’clock, once even till 6 in the morning.] (Kafka, Letters to Felice 22) As biographer Louis Begley has pointed out, it is striking how little time has been reserved for writing in the schedule outlined above� With his afternoons mostly free, Kafka should theoretically have had ample time at his disposal to allow for both intellectual work and a full night’s sleep. All the same, when Felice suggested a reorganization of his day along those lines, his reply was uncompromising: “The present way is the only possible one; if I can’t bear it, so much the worse; but I will bear it somehow” (Kafka, Letters to Felice 180)� What are we to make of this contradiction? The obvious answer, of course, is that Kafka simply wasted most of his time, an explanation emphatically supported by scores of articles published by fellow procrastinators in outlets ranging from Reader’s Digest to the New York Review of Books. 3 But taking Kafka at his word, I would like to argue - as much for our benefit, admittedly, as for his - that the situation was slightly more complex than it appears. In an effort to understand why Kafka opted, even with the resources available to him, to 268 Vanessa Barrera squeeze his writing into a few hours of stolen time, I shall turn now to one of his literary texts, which may offer further insight. “Die Prüfung” [“The Test”], a very short story written in 1920, begins with a simple declaration: “Ich bin ein Diener” [I am a servant] (Kafka, Erzählungen 379/ Kafka, Stories 441). But the narrator does not serve - there is, namely, “keine Arbeit für [ihn] da” [no work for [him]] (Kafka, Erzählungen 379/ Kafka, Stories 441). As such, he spends his time lying in bed in a kind of daze, staring at the ceiling, falling asleep, and waking up at random intervals. Sometimes, he goes to the tavern across the street, where he can watch his own building without being spotted and drink a beer that he doesn’t like. One day, the routine is interrupted: he walks into the bar and sees that someone else is occupying his usual seat. When he turns to leave, the stranger - who is also a servant, as it happens - invites him for a drink and asks several questions, none of which he understands. Assuming he has disappointed the stranger, our narrator apologizes and prepares to depart. He is promptly informed that the questions were merely a test, and he who does not answer them has passed. Now, just as Kafka insisted that writing was his only talent despite the fact that, by his own account, he did not write much and had no proper literary interests (Kafka, Briefe an Felice 250 and 444), this nameless servant lays claim confidently to an essence without providing any evidence to support the assertion. Strictly speaking, he does not serve at all - we recognize him as a servant only because of his introductory declaration: not “Ich diene” [I serve], but “Ich bin ein Diener” [I am a servant]. Additionally, the question of desire or aptitude is as moot in the servant’s case as it is in Kafka’s: neither identity is experienced as a matter of choice� The narrator tells us that he sometimes wishes to be called to service, but those who are called up more often have not, he suspects, felt such a wish more strongly (Kafka, Erzählungen 379). At the same time, however, one might argue, as Christiane Frey has suggested, that the nature of a servant is to be found not in the action of service per se, but rather in a certain kind of capacity or readiness to serve (Frey 375—76). In other words, being a servant consists not exactly in performing the function that the label implies, but in maintaining the potential to perform it. As many of us can attest, the situation is very similar with writing: one remains a writer even (or precisely) when one is not writing, insofar as one could, if inspiration struck, if one were called to it, write at any time. We know that there are other servants, but the narrator is careful to distinguish himself from these “andere[n]” [others], not only according to the frequency with which they are called, but also in terms of their behavior and character (Kafka, Erzählungen 379/ Kafka, Stories 441). He explains, for example, that “andere sind gerufen worden und haben sich nicht mehr darum bewor- Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures 269 ben als ich, ja haben vielleicht nicht einmal den Wunsch gehabt, gerufen zu werden, während ich ihn wenigstens manchmal sehr stark habe” [others have been called yet they have not tried harder than I, indeed perhaps they have not even felt the desire to be called, whereas I, at least sometimes, have felt it very strongly] (Kafka, Erzählungen 379/ Kafka, Stories 441). In theory, the narrator could have discovered by speaking with them that his colleagues have not made more of an effort to be called, but he does not seem to know any of them personally. From his seat at the tavern, he occasionally catches glimpses of other servants, but does not recognize them because those who are always working, he explains, sleep in another room. The strange examiner in the tavern is also a servant, but the encounter at the bar marks their first interaction. The servant, then, is one of many, but nevertheless, like Kafka, leads a curiously isolated life. Why might this be? If, following Frey, the servant fulfills his calling by remaining available for service, then it stands to reason that it would behoove him not to answer other calls - to, so to speak, keep the lines open. This might explain why he steadfastly avoids all other occupations, preferring instead to idle in his quarters or in close proximity to his building, such that he can be ready to serve at a moment’s notice. Here, though, it would seem that we have stumbled upon a significant difference between the servant’s life and Kafka’s. Whereas Kafka’s literary calling was confined to a few odd hours appropriated from other activities, the servant’s case is still more extreme, for he is a servant only insofar as he shapes his entire life into an answer to his calling by remaining forever ready to be of service, or dienstfertig [ready to serve]. Paradoxically, then, a servant with only one job might be said to have even less time at his disposal for non-work activity than Kafka, for to steal even a second for other things would be already to undermine his very essence and trigger a change of state - to acquire, effectively, an entirely different mode of being, or, if you like, a new Bestehen [existence]. Which brings us to the test� I will not dwell on the word Prüfung [test] itself, except to note in passing that it contains, as a kind of happy coincidence, a sly nod to the Ruf [call], and by extension of course, Beruf [career]. And indeed, it is only in the context of this exam that our servant is finally “gerufen” [called] - as he puts it, the man sitting in his usual place “rief mich zu sich” [called me over] (Kafka, Erzählungen 380/ Kafka, Stories 442)� But this call is precisely not a call to service; on the contrary, the servant is himself served a drink, and as an invited guest no less. As a result, the narrator - whose status qua servant depends, as we have established, in large part upon his ongoing capacity to serve - violates his own essence by answering the call and enters in the process a separate temporal sphere, a short but momentous length of time snatched away from his rightful occupation� 270 Vanessa Barrera On the linguistic level, this evolution is signaled by the introduction of speech, an altogether different kind of language that breaks the flow of internal monologue. Consistent with this shift, too, is the sudden intimacy of the exchange - despite never having spoken before, the narrator and his fellow servant slip seamlessly into the informal “du” - predicated, we might assume, upon the characters’ shared social status. Taking these changes into account, the test itself becomes more than a test, although it is that as well - for all its peculiarities, it possesses the basic elements of test-giver, test-taker, and questions. But its idiosyncratic implementation of these serves only to undermine the exam form as such� In this way, the tavern exchange resembles a “minor utilization” of language as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: an instance (or instant, as the case may be) of speech or writing created by a minority in a major language (Deleuze and Guattari 26). Not unlike Bartleby’s humble yet forceful “I would prefer not to,” Kafka’s test thus “carves out a kind of foreign language within language” by marshalling the components of a regulatory structure towards a refreshing elimination of hierarchies and celebration of incompetence (Deleuze 69 and 71)� In this sense, I believe the final scene of Kafka’s story holds the key to what we might otherwise have called its author’s incapacity for effective time management. For such brief, stolen moments afford us special freedoms unavailable during those longer periods properly dedicated to the “obligations, excursions, appointments and unavoidable amusements” that occupy most of our lives (Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections 138)� At once outside of and in direct opposition to conventional norms around time - which have, at least in the West, unilaterally condemned idleness and all other forms of perceived inefficiency for centuries - these fugitive interruptions are always essentially transgressive, making them fertile ground for experimentation, invention, and even resistance. But just as the minor can only assert itself vis-à-vis the major, stolen time depends in large part upon the same oppressive mechanisms it challenges. This, perhaps, is why we are hard-pressed to conjure independently that singular sense of urgency which so often takes root in the dark shadow of competing deadlines and commitments. Equally, however, we cannot bear the immense pressure of these demands for more than a short while before being overwhelmed. On the one hand, then, a thrilling window to alterity presents itself only when all doors have been closed by time constraints; on the other, that window threatens at each moment to be snapped shut by the very force which pried it open� As inauspicious as these circumstances might appear for the kind of work that requires protracted reflection, the inherent brevity of these intervals, in conjunction with their radical potential, may indeed be their most valuable feature. After all, as Freud tells us, “[d]er Vergänglichkeitswert ist ein Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures 271 Seltenheitswert in der Zeit” [[t]ransience value is scarcity value in time] (Freud, Gesammelte Schriften 292/ Freud, Standard Edition 305)� While Kafka may well have bristled at the suggestion that his writing actually benefitted from the strain caused by his Brotberuf [day job], his diaries leave no doubt that part of him relished the experience of working on stolen hours� Recounting the night of 22 August 1912 - during which he wrote “Das Urteil” [“The Judgment”] in a single sitting from ten o’clock at night to six in the morning - he speaks fondly of the stiffness that settled into his legs and of the “in der Mitte der Nacht vergehende Müdigkeit” [weariness that disappeared in the middle of the night]. Wistfully, he recalls that extraordinary but familiar feeling of endless possibility - “[w]ie alles gesagt werden kann, wie für alle, für die fremdesten Einfälle ein großes Feuer bereitet ist, in dem sie vergehn und auferstehn” [[h]ow everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again] - as the sky turned blue and the maid’s arrival announced the night’s end (Kafka, Tagebücher 214/ Kafka, Diaries 276)� Exhausted as he must have been after yet again trading rest for writing, and with the dreaded workday looming on the horizon, his verdict is nevertheless decisive: “ Nur so kann geschrieben werden” [Only in this way can writing be done] (Kafka, Tagebücher 214/ Kafka, Diaries 276)� Notes 1 At the institute, Kafka’s duties included: preparing annual reports on accident prevention and safety standards; investigating claims (from his office and in person); composing addresses on behalf of his colleagues; making recommendations for the improvement of various kinds of machinery� For more on the nature of his work and his respected status as an employee, see Begley; Kafka: The Office Writings ; and Stach� 2 Kafka retired in 1922, but only after the insurance institute’s physician “declared him unfit for duty” (Begley 43). 3 See Specktor as well as Smith� Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life . Trans. E. F. N Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005. ---� Minima moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben � Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975. Alt, Peter-André. Franz Kafka: Der ewige Sohn. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005. 272 Vanessa Barrera Begley, Louis. The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay . New York: Atlas, 2008. Binder, Hartmut. Kafka: Der Schaffensprozeß. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature � Trans� Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1975. Freud, Sigmund. Gesammelte Schriften � Ed� Anna Freud and A� J� Storfer� Vol� 11� Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1928. ---� The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud � Ed� James Strachey et al. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1957. Frey, Christiane. “Kafka’s Test.” Monatshefte 103.3 (2011): 372—84. Guillory, John. “How Scholars Read.” ADE Bulletin 146 (2008): 8—17. Kafka, Franz. Briefe an Felice � Ed� Erich Heller and Jürgen Born� Tübingen: Schocken Books, 1970. ---. The Complete Stories . Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1988. ---. The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1913 . Ed. Max Brod. Trans. Joseph Kresh. London: Secker & Warburg, 1948. ---� Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa . Frankfurt am Main: Fischer TB, 2014� ---� Franz Kafka: The Office Writings . Ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner. Trans. Eric Patton and Ruth Hein. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. ---� Letters to Felice � Ed� Erich Heller and Jürgen Born� Trans� James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth. New York: Schocken Books, 1973. ---� Tagebücher 1910-1923 . Ed. Max Brod. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe . Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Fünfte Abteilung, Zweiter Band. Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 1973. 13—335. ---� The Gay Science . Ed. Bernard Arthur Owen Williams. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. The Provincial Letters � Trans� William Finlayson Trotter and Thomas McCrie. New York: The Modern Library, 1941. Smith, Zadie. “F. Kafka, Everyman.” The New York Review 17 Jul� 2008: n� pag� Web� 14 Sep� 2020� Specktor, Brandon. “5 Geniuses with Serious Procrastination Problems.” Reader’s Digest n�d� Web� 14 Sep� 2020� Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years . Trans. Shelley Frisch. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. Wagner, Benno. “Kafka’s Office Writings: Historical Background and Institutional Setting�” Franz Kafka: The Office Writings . Ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner. Trans. Eric Patton and Ruth Hein. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. 19—50. Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung 273 Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung Jodok Trösch University of Basel Abstract: This paper will explore the effects of integrating short poetic forms into a prose text� It examines Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung (1575), a German adaptation/ translation of François Rabelais’s novel Gargantua that incorporates various citations to produce an intricate text in prose� Among them are over one hundred excerpts from contemporary popular songs that contain both verse and rhyme� Instead of arranging them as a prosimetrum with clear separations between prose and poetry, Fischart fits these songs seamlessly into his prose fabric, leaving no formal features that instantly distinguish them as non-prose. As a result, he obliterates the distinction between poetry and prose� This paper will argue that there are no concepts from humanist poetics capable of explaining this way of mixing poetry and prose. Through extensive formal analysis, it will reconstruct Fischart’s particular technique of incorporating short poetic forms into a prose text, arguing that this technique produces an original form of hybrid textuality� Keywords: François Rabelais, Johann Fischart, Gargantua, Geschichtklitterung, popular song, prose, incorporation, hybrid textuality A trope in formalist literary theory holds that long literary texts can be analyzed as being composed of short forms (Tynyanov 31)� 1 This argument is particularly prevalent regarding long prose texts that evade any attempt at formal classification. These texts are conceived as being constructed of various components. While each of the components is thought to have a defined literary form, the resulting combination constitutes an entity that appears to be more or less amorphous� This procedure of combining several short forms into one larger text can both be used to emphasize and to conceal formal differences between the constituents. One major formal difference is the one between po- 274 Jodok Trösch etry and prose, understood as the (premodern) distinction between texts that use metrical language, possibly with rhyme, and texts that do not (Barck 87). This poses the question of what happens to a text when it is composed of both poetic and prosaic forms. Both poetry and prose possess specific properties that are inseparable from their textual structure� These structural characteristics are not lost even if only a short section of text is used in a quotation. Therefore, the integration of short poetic forms into a prose text leads to formal ruptures in the resulting text. This paper will explore the effects of integrating short poetic forms into a longer prose text. More specifically, I will examine one case in premodern German literature, in which verses are so seamlessly integrated into the fabric of a prose text that the differences between them are difficult to notice� Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung , first published in 1575, is a long prose text that is not bound by any formal convention� Two further editions were published during Fischart’s lifetime (1582, 1590); both of them expanded the text considerably� 2 Although the text presents itself as the translation of the French novel Gargantua by François Rabelais (only to promptly retract that claim), it includes a multitude of other literary texts from various sources (Seelbach, Ludus lectoris 291—391), including over a hundred excerpts from contemporary popular songs (Williams, “Liederpoesie” 397). This paper will try to show that these verses are incorporated into the prose text in such a way that no external feature makes them immediately recognizable as non-prose� Considering the historical context of Geschichtklitterung , a time when the distinction between poetry and prose was the central dichotomy of Renaissance poetics (Kleinschmidt 168), the concealment of these differences raises some questions regarding how this harmonization or leveling of poetry and prose is implemented in the text and what its function is� Are there any historical concepts addressing such phenomena of convergence between poetry and prose? Or is Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung an exceptional outlier? More generally, one could ask what the effects of such an interaction between verse and prose are and how they possibly change the fundamental characteristics of both. The central question, however, is what formal techniques are used in Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung to combine short verse and prose forms into a coherent and integral longer text� 3 This paper first will consider an example from Geschichtklitterung that demonstrates how Fischart unnoticeably integrates various short poetic forms into his prose text, virtually disguising them within it. Based on this initial evidence, I will then attempt to understand and evaluate this phenomenon in more theoretical terms. Once this baseline has been established, the focus will be on the text’s self-referential statements about its status as a text pieced together from shorter forms� The text employs two poetological metaphors to describe Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung 275 the composition of the text from a multitude of different elements: the stuffed pie and the melting pot� Both of them portray the text as a conglomerate or mixture of various literary forms. After that, I will look at theoretical concepts related to the composition of longer texts based on shorter forms� I will identify two concepts from early modern poetics that correspond with the autopoetical metaphors and concern transgressing the boundary between poetry and prose� In the final part of my paper, I will closely study one further example. Through a detailed description and reconstruction of two pages of Geschichtklitterung , I will show that it employs at least two ways of integrating short poetic forms into prose: One works by contrasting poetry and prose while the other disguises their difference. What does “poetry disguised in prose” mean? This is best illustrated by an example. It shows how passages of verse and rhyme first evade notice and can only be gradually discovered in the progressive act of reading and understanding. For example, the seventh chapter of Geschichtklitterung describes a massive feast hosted by King Grandgousier, the giant father of the protagonist, before the onset of Lent. In the following passage, Grandgousier is happy about the indulgence and tries to encourage it� Der gut Man Grangusier hett sein herzliche freud darmit/ wann er also gutherzig sah die Platten raumen/ vnd die Becher schaumen: und that nichts anderes, als das er sie auffmunteret, auff das sie jm nicht inn der predig entschlifen: Frisch auf jr gesellen/ die Hüner praten schon/ Trinken wir Wein/ so beschert Gott Wein/ seit frölich bei den Leuten/ vnd wer dan ain Hadermann will sein/ der mach sich weit von Leuten/ und far in Wald nach scheuten� [The good man Grandgousier heartedly enjoyed watching the plates go around and the cups foam: and he did nothing but encourage them so that they would not fall asleep during his sermon: Freshen up, my friends; the chickens are roasting. When we drink wine, God gives us wine. Be merry among people. And if you want to be a troublemaker, then stay well away from people and go into the forest.] (Fischart, Gsch H5r) 4 This passage quotes from a sixteenth-century drinking song. Typographically, the song cannot be distinguished from the rest of the text� There is no visual indication that it is a quotation, as quotation marks or similar typographical characters were not yet in common use in literary texts in the sixteenth century (Houston 200—01; Godart 283). But neither is the song set off by a line break, as is typically done with cited verse (Bland 94) even within Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung . As a consequence, it takes reading every single word to realize that it might not be a mere prose text� 276 Jodok Trösch The excerpt from the song takes up most of Grandgousier’s address to the party� The sentences beginning with “Trinken wir Wein” and ending with “Wald nach scheuten” can be found in several collections of songs from the sixteenth century with only slight variations (Williams, “Liederpoesie” 434, no. 57). 5 It is included in Der vollen brüder orden [The order of drunk brothers] by Hieronymus Bock 6 as well as in the fifth volume of Georg Forster’s song collection Frische teutsche Liedlein [Fresh German songs] (1566) 7 and in Antonio Scandello’s Nawe und lustige Weltliche Deutdsche Liedlein [New and amusing secular German songs] (1570). 8 Parts of this song are also cited in other texts by Fischart� 9 In addition, the first two lines of the song (“Trinken wir Wein/ so beschert Gott Wein”) form part of a widely used proverb that is included in Sebastian Frank’s humanist collection Sprichwörter � 10 But just as there is no indication that the lines are verse, there is nothing to mark that they represent a quotation. The colon, which could serve as a kind of indicator for a shift in textual levels, marks the beginning of Grandgousier’s direct speech. But it does not directly precede the beginning of the quotation of the lyrics. The two opening clauses of his speech do not belong to the quotation. In their brevity, they blend in with the rest of the song, but they have never been transmitted as part of the song in other sources. Unlike the song, these two sentences do not rhyme. The verses of the song, on the other hand, do indeed have end rhymes, using the rhyme scheme aab abb but they are exceptionally plain and consist twice of simple word repetitions (Wein-Wein-sein; Leuten-Leuten-scheuten)� A much more sophisticated rhyme can be found in the opening sentence, even though it is written in the ordinary prose ductus of Geschichtklitterung: the “raumen” [going around] of the plates at the table is thus parallelized with the “schaumen” [foaming] of the glasses and beer jugs in a rhyme that also exists with the etymologically equivalent words in English, roam-foam� With this rhyme and the lack of any clear gap between it and the song, the lines of the song are seamlessly woven into the text’s prose texture. The transition into the song is so fluid that only a reader who already knows the song will be able to pick it out. Hence, in this section of Geschichtklitterung , the boundaries between prose and poetry are blurred� Aside from recognizing the song from another source, one has no clear way to distinguish poetry from prose, contrary to contemporaneous poetics that posited a rigorous distinction between them� This initial evidence warrants further examination� The following section deals with a series of self-referential poetological statements and metaphors in Geschichtklitterung . Fischart’s text has been compared, somewhat hyperbolically, with works by James Joyce (Hörner 9) due to its wild experiments with Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung 277 language and the amorphous structure of its prose, which can be seen as a unique example of mannerist artificiality (Zymner 163). Modern scholars have repeatedly shown how heavily it is shaped by intertextuality (Seelbach, Ludus lectoris )� This has been understood as an attempt to incorporate all the knowledge and discourse of its time in a parodistic encyclopedia that particularly seeks to compile a comprehensive inventory of short forms such as songs, examples, and proverbs (Bulang 356—60). Geschichtklitterung features fragments and excerpts from dozens of other texts in various languages� Besides excerpts from popular song texts, the short forms the text incorporates include exempla and proverbs� The linguistic scope of the material is not limited to German and French. Besides Latin, it also includes - to a lesser extent - other European vernacular languages. These passages are often translated into German, but in some cases, they remain in the original language. The result of this process of blending diverse elements is a hybrid text, both culturally (Schulz 147) and linguistically (Hess 228)� The word Geschichtklitterung , the designation most commonly used in modern scholarship, does not in fact figure in the title of the first edition, which starts with the words “Affenteurliche vnd Vngeheurliche Geschichtschrift” [Ape-venturous and outrageous (hi)story], only to continue for another three full sentences, taking even the norms of early modern title pages, which allowed for extensive titles, to their limits. The change in title from Geschichtschrift to Geschichtklitterung in the second and third editions reflects the composite and intertextual character of the text. The first term is nothing more than a German translation of the Latin historia , a genre designation denoting both factual and fictional narratives in prose (Rusterholz 246). The word klittern , which was inserted into the title of the second edition, means “to piece together (a text)” and “to copy hastily” (Grimm 1213). As such, the new title reveals the underlying nature of Geschichtklitterung as a prose text hastily pieced together from various sources� The paratexts at the beginning of the work employ two poetological metaphors that further outline and specify the status of Geschichtklitterung as a mixtum compositum , a text composed of a mixture of other texts and genres. One metaphor is prominently featured in the first preface, which, in the intricate interplay of opening paratexts, is attributed to the translator, who appears in the disguise of one of Johann Fischart’s various pseudonyms� In defending the text despite its offensive nature, the translator references many renowned texts in the vernacular. He argues that despite some inappropriate words, the value of these texts is not in doubt� Employing a stylistic device typical of Fischart, the preface presents an extensive catalog of such books. Headed by Boccaccio’s Decameron , it assembles many texts from the narrative and satir- 278 Jodok Trösch ical tradition of the Upper Rhine, establishing an anti-classical counter-canon (Müller)� The preface also provides a long list of genres of entertaining literature� It contains genres as famous and respected as Greek tragedy but also shorter literary forms such as the Latin “Fescennine verses,” the German “Freihartspredigt” and “Pritzenschlagen,” as well as the “quodlibet” used in the context of university culture (Fischart, Gsch 4r)� The list is characterized by the dissimilarity of its elements� All possible forms and genres are included: high and low genres as well as lyrical, dramatic, and epic forms. And they are taken from four distinct literary traditions: Greek, Latin, German vernacular literature, and university life. At the conclusion of this list, it is explicitly stated that all these forms and genres had a formative influence on Geschichtklitterung � The work combines them all� This is expressed by the following metaphor: “So pringen wir nun hie aus allen forgedachten arten ain gebachenen kuͦchen” [We thus present here a pie baked from all the genres mentioned above] (Fischart, Gsch 4r)� While the German word Kuchen can also be translated as “cake” in English, all occurrences of the word in parallel passages within Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung 11 suggest that it is more appropriate to think of it as a hearty pie with a filling here. The image of the pie (or for that matter: cake) made up of different literary forms is significant. With this image, Geschichtklitterung situates itself in a satirical tradition of using dishes as metaphors to characterize the diverse ingredients of a literary work. Metaphorically, it is structurally similar to a farcimen , a coarse sausage or pâté, which is an emblematic symbol for Menippean satire (Knoche 5—12), for its lack of form and its tendency to devour and incorporate all other genres (Dell’Anno 93)� It is also reminiscent of the image of macaroni that Teofilo Folengo uses to characterize the structure of his macaronic poetry (Wiegand 527)� His texts infuse the Latin language of scholars with barbarisms from the vernacular, exposing scholarly language to ridicule. The resulting cacophony of languages is, according to Folengo, similar to “quoddam pulmentum,” that is, to some sort of a stew made of “flour, cheese, and butter mixed together, crude, rough, and rustic” (Coccaius 19). 12 Situating his work in the tradition of Menippean and macaronic literature, Fischart thus portrays his text as a heterogeneous product made up of various components� The title page of the second edition of Fischart’s book introduces another metaphor for the mixing of components� This is the edition that completes the shift from Geschichtschrift to Geschichtklitterung . Overall, this version shows a heightened self-reflective awareness of the work’s exceptional textual makeup� The title claims that the French original was poured into a German mold (Hausmann 43)� This describes the fundamental changes the text was subjected to during the translating process, which left nothing of the original form. To Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung 279 cast a metal object, the original object must first be completely molten and dissolved� The use of melting and pouring as metaphors for the production of a text implies a strict dichotomy between form and matter� Through melting down, an object is completely stripped of its outer shape. It is transformed into a molten mass, a state of pure matter with no apparent form. By pouring the mass into the cavity of a mold, the metal takes on a completely new shape when it cools. If different ingredients are used to make the text, these metals are all fused into an alloy� This implies that the individual components are no longer recognizable as separate segments in the product and that a new, uniform entity has been created from them. While the ingredients are diverse, the product is homogenous� To conclude this section, one can identify two different metaphors in Geschichtklitterung , both of which describe how this text is composed of shorter forms. The two concepts stand, however, in a certain tension with one other. They represent the two ends of a spectrum. As has been shown, one extreme is represented by the pie made up of various literary genres� It has a distinctly heterogeneous structure. The other is symbolized by the mold or melting pot, which stands for a new, homogeneous entity made up of different ingredients. The next step is to identify concepts from early modern poetics that allow us to apply these metaphors to the dichotomy of prose and poetry� How can we conceptualize homogeneous and heterogeneous mixtures of short forms in texts like Geschichtklitterung that are partly written in prose and partly in verse? Humanist poetics was founded on a sharp distinction between poetry and prose� Poetry was commonly defined by formal criteria, by meter, and - to a lesser extent - by rhyme� These formal attributes were often seen as preconditions for poetic language. As a consequence, most forms of prose, even though they were widespread in vernacular literature, were completely ignored by poetic treatises. Nevertheless, two rather minor poetic concepts can be found in the Latin poetic tradition that both deal with texts occupying a middle position between poetry and prose: prosimetrum and art prose. If one applies the image of the melting pot to the distinction between poetry and prose, one expects a product that seamlessly absorbs elements of both poetry and prose simultaneously and effaces the border between them. This is the case, for example, if the prose text is subjected, despite its character, to extensive rhythmization or if there are individual rhymes (or at least assonances) in it. And indeed, the prose of Geschichtklitterung is marked by these specific characteristics, at least in certain sections. We have already seen such a manifestation of poeticized prose in the opening example in which the narrator depicts the festival held by Grandgousier, king of the giants. In this passage, the 280 Jodok Trösch two verbs raumen and schaumen rhyme with each other: “sah die Platten raumen/ vnd die Becher schaumen” (H5r)� But this prose sentence contains more than just a prominently placed rhyme. On closer inspection, one notices that the two clauses both contain the same number of syllables. Furthermore, the six syllables have precisely the same alternating stress pattern. Rhythmically, these two parts of the prose sentence are identical, which is a characteristic feature of verse. Nevertheless, the contrast between this sentence and the song that follows, which is clearly in verse, demonstrates that it is still a part of the prose text� The poetic mode that most closely corresponds to the fusion of verse and prose is that of rhetorical art prose (Till 232, referencing Norden’s “Kunstprosa”), like rhythmic prose and rhymed prose (Amstätter 257). These concepts refer to a form of overstructured prose that was already known in ancient rhetoric as a specific register of speech. Of course, ancient prose used assonance and not end rhyme� Quintilian labels this rhetorical register oratio vincta (bound speech) and opposes it to both poetry in the strict sense and to free, unregulated prose called oratio soluta (unbound speech). In rhythmical prose, some parts of a sentence - especially its finishing clause - were subjected to certain rhythmic schemes while the rest of the sentence could be constructed at will (Asmuth 611)� Quintilian’s concept of oratio vincta was partially misunderstood in early modern poetics. Based on the distinction between bound and unbound speech, the constraints imposed by this form of speech were understood to be a kind of metric form only found in poetry� Yet the concept survived to some extent in sixteenth-century rhetorical discourse (Till 245), while at the same time the humanist neo-Latin style of writing letters in prose borrowed these features from Cicero (Tunberg 108)� The rhythmical prose of Geschichtklitterung , which has also been enriched with rhymes, fits perfectly into this specific historical tradition. Here, the idea of the melting pot is applied to the difference between poetry and prose. But it cannot contribute to answering the question of how the short poetic forms in question are integrated into the prose text. The concept of oratio vincta does not fit such cases since the sentences produced by the integration of song texts are subjected to verse and rhyme not only in part but in their entirety� On the spectrum between prose and verse, they are still closer to the latter. So let us consider the other concept proposed above� The term prosimetrum describes texts that exploit the great contrast arising from the juxtaposition of verse and prose in the same text (Pabst 350)� Since it represents a departure from classical aesthetic values, the prosimetrum was particularly associated with Menippean satire, which sought to produce a comic effect from the contrast between the high pathos of verse and its banal context in prose� In the Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung 281 prosimetrum , the contrast between prose and poetry is turned into a sign of a comprehensive dissociation (Koppenfels 26). Insofar as the prosimetrum juxtaposes heterogeneous elements, it fits well with the metaphor of the filled pie discussed above� And Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung can undoubtedly be placed in the tradition of the Menippean satire, mediated by the proximity of Rabelais’s work to this anti-genre (Renner 21) but also reinforced by Fischart’s additions of Menippean motives and techniques and explicit references to Menippean intertexts (Seelbach, Ludus lectoris 241; Bässler 293). It thus comes as no surprise that elements of the prosimetrum can be found in the Geschichtklitterung . For example, a German adaptation of Pierre de Ronsard’s famous “Epitaphe” (Ronsard 10) dedicated to François Rabelais is inserted into the translator’s preface� The prosimetric character of the text manifests itself more clearly still in the second chapter, which contains, among single prose passages, an enigmatic prophecy written in verse and rhyme, a figural poem, and two fragmentary samples of hexametric verse in German. In all these cases, the boundaries between the individual textual units are very clearly emphasized. Still, as a concept, prosimetrum fails to fully capture the specific feature of Geschichtklitterung this paper intends to study: imperceptible transitions between short forms of poetry and prose� Precisely because it operates through contrast, the concept prosimetrum is ill-suited to explain the hidden transitions between prose and poetry discovered above� To come closer to answering the question asked from the outset, I will devote the following part of the paper to one exemplary passage� A closer look at two consecutive pages taken from chapter one of the first edition of Fischart’s Geschichtschrift (B2v—B3r) shows that different modes of assembling short forms of poetry in a prose text are used without privileging any one of them� I will show that both metaphors, the filled pie and the melting pot, are applicable to combinations of poetry and prose in this text� There are sections in which the short forms incorporated into the text are presented as a heterogeneous patchwork, a prosimetrum , and there are larger sections of prose that give an impression - at least superficially - of homogeneity. 282 Jodok Trösch Fig. 1: Fischart, Johann. Affenteurliche vnd Vngeheurliche Geschichtschrift � Strasbourg: Jobin, 1575. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, ESlg/ P.o.gall. 1769d, fol. B2v-B3r, urn: nbn: de: bvb: 12-bsb00047235-2 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). A visual assessment of the verso and recto pages reveals clear differences in the presentation of the text� The text on the recto page has the appearance of any regular page of the Geschichtklitterung � It is set in a medium-size Schwabacher blackletter font spreading over the full width of the page in justified alignment with no breaks between paragraphs. The text fills the printed page completely up to the margins; there is no white space� The whole page looks very uniform� The verso page is different. 13 In comparison, its layout looks much more uneven. The text is broken into many smaller pieces� There are indentations on both the recto and verso pages and various paragraph breaks. Different typefaces are used� These are all effects of the use of prosimetrum ; here the transitions from verse to prose are clearly marked in the typography� It is the two neo-Latin poems integrated into the text as quotations that cause the distorted appearance of this verso page. According to the printer’s custom, all Latin lines are set in Anti- Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung 283 qua. They are followed by German translations that are printed in the common Schwabacher typeface used throughout the book� This reiteration of the verses in two different languages leads to further typographical anomalies and renders the two poems even more distinctive from the rest of the text� The way in which the two Latin lines of the second poem are turned into six German lines, namely by including an interpretation in verse form, further strengthens this effect. The Latin verses contain two epigrams in distiches written by Peter Schott the Younger (Worstbrock 831) and Jacob Wimpfeling (Mertens 1289), German humanists from the second half of the fifteenth century. Both Schott and Wimpfeling are mentioned by name before their poems are quoted. Such emphatic references to an author’s name, which tacitly declare them to be authorities, are quite rare in Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung � Their poems seem to be highlighted in the arrangement of the text because they enjoy a fair degree of prestige� Both poems can be found in Schott’s collection of letters titled Lucubraciunculae ornatissimae [Most ornate night thoughts] and published in 1499 (Schott 154v, 185v; see Seelbach, Ludus lectoris 369, 374). 14 Both contain proverbial maxims concerning what kind of people it is better not to have in the home or in the parish. Fischart uses them because of their antimonastic tendencies, as he wants to satirize the fact that monks’ behavior is pernicious to the morals of society� On the verso page, the way that poetry is integrated into the prose text is a prime example of the principles of the prosimetrum � The text is divided into different sections; the poem is clearly highlighted as something else. In this case, the image of the pie filled with various, heterogeneous ingredients is very fitting. The recto page, by contrast, filled with text from margin to margin, gives the appearance of containing only prose� But this is a typographical illusion� On this page, there are not only two, but many more passages quoted from several song texts� These passages contain both verse and rhyme� But the short forms in poetry used here are not highlighted in the presentation of the text at all� Instead, only by careful analysis can one identify a specific passage as a proverb, an excerpt from a collection of exempla, or a song text. Consider this excerpt: der Betler heyaho: der Augspurgisch Spinenstecher/ der der Betlerin den Pflaumenbaum schütt/ vnd in eil jren Bettelsack für den Fischsack erwischt� Schlaf Töcherlin/ du weckest mich/ schlaf müterlin/ die deck lang ich/ O wee der leidigen decken/ die du gelanget hast/ ich sih vir füs da stecken/ du hast gewis ein gast/ vnd was dergleichen sauberer lider meher sind/ die man singt vnd getrukt find/ darin man die tägliche gedachte wechselung der Kinder gründ. Eins morgens frü/ that ich mich zu/ zu einer Meid/ schmuckt sie zu mir/ was schaffet jr/ laßt mich kehren/ man möcht vns hören/ 284 Jodok Trösch [the beggar’s heyaho, the spider stinger from Augsburg who shakes the beggar woman’s plum tree and, in a hurry, mistakenly grabs her beggar’s bag instead of her fish bag. Sleep daughter, you wake me up! Sleep mother, I grab the blanket! Alas, the wretched blankets you have taken; I see four feet lying there; you certainly have a guest� And there are more such neat songs that are sung and printed in which one explains that children are swapped daily. Early one morning, I went to a maid and she snuggled up to me: What are you doing? Let me turn away, someone might hear us.] (Fischart, Gsch B3r) A first impression of the hidden poetic structure can be obtained by marking all the rhyming pairs in this passage� There are a large number of rhymes: Töchterlin-mich-müterlin-ich; decken-hast-stecken-gast; mir-jr; kehren-hören� Under the reasonable assumption that these rhymes each mark the end of a verse, line breaks can be inserted at these points to isolate the individual verses. Such a rearrangement of the text results in a much more familiar textual composition� It makes it easier to see the individual elements contained in the text� der Betler heyaho: der Augspurgisch Spinenstecher/ der der Betlerin den Pflaumenbaum schütt/ vnd in eil jren Bettelsack für den Fischsack erwischt� Schlaf Töchterlin/ [a] du weckest mich/ [b] schlaf müterlin/ [a] die deck lang ich/ [b] O wee der leidigen decken/ [c] die du gelanget hast/ [d] ich sih vir füs da stecken/ [c] du hast gewis ein gast: [d] vnd was dergleichen sauberer lider meher sind/ [e] die man singt vnd getrukt find/ [e] darin man die tägliche gedachte wechselung der Kinder gründ� [e] Eins morgens frü/ that ich mich zu/ zu einer Meid/ [x] schmuckt sie zu mir/ [f] was schaffet jr/ [f] laßt mich kehren/ [g] man möcht vns hören/ [g] Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung 285 We find a structure in which prose and poetry are tightly intertwined. The indented lines are taken from two popular songs. The first eight lines are taken from a song with the title “Es wolt gut jäger jagen, wolt jagen die wilden schwein” [A good hunter wanted to hunt, wanted to hunt the wild boar]. In the sixteenth century, this song was widely recorded in various versions; there are also spiritual contrafacta � This means that it was apparently very popular around 1600 for melodies to be used for other songs, including sacred ones (see Fischer; Zillmann). The final five lines - including the one line that does not contain any rhymes - come from a second song beginning with the words “Eins morgens früh” [Early one morning] (Williams, “Liederpoesie” 418—19, nos. 13— 14). In this new arrangement, the lines that comment on the texts, which were previously concealed, stand out, especially since they have more syllables per line. Indeed, this is the only feature that distinguishes them from their immediate surroundings� For even these lines contain rhymes: the three words sind , find , and gründ link these lines together as one� 15 Despite the rhymes, the lines are supposedly in prose, as they have the function of a commentary. They point out that the lyrics quoted here are taken from songs commonly sung and printed in the community, and they indicate their purpose in the broader argument the narrator makes. This means that while they are formally similar to the quoted lyrics, they are functioning on a completely different textual level. At the same time, the first three lines of the following song do not contain any rhymes at all, and hence are more like prose� Prosaic metalanguage and poetic object language converge. Once again, we are operating in a strange intermediate zone between poetry and prose� Extending the scope of the inquiry to the whole page, it is possible to identify sections in verse as quotations from popular secular songs that can also be found in various other sources from the sixteenth century� Charles Williams has identified the sources of most of the songs. 16 His catalog reveals the sheer number of songs that have been included on this single page (the one on the right in Fig. 1 above): twenty, at least (Williams, “Liederpoesie” 415—22, nos. 1—21). 17 Handwritten markings, as can be found on many copies of this text and not only the one digitally reproduced here, indicate that readers may have been able to recognize some of the songs (Bulang 359)� Williams’s catalog indicates that direct allusions to key expressions from popular songs can be found even outside of rhymed sections. For example, the words “der Betler heyaho” in the prose section at the very beginning of the cited passage refer to a song in which this phrase can be found with slight variations in the one-line refrain at the end of every stanza of the song, as for example in verses 39—40: “ein betler, | das heyaho” [a beggar, the heyaho] (Bergmann 102—04, no. 98; Williams, “Lieder- 286 Jodok Trösch poesie” 418, no. 11). The very short extracts of these songs in Geschichtklitterung are stripped of the characteristics that lend them their poeticity� Fischart’s text operates with a large amount of intertextual material that is collected and arranged in some sort of assemblage� His strategy is heavily influenced by the humanistic practice of collecting memorable sentences in personal notebooks in order to use them to improve one’s stylistic expression while writing (Zedelmaier 22; Keller 54). At the same time, his literary techniques bear similarities to the principles of the late-antique cento (Glowa 18; see Verweyen and Witting 293) and the vernacular quodlibet (Kühne 210). All these techniques aim to assemble short excerpts and fragments from other (poetic) texts in such a way that the old sense of the text is erased. Sometimes, this allows for new and unexpected meanings to emerge, but in places it produces sheer nonsense. Fischart uses different strategies to integrate these song fragments into his text. In some cases, like those seen above, the extracts are short but still long enough to contain their original rhymes and metric structure� In other cases, the excerpts are shortened even more. By extracting only parts of a verse, most often striking images and iconic expressions, the excerpts lose their underlying poetic character� Their metric structure becomes distorted; their rhyming words are torn apart� The humanistic practice of collecting excerpts is thus capable of fundamentally changing the poetic code of the message from poetry to prose. At the same time, the short forms integrated into the prose text change the characteristics of the prose text, too. This is an example of Fischart’s peculiar way of combining poetry and prose� As the phenomena of sound and rhythm encountered in the prose sections affect the structure of the sentences in their entirety, they cannot be adequately explained with the rhetorical concept of oratio vincta . Instead, these oscillations between poetry and prose should be viewed as a characteristic feature of Geschichtklitterung � The same technique of hiding song fragments within the prose text is broadly used in other chapters of Geschichtklitterung , especially in a chapter called “Trunken Litanei” [Drunken litany]. It reproduces the conversations of a group of drinkers getting heavily intoxicated after feasting on large quantities of tripe. In this chapter, the voice of the narrator is completely absent. This technique turns the text into a disordered mix of voices, particularly because it is often hard to recognize transitions between speakers� This cleverly orchestrated collective babble is composed of an assemblage of idioms, proverbs, and drinking songs� Transitions between prose dialogue and verses are not explicitly highlighted. Throughout the chapter, rhymes break up the prose speech into shorter parts and form something resembling verses in the midst of the prose� Only some of the sections with rhymes actually contain song texts; only some of them are indeed poetry. As a result, the “Trunken Litanei” becomes a Dionysian tap- Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung 287 estry of sound (Kaminski 157). This leads to a further blurring of the boundaries between versified and prosaic speech. In this text, any sort of definite categorization is abolished, be it the distinction between the voice of the narrator and the voices of characters, the attribution of a particular speech act to a particular character, the distinction between prose and poetry, or the attribution of rhyme and verse to poetry alone� As a satire, Geschichtklitterung sets out to be a confused and disfigured representation of the confused and disfigured world. For this purpose, intertextual techniques of writing are used that seize short literary forms of any kind and shuffle them around. This turns even the most fundamental categories upside down. If the satirical non-form (Dell’Anno 93—94) of Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung abandons the distinction between poetry and prose, it also plays with the question of its poeticity, which was, in sixteenth-century poetics, inseparably bound to the presence of verse (and rhyme)� In their oscillations between poetry and prose, these sections we have studied are neither one nor the other. They call into question the strict distinction between the two categories. At the outset of this paper, I posed two questions. With regard to Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung , I asked if its amorphous form could be conceptualized by analyzing it as a product of several short forms. Second, I asked about the interplay between poetry and prose (understood in the premodern sense as the presence or absence of verse and rhyme) in Geschichtklitterung . I used the first example to illustrate one form of this combination - and to show what it might mean to disguise short poetic forms in a prose text. I then identified two poetological metaphors for the incorporation of short forms into the text, marking the ends of a spectrum� They were then linked with two concepts from the contemporary humanistic discourse on poetics: oratio vincta and prosimetrum � By working with further examples from the text, I demonstrated that the concept of oratio vincta does not fit the phenomenon at hand. By contrast, there are passages from Geschichtklitterung that can be understood as prosimetrum � There are, however, striking differences between, on the one hand, the overt juxtaposition of prose and poetry in such passages and, on the other, the phenomenon of songs hidden in prose that is in question. It seems that new types of textuality emerge through this particular mode of incorporating short poetic forms� These modes can no longer be described in traditional poetic terms� Studying these short forms shows that the textual multiplicity of Geschichtklitterung , the amorphous entity that emerges from them, is greatly influenced by their diverse characteristics� 288 Jodok Trösch Notes 1 In Tynyanov’s essay “The Literary Fact” from 1924, the idea that ‘large’ forms are composed of various short forms is a necessary premise for defining literary genre as a concept that fluctuates and develops evolutionarily. Rosengrant (382) summarizes Tynyanov’s point: “If a work is acknowledged as a ‘large’ form, it is because its elements relate to one another in a particular way that is characteristic of a specific genre, although it may be that all of the other features of that genre have been drastically changed� A genre evolves at the expense of its ‘basic’ features; if its ‘secondary’ features persist, the genre will persist” (382). A similar consideration regarding the composite character of longer literary texts is already present in Friedrich Schlegel’s thought, most prominently in Athenäumsfragment 116. In this conception, Campe (161) argues, the Romantic novel is “the framework for the mixture of genres” [der Rahmen für die Mischung von Gattungen]. 2 Johann Fischart, who was born around 1545 in Strasbourg, is one of the central authors of German literature in the second half of the sixteenth century. He acquired a comprehensive humanistic education at the universities in Paris and Siena, finally receiving a doctor-of-law degree in Basel (Seelbach, “Fischart” 358). From over twenty years of collaboration with Bernhard Jobin, an important printer in Strasbourg, Fischart gained an intimate acquaintance with the book market and the intellectual community of his time (Brockstieger 27)� 3 This paper is not concerned with the difference between epic and lyric texts, as it focuses on the difference between poetry and prose as two fundamental modes of literary language, and not on the difference between literary genres. 4 All translations are my own� A note regarding these translations: Because of the ubiquitous wordplay and the many improvised compounds, no one has ever attempted to translate this text into any other language� For this reason, my translations into English are merely crutches intended to make the German text accessible for English readers� They cannot stand for themselves. Among other formal aspects, the text’s rhyme and verse, which play a central role in this paper, could not be reproduced. 5 In two studies from 1909 and 1911, Charles Williams uncovered the folk songs cited in Geschichtklitterung and the rest of Fischart’s oeuvre� Williams’s studies still provide a solid foundation for investigating the German-language lyrics cited in Geschichtklitterung � Based on parallel traditions in folk-language songbooks and single-sheet prints, Williams identifies a total of 139 song texts quoted in Geschichtklitterung alone. The citations are of different lengths, ranging from single words to the reproduction of several stanzas. Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung 289 6 Bock’s text, probably published in Strasbourg in the second half of the sixteenth century, is not a songbook with musical scores but a collection of speeches by various “wine fools” praising the benefits of drinking (Strauch 90—97). In a section called “Affen wein” [monkey wine], the following lines can be found: “Wer mit will vns ein guͦt gsell sein/ | Der drink mit vns den besten wein/ | Will er dann ein huderbutz sein/ | Sauff er wasser verlob den wein | Dar zuͦ pack sich bald von leuten/ [in the margin: “ Aut bibe aut abi �” J. T.] | Far ins holtz noch buͦchen scheiten/ (Bock D3r). 7 In Forster’s secular songbooks (see Brunner), the German text in question is only used in one of the five voices of the polyphonic song called vagans , while the other four voices have a different Latin verse (Marriage 202). In the vagans voice of this song, the lyrics begin as follows: “TRinck wein/ so bschert dir Gott wein/ sei frölich bey den leuten/ wilt du den ein hauder butz sein/ so fahr in wald nach schreyten/ ” (Forster no� 39)� 8 Scandello’s German-language songbooks (Scandello no� 18; see Classen 185—89) are an important source for song texts in Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung (Williams, “Liederpoesie” 410), so it is quite conceivable that this is the direct source for the texts used in Geschichtklitterung � 9 In his Aller Practic Großmutter [Grandmother of all prophecies], a parody on astronomical calendars with their prophecies, we read the following lines: “Trinken wir wein/ so beschert der Wirt wein/ vnd wil auch inn der zäch sein” (Fischart, Practic C4r). Here, God is substituted by “Wirt” [landlord] (see Williams, “Liederpoesie” 434 with erroneous page numbers; corrected in Williams, “Weiteres Zu Fischarts Liedern” 263). A further instance can be found in Fischart’s Podagrammisch Trostbüchlein [Podagra’s consolation book] with an explicit reference to its proverbiality: “Es geht da/ wie man sagt/ Trincken wir wein/ so beschert Gott wein/ Tränken die Gäns wein/ so beschert jhnen Gott kain Wasser” [It is as they say: If we drink wine, God will give us wine. If the geese drank wine, God would not give them any water] (Fischart, Trostbüchlein D6r; see Williams, “Liederpoesie” 434). 10 “Trinck wein/ so beschert dir got wein. Faul hend verarmen” [Drink wine, and God will give you wine. Lazy hands become poor] (Franck 163r; Wander 103)� 11 The most relevant passage in this regard is the “Maisterlos Fladensiglid” [authorless flatbread victory song] (Fischart, Gsch V5v), a song Grandgousier’s people sing after their victory in a fight against the bakers from Lerne, who didn’t want to sell them their “Käsefladen” (an open-faced pie with cheese filling). This marks the beginning of the picrocholine wars. The song contrasts hollowing out the pie to reach its tasty filling and avoiding the dry crust by devouring the dish completely (V5v)� 290 Jodok Trösch 12 “Ars Macaronica a macaronibus derivata, qui macarones sunt quoddam pulmentum, farina, caseo, butyro compaginatum, grossum, rude et rusticum” [The macaronic art has been derived from the macaroni. Macaroni is some sort of stew, flour, cheese, and butter mixed together, crude, rough, and rustic] (Coccaius 19). 13 Transcription of the central passage: “Vnd Peter Schott reimt: Inveterata peti non simia debet in aedes, | Vrsus silvestris, presbiter & iuvenis. | Alt Affen/ jung Pfaffen/ darzu wilt Bären | Soll niman in sein Haus begeren. | Vnd Jacob Wimpfeling verbeißt es/ vnd spricht: | Fœlix Plebanus, fœlixque parochia, subqua | Nec Naam, Abraham, nec Sem, nec vivit Elias. | Die Pfarr ist glückhaft/ lobesamm/ | Jn der Naham noch Abraham/ | Noch Sem/ noch kein Elias ist: ” [And Peter Schott rhymes: Inveterata peti non simia debet in aedes, Vrsus silvestris, presbiter & iuvenis. Old monkeys, young priests, and wild bears - nobody should wish them in his house� And Jacob Wimpfeling can’t stop himself from saying: Fœlix Plebanus, fœlixque parochia, subqua, Nec Naam, Abraham, nec Sem, nec vivit Elias. The parish is blessed and praised, in which neither Naham nor Abraham nor Sem nor Elijah live] (B2v). 14 According to the Lucubraciunculae, the second poem is by Jacob Wimpfeling: “Distichon Iacobi Vuimphelingi Sletstatini” (Schott 185v)� 15 The last word, gründ , only rhymes if pronounced in the Lower Alemannic dialects of the Alsace. There, the rounded ü sound has shifted to an i sound (Besch 1103), resulting in the last word probably being pronounced “grind.” 16 Though it was often impossible to identify the specific source, it has been plausibly claimed that most of the song texts were copied from single leaflets (Bulang 358)� 17 Here, the narrator argues that it is pointless to conduct genealogical studies, given that humans are constantly begetting children outside their legitimate lineage. Throughout the history of mankind, various factors have led to the fact that there are constantly more “bastards” conceived than legitimate children. 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Zur Stoff- und Formengeschichte des Volksliedes “Es wollt ein Jäger jagen.” Berlin: Ebering, 1920. Zymner, Rüdiger. Manierismus. Zur poetischen Artistik bei Johann Fischart, Jean Paul und Arno Schmidt . Paderborn: Schöningh, 1995. “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle 295 “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle Arne Höcker University of Colorado, Boulder Abstract: How does a blog become a novel? How do small forms relate to large ones? How does the present turn into history? And how do theory and praxis intersect in the daily act of writing? These are some of the questions addressed in Rainald Goetz’s 1999 novel Abfall für Alle that had started out as an Internet diary. Between February 1998 and January 1999, Goetz kept a practice of taking notes that he posted on his website on a daily basis. Consisting of various materials from shopping lists, descriptions of quotidian routines to more elaborate but mostly fragmented poetological reflections, these notes capture the everyday practice of writing and can therefore be emphatically characterized as Gegenwartsliteratur in a literal sense� The publication of the collected written material as a novel changes this perspective on the act of writing and confronts the literary practice with its formal demands, presence with repeatability, and praxis with theory. This paper focuses on Abfall für Alle as a novel and discusses the poetological consequences that go along with the media transfer. In particular it focuses on the Poetikvorlesungen that Goetz presented at the University of Frankfurt and that he decided to include in the novel where they confront the daily attempts to capture the everyday reality of writing with the - failing but productive - attempts to reproduce this practice under the conditions of academic and poetic discourse� Keywords: Rainald Goetz, theory of the novel, writing, poetics, Gegenwartsliteratur, German literature, Roland Barthes Von Februar 1998 bis Januar 1999 führte Rainald Goetz im Internet Tagebuch� Heute würde man von einem Blog sprechen. So entstand über den Zeitraum von einem Jahr eine Serie bis auf die Minute genau datierter Eintragungen, die von Listen, Skizzen, Beschreibungen, kurzen Erzählungen bis zur Poetik- 296 Arne Höcker vorlesung reichen und die mit dem Anspruch auftreten, den gegenwärtigen, flüchtigen und an sich kontingenten Moment erfassen zu wollen. Ende 1999 erschien Abfall für Alle bei Suhrkamp als Roman in Buchformat� Wurde das Internet-Tagebuch noch emphatisch als revolutionärer Versuch gefeiert, den neuen medientechnischen Bedingungen eine neue Literatur abzuringen, so erschien einigen FeuilletonrezensentInnen die Entscheidung, daraus ein 864-seitiges Buch zu machen, als eine Art Regression, wenn nicht gar als unliebsame Erinnerung daran, dass auch literarische Erzeugnisse einem Markt unterworfen sind, der nicht nur nach künstlerischen, sondern primär nach ökonomischen Regeln funktioniert. Dass die “Minutendinger,” wie Goetz seine Eintragungen zuweil bezeichnet - Textfetzen, Notizen, fragmentarische Aufzeichnungen und auf das Hier und Jetzt zielende und datierte Tagebucheinträge - nun in einem Zusammenhang verfügbar waren, der als Roman ausgewiesen wurde, wollte all denjenigen, die unter Roman zuallererst einen les- und konsumierbaren und also zumeist narrativ gestalteten Text verstanden, nicht sofort einleuchten. Was im Medium des Internets als tägliche Lektüre für Minuten funktioniert habe, müsse als Buch - und als Roman zumal - scheitern� Insbesondere die Gattungsbezeichnung Roman erschien vielen RezensentInnen als unangemessen und unangebracht unzeitgemäß. In der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung etwa schrieb Eberhard Rathgeb, dass der Titel “Roman eines Jahres” altmodisch und heimelig anmute. Schon von außen “schimmer[e]” das Buch “nach einer runden und wärmenden Geschichte, die einem sogar guttun könnte, so wie einem ja auch ein bequemes Sofa angenehm entgegenquillt, nachdem man stundenlang durch den Tag marschiert ist” (Rathgeb n. pag.). Nun löst Abfall für Alle dieses angebliche Versprechen der Romangattung keinesfalls ein. Statt die Notizen, Aufzeichnungen, Textfetzen, Protokolle, Exzerpte und “Minutendinger” in einen ordnungsstiftenden Gattungsraum “Roman” zu stellen und damit rahmend zugänglich zu machen, vermittelt der “Roman eines Jahres” den Eindruck der Unüberschaubarkeit und steht dem Einsatz des Tagebuches damit diametral entgegen. Denn war die einzelne Tagebuchnotiz noch als Versuch aufzufassen, den Wirrnissen des Tages ein Moment der Verlässlichkeit und Notwendigkeit abzugewinnen, so hebt die Zusammenstellung der “Minutendinger” im Roman gerade ihre Zufälligkeit und Kontingenz hervor, was durch das Monumentale des 864 Seiten starken Buches, das 923 Gramm Gewicht auf die Wage bringt, noch verstärkt wird. Die Leichtigkeit, mit der sich die täglichen kleinen Notizen im Internet in den Alltag integrieren ließen - “Abfall für Alle. Mein tägliches Textgebet” (Goetz, Abfall 357) - weicht im Roman einer “Gewichtigkeit, die dieser Text als ganzes für mich hat�” Goetz spricht in einem Interview diesbezüglich von der Besonderheit des Buchformats und der besonderen “Art, wie die Widersprüche in einem kleinen Ziegelstein, die Vielzahl der Widersprüche, da geballt “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle 297 vorliegen” (Goetz, Jahrzehnt 154)� Mit dem Übergang vom Internet-Tagebuch zum Buch-Roman vollzieht sich auch eine Änderung in der Ausrichtung der Referenz auf die Form. Lassen sich die kleinen Formen, die im Internet-Tagebuch zum Einsatz kommen, als Aufzeichnungsverfahren der Gegenwart verstehen, so gewinnt der Roman seine Form am Zusammenhang dieser heterogenen Elemente als Spur einer Schreibweise� Bevor hier jedoch weiter auf dieses Verhältnis von kleiner Form und Roman eingegangen werden kann, muss zunächst eine Besonderheit von Goetz’ Internet-Tagebuch angesprochen werden, das sich, worauf Elke Siegel hingewiesen hat, in einem ganz wesentlichen Aspekt von anderen literarischen Tagebüchern unterscheidet: “[A]lthough all other literary diaries are written and then published at some later date - whether after the intended time span or posthumously - Goetz’s Internet diary went about as far as possible in minimizing the delay between inscription and publication” (Siegel 236—37). Mit Abfall für Alle habe Goetz, so Siegel weiter, eine öffentliche Form des Schreibens betrieben und Gegenwartsliteratur im wörtlichen Sinne� Doch auch wenn Goetz’ Tagebuch sich einer unmittelbaren Rezeption anheimgibt, so bleibt es in einer anderen wichtigen Hinsicht dem Tagebuchschreiben treu: Es schert sich nicht um seine Leserschaft, richtet sich nicht an sie und bleibt ganz allein auf das schreibende Ich ausgerichtet, das sich und sein Schreiben so unmittelbar wie möglich der Kritik übergibt. Nicht um deren Einfluss auf das Schreiben aber geht es Goetz im Internet-Tagebuch, sondern allein darum, den Authentizitätsgrad zu steigern, der dadurch entsteht, dass das Geschriebene zugleich der Öffentlichkeit übergeben wird� Das Internet wird somit für Goetz zu einem interessanten literarischen Schreibwerkzeug, aufgrund der Geschwindigkeit, mit der es Text prozessiert, und dadurch eine besondere Nähe zur Gegenwart herstellt. Beobachtet wird, wie sich das schreibende Ich unter veränderten medialen Bedingungen, die sich Ende der 90er Jahre schon sichtbar auf alle gesellschaftlichen Bereiche der Kommunikation und Informationsvermittlung auszuwirken begonnen haben, sprachlich konstituiert. “Das Kollektiv sucht nach Schriftformen, die näher an der mündlichen Rede dran sind,” so Goetz in Bezug auf die durch das Internet sich verändernden literarischen Sprechweisen: “Da arbeitet jetzt quasi ein millionenfaches, tippendes Schreiberheer an solchen Formulierungsausweitungsprozessen. Das finde ich natürlich faszinierend” (Goetz, Jahrzehnt 146)� Auch wenn sich die herkömmliche Literaturkritik Ende der 90er Jahre teils noch schwer damit tat, die Versuche, dem Internet neue Schreibweisen abzugewinnen, als Literatur anzuerkennen (vgl. dazu Schumacher 42—44), so war Abfall für Alle auch als Internet-Tagebuch ein dezidiert literarisches Projekt, das sich von Anfang an in einen Hallraum tradierter literarischer Referenzen und Prämissen stellte. In einem nahezu klassischen Sinne führt das Schreiben 298 Arne Höcker bei Goetz die Frage nach der sich gegenseitig bedingenden Konstruktion von Form und schreibendem Ich durchgehend mit. Eine Frage, die mit der Literatur wie mit ihrer Theorie verbunden ist, seit sich literarische Form nicht mehr aus Poetiken und Rhetoriken herleiten lässt. Anders gesagt: seit der Roman die für den literarischen Diskurs maßgebende Form ist� Und damit ist die Perspektive genannt, aus der dieser Aufsatz im Folgenden Abfall für Alle als Roman und nicht als Internet-Projekt in den Blick nehmen soll� Was also macht, abgesehen vom Medium, aus einem Blog einen Roman? Die Frage ist hier zunächst weniger als Frage nach einer Gattungsbestimmung zu verstehen als die nach der Romanform und ihrer Beziehung auf die Praxis des Schreibens, von der der Roman Abfall für Alle selbst handelt. “Abfall war,” so erklärt Goetz in einem Interview, “von der Grundidee her die Fiktion, auf die Realität des Alltags einen sprachlichen Zugriff zu kriegen. Und der Roman, der sich daraus entwickelt hat, ist der Entwicklungsroman der Form des Romans selbst” (Goetz, Jahrzehnt 149)� Diese Aussage schließt gleich in mehrfacher Hinsicht an einige zentrale Themen der Romantheorie an� Der Verweis auf den intendierten Realismus und den sprachlichen Zugriff auf die Lebenswirklichkeit ruft Georg Lukács’ Theorie des Romans auf den Plan, der die notwendige Prozesshaftigkeit der Romanform aus der für ihn prägenden Dissonanz von Leben und Form ableitete: “Die Kunst ist - im Verhältnis zum Leben - immer ein Trotzdem; das Formschaffen ist die tiefste Bestätigung des Daseins der Dissonanz, die zu denken ist. Aber in jeder anderen Form […] ist diese Bejahung etwas der Formung Vorangehendes, während sie für den Roman die Form selbst ist. […] So erscheint der Roman im Gegensatz zu dem in der fertigen Form ruhenden Sein anderer Gattungen als etwas Werdendes, als ein Prozeß” (Lukács 62). Mehr noch aber klingt in der Bestimmung von Abfall für Alle als eines “Entwicklungsromans der Form des Romans selbst” eine Formulierung Friedrich Schlegels an, der in seinem Brief über den Roman zu dem Schluss kam, dass die Frage nach der Form des Romans aufgrund seiner prinzipiellen Gattungsunzugehörigkeit dem Roman selbst schon notwendig eingeschrieben sei und dass eine Theorie des Romans, “die im ursprünglichen Sinne des Wortes eine Theorie wäre: eine geistige Anschauung des Gegenstandes,” selbst ein Roman sein müsse (Schlegel 336). Als zentrales Charakteristikum des Romans hat Schlegel deshalb “die chaotische Form” hervorgehoben, die der klassischen Ordnung eine auf ihre eigene Komplexität rekurrierende Ganzheit entgegensetzt und gerade das Widersprüchliche ihrer Elemente betont. Als eigenständige Gattung, so Schlegel, würde sich der Roman seiner eigenen Möglichkeiten berauben� Anders gesagt führt der Roman - jedenfalls der Roman, den Schlegel als “romantisches Buch” bezeichnet - seine Theorie stetig mit und kompensiert seine eigene Formlosigkeit damit, dass er das Leben, dessen Darstellung er bezweckt, auf die poetischen Bedingungen “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle 299 bezieht, die ihm in den bestehenden und tradierten Gattungsformen zur Verfügung stehen. Denn der Roman schließt alle anderen Gattungen ein, er baut auf kleinen und einfachen Formen auf, ohne sich ihrem Diktat zu unterstellen. Damit reflektiert der Roman das Leben und die Welt in ihrer radikalen Subjektivität und beobachtet den prägenden Einfluss von sprachlichen Formen auf die vom Roman betriebene “Selbstgeschichte” (Schlegel 337)� Ich möchte in meinen nun folgenden Lektüren von Abfall für Alle dieses Verhältnis der kleinen Form zur großen Form des Romans als eine Praxis des Schreibens der Gegenwart in den Blick nehmen� Wenn dabei auch das Spannungsfeld von Literatur und Theorie in den Fokus rückt, dann ist das nicht etwa einer bestimmten und allerdings vorhandenen Vorliebe des Romanautors Goetz noch meiner eigenen geschuldet, sondern ist dem Roman als Frage nach seiner Form selbst eingeschrieben� “Los gehts. Mittwoch, 4.2.98, Sonnentag, Berlin. Anruf von Herrn Häberlen. Ich soll jetzt mal mit Texten rüberkommen” (Goetz, Abfall 13)� Schon Eckhard Schumacher hat in seiner prägnanten wie scharfsinnigen Analyse von Abfall für Alle auf die Paradoxie des Anfangs hingewiesen, dessen Gegenstand kein besonderes, einschneidendes und bemerkenswertes Ereignis ist, sondern ganz im Gegenteil die Gleichförmigkeit und Gewöhnlichkeit des Alltäglichen. “Alltag,” so Schumacher, “hat immer schon angefangen als das, was sich wiederholt, nicht einzigartig ist, nicht aus der Reihe fällt - und gerade deshalb schwer zu fassen ist” (Schumacher 116)� Und trotzdem wohnt auch diesem wie jedem Anfang ein Zauber inne, der hier darin besteht, dass ein schreibendes Ich in den Raum des Textes tritt und sich dem Medium der Schrift überantwortet� Dass dies kein selbstverständlicher oder gar banaler Schritt ist und nicht ohne Zwang und Disziplin vonstatten geht, auch das ist dem Anfang des Romans bereits eingeschrieben. Noch vor der Datierung markiert das “Los gehts” einen Übergang durch den Aufruf, den das in den Text eintretende Ich an sich selbst richtet, und dem dann sogleich mit dem Anruf von Herrn Häberlen eine Instanz zugeordnet wird, die diese Illusion der Selbstschöpfung mit einem äußeren Zwang konfrontiert� So ist schon der Anfang des Romans mit einer Spannung von Autonomie und Dependenz versehen, aus dem das Schreiben seine Dynamik beziehen kann, indem es das Ich und seine sozialen wie medialen Wirklichkeiten miteinander in Beziehung setzt und auf die Frage der Form und die Praxis des Schreibens weiter zuspitzt. Das aber ist eine Ausgangslage des Romanschreibens, die sich auf nicht geringe literarische Vorgänger berufen kann. “Der Zauber des Anfangs und das ‘Zögern vor der Geburt’” hat Gerhard Neumann einmal einen Aufsatz über Franz Kafkas Poetologie des riskanten Augenblicks genannt und von dem für Kafkas Roman-Protagonisten spezifischen Problem gesprochen, sich der Welt in ihrer räumlichen wie auch sozialen Dimension zu vergewissern (vgl. 300 Arne Höcker Neumann 423). Kafka hat damit den Finger auf die Wunde des Romans schlechthin gelegt, der an jedem seiner Anfänge voraussetzen muss, was erst am Ende herauskommen soll. Denn das Subjekt des Romans soll immer schon sein, was es - durch die vom Roman ermöglichte Bezugnahme auf sich selbst und das eigene Leben - erst noch werden muss� Die Gegenwart des Romans und die des Subjekts stimmen nicht überein. Im Tagebuch schrieb Kafka über den der Subjektivität fest eingeschriebenen Widerspruch, den der Roman aufzuheben verspricht oder der ihm jedenfalls als Formproblem zugrunde liegt: Unmöglichkeit das Leben, genauer die Aufeinanderfolge des Lebens zu ertragen. Die Uhren stimmen nicht überein, die innere jagt in einer teuflischen oder dämonischen oder jedenfalls unmenschlichen Art, die äußere geht stockend ihren gewöhnlichen Gang. Was kann anderes geschehn, als daß sich die zwei verschiedenen Welten trennen und sie trennen sich oder reißen zumindest an einander in einer fürchterlichen Art. (Kafka, Tagebücher 877) Wie für viele seiner literarischen Zeitgenossen gilt auch für Kafka, dass das Tagebuch nicht nur Datenspeicher ist, sondern mehr noch Experimentierfeld für literarische Versuchsanordnungen� Tagebuch schreiben ist literarische Praxis; “PRAXIS, ein Wort, das Abfall für Alle von Anfang an nachhaltig durchsetzt” (Schumacher 118). Denn großgeschrieben begleitet “PRAXIS” die Leser des Romans durch den Text, insbesondere auch da, wo dieser theoretisch wird. Dass das kein Widerspruch sein muss, lässt sich mit Verweis auf Rüdiger Campes These belegen, “dass es den modernen europäischen Roman ohne Theorie nicht geben kann, und zwar ohne eine Theorie des Lebens nicht geben kann […]. Roman, Theorie und Leben […] bilden einen für die Gegebenheit der modernen Literatur zumindest in der europäischen Tradition charakteristischen Zusammenhang” (Campe 193). Und so findet sich konsequenterweise im Zentrum des Romans Abfall für Alle eine auf die Praxis des Schreibens bezogene Theorie des Schreibens, eine als “PRAXIS” betitelte Poetikvorlesung, die der Autor im Sommersemester 1998 an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt hielt und die nicht lange braucht, um die Frage zu stellen, deren Beantwortung man sich von einer Poetikvorlesung erwarten könnte: “Hallo Frankfurt. / Ha. / Also. Nein: / / Was ist eigentlich ein Roman? / / Ein Roman ist ein Stück Prosa von mindestens 300 Seiten, / das die ganze Welt umfaßt.” Eine Erzählung sei im Gegensatz dazu “etwas Kleines, Schnelles, Böses, ein Ausschnitt, etwas Ungerechtes, ein Zeitpartikelchen, eine Gewalttat. Eine Sache von 100, 200 Seiten.” Ein Theaterstück: ein Text, “der so geschrieben ist, daß er seine Erfüllung erst erfährt, wenn er auf der Bühne realisiert wird, als Theaterstück” (Goetz, Abfall 229)� Ein Roman also ist - und das ist hier das wesentliche Unterscheidungskriterium - Entgrenzung, er will alles und umfasst nicht weniger als die ganze Welt� Wo soll man also anfangen mit einem Roman? “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle 301 Zurück zum Anfang von Abfall für Alle , Kapitel römisch Eins, erster Absatz: Ausruf, Datierung, Platzierung, Anruf, Deadline. Zweiter Absatz: “ganz am Anfang / trete hier also ein in diese Institution - siehe Foucault - alles bisher Gesagten - und dann gleich aber natürlich das ABREISSEN sofort - loslegen - irgendwo von außen intervenieren lassen - bloß nicht rumsuhlen im Alten / PRAXIS” (Goetz, Abfall 13). Die Institution alles bisher Gesagten wäre mit Foucault gesprochen die Ordnung des Diskurses. “Ich setze voraus,” schreibt Foucault in seiner 1970er Antrittsvorlesung am Collège de France, “daß in jeder Gesellschaft die Produktion des Diskurses zugleich kontrolliert, selektiert, organisiert und kanalisiert wird - und zwar durch gewisse Prozeduren, deren Aufgabe es ist, die Kräfte und die Gefahren des Diskurses zu bändigen, sein unberechenbar Ereignishaftes zu bannen, seine schwere und bedrohliche Materialität zu umgehen” (Foucault 10—11). Auch das Romanschreiben ist Teil dieser Prozeduren, auf deren Voraussetzungen es basiert, die es in sich aufnimmt, sich ihnen einschreibt und von denen es sich wieder abstoßen muss, wenn es sich nicht im Alten rumsuhlen will: “WAS / sind das für Tage, die - / was ist das für ein Land, in dem - / wer bin ich, um hier zu - / / VORSICHT Literatur” (Goetz, Abfall 15)� Es ist kein Zufall, dass der Verweis auf die Institution des Diskurses den Roman Abfall für Alle eröffnet und der Bezug auf die literarische Tradition Biographiezentrierten Geschichtenerzählens rigoros zurückgewiesen wird, wann immer es sich in den Text einschleicht und sich einzuschreiben droht� Die Intention des Tagebuches dreht sich hier um, denn es geht nicht mehr darum, wie vielleicht noch bei Kafka, sich eine Subjektposition zu erschreiben, einen sicheren und unverrückbaren Standort, von dem aus sich die Welt und von der Welt erzählen ließe. Stattdessen schreibt Goetz “Minutendinger,” immer wieder abreißende, unterbrechende, rhythmisierende Einträge, die Gegenwart markieren sollen: “Ich las die Tagebücher von Jünger, Krausser oder Rühmkorf, und dachte immer: wenn man doch nur wüsste, wie es JETZT steht, was er JETZT macht, JETZT denkt” (Goetz, Abfall 357)� Goetz’ “Minutendinger” bleiben gewissermaßen am “Nullpunkt der Literatur”: Es geht in ihnen um den immer wieder sich erneuernden und immer wieder neu zu erschreibenden Bezug von einer Schreibweise des Jetzt zur Institution alles bisher Gesagten� Und so schreibt sich der Text von Abfall für Alle fort, indem er immer wieder von Neuem ansetzt, beim “JETZT,” das sowohl authentische Gegenwart markieren soll als auch, wie Schumacher betont, immer schon “eine Form des Zitats, eine zitierende Wiederholung eingeführter Formen” ist (Schumacher 126). Was Goetz durchweg als “PRAXIS” heraufbeschwört ist die Aktualisierung des Schreibens aus einem Formenrepertoire, aus dem es seine Impulse bezieht und von dem es sich zugleich immer wieder abstoßen muss� So hat schon Schumacher die von Goetz gleich zu Beginn genannten Techniken des Loslegens und Abreißen-lassens als wesentliche 302 Arne Höcker Strukturmomente der hier vorgeführten Schreibverfahren bestimmt� In den fünf Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen, die in mehrfacher Hinsicht als eine Art Zentrum des Romans verstanden werden können, wird diese Bewegung des Schreibens ausgehend von der Frage der Form thematisiert. Im Kontext des Romans Abfall für Alle funktioniert die Poetikvorlesung als Reflexion auf das Romanschreiben, genau aus denselben Gründen, aus denen sie als Vorlesung, wie Sibylle Peters erklärt, scheitern musste. Denn Goetz, so Peters, hatte die Vorlesung zunächst als Performance angelegt: “In Anlehnung an das Modell des freien Vortrags sollte sich der Frankfurter Hörsaal in das Labor des Autors verwandeln, in einen Ort, an dem sich die Produktion von Literatur in gewisser Weise selbsttätig vollzieht und zwar im Zuge einer Rückwendung des alltäglichen, des medialen, des momentanen Sprachgebrauchs auf sich selbst, der der Autor Rainald Goetz als Medium dienen sollte” (Peters 152)� Die im Roman enthaltenen Vorlesungsmanuskripte hingegen bleiben einer Schreibweise verpflichtet, die den gesamten Roman Abfall für Alle durchzieht, und fügen sich somit fast nahtlos in den Text ein. In der letzten der Frankfurter Veranstaltungen reflektiert Goetz das Verhältnis der Vorlesung zum Schreiben des Internet-Romans: Im Verhältnis zur Praxis Veranstaltung hier hat Abfall eine komische Rolle gespielt. Eine große Zahl von Einträgen war als Vorbereitung für hier gedacht, Abfall wurde erster Produktionsort für Argumente, Strukturüberlegungen, Formulierungsversuche, die später alle in Praxis eingebaut und verwendet werden sollten. Und erst neulich kam es mir richtig zu Bewußtsein, daß ein genau umgekehrter Effekt eingetreten war: ich wollte die in Abfall schon gesagten Sachen in Praxis nicht noch einmal wiederholen. Als würde man einem alten Freund die gleiche Story noch einmal auftischen, und der: ey, Alter, das haste doch neulich schon erzählt. O. Tschuldigung. Soll nicht wieder vorkommen. (Goetz, Abfall 358) Dass sich das Problem der Wiederholung hier stellt, hat natürlich zunächst etwas mit dem Internet als Ort öffentlichen Schreibens zu tun, denn das Frankfurter Vorlesungspublikum konnte die Vorwie Nachbereitung der Praxis-Veranstaltung dort jeden Tag verfolgen. Zugleich aber fordert der Ort der Vorbereitung und des Notierens nun selbst Geltung ein, “will Abfall plötzlich Autonomie” (Goetz, Abfall 313)� Die sich in Abfall etablierenden Schreibweisen zwingen der Poetikvorlesung nun eine gewisse Nachträglichkeit auf und legen PRAXIS auf den Modus der Wiederholung fest, so dass das Resultat, auf das sich das Schreiben von Anfang an richtete, am Ende nur die Einlösung einer Praxis war, die sich in ihrem Versuch Gegenwart zu erschreiben selbst aufhebt� Wo in der Poetikvorlesung die Praxis des Schreibens als ein Angriff auf die Gegenwart aus der Perspektive der Form - großgeschriebener PRAXIS - in den Blick genommen wird, scheitert sie als ein Projekt, dessen Ende eigentlich immer schon “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle 303 vorgeschrieben war. Das ist die Einsicht, die Goetz zu Beginn seiner letzten Vorlesung mit der Erfahrung verknüpft, von der Romane seit jeher erzählen. “Was ist also ein Roman? ” fragt Goetz hier noch einmal: Wir haben es hier erlebt, ganz anders, als ich zumindest es mir vorgestellt hatte. Und insofern wahrscheinlich genau so, wie es die Ordnung dieser Form vorsieht: mutig zieht der Held hinaus ins Leben, verwickelt sich in Weltgeschichten, besteht sie irgendwie und kehrt schließlich zurück nach Hause, erschöpft, bereichert um Wissen und Erfahrung und niedergedrückt davon, von Vernunft und Verstehen, geschlagen. Bereit sich abzufinden mit dem Vorgefundenen und dem Erlebten, mit der Welt, wie sie sich gezeigt hat, und mit dem Platz, den sie ihm zugewiesen hat dabei. Bereit auch, diese eigentlich traurige Geschichte zu erzählen und dabei zu VERWANDELN, in den Roman. In etwas für andere Sichtbares, Faßbares, Abgeschlossenes und Benutzbares, in etwas Sinnvolles und Ermutigendes also. (Goetz, Abfall 351) Die Entscheidung, die Frankfurter Vorlesungen in den Roman Abfall für Alle zu integrieren, der wiederum selbst von der Vorbereitung der Vorlesungsreihe handelt, rückt die tägliche Praxis des Notierens und Schreibens in einen weiteren Diskurs- und Formzusammenhang, aus dem sie ihre Spannung und Dynamik beziehen soll ohne sich darauf eingrenzen zu lassen� Wie das in der Praxis aussieht, darum sollte es in den Poetikvorlesungen gehen: So beginnts also, mit der Formphantasie. Ich möchte schreiben - einen ROMAN. Denkt fast jeder in seinem Leben irgendwann, richtigerweise. […] Und davon soll diese Veranstaltung handeln. Von dem Vorgang, der von diesem seltsam vagen, aber doch auch nicht ganz unpräzisen, Traumartigen - von dieser traumartigen Gestalt zu etwas ganz Konkretem schließlich führt, was in Form eines Textes vorliegt. […] LABOR Nochmal: so beginnt es also. Diffus, chaotisch, wirr, bißchen geträumt. Montäglich bedrückt, morgendlich zuversichtlich. Es beginnt auch, von einer noch grundsätzlicheren Sicht her gesehen, mit dem Schrei, mit dem die meisten von uns wahrscheinlich diese Welt hier begrüßt haben� Oder eben: mit der Stille des Erwachens am Morgen� (Goetz, Abfall 229—30) Diese Beschreibung des Anfangens findet sich gleich zu Beginn der ersten Frankfurter Poetikvorlesung und ist nicht besonders originell� Vielmehr gleicht sie einer Ansammlung poetologischer Gemeinplätze. Man könnte zunächst an Gottfried Benns “Laboratorium für Worte” (Benn 74) denken und dem von diesem beschriebenen Heranfühlen von Substantiven� Dem folgt die Geburtsphantasie einer literarischen Schöpfung, die ich früher bereits in Bezug auf Kafka erwähnte. Und das Erwachen: bei Kafka “der riskanteste Augenblick am Tag,” bei Walter Benjamin “die dialektische kopernikanische Wendung des Eingeden- 304 Arne Höcker kens” (Benjamin 490). Die Betonung der Unoriginalität dieses Anfangsszenarios ist allerdings nicht als Kritik an Goetz gemeint, sondern spricht hier selbst für ein literarisches Verfahren, das in diesem Fall unter dem Vorzeichen “Poetikvorlesung” steht. Die Frankfurter Poetikvorlesung gibt vor, dass sie sich “in freier, noch zu findender Form” entwickeln solle als “Praxisgespräch zwischen dem Dozenten und seinem studentischen Publikum” (zitiert in Bohley 228)� Goetz folgt diesen Vorgaben aufs Wort, betitelt seine Vorlesung “PRAXIS” und spricht vom morgendlichen Glück, mit frischem ausgeschlafenem Blick, noch unberührt unschuldig von den Wirrnissen des Tages, loslegen zu können, dem schöpferischen Genius freien Lauf zu lassen. Tatsächlich bestimmt sich aber Form hier nicht in dieser Beschreibung schöpferischer Freiheit, sondern in einer Praxis, die noch diese Beschreibung selbst bestimmt: im Zitat oder den Vorgaben des Diskurses, dem poetischen Diskurs, dem sich die Vorlesung verschreibt und widmet. Wer einen Roman schreiben will, verhält sich damit immer schon zu allem, was über das Romanschreiben gesagt worden ist und gesagt werden kann. Wer eine Poetikvorlesung hält, hat es mit dem Poetikdiskurs zu tun, vor dessen Hintergrund jede Anrufung schöpferischer Originalität selbst nur peinlich unoriginell sein kann. Tatsächlich aber ist Goetz’ Poetikvorlesung nicht nur Anrufung einer Praxis, sondern selbst Praxis. Nicht da jedoch wo sie von Poetik spricht, sondern da, wo sie auf die Gegenwart der Vorlesung selbst reagiert. In der ersten der fünf Vorlesungen wird Goetz, da redet er gerade von Luhmanns Abschiedsvorlesung und Foucaults Ordnung des Diskurses , unterbrochen: nee! , das geht mir zu weit! , entschuldigung! , Kollege. Das lenkt mich ab, tut mir leid. - Zum schreienden Kind, zum Vater. Pause. Gemurmel. Wie war das? Ach ja, genau. In Japan, jetzt DJ-Gipfel, auch so ne Diskussion. Meint die eine Maus: ja, das mit den Raves, das wäre ja alles ganz toll. Aber wie wäre es eigentlich mit den Müttern? Wieso gäbe es keine richtig geilen Raves für Frauen mit kleinen Kindern? Und dann meinten die Japaner in ihrer unendlichen Höflichkeit: ja, selbstverständlich, meinte der DJ Tobi, wir organisieren das dann, Sonntag-nachmittag, machen wir dann Rave mit Müttern. Sage ich nur, weil Raven Gehen ist vielleicht doch eine Veranstaltung, die für kleine Kinder nicht so wahnsinnig geeignet ist. Und vielleicht ist auch so eine Vorlesung hier eben nicht der Ort, wo kleine Kinder maximal optimal aufgehoben sind. (Goetz, Abfall 233) Die Unterbrechung der Vorlesung - gewissermaßen als Einbruch der Wirklichkeit in den poetologischen Diskurs - wird in der zweiten Poetikvorlesung wieder zum Anlass für poetologische Reflexionen auf die literarische Praxis. Goetz berichtet nun davon, dass er nach seiner ersten Vorlesung von einer Frau angesprochen wurde: “Textet die dann los, auf mich ein, als wäre ich ihr WG- Mitbewohner, und erzählt mir, wie sie das fand, wie ich das mit dem Kind gehan- “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle 305 delt hatte, das da in der ersten Reihe saß und krähte” (Goetz, Abfall 261)� Was Goetz danach ausführt, bleibt auf der Ebene des Inhalts höchst problematisch und maximal unPC , könnte man sagen. Allerdings geht es hier genau um das, was gesagt werden kann und was nicht - also wieder Foucault -, und was in Bezug zu Fortschritt und Frauen gesagt werden kann und was nicht; davon, verkündet Goetz jetzt, würde also das Buch Das Jahrzehnt der schönen Frauen handeln: „Und wenn ich neulich, bei der Formphantasie als ersten Begriff sagte: Politik - ist damit die Perspektive bestimmt, unter der das Büchlein diese Probleme sehen will” (Goetz, Abfall 262)� Der Gegenstand von Goetz’ Schreiben also ist die Beobachtung von Diskursen aus der Perspektive sozialer Systeme, Foucault und Luhmann: “Es geht darum, daß das Fenster zur Welt aufgemacht wird� Daß Praxis für mich hier also in erster Linie heißt, zu 90 oder 95 Prozent: Rezeption. Rezeptivität. Aufnehmen. Im Hinblick auf die Sprache, in erster Linie: wie wird Sprache in allen Weltbereichen verwendet. Und das heißt für jedes einzelne Wort, für den Hallraum jedes einzelnen Worts� Von da her begründet sich für mich eine möglichst ungeordnete Faszination für alle Formen, die Welt hereintragen” (Goetz, Abfall 232)� Für die Poetikvorlesung heißt das also: Beobachtung literarischer Rede aus der Perspektive des Systems Literatur� Für den Roman? Vorschlag: Beobachtung von Form aus der Perspektive des Lebens� Daraus ergibt sich die Spannung des Romans: “Ich wollte die Verbindung des literarischen Schreibens zu seinen lebensalltäglichen Wurzeln nie ganz aufgeben, davon irgendwie auch immer ausgehen, vom Schreiben von Briefen, Tagebüchern, Tabellen und Listen, von Einkaufszetteln und kleinen Notizen wie: bin gleich zurück” (Goetz, Abfall 321)� Auf formaler Ebene sei das “Spezialgebiet Leben […] vielleicht sogar das experimentellste und riskanteste Schreiben” (Goetz, Abfall 322), weil es wirr und chaotisch, mit der Form in Konflikt bleibt. Das Leben ist schnell, ungestüm und impulsiv, das Schreiben langsam, zaudernd, unsicher, tastend: “Als ich den Begriff vom Writer’s Block zum ersten Mal hörte,” schreibt Goetz, “verstand ich überhaupt nicht, was damit gemeint ist. […] Ich hatte gedacht, diese Blockade WÄRE Schreiben” (Goetz, Abfall 322)� Was macht nun aus Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle: Roman eines Jahres einen Roman? Nimmt man die Poetikvorlesung als Goetz’ Theorie der Dichtung ernst, dann könnte eine Antwort vielleicht so lauten: Abfall für Alle ist ein Roman, weil hier das Romanschreibenwollen, die Form- oder besser Romanphantasie, mit einer Schreibweise konfrontiert wird, die sich dem Notieren der Gegenwart verschrieben hat, dem “einfachen wahren Abschreiben der Welt” (Goetz, Hirn 19), wie Goetz einmal an anderer Stelle schrieb. Weder Foucault noch Luhmann lassen sich als theoretische Garanten für diese Antwort herbeizitieren, stattdessen Roland Barthes. Zwischen 1978 und 1980 hat Barthes die Vorbereitung 306 Arne Höcker des Romans zum Gegenstand seiner Vorlesungen am Collège de France gemacht und dabei einen Problembereich des Romanschreibens markiert, der auch für Goetz zentral ist: Kann man aus der Gegenwart eine Erzählung (einen Roman) machen? Wie lässt sich die in der schriftlichen Äußerung implizierte Distanz mit der Nähe in Einklang - oder in eine Dialektik - bringen, mit der Erregung der unmittelbar erlebten Gegenwart? […] Ich komme also auf jenen einfachen, in der Tat unerbittlichen Gedanken zurück, dass die “Literatur” […] immer aus dem “Leben” gemacht wird. […] Doch wenn es mir anfangs auch schwierig erscheint, aus dem gegenwärtigen Leben einen Roman zu verfertigen, wäre es falsch zu sagen, man könne Gegenwart nicht in Schrift verwandeln. Man kann die Gegenwart schreiben, indem man sie aufzeichnet (Barthes, Vorbereitung 53—54). Während die Notiz, wie Barthes weiter ausführt, eine Öffnung aufs Reale mit sich bringt und das Problem des Realismus aufwirft, drängt sich dem, der einen Roman der Gegenwart schreiben will, die Frage auf, wie ein Übergang von der Notiz zum Roman gelingen könne. “Für mich ein psychostrukturelles Problem,” schreibt Barthes, “denn das bedeutet vom Fragment zum Nichtfragment überzugehen, das heißt, ein anderes Verhältnis zum Schreiben, zur Äußerung zu finden, und das heißt wiederum, das Subjekt, das ich bin zu verändern: fragmentiertes Subjekt […] oder überströmendes Subjekt […]. Anders gesagt, der Kampf zwischen kurzer und langer Form” (55). Im Notieren stößt die Form- oder Romanphantasie auf die Realität des Schreibens. Selbst wenn die Romanphantasie immer an die Idee gebunden bleibt, einen vollständig neuen Roman schreiben zu wollen und sich nicht mit Altem und schon Geschriebenem zufriedengeben will, so ist mit dem Roman ein Unterschied gesetzt zu den großen logischen Kategorien der Äußerung. Folgt man Barthes, so ist der Roman eine Schreibweise des Neutrums, weder Bejahung, noch Verneinung, noch Frage: “Der Roman ist ein Diskurs ohne Arroganz; ein Diskurs, der mich nicht unter Druck setzt - und deshalb Lust weckt, selber Zugang zu einer Diskurspraxis zu finden, die den anderen nicht unter Druck setzt” (50). Das haben die kleine Form der Notiz und die große Form des Romans gemein: sie bleiben zur Form hin offen, schließen sich nicht ab, diskriminieren nicht und finden ihre Form am Schreiben und am Diskurs selbst. In diesem Sinne zitiert Barthes Proust: “Die Ereignisse erzählen heißt die Oper nur über das Libretto vermitteln; schriebe ich einen Roman, würde ich versuchen, die Musik eines jeden Tages herauszuarbeiten” (Barthes 57). Die Musik eines Tages ist für Barthes, aufgrund persönlicher Präferenzen, das Haiku, für Rainald Goetz, die Minutendinger, Abfall für alle, “mein tägliches Textgebet”: “Ausgangspunkt ist die rein formale Vorgabe, daß die Seite sich jeden Tag aktualisieren muß. Es geht um den Kick des Internets, der für mich mehr als in Interaktivität in der Geschwindigkeit, in Gegenwartsmöglichkeit, in “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle 307 Aktivitätsnähe besteht” (Goetz, Abfall 357). Im Internet hat das Geschriebene, Notierte zugleich eine öffentliche, also soziale Dimension und eine flüchtige, also historische� Im Medium des Buches wird daraus die Spur einer Schreibweise, durch die sich der Schreibende als Romansubjekt jeweils immer wieder neu in Bezug auf Sprache und Diskurs - also wieder Soziales und Historisches - konstituiert. Der Klappentext von Abfall für Alle , und selbst paratextueller Bestandteil des Romans, also ernst zu nehmen, fasst diesen Gedanken am Ende prägnant zusammen und soll darum auch hier das letzte Wort bekommen: Schließlich war, ein Traum, der wahr geworden ist, das Buch entstanden, das ich bin. Das ich immer schreiben wollte, von dem ich immer dachte, wie könnte es gelingen, das einfach festzuhalten, wie ich denke, lebe, schreibe. Von Seiten des Todes her gesehen. - Was mir also gefällt am Buch Abfall: der Realismus der Ideen-Vorrang die Banalität der Dämonie des Alltags das Schreiberleben die Stille der mediale Lärm die Fiktionalität der auftretenden Personen die argumentative Pedanterie das Tasten das urteilsmäßige Rumholzen die Gleichwertigkeit aller Dinge die Poetologie, die ästhetische Theorie strukturell fragmentarisch, fragmentiert von Zeit die Zeitmaschine das Jahr die Minutendinger und ihre Plausibilität die Sekundengedanken: der Wahn Tag für Tag, die Erzählung Zahlen und Ziffern ALLES IST TEXT und über und unter und in allem: Melancholie Keiner weiß, was als nächstes passiert. Davon erzählt Abfall für alle. Wie es war, als man noch nicht tot war und nicht daran dachte, wie es weiter geht. Augenblick, Moment� Und jetzt? (Goetz, Abfall Klappentext) 308 Arne Höcker Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Am Nullpunkt der Literatur . Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982. ---� Die Vorbereitung des Romans. Vorlesung am Collège de France, 1978-1979 und 1979-1980 . Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2008. Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk � Gesammelte Schriften V/ 1� Ed� Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Benn, Gottfried. “Vortrag in Knokke.” Sämtliche Werke � Stuttgarter Ausgabe� Vol� VI� Stücke aus dem Nachlaß, Szenen. Ed. Holger Hof. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001. 72—79. Bohley, Johanna. “Zur Konjunktur der Gattung Poetikvorlesung als ‘Form für nichts’.” Das erste Jahrzehnt. Narrative und Poetiken des 21. Jahrhunderts � Ed� Julia Schöll and Johanna Bohley. Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2011. 227—42. Campe, Rüdiger. “Form und Leben in der Theorie des Romans.” Vita Aesthetica: Szenarien ästhetischer Lebendigkeit . Ed. Armen Avanessian, Winfried Menninghaus and Jan Völker. Zürich/ Berlin: diaphanes, 2009. 193—211. Foucault, Michel. Die Ordnung des Diskurses . Frankfurt a. M: Fischer, 1991. Goetz, Rainald. Abfall für Alle. Roman eines Jahres . Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1999. ---� Jahrzehnt der schönen Frauen . Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2001. ---� Hirn . Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986. Kafka, Franz. Tagebücher . Ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller and Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2002. ---� Der Proceß. Apparatband . Ed. Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M: Fischer, 2002. Lukács, Georg. Die Theorie des Romans. Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Form der großen Epik . Frankfurt a. M.: Luchterhand, 1988. Neumann, Gerhard. “Der Zauber des Anfangs und das ‘Zögern vor der Geburt’. Kafkas Poetologie des ‘riskanten Augenblicks’.” Kafka-Lektüren . Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 422—43. Peters, Sibylle. Der Vortrag als Performance . Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. Rathgeb, Eberhard. “Panik vor dem Jetzt.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 18� Sept� 1999� Web� 20� Okt� 2022� Schlegel, Friedrich. “Das Gespräch über die Poesie.” Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe . 1. Abt., Vol. 2. Ed. Hans Behler. Paderborn/ München/ Wien: F. Schöningh, 1967. 329—38. Schumacher, Eckhard. Gerade Eben Jetzt. Schreibweisen der Gegenwart � Frankfurt a� M�: Suhrkamp, 2003. Siegel, Elke. “Remains of the Day: Rainald Goetz’s Internet Diary Abfall für Alle �” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 81.3 (2006): 235—54. Verzeichnis der Autor: innen Vanessa Barrera 1609 N. Normandie Ave #311 Los Angeles, CA 90027 USA vnzbarrera@gmail�com Christiane Frey Johns Hopkins University Department of Modern Languages and Literatures Gilman Hall 408 3400 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21218 USA cfrey9@jhu�edu Florian Fuchs Freie Universität Berlin EXC 2020 Temporal Communities Otto-von-Simson-Straße 15 Room 01�10 14195 Berlin Germany florian.fuchs@fu-berlin.de Arne Höcker University of Colorado-Boulder Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures 276 UCB, McKenna 219 Boulder, CO 80309 USA arne�hoecker@colorado�edu Florian Klinger University of Chicago Department of Germanic Studies 1010 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 USA klinger@uchicago�edu David Martyn Macalester College Department of German and Russian Studies 1600 Grand Ave� St. Paul, MN 55105 USA martyn@macalester�edu Jan Mieszkowski Reed College Department of German 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd� Portland, OR 97202 USA mieszkow@reed�edu Jasper Schagerl Universität Bremen Fachbereich 10: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften Universitäts-Boulevard 13, Gebäude GW 2 28359 Bremen Germany jasper�schagerl@posteo�de 310 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen Jodok Trösch Universität Basel Deutsches Seminar Nadelberg 4 4056 Basel Switzerland jodok�troesch@unibas�ch Gabriel Trop University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures Campus Box 3160, Dey Hall 426 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3160 USA gtrop@email�unc�edu Erica Weitzman Northwestern University Department of German Kresge Centennial Hall, Room 3-333 1880 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208 USA erica�weitzman@northwestern�edu Sprache und Medialität des Rechts Language and Media of Law Band 6 Föderalismus-Rhetorik- Dekonstruktionen - Rechtsdogmatik als Literaturdogmatik Instrumentalföderalismus in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika und in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland als romantisch-lyrische Lesekonvention vor Gericht Von Rico David Neugärtner Duncker & Humblot · Berlin Im US-amerikanischen wie im deutschen Föderalismus gebrauchen Gerichte ›selbstbewusst‹ dogmatische Topoi wie ›state dignity‹ oder ›Bundestreue‹, welche nicht im Verfassungstext enthalten sind. Diese ›ungeschriebenen‹ Figuren sind offen für ideenpolitische Instrumentalisierung: Sie dienen als Vehikel, um Vorstellungen von ›(Sub )Nationalstaatlichkeit‹, ›Demokratie‹ oder ›Freiheit‹ auszutarieren. Ihre politik-theoretische Einbettung im Modell des ›Bundes‹, Referenzfelder ihrer Verwendung (etwa Kulturpolitik, Umweltrecht, öffentliche Sicherheit, Personal und Finanzen, Wahlrecht, Verfassungsänderungen) und ihre rhetorisch-diskursiven Wirkungsbedingungen sind Gegenstände der vergleichenden Studie. Die Rhetorikanalyse erfolgt interdisziplinär: Das untersuchte Muster kreist um anthropomorphe, ›lyrische‹ Vorstellungen von ›Würde‹ und ›Treue‹. Unter Rückgriff auf die literaturwissenschaftliche Dekonstruktion analysiert das Buch die Kraft anthropomorpher Dogmatik in Recht und Literatur. Sprache und Medialität des Rechts / Language and Media of Law, Band 6 127 1 Seiten, 2023 ISBN 978-3-428-18953-3, geb., € 149,90 Als Open Access-Publikation verfügbar. Duncker & Humblot Föderalismus- Rhetorik- Dekonstruktionen - Rechtsdogmatik als Literaturdogmatik Von Rico David Neugärtner ISSN 0010-1338 Themenheft: Below Genre: Short Forms and Their Affordances Gastherausgeber: innen: Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn: Introduction Gabriel Trop: Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius Florian Klinger: Mayröcker’s Drama of Association Jasper Schagerl: Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 Florian Fuchs: Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism David Martyn: Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia Jan Mieszkowski: Dashing Expectations Erica Weitzman: Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis Vanessa Barrera: Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures Jodok Trösch: Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung Arne Höcker: “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle narr.digital
